Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  The landing, lit by a poisonous-looking gas-mantle, would’ve been just the job for a Beckett play: main prop – a bucketful of ashes, tea leaves, vegetable peelings (played, perhaps by Nicol Williamson) stands on the gritty concrete, midstage; the landing has three doors, two of which – the left-hand and the central one, create the impression that they’ve been copiously vomited upon, then clear-varnished; the remaining door, on the right-hand side is painted a violent ox-blood colour, and has a terrazzo doorstep – a symbol of tenement affluence in the early fifties. This door is half-open and from within the flat can be heard the strains of C & W music, in this instance, Johnny Cash singing ‘Orange Blossom Special’. Clay approaches the door and stands hesitantly before it. He looks dishevelled, his jacket splotched with the damp imprints of effectively-aimed snowballs. He pushes his longish hair from his brow then draws the paper-wrapped half-bottle from his pocket. He knocks on the door . . .

  I liked the music, but not the vibes, coming from the flat. The nameplate said Pike, a not over-friendly handle but, come to think of it, I’d once known this guy on the railway, name of Broozer, who’d turned out to be a fairy. Nobody seemed to hear my knocks so I knuckled the door a bit harder. Johnny Cash had started on ‘The Long Black Veil’ which was a shade on the morbid side for my taste but at least it was quieter. Still no reaction to my knockings. No Ciggy McQueen, no Benny Spencer rushing out to greet me, to exclaim with hearty shoulder slaps: ‘Tam Clay – you poxy midden! How goes it? Long time, no see . . .’

  I heard the stairhead bog being flushed then the sounds of its bolt getting waggled free. From the sighs and groans of him, I figured that no fit guy full of the joys of life was about to breeze into view. And I was proved right: the ruins of what must’ve been a strapping man in his prime limped onto the landing. His duds were all over the place, the elasticated waistband of his drawers curled over his unbelted trousers, his fly-zip was down, and his stained grey cardigan was buttoned out of sequence. From his chest, as if it housed antiquated machinery, came sinister crepitations, a sort of death-rattle rehearsal. Dead, but lacking the sense to lie down. How wrong can you get? The greybeard proved to be a spunky old sod. He came closer and I got a whiff of him, a real nose-wrinkler, strong on piss, gumrot, and unwashed oxters. ‘Is that the bells already?’ he wheezed and reached out a mucky claw to touch the half-bottle. ‘Don’t even mind of Christmas going by.’ I drew the bottle away from his covetous attempts to take hold of it. ‘Whaur’s your lump of coal?’ he now enquired. Just in time he caught his putrid pants as they were about to plunge anklewards. He hauled them up with his right hand while with his other one he waved me into the flat. The lobby was in darkness except for a wedge of light thrown by a half-open door. On a seedy carpet a grey cat drifted like a patch of moving fog. ‘She walks the night in a long dark veil . . .’ Johnny Cash was singing behind a closed door. From the room within I could also hear the sounds of voices and laughter.

  The greybeard signalled for me to follow him to the half-opened door of a room which housed either a TV set or a radio going full blast, ‘C’mon intae ma nest and see if you can fix me a better picture.’ I followed him into a crypt of a place, so cold it would’ve made a corpse shudder. And the stink! A real skunkbox it was. The room’s wallpaper was being devoured by a roving fungus and a chunk of ceiling plaster near the curtained window had collapsed to expose the lathes. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit had a rat stuck its head through that hole and waved a white flag at us. On a bulky dressing-table, dimly duplicating themselves in a cracked and dusty mirror, were piles of paperback Westerns and boxing mags. The telly was on a low bedside table surrounded by enough pillboxes and medicine bottles to cure the sick of Bombay. The stark iron bed on which several heavy coats served as additional blankets looked as if it’d been party to a lot of dying. The old man shucked his slippers then with an assortment of creaking noises – either the bed or his skeleton was coming apart – he got under the coats and covers. I nodded towards the gasfire in the corner, a toothless-looking specimen due to several of its chalks being missing. ‘You’d be better wae that on, auld yin.’

  He shook his head. ‘They’ll no let me, son.’ His puny shoulders trembled. ‘Cauld enough tae kill a husky so it is – and they’ll no let me.’ He waved an almost transparent hand towards the flickering TV set, ‘C’mon, then, do your stuff!’

