Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘Family!’

  ‘Yes. Family. Okay, maybe we should see each other more often but . . . well, it’s only natural that Phyllis should . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, be concerned for her sister’s welfare. Surely you can see that?’

  I said nothing because there wasn’t anything that could be uttered without risk, no phrase that wouldn’t be inflammatory. Deep down in the very marrow of his bones, Sherman was shit-scared of me. I was a reminder to him that poverty might only be a toss of the dice away. In the Monopoly world around which he so deftly hopped there might yet come a go-to-jail day with no bail card on hand to spring him.

  ‘I’ll have to split,’ I said. ‘Get my jacket, will you?’

  He rose. ‘I’ll give you a lift to Bishopbriggs, if it’s any help.’

  ‘What like’s the bus service?’

  ‘Still in the garage, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Could you call a cab, then?’

  Phyllis swept into the room with her pacy sense of overdrive which – I submit this only as a theory – is a quirk of the prematurely-born, an impetus those rawnecks seem to maintain throughout their existence, giving us womb-turtles the finger as they blaze along life’s highways, their speedo needles to the pin, every town they flick through called ‘Goodbye’. Here’s another try-on-for-size: couldn’t it be that the frenetic, high blood-pressuring hustle of the modern world is down to the technique called ‘Birth-induction’, a form of womb-robbery which is sweeping our assembly-line hatcheries. You’d think with all the insomnia-plagued and dream-dogged nights yet to come that they’d at least let you have your first nine months in the maternal hammock undisturbed. But no, if it’s not a sinisterly gloved hand coming through the litterbox to grope you, or pipes with eyes on their noduled ends rising through the floor to ogle you, then it’s the worst of all possible intrusions: you’re just turning over onto your other side for some prenatal zeez when BLAM! the womb-door’s booted open and in stomps Sister Pulham and her gloved and masked accomplices, vaseline and crowbars at the ready.

  As she came round the mountain that was the sleeping Faraday, Phyllis said to her spouse, ‘Jason’s got his rails in a twist again. See what you can do, will you?’ As soon as he’d left Phyllis immediately confiscated the whisky glass from the tray on Sherman’s armchair when with that sardonic smirk which adorns the facial putty of Eliott Ness as his boys with their sobering axes bust the liquor barrels, she marched across and claimed mine too: no more blue danubing tonight, folks! She placed both glasses on the hostess trolley then crossed to straighten a cushion on the settee.

  I wondered if Phyllis, like me, had picked up her husband’s distress signals. I remember once hearing this widow saying of her husband who’d died of a coronary, ‘I saw his attack coming when it was still miles away.’ I got this picture of a grey-jowled man gamely digging in his windowbox and dreaming of nasturtiums, while his partner, staring over his shoulder, is watching the formation of a blue, heart-shaped cloud on the horizon.

  Phyllis now turned to confront me.

  A book I’d been reading recently about human body language had claimed that the cross-armed position (CAP), which Phyllis had now adopted, was NT (Non-Threatening). I doubt if its author had done any researching in Glasgow, for up here the jaggy-elbowed stance accompanied by clamped lips and a fierce rocking motion of the head can look decidedly menacing. Oddly enough, she now hit me with a query connected with elbows. ‘What’s wrong with your arm?’

  My stoical shrug seemed to make’r all the crosser. ‘Why d’you keep rubbing at it, then?’

  ‘I bumped my elbow, that’s all.’

  ‘Falling off a bus?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Or was it a bar stool?’

  What was the X-armed bitch on about?

  ‘. . . by the look of that army rag of yours . . .’

  What had she said? Missed a bit . . . Dosser, I see. I look like a dosser. I ponged like one too. Stink of booze never off my breath. A walking brewery. The son of Shiny Shoes and with the same whiff of recklessness about me . . . The penny finally dropped. Now I saw the way the shit was shifting. This was me getting a sherrikin – verbal abuse, Glesca style. It was obvious to me now that Sherman had been delegated by the family to sort me out, to let me know that my infantile irresponsibility was no longer to be tolerated. But he’d fallen down on the job – messing around with metaphors just wasn’t his bag. Phyllis knew what was what but. No ego-whittling with a dainty penknife for her; by the look on her face she was about to do the full machete number on me.

  ‘How did you manage to lose Jason?’ she asked in a tone more suited to the Nuremburg Trials than to this temple of tackiness. Shit, the wee yin had gone’n cliped on me. Had promised he wouldn’t as well.

