Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘For any favour, do hurry along,’ she commanded. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  30

  ‘I HOPE YOU like yellow nosh,’ said Phyllis with arch slang. ‘Wan Tun soup this is called.’

  I paddled my spoon in the foggy stuff, half expecting to find Wan Tun’s sandal. Young Jason, who wasn’t sophisticated enough yet to know that food can serve wilier ends than mere nutrition, murmured, ‘Yellow nosh,’ a couple of times then began some vocal experimentation: ‘Yellow nosh . . . Red nosh . . . green nosh . . . purple nosh . . . posh nosh . . . squash nosh . . .’ a colourful chant which was given the chop by the sound of his own name, burred with reprimand, as it flew from his mother’s lips. The boy now studied his reflection in the bowl of his as-yet undipped spoon. He breathed on it then restored his image again with a quick wipe of his serviette. Again his name, fizzing with the kinetics of censure, came hurtling across the table, but this time tagged by a weary postscript: ‘Jack, speak to him. Really his manners . . .’ Sherman, whose blankness of expression suggested that he was off on one of his internal audits, maybe evaluating the costs incurred by some financial tornado, hastily rejoined us. He mouthed some vocal guano about his six-year-old son’s need to stop behaving like a child of six, and to remember that Santa didn’t bring toys to ill-mannered boys.

  Jason chewed on this for a time then flicking a cheeky glance in my direction chirpily asked, ‘When Baby Claus disnae down his scoff, does Mammy Claus dae her nut in?’

  Phyllis’s eyebrows nearly shot off her forehead. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said . . .’

  ‘Don’t you dare repeat it. I’ve told you before about bringing gutter language into this house.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No buts about it!’

  Sherman nailed the lad with a hard stare. ‘Right, settle down. This is your last telling. C’mon, set to.’

  Jason was dining on hamely fare, his favourite grub – tomato soup, mince’n tatties with baby carrots, followed by a tub of custard trifle. Both parents began now to probe him about what he’d seen at the Museum. ‘Nothing moved,’ he told them. ‘And the armour was empty.’

  The boy ate while he talked, both acts performed with such a rapidity that I was reminded of the constraints imposed upon my gustatory galloping when I was a kid. ‘C’mon, noo, son,’ Ma Clay would scold, ‘let your stomach see the daylight.’ The boy had in fact dispatched all three of his courses (very minute portions for a growing lad, I thought) while we were still dawdling with Wan Tun. Jason was given permission to leave the table, which he did only after extracting the grace of being allowed to play with his train set for half an hour, after which it was beddy-bye time. The boy, chancing his luck, made a further request. ‘Definitely not!’ Phyllis snapped. ‘Uncle Tom won’t be coming through to tell you one of his stories. You’ve enough rubbish in your head as it is. Now kisses all round and off with you.’

  Second course: sliced duck with bamboo shoots. The Shermans were expert with chopsticks, easily carrying succulent portions of my ego to their voracious mouths. It was just a knack really they assured me, and with hooded smirks allowed me to pig it with knife’n fork. The wine, to judge from the superlatives they heaped on it, had originated in prestige grapes that’d been trodden by the feet of angels. Their sophisticated palates fused with the mystery of growth and maturation, while my gross tongue, numb as a stone, let the bon vin slosh over unpraised and unappreciated.

  We were dining in what they referred to as ‘The Dinette’, an alcove off the kitchen area which was roomy enough to accommodate six chairs around a table. About a dozen species of pot plants swarmed across the alcove’s wood-panelled walls where ledges and nooks housed an aviary of porcelain birds. A nocturne of owls glared balefully down from what looked like a genuine tree limb bracketted to the wall. I was reminded of a childhood terror – the glass caseful of stuffed birds that’d dominated the hall at Killynowe Farm, in Dumfriesshire. Jackdaws, ravens, hoody craws, magpies and wagtails, all seemed to fix their cruel eyes on me as I scampered past them on my way to bed. But, how bold I was when Mrs Irwin, with a tread that wasn’t going to falter for some footling phantom, went on ahead of me, her paraffin lamp with its puttering flame routing the shadows while I crept along in her stout and steadfast shade, brave enough now to even outstare the evil magpie and his gang of graveyard croakers. In the morning Mr Irwin would leave his room with a scad of farts, his heavy tread making the staircase creak like the timbers of a clipper going round the Horn. I always imagined the birds in the glass case being stirred to a black frenzy as he padded past them, rifle shots volleying from his abundant behind.

