Shug, recovered now from his original shock, was back on his feet. ‘C’mon, you,’ he snapped as he confronted Death, bravely squaring up to’m although he scarcely reached to the bony one’s shoulder. ‘Bugger off! You’re no getting in here.’
Death grinned at me. His teeth reminded you of a vandalised graveyard, mossy molars pitching every which way but loose. ‘Shat yersel there, big man, eh?’ He tapped his lips with two leprous looking fingers. ‘Any smokes?’ I dug out my pack. Death snatched away a fag, a couple, in fact. As he bent forward to take a light from me a stench so rotten it would’ve given maggots the boke polluted my nostrils – the lighter flame turned green. Shug, getting more pugnacious by the minute, began to shove at the tall, skinny intruder. ‘Out of it. C’mon – on your way.’ I hoped things weren’t going to get physical. I mean, being spotted slinging Death from a shithoose! Man, that’d be tough to live down, especially when the Salty Dog wags got to hear of it. ‘Look, Boss,’ he pleaded, ‘I’m no askin tae sit doon or anything. Just a wee wash, that’s all I’m after. Surely you’ll no grudge a man a wee wash?’
‘The flame-thrower’s out of order,’ said Shug with a nifty turn of wit. ‘Out you go!’
And would you believe it, Death turned out to be a right crapper. He gave a cheery wave. ‘Ta for the smokes, bree,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll be back for ye in ninety years, if I’m no too busy.’
Shug, ever more emboldened, gave Death a hefty shove from the doorway. ‘Bugger off, I said.’ And without so much as a departing retort, some face-saving insult, the duffel-coated rickle of banes slunk off. Having sorted Death out, Shug returned to the neuk. ‘Aye, you can laugh, Tam,’ he said eyeing me reproachfully while he laboured for breath, ‘but I’m just sick’n tired of it, so I am. Bloody hobos and half-wits crawlin doon here. And the stink of them – turn your stomach.’ He sat down, looking even more irritated by my continuing cackles. ‘C’mon, lay that egg and be done wae’it.’ But I just couldn’t get the clamps on my hilarity which had passed over into near-hysteria, when from a not very great height Death pissed on us. Down the stairs it came, a livid arc of urine that thrashed on the stone floor outside the neuk, japping the window-pane as it did so.
‘Ya durty swine!’
Shug was up and running. The neuk door crashed back on its hinges as he flung it wide and charged up the stairs in pursuit. What a gas – Death being chased by a lavvy cleaner! A sight to behold, the sudden emergence of this grotesque pair, looking, no doubt like they’d bounded straight from the caverns of Hell. It was to be hoped that there weren’t any kneecreakers with wonky tickers on the go up there. It was real acid-head stuff – the Scabby on a trip.
Shug returned, red-faced and panting, to his keechdom a couple of minutes later. Death had given’m the slip. ‘Legged it up one of they closes,’ he gasped. ‘Lost the bugger . . .’ I poured some char and let’m bellyache for a bit although I found it hard to keep a straight face and a laugh bobbed dangerously at the base of my throat.
While Shug, still grumbling to himself, mopped up outside the neuk door I had a wee shufty at my mail. To save the postie’s legs I’d an arrangement with’m for my mail to be dropped off in Shug’s Bum Boutique. This accommodation, of course, allowed me to boast the unique Glasgow postal district – WC1. There were only two items of mail for me this morning; a chrissy card and a business envelope with a LONDON postmark! The auld chest-walloper kicked off its klaxon and my nerves began to riot. Was this then THE MOMENT, the clap of thunder before luck’s lightning cleft my former self from top to toenails, heralding the new man?
No, it’s bad luck to anticipate events. Play it cool. Don’t let on you’re affected by it. Put the letter to one side, that’s the way. Yes, open this nice big xmas card your thoughtful and thoroughly delightful sister-in-law has thought fit to send. The card was from the Shermans right enough. You could tell by the faint tang of venom coming from it. Aye, Her Ladyship’s fair hand had penned this. Look at those twanging loops, the slightly crushed consonants, signs, I believe, of suppressed eroticism. MacDougall, slumbering peaceably on my thigh twitched. He seemed to think I was referring to Phyllis Sherman’s actual hand for sleepily, he says, ‘Let’s have it gloved in black translucent silk so that when it gently falls upon my inner thigh . . .’
