Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘What you gettin her – a pyramid?’

  Through in the op-box the phone buzzed.

  ‘That’ll be Burnett to say your shroud’s ready.’

  With anxious mutterings Lucas bustled from the spool-room into the op-box, or as Becky McQuade had called it, the projection booth, a fancy handle for a cupboard that generated fog with a sound-track. I got down from the spool-safe and went out onto the small balcony. Laughably, this enclosed area was referred to as the ‘Sun Roof’ though my abiding memory of it’ll always be of raindubs and gullshit. Today though it was decked out with a fleecy white rug Mary’d been up all night stitching for her son’s approaching birthday. I tightened my scarf and jerked up my collar. Parky up here it was. I could’ve done with a fag but resisted the notion. My chest, as a reward for my self-sacrifice immediately tried to evict both lungs simultaneously. Whether it was my coughing or a coming thaw I don’t know but an icicle, the largest of a daggerlike bunch suspended from the guttering, cracked clean across and fell with a quick bright flash. The balcony on a day like this wasn’t a place to linger for it seemed only to be shored up by the flimsy fire-escape which plunged in a series of flights down the Planet’s gale-scarred southern wall.

  Cold though I was I was well compensated for my gooseflesh by a panoramic view of the Lost Barony of Gorbals. What set the red nerves twitching was the utter contempt for the working classes which was evident no matter where the glance fell. Having so cursorily dismantled the community’s heart, that sooty reciprocating engine, admittedly, an antique, clapped-out affair, but one, that’d been nevertheless capable of generating amazing funds of human warmth, they’d bundled it off into the asylum of history with all the furtive shame of a family of hypocrites dumping Granny in Crackpot Castle.

  Much imbued by the so-called merits of functionalism the planners and architects had taken wardrobes and tombstones to be their thematic design models, and had set to work with that civic slapdashery which erecting homes for the pre-Holocaust working classes tends to invoke. Surely, it was with such a sense of transience that Basil Spence had sat down to fashion yon concrete spike he’d driven into the Gorbals’ vitals. Paddy Cullen, on a visit to his Aunt Terry who existed in Spence’s desolation of corridors, cramped apartments, lonely womenfolk, and trapped weans, tells of the day he’d been confronted, when the lift doors had opened, by a funeral party: ‘Aye,’ says Paddy, ‘there he was, him wae the pine jaicket on, staunin up, same as the mourners, though whether he was on his feet or his heid, who’s tae know?’ The lift you see wasn’t big enough to take a six-feet’n-over stiff; there was no way that the coffin could be laid out horizontally as is dignified and proper.

  I stood there, mentally re-erecting the Gorbals of old, running my hands so to speak through the pile of grey jigsaw pieces which depicted fragments of lost streets, shops, and buildings, interlocking a well-known corner with a familiar lamp-post, plonking a lost cinema (the Paragon of Cumberland Street) into the wrong locus – lla-llb Commercial Road, which was where the Wellington Palace had stood, or as it was more popularly known, the B’S. Wee Tam Briggs, the Salty Dog’s Memory Man, can reel off the names of every shop in Rutherglen Road from Queensferry Street to Crown Street, as they were in the fifties. His powers of recall are staggering. One night in the Dog when he was dumbfounding some punters by naming the entire Blantyre Vics Squad from yonks back, the door was suddenly flung open and in storms wee Sadie Briggs, his struggle’n strife, with a steaming hot plate of tatties’n mince in her hand. This she smacks down on the table in front of Briggs, then, hands on hips bawls: ‘There, yar, Memory Man, you can have it here – seeing’s you’ve forgotten the fuck’n road hame!’ Quite unabashed, Briggs had forked some mince into his gub, then with a nod of approval had said: ‘I cannae mind who you are, missus, but, I’m telling ye – yer mince is champion.’

  In the ‘fastest gun’ tradition, Briggs was regularly challenged by punters who’d heard of his amazing powers of recall. He was shit-hot on sporting questions, and, to date, I’ve yet to see’m being outfoxed. One night this stranger turned up’n the Dog – he was a dapper-looking, clean-shaven guy, so he must’ve been from Rutherglen. Patiently, he waited his turn to have a go at Briggs, and soon enough it came. ‘Right,’ says the stranger, ‘what’s this from: “Quinquereme of Nineveh, from distant Ophir, rowing home to haven from sunny Palestine, with a cargo of –”’

  ‘Here,’ says a baffled-looking Briggs, ‘is this in fuck’n code or what?’

