Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  Turning in my direction Strang advanced into the relative chilliness of Shubumpkin Corner to extend his hand towards me. I rose to shake it. ‘Nice to’ve met you, Mr Clay. Very interesting. You should pop along to the Tent Halls one Saturday. Such a cheery crowd. And happiness, if you’ll suffer me to say so, isn’t a treasure the world is over-endowed with, is it?’ Smiling at the crafty way he’d inserted ‘suffer’ into his homily I also found myself nodding for some reason. As our hands dropped away he sprang a curious question on me. ‘D’you ever go hill-climbing Mr Clay?’ When I shook my head he briskly nodded his own. ‘Good, good. My advice to you is never to do so. You understand – never!’ With a farewell hand salute he moved towards the door. ‘Good-day to you also, Edward, God willing it we’ll meet tomorrow evening.’

  The lounge door closed behind him. Before I was fully aware of what I’d done a lighted cigarette was burning between my fingers, the thing seemed to’ve self-ignited at the heart of my musings. I was puzzled, aye, even a wee bit intrigued, by the ex-pawnbroker’s warning against any notion I might have to go climbing. It wasn’t very likely – I can get dizzy standing on the edge of a pavement; you’ll never catch yours truly spikebooting it up Ben Nevis, yon chittery place where Englishmen head by the coachload in order to fling themselves from its icy ledges. By the way, I’m talking about the mountain here, and not the Ben Nevis Bar up the Calton. Aye, it can be a right cauld shop but I’d rope myself to its gantry anytime.

  With all the outrage on his waxy chops of a priest finding a couple canoodling in the Confessional, Eddie strode up to me and would’ve struck the fag from my lips if I hadn’t got to it first.

  ‘No smoking allowed in here!’ he hissed.

  I nodded, but helped myself to several deep puffs before nipping the fag and burying it in the moist compost of a nearby houseplant. I wagged a hand through the smoke.

  ‘There, wisnae that loud, was it?’

  6

  I’D THIS DREAM once which began with me being stretchered into the Salty Dog Saloon. My carriers were a pair of Jewish lads from my secondary school, Bauxenbaum and Yaffie. With a carelessness wakened life would’ve censured them for they couped me onto a table and left me there to my own goyish devices. I lay on my back, broken and bloodied as an ant newly-spat from the grassy jaws of a palpitating mower. I began to call for water but the word for some reason came out in German: ‘Wasser . . . Wasser . . .’ I’ve no idea why this was, unless the dream-director wanted to exploit the word’s sibilance, its suggestiveness of a puncturing tyre or lung: certainly, the springy consonant of the English equivalent would’ve contradicted the tone of collapse thus far established by the dream.

  I could’ve ‘wassered’ away there until closing time for all the interest the barstaff took in me which, considering they were family, was a real put-down. The fact that they were dead and not merely dying might have had some bearing on their indifference but you would’ve thought Ma Clay at least could’ve spared me a word of comfort or even a consoling glance. But no, with cloth and cleaning fluid she remained completely absorbed in the erasure of a stain from the polished counter. (Out, damned spot!) Da Clay, a pencil stub behind his ear, was fine-combing a racing paper, still on his eternal search for winners, while Granda Gibson stood near the end of the counter, his attention enmeshed in the shrouding of a model sailing ship. The only one doing what barstaff should be doing, namely the pouring and selling of booze was Uncle Norman. His customer was his former boss, Farmer Irwin. Two children capered up and down the Saloon. One of them was my young brother Martin, who died aged seven during the meningitis scourge which swept the Scabby in the late forties. He was skimming beer mats at a baby who wobbled around in her rubbers and nappy making cooing noises. Like an infant Atlas she bore on her puny shoulders a grotesquely huge head. A greybeard came hobbling into the shop. He looked as if he’d been in a fire: threads of smoke were still unravelling from the seams of his scorched cardigan and on his charred face blisters were quickening.

  This weird wee dream popped up for reappraisal as I stormed the counter of the Salty Dog and elbowed my way into the two-line crush of boozers to claim my usual spot. ‘Hey, Sammy,’ I shouted as I tugged the alarm clock from my pocket, ‘your pub’s ten minutes fast again.’

  Aye, there’s no doubt about it – living’s a fine thing to be doing: people are forced to respond; they can’t just ignore you in the cavalier fashion of dreams. Sammy’s the exception, of course. Not a blind bit of notice did he take of me. But then he was watching the till wasn’t he? And believe me, with so many poor mouths pressing around him, that till took all the watching it could get. I stuck the clock on the counter in front of me, then skiffed a bright confetti of snow over Auld Andy Spowart who’d been trying to nurse a cure for rheumatics from a glassful of thin red wine. ‘Sorry, Andy,’ I apologised as he bubbled up like a fart in bathwater, ‘but you will stand in the daftest places!’

