Chapter 20 #5
“OK.” He shrugged like it was nothing at all.
Digging around in his bag he found a brace of lager.
He offered one to Innes and although Innes took the can he set it to the side.
Cal opened his. He swished the lager around his mouth and felt the strangeness of the room, felt the draught whistle under the door.
He placed his hands on his hips and then, feeling weirder, he folded his arms across his chest. “So, what do you want to do now?”
“Aren’t we doing it? It’s late.”
There were no bathrobes in the room so Innes went to his overnight bag.
He searched through his own clothes and Cal watched him consider a pair of Y-fronts, but perhaps they were too old or no longer white enough because he passed them by and handed Cal a check shirt like the one he was wearing.
Cal let the towel fall. He took the shirt and put it on.
It was two sizes too large and covered him like a nightshirt.
“Sometimes, when you talk about your father, I get the sense we’re talking about two different people. I can’t imagine John courting a woman like this one you mention up in—”
“—Tolsta.”
“Aidh—Tolsta. He’s quite a shy man. Very above board.”
“Well, like I said, I don’t have proof yet. I only have a feeling.”
They stood on opposite sides of the room.
The room was too small, the men too used to being in the open.
There was nowhere for them to go, no way for them to turn away from each other.
Cal searched the pockets of Innes’s jacket until he found his cigarettes.
He went to the window and stared out at the damp car park as he smoked.
He wondered why Innes had not made a move.
He felt insulted, angry at this dingy hotel on the outskirts of a dull town, and this strange, shy bachelor.
Perhaps he had read everything wrong. Perhaps they would actually go look at vans.
He thought of Doll then, of how he had trained himself to settle for so little. All the furtive, shameful things they had done, all the ways in which he had allowed Doll to take whatever he wanted and bin the rest.
There was a petrol station across the road.
Late-night drinkers were lined up at the hatch buying a few last cans and packets of fag papers.
The woman who worked the window was slow to serve them and so the queue was singing Johnny Cash as a choir.
Cal flicked his dout out into the rain. He wanted to get dressed and leave.
He thought to go down to the petrol station to see if the crowd were going to an afters.
If Innes didn’t want him, then he wanted to insult him, to reject him by going off into the night with a group of young people.
“Tha gaol aig d’athair ort,” said Innes out of nowhere. There was an edge of tiredness in his voice that made Cal feel foolish. He heard that faint note, that slight suggestion, with more clarity than any of the reassurance.
“How do you know what my father thinks of me?”
“I know he’s proud of you.”
He flopped onto the bed by the window. “He doesn’t even know me, Innes. Couldn’t tell you the first thing about me.”
He watched as Innes removed his boots and set them carefully to the side. He had large, flat feet and Cal, who had suspected Innes was well-hung, felt certain of it now.
“Do you think it’s true . . .” He picked his front teeth. “If I don’t ask Jesus to save me, do you think I’ll really go to hell?”
Innes, who was unbuttoning his shirt, stopped suddenly. “I hope not.”
The shirt had frayed in places. There was a row of mending stitches holding the cuff together. The stitchwork was delicate, well-practised.
“Maybe the Catholics have the right idea.”
“Please don’t ever say that to your father!”
“When I die,” he said, grinning, “I’ll leave enough money so that a choir of drag queens can stand in St Giles Cathedral and sing for my eternal soul.”
“Heresy!”
“I might as well try. I would want them to be dragged up like Michael Jeter in The Fisher King – middle-aged men, all moustaches and sequins. They can sing whatever they like as long as once a week, they sing ‘Modern Girl’ by Sheena Easton.” He smirked at the look that Innes gave him.
“It’s my pick-me-up song. It gets me going in the morning. ”
Innes frowned at him. It felt oddly confrontational for such an indirect man. “Tell me,” he said eventually, “why drag queens?”
“If you’re begging for salvation you want to be sure of getting God’s attention.”
“Then I’d like to see that,” he said. “I hope you die before me.”
Cal burst into laughter. “Innes MacInnes. You’re a dark horse, you are.”
Innes waited until Cal stopped laughing before he said, “You talk of death. I went to the cemetery last week. I wanted to make sure everything was in order for my father. Do you know that when you die you’ll be buried in the western plot, right next to your father?
And there, on the other side of you, in the MacInnes plot, will be me. ”
“Cool,” he said. “Can we hold hands?”
“Afraid not.” Innes lay back on his bed and sighed in relief. He was still wearing his undershirt and tweed trousers and he clasped his hands and rested them on his chest like a memorial to a fallen soldier. The bed was too small, his feet dangled off the edge. Cal smiled at the image.
They lay like this, neither man speaking, until their breathing calmed.
After a while, Innes tucked one arm under his head.
The beds were a few feet apart. He clicked his fingers and made a motion for Cal’s attention.
Cal rolled onto his side and reached back and their hands bumped in the gap between.
“This is probably not the night out you expected. I’m sorry you don’t have friends your own age. ”
“It’s better than another night at home.”