  ‘Lose’m? C’mon that’s a bit strong, is it no? We’re only talking a minute or a minute’n half at the most.’

  ‘You don’t deny it then? you did lose’m?’

  ‘Well, if you call being out of sight for –’

  ‘What happened?’

  I filled her in but scratched the doppleganger stuff – a gaffe as it turned out.

  ‘What about the man?’

  I met her stormy gaze. ‘What man?’

  ‘The one who took Jason from under your nose – that man!’

  Willie Congreve, auld son, you had it wrong – Hell hath no fury like a woman conned, it should’ve been.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’

  She unclasped her arms but her behavioural stance became very worrying: semi-crouched she was, rage blinking on like neon along the slender bones of her face, while the forefinger of her right hand was going its dinger at me, as was her tongue. Stop lying in your teeth: a man took Jason away – the child told me; the man said it was a game of hide’n seek. They watched you running around like – a headless chicken. That, by the way, was the man’s expression. Jason didn’t make it up – couldn’t have. After quite a long time – about ten minutes, Jason says, the kidnapper took’m to an attendant. That’s what happened and I want to damn well know why!’

  Me, too, lady – believe me! I’ve a stack of mysteries piling up, from haunted closets to leather-backed snoops, not to mention this latest brow-wrinkler – the Kelvingrove kidnap. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘a bloke did find’m, that’s right enough, as for the rest, well –’

  ‘Dammit, how long was he missing for?’

  ‘I’ve told you – two min –’

  ‘You’re a liar! Ten minutes, Jason says.’

  ‘What’s a wee boy know aboot judging time?’

  ‘You damned eejit – that man could’ve been one of those perverts. Places like that hoach with’m. Come clean – how long did he have’m?’

  ‘Two minutes at the outside. Get a grip on yoursel. That guy’d been a perv, d’you think he’d’ve taken the boy to an attendant? C’mon, think about it. Another thing, the man didnae lure Jason from me – Jason followed him because he was wearing the same clobber as me. “Hide’n-seek” my eye. There just wasnae the time for it.’

  Although I was fairly certain that the boy hadn’t come to any physical harm – taken to a wc and interfered with, I mean – I didn’t dig this being forced into lying complicity with my dress-alike. Jason, like most imaginative kids, hadn’t been content to tell of the incident as was – he’d jived it up some, flung a few more squibs on the fire. Still, all wasn’t made explicable by a childish sense of the dramatic – the happening in the museum remained criss-crossed by disturbing shadows. Phyllis moved away from me. She began to prowl around the lounge, adjusting an ornament here, a lace doily there. ‘You’re too damned careless for words,’ she scolded. ‘We entrust you with Jason’s care and surprise, surprise you made a mess of it. We must need our heads examining, giving you custody of anything – never mind an infant. Putting you in charge of anything has to be about as clever as tap dancing in a minefield. I just knew something was going to happen. Kn
ew it for sure. And, as usual, you didn’t let me down.’

  My chair creaked as I rose. ‘What d’you mean “as usual?”’ I snapped, the old dander getting up. ‘When last did I –’

  ‘You’re careless. Nothing matters to you but yourself. If anything had happened to that child –’

  ‘Nothing did happen. How many times’re you wanting told.’

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  ‘Does the same go for your mother, then?’ A fine time I’d chosen to start juggling with nitro-sticks.

  ‘What about Mother – what’s she to do with your negligence?’

  ‘I heard tell, a couple of weeks back, she lost Jason in Woolworths.’

  ‘That’s different, and you know it. He simply wandered. She didn’t stand around daydreaming while he was kidnapped from under her nose.’

  ‘He wasn’t kidnapped. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  She approached me. There wasn’t one single body-sign favourable to my continuing health. A smack in the gub seemed about to unleash itself. ‘Find a mirror,’ she growled, ‘and take a good long look into it. With a bit of luck you’ll catch a glimpse of what the rest of us see all too plainly: a tramp, that’s what, a tramp mooching from one day to the next, no pride in his appearance, not an ounce of ambition in his head. A fag in one hand, a pint-pot in the other and you’re as happy as Larry.’ She sighed and slowly shook her head. ‘Why our Rhona was stupid enough to –’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, feeling really needled, ‘stupid enough to – what?’

