Lonie 66

Audrey was worried. Lonie hadn’t phoned her at home that night, or the night after. There was no one she could talk to. At work, people were distant, which was just the way she liked it. Her report to Bresslen on the Goldenwell visit was a paragraph long and so bland it could have been used as tracing paper. He said practically nothing in reply. The fatman even less. But now her eyes couldn’t help straying towards the fatman’s, as she passed the editor’s office. She wondered if what she’d heard was true. There had been another riot at the Rangers and Celtic game with 182 arrests. Editors and reporters were clapping their hands with glee. It didn’t matter what slant they put on the story, it was all bad news, which was good news for them. She seemed to be the only one out of this binging on religion and violence. There were so many questions running circles round her head and no answers. One good thing was that she could come and go as she pleased.

She met up with Davy Brown in the café near their work. They sat at a window seat, stirring hot chocolate, looking out into the rain scouring the street.

‘He’s an arsehole, but a good reporter.’ Davy’s pink palate opened up a maw beneath his thin moustache as he yawned. ‘The best way to get in contact with him is to trawl every pub in the West End or write a letter.’

‘I don’t think I’ve got time.’ Audrey’s fingers gripped the hot chocolate keeping her hands warm. She told Davy what she knew, but didn’t say anything about the fatman’s involvement. ‘Do you think Carol’s been framed?’

His head hunched onto his left shoulder as if someone had put a fifty pound weight on it, as he considered the question and stared at her myopically. ‘Maybe…or maybe not.’

‘What about Bisset?’ Audrey’s face was glowing with the heat of the café, but she was also becoming angry.

‘Aye, he’s involved and he’ll need a watchin’.’ He sniffed and looked out the window, his fingers crawling along the table until they chanced on his packet of Silk Cut. ‘Can I give you a piece of advice?’ He leaned back in his chair as he lit a fag.

Audrey nodded. Her lips a straight line.

‘These people are dangerous.’ His shoulders hunched as he tried to explain. ‘You’re young and have no idea. The Masons have got all the angles covered. It’s not just about getting you off with a parking fine or getting you a job. They’ve got links to the paramilitaries in the North. They can make you disappear.’

‘Like those young boys?’

His head jerked up and down in reply. He looked once more past the condensation on the window, outside to the black shadows of the quayside. The chair he was sitting on creaked as he pulled it in closer to the table. ‘My advice to you is back off and don’t get involved.’

She leaned forward too, their heads almost touching above the rising steam of their drinks. ‘But I’m already involved.’

Davy flinched. His posture became stiff and wooden as the chair he was sitting in. ‘But nobody knows you are.’

‘What about Lonie?’

He laughed through his nose and stubbed the fag, half finished, in the ashtray. His fingers reached behind him for his gabardine coat and the palm of his hand rested on the edge of the table as he stood up. ‘Nobody can give Lonie any advice.’ He struggled into his coat, his face red and flushed as hers. ‘Best thing you can do is keep out of it. You’ve got a life and a son to take care of. If that means avoiding Lonie…so be it.’

The green coat buttoned up, tight at the neck, made him look like an exotic parrot, with its wings docked. He didn’t look back at her sitting at the table and the bell dinged as he left.

That night Audrey sat in the living room with her mother and willed the phone to ring. She didn’t care what time or when, or even if mother answered, but it didn’t. Even in bed, tossing and turning and her heartbeat racing, part of her was still downstairs standing, waiting.

Next day Craig was raucous and kept knocking over cups and plates and tripping and falling and clinging onto her as if he’d regressed into a fat baby. Mother shouted at him and shouted advice to her. Audrey was glad to escape to work and leave the two of them to fashion a truce. She got off the bus, as usual the wind howled through the bus station, blowing wrappers and papers and debris from the night before; everyone was pushing and hurrying, when someone snatched at her bag. She whirled and grabbed it back.

‘You should see your face.’ Lonie grinned at her discomfort.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Thought Ah’d meet you before you got to work…Try and get you to elope with me.’

‘Fat chance.’ Audrey sauntered, with him in tow, a few hundred yards, keeping to the safety of the same strip of elevated pavement in the bus station. She stood sideways to him at the bus stop, using his body as a windbreak, waiting for the second bus that would take her directly to work. ‘What are you really here for?’

‘Well.’ Lonie dug into his coat pocket for his fags, breathing in diesel fumes hanging in the air. He lit a Woodbine, killing time, by looking out at the forecourt towards the double and single decker buses dropping and picking folk off and didn’t know where to begin. ‘Somebody broke into my house.’

Audrey waited for the punch-line, but, like the bus she was waiting for, none came. ‘What did they steal?’

‘Well, you’ve seen my house!’ Lonie took a deep drag. ‘They had a whip round and left me a tin drum.’

Audrey smacked him on the shoulder. ‘I thought you were serious.’

Lonie took a step back, grinning at her. ‘Ah wiz, but not about the tin drum.’

The passengers sitting nearby stood up. Some of them folded their newspaper; others lifted and pulled tight the straps of their bags; all of them moving forward in slow motion as the front of the bus made a sharp turn and it swooshed into the parking lot close to where Audrey stood.

Distracted, not having time to look at him, or have a proper conversation, she watched the other passengers get on the bus. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Her voice had the neutral tone of the speaking clock.

Lonie got on the bus behind her. Gallantly, he let her take the window seat and let her pay the fare to the conductress. ‘Words out -- A’hm persona non grata.’

‘What does that mean?’ Audrey knew what it meant, but not what he meant. She swayed against him, at every corner, as if they were in the same hammock, close enough to smell the Vosene on his hair.

‘It means Ah’m fucked.’ Lonie flung his hands up in the air. ‘Even the lowest-life photographers that doorstep kids that mum’s have died, won’t talk to me. And a couple of times Ah think Ah’ve been followed. We must be close.’ He put his hand on her knee.

Audrey swayed with the bus as she got up. ‘That’s close enough. This is our stop.’

‘Ah’ll just stay on ‘til Partick. Ah’ll phone you later.’

The conductress working her way up the aisle overheard Lonie. She’d different ideas. ‘You’ve only paid until this stop. Geez another ten penny fare or get aff.’

‘Ah’m on the sick.’ Lonie tried a few desultory coughs, but found himself standing in the rain with Audrey. The bus sped off in the direction he’d be walking. He grabbed at her coat and threaded his arm through hers, but as they got nearer the Glasownian he pulled his arm away.

Audrey stopped to get a better look at him. In the rain and bright morning light his face looked wan, his shoulders drooped and he looked thinner as if he hadn’t been eating. ‘You want to go to the café, for a coffee or something?’

‘Ah’ll take the something.’ He pulled her into an inlet of a bricked up doorway, out of the rain.

She didn’t let him kiss her. But they stood and talked until her feet got so cold she thought she’d have to pee on them so she could walk the last few hundred yards to work. She told him everything that had happened at Goldenwell, but, it was, as if he wasn’t really listening, or already knew that part. He lobbed some names at her, big names, well-known names: politicians, police and councillors. She began to shiver and not just because of the cold. ‘You will be alright?’ He let her pull her in and kiss her, his cock rubbing against her stomach.

‘Ah’ve got that abortion arranged.’ Lonie's outstretched hand let her fingers flutter away from him as she readied herself to flee towards work. ‘It’s a Friday night. You’ll need to stay with me the whole weekend. You better make something up to tell your mum.’