He flicked Cal’s knuckles. “When I was younger, a little older than you are now, I would get so lonely in the winters that I would go to the mainland for a few days. I would go to this one pub in Glasgow. This dingy basement bar by the university that was always full of preening city boys and just the loosest sort of woman. I wanted to see what Sorley saw. I would save up for months to go, and then I would get there, and I wouldn’t know the first thing to say. ”
“Don’t you talk to lots of strangers? What with your radios?”
“No. It’s only a signal and response. There’s no talking.” He rubbed his face. “CBs were a thing in the eighties but they’re out of style now. I used to listen in on the long-haul drivers. If the weather was clear, I could reach the mainland with the tower.”
“What did they say?”
“Sometimes they’d have a woman here or there. And they would say the things that men say when they think no one else is listening.”
“Ah, you’re a peeping Tom. An eavesdropping Tom!”
Innes blushed. “I never liked to talk. I worried someone on the islands would overhear me and then . . . well. See, there are other radio enthusiasts, a few wives with men on the trawlers. So mostly they talked and I would listen in. Safer that way.”
“Was it dirty? Sounds dirty.”
“No.” He paused. “It was mostly boring. But it could be intimate. There were times when it could feel like a confession. If the men trusted the other person then they would talk about their wives, their children, their worries. I’d just listen. It’s better if you just listen.”
“You sound like a priest.”
Innes cracked his fist off Cal’s knuckles which made Cal cry out and rub his hand.
“So, what’s the worst thing you’ve heard?”
For a moment it seemed like he would not answer, but then he said, “One man killed his daughter. She had a problem with the drugs. He kicked her out. And the world was bad to her.”
“Oh, who wants to hear that?”
“You sound like your father. One time, I let your father listen in. All those disembodied souls. He said it was the Devil’s work.”
Cal snorted. “Classic John.” He rolled onto his elbow and changed the cassette.
The shirt rode up a little and exposed his buttocks and he left them exposed.
When he found the song he wanted he sprawled, face down, across his pillow.
They lay in separate beds and listened to the trance of Massive Attack, some Leonard Cohen, some Sinéad O’Connor (Cal wanted Innes to hear, “John, I Love You”).
Whenever Cal told Innes he liked a particular song, Innes would listen for a while and then he would hum the melody as if committing it to memory.
Now and then, he tapped the back of Cal’s hand, playing his fingers like they were ivory keys.
“Do we have to look at vans tomorrow? Can’t we stay like this all day?”
“No.”
“Can we at least get some McDonald’s?”
“Maybe.” Innes nodded at Cal’s bare legs. “Have you always been so white?”
“There’s not a bit of me that’s white.” He held his wrist up.
He traced his finger along the inside of his arm.
“This. This is the palest part of me and even here it’s the colour of pearlwort, maybe crowdie.
This bit of me is the colour of January light on the back wall of the church, this is that same daylight but on the side wall. This—”
“Uncooked turnip?”
He pulled the sleeve up and pressed hard on the blue vein that ran up the inside of his forearm. “Lapis, cornflower, gin bottle . . . gas bottle.”
“Wait . . .” Innes reached behind himself and searched his bedside table. He put on a pair of thick, ugly, NHS glasses that Cal had never seen before. When he turned back to him, his green eyes were tiny, reptilian.
“Wow. Those are some ugly glasses. Do you have any more surprises for me?”
“Just this one glass eye.” Innes dunted the back of his own head. He grinned, pleased with his own joke. Then he lay there studying Cal, as though he were recording all the fine details of his face.
If he was going to do it, then he realised that now was the time.
Cal rose up on his elbows. He crawled off his bed like some prowling animal and, staying low, he slithered across the narrow gap.
He kept advancing until he was above Innes, coming closer, expecting that at any moment, Innes would tell him to stop.
He was so close, he could smell the Imperial Leather on his skin.
It was the same brand of shaving cream his father used.
He kissed him.
He liked the hardness in Innes’s kiss. It was what he had hoped for: a man who was not interested in tenderness. He sighed and kissed him deeper.
It took a moment to realise that Innes was not kissing him back, that this was not hardness or shyness, but that he was simply tolerating the kiss, as though his own good manners forced him to endure, as though his kindness forbade him from hurting Cal’s feelings.
Realising too late that his kiss was unwanted, he pulled away. He blinked. “You can do anything you want to me.”
Innes gave him a pitying smile.
Cal withdrew to his own bed. He lay on his side, his face buried in his pillow.
“Hi . . .” Innes reached out and brushed his hand. “Let’s never do that again. OK?”
Cal couldn’t answer. The only sound was the hum of the small refrigerator.
“You won’t tell my father, will you?”
Innes took firm hold of his wrist. He pressed his thumb into the blue artery. His hands were rough, but the fingers were long and elegant as though God had granted them for a life he had never lived.
“How could I?” he said. “I wouldn’t know how.”