  She took a step nearer me and her words came out in a kind of semi-shriek. ‘Good God, man, don’t you know how dangerous high blood-pressure can be during pregnancy?’ On a much lower register now, in a voice that expressed all the contempt she felt for me, she murmured, ‘Why don’t you just get out of my sight?’

  An astonished-looking Sherman came in with my jacket over his arm. He looked from Phyllis to me then back to his wife again. ‘What on earth’s going on?’

  I took my ‘army rag’ from him. ‘It’s all right, Jack. Phyllis here was just giving me my marching orders.’

  31

  IN THE FIRST place Jack Sherman shouldn’t’ve been driving. He should’ve been at home sitting in his upholstered ‘orchid’ with his slippered feet parked on the slopes of his comatose St Bernard; he should’ve been conducting his musical cocktail cabinet while coaxing fiendishly innovative trumpetings from his rudewind section; he should’ve shoved off to his bedroom to savour the eroticism of being rubbed down by his wife with scalding teabags; in fact, he should’ve been doing anything but just sitting there like a gringo awaiting the garrotte while one of St Mungo’s finest came crunching towards him across the deep and crisp and even. From this law guardian’s chest there issued crackling bursts of crimespeak, impressive proof that he was in direct contact with his mother ship. Of the legendary pig-poke there was, as yet, no sign. Maybe, at this very moment, his companion was crouching in the front seat of the Panda swigging neat brandy before cooking the crystals – just a wee jag to get them going.

  Green means GO – go directly to Jail: do not collect £200.

  Sherman was wheezing like a set of knifed bagpipes. He rolled down his window. He said, ‘Oh God!’ three times. He also farted, which interestingly enough corroborated the claim that even the most hardened criminals frequently get their bowels in a twist during the commission of a felony. Jeezuz, the post-gut stench of Chinese wokery is unforgivable – a real friend loser. The officer stopped alongside Sherman’s door, then a startling face appeared in the window aperture. It had a stony sheen to it, implanted with eyes that brimmed with hostility, and its blue jaws jived on a wad of gum. The eyes focused on the driver and Sherman after Sherman rolled away onto the crime-greased spool of Pandaman’s mind. The darkly-garbed statue now spoke: ‘Excuse me, Sir, are you the owner of this vehicle?’

  Let’s cut to a happier moment, the start of the journey, maybe, when I found myself agreeing with Phyllis that her husband, having shifted the Chivas some, not forgetting the table wine, should sensibly refrain from driving. No, let’s skip that bit too – I can’t stomach being seen to be in agreement with that bitch. How about Sherman bumming about his car? Aye, that’ll do. A peerless set of wheels, just right for a man who, although no longer a kid, still packed plenty of whizz – or so he liked to think. An MG 1300 saloon, one thousand sovvies to put on the road, a couple of whiskies to put it off again. Right, let’s have some autospiel. ‘She’s got a new transmission system that gives synchromesh on all gears.’ Definitely handy stuff to know that. Such info’ll go down a bundle in the Dog. ‘She’s powered by a 1275 cc four cylinder engine, in other words, a detuned Mini Cooper S engine.’ Did you hear that? Dead impressive. Just think, here I am, sitting at the heart of a thousand quids’ worth of freshly-minted technology. Me, who only the other day had been seen in a junkshop selling my tipper-tapper for two measly blues. What a jalopy. A man could be forgiven for warbling with pride in its ownership. Sherman, in fact, was practically yodelling as he took me on yet another tour of the walnut fascia which I was thrilled to learn had been affectionately based on the dashboard of the old Reilly. ‘Oh, really?’

  As in wheelsure fashion we were descending the shiny brow of an avenue, and he was explaining to me some technical tosh about the MG’s ability to get from standstill to crimespeed in so many seconds (I’ve never quite grasped the need for such a coveted facility in a family saloon; surely it’s a perk only the Brands Hatch boys and bank heist merchants would dig?) a series of vocalised yawns broke from my lips. Sherman immediately drew the car in to the kerbside, braked, killed the engine, nailed the wipers and jabbed at the radio’s buttons. As the sound of Donovan’s bland voice evaporated – he’d been singing his indigestion number: ‘Catch the Wind’ – Sherman uncellophaned a cigar which looked like a small cudgel. But, not even after he’d sucked some fire into its snout did he indicate why we’d stopped. I lighted up one of my skinny plebeian weeds, took a cautious puff on it but a bout of coughing started just the same and I’d to ashtray the fag. I sensed that a lecture was coming on, and I was right: out of a Havana cloud came forth his voice, employing that grandiose tone Hollywood accords to God when in biblical epics he starts rabbitting from behind a choric thunderhead. It was a stylish Orson Welles performance in which it was possible to detect his egotistical pleasure in the low, manly rumblings of his voice, a temporary timbre loaned to it, I suspected, by an incipient bronchial condition.