  I began to jiggle with the wire hoop aerial that stood on top of the telly. The set was so ancient it was miracle enough that it was generating wobbly images of a sort of electronic limboland in which faces, clouds, and smoke writhed in spasm after spasm across its stourie screen. An old tatty yesterday, all blotched skies and speckled motion, jittered into view. Writhing clumps of shadow divided then divided again into the darting tadpoles that become people. A king, or one of those feather-brained ambassadors who crowed and preened themselves on the dungheap of a pre-war Europe, was to be seen at a racetrack surrounded by sycophants. A jockey, so tiny he looked like a silk-clad puppet, had his elfin hand pumped by the visiting dignitary. The camera lied, blatantly burlesquing motion, giving such a froth of speed to each event that it was small wonder that Europe itself was dashed to pieces the very same year. I shifted the aerial. A beard sprang from nowhere onto the VIP’s face and he developed a sudden limp. An obese doll with medals as large as lollipops on its chest shot from a model train. Traffic spluttered around. A carpet unrolled its tongue. The ambassador strutted through the murk to disarm a smiling traitor with a handshake, then both of them popped into a cavernous car. Black flowerings of people on the wet streets . . .

  ‘That’s a loada shite,’ said the greybeard.

  I thumbed a button. Ice-skating; not a bad picture. ‘That’ll dae me,’ said the auld yin with a lecherous grin. ‘I like seein their wee knickers.’

  He raised two nicotine-fouled fingers to his lips and mimed a smoking motion. ‘Give’s a gasper, son.’ I held out my pack and the fly old bugger grabbed three ciggies from it. ‘Seeing’s I missed Christmas, eh?’ He winked then made with a grin that starkly exposed his beige gums. ‘And while you’re aboot it,’ he added, ‘a couple of strikers, as well.’ From the box he clawed about six or seven matches and stuffed them into his cardigan pocket. Keen to get away from the stink of the place, I moved towards the door. ‘Mind, noo,’ he said and looked as happy as a pig in shit, ‘if you’ve the mind to first fit me, you know where I bide.’ He did something really loopy now: raising his finger to tap his temple he then pointed with it to the wall through which music faintly leaked. His meaning was evident – clearly he considered the shindiggers next door to be prime candidates for Rubberland. I left him drooling over the gyrations of a thick-thighed ice-maiden.

  In the lobby the grey cat, having decided to gatecrash the party, lined itself up alongside me as I paused for a moment to make myself presentable. I hand-skiffed a smudge of whitewash from the sleeve of my jacket, finger-combed my damp hair, then with the half-bottle held palm-upwards in a manner I hoped would look indicative of friendship and generosity, I opened the door and with a slightly overdone bacchanal swagger, breezed into the party.

  23

  THERE WAS A party in that room all right; the only trouble was that it looked like a lynching party. It consisted of four men in shirt sleeves who were playing at cards in such an up-pouring of smoke you would’ve thought that their table was on fire. A dog was present, too – living proof that the wild wolf was anything but extinct in Scotland. On initial impact the room looked like an ongoing collison between a brewer’s truck and a secondhand furniture van. Beercans and bottles were everywhere – on the drinks cabinet, around the Dansette record player, amongst the xmas cards that lined the mantelpiece, on the dresser, where for the second time that day I saw King Billy mounted on his Boyne beast, not a picture this time, but a small porcelain statuette. More beercans crowded the table, they stood amidst the choked ashtrays, cig packs, and the tinfoil containers carry-out snacks had been eaten from. Then th
ere were the glasses, some empty, some half-full, not forgetting the money – more bread than I’d seen this side of a bank vault.

