Butcher Read Free

do I start? This’ll take weeks.’
    Perlman shrugged. ‘Anywhere you like, Betty.’
    He scanned the living room. Pigsty, well … He’d let the place go year after year, and apart from the occasional desultory attempt at dusting or knocking spider’s webs down, he’d done pretty much fuck all.
    Now Betty McLatchie was here to transform the place, at the behest of Perlman’s aunts on the Southside, who worried about his well-being. They were kindly women, his aunts, although their concern sometimes became meddlesome.
    He gazed at the collection of WWI medals he’d bought at a jumble sale because he felt sorry for the poor long-dead sod who’d gone through shite and shellfire to earn them; the big glass jars of predecimal coins, those huge brown pennies and tarnished florins he’d had since childhood; the vinyl albums long parted from their sleeves and the CDs that lay in silvery layers on the floor around the miniaturized sound system.
    He dreaded the idea of all this being disturbed – but it was time for change. Time – he had time in spades right now.
    Betty McLatchie said, ‘I’ll get started then.’ She produced a canister of air freshener and sprayed the room briskly. Off guard, Perlman tried to dodge the scented mist but felt a few drops of moisture fall against his face.
    â€˜I know spraying’s superficial, but I always say freshen the air before you start in earnest.’
    â€˜Is that what you always say?’ Perlman could taste the stuff on his lips. ‘What is that?’
    â€˜Ocean Breeze.’
    â€˜Ocean? It’s no ocean known to man,’ Perlman said, giving in to a brief coughing attack. ‘I’ll let you get on.’
    He went inside the kitchen and opened the door that led to a backyard. A tangled sanctuary of great ferns, old rhubarb stalks, a couple of maniac hawthorns beyond pruning. He lit a cigarette and made his way through the jungle where he knew there was a relic of a wooden bench somewhere. He pushed long hanks of obstinate grass aside and sat gazing at the back of his house. Black stone stained by a hundred years of the city’s effluents. The window frames needed paint. A drainpipe was loose and rusted. Starlings bred there.
    This catalogue of neglect and carelessness weighed on him. I’m never here much. It’s a place where I sleep and change clothes . Excuses. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter. He listened to the wind in the trees and the way it slapped ferns and grass: one of those unpredictable Glasgow afternoons when the weather could go any direction. The sky was glowering, and grey as ash.
    He thought, as he often did, about Miriam: his regular haunting. The last postcard he’d received had come four weeks ago from Copenhagen, a terse message with no suggestion that she was coming home to resume where they’d left off – wherever that was. A kiss, a light caress of her breast, vague suggestions of a possible future. Or else he’d misconstrued the situation, reading far too much into it. He wasn’t sure about anything save his feelings for her, and sometimes even then he had moments of uncertainty.
    She’d written: lovely city, fond wishes .
    Four words, followed by M.
    Fond, oy, what the fuck was fond ? It was a word you’d use about a favourite uncle or a soup you liked. Four weeks. Had she forgotten the romantic dinner at La Fiorentina, and how they’d lain close together on the sofa in her loft-studio and he’d wondered if love was finally breaking through like a half-remembered song?
    She needed time, she’d told him. He’d been sympathetic, of course: love was a serious commitment, a matter of the heart, an organ about as predictable as this city’s weather. He was always so damned acquiescent where Miriam was concerned, so patient.
    I never carped the fucking diem .
    He thought: let it go. Miriam, neshumela . He’d loved