  He began with some routine invective about my lifestyle in general, the spur for the entire verbal charade about to unfold itself being down to the fact that I’d yawned in his illustrious presence and, worse still, while he’d been expounding on the merits of His Car, an insult in Jack’s book on par with scratching your ass while shaking hands with royalty. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘where d’you get off looking down your nose at people? The only outstanding thing in your life so far’s been your backside hanging out your troosers . . .’ My attitude was all wrong. Why, even back at his house I’d sat there with the usual cheap sneer on my pan, as if I’d the key to Fort Knox wedged up my jaxie. Who did I think I was kidding? Certainly not Jack Sherman. No way. He’d my number all right. There were hamsters that’d a better lifestyle than I had. I was a walking zero, a complete zilch with loser written all over me. (Must be helluva wee writing, Jacky boy!) It was criminal the energy I was willing to expend in order to avoid working for a living. That religious malarkey I’d tried to pull at Uncle Billy’s yesterday, that was me to a tee. Had I really expected him to swallow such guff? Credit’m with some commonsense. It was high time I grew up. Toilet-training time was over – from now on I’d have to wipe my own bum. ‘You get nowt for nowt in this world.’ For a start – housing. It was high time I’d dropped the notion that I was too good for the likes of Castlemilk. The truth was that Castlemilk was too good for me. Was I blind, or just being plain stupid in my inability to see that jumping on and off the do
le, being on the panel for weeks at a time, meant the loss of crucial housing points? I’d end up in another pesthole like Scobie Street. Was that fair to Rhona? Was it fair to my unborn child? Maybe I thought that since Ma Carlyle had provided storage room for my stuff, that should the worst come to the worst I could plonk myself down rent-free in her spare room. Well, I’m here to tell you – forget it.

  He shut up for a few moments, winded, maybe by slamming those non-returning balls over the net. I guess he thought that I’d dummied up because his home truths had humiliated me. Where’d he got hold of the idea that I was trying to get cheap lodgings in my murder-in-laws’s pad? I’d rather share a kennel with a rabid Doberman pinscher. I was peeved some to learn that Uncle Billy hadn’t after all taken on board my possible conversion to the Catholic faith. I should’ve guessed he would twig. Screwball notion, anyhow. A cross and a whole lot of bother. Right now, because of it, I could’ve been slabbed out in the City Mortuary, alongside Talky Sloan, Old Pike, and the knifed youth. Closest call yet. No doubt convinced that his manly growlings had wiped me out, Sherman now eased up on the slag-pedal, and with what was supposed to pass for an avuncular smile creasing his clock, he said, ‘I’m only telling you for your own good, Tommy.’

  For my own good, eh! When I think of the confolk who’ve sapped me with that line! Everytime I hear it I check to make sure I still have my shoes. Take Ma Clay for starters: ‘You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, son,’ she’d say as with unwonted vigour she’d scrub the grit from the flesh wounds I all too frequently bore up to her with salty howls from the backcourt. And, days later, when the plaster was filthy and curling up at the edges, came the harrowing exposure of the healed wound – and another verbal rip-off from Ma: ‘This’ll hurt me more that it hurts you, Tommy . . .’ though when the plaster was yanked off it was always me who did the yelping while she smiled and called me a big wean. Medicine, too, was helped over sugared with a lie: ‘C’mon, son, though nasty’n soor – the quicker the cure!’ I mean if your own kith’n kin were stitching you up something rotten like this, what hope could you have when they trotted you off to those chalky chancers in Scobie Primary School? They knew what was good for you all right, they were experts in that regard. When I was little more than soft-boned bewilderment in short pants they showed me the ropes then promptly proceeded to tie me up in knots. By the second week in that place they’d me eating plasticine and wetting myself. For my own good I was made to stand in draughty corridors and was on sneezing terms with many a dusty classroom corner. With pinches and nudges they’d soon fitted me into my allotted niche in that bellowing asylum for unopened minds. And, as if this enforced ‘goodness’ wasn’t burden enough, they’d a second penal tier waiting. And boy did its warders know what ‘goodness’ was!