Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  Reluctantly, at her request, I forsook the flipside of Bostic’s biscuit in favour of Englebert Humperdink’s Pretty Ribbons, which, if not proof of the white man’s hypocrisy is indicative of the depths he’ll sink to in order to enjoy a session of vigorous carnality.

  And so to bed.

  Not until we’d finished the vodka, of course. Then, in that cluttered overheated little room which had been officially deemed unfit for human habitation, we danced boozily together, me not minding her need to bawl the entire maudlin lyric of’Am I That Easy to Forget’ in my earhole. Thereafter there followed a little Simon and Garfumbling on my armchair where, come midnight, the sexual guards quitted her no-go-areas and my hands were free to frolic like frisky salamanders in the brief flame of her dress. By then there was what old Walt Whitman calls ‘libidinous prongs’ forking up through me, that carnal revving of the senses as the moral brakes ease off.

  It was not the classiest of couplings; this has to be admitted. It might’ve been a bit more elegant than the sealion screwing I’d seen in yon Eskimo movie, but it was gross nevertheless. When it comes down to it, the sex-act’s gross to start with, especially so if your ticket to ride takes you no further than the bleak station of Lust. It’s a bit nutty, too, screwing: all that panting and peching so’s you can get a temporary projection of yourself into a temporary surrender of herself. Of course, that’s just post-coital cynicism. At the time, when I was up to my ears in it, entangled in all that slippery, sensuous insanity – the coiling limbs, the entwining tongues, the gush and the give overlaid by a coarse fuckalogue, the sexual commentary of that lewd maniac who lives in the skull’s boiling attic, and who at one point was hoarsely assuring the sniggering dark that a set of perfectly average breasts were a ‘pair of hot honeys’, a claim to which she responded with language that would’ve made a brickie blush, inciting me to perform acts that some men are doing time for, then you’re in no state to philosophise. No, you just want to get the job done, to plough your furrow, sink your shaft, willingly offer yourself to become a cosmic jerk, a dupe of planetary regeneration.

  Becky was clean-shaven where it’s at – the first beaverless woman I’d done sack time with. ‘A door like this doesn’t need a rug,’ she’d randily whispered in my ear, then, as her seducing fingers closed around an ecstatic MacDougall, she’d giggled: ‘But what’s a door without a knob?’ I don’t know if she made that up on the spot. I doubt it, but I’d no chance to share her amusement for, after getting her tongue further down my throat than my own one was, my depilated demon went into overdrive and laid on me such a sexual scorch it’s a wonder my scrotum remains unblistered. She seemed to be like five women coming at me from as many angles, so much so that there scarcely seemed a moment when any of my orifices was free from her erotic intrusions. But, since abstinence makes the hips go faster, I was your randy reamer all right. That tuned-up chassis of mine was a busy blur as we went barrelling round sexual hairpin bends, doing the ton in built-up areas, outstripping the world and all its tame velocities. Aye, quite a performance, one to bring a glow to the cindery memories when you’re sitting all soft-dicked and useless in Time’s waiting-room. ‘Did I ever tll you about the night me’n a lassie called Becky McQu –’

  ‘Aye, a thoosand times, faither. Noo, zip up your flies and don’t be disgusting!’

  But, if I turned in a personal best in that memorable sackrace, Becky herself was no slouch. That woman knew more tricks than an extended Whist Drive. A tireless performer, even after MacDougall was limply declaring himself to be knackered, drained, done-for, why her electric digits, not to mention her electric tongue, would soon tickle a dream into’m, and in no time he’d be standing all aquiver at her rugless door. Renewed and ready for action.

  Afterwards, we lay in silence watching the rubescent dramas that were being projected onto the walls by the firelight. Maybe because she’d read too much of Harold Robbins stuff or had seen too many movies she seemed to presume it was incumbent upon clandestine lovers to tell their life-stories. It was a boozy little biog, peopled by the usual stereotypes: a drunken father, an ill-used mother, and a husband who, in her own words ‘should be hanging from a hook in a butcher’s window’.

  I dozed off and dreamed that I was an insect, a strange insect with the time marked on its back (quarter past eight, as a matter of fact). Donald Strang, ex-pawnbroker and latter-day soul saver, came along, and with a cold pair of tweezers lifted me and dropped me into his collector jar which was filled with broken butterflies and crushed beetles.

  ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned, Thomas,’ he said.

  14

  THERE WE WERE, Rebecca McQuade and me, quite the domestic duo, sitting at the cluttered table, scoffing bacon sannies while, outside, the hailstones were softening to snow again.

  ‘You didn’t tell me this place was haunted,’ Becky said.

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘Ghosts’n that.’

  ‘Garbage.’

  ‘You think so? Did a policeman ever live here?’

  ‘Polis? In the Scabby, you mean? Aye, sure. Peter Manuel used to drop by every Sunday to play’m at chess.’ I laughed. ‘The Pope’d last longer in the Govan End at Ibrox.’ About to scatter some milk powder into my char, I thought the better of it. ‘Listen, if a pig screwed up badly on his beat, let’s say he raided a Brownie Pack and got a tankin, something like that, they’d say to’m, ‘Right Constable, what’s it to be – your P45 or the Scabby? You’d better believe he’d be grabbing for his cards, pronto.’

  ‘Well, there was one here last night, that’s all I’m saying. Aye, laugh if you like. I woke up and there he was.’

  ‘Polishing his truncheon?’

  ‘Plain as day.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Say what he wanted, did he?’

  ‘You, by the look of it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  With the ball of her thumb she wiped bacon grease from the corner of her mouth. ‘He sat there by the bed. Ages it seemed like. Then he was gone.’

  ‘In a puff of Mace smoke?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Jeremiah, often dons the chequered cap and lurks at dream crossroads awaiting old irresponsible me to come bucketing down a hairy gradient on a bike with shot brakes and buckled wheels. Could it be that he’d – Naw, that was crap. Shag Jeremiah. For the time being I intended to savour my status as a house guest, a sexual tourist like Becky here.

  ‘D’you do it a lot, then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dream aboot the fuzz.’

  She lowered her cup, placing it delicately in its saucer. ‘So, I was dreaming was I?’

  Except for a pair of shiny blue briefs she was naked under Rhona’s old housecoat with its torn pocket and its grubby braid. My judgement no longer foxed by booze, I saw that she was certainly no Kim Novak, but neither was she a look-alike for Marlene Dietrich, hunched over a fag at dawn. Her hair, that sculpted creation in which not a single strand had been out of place looked now like a burgled haystack. She flourished a hand. ‘This looks more like one – a dream, I mean.’ She took up the cup once more. ‘I keep expecting to wake up beside old Sweaty Drawers.’

  ‘He’s in Dagenham, remember?’

  She nodded. ‘He’d better be, for both our sakes.’

  ‘Sorry there’s no cow juice,’ I apologised. ‘Daisy’s never been the same since she got her horn crumpled.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s okay. Proves it, I suppose, that it isn’t a dream – powdered milk –’

  ‘– and the fags running oot.’

  ‘There’s some in my handbag, but they’re tipped.’

  As I stretched towards her bag she made a sudden, snatchy grab for it herself. Secrets, eh? Funny folk, women. This particular specimen had invited me, no, had encouraged me to explore her most intimate nooks and crannies, had given me the lowdown on her sexual topography on a scale that probably her gea
r jockey of a husband had never been granted. Yet, here she was, coming the coy nun-caught-naked routine. We lighted up and appraised each other through the smoky curlicues. On the mantlepiece the tranny, its delivery at demi-volume, was playing Bobby Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billy Joe’.

  ‘It must be hellish quiet here,’ she said. ‘Spooky even.’

  ‘We back to ghosts again?’

  What she was experiencing was an absence of sounds in general, not my own peculiar distinction of noises no longer heard: the screeching of pulley-wheels as rainyday washings rose to beflag the ceiling; the thump of doors closing; footsteps going or arriving on the stairs; prams thumping closewards burdened with weans or steamie bundles; the sound of human voices; kids crying; kids laughing; coughs; whistles; and from a long way off a rag’n’ boneman’s bugle sounding the last post for the old way of things. No more the tiny uproars that thrum through the living tenement, the absence of which made me feel like a spider dwelling at the heart of a busted guitar in which dying sounds faintly resonated.