Fucksake . . . what gives? ‘Don’t come the innocent with me,’ MacDougall warns. ‘I’ve got your number all right. This morning you had Becky McQuade on the bed, then, just for the heck of it, had second helpings on the table amongst the breakfast debris, your randy head rapping on a sauce bottle, your bum wag-wagging between her spread thighs as you took your timing from the Zombies’ ancient biscuit: ‘She’s Not There’, which, of course, she wasn’t. How could she be there when you weren’t even present yourself? Yeah, you were real gone, man, reported missing, a randy AWOL on a mind-fuck with Mrs Phyllis Sherman. Yeah, giving it to her strong on one of the back pews of the Bleaker Memorial, while she yelled: ‘Gun me Patton! Gun me . . .!’
What utter garbage! MacDougall needs seeing to, he really does. The christmas card itself has this coach laden with lardbuckets waving with festive bonhomie to an assortment of bedraggled peasantry, most of whom were up to their bucolic butts in roadside mud but still able to return the waves and smile their delight at God’s little manger pressy. Lots of robins too, the whole design neatly rounded off by the Sherman’s monickers appearing in copperplate writing, so much more with it than the bookie-pen scrawl I served on such fripperies.
Is that everything, then? Why no, here’s another letter I’ve just noticed. From the Smoke too. Shall I open it now? Oh, very well. Casually rending the envelope and frenziedly pluckin forth its contents, I smoothed out the single page letter with sweaty fingers. Ah, yes, just as I expected: it was a wistful reminder from a record club (a warp on your waxings!) with an enquiry regarding some Dylan discs I’d ordered while the balance of my mind had been disturbed. Their non-return seemed to indicate that I’d decided to keep the aforementioned discs. Would I, therefore, honour my part of the agreement by forwarding the now grossly-overdue remittance? Thanking you in anticipation and taking this opportunity to wish you the compliments of the season.
‘It ain’t me you’re looking for babe! It ain’t me you’re looking for.’
Anyone glancing into Shug’s neuk would’ve seen a stricken looking man (how manfully stiffened was his upper lip!) casually scribbling upon an envelope. ‘Building gone away: addressee demolished. Return to sender.’ Placing the aborted correspondence into an inner pocket for future mailing and still bravely masking his chagrin, he gives Shug’s electric fire a hard kick with the toe of his shoe, then taking up a newspaper limps painfully out to his favourite stall, number four.
Ensconced on one of Shug’s wally thrones I raked through the Daily Express. Of a nauseous world the inky vomit. Nothing in it about the death of a dosser in a city maternity hospital. They were still giving it big splashes for the spacemen. Lots of speculation about the DSM (Dark Side of the Moon). The consensus of scientific opinion is that it’ll be very dark, very quiet, and very far.
I don’t dig this space travel guff, the New Frontier hyperbole. It’s a pity we hadn’t developed a Time Machine technology. Even a very primitive one capable only of a couple of frog leaps into the past, a century or so would do. An interview could be set up with an old Sioux chieftain. He could be questioned about his attitude towards the expansion of the New Frontier. Did he not agree that the Conestoga Wagon was a worthy symbol of the civilising process? How exciting it must be for him, a semi-moronic savage who looked, by the way, with all those stupid feathers like a turkey with high blood-pressure. Yes, onward. Ever onward rolled the wagon trains, from sea to shining sea they came, dropping buffalo and Redskins, not to mention names like Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Out of the Conestogas fell the seedcrop of tomorrow’s greatness, frontier towns, schools, churches, jails, forts, hooch, brothels, syphilis, dysentery . . .
I suspect that o
ld Sioux chieftain, fetched out of time on the hook of devilish white technology wouldn’t say a word. For answer he’d merely point to the hectares of dust and scrubland the Washington Chiefs had given them with a grandiose flurry of speeches and lies set down by a buzzard’s feather tricked out in gold. The Red Man had long come to distrust the white noises that came from these fork-tongued fraudsters, especially the long words like Democracy, Freedom, Dignity. The one most to be feared in that hissing pot of lies was a peaceable-looking viper called Civilisation. From out of Eden they say it came, just as from the east rolled the unstoppable Conestogas.
(Strike up Stars and Stripes here please.) Yes, you riders of Apollo, you well know what immense odds are stacked against you for the camp-fires of your foulest foe, Ignorance, blaze on the star prairies of that still to be won Frontier we call space!
(Careful, Thomas, you’ll bust a snackpipe with all that straining!)
Ah, here we are. Poor wee Talky, the most important event in his life, namely his death, has through the machinations of the capitalist press been shunted onto a news branchline. His demise merits no more than a single sentence, an inky toeprint on the beach of history:
‘A man knocked down and fatally injured in Crown Street, Gorbals, Glasgow last night has been identified as Charles Sloan (62) of Eglinton Street, Glasgow C5.’