  I don’t have the maths for it, but take my word, Time’s lethal trot can be slowed, maybe even stopped. For that’s what happened when I stepped into that room – Time was syphoned from it, motion too. Like a waxwork tableau depicting variations on a theme of evil, the gambling quartet sat transfixed around the table. One of them, an immense man wearing a dark blue shirt bestrewn with stars, had been frozen mid-deal, this arrested moment allowing me, almost at leisure, to see how small and dainty the cardpack was made to look in his shovel-like hands. Beside him, with a neb on’m like a shoehorn, a man sat motionless in the act of counting a wad of dough; another card player had been petrified as he’d reached for his lighter; the remaining guy had his forefinger raised in a hectoring manner which suggested he’d been making some point with considerable intent before my interruption of it. As for myself, although adrenalin washed through my system, pounding glands and yelling RUN! I just stood there as fartless as those Pompeian punters had been when Vesuvius greeted them by doffing his hat. The grey moggie, of course, had skedaddled via the door and could be heard pelting to safety along the lobby carpet. To the accompaniment of a low rumbling noise from the cur’s throat, it was left to the giant with the shirt-of-many-planets to break the spell by rising (it seemed he’d never stop getting up) to his feet and lumbering towards me. This was the signal for everything to unfreeze again, my asshole especially, as the dog dashed to within knee-cropping distance. But this was only a half-started motion, Time being played at the wrong speed, the very opposite, in fact to the auld guy’s telly. For now events crawled frame by slow frame into existence. ‘It aint me, babe, it aint me you’re lookin for, babe . . .’ Cash was growling in a wound-down voice that seemed to be coming from his boots. An instruction crawled from Starshirt’s mouth and the Alsatian dog’s intention of snacking on one of my kneecaps was stymied. It stopped, backed away a pace, and although it was still horripilating with malice it sheathed its thwarted fangs. Another instruction sent the animal loping past me to take up guard duty by the door. The dog’s master, his flabby pecs lobbing the stars around, tramped in my direction. He stood around six-four although if he claimed seven foot I wasn’t about to dispute it. So fiercely cropped was his hair that it dappled his skull like iron filings – you could’ve sharpened a ploughshare on a dome like that. All in all, his gudgeon-like mouth, and a sort of black energy flickering around his eyes, had the effect of making a brontosaurus look cuddly by comparison. He stopped within about a foot of me, then, slowly tilting his enormous torso, he brought his face close to mine, rocking me with his tartan breath. He asked two very basic questions: ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ and, ‘How d’you get in here?’

  It’s difficult to explain to a giant that you’ve been duped by a dwarf. The best thing is to stick to the basic facts, the most basic of these being that while in search of a party you’d been stupid enough to wander into the wrong pad. Apologies were, naturally, called for and these I spouted in abundance with what, I hoped, was just the right mixture of humour, self-denigration, and contrition. A bad mistake to make. Jings, aye. The auld man’d let me in. He’d been doon at the lavvy, you see. Asked me in to fix his telly. No way would I’ve come in otherwise. No siree. Definitely not. I must’ve got the wrong close number. Easily done, what with the kiddiewinks having some innocent fun by battering me with snowballs and stanklids. Sorry, sorry, aye, really sorry, big man. Aye, and when I laid my hands on that wee bastard, Horace, he’d be a whole lot sorrier. He’d obviously set me up – gone through the close’s backdoor and got off his mark. The mystery cab tour had been his way of rooking me. Now I thought about it, didn’t the wee shitpot actually live up in the Possil? He’d decided, it seemed, to make me pay for those past insults, had been nursing a long-held grudge. And now this, his pièce de resistance, getting me lumbered with what looked like a quartet of Possil’s choicest psychopaths.

  I could be wrong, though. It was possible that Horace’d been devoured boots to wig by Blightfang, here, the moment he’d planted his size threes on the lobby carpet. For all I knew, he could be hanging like a skinned weasel in the scullery from a meathook. The old nutter in the bedroom might at this very moment be spooning, as a treat, Le Cerveaux de Horace onto the moggie’s food-dish. No such luck! Horace was off and running, legging it through a snowy maze of backcourts and sidestreets with the bulk of my carry-out clutched to’m, chirrupping homewards to the security of the boulder beneath which he lived out his plague-ridden existence.

  The Sky-at-Night was laughing. Was this a hopeful sign? Probably not – Peter Manuel had laughed a lot, hadn’t he? Half-turning to the trio at the table he said: ‘Hey boys, get a load of this: see this punter, here, you know what? – he’s lost a gay’n hearty! What’s your name, son? Tommy, eh?’ He turned to the gamblers again. ‘C’mon, where’s your manners? I said, Tommy here’s mislaid a party.’ From the trio there arose in unison a mock ‘Awwwwh.’ The starry giant nodded. ‘That’s more like it. It’s only a wee hale’n hearty but, Frankie, see if maybe it’s fell doon the back of that table.’ Frankie, an evil-looking sod with a scaly brow and a dot moustache actually went to the bother of physically checking before he dourly shook his head. ‘Nothin here, Malky.’ The big man shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s in wan of they pockets, Bilko’.

