Read The Red Road for Free Online Page B

Julius’s table and stopped.
    ‘I saw you smoking,’ she said.
    ‘I was gasping,’ he said, his mind still on the journey home.
    She smiled right at him, taller than him, luminous. ‘ Gaspers ,’ she said. ‘Terribly bad for you.’ Terribly bad for you. Not carping, not like that, tender, as if she was concerned.
    Then, quite suddenly, Julius was in the room, in Edinburgh, with Princess Diana. She was beautiful. Long necked, a choker of small pearls, six or eight rows of them, such a long neck. She wore a purple dress, sleeveless, the skin of her arms was bronzed and flawless.
    She left, gliding through the assembled tables, but Julius stayed in the room with her. He never told anyone how he felt about that. He would have been ashamed. He was a Republican, anti-Royalist by instinct and tradition. But he couldn’t deny it to himself: the sensation that he had met someone much, much better than him and that she had cared whether or not he smoked.
    Now she was dead.
    Julius saw the footage of people sobbing at the gates of Kensington Palace, strangers clutching one another, lucky not to live in cynical Glasgow, a city exhausted of sorrow.
    He lathered soap on his cheek and scratched it off, aware that the blade was wrong, that a flaw was scratching tiny welts in his skin, but too sad to stop. He splashed water on his cheeks, washing the soap off his sore face and patting it dry. The towel smelled faintly sour.
    Defeated, he lit a cigarette and examined the grief-stricken face in the mirror. You could tell, just looking at him.
    He would tell the police officers that he was hung-over. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, lifted his shoulders as if his head hurt. He lowered his eyelids into a half wince. A hangover. That’s what he would say. If Diana came up he’d say he’d heard about it and then move away. He couldn’t discuss her with any of them. He just couldn’t.
    Julius finished his cigarette in the corridor outside the holding cell interview room. He glanced in at Rose Wilson through the wired glass in the viewing slot.
    The glass was scratched on the inside, almost opaque, but he could see that she was tiny. She was sitting at a steel table. When they found her she was covered in blood and her clothes had been taken as productions. The prison issue hung off her, as if she’d shrunk in them.
    Julius dropped his cigarette and stamped it out, nodding to the officer on duty. The cop came over and took out his big brass key, fitted it in the door and opened it.
    She looked up at him.
    She had been covered in blood when they found her. They’d given her a basin to wash in but no mirror. Her face was washed with watered blood. Every future furrow, every crease that would one day be, picked out in dried crimson. It was in the folds of her forehead, the laughter lines around her mouth, the prophetic tracks of sorrow under her eyes. This newborn ancient looked up at Julius with the eyes of a disappointed mother.
    Aware that he was stalled at the door, he dropped his chin and forced himself to walk into the room, taking in what he could bear to look at. She wore a baggy grey T-shirt and a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, rolled up at the ankle into a fat rim. Her hair was brown, quite short. It looked as if she had cut it herself because it was shorter at one side than the other. She was miniature enough to evoke wonder, like a baby’s fingernails, but these fingernails were black with dried blood.
    The door scraped shut behind him, the lock crunched closed as he sat down opposite her. He didn’t want to look up. He busied himself getting a notebook and pen out of his pocket, putting them on the table, straightening them.
    She was looking straight up at him. ‘The fuck are you?’
    ‘I’m Julius McMillan. Mr McMillan. I’m your lawyer.’
    He had brought her a bar of chocolate. He always did with young offenders. He brought fags for the older kids. That was all it took, a cheap gift made them loyal customers