Weekend by William McIlvanney

weird still life. The French term for it would have fitted her mood more exactly:
nature morte
. Her nature certainly felt dead. All she thought remained to her at the moment was an autopsy on her past.
    Before her were the means she had given herself to perform it. It seemed a random and incongruous collection, the purpose of which would have baffled anyone else, like the tools of an esoteric trade. Perhaps one no longer commonly practised. Say, fletcher or lorimer. But the despair she was about to open up and explore was peculiarly her own. She thought she knew what they were for.
    She moved them around absently on the desk. Maybe shewas simultaneously reminding herself of their purpose and arranging them in some mystically advantageous way, as if they might form a pentagram within which to summon up the meaning of the past.
    The thought was laughable when she considered what the objects were. She had bought the packet of sandwiches on the ferry. They were egg-and-cress. The irrelevant exactness of that fact overwhelmed her. Egg-and-cress? The meaningless multiplicity of things was endless. The stiff triangular plastic container appeared strange to her. Who had made it? She thought she might need an instruction booklet to open it. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. She hadn’t eaten anything since this morning. Why should she start now?
    The coolbag contained two bottles of champagne. She had brought them as a way of celebrating.
    The irony of it twisted her mouth into the death mask of a smile, one which extended to the bottle of sleeping pills, sitting squat and practical. She had persuaded her doctor to prescribe them more than six months ago, when she wondered if she would ever sleep again for a full night. She hadn’t taken one. She had brought the bottle with her this weekend because she had thought she might be too excited to sleep without them. They might still have their uses.
    The glass had been rinsed and dried with the hand-towel in the bathroom. It sat shining and empty on the desk. Its innocent emptiness offered interesting possibilities. It could deaden the pain or end it, depending on how she decided to employ it. She would see. The Polaroid photo lay face down beside the pills. The black back of it was all she could bear to look at just now.
    She arranged her five objects into a pattern that pleased her. Then she simply waited. She felt empty. Perhaps, she thought,friendship and love and trust are the clearest mirrors in which we see a reflection of ourselves. Break them and we are left wondering if we exist. She felt hardly present in this room, barely physical. But mind remained – self-generating, the mad amoeba. Its endlessness frightened her.
    In order to block out the image her mind was endlessly presenting to her, she had already crossed the room and locked the door that the strange woman in pyjamas had closed for her. She had taken off her coat and put it on the bed. She had lifted one of the glasses and replaced it in the bathroom, as if that were erasing the evidence of her folly.
    But she knew none of this activity would work. The glass seemed more immediately present in the bathroom than it had been on the desk. In her head the door was always swinging open, ushering in the moment that had atomised her understanding of her own experience. It was a door she couldn’t effectively lock. Through it were still coming David and a woman she didn’t know, like an incessantly repeating scene in a bad film from which she couldn’t take her eyes.
     
     
     
     
    Hyde seems obvious enough: the hidden asocial nature of a man who is socially thought to be known and much admired. But the name has other echoes, which trouble the clarity of this first impression. Hyde is also the name of a famous park in what was the most famous metropolis in the world. And a park can be seen as an obeisance to the country made by the town. A shrine to the natural in the heart of the man-made. That normalises him somewhat