  The stranger was smirking.

  ‘Who the hell’s this Quinky-whatsit?’ a bystander mumbled.

  ‘Must be wan o’ they Arab teams,’ another suggested. ‘Y’know, sandshoe shufflers.’

  When it emerged that the stranger had been wasting The Memory Man’s valuable neurons on poetry of all things, he was soon sailing through the isthmus of the saloon door and, no doubt, went chugging through the channels of the mad March Streets ruffled and upset and vowing never again to show face in any of the Gorbals’ cultureless watering-holes.

  I’d hoped Paddy Cullen would’ve come down from the attic by now. I was a bit worried about’m. It was a dodgy place to be, especially with a hangover and I’d never known a Monday when Paddy wasn’t half-jaked from the night before. Not that I, sober as a Presbyterian goldfish, and about as fit as a legless spider was into traipsing around those catwalks either. Firstly, it involved having to climb something that looked more like a metaphor for rust than an iron ladder. Despite my nagging wing, I somehow managed to heave myself up the thing: it wouldn’t do to supply the Thought Police with the info that I was shit-scared of heights – such phobias are the very ones they wind you up with in Room 101.

  The ladder rose to another balcony which concealed the Planet’s asshole – in other words, its extractor-fan chamber. From here the fleapit discharged eye-watering farts redolent of ciggy smoke, orange peel, cheap wine, and the stinks of the fleshpacks. Beyond the bulk of the extractor chamber was a flimsy door which bore a clumsily-painted warning in red letters: DANGER – KEEP TO CATWALKS AT ALL TIMES! This was the ‘Doorway to Heaven’, so-called, of course, because of O’Toole’s ceiling paintings of angels, stars and planets.

  The attic definitely gave me the willies; it was a place to be avoided. I’d the same aversion for it as, I suppose, uncaught murderers used to have for trapdoors.

  The lights, such as they were (dim bulbs sown amongst the rafters and stanchions), revealed the dusty spread of the wooden planked catwalks which radiated in lateral offshoots from the central catwalk, the only one I’d risk walking along because I’d been assured that it rested on a stout steel girder that ran the length of the auditorium. As far as the other catwalks were concerned, they seemed to me to be hanging out there on a wing and a prayer, supported by habit and kippered angels. If stepping onto these catwalks was dodgy then stepping off them was suicidal. One false step and you were away for oil – straight through the ceiling’s thin membrane to a long screaming fall that’d explode you like a bag of ripe tomatoes on the hard reef of the stall seats.

  Wee Lucas tells a good story about the first time he’d been taken on a conducted tour of the attic by the then chief projectionist, Billy Bain, so that he’d know the location of safety-lamps. Every minute or so Bain stopped to repeat his dire warning: ‘Never, never, step off the catwalk, not for any reason. You’ve got to keep your wits about you up here.’ So saying, he’d planted his size tens on a sheet of asbestos and plunged clean through the roof as far as his hips before he’d frantically grabbed at a catwalk to save himself. ‘S-see what I mean,’ he’d panted, his face ashen, ‘that’s how easy it is!’

  As my eyes adjusted to the attic’s dimness their lengthening vision saw that something was seriously amiss. ‘Paddy!’ I shouted. ‘What’s wrang wae ye?’ Before my phobia could stop me I was on the main catwalk and running. Apart from scaring the shit from a pigeon (a dusty percussion of wings), my shouts were having no effect at all on the boilersuited
Cullen who lay prone on a skinny catwalk far out above the stalls, face down, his head on his arms, motionless. The powerful flashlight at his side flung a raw beam of light amongst the rafters and some tools lay scattered around him. Normally, the very thought of chancing my weight on one of these lateral struts would’ve been enough to turn my bowels to slush, but here I was, on all fours now, my asshole, I admit, semaphoring maydays, crawling along that creaking spar until I was within reaching distance of Cullen.

  Don’t touch! My brain, panicking over the liberties already taken with its welfare, warned me just in time. Electrocution! Paddy might’ve touched a bare wire and become part of the circuitry. What to do? The speckled memory of an old safety poster reassembled itself . . . Do not touch victim . . . Switch off current . . . Lever victim from live source with a broom handle . . . Artificial respiration . . . Call an ambulance . . . Fucksake, I hope the ambulance brings a broom handle! Power source? Hadn’t the foggiest . . . As I crouched there, not knowing what the hell to do or not to do, Cullen raised his head and with a chipper-looking expression on his face gave me a big grin. It was a face I would dearly’ve loved to’ve slammed my fist into, non-stop, for about a fortnight.

