Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  What I’d written was a simple tale about a guy called Webster, based loosely on Da Clay though I’m bound to admit that his rumbustious character failed to make the journey intact between penpoint and paper. It deals with the last few years of his life when a tragedy befell him that transformed his existence – he fathered a monster, a hydrocephalic babe who was destined to die before her second birthday. His partner, the Black Widow of real life, Mrs Cavendish (in the novel she’s Amy Struthers) cuts and runs, but Webster, knowing full well that his daughter’s life will be both harrowing and brief, nevertheless chooses to dedicate himself to her care. He gives up boozing and gambling, finds work in order to pay for her medical fees. Brian, his legitimate son, by whom a part of the novel is narrated, expresses his puzzlement and his hurt over his father’s apparent disinterest in him. How could it be that the shallow Webster had after all profounder depths to him, depths he was only willing to plumb for Brian’s blighted half-sister? Why was it that all his father had to offer him was ‘the bleak sight of his retreating back . . .?’

  Billy had asked a question.

  ‘Sorry, you were saying?’

  ‘Your book – what was it about, then?’

  I noted the posthumous phrasing of his enquiry. ‘A lavvy attendant,’ I said.

  There was a whirr of surprise in his grey, pleated throat, ‘A lavvy attendant?’

  ‘There’re still some around.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s not very often that you read about them, y’know, in books.’

  ‘It’s a whodunnit,’ I blandly told’m. ‘A sort of Sweeney Todd thing. Clients, usually rich wans, sit down on bog number two then vanish through a trapdoor.’

  Maybe it was the wine but Billy’s eyes had taken on a glassy look. He fiddled some baccy into his pipe bowl. ‘Unusual, right enough. And have you a publisher for it?’

  I shrugged. ‘Things are a wee bit bogged doon at the moment.’

  With his pipe going to his satisfaction, smoke squirting from the corner of his mouth, his lips making rapid putt-putting noises, Billy became at ease again. ‘Aye, Tommy,’ he assured me, ‘it’s a tough auld life right enough. If you don’t give, you don’t get.’ His glance returned to the wally dug – it was proving to be a useful prop. ‘What stands still gathers dust, there’s a fact. My auld faither (God rest’m) used to say: “He who hesitates gets bossed”. Always remembered that.’

  I loosened the third and final button.

  In comparison to this crap, the blizzard raging outside had become immensely seductive. Uncle Billy continued to lumber through the script Ma Carlyle had obviously written and produced for this occasion. ‘I know you’ll agree that it’s the young ones we’ve got to think about. There’s your Rhona wae a bairn on the road, I mean, rich or poor, we all start out in a single-end, if you get my meaning; it’s what comes after that counts, eh?’ I raised my hand to my shirt collar; his eyes followed the movement then visibly widened as they beheld the unbelievable. He looked quite overcome, apoplectic as they used to say in Victorian novels. Hastily, the telly hid away its swimming-pool nymphs, replacing them with an ad for bleach that seemed potent enough to liquify granite. ‘Tommy,’ Billy said in a strangling voice, ‘what in the name’s that you’ve round your neck?’ By the sound of his voice you would’ve thought he’d swallowed a couple of gallons of the super bleach.

  Hamming puzzlement, I casually flipped out the crucifix, ‘This, you mean?’

  He cringed from the sight of it with all the comic revulsion of a Hollywood Satanist. ‘And . . . and what would you be doing with the like of that on ye?’

  ‘It’s a crucifix.’

  ‘Aye, fine well I know that.’ His struggle to find words would’ve made even the sloppiest of directors frown. Hope flared anew in his troubled eyes. ‘It’s one of they hippie ornaments, is that it?’

  I tucked the crucifix back inside my shirt. ‘It’s real enough.’

  ‘C’mon Tommy, what are you playing at? Take off that Vatican brooch. Imagine a good Proddy like yourself – you’re having me on. It’s a joke, right?’

  Solemnly, I shook my head.

  From the strangling roots of Uncle Billy’s bigotry there arose a great orange lily of wisdom. ‘Tommy, you can’t cure popery with penicillin. It spreads, son. Aye, they bead-rattlers make sure of that.’

  Suppressing a grin at the thought of Billy here sneaking past chapels wearing a smog-mask, I got to my feet. ‘I’ll have to split.’

  Looking like a guy who’s just won a Firhill season ticket, the Banana Baron, glowering darkly from his scorched fireside throne, gave tongue to a timely warning: ‘You can’t turn your coat without showing the seams, Tommy.’

