Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  Harry Harrison, hirpling past our table, enroute for the lavvy, paused to stare at Cullen. ‘Here,’ he asked, ‘did I see you in a diver’s suit, Saturday night?’

  ‘Colour was it?’ Paddy blandly enquired.

  ‘Eh, a kinda shitty colour.’

  Cullen shook his head. ‘Naw, couldnae’ve been me – mines is a salmon pink wae polkadots.’

  ‘A good match for your arse then,’ Harrison said as he thumped off on his walking stick.

  McQuade still playing toss’n catch with his keys, said: ‘Cannae hang about too long. I think I’ll take a wee scout around.’ He fingered his moustache. ‘I’ll probably get lost. On the road here I’d to ask an auld joker for directions to Scobie Street. He told me it was a gonner. Taken away on the back of a lorry, he said.’

  Cullen sighed. ‘Ach, there’re still a few shovelsfy left yet, so there is.’

  ‘You’d think the place’d been bombed.’

  Cullen shook his head. ‘Naw, naw, yon’s just a staun-in Gorbals you’re seeing oot there. The real wan’s away getting fixed. Be back any day noo – mark my words.’

  The man in black hadn’t a clue: crossword completed, he discarded the newspaper then did a surprising thing – from his briefcase he took out a creased-looking paperback of J.W.Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. Opening the book where the purple tongue of a bus ticket poked out, he smoothed the pages then fell to avidly reading a text which had once thrilled me to my existential core. A time-convict, then as now, I’d been tramping the universal round, doing my porridge, when Mr Dunne had slipped me this pass-key. Unfortunately, it hadn’t quite fitted any lock of significance but maybe a little more patient philosophical filing would’ve done the trick . . . Strange it was though to see it again, that quirky little word machine in which its pilot, a level-headed, aeronautical engineer, had taken off on a night flight, plotting his course from the sober star graphs of science. But it was a flight that was to end in disaster with the far from practical aviator looping the loop before he fell in a mad rush of angels’ wings, proclaiming in the inflated manner of some hoary patriarch as he plunged to the unconvinced earth that ‘Nothing Dies! Nothing Dies!’ Aye, he might’ve been right about things but not people – they certainly snuffed it: Ma Clay – cancer; Da Clay – cancer; Talky Sloan – evisceration; John Hallison – knifing; Old Pike – suffocation.

  McQuade got to his feet. ‘I’ll have a quick spin aboot, then. But if I don’t catch up with’m tell’m to give me a bell at the garage. Okay?’

  ‘I’ll come with you if you want,’ I volunteered. ‘Four eyes’re better’n two.’

  McQuade nodded. It was hard to figure whether he was pleased or not. ‘Sure, if you want to. But finish your pint first.’

  Cullen grinned. ‘Tam’s never had any problems in that department.’

  As I gulped my lager I glanced at the stranger at the adjacent table. He looked engrossed in Dunne’s time-twister, yet I got the impression that this was a pose, that, in a happy phrase that tumbled from young Jason’s lips when he was describing a sneaky eavesdropper, ‘He was watching me with his ears.’ Such was my familiarity with Dunne’s book that I could near enough tell by the thickness of the still-to-be-read portion where he was at – somewhere in the region of the Fallacy of the Phoney Pencil, I guessed.

  In order to bring a homely cast to this theory the author chose a humble pencil to represent our dynamic 3-D Universe; while the 2-D one, shorn of the dimension of height, was to be thought of as being a gossamer-thin piece of paper, spectral stationery so fine that it is convenient to say of it that it has no thickness at all. Yet, it is into this very non-thickness that the reader is to imagine himself compressed.

  A steamrollered shadow of himself the reader is now asked to visualise the pencil passing through the surface of the ghostly sheet of paper, in other words, the 2-D being pierced by the 3-D universe. What results from this is an analogy of growth as we know it here in our own cosmic backyard. Since the 2-D observer is unable to see the pencil in its entirety, his/her knowledge of it being restricted to a changing cross section of it (the smoke machine should be vigorously cranked here!) then, as the pencil penetrates the paper, first of all there will be seen a particle of graphite which the further the pencil is pushed through will accrue other particles and gradually assume the shape of a small leaden disc around which a larger wooden disc will form.

  It’s at this point that Mr Dunne pulls on his seven league boots and strides across the puddle-like oceans to search for Disney Exist. ‘What if,’ says Mr D., ‘just as the pencil penetrates the paper, our 3-D universe is penetrated by the 4-D one of Time?’ A fascinating question if the whole theory hadn’t been completely fraudulent from the outset, the sneaking of an entire dimension through the custom post of logic. ‘Man’s still the dupe of Time’n Tide – the woman’s brolly’s in the Clyde.’

