The Beetle crawled into the crevice of a sidestreet. To our left shuttered warehouses and abandoned workshops began to pass while on our right a padlocked adventure playground could be seen. Within it on a sagging gallows a piebald tyre hung in a perfect lack of motion.
We came now to a thoroughfare that blitzed the senses with its sudden buzz and uproar. Here, there were many shops doing business: bakers, fruitshops, fishmongers; banks, dairies, butchers. Above these thronged premises there were dental surgeries which shared their common stairs with tenanted flats from between the curtains of which faces could now and then be glimpsed. On the pavements, shoppers’ feet churned the slush to a fine black mud. It was as if Cumberland Street had returned in all of its commercial glory. But, alas, it hadn’t. This was in fact Crown Street, what remained of it, a barrier already collapsing before the Hammer’s onslaught. There’d be no gainsaying it – soon from the sky there would fall a hard pelting of slates.
‘That’s it!’
I pointed to a battered-looking shop on an equally battered corner where old election posters hung in a dismal rash of unfulfilled promises. (Come back Alice Cullen – we need you now!) Eddie brought the car to a crackling halt in the gutter. He switched off the engine. Bright sparks of snow drifted by. In a shop window an xmas tree stood bathed in its sentimental fires. Cradling a polythene-wrapped giant teddy bear a man lurched past. He was doing the Boozer’s Bolero – three steps forward on tippytoes, two back heavily on heels. Potent stuff this xmas spirit. Eddie, being such a switched-off cat, made a nipple of his mouth and milked titsing noises from it. A real Paradise put-down is Eddie. Imagine arriving up there, sporting your new wings and your ‘Be A Harp Hotshot in Just Two Weeks!’ booklet, only to find the place stiff with Eddies!
I raised the typewriter from my lap a little and MacDougall (the self-raising flower), who’d obviously been beset by castration fears, pulsed with gratitude as my manly blood revisited him. ‘He lives! Praise the Lord – he lives!’ C’mon now, show some respect. A most poignant moment in my life has arrived. I patted my old Imperial Fictionmaster. Sorry pal, hate doing this, but I need the bread. I wasn’t coming the con either. The jingling mitt of xmas had me by the throat. ‘C’mon you tight bastard, buy your wife a decent pressy for a change. How many wee bottles of eau-de-Cologne d’you think a woman needs?’
‘We’ve still the pram, remember,’ Eddie said.
We’ve-still-the-pram-remember . . . Now, where’s that coming from? What can it mean? Just a mess in a dixie, is that it? No, not at all. What we have here is a variation on those egghead puzzles where you’re required to identify a concealed geometrical shape by coordinating the variant spaces. There’s no lid-of-the-box-solution here, everything’s down to the manipulator’s geometrical know-how. Likewise to interlock the voids in Eddie’s remark depends on a shared pool of familial knowledge. Given this info, everything soon clicks into place. Thus We’ve-still-the-pram-remember unpacks to read: ‘We’d best step on it for we’ve still got that pram to uplift!’ What pram? The one being offered to Rhona and myself by Rhona’s sister, Phyllis, and her husband Jack too, of course. I was to uplift it from their place this very afternoon. At the moment Rhona is in the Maternity Hospital, prematurely as it happens, due to an elevated blood-pressure condition . . . Decoding of message complete.
‘C’mon,’ Eddie now urged, ‘move yourself!’
It’s amazing how contact with his Nazi steering wheel – gloved or not – turns Eddie into an insufferable little Volkswagenführer. It’s like he’s hooked a jump-lead into a super ego-booster. Ex auto, of course, he lives a vapid existence, snailing along at the heels of his mother Letitia Dalrymple Carlyle. When he’s not doing this then he’s slaving away in a textile warehouse in the despatch room of which he prepares for consignment parcels of cambric, organdie, buckram and tarlatan.
‘Right,’ I responded, ‘get your arse roon here and haud the door. This thing’s a ton weight.’
Bugged by my tone, not to mention my language, he snapped. ‘This could’ve waited. I’m not a flippin taxi service. You do realise that I’d to get –’
‘– time from your work? Aye, I think you mentioned it a couple hunner times.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Anyway, I don’t see what all this hurry-hurry’s about: Rhona’s no due tae February.’
He caught me adrift at the nets with a moralistic backhand volley, ‘It’d never cross your mind of course, that since her hyster – her operation, Phyllis might get depressed by the very sight of that pram.’
‘Heavy, man.’
His shirt collar crackled, at least I think it was his collar though it might well’ve been his indignant soul stretching its astral muscles. How godalmighty powerful he looked all of a sudden – like a thrush unzipping a worm.