17
THE SALTY DOG Saloon was heaving. Harry trotted to’n fro, ducking the lusty calls for pints as if they were thrown knives. Milly continued to carry all before her, while Stirrat stuck up the stout with his usual gruff charm. Auld Fergie, who had the Gaelic and a paunch that piled on the counter, hummed a Teuchterish dirge from the corner of his mouth. An outburst of laughter suggested the presence of Freddy Green ben the Lounge. The Dog fondly enclosed us all, revelling in our masculine growl; it encircled us with varnished wood-panelling and cast benign winks from its gantry. At the till, Sad Sam Murney edged nearer and ever nearer to that glorious moment when he’d chance his first smile. The bog leaked a steady stream of punters and a darts match narrowed to single figures: the Salty Dog Saloon at lunchtime on a Saturday, but, alas, now drawing its last beery breaths. Soon nothing but dust and fallen ceiling plaster, gantry stripped of its bottles, a wreath of holes where the dartboard had hung, and a thin rat singing: ‘I’m just wild about Harry’ – Harry, himself, signing on at the buroo: ‘Sorry, there’s no demand for hump-backed barmen at the moment . . .’
‘D’you hear aboot Talky?’ I asked Paddy Cullen.
He nodded. ‘Aye, had an argument wae a 37.’
‘What time’d it happen?’
Paddy shrugged then made a beckoning gesture with his hands. ‘Hope tae fuck you’ve got the readies?’
I nodded, then taking the wad from my pocket passed it to him: this was one thing we never joked about. Quickly, he stashed it away. ‘Thank Christ,’ he muttered.
‘What’s that?’ Paddy bent his head closer to mine. ‘A carryoot? When?’
I tried to sketch in a few details of the night before but, as usual, it proved pointless: for Paddy, yesterday by now was just another crate of empties. I nailed a few time slats into the rickety fence that kept him from blundering off the planet but omitted to mention Becky McQuade or the fact that for the sordid needs of my libido I’d made off with a background and several biographical details not my own.
He squinted at the drained glass. ‘Must be a hole in this shagging thing.’
I took the hint and got a round in.
When I began to tell Paddy the laugh about Death dropping into Shug Wylie’s bog he seemed to only be half-listening. His whisky was over in one go and again he bad-eyed the glass as if it’d short-measured’m. The beef about his sister came up again. ‘See her, it’s like being tied to wan of they wee yappy terriers, “Yak, yak, yak”, night’n day. Nae kiddin, I’d be better ofPn a dosshouse. Every morning it’s war-bulletins – ham’n egg and pincer attacks.’ Drolly, he imitated his sister: ‘“Are you for another buttered hand-grenade, Patrick? Or maybe a wee daud of shrapnel on your toast?”’ I laughed, you just had to, but he didn’t join in. ‘I’ll be hung for her wan of these days, so I will.’
A shrew she might be but, nevertheless, Nora Cullen was the main prop that kept the roof from caving in on her alcoholic brother: remove her and those dark workings through which he fumbled from day to day looking for god knows what (do any of us?) would collapse.
‘Where’s that wee shit, Killoch?’ Paddy wanted to know as he glowered around him at the massed boozers as if they were part of a conspiracy to conceal the only man who could save’m from having to perform the matinee run at the Planet. He glanced speculatively at me but I moved quickly to nip hope in the bud. ‘Sorry, Paddy, no can do. Got something on this afternoon.’
After about half’n hour with no sign of Killoch, Paddy was forced to knuckle under. He trudged from the warmth and jollity of the Dog with all the enthusiasm of a man thrusting his plums into a fast-closing vice.
I took my pint for a wander into Commie Corner. And there they were, the same old mammoths with their redundant tusks still patiently waiting for the political polar caps to melt and to flood Europe with the warmth of socialist brotherhood, to fissure and finally sweep away the bergs of capitalism on which their titanic dreams had so often foundered. All the regular Moscow tuskers were there except, of course, Talky Sloan, whose absence in fact seemed to’ve given them a renewed zest, more vocal elbow room maybe.
