Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  Amy Harrison was gorgeous, and had breasts. Unbelievable.

  As soon as he got home Fraser went to the bathroom and masturbated, thinking about Amy.

  He feigned illness the next day, and once everyone was out of the house, he went to Elizabeth’s room and put on one of her skirts and her tights. Then, looking at his erection in the mirror, he jerked off again, imagining the image of women’s underclothing; his hands and cock were really him fucking Amy.

  The results were spectacularly pleasant for him. He vowed to do it again as much as possible. And he did. He was never caught, and when he actually started really having sex with Amy, he ended his little brush with transvestism. He didn’t think about it much until years later when he mentioned it to Carl, his therapist, who as you can imagine was delighted.

  No one actually came out and said it, but vis-à-vis sex the prevailing wisdom in the Darby household was that men were horny bastards and wanted sex all the time, and women didn’t really like sex but would let men do it as a favor in return for curtains and furniture.

  Maybe some women liked sex but they were bad and dirty and probably Catholics.

  What amazed Fraser, as he thought about this years later, was how frighteningly accurate it was. He was very grateful that he hadn’t been brought up to believe that sex was a natural expression of love between a man and a woman. It would have taken all the fun out of it.

  “Coming to you in five, four, three, two . . .”

  The floor manager mimed the “one” and swept his arm below camera two.

  Fraser was looking skyward, a beatific smile on his face, as if Jesus had just told him a joke he had heard before but he wanted to be polite. After a short pause, he turned and looked directly into the camera and read from the TelePrompTer.

  “Hello, everyone. When I was a wee boy I had a cairn terrier puppy—a cheeky wee thing with whiskers that made him look a bit like my grandpa. . . .”

  In the sound gallery Charlie MacDuff pretended to vomit.

  Fraser continued, “My father had gotten him from a man at work. He said that the owner was going to drown him because he had no room for a puppy, and would I look after him. Of course, like any little boy, I was delighted. I named him Blackie, because he was black. That dog followed me everywhere, to Mr. McMurtry’s shop when my mother sent me for potatoes, to Stoorie Burn when I went fishing, and when we went to my granny’s house on Sunday, Blackie would sit outside waiting patiently for us to come out. My granny was a proud woman and she didn’t want dog hairs on her Axminster carpet.

  “When you think about it, that wee dog was a little bit like Jesus, wasn’t he? Waiting for you, a faithful, loyal, and true friend. Although you can’t nourish Jesus on Boneos and Bacon Bits, he needs your love and faith. . . .”

  As Fraser continued with his ridiculous allegory, a leathery blond woman crept in and stood next to Margaret. His agent tried to ignore the woman, who smelled dreadfully of nicotine and hairspray. Margaret assumed she was another of Fraser’s “friends.” She was wrong.

  “Are you Margaret Bonaventura?” asked the woman in a consumptive, forty-Marlboro-Reds-a-day whisper.

  Margaret nodded.

  “I’m Tracy Flood from the Sunday Recorder. Can we talk?”

  DEPARTURE

  GEORGE FARTED and enjoyed the smell in his car.

  Canned ham.

  Strange his farts always smelled like canned ham, as he never ate it.

  Better try it soon or not at all.

  I’ll miss farting, he thought.

  Perhaps there’s farting in the afterlife, although he doubted it. Doesn’t really make sense, wouldn’t need to be—unless there was food, which, if there’s not, then that doesn’t sound like much fun either.

  At least he had stopped coughing. His persistent cold had gone away too. It was odd but the symptoms that had finally driven him into the hands of the doctors had disappeared now that he knew he was fucked. He felt fine physically. He wondered how long he’d have to wait for the pain. He wondered what it would be like. Like a toothache or a sprained ankle? What?

  Maybe he would see his parents again.

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He didn’t look sick.

  Just looked like himself. Sheila used to say he was handsome, never to him but often to her friends. He thought about the skull under his skin, how he would look when he had been dead for a few months.