‘“Heavy, man,”’ he mimicked me. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Why can’t you speak normally instead of . . . of . . .’ normal words failed him. I got a Zen buzz: ‘Man who rides on Beetle should refrain from stamping his foot . . .’
‘Eddie,’ I said, ‘get the door, will you – before my bastard’n legs drop off!’
3
THE SHOP WAS crammed floor-to-ceiling with junk. Every nook and cranny had been utilised to accommodate the domestic fallout which had resulted from that most disastrous of community explosions – the dinging doon of the Gorbals. Leaving in their wake the chattels of an outmoded way of living, whole tribes of Tenementers had gone off to the Reservations of Castlemilk and Toryglen or, like the bulk of those who’d remained, had ascended into Basil Spence’s ‘Big Stone Wigwam in the Sky’. To be found in this shop with its pervasive stink of Time-rot were their old zinc tubs, their steamie prams, their wringers and their scrub-boards, their quaint old wirelesses, wind-up gramophones, dusty piles of 78s, EPs and LPs, twelve-inch tellies, wallydugs, wag-at-the-wa’s, brass fenders, fire-irons, fretworked pipe-racks, marquetry pieces, box cameras and speckled photographs scattered as far and wide as no doubt were the people they depicted, cartons stuffed with picture postcards, old music sheets and books, hundreds and hundreds of books, every domestic prop you could think of, aye, and including not one but at least half a dozen kitchen sinks.
Into this shop too, like so many stale pizzas, had tumbled wall plaques which showed every sentimentalised rural scene imaginable. Ours had been ‘The Watermill’, though its stream had been diverted after Da Clay’d vented his spleen on it with a flying boot (a great spleen-venter was my old man). The leader of the ‘Ducks in Flight’ had winged on for many a year with a broken neck caused by – who else? – Vic Rudge, when he’d taken a potshot at it with his Webley air pistol. Those selfsame ducks might very well be here as might also my old bike, a royal-blue’n white Argyle with a wee kiltie on the handlebar stalk. With some rummaging I might even be able to howk out those stookie ornaments Ma Clay’d been so fond of: Boy with Cherries, for instance. Poor bugger, he was always getting his conk knocked off before he’d a chance to sample the fruit. ‘Tantalus’ I’d nicknamed him, being at that time a raggedy-arsed kid who mainlined on bookprint.
‘Don’t put it there – you’ll scratch it!’
The typewriter, about to mate with its dim reflection on a dust-streaked table was hastily transferred to the lid of a travel-weary trunk. The shop’s owner, a crabbit wee nyaff came over now and, looking aggrieved, rubbed a finger across the table’s stourie surface. If I’d scratched it I’d make good the damage, he warned me, which was really rich considering the tabletop already had more scrapes and blemishes on it than there were on my Jimmie Rodgers record collection. Muttering under his breath he fixed his querulous glance on me. ‘You, is it? And what rubbish are you trying to unload this time?’
The old yap bent to give the machine the once-over. He poked at it with a finger, mainly in the area of the ribbon spools but never once pressed a key which was about as nutty as buying a car solely on the design of its ashtrays. He straightened. When he spoke his voice was loused up with catarrh and a
crack ran through all of his words.
‘What’s this, then?’
When I told’m he snapped. ‘Aye, I didnae think it was for sweepin carpets! But what’m I supposed to do wae it?’ Again I told’m. ‘Buy it?’ he squawked. ‘I thought maybe you wanted it rebuilt.’
‘It’s a fine auld machine,’ I assured him, then slipped in a quick commercial which glossed over the typewriter’s crucial lack of the letter I. ‘I’ll give you a wee demo if you like.’ Adjusting the creased sheet of paper I knelt beside the chest and briskly typed: ‘The fast brown dog jumps over the lazy fox . . . Now’s the hour to come to the help of the party . . .’
‘There, how’s that?’
He shrugged his skinny shoulders. ‘Hanged if I know. Havnae got on ma readin specs.’ He tugged now from his pants pocket a hankie, so clatty it would’ve been the talk of the steamie. Raising the pestilent rag he proceeded to snort his brains into it. When the messy job was done and his sight had been partially restored he looked cross to find me still there. ‘Better chance of sellin a cracked chantie. Who’d want a typewriter aroon these parts?’
What a question. A blizzard of authors was sweeping through Glasgow. To get into the boozers you’d to plod through drifts of Hemingways and Mailers. Kerouacs by the dozen could be found lipping the Lanny on Glesca Green. Myriads of Ginsbergs were to be heard howling mantras down empty night tunnels.
‘I thought maybe a ten-spot,’ I said, as in the classical manner I assumed the stance of the black-belted Haggler.
