Shortly before I reached that place of heavenly rest, promised to me by the horned and hooved Sherman, a muster of icy sentinels frisked me to the skin, turning out my last pockets of warmth, beggaring me to my last therm before allowing me to proceed, but only after I’d given them the password.
‘Bastard!’ I howled. For, having gone round the bend I found nothing but a roofless biggin – the former home of a turnip howker – hedged about with a ha-ha, its interior thickly wadded with snow. Nothing else to be seen by way of human habitation, neither hotel, motel, nor pub – not even a wee pie-stall. The glimmering road went on ahead of me, occasional dim sparks of light, as lustreless as a March xmas tree, a scarcely worthwhile amperage grudgingly shed by some tight-fisted local council lighted the way to yon grim wee hamlet, the name of which never appears on signposts, the one most feared by mountaineers, hillwalkers and Arctic explorers alike – ‘Lethal Exposure’.
As I stood there, coughing and shivering, another of Jeremiah’s promised chickens came home to roost. ‘The Eskimo’s Exit’, that’s what’d been given me. No doubt such a drastic solution to the ‘Clay Problem’ had been arrived at during a round-table conference of the Family. Those present who’d displayed qualms about offing me would’ve been quickly slapped down by the Godmother, Letitia Carlyle. I could almost hear her harsh death sentence as she put out a contract on me. ‘Best he be put down. Best for us all – especially our Rhona. Some mongrels can’t be trained. They spend their lives leaving messes behind them, messes other people have to clean up. But, no more of it – he’s got to go! And having thus spoken she’d no doubt arisen and hurried herself off to her velvet-lined coffin for the sun was already high in the heavens and the rays from it drove her quite batty.
The task of my disposal had obviously fallen upon the Family Champ, Jack Sherman. This would account for the way he’d given the booze big belters and provide the reason for his insistence – despite protests from both Phyllis and myself – to drive me as far as the Briggs. After his brush with the curlytail, instead of panicking, he’d kept his cool. You’ve got to hand it to these money-men, always a step ahead they are, real sharpies the way they can turn a potential disaster into an astounding gain.
A homicide in which the weather, itself, is the murder weapon – it literally took the breath away. And, an important point, the murder was still in progress, my gradual elimination was underway. Right now I was about two parts human to one part cadaver – my feet’n hands were already grave-fodder – and the corpsification of my arms and legs was imminent.
‘The body of a man, later named as Thomas Clay (28), of 37 Scobie Street, Glasgow C5 was found in open country several miles south of the Nat Smollet Estate. The deceased is believed to have been ran over by a snowplough, but the police declined to comment on what part of the victim’s anatomy was affected when the cruel coulter passed.
As a celebration of my own daftness, this cockeyed heroism in fraught circumstance which is a marked characteristic of your glimmerbrain, my stiffening mirth-muscles managed to crank out a pale facsimile of the John Mill’s ‘Tuff Brit Grin’, the original of which is now in the Imperial War Museum. Encouraged, my ice-locked tongue and throat muscles tried for a chuckle but could produce only a threadbare chirruping sound such as you’d expect to hear from a newly-widowed grasshopper. Still, my show of defiant optimism, allied as it was to a windshift which despite its kidney-glazing potential, kept giving me big shoves in the right direction was, for the first time, granting signs that I was making real progress and not merely marking time on the same snowdrift like a helpless cartoon figure trapped in a scenery whirlaround of repeater trees, born-again boulders, and mimetic mountains.
Hey, s’that no a light ower yonner?
Shhh!
Can you no see it, or what?
Block your wordhole. Course I see it.
Well, then?
Don’t want to scare it off, that’s all. Sorta creepin up’n it. You crowd them mirages, give’m your scent, so much as step on one little knuckle of ice – and they are gone, man.