  He decided to get cremated, then he laughed out loud at the fact that he could be so vain about his appearance after he died, especially given the fact that it was highly likely that no one would ever see him again. Except perhaps for an archaeologist or two a few thousand years in the future.

  He conceded to himself that he was handsome; he had green eyes and brown hair and nice skin and good teeth and he was tall and not fat and looked a bit like that magician who was engaged to a super-model and fucking fuck he should have gotten laid more.

  What the hell had he been doing getting married to his high-school girlfriend? He wasn’t sure if he’d ever even liked her. She was just persistent and wouldn’t leave him alone. She determined they would get married—he never really questioned it at the time.

  He supposed he was having a midlife crisis. Yes, dying in the middle of your life could definitely be classified as a crisis.

  He thought, I have never known how to have any fun.

  Fraser could always have fun, I never had any fun, and now I’m fucking dying and that’s just about the least fun I’ve ever had.

  He had had three affairs in the time he was married. All with other lawyers, all of whom were also married. None of them were fun. He just felt guilty.

  He had made love to seven women in his life. Sheila, then Lorraine, Sophia, and Glenda, his affairs, there was Tricia Docherty during a period when he and Sheila had broken up for a while, Olivia the English girl on a boys’ holiday in Spain when he was engaged to Sheila but they were not yet married, and the prostitute at his bachelor party. Daisy, he thought her name was but he couldn’t be sure.

  Fraser had also shagged the prostitute and he wasn’t even getting married.

  George thought about the things in life that had made him happy and so naturally he thought of his daughter, Nancy. She had been wonderful when she was a toddler and when she was a little girl. Being in her company was like mainlining joy directly into his system. But she was a teenager now, surly and bitchy, and didn’t want him around.

  Said he was no fun.

  The whole bloody dying thing was no fun whatsoever, he just couldn’t get a positive spin on it. He wasn’t thinking like himself at all and he guessed that he was having some sort of breakdown, which, given the circumstances, etc. etc.

  He thought about his mother and father, how the chemotherapy seemed to have ravaged them as much as the illness itself.

  He wondered if what he was doing—running away—would be the sort of behavior that would keep him out of heaven, although now that he was facing the big sleep, he just couldn’t force himself into believing in all that. He would have liked to. If he did, he would have stayed at home and gone through the dreadful treatment and the drugs and the weeping and teeth gnashing but he just couldn’t force himself into that foolishness.

  He had been around, he had seen too much, he was a criminal defense lawyer, for Christ’s sake, he heard more lies on a daily basis than a politician’s wife.

  Or perhaps a lawyer’s wife?

  Afterlife—bollocks.

  It was like when he was at university.

  Every Saturday night, the students from his class would go drinking in the Ubiquitous Chip or the Cul de Sac in the West End of Glasgow. At eleven o’clock when the bars closed and the young still had an appetite to party, somebody would always claim to know that there was a party in Clouston Street—usually fucking Fraser, who would hang around the Uni to meet girls even though he didn’t go there. He had some glorified tea-boy job on the Evening Times sports desk.

  So they’
d spend the rest of their money on tinned beer and bottles of cheap blended whisky and traipse through the bitter cold looking for the party but there never was one.

  There never was one, so you might as well drink as much as you can in the pub ’cause when it closes it’s just cold and dark outside.

  There is no party in Clouston Street.

  He thought about Fraser. Jeez, what an arse he had turned into. Actually he had turned into an arse when they were about thirteen or fourteen years old. He had been an arse at school, an arse when they left, and now he was a professional arse among his own kind in the media.

  He always fell on his feet, though. There’s no way he’d get cancer, and he smokes. Probably; he used to anyway. George had given it up years ago. He still missed it.

  His father had given up smoking six months before he died. Seemed pointless to George.

  His mother hadn’t given up smoking before she died. She had just given up. Cancer had killed both his parents and now it was going to kill him. He was an only child, like his daughter. He hoped he hadn’t passed some kind of cancer gene on to her.

  He had no way of knowing.

