Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Thomas Clay, 1960s Glasgow slum-dweller, father-in-waiting and wordsmith manqué, stumbles through the drink-sodden world of the Gorbals underclass on a mini-odyssey of self-discovery. The result is a Joycean first novel laced with black humour. It won Torrington the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1992.

  About the Author

  Jeff Torrington was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow, in 1935. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs, and is married with three children. Jeff Torrington has published short stories in many anthologies and magazines; Swing Hammer Swing! is his first novel.

  Swing Hammer Swing! won the 1992 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

  ‘Swing Hammer Swing! is simply superb’

  Catherine Lockerbie, The Scotsman

  ‘Wonderfully enjoyable book . . . this is the rare sort of novel that a reviewer resents not being able to quote in its entirety’

  Paul Taylor, Independent on Sunday

  ‘The man is in love with words and he uses them well. He has an ear for the patter and the knack of making it sound as if he invented it . . . funny from beginning to end. It’s fine fun, with enough good jokes for three more of the same. Let the voice of the saster be heard aloud in this wasted land’

  Ian Black, Herald

  ‘The funniest novel to come out of Glasgow since the tobacco lords gave up smoking’

  Deborah Orr, Guardian

  ‘Swing Hammer Swing! is assured of its place among Scotland’s classics’

  Miranda France, Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Strikes a blow for Scottish literature in particular and non-metropolitan writing in general . . . Jeff Torrington has made language new. Hats off’

  Andrew Motion, Observer

  ‘It is such a good novel, with such energy of language and gift for striking off memorable scenes, that its appearance at any time would be welcomed . . . It prompts reflection on how much it would have benefited Scottish writers if 20 years ago a novel had been published with Jeff Torrington’s absolute lack of compromise or temporising explanation in the use of Glasgow material and dialect’

  Frederic Lindsay, The Scotsman

  ‘This might be the Gorbals, and the banter might be exchanged on the steps of tramp-haunted urinals, but the reference points are Nietzsche, Pascal, Chekhov and Sartre’

  D J Taylor, Independent

  For My Mother

  My wife Margaret

  And Family

  Swing Hammer Swing!

  Jeff Torrington

  Now, the buildings they go up

  Just as high as the sky

  But me, I’m feelin low enough

  Like I could die.

  They say they’re building this city

  Fresh from the start

  But there’s a demolition party

  Working down in my heart.

  I’m a man to pity

  Got the blues, south city:

  Nothin to gain

  Nothin to lose

  That’s how it is with them

  South City Blues.

  1

  SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD was happening in the Gorbals – from the battered hulk of the Planet Cinema in Scobie Street, a deepsea diver was emerging. He hesitated, bamboozled maybe by the shimmering fathoms of light, the towering rockfaces of the snowcoraled tenements. After a few moments the diver allowed the vestibule door to swing closed behind him then, taking small steps, he came out onto the pavement which in the area sheltered by the sagging canopy bore only a thin felting of snow. Up the centre of this quiet little grave for privileged snowflakes desecrating feet had trudged a pathway which shone with a seal-like lustre. One person though – a young girl, to judge from the footprints – had ignored the conventional route, and skipped off into the untrodden snow where she’d left the steps of an unknown dance sparkling in her wake.

  The diver’s gear was from Laughsville: it consisted of a heavy grey plastic boilersuit which was studded all over with fake rivets. The chest area was cluttered by a harness of entwining pipes and pseudo valves, fanciful apparatus which, had it been translated into reality, would’ve rendered the suit’s occupant woad-blue and windless before his boots had so much as dipped into the briny. It also gave the impression, this suit, of having recently passed through the business-end of a shark or some other multi-toothed predator; so badly holed was it, that a string vest would by comparison have looked watertight. The helmet, apart from offering a cramped but nevertheless very private place to drown in, provided zero protection; the thing had a gashed brow and had been all but eaten out by a virulent strain of galloping paint cancer. The diver’s feet were stuffed into patched gumboots and, to complete his submarine ensemble, he wore on his tiny hands a pair of ladies’ Fair Isle patterned mittens.