  ‘Where’d she go, Mrs Clay, I mean?’

  She’d returned to her favourite subject. Like playful seal pups her breasts kept peeping forth; the urge to stroke their sleekness was becoming mandatory.

  ‘Dundee,’ I said, taking my cue from a tartan ditty the Alexander Bros had begun to kick around the tranny like a set of duff bagpipes.

  ‘Seems funny, just up and offing like that, leaving her stuff.’

  ‘They’ll be back soon,’ I told’r. ‘They’re going to have another duffy at it.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Duffy. Y’know – another try.’

  ‘Come back to this hole!’ She shook her head, looked dubious. ‘She must need her head seeing to. How come they weren’t rehoused? Everybody else’s flown the coop.’

  ‘No everybody. Apart from them, the Clays, there’re a couple of kneecreakers.’

  ‘Knee – what?’

  ‘Kneecreakers – pensioners.’

  ‘The Clays’ve had offers, then?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But they turned them down?’

  ‘Have you seen what was on offer?’

  She shook her head. ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta would’ve been preferable to this dump.’

  ‘You been up the ‘Milk recently?’

  ‘Must still be some good bits. It’s not that long ago since they were balloting for a house up there.’

  ‘Aye, afore they fun oot the Planners’d built the moat inside the castle. Damper than Neptune’s willie, I’m tellin ye. Weans are being born there wae webbed feet.’

  ‘If they keep turning down offers they’ll get turfed out.’

  I flicked some ash from my fag. A subtle alteration in the chat’s bias was called for. ‘See yon Moss Heights – they’re twice as bad for dampness.’ I stubbed out my fag-end. ‘It’s time they got round to building Mudscrapers, y’know, doonwards.’

  ‘I don’t see the advantage of that.’

  ‘D’you no? Think aboot it. For starters, no windaes to wash; no sunshine tae bleach your furniture; no wind, no rain, and no sparras to drill your eardrums at five in the morning; no traffic noises, and –’

  ‘Down there with the rats and the mice, and all those creepy-crawlies?’ She shuddered. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Mice’n cockroaches up here. What’s the difference? And I’ve just thought, we’d be out of the road of the noisy supersonics. Aye: nae sonic booms in the tenement-tombs!’

  ‘Horrible.’

  ‘No way. We could have mega subschemes like . . . let’s see, aye, Beetlemilk, Grubchapel, Fossilpark, Wormhill.’ My levity had done the trick and it was easy now to steer the confab to safer subjects like the weather, the price of coal, the Beatles. Coincidentally, as we were discussing the Fab Four, ‘Hey, Jude’ came on the tranny.

  ‘I’ll need to be making tracks soon,’ I told her.

  ‘Tracks is right,’ she said with a nod to the window where snowflakes had begun to birl with a renewed vigour. ‘Cosy here. What’s the point of going out in that stuff?’

  ‘I’ve got to see somebody about a job.’

  ‘You have one.’

  ‘The Fleapit shuts soon, remember.’ Deftly I slipped into the persona of Matt Lucas, chief projectionist of the Planet Cinema, but it no longer fitted snugly, being a bit puckered and rough to the touch.

  She shook her blonde head. ‘That dump’ll fall down before its knocked down. Just a hangout for hobos, somewhere for them to sit’n sup their rubbish. And the stink! They must wet themselves where they’re sitting.’ She pushed her cup’n saucer away from her and stood up. The housecoat swung open to reveal her sexy blue panties and, of course, her peerless paps. ‘Bonus or no bonus, you’ll not catch me going back there . . .’

  Which was very good news for Thomas Clay, esq.

  An embarrassing moment now ensued which the host handled with superb aplomb. The lady visitor desired ‘to go a place’, and, to judge from her pained expression, the sooner the better. Skirting explanations that while the stairhead facility remained, surprisingly, functionable, it was unwise to use it unless caught in the terminal throes of Montezuma’s Revenge, he drew her attention to the presence, close at hand, of a wally receptacle which he was led to believe Mrs Clay resorted to when the weather was inclement or the hour too late to make a visit to the outside lavatory a prudent venture. He, Matthew Lucas would make the chilly descent thither, thereby affording his guest a discreet period of privacy.