  I finished my pint and got to my feet. The man in black also bestirred himself for what looked like imminent departure. He abandoned the newspaper, but carefully inserted the purple ticket into his book: you never know, maybe ticket inspectors board Time Machines with the same suspicious frequency as they do that Rarely-on-Time machine, the Corporation Casdemilk-bound No 37.

  38

  Stop Press

  Matthew Lucas of

  Caledonia Road,

  Hutchestown,

  Glasgow, struck

  down and injured

  by a Bubble Car

  in Rutherglen Rd.,

  Oatlands, Glasgow.

  Condition described

  as ‘comfortable’.

  THE ALMOST BIBLICAL simplicity of hot-lead prose, the salient facts only, the bones of the matter – fractures all over the shop, including a hairline one in the skull’s occipital region. ‘The patient was almost certainly saved by his zipless zoot suit,’ said a genial surgeon. Tomorrow the media would flesh out the story, develop the human interest angles, which, since the mishap involved a bubble car and a mobile ‘cadaver’ would, automatically, invite a wacky seasonal treatment. Let’s admit it, wouldn’t most of us want to scurry into a corner for a yodel if we heard that someone – even our best pal – had gotten his butt dented by a bubble car?

  ‘It’s a terrible business,’ sighed Burnett, not for the first time that afternoon, ‘terrible . . .’

  As our cab came down the Bell o’ the Brae and crossed into High Street at its Duke Street/George Street intersection I wondered if by ‘terrible’ Burnett was thinking of Matt’s splintered anatomy or was deliberating more on the possibility of being sued, a threat Mildred Lucas, Matt’s wife, had shrieked at him in the hospital waiting-room, although, admittedly, she’d been up to high-doh, at the time. Then, of course, yon big police sergeant hadn’t helped Burnett’s nerves any either when he muttered something about a bye-law infringement. It’d be typical of the city of St Bungle to be able to flourish some mildewed document, a Dark Age enactment which perversely remained in statute. A constraint on the citizenry from the blasphemous use of shrouds for any other purpose than ‘the decent claithing of the deid . . .’

  Halfway down High Street we got pinned by a red, which gave us a cabseat view of a pavement squabble that was attracting a sizeable crowd. A wee man and an even tinier woman were wrestling for possession of a nearly bald xmas tree. A custodial dispute, possibly: ‘I admit, your Worship, to having committed indecent acts with a randy rowan, and that once I had a knee-trembler with a gallus wee aspen, but that was back in the days when I was still sowing my wild oaks. I’ve since married and put down roots. I’m fully confident that I can provide the spruce in question with a good home . . .’

  What a city was Glasgow! It was really more into vaudeville than it was into violence, a fact seldom appreciated. For instance, while waiting for the ambulance to come, as wee Matt lay groaning on the slushy pavement with authentic slow-welling bloodstains creeping out amongst the spurious red-ink ones, a pair of fat wifies in the Gossip and Grumbles mould had sto
pped to do a bit of rubbernecking.

  ‘My, would you look at that, Senga!’ says one to the other. ‘They’ve got’m wrapped in bandages already. By jings, that was quick, was it no?’

  ‘It’s a mummy, missus,’ a wee boy tells her.

  ‘D’you hear that, Lizzie?’ says her pal. ‘It’s this poor wee laddies mammy, so it is. S’that no a shame?’

  As our cab took the green, the xmas-tree struggle continued to its pine-spilling conclusion. My bread was on the woman but I’d never know the outcome. Never mind, around the next corner, or the one after, there’d be yet another pavement pantomime. And I was proved right, for as the taxi sloshed through the slushpuddles at Glasgow Cross, to be seen fleeing from the Saltmarket into Argyle Street dressed in nothing but his Y’s was this beefy looking guy. Hot trottering behind him came a couple of oinks, their strides long and casual, as if to say: ‘Don’t worry folks, we’ll nab’m in our own good time . . .’

  ‘Terrible,’ said old Burnett once more. Probably, he was brooding on the prospect of having Paddy Cullen and Archie Killoch working in tandem in the Planet’s op-box, an arrangement that was as sensible as hiring Burke’n Hare as mortuary attendants. Not that Burnett had much choice: a fully subscribed member of the show-must-go-on brigade, he’d phoned off a priority telegram to Killoch, inviting him to report for duty at the Planet this very evening. Cullen, himself – I beg your pardon, chief projectionist Cullen, as yet ignorant of the extra stripe sewn by Fate onto his sleeve, would on this bookieless afternoon be at home sat bolt upright on the sofa giving it the big zeez after a liquid lunch of a double-double whisky and a couple of stout screwtops which was his customary chaser after his session in the Dog, of course.