  The diver’s identity wasn’t hard to crack. Like a clue slipped within brackets his bandy legs gave the game away. Sensing rather than seeing me – the faceplate was completely misted over – the diver stopped, turned quickly in his tracks, then scuttled back in the direction of the vestibule’s grotto-like gloom. Before he’d reached it, though, I’d caught’m by the elbow. From within the helmet there sounded a muffled sigh, then his hand rose to unlatch the faceplate. As it swung open with a thin squeal, a pungent aroma of peppermint confirmed that the suit’s occupant was indeed Matt Lucas, the chief operator of the Planet Cinema. Lucas was a mint imperial junky; totally hooked on ‘Granny’s Windbreakers’ he was. Only during mealtimes or sleep itself was his luckless tongue spared the chore of lobbing one of these flavoured pebbles around his dentures. No conversation with Lucas was possible that wasn’t accompanied by the clack-clacking sound of the world’s most boring sweetie.

  ‘Lo, Matt.’

  ‘Aye, hullo Tommy.’

  ‘You’re a wee bit late for Halloween, eh?’

  The helmet waggled. ‘Ach, it’s a stunt Mr Burnett’s dreamed up.’

  From the bundle of handouts he had wedged under his arm he tugged a sheet out and passed it to me. I studied it.

  ‘I’ve to go round handing them out,’ Lucas explained.

  ‘You’d be as well chucking them in a midden.’

  ‘The boss’s coming wae me.’

  ‘Did Paddy trap this morning?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘Aye, but I don’t know what for: heaviest thing he lifted was an aspirin.’

  ‘Got a nippy t
urnip, has he?’

  ‘Did the sun rise in the east the day?’

  Come Judgement Day the prosecution would exhibit the damning evidence of Paddy Cullen’s liver – a drink-maimed organ which not even his good qualities, like his sense of humour or his generosity, would gainsay. Paddy would spend Eternity chasing a mobile pub barefooted across a jagged terrain of smashed whisky bottles. My own skull was gowping, the outcome of pigging the booze alongside Cullen in the Dog, followed by an after-hours session in the Moderation Bar. After that the shape of Thursday had become fluid, very fluid: glints and glimmers of glasses half-recalled; faces, and from the holes in them, long idiotic conversations. Later Paddy and me had pissed steamy shadows on a brick wall. The sky had been littered with smashed tumblers. Cullen had spewed a perfect map of Africa – complete with Madagascar. Even when he’s bevvied that boyo shows talent.

  From the Planet Cinema, its proprietor, Oswald J. Burnett, now emerged. ‘The Zombie in the Crombie’ Cullen called him and with good reason. Ever since the death of his manager, Rinty O’Dowd, Burnett had been a man motoring on air. But unlike many film exhibitors of the sixties who’d gone running off to Bingoland as fast as their legs-eleven could carry them, Burnett had remained loyally behind to nurse fatigued films from this choked Hollywood conduit. But even he’d to concede that the Planet was well into its last reel of existence and that the Hammer epic to beat them all was fast approaching. Today Burnett was wearing his Gestapo outfit: shades, Cossack mink-fur hat, leather coat and overshoes. As he loomed closer I found myself wondering, not for the first time, how many animals had perished that his vast coat might live. It’d probably something to do with all those Nazi movies I’d sat through, but the coat seemed to bestow on its wearer a sort of sinister sheen, a sartorial threat of interrogation. Burnett was a real lard-bucket, shifting sixteen maybe seventeen stones. As usual his face was full of amiable little pleats and tucks. A man slow to anger was Burnett, but when he did get aroused the Mussolini with a migraine would by comparison have looked sweet’n sapsy.