  Bilko, wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat began to pat his various pockets. He was a burly man with black hair sprouting extravagantly from everywhere but his head; it coated his throat’n chest, his arms, and the back of his hands, making him look like a bald panda. But the eyes behind the chunky glasses were as soulless as those of the shark I’d seen only yesterday – it seemed centuries ago – on the TV set back home. Bilko tapped one of the waistcoat’s upper pockets. ‘Eff all,’ he said, then, suddenly, he whipped from the remaining pocket a small, square pack which he brandished aloft. ‘Whadye know – eff-ell this time!’

  They all fell about laughing. The stars on Malky’s shirt heaved in chaos while the three men at the table collectively cracked up. I figured it might stand me in their favour if I weighed in with a few titters of my own. When the cackling had ran its course the man with the shoehorn sneezer – his pinky had resumed patrol of his flattened left nostril – was addressed by Malky. ‘Anything doing up the auld trumpet, Cadge? Naw? I thought maybe we’d knocked it off there.’ Malky turned to me. ‘You’re out of luck, son – nae party here.’

  I was nearly daft enough to thank’m for trying. ‘I’d best split then,’ I said. ‘Sorry bout the mix-up.’

  He nodded while the others drank their drinks, smoked their fags, watched. I took a couple of backward steps. A throaty growl from the dog made me pause.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ Malky said.

  ‘Ta ta,’ Cadge said with a smirk.

  ‘D-d’you think you could call your dog off?’ I asked.

  ‘Call it Off?’ He shook his head. ‘Naw, naw, I think it’s got used to Shane’.

  A cue for more laughs.

  ‘Cadge,’ Malky said, ‘away’n see if faither’s okay.’ Cadge rose and passed us both. The dog gave a sharp bark but was quickly silenced by its master. The door squealed open as Cadge headed for the auld yin’s room. Johnny Cash was droning about a lifer who kept staring at his prison’s walls and of how he hoped one day to be up and over it. I was in a similar fix myself, although my problem concerned not wall-hopping but wolf-vaulting. The solution lay literally close to hand – the whisky bottle. All that was needed was a quick hip-swivel, arm up fast, bottle down even faster, and – splatt – Shane’s brains everywhere. But my hips remained unswivelled. If wrestling with a wolf wasn’t on then neither was Pike-grappling. He pointed to one of the battered armchairs that flanked the fireplace. ‘Park yersel.’ When I showed reluctance his request switched to command: ‘Sit on your best features – there!’

  I sat.

  Cadge returned
and once Shane had resumed his Cerberus role he grunted that the old man was okay then resumed his seat at the table. Pike dumped himself in the armchair opposite mine. I made a point of not glancing too often at the table for there was a hellish amount of bread on it, maybe too much to be legal. It was to be hoped that I hadn’t interrupted them as they were divvying up the proceeds from a blag – if so, then I could expect to be divvied up myself. No, more likely all that table lettuce was made up from the clippings from gamblers who’d got busted and had left. Surely all the empty booze bottles and cans couldn’t be down to just this foursome; they’d be paralytic by now. Pike was lighting a cheroot. When he got the thing going he resumed staring at me. I began to realise how Fay Wray must’ve felt when King Kong was running his inflamed peepers over her. He turned to the table. ‘I’ll drop oot for a bit,’ he said to Bilko who was restlessly boxing a card deck. ‘Give youse a chance.’ His gaze swivelled back to my face and the cheroot tip flared as he took a drag.

  ‘What’s your line of toil, son?’

  A nice friendly question the brontosaurus was asking. Good. We’re going to have a wee pally blether about this’n that while his chums, up to their elbows in loot, slugged their booze and made gamblers’ wisecracks. Maybe, before we got too settled I could take Shane for a pee-pee – there was a good-going bonfire out there I could sling the bastard into. Pike grinned when I told’m my occupation. Aye, that’s right, a humble nana-packer. (The more I tried on this particular hairshirt the better I’d be able to endure it should the worst come to the worst and I was forced to take the bloody job.) The cards trio were making animal noises. Cadge, in particular was doing a witty impression of an orangutan, a a real belly-heaver, it was. Weren’t we all having a real wacky time!