Lonie 62

Audrey wasn’t sure if she was ready to go back to work. She was sure one more day with her mother constantly sniping -- about her son, his hair, his clothes, her hair, her clothes, her everything -- and she’d gladly sign herself into Goldenwell Secure Unit and lock the door behind her. Only her son kept her sane. She still slept fitfully, waking up about three am, and finding it difficult to get back to sleep, but her dreams were no longer filled with dread. She did begin to doze and would eventually nod off, getting up about seven, when she heard her mother banging about. Her fingers would rub the curve of her stomach and her thoughts would stray to the foetus growing inside her, an alien presence, gathering strength from her limbs. Whilst waiting for the early morning bath to fill she’d routinely masturbate. There was a sameness of overcast dark days growing into the inky-octopus darkness of night, seeping in through the windows from the garden outside, and creeping into the house, that made her feel like she was trudging barefoot through treacle wearing the dark glasses of a blind woman. She’d read the Glasownian and watched the news. Lonie was literally a feature of her life, of her body, and his reputation had grown beyond that small parochial paper. She allowed herself to acknowledge that her standing as a reporter should have been yoked to his, in the way her body was, but she bit back her bitterness. Her mother had told her about him sitting stone-faced beside her bed every day after the accident and that had helped. Still, as her fingers trailed through the pages of Women’s Own, with her mother sitting on the couch opposite, crocheting another seat cover and listening to Radio 4, and her son lying down upstairs during his afternoon nap, her body had been tense as cardboard packaging as she willed their telephone to ring.

Week after week she’d phoned the newsroom to report her continuing struggle with illness. Bresslen had been curt and gracious and, in his own way lovely, but he made her feel as useful as a potted aspidistra. She picked up from Bresslen that Lonie was also off sick. Let the bastard suffer she thought.

The telephone call, when it did come, left her flustered and afraid as a nun at the altar. Her hands trembled when mother handed her
the receiver with a knowing look.

‘It’s me.’ She hated when somebody said that, especially when that somebody hadn’t phoned for almost five weeks.

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Ah’ve no’ got much money for the phone and Ah was wondering…’ Oh god, she thought, Lonie’s phoned to borrow money from me ‘…if we could meet?’

‘That may be possible.’ Her hand cupped the receiver. The phone was on a small table at the bottom of the stairs. Grace had left her to it, but would be hovering, out of sight, at the top of the stairs.

‘Ah was thinkin’ The University Café that’s on…’

‘…I know where it is. What time?’

‘Ah was thinkin’ tomorrow about tenish.’

‘Alright…’ Audrey wanted to say more, but the pips started. She waited, for what seemed the longest time, before she got the disengaged tone. Resisting the urge to call him back and castigate him, the phone receiver was placed gently back on the hook. The delicious thought of leaving him sitting alone in The University Café perked her up.

The following morning, Craig had to be managed and mother had to be managed, even more carefully.

‘How will you get over there?’ Grace stood behind her as she crunched Cornflakes, without sugar, in the dining rom.

‘I’ll take a bus. It won’t kill me.’ She raised an eyebrow. The irony wasn’t lost on her mother.

Craig sat beneath the table playing “This little piggy” with her toes out of mother’s eye line. Audrey patted him on the head and made encouraging noises. It remained a delicate negotiation. Mother could simply make up a prior arrangement and with no baby-sitter her appointment with Lonie would need to be cancelled. There would be no way of contacting him. Her premonition of leaving him sitting alone in the café would have come true. Mother flounced out of the room, her face a scrabble- board of disapproval.

Audrey tore clothes from her cupboard looking for something to wear. A denim skirt was too tight so she settled for bellbottom denims and a cream coloured cashmere sweater –clothes that he’d think she’d just flung on. Later that morning she tiptoed out of the house and shut the front door quietly behind her. A younger self had left home every morning to attend Glasgow Uni so she knew the route well, and the café was a five minute walk from it. The bus and tube journey gave her time to rehearse what she intended to say.