  It took me a while to get an order. There was no sign of Paddy Cullen in the heaving ranks. Paddy was the second projectionist at the Planet. A grand wee picture house. A great place for Fleas’ Conventions. What was yon saying again? Aye: ‘Ye go into the Planet wae a coat and come oot wearing a jaiket.’ Like the cinema, this very boozer was for the kibosh. It was galling to think of it becoming a rancid patch of waste ground. The Salty Dog Saloon, the best wee boozer bar none. Hands fluttered over foam-topped pints and nuggets of whisky gleamed everywhere. Clinks of glasses, clack of the doms, the rapid thwock-thwock-thwock of darts biting the board. Paper decorations were strung across the ceiling and in cottonwool lettering the gantry mirror wished everyone the compliments of the season. Freddy Green, who did a little bartendering on the side, had a group of drinkers straining towards him as he told another one from his Bumper Fun Book: the fuse of the story was well lit and soon burned to its mirthful explosion. The area behind the bar served as Freddy’s stage. There he clowned, did tricks and pattered up the boozers. Sad Sam Murney, the chargehand, of whom it was rumoured that he pissed into a leg-catheter rather than desert his till, was forever chiding Freddy when he got out of order, whereupon the comic would offer his time-honoured response: ‘Get a smash at that coupon! He disnae know whether tae part wae it or fart wae it!’

  ‘Can you no buy a watch like everybody else?’ Millie, the weekend lassie (some lassie!) asked as she shoved a pint of lager towards me. I patted the clock. ‘Got it from Alky Anon. Soon as it rings I’m off my mark.’

  Millie was big, blonde and brassy. She lifted the clock and jammed it to her ear. ‘Bloody thing’s no workin!’

  I nodded. ‘Well, as they say, Millie – nothin’s perfect.’

  ‘Aye, you’re right there Tommy lad, so you are,’ a voice said moistly into my left ear. ‘Nothing’s perfect, but it could be a damned sight better.’

  I frowned and lifted my pint. Just my luck to get lumbered with Talky Sloan. Talky was an old socialist hack, one of the greybeards who gave capitalism laldy in the area of the pub known as ‘Commie Corner’. In his youth Talky had come across that fat slug of a word ‘bourgeoisie’ and had hungrily sank his socialist fangs into it. Thereafter he became addicted to its decadent juices, a dependancy so chronic that he could scarcely string a few political sentences together without reference to the archaic class beastie. He held out a vibrating hand (for a glad moment I thought he was saying ta-ta!) then he tilted his fingers down sharply. ‘That’s whits wrang wae this country, son – nae balance – ower much gold at the English end. Ask yersel, go on, why should a Londoner get three sheets mair’n a Glesca punter? Aye, for doing the same job? I’ll tell ye for why – coz that’s how your boorjwazee get to rule – by division. Aye, your auld “divide’n conquer” tactic . . .’

  As he rambled on Talky was casually parting with a ten bob note for the pint that’d been shoved across to’m. All round me the underpaid Glesca boozers were lashing out good loot for their medicine, aye’n maybe needing just that wee drappie more than their Engli
sh counterparts. Talky dropped some of his change and as he bent to pick it up I did a conjuring trick so knackily that they should’ve been giving me a Magic Circle membership, instead of trying to push a pub raffle ticket on me. I dismissed my chance of a prize – it was rumoured to be a ‘wee swing on Big Millie’s garters’ – then as Talky continued to yammer politics, boorjwazeeing for all his worth I switched on my mental scrambler and tuned into a really ludicrous sight – that of a Volkswagen Beetle with a Silvercross pram mounted on its roof. What an eyepopper! It was a wonder somebody hadn’t come out and flung a bucket of water over them. For a start the Beetle was never designed to accommodate a roof-rack and certainly not to handle a pram that looked like it’d been made for export to Brobdingnag. I’d suggested to Eddie that we’d be better mounting the car on the pram but the joke hadn’t gone down too well. An accident seemed inevitable but, surprisingly, we’d got as far as humping the baby-truck up Ma Carlyle’s stairs before one happened: I nudged against a pot plant on the stairhead window ledge and down it crashed.

