‘You having a bet?’
‘Haven’t studied form, Joe.’
The familiar creaking sounds of Joe’s sandals as he moved around the chair. The ticklish flurry of the lather brush on my flesh. It’s indecent to talk about things that really matter. Time, for instance, why can’t we discuss the concept of duration or hazard some notions on the nature of eternity? You just can’t somehow. Upsetting. Imagine me remarking off-the-cuff to Joe, ‘Say, man how d’you dig this acid of being we’re all frazzling in . . .’ No way was it possible. Too embarrassing. Joe’s wife is rumoured to be dying from a cancer which is located in a most unusual site for that disease. Me, I’m just dying to ask’m about it, but won’t. Depressing. Funny stuff is Time. It gets into your hair eventually, can’t be scraped off the face. When you thought about it, Sweeney Todd with a cut-throat razor welcoming you into your last chair would better personify urban death than yon undernourished gink with the scythe. The grim reaper. Aye, grim wasn’t the word for it. Business was bad. I squinted along the empty chairs to my right. Old Pat Mooney, the usual watery drip at his nose, was sweeping up the morning’s clippings. You’re never alone with a strand right enough.
‘Things’re quiet this morning, Joe.’
He delathered the cut-throat on the soggy pad of newsprint he’d perched on my towel-wrapped shoulder. Bladed light lit up his morose features. An Italian shoulder-shrug as he said, resignedly: ‘People go – they take their hair with them.’ Snow on his roof, ash in his smile. ‘Not be too long till I’m saying arrividerci Gorbals myself.’
‘When’re you quitting?’
‘Soon now.’ He sighed as the blade made creamy upstrokes. ‘They make the clean sweep, eh?’
Aye, a clean sweep all right – like Mooney there, brushing himself onto a shovel:
SITUATION WANTED
Owing to circumstances beyond his control, senile snipper requires sit. Trembly-handed, a tippler, over-fond of punting, but wonderful with children.
HAVE SCISSORS – WILL TRAVEL.
Joe was moving into his son’s fancy uptown shop. Hard to imagine him in a hair boutique. He’d be there to collect the money and exchange weather opinions, to blow the dust from lotion bottles and try to avoid the meshed glances of that useless twin in the mirror.
Before we parted – in the close as it so happened – Becky’d gone up on the toes of her fashion boots and laid a little cheeper on my lips. ‘Good luck with the job,’ she said. ‘Be seeing you.’ And she exited, stepping behind a curtain of snow. Gone. Such emotional neatness, so admirably adult.
‘Why don’t you retire, Joe?’
‘Who? You talking to me?’ An uneasy laugh unravelled some more of the frayed stitching of his mouth. ‘Whadda I do, retiring?’
‘That’s the point – do nothing. Just lean on the fence for a change.’
Soap flew up to spatter the mirror. ‘Not work and sometimes not eat, eh? Maybe not have a house too soon. I just wear out at the elbows leaning on this fence of yours.’
‘Sure, see Naples before you . . .’
‘Food on the table, that’s all I want to see.’ He smacked his fist on the radio, clarifying a Morse-signal. ‘Lean on the fence. That’s a good one . . . Lean on the fence.’
Mooney was still skulking around looking for hairs (maybe he got paid by the hundredweight). A bald barber made a poor advert for his profession. I looked into the mirror as Joe towelled away the soap traces. A fine healthy glow. This was one of the last remaining shops in the Gorbals where it was possible to get an old-fashioned shave. The cut-throat razor had the edge on those electric jaw-mowers; the one gifted to me by Rhona was at present gathering dust in the Three-Balled-Blessing. My suit has storage place in there, too. Sometimes when I pass the premises I could swear I hear it plaintively singing: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth . . .’ Only just, believe me. Bending forward I plucked a comb from a brush on the shelf and tugged it through my hair. The old locks were getting to be on the longish side. Rhona scolded me about it on every visit. Her mother had gone so far as to say it was a ‘dampt disgrace’. What kind of father was I going to make, running around like a hippie eejit?
‘But your Jesus had long hair, had he no?’
‘We’ll have none of your wicked blasphemy!’
