Strange Loyalties Read Online Free PDF Page A

sentence.’
    â€˜Listen, you,’ the small man said and grabbed my arm.
    I shook him off and he sat down on the floor. Things could have turned, as they say, ugly, except that I helped him up.
    â€˜It was a joke,’ he said again.
    â€˜So was that,’ I said. ‘Let’s forget it.’
    â€˜All right,’ he said. ‘Just so long as ye know it was a joke.’
    The repetition of that statement reanimated the demon.
    â€˜Sorry Ah knocked you off your perch,’ I said.
    Thankfully, the small man didn’t turn back. But there followed many mutterings while Scott beamed upon the sotto voce threats as if they were a concert in his honour. Miraculously, we got out of there without any more trouble and out of the next bar as well and eventually bought a carry-out and took a taxi back to the flat.
    The evening resolved itself into what it had really been about. We were matching disasters. I think Scott had come to see me for some kind of joint exorcism, a mutual laying to rest of some of the wilder dreams we had spawned together lying in our shared bedroom in our parents’ house. He had started to admit to himself how badly his marriage was failing and he needed to share the admission with me, the keeper of his old dreams, as he was the keeper of mine. Also, he knew my situation and I think he suspected it might soon be his and he was perhaps checking out the terrain with someone who already lived there.
    I wished now that I had been more help. We were both too sore at that time. As we drank and talked into the night, we discovered a new kind of sibling rivalry. You think you’ve got wounds? Look at mine. Your compass is broken? My ambition’s got gangrene. Women came in for much meandering analysis. Weighty pronouncements on the nature of relationships were made and forgotten. Past girls who had long since vanished into unknown marriages and for all we knew divorces were conjured from their names and seen in the maudlin glow of nostalgia and knelt before, like shrines we never should have lost faith in. We battered ourselves against the incomprehensible and the unsayable and lay back exhausted.
    At about half past three in the morning, Scott sat up suddenly on the floor where he’d been lying. He stared ahead like a visionary.
    â€˜I came here to tell you something,’ he said. ‘I should have told you this before.’
    He looked at me and looked away. Whatever he had to say was not something he found easy to say.
    â€˜I am leaving Anna,’ he intoned and lay back down and went to sleep.
    Next morning he sheepishly washed himself and shaved with my razor and went back to her. I had seen him a few times since then but only over the shoulder of other people’s events.
    That was my last real memory of him alive and it wasn’t such a bad one. Let those who think life is measurable by its propriety wish for nicer last remembrances of the ones they love. That crazy night stayed with me. It made me smile. For in spite of all the hurt, he had somehow stayed above it. The size of the pain was the size of the dream he felt denied in him. To hold the pain yet was yet to hold the dream. That was one reason why I couldn’t forgive his dying. That was one reason why I was driving towards Anna.
    Who was Anna? I had never quite worked that out. I knew what she looked like all right. She was small and fine-boned and sweet-faced. Since her marriage to Scott, she and I had always exchanged pleasantries like sealed envelopes. Who knew what implications were inside them? Perhaps I would find out now.
    On my left I saw Fenwick, where Brian Harkness had lived with his father before marrying Morag. I had met the old man several times. I liked him. I was tempted to go in and see him, postpone my descent into whatever Graithnock had in storefor me. Brian’s father and I had things in common. He wasn’t sure of policemen either. But Graithnock was only minutes away