Free The Glasgow Coma Scale by Neil Stewart Page A

skin.’
    ‘Uh-huh?’ China replied, on a rising note, as though intrigued by this information. She threw aside the pencil she’d been using, took up another, and started shading, just as Dean had taught them.
    ‘Aye.’ He cleared his throat and then sat beside her on the polished floor, which was a more complicated and painful process than he had anticipated, involving dropping into a crouch then arranging his sore legs like a puppet’s beneath him. ‘That there’s bones, and muscles and tendons, and . . . other stuff. Ye know, the same workings that’re inside us aw.’ His bad knee, folded back on itself like a flick-knife, chose this moment to click into place, emitting a crack that seemed to echo in the hush. Embarrassed, he fell silent, opened up his pad and began to sketch – without the aid of any geometric shapes, mark you – the same Arctic fox, from a different angle. After observing without overt interest what he was doing, China returned to her own work. Frowning, she drew the line of the fox’s back, glancing up at the vitrine every few seconds, wary, birdlike, in case the creature might have moved in the meantime – taken a hesitant step forward, ruined her composition.
    In a sense, by watching China work, he was obeying Dean’s first principle: observe. She was using soft pencils, 2B, 3B, and she was leaning rather heavily on them, with the result that the picture emerging was too dark to capture the scrappy fox’s spoiled-milk pelt. Rather than mention this, Angus said:
    ‘Interesting, but, comin here, seein aw the different stuff folk’re daein.’ Ah,
interesting
, the weasel word that could mean anything you wanted it to. ‘Ma first class, ye see, although ye probably knew that. Ah wis reassured tae see sumdy more in ma ain age bracket.’ This was deliberate provocation – China couldn’t fail to be outraged by the insinuation that she was anything near as ancient as him – yet she didn’t respond to this either. Tough audience. ‘Ah’m glad it’s no jist auld biddies here shelterin from the cauld.’
    Beside him, China was using a pocket Stanley knife to whittle her pencils sharp, holding up each in turn to inspect its squared-off nib. Under her hand, the scene that was forming was livelier than the stilted set-up in the vitrine. She’d lent the static beasts some dynamism. Painted up, her drawing could’ve been used on a jigsaw puzzle or a calendar for a child’s bedroom wall; that was the standard he was seeing.
    With his own fox nearly completed – though he had misjudged the starting point, so the animal seemed to cower at the foot of the page – Angus had a go at adding a fulmar, which hung by nylon threads from the vitrine’s gridded ceiling. He wanted to show it swooping low and majestic over the animals’ gathering, but instead he inadvertently made the bird look like it was plummeting, petrified, from the air. Flummoxed, he turned the page and debated whether he was better starting over or giving up. Some days you just didn’t have it. It was his first time drawing in God knew how long, yet that made him even less inclined than usual to go easy on himself. He tried again, and this time got a couple of the seabirds down reasonably well. What must China think of him, seeing these half-arsed efforts? He found himself wishing he could show her the paintings he’d done in his old life.
The Losers
– he didn’t even know who owned that any more. He’d held off selling it as long as he could, then let it go hastily, reluctantly, for an insulting sum, to keep body and soul together that bit longer. Whose wall did it hang on now? Whose attic was it shoved in, waiting to appreciate in value? It was not about who owned it, he corrected himself; it’d always be Angus’s, no matter if he never saw it again.
    He felt the long point of dejection pressing into his throat, and had to switch his attention back to China swiftly. ‘How long’ve ye been comin to these