I was starting to feel good and that was real bad. Polarnauts take up whole chunks of their snowographies warning against euphoric moods. Mountaineers too. When outfoxed by the overhang and no way of getting back, you start into whistling, cracking jokes, and waving your knife around, your fellow ropees have every reason to reach for their worry-beads. Deepsea divers refer paradoxically to such untimely mood upswings as ‘Rapture of the Deep’, though right now my main fear was from rupture of the spleen caused by a drop through the ice of this frozen River Styx I was walking. Tagging along at my heels beneath the carapace I keep getting imaginary glimpses of a huge fish, a pike maybe, which just couldn’t wait to get its teeth-bristling jaws wrapped around yours truly. But do I worry? Not a bit of it. If I had lips for it I’d give a little whistle. So what if my elbow was gowping and some rough-handed cove was ramming bales of hot steel wool into my gasbags; I still felt so goddamned good about things, so upbeat and ticketyboo. Shake your heads and mumble doomy forecasts into your frozen beards, you tundra vets – I’ve gone beyond your reach into gladness. Yup, I was that far out of it!
I recall reading a diver’s account of his experience with the ‘Rapture of the Deep’ or as he called it, ‘giggling with the gudgeons’. Having got a kink in his airline or an eel up his asshole, some such techno-letdown, he’d seen through his facemask his entire family, stretching back for many generations, sitting around a table on the seabed having what he chooses to call ‘a sort of Mad Haddock’s Tea Party’. It looked like a real lavish spread and his kinsfolk kept waving to’m, urging him to come and join them. He’d been sorely tempted to do just that when suddenly there’d been revealed to’m amidst the multi-hued, dappling interplay of numinous fishes, the very Meaning of Existence itself. So penetratingly simple had been this Meaning that he’d resisted the alluring come-ons of his family at its seabed celebrations and had fought his way to the surface. Once he’d returned to his own element and they’d got’m into a decompression chamber, amongst the first words spoken by him were the very ones that’d emblazoned themselves across his mind while he’d been ‘giggling with the gudgeons’.
Gentlemen, he’d solemnly intoned, I am privileged to be the custodian of the Meaning of Existence. Please record the following for posterity:
A FISH MAY RIDE A BICYCLE BUT NOT WHILE WEARING TROUSERS!
Thank you.
Hey, man, those lights, they’re getting brighter.
Dummy up. I see’m okay. Play it cool – ignore’m.
But I took another peep at’m just the same. From the mere straw of light I’d been clutching at, the luminous band stretched along the horizon had broadened so that it’d begun to look like a mahogany plank, one strong enough to bear the hope that its very presence signalled the proximity of a townlet or even a village. The wind had dropped by now and the snowfall had lightened to oddly separate cascadings of flakes, like the last sweepings from the now all but empty snowbunkers. Another peep. Aye, the lights endured, pricking to brightness with every slow nearing step. A dog could be heard barking and a raven with one of Noah’s waistcoat buttons caught in its beak fluttered past . . . Okay, quit the exaggeration, I think we’ve got the picture. But just to reinforce the fact that civilisation was close at hand there began to materialise before me an astounding apparition.
Sunday 22nd Dec. 196- (An unexpected PS)
‘A miracle! Out here, in this folkforsaken place – a telephone kiosk! And, what’s more, not a single pane of it was missing, broken, nor even cracked. It was swathed in a tissue of fine snow through which, here’n there, festive patches of ruby paint gleamed. It looked for all the world like a gigantic xmas present stood up on its end. But as is often the case with glamorously wrapped pressies after they’ve finally been opened – disappointment: the kiosk was completely gutted, empty, denuded of apparatus, a ghost in the telecommunication’s network. Nevertheless, it offered proof that humans ha
d once been here and this was emphasised still more by the presence in the kiosk of a pink sports paper and on the damp mucky floor, looking like a flattened slug – a used loveskin.’
I stood wheezing and coughing in the snow-shrouded kiosk, feeding its darkness with flaring, short-lived matches. The sports paper was too sodden to catch fire, my lungs too twitchy to suffer smoke. A helluva thing is existence: a wee splutter of light, that’s all there is to it. You learn to eat; where to shit; what your given name is. You’re made to take a job and to live by the rigours of its working conditions; then, one day, usually when you don’t expect it – they drop a coalmine on your head. Finito.
Maybe those frozen dadpoles down there on the manky floor had gotten lucky did they but know it. An idea for a short story occurred to me, so at least my fictional gland was still secreting: this guy is walking across the Sahara when he hears a phone ringing. Being a Scot he detests this waste of time and energy. Going well off his route he traces the ringing to a British telephone kiosk which stands on its ownsome in a wadi. He enters its broiling interior and lifts the receiver. A Brooklyn voice grinds into his ear: ‘Kaminsky Account: two sawbucks Saloosi, thoid; if bread, dump all, Mighty Fine, de fourth . . .’