  As he limped towards Lucas and me, a cigar stump was reeking at a corner of his mouth. He dumped his bundle of yellow handouts into my hands. ‘Hold these a minute, Tom. That’s it. Ta.’ His hands were free now to adjust the maroon scarf he’d wound about his neck. This done he jettisoned the cigar butt, tossing it out onto the slushy street, ‘God’s forgotten to shut his fridge door again Thomas, eh?’ I nodded and gave’m back his handouts. Burnett patted Lucas’s shoulder. ‘What d’you make of this? Came across it in the Rectifier Room. Left over from some salty saga. Can’t recall which. But, no matter.’

  I figured he was referring to the diving gear and not to the hapless Lucas. Burnett flicked the faceplate shut and then knuckled the helmet’s crown, ‘Off you toddle, Matthew. I’ll catch you up. Just keep a lookout for sharks.’

  We watched Lucas as he ventured beyond the canopy’s cover, his gumboots crackling through the crisp scrolls of shovelled snow outside Nelly Kemp’s fag’n paper shop. A conger eel with toothache would’ve drowned laughing if such a figure had come stomping past its home reef. Burnett sighed. ‘Is it not terrible what’s to be done to turn a coin these days?’ I was sure the auld goat was referring to himself and not to Lucas. The fact that his employee might feel a right eejit inside that suicidal suit wouldn’t have occurred to’m: Fathoms too deep, it was.

  It’s really mind-blowing how quickly we can accommodate even the most outlandish spectacle, taking it in our visual stride: ‘Look – a deepsea diver! . . . Where? . . . ower yonder, plodding through that urban snowdrift. See’m . . . Yeah, I’ve got’m. A diver, right enough. Imagine that . . . ho hum . . . yawn yawn . . . It might well be that senility disturbs our shockproofing, attacks the mind’s defensive cladding in much the same way that deserted villas shrug off their roof tiles to admit the elements. Certainly the kneecreaker in the doorway of Nelly Kemp’s fag’n paper shop had been stricken motionless by the sheer novelty of meeting up with a deepsea diver instead of her usual street encounters with dogs, moggies and tenuous life-wisps like herself.

  Burnett stretched around me to thrust a handout into the shaking paw of a passing greybeard. The old guy stared in seeming amazement at the piece of paper that’d so suddenly bloomed on his palm. But as he continued on his way the yellow page detached itself from his palsied hand and drifted into a corner of the snowy rectangle where it adhered like a postage stamp. Meanwhile Lucas was trying to deliver a handout to a lamp-post.

  ‘What the devil’s he doing?’ Burnett muttered.

  ‘His faceplate’s steamed up,’ I explained, then suggested a method of overcoming the problem.

  ‘Shit’n it!’ No wonder Burnett looked incredulous.

  ‘Naw – spit’n it,’ I said. You must’ve seen scuba divers doing it?’

  Burnett seemed to find the idea distasteful. ‘I believe a smear of liquid soap is equally effective,’ he informed me.

  Two guys standing in the snow outside a doomed cinema discussing the most efficacious method of preventing a deepsea diver from trying to deliver handouts to lamp-posts! Who, aware that such an absurd conversation was not only possible but had actually taken place, could haughtily discount other so-called improbabilities? Eddie Carlyle, my pious brother’n law, for instance, might one day be confirmed in his naive belief that Heaven is a sort of Butlins with room-service. Well, why not? Jesus himself could turn out to be a lanky, likeable bloke, a Red Coat in fact, with a straw hat tilted rakishly on his head – so much more chummy looking than that luminous doughnut sentimental artists seem to insist on.

  Burnett was admiring his handout. ‘Decent little job, eh? Got Madge to run’m off on the Gestetner. Wish I’d thought of it a whole lot sooner.’

  I nodded. ‘Only a couple of things wrong as far as I can see.’

  He looked a bit miffed. ‘Wrong?’

  ‘You’ve got The Dab Four,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Should be “The Fab Four”!’

  ‘Dab, Fab, Crab – what’s the difference? Anyway, “dab” sounds better than “fab”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.’

  ‘Fabulous.’