  ‘You bastard, Paddy!’

  He went on grinning as he saw me and my fury shrivelling to that shameful and abject sight – a man in the grip of his phobia, that withering moment when his prime fear sinks its mandibles into his terror-ducts, and he immediately begins to spurt infantilism. Nailed to that catwalk, fully alive to my plight, like a somnambulist peering through the fine mist of a nightmare to find himself on his own high window ledge, I could feel all that space beneath me, the gravitational drag of the void. I couldn’t move yet inside me there heaved this great bore-tide of dread, rushing up my arteries, undoing dams, gulping bridges and spitting out anchors as it went, an unstoppable torrent of funk. All those years of training that’d been invested in me were gone in an instant, swept aside; honour, manliness, bravery, self-respect, all were carried off like twigs and me with’m heading for the cataract, and beyond it the cradle: any second now I’d be puking and mewling.

  The catwalk seemed to be twisting and buckling under our combined weight, it was shrivelling to the narrowness of a rope which strand by strand began to undo itself . . . Cullen saved me. He did so by simply ignoring my presence. Reaching into his pocket he took some coins from his pocket, then he pressed an eye to one of the holes let into the ceiling to accommodate a safety lamp. Chuckling, he raised his head then began to feed coins through the orifice; after each deposit he’d squint through the hole to mark the coin’s descent into the auditorium. The target for this wacky mischief would probably be the deaf Emily Dodds. I could picture her, maggot-sized from this height – the hoovering of the stalls suspended – her mouth gaping as the pennies from Heaven fell silently around her.

  ‘You’re a complete bastard, Paddy,’ I told’m again. Unabashed he dug into his pocket for more coins. He paid scant, if any, attention to my humiliating exit when, like a half-crushed insect retreating over bits of itself: a feeler, a cracked thorax plate, the torn jelly of an eye, a split wing, and the thin pitiful leg which quivered with the trauma of separation, I followed my tweaking asshole back to the main catwalk.

  35

  THE NAME BRANNIGAN had been branded on a hardboard offcut by – judging from the bolloxed lettering – an illiterate joker with a blunt poker. This nameplate had in turn been crucified on a door, the portal of which was at this moment occupied by a gargoyle with peroxide-singed hair and a faceful of fourteenth-century pockmarks. Looking deeply suspicious she eyed up’n down the coughing stranger who’d arrived on her mucky doorstep; it took’r some time to admit that aye, this was the home of Pat Mooney, her father.

  ‘Is he in, then?’

  ‘Aye, the jile I hope, or better still – the Clyde! What? Naw I don’t know where he is. Try the barber shop doon in Scob – Oh ye have, have ye? Well, fuckt if I know where’ll be.’

  Her voice boomed on the tight landing with its name-infested walls and cratered plasterwork. Behind me a door creaked. Glancing over my shoulder I saw an old crone peeping at us. Mooney’s daughter – what a spine-melting glare she had – bawled: ‘What’s the matter, you nosey auld bastard? Has your deefy dried up again? I’ll try’n shout a wee bit louder fur you –’

  The woman’s head, like that of a startled tortoise, was quickly withdrawn into the cracked shell of her kitchen.

  ‘He’s no been back since Saturday, you say?’

  ‘Naw, he’s no. And we’ll no be hinging oot flags for’m when he does get back.’ She wagged her ferocious head, ‘Anyway – what’s it to you?’

  I explained about her father collecting my winnings.

  ‘S’that a fact, noo? Ran aff wae your money did he?’ She nodded. ‘Nae wunner his belly never brought’m back.’ Judging from the stench coming from the kitchen’s greasy innards Skunk Maryland was the dish-of-the-day. A voice, possibly that of Brannigan himself, growled something deep and untranslatable from the interior darkness. But she seemed to get the gist of it all right. ‘Fuck you’n a draught!’ she shouted over her shoulder, then she scratched vigorously at her scalp with the spud peeler she happened to be holding (hundreds dead – many injured!): ‘How much, then?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Much does he owe you?’

  When I told her she pointed the peeler at me like a dagger. ‘And what were you thinkin of doing aboot it? Get the polis, maybe. Well, I’m no stoppin ye. Away and get’m. Go on. They know the road well enough. I’m past shame wae that auld midden. He’ll no set foot in here again. Tell’m that if you find’m.’

