Read Online The Glasgow Coma Scale by Neil Stewart - Free Book Online

you, and you half wanted to show your da, your then-immaculate da, what you’d noticed. Yet there was something unspeakable about the holes – they were rude, somehow. Sooner or later you’d be called by nurses you recognized from last time but who didn’t recognize you, and who got your name wrong the same way each time – ‘Rennie? Rennie Angus?’ – making you wonder, even that young, what the hell sort of name that was, your earliest notion of identity and disguise provoked, you believe, by their recurrent error: your vague sense that the person being summoned both was and was not yourself, and there was a minuscule gap in there that you might one day squeeze into, exploit. It also gifted you a treasured memory, the old man pissing himself laughing: months after it first happened, he still, to your bafflement, sang ‘Walk Away Renée’ any time you exited a room, for which recollection you remain grateful.
    Angus loitered outside by the scaffolding tower, smoking a steadying cigarette, until some folk he felt certain were drawing-class attendees had entered. Matching jackets, matching portfolios; he knew the sort. After a brief wrangle with the revolving door, he followed them in.
    A group had gathered at the far end of the main hall, beneath the vast church organ that dominated the whole wall, and beside the entrance to a temporary exhibition of Egyptian artefacts pilfered, he supposed, from the tombs of kings. No surprise, the blue-rinse brigade were present in droves, all fawn anoraks and fingerless gloves, more females than males. Angus approached, his rubber soles making a mortifyingly loud squealing on the marble floor. Orange plastic chairs had been set out in a semicircle, and the students were clustered, nattering, around a small guy with a shaved head who was doling out stationery and platitudes. ‘Who needs supplies? Alice? That’s a pretty dress, dear.’ He wore a sticker: HI! MY NAME IS DEAN . ‘Oh, and Campbell, I should have known – needing pencils again, right? Right.’ Didn’t the old dears realize they were being treated like bairns? Maybe that was how they liked it.
    Of course Angus had no equipment either, and had to queue up with all the other losers for paper, pencil, eraser, talking-to. ‘You’re new!’ Dean greeted him when he reached the head of the line. ‘Did we speak on the phone this morning? Angus?’ Angus gruffly admitted it. ‘Well, welcome to our little gang. Here’ – applying to Angus’s jumper a sticker like his own, with Angus’s name felt-tipped on. ‘Now, you said you’d done some drawing before? Excellent. How it’ll work tonight is we’ll start out with some group work here first, and then after an hour or so people peel off and do some solo investigations, picking an object that interests them and drawing it. Then about nine o’clock I round everyone up, like a big old sheepdog, and we let the good people keeping the gallery open late for us go home. How does that sound?’
    How it sounded was like death on toast, but Angus capitulated, choosing the last chair in the line, away from the others, where he sat silently, radiating, he hoped, a dinnae-speak-tae-me vibe. Everyone around him was gabbing away like ninnies. His chair was warped and he took pleasure in rocking back and forth on its misaligned feet. What had Lynne meant about it doing him good to imagine himself a student again? A bullshit thought experiment she’d lifted from her
How to Manage
book. All it made him feel, to be back in a classroom but not in charge, was as sullen as a teenager.
    Dean clapped his hands. ‘Are we all ready? Campbell? Well, tonight I’d like to talk to you a bit about shading.
Shading
.’ As he spoke, Dean began sketching a portrait of the replica statue advertising the Egyptian exhibition: a serene androgynous face on a long, slender neck, bargain-basement Modigliani. ‘Now, that’s a start, but she’s a bit flat, isn’t she? So what I’ll do now is . .