My phoneless kiosk, although offering me a modicum of shelter wasn’t a place to hang about in. About as chummy as an Iron Maiden, only this version for its fatal hug would use icicles instead of nails. I wound my sodden scarf about my head again, jerked up my collar, then dropped somebody’s stone hands into my pockets. It looked, after all, as if the kiosk had been a sucker card in a forked deal, a come-on to the clean-out. But I was proved wrong: the Man started to skim me some potent pieces of pasteboard. I picked up on a pair of lamp-posts, a prile of streets, followed by four-of-a-kind in cottages. Soon enough I’d the makings of, if not a town, then a hamlet at least. This could only be the miniopolis of Crabton. Its streets always have this peculiarly empty look about them. Like now, for instance, when the sole pedestrian to be seen was a snow-drenched transient.
I was drawn to a place of sanctuary. On an otherwise snowbliterated board the words ‘Sister of Mercy’ reached out to me. Had they been cleared expressly for me by the hand of St Christopher himself? A kindly-looking nun responded to my urgent knockings. In those time-honoured clichés, hallowed down the centuries, the traveller puts his case, with some necessary updating, of course; a taxi would be preferred to an ass, and a telephone to summons one better than hanging about in a gutter shouting. Following an altogether alien tradition, the good sister told me to clear off then gave me a snoutful of door timbers. A merry xmas to all you holy cockroaches. I don’t envy your lives one bit. I think your God gave you a bum deal walling you up’n that penitentiary for the pious, that sepulchre which whited with snow ‘appears beautiful outward but is within full of dead broads’ bones’. Almost word-perfect. The Reverend Weaver would snip a couple of knots from my sin-thread and Ma Clay would be well pleased, too.
I was lured by a bright light down an avenue which looked like a place where birch and poplar trees came to die. Humans, given that there were some hereabouts, were sticking close to their tepee hearths tonight. Any moment now I expected Ray Bradbury’s chilling robocar to come on powdery white wheels around some corner, to fix me with its probe while from its personless interior a voice would begin to ask very intimate questions. The upshot? I’d be charged with being a stranger – a very serious offence around these parts.
Mundanely enough, the seductive light illuminated a low squat building which had dithered between becoming a pillbox or a Martello tower and done neither. According to its noticeboard which by half-turning its shoulder had managed to preserve some of its identity, it declared itself to be a ‘Home for the Chronically –’ something or other. The Deaf and Chronically Ignorant was my guess to judge by the way those roasting themselves at fires inside ignored my heavy fistings upon their snow-festooned door.
Hurrah! I was picked up by a baker on his way to perform a nightshift in an industrial laundry. (I know, I know. Let it pass – I was in a very bad way!) Its driver talked all the way to the Briggs about budgies. He bred the little buggers. He’d lost ten of them due to the bad weather. When we got to the Briggs he gave me a couple of bridies that looked like retreads. The wispy blue feathers preserved under the crust-glaze was a novel touch. Anyway, I gobbled them down and wished my saviour many happy budgerigars when they came and the best of luck to Stretchy, his prize cock.
I hailed a cab but its driver gave me the slip. The driver of the next one I signalled to gave me the finger. The third driver had almost to be ambushed, and even after I’d cornered him he wouldn’t turn a wheel until he’d seen the colour of my money. Eventually what was left of me arrived in what remained of the Gorbals. By then it was too late to wet my whistle, since Glasgow, that most holy of cities, although it’d liberalised its Sabbath boozing hours a little, still tended to take her pavements in around ten p.m. But even if there’d been time to tie a couple on I wasn’t up to it. No way was I fit to ‘scrum for a rum, or bruise for some booze’ as John Scobie puts it in his ‘Heavy Drinkin’.
I returned to base, coughed my way up every flight of stairs, lurched wearily into my cane. I lighted the fire and got a mugful of scalding Bovril down me while I sat so close to the roaring fire it would’ve looked to any stranger watching like an attempt at do-it-yourself cremation. Eventually I thawed out but it was only sheer discipline that persuaded me to write up my journal.