  There’s no justice, thought George, which you’d think he would have worked out by now, given that he’d worked in the legal system for fifteen years.

  Fraser dropped his cigarette butt over the side of the balcony and walked back into Gus’s office.

  Gus’s office, in fact the whole building, was a smoke-free zone, which seemed horribly undemocratic given that most people who worked there smoked. At certain points, usually just after lunch, it seemed as though the entire workforce was huddled outside on the fire escapes or at the entrances, like little pockets of pickets for earlier death.

  He listened as Gus droned on, “. . . blah blah . . . cutbacks . . . setbacks . . . national adverting versus regional viewing . . . percentage . . . demographics . . . ho hum bladdy . . . crappity bladdy crappity blah . . .”

  Gus was technically his boss, so he had to look like he was listening, or at least look like he was trying to look like he was listening. Gus had worked in television for a long time and he knew the realities of star versus management but he was a traditionalist, and also his ego was so huge that he thought most people found him as fascinating as he found himself.

  Fraser was thinking about the new makeup lady—Paula. He loved that when she sucked him off she made a little humming sound that seemed to vibrate right through him, just like Julie used to.

  They probably both read the same edition of Cosmo. Unlike Julie, though, she let him come on her face. What a great girl.

  She said she liked it, that it was good for her skin, and also that it was dirty.

  Fraser presumed she was Catholic but he hadn’t bothered to ask.

  “. . . in conclusion smaller raises performance related blah brubbadah team pull together loyalty one of the family badaadah pigity pop.”

  Fraser snapped into the present when he heard the cadence and timing indicate that Gus’s monologue was over. He smiled at Gus. Then looked at Margaret.

  Margaret smiled professionally at Gus.

  “Well, you’ve been very clear and precise, and of course you are aware of Fraser’s popularity. Why don’t we think things over and come back to you with some real numbers?”

  “Fine,” said Gus. “Think it over but . . .”

  And off he went again.

  “. . . bladdy back in the days of . . . live documentary . . . my early years . . . investigative journalism . . . bruuddding broagde . . . vargggy pladdy blop . . .”

  By the time Margaret and Fraser left the meeting, they were almost ready to accept a pay cut just to get out. Meetings with Gus, particularly negotiation meetings, were just excruciating. Gus was very smart. He’d bore you to his will.

  I hate that fucking cunt, thought Gus. You had to think cunt these days, there were not too many occasions when you could say it out loud. Gus longed for the old days when cunt was okay and you could drink at lunchtime without some mad cunt suggesting you had to go to cunting rehab for alcocuntyholism. Arse. Fucking arsey cunt.

  It was Americans who’d ruined the word cunt. They thought it was some kind of derogatory term for a vagina, or someone who had a vagina, but it had never been that in Scotland.

  In Scotland the word cunt was cheery, like shite or shortbread.

  Fucking Global Village, everything got confused.

  Deborah, Gus’s secretary, who was one of the main people he never said the c-word (as it was now known) in front of, brought him in a cup of tea. Gus was terrified of her because she was very sexy, with her dyed blond hair and her zaftig body pushing at the little Chanel suits she wore. He was convinced she would file a sexual harassment suit against him if he even looked at her the wrong way.

  He was wrong, though. Deborah secretly wanted Gus to grab her and kiss her hard on the mouth, his big jaggy mustache scratching her face. She wanted him to pull her hair and rip her tights off and plunge his big hard cock in her cunt.

  She didn’t say that out loud, of course. She said, “Do you want a chocolate digestive with your tea?”

  Gus declined, as nonsexually as he could, and Deborah left slightly disappointed.

  Gus sighed and looked out the window to the great damp city of Glasgow. Most of the buildings had been sandblasted in the last twenty years, which Gus, along with most Glaswegians, secretly detested. This town used to be black and sooty and smelly and terrifying; now it looked like Disneyland in the rain, sad and wrong.

  It hadn’t just been sandblasted, it had been disinfected.