  Aye, nor could you walk through a blizzard and not get your jacket soaked. I stuck it on, tholing the arctic hug of the thing as one might endure the ghostly embrace of a departed loved one. Up’n heaven, Ma Clay popped her head from a daffodil-yellow window and chirped: ‘First the sneezies, next the wheezies, then the De’il does as he pleases!’ The window tittered shut. Meanwhile Mrs Clay’s anti-bellum offspring was zipping himself into an obsolete warsuit, having sold himself, as usual, for short-time gains – a mercenary of the passing moment.

  ‘I’ll have to chat to Father Cullen about it,’ I promised.

  Billy rose from the armchair. ‘Who’s this Father Cullen, then?’

  ‘I’m attending his pre-convert classes.’

  The image of Paddy Cullen got up in a reversed collar and hassock – no, not hassock, that’s a cushion, I think – cassock, that’s what I’m after. Aye, Cullen in a cassock and zonked out in the Confessional, having stuck away a flagon or so of communion wine, the thought of this put a severe tax on my laugh-restrainers.

  ‘I hear you’re an atheist, anyway?’ Billy said huffily.

  I shrugged. ‘You shouldnae believe everything you hear on the Carlyle tom-toms.’

  Eastern mysticism, that’s what I’d chucked, being taken to the spiritual cleaners by saintly curry-bashers and Tibetan spivs. The yogi-bogi men as well, with their asanas that drove western man bananas – circus tricks and claptrap, it amounted to nothing more. Koans and cons, and meditation is the first symptom of narcissism. Take a gander at those psychic fat cats who preach poverty and practice wealth. Lazy bastards, every last one of them. Be sure that when shit wants shifting they’ll be on hand to flog you the bucket’n spades. Sacred India my ass! I tell you, there’re more ramps, cons and stings going down in your average ashram than there are at the Fiddler’s Ball.

  I turned up my jacket collar. ‘Be seeing you,’ I mumbled.

  He really did look put out. ‘I don’t suppose Rhona knows about this?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Aye, well, you’d best be keeping it that way. It’d be bad for her, bad for the . . . the . . .’

  ‘Baby?’

  He nodded. ‘That goes without saying. A bad deal all round. I hope you’re ower this daftness afore she’s by.’

  He showed me out, anxious now, it seemed, to be shot of me. I stepped out onto the dismal landing. Snow sluiced through a broken pane on the half-landing and above us a gas-mantle flung a shivery light upon the name-infested walls. ‘I’ll see Mr Mellish on Monday,’ Billy said and I was pleased by his downbeat tone. ‘He’ll maybe drop you a line for the interview. Oh, and Tommy,’ he added with sledgehammer subtlety, ‘I’d keep my shirt buttoned if I was you – Mr Mellish is a heid-bummer’n the Masons!’

  Mr Mellish, your bigotry’s hellish!

  I made my way down slanting, snow-leprous streets to my bus-stop. A wayside church billposter reminded me that JESUS SAVES! I fell in line with that all right. Surely the distribution of bananas was a minor item in his Dad’s agenda. As it happened, Donald Strang sent me a telegram. It was delivered by a spiritual hobo, one of those pamphlet machines which, operated by a tiny battery of faith, give service for years. The tract was as green and as moist as a lettuce leaf with tiny caterpillars of wisdom wriggling whitely all ov
er it. Strang, in his inimitable style, presented the rumour that the universe was more or less jiggered. Very soon now, perhaps on a run-of-the-mill Saturday like this one, the cosmic ringmaster would heave a disappointed sigh then give the word for the Big Top to be struck; the sustaining pillar of creation would be removed and the spangled canvas of the heavens would flop into chaos. For is it not said in the Book of Zephaniah that ‘the great day of the Lord is near’? And what a day was being laid on, an Armageddon spectacular. Nothing was to be spared: ‘Clouds of thick darkness’; ‘Trouble and distress’ by the bushel; they were really digging deep into the human misery-bag for this one. The frogs, locusts, and pestilential what-nots the ancient Egyptians got plagued with for coming-the-turtle over exit visas for their Hebrew tribes was but a series of mild irritants compared to the woe and desolation already in the mail to us. Our planet, need it be said, is in a very bad way. The real mystery is how human hope came to flower in its strangling clays, how myths of continuance beyond the final heartbeat came to germinate in a rind of corpses a half a mile thick. There’s nothing to be depended upon, nowt at all. From the first yell life has us on the ropes and there’s no trick, no dirty tactic that pugilist won’t resort to, from kidney-punching to ear-biting, to stretch you out at his feet. Only one fact is certain in this uneven contest – the fight’s fixed: the Ref has your card marked, even before you’ve laced on your gloves. When you dive – as dive you must – all you can do is to try’n make it convincing, to go down with some style.

