Swinging to’n fro on the windscreen was a tiny plastic skeleton, one of those keyring curios. Eddie probably hung it there as a ‘memento mori’, though one glance in the mirror at his corpsy face would’ve served the same purpose. Mentally I saluted the grinning effigy. ‘Lo there, Morto – this Hereafter biz, it’s a bit of a giggle then, isn’t it?’
The car braked as another traffic lamp ripened.
‘Big night at the Tent Halls, Saturday, eh?’
Eddie ignored my remark, still sore, I suppose about the time I’d taken in the junk shop. Or maybe he was too absorbed in watching for a wave from Jesus, out there on the slushy pavement. Could be that he was receiving divine Morse through the juddering gearstick. Must be dead comforting to know you’ve got it all buttoned up on the Other Side, to sit here in a crummy Beetle completely at ease with the shuddersome prospect of Eternal Life. In my Father’s Garage there are many Jags. But also one or two Minis for the agnostics.
Passing now on our left was the Sighthill Cemetery which provided a much more potent memento-mori for the residents of the Fountainwell Road High Flats. Nifty location, when you thought about it; from the mossy gravestones you’d get a renewed zest for living. ‘You down there, and me up here, you can’t smoke fags and you can’t drink beer!’
Eventually we’d shaken off Springburn and after a while were skittering through the tight streets of Crabton. It was the kind of place you’d only visit if your plane crash-landed there. Its architectural theme was anonymity and this had been so faithfully subscribed to that even though it’d a graveyard bang at the heart of its main thoroughfare you’d’ve been hard pushed to locate it.
Having shaken off Crabton, an Arctic landscape began to impose itself, a slow unpleating of fields like a luminous fan that eventually wagged me to sleep. When I awoke from this doze we were already in the environs of the recently built Nat Smollet Estate. What a groovy Winter Wonderland. Even the snow hereabouts had a luxurious sheen to it, a golden lustre derived from a plenitude of sodium-vapour lighting. Rolling past on either side I could see chunky, snow-capped mortgages and also many a lofty foreclosure with xmas trees chained in their windows. It was here in Fat Wallet, as I called it, that those star-favoured creatures Mr and Mrs Jack Sherman, had their abode.
5
IF JPS IS right and Hell is other people then, presumably, Purgatory is where they kennel their dogs. Phyllis Sherman had more or less to dig me out from under an avalanche of salivating beef and bad breath called Faraday, a St Bernard who wore a ketchup bottle where you’d expect to find the traditional brandy keg. Phyllis fetched the brute clouts which would’ve amounted to aggravated assault had they been directed at a human. ‘Far-a-day (punch punch) STOP IT! (punch punch) Ouf, you brute. Who put this stupid bottle on you? Jason . . . Jason, come through here at once!’ But young Jason, who’d been awaiting Alpine rescue under a pile of ‘snow’ in the linen cupboard, wisely decided to lie doggoe and let Faraday take his lumps. The St Bernard was eventually condemned to cool it in the cellar for a while though even from there his baying was powerful enough to suggest that he’d the backing of half the Kennel Club. His heavy headbutts on the door threatened an imminent outburst of mangled hinges, flying screwnails, and instant sawdust. Phyllis stormed to the vibrating door then in a high but controlled voice, she cried: ‘Just keep that up, boy, and you’ll be on pound food for the rest of your very short life!’ Faraday clammed. Right there’n then he shut down on the barking, the panel beating, the works. I don’t know what they put in that pound grub but one thing’s for sure – it must be helluva hard on canine tastebuds.
‘Sorry about that,’ Phyllis apologised, ‘but yesterday an old tramp mouthed off at’m outside the supermarket. Maybe seeing you he . . . well, never mind, he’s quiet enough now.’