  Three doors opened simultaneously; three harpies appeared on the upper landing; three grim and slippered harridans descended with scolding tongues – Letitia Carlyle to the fore. Had these cauldron carlins been armed with clubs I’ve no doubt they would’ve pulped me on the spot. The plant itself, a fungoid wee leaf-dropper, lay on the linoleumed landing amidst the shards of its pot and the spilled earth, its tuft of roots sticking up like the paws of a dead moggie. Loud were the lamentations of the Macbeth Sisters, louder still their condemnations: ‘clumsy’, ‘stupid’, ‘careless’ – these were three of the milder adjectives Ma Carlyle spat waspishly into my face.

  Collectively they seemed to be insinuating that this had been no accident, that, in fact, it had been a cold, calculated act of vegicide. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this was by no means the first time that the accused had topped a houseplant. I bring to your attention the case of the Blitzed Begonia! When he was no more than ten years old the fiend who stands there in the dock, this ice-hearted chlorophyll-killer, deliberately and most wantonly smashed to bits with a brick the beloved begonia plant of Mrs Lizzie Ferguson, a peaceable old lady who had innocently put her plant, her pride and joy, out into the backcourt so that it might catch a sup or so of rain. It was then that this monster struck!

  Aye, it was true enough, I had indeed offed Granny Ferguson’s begonia. I’d no choice, for it was the task I’d drawn from the Scobie Hatchet’s Dare-Box. What a hullabuloo that caused. I ice one cruddy little plant and suddenly I’m Public Enemy No. 1. Hatchet Hannah, who’d turned over Blind Geordie’s cane, was forgiven quicker than I was. Even months later I overheard Mrs Dawson say to a new neighbour, ‘See that yin there? A right bad wee bugger. Put a brick through Granny Ferguson’s pot plant after the auld sowl put it oot for a wee drink of rain . . .’

  Harry Moffat, known snidily as Harry the Hump because of an unfortunate addition to his shoulders, poked his head from the opened trapdoor of the cellar. He’d a wee keek up Millie’s skirt as he did so but who could blame’m for that? A sinbad with bad sins burdened. Might’ve become my stepfather, Harry, if fate had taken it up its humph. He’d had a fancy for Ma back’n the old days when she’d skivvied in the Dog on Mondays – her day off from Sammy Stein’s Snapshot Parlour where she’d worked as a printer/developer. Little jokes and shared confidences. Harry came to Ma’s funeral and in his nervousness had dropped his hat into the grave as the coffin was being lowered. The gravediggers had presumed that this was an eccentric departure from the earth-throwing custom and made no move to retrieve the hat. Harry had just stood there, pink with embarrassment as the rain had thrashed his bald napper. The hat would still be there yet, crushed against the rotten lid, squashed wreath of a dream. Harry was for his jotters when the Dog shut up shop. He would not be going with Proprietor Peacock to the new premises, soon for opening elsewhere in the city. It seemed a hunchback would not fit in with the snazzy decor. Millie’d be okay though, her hump was on the socially-approved side.

  ‘What the bloody hell!’

  Talky Sloan, having gulped over some stout, hastily dumped the glass back on the counter. He plucked something from his drink and tossed it down into the beer swill. The frothy shroud cleared to reveal a wee plastic skeleton, the very one I nicked from Eddie Carlyle’s Beetle with the intention of hanging it in the family cupboard.

  ‘Hey, Sanny, get yoursel ower here a minute!’

  Sanny Stirrat, the bestower of headaches, loused-up stomachs and broken homes, refused to accept responsibility for the presence of a skeleton in Talky’s bevvy. As if he kept a special eye open for such novelties, he claimed in that dead-pan way of his that the stout had been skeleton-free when the pouring’d been completed. He looked real cheesed-off at the barrage of quips that was now let loose from boozy mouths: ‘Hey, Sanny, is that the new drink! Cemetery Shandy?’

  ‘Talky, it looks like somebody’s a bone to pick with you!’

  ‘Canny say noo your stout’s no got “body” in it!’

  I clapped his shoulder. ‘If I was you I’d steer clear of the horses ramorra. Helluva unlucky a thing like that.’

  The pub door opened and in came Cullen. At times Paddy could make the inmates of a dosshouse look elegant; Cullen had outdone himself this evening. As usual he wore the heavy, lint-flecked overcoat which senile moths nostalgically referred to as ‘the good old days’; a suit that was out of date when Burton was a boy; a dinner-speckled tie with matching shirt; but, unbelievably, tonight he was wearing a pair of needle-toed shoes that’d certainly ‘Hound Dogged’ to Presley way back when. He ducked into the ruck of drinkers and had soon barged his way to my side.

