Lives Half-Lived

One year later at her mother’s funeral Helen will realize how their decision to call it a day at the entrance to Fraser’s department store had changed the odds—how, at the same moment she and her mother began their journey home along Buchanan Street through turnstiles of elbows and rolls of gift-wrap, Tom must have hatched his plan to pop in to see her at the end of his classes. He would have entered Helen’s tenement on the other side of town and climbed its dank stairwell with its ribbons of subway tiles. He must have rung the doorbell and looked through the landing window down into the back green where a saturated clothes rope drooped between two poles. His ringing, of course, went unanswered, and so he would have turned away, just as Helen and her mother passed frazzled Christmas shoppers jostling into the central railway station.

Under its arches a newspaper-seller shields editions of the Evening Times beneath blue tarpaulin and calls out an indecipherable headline, his bottle-glass spectacles held together by masking tape. Young men offer stolen socks from cardboard boxes—socks, socks, git yer sports socks, three pair for a pound—primed to scar-per. At the taxi stand tourists bunch like lemmings, back from hills they thought they’d find pretty. Instead they found them dour and belligerent. Their cheeks are raw; their noses run.

Helen and Fiona huddle at the bus stop while Tom leaves Helen’s tenement for Byers Road. Swithering between the leftover delights of the school canteen (gritty mashed potatoes, corned beef, lumpy semolina pudding) or the reliable plain cooking of the Grosvenor Café, he decides on the latter. He strides off—one year later Helen will imagine it—confident in his choice because he’s remembered that her mother, Fiona, is visiting from Skye, and he’s relieved to have missed them.

Rescued by a bus, Helen and Fiona climb aboard. Strangers squeeze together to allow them passage down its aisle, past conversations about how the shops are worse than last year and everything is so expensive—and why, oh, why, did they do it, especially given the weather, the weather that provides a perspective on everything. It is, Helen thinks (standing next to her mother’s seat on the backbench where the engine’s heat breathes seductively against her legs), a whipping post, a scapegoat, a stool pigeon, and a convenience. The weather forms the city’s character, screws it to the sticking place. Should Glasgow be faced with possibilities beyond these low slab clouds, beyond this reliable grievance, it would flounder disoriented and rootless. Water runs down the grooved floor toward the front end of the bus, toward the west end of town, the university, and their unexpected (but inevitable) meeting with Tom, who by now has turned into Grosvenor Lane and skirted the crates outside the off-license and the queue for the three-o’clock showing at the arts cinema.

On the bus’s adjacent bench, swaying with its stop-start gait, three women pull things from carrier bags, reinforcing each other’s choices, soothing the disquiet of compromises made owing to weary feet, fraying tempers, complacency, hazards, prices—the ready-packaged shirt and matching tie, the set of monogrammed hankies, the heavy Boots toiletries arrayed in a wicker basket coated in festive cellophane that will prove difficult to wrap. The scents on offer had been freesia, jasmine, and magnolia—magnolia was chosen because you know where you are with magnolia. But do you think it’ll do? one asks. Will it do? God, aye, comes the resounding affirmation, I’d be right chuffed with one of them myself. I’m no made of money, anyways—so she can like it or lump it.

“You okay?” Helen asks her mother, who looks peaky.

“I’m fine.”

A typical exchange. Together they’ll get through it. In front of them a small boy writes “Rangers 2 fuck you” on the condensation-coated window. An older boy pulls his anorak cuff over his wrist to smear it off. Helen checks...