Jeezuz, they took no prisoners in this house. First they set the dog on you then obliquely let you know you’re a ringer for some festering old dosser! Phyllis returned to the interrupted ritual of receiving her visitors’ coats, an effete, diddleclass custom. Scobie Street folks didn’t go in for that kind of thing, they could shuck their own duds except maybe when they were partying, in which case an appointed household urchin or urchins would see to their removal and the garments would eventually fetch up on the host’s bed in a wild, incestuous tangle. When I knocked back Phyllis’s invite to remove my combat jacket her ruthlessly cropped eyebrows arched a millimetre or so, just enough to indicate her indelible contempt for my shirtless origins and my shiftless ways. Although Phyllis, like her sister Rhona, had been Gorbals-born, the Carlyle family through some unspecified windfall had come into money and soon after they’d shaken the slum dust from their shoes and headed for the far more salubrious district of Kings Park, where Mr Carlyle set himself up in business as a locksmith. Their new home had been a first-class sandstone tenement which was tiled from entrance to topdeck and had, for goshsakes, lino on all of its landings and flowering pot plants along its window ledges.
At the time of the Carlyle departure Rhona had been around ten or eleven and I was considered to be ‘going with her’ as they said in those days. When I put in an appearance at their new home Mrs Carlyle was far from pleased to see me. In fact, she gave me a long finger-wagging lecture about my need to keep away from her daughter in the middle of which she lost all control of herself, seized me by the shirt collar and dragged me down the stairs, along the close, then pitched me out onto the pavement. As I rose shakily to my feet and she was dusting her hands she screamed at me: ‘Get back to the Scabby where you belong – you and your guttersnipe family. And if I see you so much as within a mile of my daughter I’ll have the police on you, d’you hear?’
Of course Rhona and me had gone on seeing each other – there were parks in plenty thereabouts to serve our purpose. I sometimes wonder if the Carlyles hadn’t flitted whether Rhona and I would’ve continued ‘going with each other’ or if our childhood crush, despite the spice of forbidden kisses, would’ve petered out in the usual way of juvenile romances. In fact, we’d begun to see less’n less of each other and eventually a whole week might pass without a meeting. One day I saw her with a gawky-looking lad who’d a face like a well-scrubbed kneecap and a Stan Laurel haircut. He wore these posh school togs and god help us was carrying Rhona’s books. The next time I saw Rhona I was half-cut and in the company of gangsters like Vic Rudge, Hatchet Hannah, Chibber Freeland, and Kinch O’Kane. Over the Glasgow Green it was, when the carnival had turned up for the Fair Holidays. And thereby, as they used to say, hangs a tale.
Phyllis was smirking at me, amused by my reluctance to part with my jacket.
‘What’s up Patton?’ she asked. ‘Scared they’ll start World War Three without you?’ This was a stray bullet from an old battle between us. Phyllis ridiculed me whenever the opportunity presented itself. ‘A walking contradiction,’ she’d called me to my face. As someone who proclaimed pacifism yet wore a CND button on a Yankee combat jacket, I suppose she had a point. If only I’d thought to quote old Walt Whitman’s gentle put-down: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.’ Instead I’d come out with some juvenile crap about ‘being at war with society’. No wonder she’d given that the horse laugh, this shrew with the armour-plated name.
She continued to hold out her hostess-white hands, making a sort of give-it-me gesture that somehow seemed playful, big-sisterly even. ‘Playful?’ ‘Big Sisterly?’ Take me to Rubberland! If Phyllis here ever got to be ‘playful’ or ‘big sisterly’ then the cobra’s a cupcake and all bets are off. No way was I about to shuck my jacket for her. She might get the notion that I was fixing to stay longer than the time it would take to lash the totmobile to the roof of the VW, and be on our way with it to Mother Dragon’s lair in Kings Park. In its current state of isolation my pad in Scobie Street was becoming too vulnerable to burglary for the pram to be stored there so, for the time being, it would join the rest of our stuff that’d already been stored in Rhona’s childhood nest. The
pram arrangement also allowed for oblique deference to the superstition against being over-prepared for the babe’s arrival, lest the Lord smiteth the presumptuous womb or some such guff. Another reason why my jacket was staying put was the post-moth condition of the sweater beneath it . . .
