Free Where the Dead Men Go by Liam McIlvanney Page B

that morning and now I lit it, watched the blue flames play on the firelighter cubes, the twists of newspaper flare and blacken, the thin ribs of kindling quicken and blaze. I stuck two blocks of larch on top. I found an old fleece and pulled it on and lay on the couch watching the flames pouring round the yellow blocks, and wondered why I couldn’t get warm.
    ‘Daddy!’ The boy was slapping my shoulders, the crown of my head. ‘Daddy! Wake up!’ His grinning face, the bunched cheeks pink with cold. I could feel the outside on his anorak as I unzipped it and tugged it off. When I hoisted him onto my chest he buried his face in my neck, chilling my skin with his cheeks. His shoes bumped to the carpet as I pried them off in turn.
    He was twenty months old. For months he’d been in the point-and-tell phase, striding around the flat like a diapered Adam, imperiously designating the objects in his path, drunk with the joys of naming. Book! Car! Dada! Cup! Recently he’d discovered the two-word sentence and a plangent note, a thread of yearning, had entered his pronouncements. Doggy gone! All done! Want it! There was a haiku starkness to these bulletins that I found appealing and that made me think of the words we waste and of how we would fare if we were held to the two-word sentence. The gains would be striking. The lies, the excuses, the fudges and shams would all go. Job done. Enough bullshit.
    Over the boy’s head the day was fading in the window. I could hear Mari in the kitchen, putting the shopping away. Angus slithered down and skittered through to his mother. The fire was dying, the last logs blackened on top, still pulsing red underneath. I lifted the poker and opened the door in the latticework fireguard, keeping one hand free in case Angus came back. I turned the logs over and laid some kindling sticks crosswise over them. When I went to add a block of larch my hand jumped and the knuckle of my middle finger bumped the edge of the stove.
    In the kitchen I ran the cold tap and watched Mari stacking cans in the cupboard. She glanced over as if to check what was blocking her light.
    ‘How are you feeling?’
    The water was cold now. I put my hand in the stream and let it play on the burn, a purple hyphen over the knuckle.
    ‘Fine. I burnt my finger. It’s OK.’
    ‘No, I mean how are you feeling?’
    I looked over my shoulder. She had paused with a can in her hand, as though weighing it for a missile.
    ‘I don’t know.’ The knuckle was numb. ‘I’m fine. I wish he had called, though. I wish he had let me know. I wish he’d done that.’
    I dried my hands on a dishtowel, stopped to look at them, the palms, the freckled backs, the pale strip where the ring had been. Could your hands do this, I wondered. Suddenly betray you? The little creatures that scampered to meet your every command, could they calmly tie the knots that lashed your wrists to a steering wheel, calmly tie and tighten them, send you to your death?
    Then Mari was in front of me, taking my hands in hers, placing my hands on her waist, pressing against me. She pulled my head down till her lips were touching my ear. ‘Give yourself a break, Gerry. It’s not a reflection on you.’
    I nodded. That I needed to hear this didn’t mean that I believed it.
    When we broke apart Mari clapped her hands, chafed them together. ‘Anyway!’ She was all brisk and business now: ‘Looks to me like someone could do with cheering up.’
    ‘Well it’s not you.’ She was struggling to stifle a grin. ‘So I guess that leaves me. I’m open to offers. What did you have in mind?’
    ‘Ah, I don’t know.’ She forced two fingers into her back jeans pocket and extracted a hinged strip of card. Two tickets. The Black Keys gig at the Barrowland.
    ‘And dinner,’ she said. ‘Beforehand. At Ferrante’s. That’s the place you like, isn’t it?’
    ‘Jesus. Aye. What’s the occasion?’
    ‘We got it.’ She shrugged. ‘We got the contract.’
    ‘The