She took one of her filter tips from her tortoiseshell case and lit it with sharp, jerky movements. Smoke twisted from her pale lips like ectoplasm. Hadn’t a ghost of a chance my story by the look of it. I was right. ‘D’you really expect’m to swallow that rigmarole?’ An impatient toss of her head during which the haircastle didn’t even sway but remained rock solid. ‘This is John McQuade we’re talking about – the worst bugger this side of Hell. And even if he did buy it – this old bat you’re on about, she’ll deny everything.’
I shook my head. ‘Her skylight’s bust, I told you.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t know’m – a right jealous ratbag.’
‘So he’d come to Granny Ferguson’s tae check your story oot?’ She nodded, but dubiously. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘So, I’ll give you the lowdown of her living-room, where the furniture’s placed, what kind of pictures she has on the walls, ornaments and stuff to be found on the mantelpiece and around the place, wallpaper, that kind of thing. Oh, and while we’re aboot it – when you came across Granny she was wearing a mink-furred Cossack hat. Got it? Aye, it might sound daft but –’
‘It all sounds daft if you ask me’.
I rose and crossed to the table.
‘You somewhere to go?’
‘How?’
‘Your eyes are never off that clock.’
I told her about taking young Jason to the Art Galleries. I’d goofed, strayed from the genealogy of Lucas into that of Clay’s but she didn’t comment on it or react in any way. ‘I’ll have to be getting back, anyway,’ she said. ‘That auld swine’ll have her spies posted.’ She exhaled some smoke, seemed a bit more relaxed. ‘How’d the interview go,’ she asked.
‘Interview?’
She nodded. ‘Aye for the job you were after.’
‘Oh, aye that,’ I nodded. ‘Think I did okay. They’ll drop me a line.’
‘You’ll be off to London then, if you get it?’
‘That’s right – the Big Smoke.’
‘What’re you looking for?’
‘In London?’
‘No, here.’
‘Pen, it was there this morning. You got one?’
She shook her head.
I resumed my table search, sifting amongst books, mags, newspapers, typewritten sheets, maps (lots of them, I love maps), record covers, and so on.
All I came up with was a pencil stub with a shoogly lead but on reaching for the sharpener I knocked over a paperback novel of Bellow, the one in which Charlie Citrine figures, and from it there rolled a red-inked pen. Ta, Humby. The search for a pen had uncovered testimonies of infidelity: a clasp bearing several strands of hair which if plaited might yet hang a man; a wineglass from which a seductress had sipped; dabs by the dozen, including a significant find – an almost entire palm-print with lines of life, fate and head clearly distinguishable, and a ketchup smut kindling an ironic stigmata at the heart of it – the accusing hand of Rhona.
I began to sketch onto a largish sheet of paper the plan of Granny Ferguson’s kitchen. As line by scarlet line the details grew and conjoined, so too did a frown, line by line, begin to pleat Becky’s brow. It was obvious that she didn’t dig this approach to our problem, this effort to extricate us from the sexual swamp into which we’d blundered. Banal, I guess she thought it was, maybe even footling. Her expression was now one of deep sulkiness.
‘Silkiness?’ MacDougall pricked awake. ‘Did you say “Silkiness”.’ Ignorant, as always, of what was taking place at the pragmatic level where the real levers of power are, he launched into his masturbatory mumbo-jumbo, an incantatory invocation to the rousing thunder, the Lazarus-raising forces of ‘what if’. Aye, what if she’s starkers beneath that coat of many buttons. Eve-suited. Uncupped breasts, beloved of babes and babbling men. Find the right combination to those buttons and all shall be revealed.
Beneath my active pen the mystery of the Red Room unfolded; to each item, be it furniture or a mantelpiece trinket, a numeral is assigned which is placed within a bubble then tethered to its object by an ink-thread. The bubbles, unclouded by my life-breath float free, a poor bet for longevity in this sharp-cornered world. Granny F., herself has been granted the numeral (1) who, on referring to the descriptive list we learn is a widow in her eighty-fifth year; not quite five feet in height; weighs little more than a sackful of ping-pong balls; she has a wall-eye, her left one, and a carbuncular-like growth on her right cheek; chin moles sprout silvery strands of hair, as tough as fifteen-amp fusewire. And so on.