  ‘What’s with the winklepickers?’ I asked.

  He barked out an order then speaking from the side of his mouth he said: ‘Nora planked my shoes tae stop me from hitting the bookies. Had tae stick these on. I’ve no been hame yet.’

  His order arrived and he snatched greedily at the whisky. He had a good bead on him, more than plenty considering he’d a stint to perform in the Planet in less than an hour.

  ‘You seen that wee shitpot Killoch?’ he asked. ‘Don’t feel like trapping the night.’ He held out his tremoring hands. ‘Would you look at that, eh. Time I jacked in the pneumatic-drill.’

  ‘Got the shakes?’

  ‘Aye, the snakes as well.’

  The whisky went over in a single throw. ‘See yon Yankee pish you put us ontae last night. Whassit called again?’ I told him. ‘Aye, that’s it.’ He shook his head, ‘Fuckaw comfortin aboot it – neither north nor south. Then that Mick’s Blood on tappy it. Up half the night shittin shamrocks and shillelaghs. Tongue like a toad’s arse this morning and Nora going on at me like the Recordin Angel.’ Nora was Paddy’s sister with whom he got what he called ‘board and lashings’.

  He was a short man, Cullen, blighted with a ‘Dublin Pot’ through his addiction to stout. His brown hair was beginning to peter out on the foreslope of his skull and his fingers habitually settled on this spot as if he entertained hope of a miraculous resprouting.

  ‘We shifted some last night, eh?’ he said as he drew his pint of stout towards him. ‘Last I remember was the rammy in the Mod after you slipped yon double-six intae the dom school.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re away off course, Paddy – that was last week, in here. Sure you know Gus Hagen disnae allow the doms after hours.’

  Continuity had a tendency to snap for Paddy these days, leaving him to scrabble around, trying to pick up the dropped hours like they were scattered beads. One morning he woke up to find himself lying on a manky mattress in a backcourt; on his chest there was a frying pan and in the pan a dead budgie; Paddy had never been able to figure that one out. I signalled to Milly but Paddy intervened. ‘Naw, this one’s on me.’ From his inside pocket he produced a healthy spread of banknotes. ‘Who says the Irish nags fill the bookies’ bags now, eh?’

  ‘You knocked it off?’

&nb
sp; He nodded happily and peeled a couple of quid from the wad. ‘Here, they’re still wet wae McGarvie’s tears.’ I made a show of rejection but Cullen pressed them on me. ‘Take’m, you’ve a face on ye like somebody that’s shat himself in a stuck lift.’

  ‘Ta, Paddy, what’s the score now – ten, twelve?’

  ‘Fifteen, but who’s countin? Don’t leave the country, that’s all.’

  He lifted the clock, and looked at it curiously. ‘Yours?’

  I nodded.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I turned into a clockroach the day,’ I could’ve said, but didn’t. Cullen’s apt to banjo you for coming stuff like that.

  Meanwhile, Talky Sloan was saying: ‘Well, the bloody thing didnae jump in there by itself . . .’

  7

  WHEN NELLY KEMP was a sprightly lass of no more than sixty years of age, she kept a caged parrot on the counter of her fag’n paper shop in Scobie Street. The parrot was called Jacob, a right vicious auld bugger with a beak on’m that could’ve snapped truck axles. Since such an opportunity never came his way he contented himself with snapping at the customers – in German, strangely enough, although to earn his corn he’d throw in the odd English phrase like: ‘No tick here, chum! . . . Hullo, Sailor . . . How’s your bum for spots? . . . Thanks for coming – come again! . . .’ What exactly Jacob was saying in German remains unknown but the Scabby legend has it that one day, Solly Singer – the last Jew in Scobie Street – on hearing the bird’s Teutonic prattling, clapped his hands to his ears and fled the shop never to be seen on the premises again.

  The wretched squawkbag first roosted in my awareness around the time Herr Hitler was becoming bunkered behind his collapsing fronts. Consequently my memory of Jacob owes more to mental taxidermy than to accurate recall, a mock-up filched from other parrots seen and glimpsed in life, books, or films; a compound which produced a very oddly speckled bird. I vaguely recall though the whispering net of gossip which settled over Nelly’s shop because of Jacob. It was a time of ultra suspicion, when walls were said to’ve ears and ‘keeping mum’ was a national safeguard. Jacob’s Goebbels-sounding phraseology had not, it seemed, been well received by those customers whose loved ones were away ‘doing their bit’ to see off the Hun.