  As for yon longbeard, Zephaniah, he, like Steve Urquhart, couldn’t have predicted an outbreak of shit in an exploding latrine. Proof of this was blazing across the screen of a TV set in a store window: Caesar’s Revenge, my selection, had obliged at the sparkling odds of 10–1!

  Roll on Damnation.

  19

  IT TURNED OUT that Zephaniah, professional whinger (grouses by arrangement) had gotten it completely wrong, he’d been wildly OVER-optimistic!

  As I returned to the Scabby – my body by bus; my mind on the back of a winged Irish colt – I savoured the treat still to come, when old Mooney would make with the bread, and my mitt would close around fifty-odd scoobies. Meanwhile, over and over, I ran that reel which depicted Dan McGarvie, turf accountant, dishing out the dosh, a grudging hand-thump to each departing fiver.

  But Joe Fiducci soon brought me down to earth, aye, he clipped Pegasus’s wings all right.

  ‘Gone?’ I echoed. ‘What d’you mean – gone?’

  Joe, who was trimming the hair of an albino kid (odd to see those white locks tumble from such a young head), wagged his own grizzled thatch. ‘He go to the bookie; he come back; he think maybe he have the flu; he put on his coat then – arrividerci!’

  The child’s mother sat polishing the lenses of her son’s specs with a hankie. She wore a shabby fur-coat, a flank musquash, maybe. Leaning forward, she whispered an instruction to Joe. He nodded. ‘Okay, I do that . . .’ The boy, sitting on the wooden flap that’d been laid across the arms of Granda Gibson’s chair, closed his pinkish eyes as if it was hard for’m to watch his hair snowing onto his shoulders then dropping to the chequered floor where the grey clippings of old men lay.

  Clippings of another kind were being swept up by Barrel Broon, McGarvie’s obese boardmaker. Barrel brushed betting copies – loser’s stuff – ahead of him like a wedge of soiled snow. From the blower in the corner a gritty voice mouthed football results. The Pools Panel had sat today. Balding soccer stars of yesteryear had foregathered at the Hotel Olympus to examine the entrails of a freshly-shot spectator. Nice number, sitting there in a cosy room, a brandy handy, and maybe one of Cuba’s costliest reeking in your word-hole. Very tasty. It was a much better deal than the punters who’d shivered it out in this dump had got. There’d been nothing make-believe about their task for they played the reality game: get it right first time pal, or you’re broom fodder!

  McGarvie, looking like an albino himself with his pale hair lying on his narrow skull, stared at me through the steel-mesh screen of his skinny payout window. McGarvie didn’t dig me, an aversion which was the result of my old man (nom-de-plume ‘Shiny Shoes’) clinching the padlock on McGarvie’s brother Jake’s turf parlour with a fantastically-priced Yankee bet. Although the shop’s ‘limits rule’ was triggered it’d still been a hefty chunk of loot Da Clay had strolled off with. Jake had decked it with a heart-attack shortly afterwards and had lit out for wherever bookies head for when time’s no-limit wager finally comes up.

  Aye, punishment for the wins of the father shall be visited upon succeeding generations right enough.

  When I put it to McGarvie that Old Mooney might’ve been lucky at the Irish meeting, he got cagey. ‘Aye, he could’ve won a poke of tanners. So what?’ His shoulders twitched in response to my next question: ‘A ten-to-wan-shot? Aye, maybe.’ Seeing no profit in me he was already turning away. I tried again, but this time the verbal response was sourer: ‘Fuckall to do with you what he won!’ He rid himself of the fag-end that’d crept to within millimetres of his mouth, crushing it to a black dot in an ashtray. Period. End of conversation.

  I’d two choices, no, three; (i) I could lie in wait for the albino kid’s maw and blag her fur-coat; (ii) make a tour of the Oatlands pubs where Mooney did his Saturday night boozing; (iii) return to my abode, have some nosh, a change of footwear, then maybe saw-the-log for a bit before my visit to Rhona. I opted for the latter and stopped by at my local dairy for some breakfast tack. It was to be hoped – bloody well expected! – that Mooney would drop by the Dog this evening with my winnings. The possibility nagged at me that he hadn’t laid the bet, but had stuck my fiver in his sky-rocket. Maybe he did have the flu. It could be that he’d had a slice of the action himself. I trudged homewards through the snow and the more I thought about Mooney drinking around with my crackle in his pooches the deeper were the footprints I left behind me.