  ‘Good, so we’re agreed?’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘What’s the other thing then?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much – a spelling mistake, that’s all. You’ve got Beatles with two ees when it should be ee-ay.’

  He shook his head emphatically. ‘I think not, Thomas. Always has been two ees, always will be. Look it up, there’s the fellow.’

  Again he adjusted his scarf, gave me a farewell salute then went off in the wake of submariner Lucas who, after his difficulty with the lamp-post, was encountering even stiffer resistance from an electrical junction box which despite the lure of a night on the Sticks watching the Dab Four just didn’t want to know.

  2

  OUR CAR, A Volkswagen Beetle, was fairly buzzing along, so zippily in fact that twice within a minute we’d overtaken the same hobbling greybeard. ‘You’re fond of first gear, aren’t you, Eddie?’ I said to the driver, and old Father Time lolling there on the rear cushions like a musical coffin tinkled out a series of chimes which I suppose is as near to human laughter as any mechanical contrivance can get. Eddie, my brother’n-law, made one of his hrrumphing noises. Wouldn’t it be a pity if after a lifetime of hairshirting, hymnifying, and hallelujahing, St Pete slammed the pearly portal in Eddie’s face just because on a few occasions he’d indulged in the odd hrrumph.

  It had stopped snowing but now and then bright flurries of the stuff fell from humpy window ledges where maybe a bird had newly settled. Pigeons, beaten to a fine lead by hunger, flickered amongst the rusted girders of the railway bridge. Over there, still standing but only just, was the Brandon Snooker Hall. Dampness had laid a green baize on its bricked-up windows. Where were they now, those gallus geometricians whose wordless lectures on the properties and projections of the moving sphere had us leaning on the smoke in awe? Cuts Colquhoun, Spider S
ampson, Skinner Murphy: gone, all of them – potted by Time, the fastest cue in town.

  Fires fuelled by wooden beams burned in cleared sites. Rubble was being trucked from busted gable ends and demolishers worked in a fume of dust and smoke. You would’ve thought that the Ruskies had finally lobbed over one of their big megaton jobs: streets wiped out, landscapes pulverised. On a gutted site near a fire that drizzled sparks on him, a greybeard sat in a lopsided armchair, placidly smoking his pipe. I nudged Eddie and pointed to the old guy. He spared the greybeard a cold glance then returned his attention to the windscreen through which could be seen advancing streets shorn of their pavements by the snow, and of their buildings by the Hammer. It was inaccurate to call them ‘streets’ anymore for they looked like a series of bleak airstrips.

  Most of the old Gorbals had been levelled by now. Housing Planners had taken up their slum-erasers and rubbed out the people who’d lived there. Some original specks still clung to the Redevelopment blueprints but these would be blown away shortly. In Scobie Street, for instance, a few commercial concerns continued to function: there was Nelly Kemp’s fag’n paper shop; Joe Fiducci’s barbering joint; The Salty Dog Saloon (my local watering hole); and Shug Wylie’s public lavatory (Men Only) which stood out in the middle of the street almost directly opposite the Planet Cinema. The movie house was bracketed by the defunct O’Leary’s betting shop and the derelict Blue Pacific Cafe, mention of which is made in local bard John Scobie’s ‘Ode to a Flea Ranch’, where he described the kinema as being ‘A crackit planet betwixt the deil and the deep blue sea . . .’

  As the car continued on its way the bulky typewriter lodged in my lap dug deeper and deeper grooves into my thighs. Eddie Carlyle just sat there, his gloved hands on the gloved steering wheel. Bugs of melted snow glistened on his dark sombre overcoat, and his tight shirt collar, as hard as cuttle bone, creaked with his every neck movement. Eddie reminded me of yon defensive guy in Chekhov’s ‘Man in a Shell’. Even his aftershave lotion had a camphorish pong to it, which is appropriate for someone who’d mothballed his life, who’d deprived himself of pleasure down here all the better to enjoy it in the sweet bye-and-bye.