I stuck the comb back in the brush. The mirror I was looking into was fast running out of faces. Mooney sat on the end of the wall bench near the gasfire. He was hunched over the sports section of his newspaper, studying form. Cigarette smoke dribbled up his finished face. Hands slack with defeat, scissor-grooved thumb a-tremble. He was digging out his three-cross-doubles and a treble, warmed by the prosect of it coming up, an unlikely outcome. I went over and sat on the bench. As I lighted a smoke, Joe crossed to the corner where his stropping belt hung. Soon the razor was cloff-cloffing on the worn strap. In the radio, a finely drawn-out thread of sax music abruptly snapped.
‘When you take a house?’ Joe asked me. ‘Soon they throw you out, eh.’ He held the stropping belt between thumb and forefinger: a man at the end of his leather. A lop-sided glass shelf on the wall next to the card of Durex Loveskins moved, perhaps a millimetre per day, towards the moment when it would cascade its stourie lotion bottles onto the floor. The gasfire flames wavered and sputtered as the door was nudged open and allowed a gust of wind to swirl into the shop. The head of Caesar, a thin, snow-stippled Alsatian dog appeared. Its melancholy gaze raked the empty chairs then withdrew. A sad business. Once the faithful companion of Tammy Cook, a Scobie Street punter, it had, ever since Tammy’s passing, been mourning around, checking out its master’s old haunts. Joe said that something should be done about the dog. Mooney was of the opinion that it should be put down. Funny how callous some folk can be; an animal gets into a wee health scrape like, say a broken tooth or a loose claw and right away the howl goes up: ‘Give it the bullet!’ ‘Away wae it!’ I asked Mooney how he’d feel about being put down because he’d a pluke at the end of his neb. Without apparent affront he replied: ‘Aye, suit me fine that would. They can stick a gun against my heid anytime they like – jist as long as it’s no sore.’
Joe folded the cut-throat’s gleam into its handle then he came across and stood with his back to the chair directly in front of me. He studied me for quite a time before he asked, ‘How long I know you, eh?’ Holding his hand palm downwards, close to his bulging midriff, he answered his own question. ‘From this high, that’s how long.’ He stepped to one side and indicated the chair he’d been leaning on. It was an unassuming piece of furniture, solidly built, but completely lacking in stylistic folderols. For donkey’s years the chair had served as the weans’ seat. ‘Do you remember,’ Joe asked, ‘when you sit on a flap of wood here, eh?’
I nodded. ‘You’d a spite against my heid, Joe: it never seemed to hing the right road for you. Know what us kids used to call you: “Tugger the Bugger”.’
He grinned but his hand remained on the chair, fingers stroking its polished back. ‘Still,’ I conceded, ‘you were never as rough as that boy of yours, Luigi – the way he scalped a queue you would’ve thought he’d lost somebody close to’m at the Battle of Wounded Knee.’
He laughed outright, a short burst of amusement, then reverted to a serious mien. His hand clapped the chair back, ‘D’you know who made this for me?’
‘Jesus of Nazareth?’
He ignored my quip. ‘I’ll tell you who, your Grandpapa.’
I think he expected me to rise and go across to touch the relic, maybe even to make some comment like: Granda Gibson – well, I’ll be damned!’ Instead I blew a thin jet of smoke into the air. I was surprised, amazed even, but I just sat where I was and said nothing.
‘Before you were born, he made it,’ Joe went on, as if this info added to its wonder. He knuckled the top of the chair. ‘Craftsmanship – built to last!’
‘That’s oot the windae these days, Joe,’ I told’m. ‘Make haste to lay waste’s the modern code.’
Joe fon
dly regarded the old chair. ‘This was built to last. Your Grandpapa was that kind of man. Patience in his hands.’ He nodded and gave vent to a deep sigh. ‘You’re right, you don’t see much of that nowadays. Nobody take time anymore. Nobody care.’
I realised that the old man was obliquely censuring me. The chair stood on the tesselated floor like a ponderous chess-piece. Here, Joe was in effect saying, is patience, the prime attribute of John Gibson, cabinetmaker, my grandfather. Against it, all I could field were a few transient pawns, a cluster of short-ranged ambitions.
I finished the fag then getting to my feet tumbled a couple of florins into Joe’s overall pocket. ‘I’m sure gonna miss you when you’re gone, Joe,’ I told’m, and I meant it.
