Free The Glasgow Coma Scale by Neil Stewart

boost blood sugar brought low by the morning’s tests and injections at the hospital. The canteen was fitted with fluorescent tube lights and a squeaky black vulcanized-rubber floor, and this made it, to Angus aged nine, the acme of sci-fi sophistication. The old man had had to tell him several times each visit to stand up off the clarty ground, since – though this had been as inexpressible as his troubling feelings on noticing the puncture marks in the rocking horse’s neck – to trace his finger around the embossed circles on the floor, sixteen per tile, was a highlight of Angus’s day, the hospital appointment for which this was compensation by now all but forgotten.
    He passed spearheads and sidearms; Mackintosh chairs, ormolu clocks, stuffed reptiles; Beryl Cooks and the Dalí Christ. Artefacts from unrelated epochs, forced to mingle in the vast cold rooms like guests at a wake. A funny feeling stole over him in places like this: he heard footsteps in distant rooms, the metronomic plod of adult feet set against a child’s adagio, and felt just for a moment that he might round a corner and see, through an architraved doorway, his father and himself as a boy, the sickly child.
    Someone blabbed, of course, the instant he’d achieved any measure of success. ‘Oh, you didn’t know? Yeah,
seriously
ill as a kid. They say he was lucky to survive.’ And oh, the critics’ relief, now that they no longer had to pretend to be divining hidden meanings, but could give anything they liked or disliked in his work the most banal, reductive biographical gloss. After that revelation all they saw in the underlit rooms and looming gronk faces he painted was the lingering psychological drip-down of childhood malady. At first, he’d been amused by the naïvety: he’d laughed at a review of the 1998 CCA exhibition in which he’d shown
The Losers
, not knowing that all subsequent reviews would resemble it: ‘Rennie contributes a vast and cinematically melancholic canvas, all austere deep Victorian browns and blacks, and, in faltering chalk marks, two huge malevolently grinning faces, personifications of disease bearing down on the feeble patient . . .’ Cheek, spouting all that claptrap then only awarding the show three stars. When reviews praised the work, the artist could take no credit; when they were harsh, he was the one felt the blame. Worse still, once the story had got around, Angus could no longer deliver his stock line about tragedies yet to befall him, all his interviewers now supposing they knew him better than he did himself – hence no bugger making the effort to find out whose double portrait
The Losers
actually was. One early death, one disappearance. Aye, well, maybe better that remain Angus’s secret.
    He finally found China in one of the taxidermy rooms. She was sitting cross-legged with her back to the wall, before a vitrine in which various Arctic animals stood in unnatural proximity on jablite tundra. A sketchbook was open on her lap, and he keeked down to see what she was drawing: the Arctic fox, which, going by its dead dumb eyes, its snaggle teeth and bald muzzle, dated back to the flood. She had lightly pencilled in guidelines for herself: cylinders for its body and legs, a tangram of differently sized wedges for its head. He almost laughed. This was what Dean was teaching the poor fuckers?
    ‘That’s – interestin,’ he opined, nonetheless. She glanced up, unsurprised at his seeking her out, or feigning it. ‘Good, is what I mean.’ Her expression didn’t change. ‘Ah’ve been tourin aboot, ye see, and the other folk . . .’ He trailed off, and, either self-conscious or uninterested, China went back to her drawing, starting on the scraggy ruff of fur round the fox’s throat. ‘Even the ones drawin properly, like you – well, it’s still comin oot two-dimensional.’ A dim sense of propriety kept him from a more candid appraisal. ‘Nae understandin there’s anyhin beneath the