‘Ten bob for that rubbish! You’re off your trolley, sonny.’
My Haggle-Master wouldn’t be chuffed with me. Recklessly I’d exposed myself to the Haggler’s prime foe – the non-Haggler. Mindless of tradition, ignorant of the rules of engagement, the subtle testing of balance until the fulcrum of compromise had been attained, the auld bugger’d simply waded in and fetched me a boot in the cheenies. Turning now he peered into the backshop gloom then shouted, ‘Alice, come ben a minute.’
After a few moments a peelly-wally lassie of around fourteen, a comic in one hand, a half-gnawed apple in the other slouched into our presence. She wore a skimpy mauve dress and a nasty line in facial acne. There was a blue slyness to the eyes that slid from me to my ‘fine example of British craftmanship . . .’
‘What d’you want, Gramps?’ she asked through a gobful of mushed apple.
‘You say you get typing at school? Right, have a bash at this thing, then.’
She wasn’t overkeen (me even less so) but Gramps insisted. The girl sighed then placed the half-chewed apple on Biffo the Bear and kneeled before the machine. Very self-consciously she adjusted her skinny fingers on the guide keys. I leaned over her. ‘If it helps just copy what I’ve typed.’ But with a nervous gulp she began to rap out something entirely different:
‘Of all the f shes n the sea the merma d s the one for me.’
She tried again with identical results. Next, with a glance up at me, she struck a rapid tattoo on the i key: the amputated leg kicked impotently.
‘Well?’ her grandfather queried.
The girl rose. ‘It’s alright, I suppose, considering its age.’ Her mouth sappy once more with pulped apple she turned mocking blue eyes on me.
‘A pound,’ the junkman offered.
‘A fiver, surely.’
‘Thirty bob.’
‘Four pounds, then?’
‘Two, no more.’
I sighed. ‘Okay, but it’s daylight robbery.’
The old man, still grumbling under his breath, creaked off into the backshop where presumably he stashed his loot. His granddaughter grinned at me then, pausing only to spit out an apple seed, said, ‘You’d better give me five bob or I’ll tell’m . . .’
4
UNDERWAY AGAIN, IF beetling along at walking pace could be called that, I’d to grin to myself at the recollection of Little Nell and her Grandfather. Smart kids around these days, real bright buttons. The backdrop depicting the High Court seemed to have jammed but with a supreme heave the scene-shifters got it on the move and replaced it with a solemn view of the City Mortuary. We came, appropriately enough, to a dead halt beside it.
‘What’s that ticking noise?’ Eddie asked.
I glanced over my shoulder. The Grandfather clock lay as before on the rear seat, its white face glimmering and, the embalmer’s touch, a long-ago midnight or noon caught in its clasped hands. It was a gonner all right, had well’n truly popped its cogs. Family tradition has it that it stopped short, never to go again, the very night its maker, Granda Gibson had taken a turn for the better and was soon on his way to a sprightly recovery in the Victoria Infirmary.
Eddie was shaking his head. ‘You surely don’t imagine that it’s coming from that thing?’
I shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Grow up. A box of junk, that’s all it amounts to. Mother won’t let it in the house. Don’t say you weren’t warned.’
‘How no?’
Eddie, bravely, and completely without an anaesthetic, studied his own reflection in the rear-view mirror. He plucked at his flat overlip, drawing it up to examine one of his yellow incisors. They looked like old piano keys his choppers did. Mercifully, he dropped the lid on them. ‘I’ll tell you why not – because that chiming orange-box is riddled with dry rot. If it’s ticking then it can only be a deathwatch beetle.’
‘Garbage.’
‘Agreed. And the same goes for some of that other junk you’ve foisted on us. Take that wardrobe for a start . . .’
‘Dartholes. How many times have I . . .’
‘Who’d hang a dartboard on a wardrobe.’
‘We didnae. Some of my pals were hellish aimers. Take Potsie Green for starters: compared wae him Mr McGoo had twenty-twenty vision. I’ll tell you another thing . . . Bless you!’
‘I wasn’t sneezing, I was going shhhh . . .’
‘Shhhhh?’
‘Shut up. I can still hear it.’
‘What?’
‘Ticking.’
His gaze swivelled suspiciously in my direction then homed in on the bump in my Marine combat jacket. ‘What’ve you got in there?’
‘A bomb.’
From beneath the jacket I produced an alarm clock. It was a blue malevolent-looking job, the destroyer of a thousand sleeps: the thing had leapt unasked onto my person as I’d left the shop.
‘Vicious looking bugger, eh? A double-action rouser. If you don’t hit the rug after the first bell it pishes on you.’