16
CRUNCHING ACROSS THE street, heading for Shug Wylie’s Bum Boutique, I saw the man, himself, struggling at the lavatory’s entrance with two vaguely human things. These entities were mostly rags and seething grey hair, and the one I presumed to be male suddenly sprouted a humanoid hand which curled its yellow fingers about the snowy railings and was not for letting go, while its companion, with equal tenacity, clung to its coat. They were whining, no, more like keening, these tattered things as the mannish heap fought against their being pried loose, torn from their place of refuge to be cast onto the street’s bright torrent.
‘Let go ya bugger!’ Shug kept shouting as he clubbed with the side of his fist at the thing’s talons. ‘Let go, I said!’ Shug, the officially-appointed Keeper of the Keechs, was wearing the approved uniform for such a position: brown dungarees, cap, black wellies, and an expression of outraged authority on his face which was appropriate to a man who took his job and his bog seriously.
Shug went on pounding at the male thing’s talons. ‘Let go!’ And being such a scrap of a thing it had eventually to submit, to release its grip. Both it and its tattered attachment drifted away, mewing like outraged seagulls they were, but soon their cries grew fainter until the ragged pair disappeared around a corner at the far end of Scobie Street.
Later, as we sat in the cramped quarters of his neuk, both of us with a mugful of Shug’s unique char – so strong it was almost unspillable – the attendant, still panting a little from his exertions, reminded me of the dire consequences those ‘auld germbags’ could’ve wreaked upon the humble convenience. ‘I’m tellin ye, Tam, if meths drinkers so much as think aboot pissing – the game’s a bogy. No a stink in the world like it. Lasts forever, so it does. You see,’ he went on, ‘they dossers are no allowed to kip in the brick kilns anymore – no since they found one of them deid – hard as a tile they say he was.’ He nodded. ‘That’s how the place’s hoaching wae them – like bloody cockroaches looking for a bit heat.’
‘You never can tell,’ I warned him, ‘it might be you’ve just changed world history.’
‘What’re ye on aboot?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what if that was Joseph’n Mary looking for a place tae kip? It could be you’ve snookered the Second Coming!’
‘The Second Humming’s more like it.’ Shug laughed and bent to flick off a bar of the electric fire.
‘Good brew this, Shug,’ I said. ‘Put a shine on your shit, this stuff.’ I chewed on a mouthful. ‘Ran out of milk this morning. Bread was hard as well. Wife’s only been in dock five weeks and already things are coming apart.’
Said Shug: ‘If they keep shutting doon the models what can they expect. Soup queues and hymns urnae the answer.’
‘It’s that auld effer, Wattie, up the stairs. Taps me stupid: a wee bitta this, a wee bitta that.’
‘Bloody miserable, right enough.’
Aye, ‘miserable’. Trees don’t know they’re miserable; only man knows that. So had said Monsieur Pascal, that wee Frog croaking so ardently down a well of doubt. I remember, back on the railway, my driver, Wee Tully, plucking a Penguin paperback from my overalls pocket and greasy-fingering through its pages. ‘What shit’s this you’re reading noo, Tam. “Pen-sees” What the fuck’re pen-sees when they’re at hame?’ I corrected’m. ‘Oh, Pong-sees, is that what they’re called? Beg your pudding.’ Later when we got the go-ahead and were hammering up the loop line past the chemical works Tully’d waved me across at his side of the cab. He’d pointed to a man who was shovelling bone-white powder into a wheelbarrow. ‘There, yar, Tam,’ he yelled over the steel-clashing bedlam of the engine. ‘That’s how your gonni wind up. Pongsees or no fuckin pongsees!’
Maybe he’d been right at that: too many books, too few answers. Donald Strang the pious pawnbroker had been bang on the mark yesterday. His remark about my need to avoid hill-climbing could’ve been a dig, a sly allusion to the towering edifice of my ego, a reminder that – pride does indeed come before a fall. Shug, catching up with my gab, said with a grin: ‘Aye, it’s great what having to wash their own shirts can dae for some folk.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe there’s something to be said for gettin things in a shambles.’
‘S’that so?’
‘Think aboot it.’ As Shug wheezily bent to kill another fire-bar, I asked’m, ‘What’s the key to a well-run home? Routine, right? And routine breeds habit. Okay? Habit, what does it breed? I’ll tell you – sleep, that’s what. The more you do something, the less you do it. Sounds screwy but it’s a fact.’
‘So, there’s some sort of salvation in a pile of dirty dishes?’
