Between the Bridge and the River Read Online Free PDF Page A

time.
    He supposed he was having a midlife crisis. Yes, dying in the middle of your life could definitely be classified as a crisis.
    He thought, I have never known how to have any fun.
    Fraser could always have fun, I never had any fun, and now I’m fucking dying and that’s just about the least fun I’ve ever had.
    He had had three affairs in the time he was married. All with other lawyers, all of whom were also married. None of them were fun. He just felt guilty.
    He had made love to seven women in his life. Sheila, then Lorraine, Sophia, and Glenda, his affairs, there was Tricia Docherty during a period when he and Sheila had broken up for a while, Olivia the English girl on a boys’ holiday in Spain when he was engaged to Sheila but they were not yet married, and the prostitute at his bachelor party. Daisy, he thought her name was but he couldn’t be sure.
    Fraser had also shagged the prostitute and he wasn’t even getting married.
    George thought about the things in life that had made him happy and so naturally he thought of his daughter, Nancy. She had been wonderful when she was a toddler and when she was a little girl. Being in her company was like mainlining joy directly into his system. But she was a teenager now, surly and bitchy, and didn’t want him around.
    Said he was no fun.
    The whole bloody dying thing was no fun whatsoever, he just couldn’t get a positive spin on it. He wasn’t thinking like himself at all and he guessed that he was having some sort of breakdown, which, given the circumstances, etc. etc.
    He thought about his mother and father, how the chemotherapy seemed to have ravaged them as much as the illness itself.
    He wondered if what he was doing—running away—would be the sort of behavior that would keep him out of heaven, although now that he was facing the big sleep, he just couldn’t force himself into believing in all that. He would have liked to. If he did, he would have stayed at home and gone through the dreadful treatment and the drugs and the weeping and teeth gnashing but he just couldn’t force himself into that foolishness.
    He had been around, he had seen too much, he was a criminal defense lawyer, for Christ’s sake, he heard more lies on a daily basis than a politician’s wife.
    Or perhaps a lawyer’s wife?
    Afterlife—bollocks.
    It was like when he was at university.
    Every Saturday night, the students from his class would go drinking in the Ubiquitous Chip or the Cul de Sac in the West End of Glasgow. At eleven o’clock when the bars closed and the young still had an appetite to party, somebody would always claim to know that there was a party in Clouston Street—usually fucking Fraser, who would hang around the Uni to meet girls even though he didn’t go there. He had some glorified tea-boy job on the
Evening Times
sports desk.
    So they’d spend the rest of their money on tinned beer and bottles of cheap blended whisky and traipse through the bitter cold looking for the party but there never was one.
    There never was one, so you might as well drink as much as you can in the pub ’cause when it closes it’s just cold and dark outside.
    There is no party in Clouston Street.
    He thought about Fraser. Jeez, what an arse he had turned into. Actually he had turned into an arse when they were about thirteen or fourteen years old. He had been an arse at school, an arse whenthey left, and now he was a professional arse among his own kind in the media.
    He always fell on his feet, though. There’s no way he’d get cancer, and he smokes. Probably; he used to anyway. George had given it up years ago. He still missed it.
    His father had given up smoking six months before he died. Seemed pointless to George.
    His mother hadn’t given up smoking before she died. She had just given up. Cancer had killed both his parents and now it was going to kill him. He was an only child, like his daughter. He hoped he hadn’t passed some kind of cancer gene on to her.
    He had no