  Gus thought about a paper cover he had seen on a toilet seat on a business trip to America. It had written on it “Sanitized for your convenience” in pleasant and friendly writing, with a little drawing of a woman smiling and giving a thumbs-up.

  The drawing of the woman wasn’t very good. She looked like Paul McCartney.

  People were frightened to bare their arses in anything less than laboratory conditions. Glasgow had been sanitized for your convenience, but then again, so had Gus.

  He had started out his working life in one of the great shipyards of Glasgow (now riverside apartments). He became a left-wing union official, fighting for the rights of the workers. A charismatic young man, he was spotted by the BBC and asked on to political panel shows. From there he went on to investigative and front-line reporting, doing a lot of face time on camera during the rise of Solidarity and the collapse of the Soviet empire. That was when he grew the trademark mustache. Somehow it associated him with Lech Walesa. They were brothers in politics, heroism, and facial hair, although this was unknown to Mr. Walesa.

  From producing his own segments he went on to producing his own show and when Margaret Thatcher created conditions that were advantageous he started his own production company, making local news programs and documentaries exposing the evils of Margaret Thatcher and the like. His company became successful and wealthy, as he did himself.

  He eventually managed a takeover of the Scottish media giant he now controlled, and now he sat at the top of his own private modern republic. Havel of his private Czechoslovakia. He hadn’t deserted socialism, he just liked money and power.

  He saw himself as a great modern left-wing intellectual trapped in the body and job of a successful capitalist media giant.

  Of course, he was, in truth, a cunt.

  He didn’t like Fraser, though. He hated his jumpers and his bourgeois religious phony baloney show (although the advertising rates were great, viewing figures were great, fuck, business is business) and he hated the fact that something this twee was one of his signature programs.

  He’d get rid of Fraser given half a chance, although he couldn’t just fire a star, the shareholders would kill him. They loved Fraser’s homespun image, his family appeal, they’d go mad.

  He hated answering to those morons.

  Deborah beeped him. “Tracy Flood from the Sunday Recorder on line three.”

  “What can I
do for you, Tracy? Don’t tell me one of my newsreaders is a crack whore.”

  “Better, Gus. Much better.”

  He stuck his hand into his waistband and leaned back in his chair.

  Oh fuck.

  * * *

  Margaret couldn’t help herself, she kind of enjoyed the fact that Fraser was panicking.

  “Shit, Margaret! Why didn’t you tell me before we went in?”

  “What good would it have done?”

  “He’ll fire me.”

  “No one is going to fire you. You’re a star.”

  “Oh, wake up, Margaret. I’m not a star, I’m a celebrity, and when Sunday comes I won’t even be that. I’ll be a punch line.”

  “Hey, it didn’t do Hugh Grant any harm. In fact, his career went from strength to strength.”

  “Margaret, Hugh Grant is upper class, which means everybody already knew he was sexually deviant. He also was not a religious broadcaster in a country of narrow-minded religious bigots.”

  “Oh, that’s right, blame Scotland, not your own penis.”

  “I have nothing against Scotland or my penis, in fact I’m very fond of both of them, but the truth is I have been playing to the religious crowd and I’ve been caught, literally, with my pants down. It’s over, Margaret. I’m finished. I won’t even get panto when this shit comes out.”

  “What about forgiveness, those Americans do it all the time. We’ll do a documentary piece, you cry, you say you were abused as a child—”

  “I was not abused as a child!”

  “Oh, come on, play the game.”

  But Fraser was right and Margaret knew it. She also knew that, if she played it smart, there would be cash and prizes for her before he finally sank beneath the surface.

  She’d have him on talk shows, an exclusive with as many tabloids as will pay, maybe even a book.

  When the time came, Margaret could even sell her story to the tabloids, getting yet another bite at Fraser’s big cash cherry. This might go national, yes, why not? If it was a light news day on Monday, as it usually is, then the English tabloids might pick it up.

  Shit, of course they would pick it up, it has everything—naughty sex, religion, TV, and laughing at foreigners, the stuff English newspapers are made of.