‘There’s friction, and that’s important – things no goin smoothly.’
‘Right, if you go oot there into your favourite box and trip ower a big stale shite, you’ll be back to shake my hand, eh?’
I laughed. ‘I’d stick it in your teapot.’ I fired a fag; it crackled and blue smoke rose twistily into the air. ‘Y’see, Shug, the mair friction, the less chance there is of you goin skimming doon the ego-chute like some bloody imbecile. You get stuck up there. And that’s when you start asking yourself questions.’
‘Are you stuck, then?’
‘You kiddin? Right now I’m coming doon so fast you’d think my arse was French-chalked.’
Shug took a slow sip of char. He shook his head. ‘You’re a right funny bugger, Tam. You’n your daft ideas. Here’s me wondering where my next breath’s comin fae, and there’s you trying to make things hard for yourself.’
I held up the fag. ‘S’this botherin you?’
‘Naw, naw, it’s you that bothers me. You’n your batty notions. You’ll be tellin me next your wife’ll be the better of a hard delivery.’
‘I never said anything aboot pain being constructive, Shug. All I’m saying is that we should welcome the odd poke in the eye from life, anything that’ll jab us from oor comas.’
‘Try selling that yin tae Talky Sloan, this morning.’
‘What’s wae him, then?’
Shug, surprised looking, put down his mug; ‘You’ve no heard?’
‘Don’t tell me he’s lost his voice?’
‘He’s lost mair’n that, Tam. He copped an arseful of bus in Croon Street last night.’
‘You tellin me he’s deid?’
Shug nodded. ‘They’ll be picking bits of’m oot the radiator yet.’
Yon inane remark so often prompted by news of sudden death flew from my mouth.
‘Aye,’ said Shug, ‘saw’m myself in the Dog. Chirpy as a sparra he was.’ Shug flicked off the remaining fire-bar and we watched it die through the family of reds. A picture skimmed across my mind, that of a wee skeleton lying on the beery counter, myself saying, ‘Awfy unlucky, a thing like that . . .’ The quirky notion came to me that if I hadn’t knocked the wee effigy from Eddie’s car then dumped it in the stout, Talky might’ve been alive right now. Not impossible. The incident could’ve given’m the wind up and made’m steam into the bevvy. As a result he could’ve left the Dog later than usual. Who’s to know, he might’ve been brooding over the demon in his drink as he began his last walk across Crown Street.
‘Salter’ll take it bad, eh?’
I nodded. Poor auld Salter. It’d be like
having his head jammed in a wet coalbag. Many a time I’d watched Talky doing yon thumbo-jumbo stuff on the blind and deaf-mute’s hand: discussing the runners, tapping out the favourites. Talky, the lantern of his life. Another way they had of communication was via the Jawhold method, when Talky would offer up his mandible to Salter’s clamping mitt while he spoke, reading the vibes, so to speak. Bar the old man’s sister, Talky was the only punter on hand who could release him from that dark closet of the senses that imprisoned him. Not that this ability gave Talky any pub-prestige. ‘Look at’m,’ Danny Dimes said to me one day, nodding towards a corner where Talky was doing his palm-patter with Salter. ‘Even the deef urnae oot-o-range of that bletherin wee bastard!’
A story there for any writer worth his salt. It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they’re symbolic: ‘I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?’ ‘Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!’
‘Mind you,’ said Shug, ‘He could talk the hind legs off a donkey, go rattling on like a stane in a boiling kettle. D’you mind yon time he – ‘Shug’s jaw sagged. ‘Jeezus wept!’ he cried. He got rapidly to his feet then slumped back down again. Staring into the neuk through its sparkling pane was Death himself. He wore a long brown duffel coat, the hood of which was drawn tightly about his skeletal face with its graveyard grin. He opened the door and shouted: ‘C’mon oot – your time’s up!’ Death had on patched wellies and a pair of industrial gloves which bore bright spatters of buttercup paint. He shook the hood loose from his head, dropping it back onto his shoulders, then shoved the Halloween skeleton mask up from his face, lodging it on the crown of his bald and scurvy skull. The real face was no improvement on the mask. In fact, it looked as if the Midday Scot had been using it for buffer practice. Apart from the severe structural damage it was also studded with inflamed boils and pustules as well as greyish hair-tufts.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 13