Gunner Langford held the floor. In his hodge-podge of military clobber he looked like a drop-out from some rag-tag army. A vintage greatcoat swamped his meagre frame and on his glengarry a badge gleamed. His feet were thrust into a pair of well-bulled army boots. Langford was making a verbal meal out of some guy, a stranger who’d probably wandered down from the publess plains of Castlemilk. A right crabbit bastard was Langford. Once, he’d excluded me from a debate because I couldn’t tell’m where the US Seventh Fleet (or was it the Sixth?) was foregathered. ‘The planet’s supreme bastion of seapower and you haven’t a clue where it is!’ he’d raved. ‘Out! Go on – bugger off!’
The Castlemilk guy was now frazzling on the business-end of Langford’s dialectical blowtorch. ‘Nothing of the kind!’ snapped the pub’s supreme bastion of warlore. ‘Where’d you read such shite – in the bloody Hotspur?’ He leanded towards his victim who, with eyes rolling, was giving a good impression of a pug who’s just realised he’s climbed into a losing ring. ‘For your information, Mister, the Battle of Kasserine Pass began on Christmas Day, forty-two. And it wasn’t Rommel who got the ball rolling. How could it’ve been when he was tanking across Libya to get to Tunisia? I’ll tell you who it was – Arnim, that’s who – Amim of the German V Panzers.’
Stevie Urquhart sidled up to me. I shrugged his greasy paw from my shoulder. Urquhart, whose napper’d suddenly erupted through a bountiful pelt of coppery hair (how bloody vain he’d been about those locks!) to leave’m nothing but a pair of rust sideboards and a perpetual ‘Why me?’ expression, said, ‘That mate of yours is for the high-jump this time, eh? I hear the Committee’s talking sine die. Can count himself lucky he’s no on a charge.’
Again I shook off his clinging hand and backed away a pace. ‘What’re ye on aboot?’
His lips, forced by the sudden dismissal of his dome crop to assume the role of his prime physical asset – some blind tart once told him that he had Paul Newman’s smile – wriggled like a pair of ardent worms having a screw as he tried for that megastar’s wry grin but looked more like Cheetah having a shit: ‘Surely you’ve heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Aboot Paddy? Y’know, pissing all over the Club’s jukebox.’
I shook my head. ‘Sick ower it you mean.’
His nude head was waggling. ‘Naw, naw, Tam, he definitely pissed on the thing.’ In the passing he hooked in an impromptu witness, Sammy Willis. ‘Sam, tell Tam what his china did up the Club.’
Sammy, a witty wee punter, stepped back a bit to
mime the wagging of an invisible willie. ‘Gave Ol’ Blue Eyes his first number wan,’ he chortled. ‘A sight tae see, they tell me, Paddy staunin there wae something like a French loaf in his haun, men fainting and wimmin climbing ower tables for a better look. Best cabaret turn ever. Wish I’d been there.’
Sammy went on his way while Urquhart’s lips cooked up a greasy smirk. ‘What’d I tell ye?’ He nodded. ‘Aye, your pal might be hung like a stallion’ – his hand rose to tap his bleak skull – ‘but there’s nothing but donkey-droppings up here.’ That creepy mitt of his kept tethering itself to me; it was like talking to an animated cobweb. ‘He says he thought he was in the lavvy and mistook the jukebox for the weighing machine. Some excuse, eh? Committee’ll jump all over him. His feet’ll no touch – telling ye.’
I shrugged my shoulders. Aye, it seemed the Social Club was going to lose one of its outstanding members. ‘By the way Tam,’ Urquhart was now saying, ‘get your tank on Flying Fox in the three-thirty the day. A skoosh case.’ He rejoined Lapsely and McPake, his drinking pals, and soon had both glimmerbrains in stitches at the things his versatile lips could come out with. I’d meant to get the SP on Urquhart’s tip but it didn’t really matter since any nag he recommended was bound to be a surefire binger. Well, at least he’d shortened the field. I borrowed the Express Racing Section from Mooney who, having apparently found the chasing of hairs to be a thirst-making business, had dropped in for a wetner. A barney had broken out between two men, both of them demolishers, who’d been christened ‘Hammer’n Tongs’ by Freddy Green. Always needling, ever ready to knock lumps out of each other, neither, as far as I knew, had so much as struck a blow in earnest yet. ‘Right,’ said the one called Hammer, ‘ootside and we’ll settle it!’
‘What’s keeping you, then?’ Tongs asked. He’d already pushed the door wide to admit a snowy blast. Both men stormed out and the door swung shut at their backs. It was proof of how routine their phoney jousting had become that nobody stirred a leg to go out with them to spectate. ‘They’ll be chipping snawbaws at each other,’ some wag shouted and there were laughs all round.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 14
