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

her line was light and fleet on the page. Seemingly she carried no more than three pencils, and to Angus’s mind this meant that she, alone among the amateurs overloaded with every coloured felt tip and set square you could buy, had come prepared to do some actual work.
    Dean had been moving around the group, offering comments and correctives, unfailingly positive. He was soft, but the last thing a group like this needed was someone mean in charge – an Angus. When he came to the end of the line of chairs, he inspected Angus’s sketch in silence. Unnerved, Angus picked up his pencil again, pretending to have paused rather than given up; but without a word to him, Dean clapped twice. ‘All right, everyone, time to split up. Find something that inspires you, pick a good spot, and get to work. I’ll be around in an hour to see what you’ve come up with. Remember, it’s not a contest, so try to choose something nobody else is drawing. China, a word before you head off?’
    ‘Just one?’
    Angus lingered too, unexpectedly wounded by Dean’s failure to praise him.
    ‘You were a bit late. I just wanted to check everything was okay.’
    ‘To be honest, I was swithering. I wasn’t all that sure I was going to bother.’
    Dean, with what seemed to Angus misplaced gallantry: ‘It would have been our loss.’
    ‘Yes.’ The colouring, the petulant set to her mouth as her smirk developed – blue eyes, black temper, the right side of insolent to interest Angus, just as she herself surely knew that her cheeking Dean only boosted her allure.
    He was all set to pursue the girl into the galleries when Dean stepped into his path. ‘And how’s Angus doing?’ Angus, who detested the con man’s trick of addressing you in the third person, rose on his toes over the wee guy and didn’t respond. ‘That was really rather good, what you drew. I didn’t want to say in front of the others, but it beats them into a cocked hat, if I’m honest. I’d make just one adjustment . . .’
    Eraser in hand, he dived for the picture, but Angus snatched his sketch pad away. ‘Ah actually prefer it the way it is, if ye dinnae mind?’
    ‘Oh, of course. Of course. Now, did you need any help finding your way around?’
    ‘This place?’ he said with scorn, mimicking the high-handed tone China had taken with the guy. ‘Don’t you worry aboot me. This is familiar territory.’
    Sketch pad under his oxter, pencil box rattling in his free hand, Angus stotted the Kelvingrove’s dim-lit halls and chambers in search of China. Compelled almost to mutter under his breath
jist looking fer ma friend
, in case anyone asked why he hadn’t begun working yet. When he did encounter other students – several had ganged together, in contravention of Dean’s instructions, and were accomplishing precious little work in between their yakking – he smiled, inspected their efforts and with great difficulty resisted pointing out their various shortcomings.
    In a front gallery he encountered the slate-grey dinosaurs he knew from his childhood visits. Still impressive, too: none of this modern-day animatronics shite you found elsewhere. These vast immobile sentinels had never changed – well, they wouldn’t, dinosaurs, nature’s losers – and still gave off their familiar freshly sculpted, coal-dust smell. One whiff of that, any time, anywhere, and Angus could’ve hand-drawn the creatures from memory.
    He shook his head, moved on, remembering the routine of thirty-plus years back. After the appointment at Yorkhill, the treat: over the road to the Kelvingrove to see the monsters, the samurai, the knights in armour – the same exhibits each time, in the same sequence – and was it coincidence, it occurred to Angus tonight as he wandered from one gallery to the next, that these had all been fighters, figures of strength: had he been receiving tacit life lessons? The tour completed, he’d be allowed a jam doughnut or square of fly cemetery in the canteen, to