  ‘No bloody wonder that Clay woman high-tailed it,’ said a scunnered-looking Becky McQuade as she trailed across to search under the bed for the Edgar Allan. I unhooked the ‘air-raid’ flashlamp from its nail ben the lobby then followed its paltry glow down the stairs to the haunted cludgie. When you think about it, Hollywood has tended to tip-toe around the fact that from time to time we humans have to discharge waste matter. It seemed it was all right to show in some detail the lady making love, but to see’r making water – no way! I hope they keep it like that; the thought of Kim Novak being watched by millions as she – No, I won’t even inkify the thought.

  Cautiously I prodded open the cludgie door. It swung wide with a raw squeal. What did I expect to find in here? A phantom cop twirling his truncheon? Mrs Muirhead knitting her shroud? The gauzy image of an adolescent having it off with flying hand over some half-naked starlet in Picturegoer? Although I’d stuck on a tee-shirt and a sweater, goosepimples stood out over my entire body like braille. The wan spotlight flitted from pan to bleach bottle, then to the bumpaper holder. Something struck against my foot and I bent to pick it up. It was an empty ciggy carton. Well, well, Passing Clouds – the very brand you’d expect a spook to puff. I dig mysteries, a touch of the uncanny: a caller leaves his card in the shape of a London newspaper crossword clue; before this discovery snowballs are pitched at me by an unknown person, or persons, a stranger dressed in a leather jerkin and striped cap has been making enquiries about me. Should I include the erratic behaviour of the street lamp? I think not. The empty fag carton must be included though. MacDougall directed a fierce jet of piss into the pan. When he was done an innocuous thought trundled across my mind then suddenly exploded. Paddy’s loot! Christalmighty, I’d left it stashed in my jacket pocket. I fled the closet and sprinted up the stairs.

  Becky was monkeying around with the bottles in the drinks cabinet. ‘Saved!’ she exclaimed as she held up a Martini bottle which contained about an inch of the highly-overrated stuff. If that was enough to ‘save’r’ then she certainly had a problem. ‘Think I’m going diabetic,’ she announced as she added some lemonade to her glass. The housecoat kept floating open but for the moment eroticism had to play second fiddle. My hand dived into my jacket pocket. Panic over – the roll of notes was still there.

  In no hurry to be off, Becky was quite content to slouch around, Martini in one hand, fag in the other. On the tranny Dylan was making it with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

  ‘If I get this job,
I’m off to London,’ I told her.

  ‘Lucky old you.’

  A wee bit sulky looking, she crossed to plant her cheeks on the bed then she bent to the floor to lift her suspender belt. I poured what water remained in the kettle into the basin and gave my face’n body a quick slunge. Drying myself with an exaggerated vigour, I turned to face’r. She was just sitting there, stretching the suspender belt between the forefingers of either hand. I wondered what I’d be like getting up in an igloo on a Saturday morning. The wife away for the Record and the rolls, myself, lighting the first husky-shit fag of the day while listening to the wind’s hard drumming on my ice-bubble, sadly aware that the legs, I mean, the walrussing would probably be called off due to adverse weather.

  Becky was watching me. She’d posed herself like one of those judies who’d sprawled across the front covers of the Hank Jansen paperbacks we used to knock from Clatty Kate’s shop in Rutherglen Road. ‘Matt,’ she murmured, and her voice was indeed as they used to say in those penny pornos ‘silked with invite’, ‘surely you don’t have to go right away?’ The housecoat slipped from her bare shoulders. ‘I mean, what’s an hour or so on a rotten morning like this?’

  Lucas flung aside the towel and moved towards her.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said as his hand reached for his belt-buckle, ‘an hour widnae be here nor there . . .’

  15

  JOE FIDUCCI’S SHOP was all but empty.

  I sat slumped in the chair by the window while Joe, himself, fussed around me. His lather brush chuckled in the mug then its bristles fizzed warmly on my stubbly chin. In the battered wireless a guitar plonked hopelessly.

  ‘Irish racing today,’ Joe said.

  The old man waited for a response. Joe never risked so much as a tanner on a horse, but he was your trad barber – nothing like the cuddies for a racy conversation. Weather substitute: going to be another fine horse by the look of it. Might get a little filly later but.