Read Online The Bad Fire by Campbell Armstrong - Free Book Online Page A

which was new and shiny, a gilded palace that corresponded to nothing in his memory of how it had been years ago, a drab matchbox where you half-expected the only craft permitted to land would be 1940s Spitfires in need of fuel to continue the war against Jerry.
    They went outside. It was dark and the night air warm, almost tropical. ‘It feels like Miami,’ Eddie said. Any subject but their father.
    â€˜We’re having an extremely rare heatwave, Eddie. Enjoy it while it lasts. It’ll probably be pishing rain again in a day or so. My car’s over there,’ and she pointed to her left.
    The conversational transition from murder to the weather; it was wonderful comfort. How would people live their lives without a vocabulary of weather?
    He said, ‘You look … different. You were all dark last time. Your clothes, hair …’
    â€˜Oh, that was my black self. My tragic period. The troubled divorcee, et cetera. You think this haircut’s too flashy for a woman almost forty? Too gallus ?’
    â€˜Gallus?’
    â€˜Have you forgotten your Glasgow patois, Eddie?’
    â€˜Gallus,’ he said, remembering. ‘Wait. Brazen, swaggering.’
    â€˜See, it’s like riding a bike. You never forget.’ She led him across the car park. ‘I love you, Eddie. We’re too careless, the way we let ourselves drift.’
    â€˜I know, I know.’
    She gripped his hand. He had a strange disorienting moment, as if he’d come to a city where he’d never been, and was talking with a woman he’d never met in his life – and then this web of illusion blew away and he was himself again, except for the fact that he had no idea of time, neither day nor date. Was it still Wednesday? Was it only this morning at 3.30 US Eastern time when Joyce had phoned him in New York? Time zones, loss of hours. He tried to calculate, but gave up.
    Joyce unlocked a car, an old dark blue Mini. ‘Just stick your bag in the back.’
    He got inside. The space was small and his knees were jammed against the glove compartment. Joyce drove out of the lot to the freeway. Motorway: he corrected himself. He looked at the blue signs pointing to Glasgow. He couldn’t recollect a motorway linking the airport to the city. It was new. So were the bright tidy suburbs he saw from the window. And light. So much light.
    â€˜When did they do all this?’ he asked, nodding at the housing estates.
    â€˜Who knows? Glasgow’s a constant work in progress, Eddie.’
    What had he expected? Everything the same, preserved in aspic? He thought: I don’t recognize the city of my birth.
    â€˜We’re right up there these days with the high-flyers,’ Joyce said. ‘Milan. Paris. We’re dead cosmopolitan now, Eddie. No more soggy tomato sandwiches washed down with cups of nasty instant Nescafé. We’ve crossed into the promised land of croissants and cappuccino. We’re Europe, Eddie.’
    â€˜And you – you’re still educating the young?’ he asked.
    â€˜What else would I do?’
    Joyce, like Flora had done, taught school; she drummed Romantic poetry into the heads of fourteen-year-olds in a school in the Southside of the city. Once, Eddie remembered, she’d announced that the work was too exhausting for a mere human. These kids to whom she force-fed Wordsworth had enough problems understanding the lyrics of fucking Boyzone , for Christ’s sake.
    She drove in silence for a couple of miles.
    â€˜Did you know I identified him, Eddie? At least what was left of him. Did I tell you that?’
    â€˜I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’
    â€˜Who needs more raw material for bad dreams? I’ve got some already.’ She flicked her cigarette into the night and it was whipped away in a quick riot of sparks.
    Eddie Mallon had seen the violent dead too many times, the faces of clerks shotgunned in robberies, the heads of people blown