  In the Sherman household there was – just had to be – a much grander place than this humble noshery-nook to celebrate the belly’s needs. This banqueting chamber, within which I hadn’t even been invited to step, far less chew a chicken bone in, was always referred to as the ‘Big Room’ by an awed Florrie Monks. Naturally, the Big Room was for Big Occasions and for the Big Folk who attended them: the Dinette, on the other hand, served the day-to-day eating of the Sherman family, and was also deemed suitable for minor visitors such as myself. In the Dinette, the diminutive dominated. Serious conversations were not expected of you here. Over this table chatettes were more the vogue, and maybe the old laughette while you sipped coffee from a tiny black cupette. This evening the topic turned out to be the social value (if any) of museums, art galleries, and such-like history warehouses. To this subject Phyllis contributed the oddball notion that it would make an interesting addition to every home if its occupants were to convert a small boxroom into a sort of family museum. This could contain a grandfather’s favourite pipe, an aunt’s treasured bible, the very telegram that brought dreaded news from the War Front, and so on. When I reminded her that in some households the grandfather, the maiden aunt, and the bereaved family might still be living on top of each other in the boxroom, she said huffily that even a corner would serve the purpose. To introduce a whimsical note I suggested that my own ‘Family Shrine’ might very well display my Mickey Mouse gasmask, ration book, Da Clay’s last pair of shoes, Granda Gibson’s spare set of wallies, his yellow long johns, complete with escape hatch, the wee white tin that’d contained my first set of loveskins, and the poignant card on which the War Office had tersely informed me that because of my scarred lung it was judged that I wouldn’t be sufficiently robust to endure the sheer manly hell of the NAAFI queue. My contribution proved to be a blunderette for it promoted what could be called a ‘Chinese Silence’, a kind of audible hush on the surface of which words float like so much trash. This persisted long after the last beansprout or almond had been cleared away with the debris from the fortune cookies.

  ‘You for another?’

  I nodded and gave Sherman my glass. The first dram had done little to strip the lead from my mood. We’d transferred from the Dinette through to the lounge, although, for the moment, Phyllis was not with us, having gone to make a phone-call. Her absence was one of the few things to be enjoyed in this most pretentious of pads. The drinks cabinet said it all. It had this gimmick, so corny it made you want to giggle. When you lowered the serving flap the cabinet chimed out a wobbly version of the Blue Danube.

  This crass novelty could be suppressed by thumbing the cork of a bottle which would’ve been a familiar prop to acid-heads, shaped as it was like a ruby snake streaked with lemon markings, and so weirdly contorted it looked like it’d sloughed a dimension. Sherman biffed the cork with the side of his fist. I’m sure he felt its trite tinklings demeaned him, being too frivolous for a man of his substance. Aye, he’d fairly piled on the substance – two stones of it, at least – since last I’d seen’m, where was it again? Aye, Dad Carlyle’s funeral, the day we’d locked the locksmith down. Just over two years ago. A grizzled touch to his still ample locks, I noted. The ‘executive look’ they called it nowadays which is just one more euphemism seeking to mask the bald facts of human perishibility. His face,
the focal point of the disintegrative process, seemed wired to a subcurrent of unease, like a man receiving the first mild buffets from a hurricane that is swarming with ruin for him. The hieroglyphics of anxiety were there for the reading on Sherman’s dial. But whatever it was that was kinking his colon had, for the moment at least, been assimilated, tucked out of harm’s way, just as the body can accommodate a bullet at the heart of its major functions, the vital business of living tiptoeing around it, but going on just the same.

  Sherman was drinking at an almost reckless pace, faster’n I’d ever seen him putting the stuff away. As I tried to figure out why, a dazzling fissure opened in my mind and I saw an Eskimo spinning off to his death on a splintering chunk of ice. Intuition, the mind slipping on those spooky goggles which enable their wearer to see around Time’s corners and to pass with ghostly scorn through the jailing walls of Newtonian physics. This paranormal peek was enough to reveal to me that Sherman was in some kind of fix – about to shoot the rapids in a lead canoe. A hitherto solid certainty in his financial world had melted out from under him, this catastrophe due to unforeseen movements in the dollar icecap; he was certainly going to get his feet wet. Was this why he’d quizzed me about various benefits a man in my financial straits was entitled to? It’d almost seemed as if he’d decided to take a crash course in failure, to get the going rates in the grey world of grits and handouts chits.