The plan’s major drawback, apart from the fact that it is a contingency one and therefore as unpredictable as the flightpath of a bullet in a tin lighthouse, was that it was pitched a tad too near the action. I would’ve felt more relaxed it it’d lead Becky’s homicidal mate to somewhere on the other side of the city or, better still, the planet. Contingency plans have much in common with those pioneer aeroplanes that flapped like gross parodies of birds from their drawing boards then, after only a few timorous hops into the air were recaptured by that stern warden, Gravity, and smashed by him to matchwood for having had such aerial presumptuousness.
29
YOUNG JASON HAD so far spent over ten minutes staring in at the diorama in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, long enough for most modern kids who, weaned on television, tend only to snack on reality. But this quaint box of tricks, a cousin of the magic lantern and the flannelgraph, had the boy hooked. So, there I stood, a prisoner of low wattage sunrises, watching the seasons come and go, seeing the stoat, the mountain hare, and the ptarmigan changing alternately from their summer garb to their winter one, then back again. It made me uneasy this gawping at the torrent of days as they disappeared down Time’s plughole. This silent doombox, this cube of light, was a die rolled from a craps game in Hell. It served as a reminder that Time, Auld Nick’s hitman, was up’n hustling.
‘No, I want to see it again!’
I hauled the kid to another inset window which, on cue, extinguished its light.
‘What’re those, Uncle?’
‘Snow White’s Jewellery.’
The fluorescent rocks brooched the darkness with blues, greens, reds, pinks, and amethysts – the cold fires of minerals. Memory began to round up Disney’s dwarfs and, to light their way home from the gem quarry, strewed their path with rubies, diamonds, opals, zircons, emeralds, and topazes, but, quick as adulthood, the magic grotto vanished in a blaze of vulgar light. Since chunks of lifeless quartz held no appeal for the boy he began immediately to strain in the direction of the diorama. I led’m firmly away.
‘Why didn’t the rabbit move?’
‘It was a hare.’
‘Was it dead?’
‘No. Bored stiff maybe.’
We wandered into the Wildlife Section, a misnomer if ever there was one. I’d never seen such a bunch of tamed-out stiffs. The tiger, for instance, was a ripe old bag of stripes. And call that a lion? I’ve seen a fiercer looking carpet slipper. At least Homo sapiens was living up to the section’s ‘wild’ tag. The place teemed with’m, tiny manlings, their feral screams, laughter, and chatterings issued from all corners of the manmade jungle. One of them – a Castlemilk Cro-Magnon, possibly – was trying to shinny up one of the legs of an immense stuffed giraffe which dominated the main floor space. No wonder the Animals’ Prayer begins ‘Heaven protect us from Homo erectus’. But since Heaven has a hard enough time protesting its own existence, protection has been delegated to a bunch of artguards who’ve about as much jungle cool as Barton MacLane after a bad day at the ivory mill. My own manling, from whom I scarcely removed a vigilant eye, was proving to be no tamer than his peers. He’d insisted upon bringing along his model Spitfire with which he’d already strafed the battle fleets in the Model Boats Section, and right now was on lethal safari somewhere over Africa. ‘Di-di-di-di-di-di’, each bellicose foray left spittle patches on the glass frontages of the exhibits, but disturbed not in the least those dusty beasts that stared out eternity in their po
st-taxidermal paradise.
Staring in at a sea-lion, nailed forever to its slab of fake ice, my mind suddenly hiccupped and had me stepping back into yon frozen moment in Pike’s lair: ‘A Tableau Depicting Variations On A Theme of Evil’. What was the quartet doing right now? Coughing up blackness, probably. I could visualise Pike, in mummy swathings, lying on his back and staring up at my image nailed like a wanted poster to a wall of his mind. And, inside his broiled head revenge, in all sorts of sadistic manifestations, flaring then dimming.
‘Di-di-di-di-di-di’, that was the koala bear getting his. You’re next, wallaby! A liveried attendant fixed a severe Sabbath eye on me and I suggested to Attila the Gun that it was time for his fighter to touch base for refuelling. The same attendant frowned when I coughed all over a wild boar which had got loose from its case. The animal didn’t seem to be up or down about it but the attendant tagged after me for a time, probably just in case I got within bronchial range of a Rodin or took my vandalistic hackings amongst the precious pots of the Sung and Ming periods. Passing the giraffe again (the manling had been lured down from its leg with a banana or something), I recalled an anecdote I’d read about Captain Cook’s ship. It was claimed that while Cook’s vessel was anchored in a certain bay that, despite its immensity compared with the local craft thereabouts, it had remained unnoticed by the natives because (a doubtful proposition) it lay outwith their perceptual frame of reference. Remembering this, I strove to direct Jason’s attention to the huge Long Neck.