And then, the unexpected; from out of the blue onto the white I penned:
Letter to an Unpublished Child.
Dear notyet,
Today, take my word for it, you’re already heavier than a deluxe volume of War and Peace, and displaying such a sinuous complexity of purpose as to rival that opus. There, I knew you’d be pleased. Better still, your tests reveal your remarkable inventive vigour, not to mention your verve’n vivacity (Daddy has sent these v’s flying like seabirds to brighten up his craggy prose). It would seem that the passing of your Homo sapiens exam is now a mere formality. Mammy and I are so proud of how you buckled down to your prelimbs. What a thrill the other day when Mammy let me touch a secret spot and I was able to feel the vibrations from that genetic typewriter you pound away at night’n day. An expert on you heroic little terranauts was able by means of a trumpetlike instrument to hear the most promising echoes from your ‘wee blood beater’ as he so drolly called it.
Things this side of the womb are so-so. Yeah, I’ll straightshoot with you, they could be a whole wedge better. But don’t you go bothering your bald wee bonce about anything: Daddy’ll have a nifty wee nest all fixed up for your arrival. February’s such a waste of a month: ‘Snaw’n slush’n the lavvies’ll no flush’, as Mr Scobie puts it, so your advent will be all the more welcomed.
Since you’ve the inside gen you’ll know that Mammy is doing fine although now’n again she gets to feeling a bit clunk. Not to worry, things’ll work out, you’ll see. So, just you away for a wee paddle in your dusky brook and let me do the worryin.
Keep up the good work,
Love, Daddy xxxxx.
33
INTIMATIONS OF DEPARTURE; presentiments of conclusion.
I’m squatting in bog four of Shug Wylie’s scrupulously scrubbed crapper, The Scottish Daily Distress is spread across my chilled thighs. Most of the paper’s prime space has been devoted to the Apollo 8 mission, the purpose of which is to lassoo the moon. A starry-eyed NASA boffin predicts that the USA’ll have men on the moon by this time next year, a feat which will be of no interest whatsoever to John Michael Hallison (19) of Burmola Street, Possilpark, whom I’d last seen imprinted on a slushy pavement, Saturday night, last. Stabbed through the heart, he’d been, ‘a single, fatal thrust’ according to the report. A time-traveller now, the youth had already departed this planet, gone dwindling away on the retrogressive velocities of death, heading for burn-out. To judge from his picture – a smudged teenager on a blurred bike – he’d
already shed twelve or so years; by tomorrow he might well be depicted toothless and tucked up’n his pram.
There was mention also of the Pike conflagration. Nothing much, just a wee cindery patch at the foot of a column to inform the readership that Papa Pike was no more, and that the condition of his son Mr Malcolm Puke (stet that misprint!) was giving cause for concern due to severe burns and the effect of smoke inhalation. Three other men who had been visiting the flat at the time of the fire’s outbreak were released after treatment.
And what of Horace the Hun? Was he reading this selfsame report while praying with every fibre of his stunted, pox-ridden body that the blaze’d been caused by the spontaneous combustion of a visiting hippie whom the forensic folks hoped to identify just as soon as his dust’d settled. The report concluded with the statement that the Pike’s flat’d been completely gutted. My main worry was how complete was complete? A concern which’d acquired sturdy roots and a whole set of poisonous leaves had implanted itself in my mind, so much so that all my other worries – there seemed to be droves of them – wilted in its sinister shade. Pike, and his trio of Proddy goons might’ve obtained my name’n address. If so then it was down to yon pessimistic pair, Pirandello and Dylan. How come? Simple. Instead of remailing the record company’s payments reminder on the Dylan discs, I’d used it as a bookmark for the Pirandello paperback. This book I’d dumped on the table when I’d been forced to jettison the contents of my pockets for their wager. In the hasty retrieval of my personal stuff (and a moderate uplift of some banknotes of varying denominations), I must’ve overlooked the paperback. Of course, if ‘completely gutted’ meant just that, then I’d nothing to worry about. But if the Pirandello biography had been salvaged, together with its telltale letter, then a hard rain was gonna fall on yours truly.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 28