Eddie too dawdled over the doffing of his overcoat. ‘Hadn’t we best see to the business first?’ he suggested in exactly the tones you’d expect from the bloke with the measuring tape and the eternal life equipment when he called to take charge of the remains. Phyllis was getting stroppy about this dithering. ‘What kept you, anyway?’ she asked her brother as she hauled his coat off and all but skewered it on a peg. ‘Mum’s been up to high-doh. On that blasted phone every five minutes.’
Eddie hooked a thumb in my direction. ‘His fault. Spent forever in a junkshop. I think he’d a job convincing its owner that he wasn’t part of the stock.’
My, my, a rare funny from Bleakchops. It’s your turn, sis. Don’t let me down. Phyllis smirked at me. ‘A junkshop? Started your Christmas shopping at last have we Patton?’
Fine teeth this classy croc had – and such a lot of them! Her smile snapped shut. She tightened the cap of the ketchup bottle she’d removed from Faraday during our epic struggle in the hall, then she began to holler her son’s name. ‘I’ll warm your botty if you don’t come here this instant.’ Not much of an offer: the lad stayed put in his Alpine retreat. I saw now that Phyllis had lost a good deal of weight since her operation. It suited her though. She wore a plum coloured sweater with what I think they call a cowl neckline, and a pair of slimline slax. Her hair was piled up in a style I approved of in Rhona though she seldom adopted it, claiming that it gave her headaches. Both sisters shared the same hair colouring, intensely black and plentiful with a rooky blue sheen to it. They also had in common a certain air of haughtiness, maybe even snootiness, which was integral with the slant of their cheekbones and the way they seemed to have of looking down their noses at you. I reckon Rhona had the edge in looks but Phyllis was definitely ahead in the bum-stakes. Too bad though she’d opted to haul on the pantie-girdle, its visible ridges marred the smooth flowline of her buttocks.
‘Donald’s dropped in,’ Phyllis told her brother as we followed her like a pair of greasy meter-readers down the hall. With every yielding footstep the carpet reminded us that we were treading a multi-bucks tapis into which its purchaser, Jack Sherman, had woven long tiring days and short sleepless nights. Eddie acknowledged Phyllis’s remark with a nod. ‘He’s into a Minx now, I see. Never did like that Zephyr, did he?’ Hrrumph . . .’
Aye, ‘Hrrumph’, indeed! What would the intrepid mountaineer, hiding up there in his snug cave, make of such verbal drizzle? If later in life when he was able to find his way around a dictionary, he tried to reconstruct this confab between his mother and his Uncle Eddie, it would appear that one year, just before Christmas, a man called Donald had dropped into something (though what the ‘something’ was hadn’t been defined). After that the man had changed into a flirty lady who for some reason had a spite against the wind. As if the planet of infancy wasn’t far enough away without adults lousing up communications with such static.
In my plebeian way I’d expected that the statuses of a textile warehouseman and unemployed drifter would at the most rate Eddie and I a mug of coffee and a biscuit à la cuisine in the garrulous company of Florrie Monks, a diligent domestic toy Phyllis had picked up at some Renta Drudge Agency. But, gee-whizz, wasn’t the Lady of the Manor actually leading us towards the Shermans’ most holy of holies – The Peacock Throne Room itself? By jings aye she was!
When you entered the lounge you could immediately see what good money and bad taste could achieve between them. This walled contrivance was a strategy of furnishings, fabrics and mural decor which had been intended to suggest artistic reticence but had ended up being little more than visual muggery. With a pilgrim’s awed stoop, my eyes blinking rapidly as if to imply bedazzlement in the treasurehouse of tackiness, I took in the porcelain, the ivory knick-knacks, the fishtank in one corner, the TV set in another, the horse-mobile, a tinkling herd that circled on the ceiling, the glass galleon with the tiny wooden bottle rammed up its gimcrack asshole, the xmas cards in a star-shaped arrangement on one wall and with a burgeoning astral twin arising on the facing one. And the christmas tree! We mustn’t forget the christmas tree – a green furry brute, wrenched from a colossal socket in a northern forest and dragged down here to be humiliated by such prissy lowland gew-gaws . . .