‘For any favour!’ A look of sufferance creased his lugubrious face. What was it with this creep? Wasn’t this proof positive that I was going to change my ways? Hadn’t I dumped the very machine that’d threatened to turn his sister’s life into a fiction? Not only that, I’d replaced it with a clock – the symbol of regularity and responsibility. Come Monday next I fully intended to cease being Dr Munn’s catspaw in his attempt to sabotage the National Health Service system by choking it with paper, lots and lots of paper. Sick lines by the shovelful; first, intermediary then, with much reluctance, final certificates; rambling letters to hospital consultants about rambling patients; X-rays which often not only failed to match the afflicted part but also the afflicted patient; and overprescribing on a scale so mega it must’ve been keeping at least a couple of pill barons in pink caddies.
My illness – a nomadic back pain (the malingerer’s mate) eluded Dr Munn’s perfunctory attempts to pin it down, but the Health Board, really concerned about my welfare, summoned me to the cave of their resident shaman, a Dr Sword, who while he was no great shakes with a scalpel was blessed with a magic fountain pen which in about as long as it takes to write ‘Fit for work’ could ‘cure’ even the most tenacious illnesses on the spot. His steely gaze had soon focused on the source of my ailment. ‘About as classic a case of self-induced narcolepsy as I’ve come across,’ he told his assistant, a Dr Butler (this duo became the infamous ‘Sword’n Buckler’, the very utterance of whose names sent foreboding s
hivers through the sub-world of means-testees, tribunalees, and appeals-panelees).
The first painlets of my affliction were sown the day I’d been doing some mental grazing in my dictionary and came across the word ‘sabbatical’. It seems that there’s this racket pros and parsons are into which allows them to sod off from the state gallery for a year or so. This is so that their mental and physical batteries can be recharged while they enjoy a little exotic nookying, surfing, or hang-gliding. Fair enough. Nowt wrong with that. But worrabout the wurkers? Nuffink doing; they were to ramain unsabbied. Bloody liberty. Was I, the son of a dead Clydesider going to stand for it? No way, Comrade! So, with the aid of that rascally old anarchist, Doc Munn, who willingly covered my trail with sick lines, I sabbied forth from my workplace (at that time I was a fireman on the railways) to give my braincogs a good airing.
Instead of indulging in some mild eccentricity like, for instance, trying to construct an atomic mousetrap or designing a navel-fluff remover for blind persons, I decided to fulfil a long-cherished ambition – the writing of a novel. And why not? I’d writing talent, bags of it. Hadn’t my English teacher, Mr Ironsides, said so? No, as a matter of fact he hadn’t. Ironsides saw himself in the role of a literary shepherd. He stood on the mound of his ego, ever vigilant to preserve us from grammatical howlers. Using specialised signals, he sent his dogs into the heart of a paragraph to snap at the heels of woolly adjectives, sniffing out ellipses and split infinitives, before urging them to drive the word-flocks into tight, pedantic pens where the casualty rate from suffocation was often high. Ironsides deprecated what he called my ‘lone wolfishness’ and he harped on about my vulgarities in matter of style: ‘I asked for an essay, boy – not a billposter.’
At last the traffic lamp close by the mortuary gave us the come on and the snow-mottled traffic, with a grinding of gears, began to surge towards Glasgow Cross. From the verdigrised rim of the alarm clock a tiny bug, a molecule on legs, had emerged. I studied it as it began an epic journey from twelve to six, its polar opposite. A time-beastie? No. Time-beetle, then? Nope. How about a clockroach? Bingo! Aye, a clockroach, a wee time-beastie that lives in a nine to five universe. I felt chuffed. It seemed that I was still on the Muse’s mailing list. I glanced from the window as the VW chuntered up the High Street, the vestigial spine of ancient Glasgow. In a shop window a nude male mannequin was to be seen staring up at a silvery tree from the branches of which handbags and gloves dangled like mutated fruits. I must sort that away for the future use of. Aye, despite the loss of my I-less pal (I could still feel its tactile phantom pressuring my thighs), I would soldier on at the writing game. Those goons who urged me to be sensible and not to strain my working-class braincells beyond their inherited capacity, hadn’t they heard of a jotter’n pen – the only tools required by a writer? A tannery jotter with all the arithmetic tables printed on the back cover, not forgetting yon stotting word – avoirdupois! ‘Open your jotters and leaving a margin begin: There was once this deepsea diver who discovered a tenement building on the floor of the ocean. He went through one of its closes and found himself in a backcourt where the calm corpses of housewives with carpet beaters in their hands floated around. Also to be seen was King Neptune himself, having forty winks in a lopsided armchair.’
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 2