  Like a ghost from the past (do any of them come from the future? There’s a thought!) Granny Ferguson disguised as a pile of woollen cardigans, stood guard at our closemouth. Apart from the fact that she’d had the wacky notion to apply lipstick to her mouth rims – missing by a good half inch or so – she wore a sartorial novelty in the shape of a mink-furred Cossack hat. This headgear had been skewered by a massive hatpin which from its angle of entry gave the impression it had been rammed clean through her skull. Not that this was anything to get alarmed about – there wasn’t much in there to damage.

  As I approached the warpainted crone she was uttering her battlecry of old: ‘I’ll have the polis on ye so I will. Aye, don’t you worry aboot that. They’re coming . . . they’re coming. I’ve got your names.’ And so she had, well most of them: Rudge, Lyons, Green, McMahon, Milligan, yours truly, of course, the rotten apple of her eye. Naturally it was to be me who fulfilled her prophecy of the outcome of our street fitba – I broke her window, knocked out a complete pane.

  There’d be no snow, no freezing winds whipping across the landscape she was peering out at; more than likely her old mind was locked into a summer day, back in the forties maybe, when life, raw and vital, had rampaged in the Scabby; disease too, of course, and plenty of deaths but always in attendance was that overwhelming sense of gallus being, especially so in childhood when there hadn’t been the time to get all the things you wanted to do done. Probably those raggedy-arsed kids, the bane of her life, jiggling a tennis ball out there on the chalk-scrawled street, were more real to her at this moment than was the spectral creature who now stepped on out of the winter-to-come and placed his icy hand upon her.

  ‘Is there something up, Mrs Ferguson?’

  The summer blinked out in her mind. ‘It’s you, is it?’ She shook off my hand. ‘Ready to muck up the close wae they Parish boots of yours. Aye, gie me your muck, that’s what tae dae!’

  In fact, the close hadn’t seen either cloth or mop since Rhona had gone into hospital. It was littered with trash blown in from the backcourt and demolition stour clung
thickly to the walls. I tried to coax the old woman into her apartment but she was having none of it. ‘C’mon, Mrs Ferguson, you’ll catch your death oot here. Tell you what, you go in by and I’ll bring you doon a nice bowl of broth. Okay?’

  No, it wasn’t ‘okay’. As far as she was concerned nothing about me would ever be okay. I belonged in a wrecker’s yard for I was an expert at breaking things; plant pots, window-panes, and hearts too maybe, nothing fragile was safe in my presence. To accept food from my hands was to invite death by poisoning. ‘You’ll roast in Hell for what you’ve done!’ she suddenly screeched. ‘Aye, and a lot sooner than you think.’

  It spooked me a bit, the old dame’s forecast, as it tailed me up the trample-delved stairs. She was still shouting as I reached my own landing.

  In my living-room I tip-toed around, dousing decibels wherever I could so’s not to rouse Wattie Mullens from his wine stupor and have him legging down to see what was for grabs. Cannily, I took a pot from the press under the sink and emptied the gunk which its label claimed to be ‘Scotch Broth’ into it. While I waited for the stuff to divide, multiply or whatever it did, I got the fire going with a splash or two of paraffin on the hot cinders.

  With the bowl of broth steaming in my hand I tried one last series of knocks on Granny Ferguson’s door, but she was not for opening it. The dotty witch, it seemed would have no truck with the Borgia Meals-on-Wheels Service. Instead she seemed content to gab to her household spooks; I could even hear her laughing at some posthumous crack. Mission abandoned. I was about to head up the stairs when Cyclops arrived. The one-eyed moggy looked wabbit from trekking snowed-up pavements. ‘You’ve knocked it off, son,’ I said and lowered the bowl to the close’s gritty floor. The furry ingrate sniffed at what was on offer then took off with a huffy miaow. ‘You’ll lick where that lay tomorrow,’ scolded, using an expression Ma Clay used to dish out at the table when I’d taken it up my humph not to dine on her hamely fare. Dead parky it felt on those stairs. On my way up them I took swig after swig from the bowl and had emptied it by the time I gained my own landing. ‘All quiet on the festering front!’ as Da Clay put it, which was just the way I liked it.