Close by the nancyfied spruce, sitting on the throne of the master himself, was a merry little jackanapes with a face as red and as hearty as a good-going stove and with such a cherubic smile, not to mention an abundance of white hair, that he could’ve passed for Santa in civvies. I’m all too well aware that the daily grind of money-making can put years on a person but not even for a fleeting moment was I diddled into thinking that this festive goblin could be Jack Sherman newly returned from a hard day’s night at the mintmill. No, Sherman was never as a rule home this time of day. It was more usual for him to come creeping in from his passionate affair with money hours after we sluggards had begun bending the straw. How, lacking such heroes, could capitalism (and cardiac consultants) flourish? Sherman was a kind of finance plumber. On call twenty-four hours a day, it was his job to ensure that capital was free to flow within its prescribed circuits: a bunged-up merger, the fracture of a feduciary joint; the overflowal of a Swiss Bank account – Jack was the lad to turn to. Money from money – it was wily pitching!
It turned out that wee Santa in the armchair was a retired triple-ball-merchant. All of his spare time was now pledged to the Supreme Pawnbroker, who’d proclaimed that all souls were redeemable even if you’d lost your ticket on an astral suit that was out at the elbows.
‘Tom,’ says Phyllis with all the tenderness of a Venus fly-trap. ‘This is a good friend of ours – Donald Strang.’ She flicked a tentacle to indicate to her visitor that I (audible sigh) was her brother-in-law, Tom Clay. As it happened I knew this man by repute: Rhona had done a good PR job on’m back in those days when she’d been naive enough – and brave enough – to accept on the strength of a single dream that her chief mission in life was to be the ‘saving’ of my soul. At that time, I’d been an eastern mishmashist, a sucker for all the curry-flavoured come-ons. My enthusiasm began to wane though the day I saw on the telly a renowned mystic, Swami Narwalagee, I think his handle was, losing his cool at an airport because they couldn’t fix’m up with a seat on a homebound flight. Now, this was the very turkey who’d claimed in one of his books to be able to transport his physical body to any spot on the planet by occult means. But to be honest, I don’t think I ever got over the newspaper exposé which revealed that T. Lobsang Rampa, whose stuff on Tibetan lore I’d devoured, was really a plumber from London. I’ve nothing against tradesmen, especially not plumbers, but I have to admit that after this revelation my mystical ballcock was never quite so buoyant.
But where was I? Yeah, Rhona, and her attempts to get me to tune into the Good News which, she claimed, radiated from every page of the NT. She reinforced this claim by slipping biblical tracts and scriptural leaflets into books I was currently reading, thus I could end up using as a page marker in Kierkegaard’s angst-ridden Either/Or, a jolly little message with a headline like: ‘Getting Into God’s Good Books’. No thanks, I told my domestic apostle, I much preferred auld Nick’s bad yins. Many of these tracts had come from the pen of the man now shaking my mitt. At that time Strang had been an active backcourt bible-basher. Kids with hardly a backside to their troosers would be encouraged by Strang to ‘Count Your Many Blessings’, and not only that, they were to name them one by one; after which they were expected to ‘Climb, Climb, up Sunshine Mountain, faces all aglow . . .’ Strang claimed that he’d saved many a soul and, God willing, would save many more. To test’m the Lord had visited on his pawnbroking servant hypertension, arthritis and growing deafness.
Strang, lo
oking as if he meant it, said that he was indeed delighted to make my acquaintance. This assurance was spoken with that sonic boom which can sometimes be the mark of the hard-of-hearing – either that or they’re whispering like spies in a corner. But as we pressed flesh I sensed that the puckish ex-pawnbroker was more curious than he was delighted to meet me. It was obvious that he was comparing two Clays – the wraith who’d preceded me here from gossip’s shallow grave; and the so-called ‘real’ me, that conjurer’s cabinet of sliding mirrors, drawstrings, and secret compartments. ‘So this,’ his subvoice was probably saying, ‘is the rogue who all but broke Letitia Carlyle’s heart! Here was the very devil who’d lassoed her younger daughter’s affections then dragged her back to the evil stews of the slums from which good fortune had freed her. Aye, it’s a fact, there’s more to the human handshake than a mere mingling of sweat.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 3