‘Look up there, son. What d’you see?’
‘Can I get a lolly, Uncle?’
The boy’s lack of response, the facile ease with which his attention had been drawn to the immediacy of a kid noisily sucking an ice-lolly tended to validate the Cook theory.
‘Please, can I have a lolly?’
‘Later, first, tell me what you see up there.’
‘I want it now.’
‘Don’t you see anything?’
‘Please, can I have one?’
‘If you tell me what you see up there.’
‘It’s a giraffe, mister,’ the lolly-guzzler informed me.
Jason, bribed with some Jelly Babies until we came across an ice-lolly shop, was now giving an elephant the once-over. He shook his head, dissatisfied. ‘Why won’t it move? Has it stuck?’
I parked myself on a bench and wished I could light a fag, but it just wasn’t worth the bronchial uproar even a couple of puffs might spring. Thinking about coughing of course immediately unloosed a bout and I went through my repertoire from mucousy minor to rib-cracking major which didn’t help my sore wing any, the pain of which came on all the meaner from having been ignored. ‘Arm With Sore Man!’ – an abstract picture of misery. Likewise Jason, as he glumly surveyed the petrified jungle, searching for something – be it a limping natterjack toad, anything at all so long as it was blessed with mobility. Surely, it wasn’t beyond the Museum’s technical ability to implant a device that would simulate breathing in some of its larger exhibits? Why, yonks ago, at the Glasgow Green Carnival, I remember seeing Sleeping Beauty lying in her kip, her wee bellows going like billy-o as she awaited a cheeper – a hundred years in the promise – from her slowcoach Prince. That she’d been hooked up to a crude motor-driven air pump was obvious but still the sight of her wee bosom heaving then subsiding was worth twice the entrance fee in the opinion, that is, of Thomas Clay, who at that time was suffering the woe and the joy of early adolescence – pimples and prurience.
I stared across at the boy and felt in some daft way that I’d let’m down. Kids nowadays were a right thrillproof bunch. The Armoury Section had, unexpectedly, proved to be a real moodclunker.
‘Where’re the men?’
‘What men, son?’
‘You said there’d be men-in-armour. But they’re empty, aren’t they?’
I’d nodded. ‘Aye, you’re right – they’re empty. But look, that’s what battle horses wore.’
‘They’re not real horses.’
‘No, but –’
‘Then, how d’you know the armour’s real?’
‘Oh, I’m sure it’s the real McCoy.’
‘They’ll fall quite soon.’
‘Fall? Why should they?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘Di-di-di-di-di-di-’, his Spitfire, banking steeply, hosed me with bullets. Take that you fork-tongued fraud for coming the con! Jason had a hang-up about the imminent collapse of things. Maybe this was down to him having an old man who daily bucked gravity on the highwire of finance. (Don’t upset Daddy – the pound’s fallen again . . .)
For the boy, buildings seemed especially vulnerable. Might they not fall? What held up the sky? Was it the tin-tack stars? Although I’d enjoyed the poetic sheen to this query I’d withheld my praise. It wouldn’t do to have him growing up a misfit with a lyrical limp, would it? Certainly not. You’re quite right, Phyllis, one monster per family is one too many. Jason had wanted to know what thunder was, and wee Florrie Monks almost got her jotters for telling him that it was just God rearranging his furniture. I remember Da Clay’s scatological comment when one evening thunder had come clattering over the tenement rooftops. ‘Aye, aye,’ he’d said, thumbs hooked into his galluses, ‘it sounds as if St Peter’s been suppin the beans again!’ A right kerfuffle that’d caused in the Clay household as Ma got stuck into the blasphemer for such irreverence in front of the boys.
For a piece of porcelain, solemnly viewed, Jason had but one comment: ‘Who dropped it?’ A statue of Buddha, smirking no doubt over how gullible people were, was curtly dismissed. ‘He must’ve rubber legs!’ We trudged around this cultural tomb witnessing the trivialised fall of things, the neatly ticketed debris of dismantled centuries. And throughout the boy had remained impassive, unimpressed. Why didn’t things move? Why did they just stand there? And soon my imagination had also been sapped of its mobility, so that it too moved from object to object in a kind of torpor, irked by the boy’s refusal to be astonished.