Lonie got up from his seat inside the cosy warmth of the café to meet her. He had made an effort and shaved and the smell of cheap aftershave threatened to overwhelm the smell of fried breakfasts.

‘Great to see you.’ Lonie leaned across to kiss her.

Audrey let a tight band of a smile play on her mouth. He gripped her elbow, but she presented her cheek and swerved round him, settling into the comfortable worn leather seat on the Formica table opposite him. He flung himself into the seat opposite her. Other spaces were already taken with a mixture of long haired students, elbows on the table and full of table-talk, pushing the formalities of not letting other people hear what you’re saying aside, and older people, sitting quietly looking out the window onto Byres Road. The waitress, a heavy middle-aged Italian looking woman, with the beginnings of a moustache, came to take their orders. Lonie already had a mug of tea sitting on the table in front of him.

‘Whit you wantin’? Lonie grinned at Audrey.

Two narrow blocks of wooden feet kept the set menu standing vertically in a smear-proof cover. Audrey glanced at it pushed up against the brown and red plastic ketchup bottles near the wall, but she wasn’t hungry. ‘I’ll just have a pot of tea and an éclair.’ She smiled up at the waitress.

Lonie didn’t need to look at the menu. ‘Ah’ll have the all-day breakfast. Everything on it. And Ah’ll share her pot of tea.’

The waitress scribbled down his order and left them searching for something to say.

‘Ah missed you.’ Lonie fingers rolled a cigarette over and over on the table, making no effort to light it, or meet her eyes.

Audrey’s mouth felt dry. All the things she planned to say were suddenly scattered dust. ‘I wonder where that waitress has got to.’ She craned her neck, searching for her, even though her stocky body, with her back to her, was only six feet away at the glass topped counter and near the serving hatch.

Lonie sighed and picked up the Woodbine. He plonked it between his lips and lit it, blowing fag smoke into the air, to join the drifting haze above their heads. His index finger tugged the ashtray from the centre of the table closer to his side. He studied her face and the way her hands sat primly on the table and the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked younger and even prettier than he remembered which made him feel older. ‘Ah’m off sick at the moment.’

‘I know.’ Audrey’s eyes met his and didn’t drift away, not right away.

‘How do you know?’

‘Bresslen told me.’

The waitress came over with the pot of tea, two mugs and the sweet. She brought milk in a small metallic pitcher with a lid that Lonie banged up and down as if checking its suitability before pouring some into his mug. When the waitress left them he poured his tea and reached for the sugar. His lips made a smacking sound, like a small bird as he tasted the tea. Audrey quietly poured her own and took a bite out of her éclair.

‘Look, Ah’m sorry you never got the credit on the Goldenwell case that you deserved.’ He felt better, lighter somehow at unburdening himself and meeting the questioning gaze of her blue and green eyes. ‘It wasn’t my fault…Ah asked the fatman…’

‘…That’s total rubbish.’ She cut in on him. ‘You’re selfish through and through, so let’s just not go there.’

The waitress came back with all-day-breakfast and put the plate down with a side dish of buttered toast. Lonie nodded his approval, bit into a slice of toast and speared a link- sausage with his fork. ‘Ah know.’ He spoke with his mouth full. ‘You’re right. Ah’m a selfish bastard, but Ah need your help.’ He leaned over the top of his plate. ‘Besides.’ He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper making Audrey bend forward to hear him. 'Ah’ve fixed that other thing.’

‘What other thing?’

Lonie’s head angled left and right, before speaking. ‘The abortion.’

For a moment they both seemed frozen in other people’s conversations, the sound of the radio in the background and the scraping of knives and forks. They both eased their backs into their seats and looked at each other over the vast gulf of the table.

‘That’s good,’ Audrey forced her face to settle like sediment, before she opened her mouth, and through pinched lips, asked, ‘When?’

Lonie cut into the yolk of a fried egg and mopped it up with toast. It dribbled down onto his plate as he put it in his mouth. ‘Soon.’ He nodded at her. ‘But let’s not talk about that now.’