  When I said that I’d no intention of going to the fuzz she about hit the roof. ‘Well, don’t think you’ll get a haun-oot here. Enough fingers in ma purse as it is. Aye’n I don’t care if you let the whole bloody world know about it. D’you hear me?’

  ‘Does he have any other relations?’ I asked.

  She nodded. ‘Aye, there’s his brother, Sammy. He’s the brains of the family.’

  ‘Where’ll I find’m?’

  ‘Where? I’ll tell you where – in a padded cell doon’n Carstairs that’s where!’

  I’ll say this for Mooney’s daughter – when she shuts a door, boy, does she shut it! As I trudged the Oatlands slush I kept checking my lugholes for signs of bleeding.

  36

  THIS BLOKE PLATO – a right flannel merchant, eh?

  Says he: What you see’s not really there. No, it’s only a mock-up of something that’s always there, always shall be there though you’ll never lay eyes on it because it’s visible only in the ideal world (Disney Exist), the location of which is being kept under tight philosophical wraps. He claims, Mr Broadbrow does, that his teacher, an Athenian windbag called Socrates, peddled this baloney to a bunch of layabouts with names like sheep diseases. These drones (and, boy, could they drone!) were supposed to be muckers of Socrates though a fair wheen of them had created an ideal vacuum when the hemlock order arrived.

  Now there’s small use in saying that Socrates’s theory regarding ideal essence refers in the main to geometrical figures – circles, squares, triangles, and so on; once you admit even the tiniest of circles there’s no way that you can logically reject the other stuff – stuff, let’s say, like yon drip accruing at the tip of the old dosser’s neb as he stands out there in the sleet watching me as I junket on eggrolls and coffee. The way I figure it, that transient snotdrop must, according to the bane of Xanthippe’s life, have its ideal counterpart, and the same goes for the fart released with such gusto by a workman at a nearby table, the potency of which so affronts his mates that admidst exclamations of disgust they flap newspapers under their noses. ‘At least,’ says the wind-breaker, ‘mines don’t sneak out in their slippers . . .’ Now, let’s ask ourselves the prime question: was that forthright emission until the moment of its release stored in a kind of ideal fart-vault? And here’s a rasper – do ideal farts, the authent
ic ones upon which our feeble zephyrs are modelled, smell more genuine?

  A snackbar like the Maggot (real name, The Magnet, though its drawing power has long since faded) tends to drive its clientele into philosophical reveries. As they sit at one of its flayed tables in the homely reek of the place they find themselves addressing the Big Questions: where have I come from? why am I here? and if I eat this accident on my plate shall I continue to be here? The Maggot is a place much frequented by gastrophobes and gluttons, folks who have a down on their snackpipes and continually bombard them with ‘Suicide Sams’, a Maggot special which timebombs the system and detonates an hour or so after the consumer has left the eaterie, otherwise you wouldn’t get near a table for stiffs.

  Me? Why was I in the Maggot? Well, I’d dropped in to brood really. My Kemsley House astrologer has recommended me to find a seat somewhere and to give myself a right good brooding over. Astrologically speaking I’m in a helluva mess: Saturn, it seems, has broken into my House and shat’n the bread-bin. It was therefore the recommendation of my press spey-wifie that for the time being I should keep my head down and remain very very still. This advice I didn’t dig. As a fatalist I reckon if your name’s on an incoming shell, then you can bob’n weave like the Road Runner, but come the detonation you’ll still find yourself fifty or so yards from your blitzed asshole.

  Anyway, the breakfast and brooding biz gave me a chance to get things into perspective. My lost winnings, for instance were a contradiction in terms – if they were lost then they were no longer winnings. Just a fog of words. The so-called actual substance was nowhere to be found in the known universe. They just might exist in Plato’s ideal world but, as we know, it doesn’t have much of a bus service. It’s also pertinent to consider that Mooney, himself, no longer exists: like Talky Sloan, he could’ve been boarded by a bus while perambulating with an incandescent liver across some lethal street. Other possibilities? He might’ve got board and lodgings in one of the City’s numerous iron hotels where tiled walls and barred windows are uniform features. Then again, might it not be that a conspiracy was afoot to conceal from me the whereabouts of Mooney? Yon virago on the doorstep could’ve been having me on; no sooner had I coughed off than she’d skipped back to the bedroom to press a cooling tenner to her father’s fevered brow.