When I hang out in Bluesville I tend to get philosophical. Okay, maybe I’m not up to comparing Hegel’s ‘intricate being’ with Kierkegaard’s ‘double-mindedness’, but this much I’ve got figured – when god chased us from Eden after Adam’s rib-tickler got suckered by the serpent, he could have been yelling only one thing: not yon gross malarkey about us bumptious bipeds having from then on in to earn our bread by the sweat of our brows. No, what god’d really been bawling would’ve been along the lines of ‘Out damned hypocrites! Out!’ Aye, hypocrisy is numero uno in Satan’s vice league. Take that guy sitting next to you on the bus, he looks a real honest Joe . . . But maybe only an hour ago he’d been forcing his odious notion of sex on his baby daughter? And who’s to tell if yon woman with the bunch of flowers, so modest looking, isn’t on her way back home to inflict more bestial cruelty on her crippled mother? It happens all the time, in every city, and no doubt in every hamlet and village as well. Open any newspaper, glance across any telly-screen, and you’ll find that the moral grotesqueries outnumber the funnies ten to one.
Take myself – any self will do; they’re all equally bogus – I’m up to my neck in hypocrisy. In fact, if there was such an institution as the Museum of Morality, I’d occupy a prime spot in it – a glass case all to myself, complete with identity tab, Urban Hypocrite: A striking example of a Twentieth-Century Urban Hypocrite. Note especially its thick skin which possesses a chameleon-like ability to blend with its background. Mark too its easily detachable features, exchangeable teeth, and reversible eyeballs, plus its readily adaptable limbs. Another significant feature is –’
I was up off the bench and running. I caught up with Jason seconds before his Spitfire could rake the sunrise derrière of a magnificently-robed negress who’d happened amongst us that Sabbath afternoon with the Garden of Eden perched on her plum blue hair. And what a powerful sermon that exotic hat with its cutesy little serpent was preaching to us drablings:
My friends, Jesus was cool.
He wore psychadelic sandals and wouldn’t have been seen breathin in no khaki kaftan. Don’t let’s forget what he say about Solomon. He say even when that gaudy ol’rooster was spazzed up’n his tux, why he still wasn’t no match for them switched-on lilies of the field. So grab yoself a rainbow for a hanger and drape it bright in Joseph threads. Ain’t no grey in Heaven folks. And, if it happens there is – then I ain’t going . . . Hallelujah!
And on she sailed, her ebony face as calm as the best night sky you ever remember seeing.
Jason and me paused to view an insult to the Japanese empire. Four stooges, purporting to be typical members of a Japanese family but who were patently a quartet of Martians who’d given Ray Bradbury the slip – his lyrical clawmarks were plainly visible – stood together in a sort of glass wardrobe. The father in his robe looked a bit like Noel Coward with conjunctivitis. If these dummies were supposed to be typical Japs, what would they be palming off on the public a couple of centuries hence as your ‘typical Scots’? Wee tartan bendy gnomes, maybe, with their eyeballs glued to their assholes to guard against any new poets who might be on their way to disturb the kailyard calm.
Aye, twad fair mak ye grieve Christopher, wad it no?
Intending to take Jason to the Eygptian Room I found a ‘Keep Out’ notice posted at its entrance. From behind a canvas screen there issued soft rapping sounds, made perhaps by a mummy knuckling the inner lid of its sarcophagus. ‘Lemme out! Lemme out!’ But, gently, Old Salter was pressed back into his fold in oblivion. ‘There, there, you’ve just had a bad awakening, that’s all. Noo, coorie doon – have another billion winks . . .’
Three men sit in separate rooms eating their breakfasts. There is a likeness in the deft manner with which they handle their eating tools and, perhaps, a correspondence in the tone of their chit-chats with their respective wives. Later, one of these men will casually place the shelled brain of Talky Sloan on the weighing pan; another of the trio will rake through the ashes of a Mr Pike then lay out his semi-cooked organs for inspection and analysis; the remaining man will from the gash in the chest of a murdered youth pluck a hypothetical weapon and other men will go forth in search of its lethal reality.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 23