Audrey chose her words carefully, her face showing no emotion, as she put down her mug of tea. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Me, of course.’ Lonie grinned at her, chewing on a bit of black pudding. ‘Here’s the way it is.’ His face grew serious and he ducked down and started whispering again. ‘Those young boys that went missin’.’

‘What young boys?’ Audrey pushed her plate away, a stump of gooey fondant left lying on the plate.

Lonie still hadn’t finished his breakfast but stuffed it into his mouth, cleaning the cream off the front of his teeth with his tongue. 'The young boys that Carol Peters was meant to have murdered.’ He swilled at the tea in the bottom of his mug and sat back in his chair.

Audrey sipped at her tea, saying nothing. Carol Peters had spooked her badly and she didn’t want to think about her, or the secure unit. She wanted her life to go back to the way it was before she’d met Lonie, worked with Lonie, had sex with Lonie…she wasn’t sure what she wanted.

Lonie’s shoulders leaned across the table again as he fed her another snippet of information. ‘Here’s what I know-there’s a young boy called Archie Ramsay.’ Her eyes showed she didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘He was one of the boys killed.’ He picked at a mushroom with his fork. ‘He’s the centrepiece of the investigation. How shall I put he’s the tethered goat that brought the other boys into the open and he was the last one to die…’ he quickly corrected himself, ‘...or go missing.’

‘How do you know this?’ Audrey’s voice had a dull hostile tone. She wasn’t sure what he was saying, but she disliked and distrusted the trumpeting tone.

‘I went to visit all the boys’ families. None of them were sure how their sons had met Carol Peters, or indeed if they had.’ He let this sink in. ‘But they knew alright who Archie was and what he was.’

The waitress appeared at their table. ‘Do you want anything else?

‘No. Thank you. ’ Audrey smiled and shook her head.

Lonie polished off the last of the tea, as she picked up empty plates. ‘I’ll have another pot of tea and a Carmel wafer.’

Audrey waited until the waitress had left before she spoke. ‘What was he?’ She too whispered, infected by the need to know, but also to make sure no one else did.

‘He was a poof -- a homosexual.’

Audrey sighed. She was disappointed, expecting Archie to be some kind of superhuman mutant. That was hardly a revelation and it must have showed on her face.

Lonie sounded angry. ‘He picked up the other victims and had sex with them.’

‘How can you know that?’

The waitress interrupted them, leaving another pot of tea and a plate with a Tunnock’s Carmel wafer.

Lonie put his hands flat on the table. ‘Because one of their mothers, a Mrs McKenzie, caught them at it.’

Audrey’s face glowed crimson. ‘That doesn’t mean they all were.’

‘Believe me it does.’

She took time to digest it. ‘And what…he killed them?’

‘He might have. Or he might have helped. He was in way over his head. Ah think he got caught doin’ somethin’ that he wasn’t supposed to be doin’ and he got blackmailed into doin’ whit he was told…then when he knew too much he was bumped off, like the others.’

‘But who would do such a thing?’ Audrey’s face crumpled in disgust. A surge of anger swept through her body. She felt like hitting out, smashing up those responsible.

‘Chief Inspector Bisset for one. The fatman for another.’

Her hand shot up covering her mouth. ‘Mr Macdonald?’

Lonie nodded. ‘Ah’m no’ sayin’ he was shaggin’ young boys. But Bisset definitely was, and had something on him, some hold over him and he was involved. All the mothers have got the fatman’s card with his number on it. But Ah don’t think it’s as simple as that. Look at the way he was promoted after the case and the way his career has gone since then. You’ve got to look at the director of The Glaswonian and there were another couple of big bosses’ names mentioned. Ah think it was a paedophile ring… something’s happened …or someone’s threatened to squeal and they’ve panicked and asked Bisset to take care of business.’

‘What’s a paedophile ring?’

Lonie took the wrapper off the Carmel wafer. He sometimes forgot how young and naïve she was. ‘It’s a group of men that, in this case, like buggering young boys.’ He dunked the wafer in his tea, before sticking the soggy mess into his mouth.