  Sherman unstoppered the bottle and jawed whisky into the pair of glasses, doing so without caution and with bags of panache, three fingers apiece as Peter Cheyney’s dipso dick used to put it, completing each pouring with a jaunty elbow lift to produce a last golden jag of the stuff. He took up the syphon and rammed a hard shunt of soda water into each drink. As he moved away from it, the musical cabinet allowed some semi-quavers to escape from its throttled mechanism. Sherman paused to glare back at it and with a series of cowed and fading chimes the thing shut down. Quel homme!

  ‘Damned box,’ he said as he handed me my drink. ‘Soon as it starts up my liver runs for cover. Enough soda?’

  I took a sip and nodded. Sherman, merely by seating himself, all but vanished into the capacious maw of his floral armchair. It looked like one of those man-eating orchids Tarzan used to wrestle with. As he slipped further down its variegated throat Sherman raised his glass in what looked like a farewell toast. ‘Slainthe!’ he said, and I mouthed the customary echo.

  For a time we gabbed about this’n that, the growing popularity of holidaying in Spain, then onto some stuff on the production of single malt whiskies. This got me onto an anecdote about a teuchter who used to drink in the Dog. Magnus McPherson, he was called, and his claim to fame was his assertion that he’d been stillborn, and could prove it. When sufficient scoffers had laid bets against’m Magnus would produce his creased and tattered birth certificate which bore the Registrar’s signature, official stamps, and also detailed that he’d been born in the mash room of a far northern distillery. What his mother had been doing in such a place at such a time, Magnus wasn’t for saying.

  In the wide hearth plastic facsimilies put on they were smouldering logs, and over by the door Faraday lay sprawled in sleep, looking, I thought, like a half ton of cleverly moulded gypsum. In the hall, Phyllis was exercising her whinnying laugh. Behind Sherman to his right, the xmas tree flickered with escape plans but couldn’t snap its luminous bonds. Even the shubumpkins seemed programmed to a tedious circuiting of their green world in which the barnacled lid of a toy treasure chest, minute by minute, opened to release a torpid pearl of oxygen. It didn’t throw me none to hear the master of the house confess that during those rare occasions when he managed to get in some goggle-boxing he mostly dug wildlife films. And why not? It was perfectly natural for a man seated between the jaws of a devouring orchid, while dressed in pullover, collar’n tie, to placidly observe a pair of manitees having it off on the ocean bed. Whatever turns you on, baby! I’m told, but remain sceptical, that there’re even glimmerbrains around who’d rather watch whelks shitting than listen to Jimmie Rodgers singing ‘T for Texas’. And why shouldn’t Sherman, as he was doing now, entertain his guest with some creepy-crawly lore? My antenna was really buzzing with the tales he had to tell about Bugland and its busy denizens. Seems, if you’re to believe it, that there’re wasps, beetles too, that can con board’n lodgings from ants by selling them a kind of chemical dummy. A ‘Pheromone’ it’s called, or so Professor Sherman told me. ‘The wee buggers leg it up to the anthill’s door, flash their pheromone badges and bingo – they’re in! Makes no difference if the bug’s got a tartan head and a star-spangled ass, so long as it’s got the right chemical credentials they hand it the key.’

  Suspicion tickled my brainlobes. Was he laying this stuff on me just to take his mouth a walk, or could he be insinuating that I was some kind of hive-crasher, that I spent my time pheromoning my way into situations where I could indulge my dronish tendencies. I doubted it. Sherman kept his edge for those gory sharkpools where the feasting on busted companies took place. To him I was little more than a ditch chokeful of dead sticklebacks, a welfare pisshole.

  ‘Tell you something that bounces me,’ said Sherman, though he twisted the promised info into the inverted hook of a question, ‘those animals that can mimic their surroundings – how the devil do they do it?’

  I laid a suggestion on him but he shook his head. ‘No, that survival of the fittest stuff doesn’t count here. There’s a hidden dynamic at work, a force that not only can unpick molecules, strip down atoms, but can rejig genetic blueprints.’

  I shook my head, ‘It’s reaction, not intention.’

  ‘Eyes,’ Sherman said.

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Cave fish don’t have any.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’ll be telling me next that all those blind creatures way back at the beginning got fed up bumping into each other so they decided to have eyes. And how’d they go about it? According to you, no doubt, certain cells became increasingly sensitive to light . . .’

  I smiled at the casuistry of the man, at this ventriloquist act he was pulling by popping questions into my mouth then answering them himself. ‘But tell me this,’ Sherman now asked as a roll of drums rose from the orchestra pit and, quitting the trapeze bar, he performed a triple somersault then, so confidently, stretched out for the spar now starting its swing towards him, ‘if those creatures were blind in the first place, how come they knew there was such a thing as light to specialise in?’ Gasps from the audience – sustained applause . . . ‘Aye’n he does it without a safety net, y’know!!’

  Bergson had produced a heap of metaphysical sawdust by sawing at the same log. Not much you could do with the stuff though, except maybe to scatter it on the floor of the Kickstone Tavern (so called after Ben Johnson’s witty demolition of Bishop B.’s anti-matter theory) where of a night a merry crowd of materialists would gather to quaff pots of really real ale and swap anecdotes about things noted, and events experienced in the great out-there, the palpable, structured universe. And what guffaws assailed the roofbeams as Mr Simon Squiggs, mine host of the Tavern, scorning the assistance from his burly flagon-filler, was to be seen giving M. Henri Bergson the Flying Farewell, the old heave-ho. And as the pauvre Frenchman biffed the cobbles with a Bishop-denying howl, Squiggs refilled his chair on the rostrum next to the definitely really real ale taps and addressed the claret-mottled assembly: ‘Keeps on arskin for sommat called “Ailing Veetall” he does. An when Bertie ‘ere tells’m there baint be sucha concoction this or tother side of the bleedin universe, says he, the Froggie, “May nong, mong sewer, zee Ailing Veetall eez zee breath of God Heemself . . .” Cries of shock’n horror from the logico-posits as –’

  ‘What d’you think yourself?’ Sherman asked.

  Unable to recall what he’d been saying I busied my lips with some Scotch.

  ‘Jason liked it, anyway.’ Sherman’s forefinger pinged a little asdic-sounding signal of distress on the side of his glass. ‘What
was he on about – the rabbit and the lights going out?’

  Rabbit-light. The two verbal prods were enough to jab me from the attractions of the Kickstone Tavern, back to the drab world of what-is. As I filled Sherman in on Jason’s fascination for the diorama, the lounge clocks, with more metallic fuss than a jail closing down for the night, rose to welcome a new hour. It was time I was high-tailing it. Judging by the way Sherman was shunting the Chivas a lift in his car, even as far as Bishopbriggs, no longer seemed a runner. Maybe it was for this very reason that he’d been skelping the booze. Well, I could always get a taxi, that is if they hadn’t been forced off the road by the arctic conditions.

  ‘You don’t seem too enthusiastic yourself about them.’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Museums,’ Sherman said, ‘stately homes, refurbished castles, that sort of thing.’ I shrugged, and he went on, ‘Odd, that is. I would’ve thought the opposite. I mean, it’s obvious that you over-invest in the past.’

  ‘S’that so?’

  He nodded. ‘More than obvious.’

  ‘No way ye.’

  Like a conjuror about to pull some digital wangle (would the empty glass vanish in a puff of amber smoke?) he held up his hands. ‘Well, look how long it’s taking you to get your backside out of – what’s it called again?’

  ‘The Scabby.’

  ‘Scobie Street, that’s it.’ He tilted his head in the direction of the hall, keying into Phyllis’s phone gab, trying to judge if it’d last long enough for him to make another raid on the drinks cabinet. It seemed not for he dumped his glass on the tray that his chair wore on its massive wrist like a toy watch. ‘From what I hear,’ he told me, ‘you’ll be hitching a ride on the last demolition truck out of there.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  Despite a flawless dress-rehearsal the conjuror had screwed up: cards, doves, silk ribbons, paper flowers and rabbits, were erupting from his person; the jaws of hidden pockets sagged; endless flags of distress were being hauled from between his faltering lips, ‘Well . . . I suppose it hasn’t . . . not really . . . family’n that.’