  Bewigged with snow, a stream of cars with searching almond headlights whisked past the High Court, carrying our cab onto the Albert Bridge from where a brolly was to be seen soaring into the darkness – a festive falcon carrying aloft the warmth of a woman’s hand and maybe just a whiff of her perfume. She stood there by the bridge’s snowy parapet, her hand still held in the air as if she entertained the hope that the traffic stream would relent and be persuaded to retreat ten seconds or so. Why not? What’re a measly ten seconds? Let’s make an xmas pressy of them to her. How rewarding to see that flyaway falcon flapping back, its onxy claw seeking lodgement once more on the familiarity of her gloved hand. In the flux world of Mr Dunne such anachronisms are ten-a-penny.

  ‘Come up to my office for a few ticks, if you don’t mind, Thomas,’ Burnett said to me after he’d paid off the cab and we were standing beneath the Planet’s ice-fanged canopy watching the wind making cones of light with the snow before dashing them to smithereens on the rutted street. As we climbed the frigid stairs up to the lounge somewhere in the dark of the auditorium an object fell.

  ‘That’ll be another star falling from heaven,’ Burnett said, as if the possibility of further loosening stars falling on a potential client’s head was of little immediate concern. ‘I asked Patrick to check them out this morning too,’ Burnett said as he searched his pocket for the office keys. A fascinating disclosure told quite matter-of-factly, changed my image of the artist O’Toole drastically. Gone for all time was the picture I’d conceived of him working heroically from the platform of perilous trestles, lying on his back, sweat gushing from every pore, and his muscles racked with pain as his brush dipped and tripped, bringing angels and planets to birth on the drab inner lid of the cinema’s ceiling. No, none of that – the painting in its entirety had been done on the deck on two-yard square sections of audiotex, a porous, lightweight material designed to retain heat and assist acoustics. O’Toole, having painted a section, would simply haul it by rope ceilingwards and bolt it into position. It was all a matter of keeping the sections in their proper sequence – a sort of hanging-by-numbers, really.

  As we padded along the lounge carpet the depressing stink of finito troubled my nostrils again. Arthritic creakings abounded everywhere as the SS Planet struggled the last league or so to Demolition, its last port of call. The wind was trying to pre-empt the Sledgehammer as it clouted the northern wall with mighty scudding blows. Burnett’s attempts to keep this old wreck afloat was an affectation. Who’d really miss it? Its employees, maybe, though the sums they scraped from the cinema’s near-empty coffers were paltry in the extreme. Maybe wee Emily Dodds, the cleaner, had convinced herself by now that the mysterious coin shower this morning had been from the angels, paying some of her overdue back money. No way could she possibly imagine the source to’ve been a demon smirking at her through a hole in Heaven’s floor.

  Burnett’s office was a damp wee hole. Its desk was littered with papers, receipts, invoices, cups and strips of mummy wrapping. Distributors’ publicity material also took up a good part of its space – racy synopses of offered attractions: Terror From The Tomb – a mummy stalks the street of a city, a nemesis from the Necropolis, sworn to wreak vengeance on those who have trashed its kingdom . . . And, for your future enjoyment: Sei Personaggi In Cerca D’Autore – an Italian tragi-comedy (with English subtitles). On sagging shelves bundles of trade magazines gathered dust. These publications contained photos of sleek grey projectors which starkly underlined the antiquity of the crummy pair of lanterns upstairs in the op-box and through which all movies were to be seen ‘as through a glass darkly’.

  On Burnett’s say-so, I plugged in his electric fire. As I was doing so I noticed three sheets of paper, interleaved with carbons, hanging skew-whiff from Madge Dawkins’ typewriter. The pages bore a dramatic, though unfinished message: ‘I CAN’T GO ON. THE LONELINESS IS TOO MUCH. I . . .’ The sentence seemed to’ve been stopped in its typewritten tracks by a side-fisted blow on the keys which had produced a manic cluster of letters, figures, and punctuation marks – in much the same way as foul language is sometimes rendered in cartoon captions. The inky bruise seemed to be a warning, the mark left by stoked-up despair. Its hidden message was ‘One of these days I’m going to tear a hole in this paper globe and jump through!’ Maybe. But it’s hard to believe a would-be suicide who writes her farewell note in triplicate.

  Wheezily, Burnett fought his way into his chair. Still wearing his hat and topcoat he sat there frowning darkly. From the table he took up a scrap of mummy-cloth. ‘Poor Matt,’ he murmured. ‘What a wretched thing to happen.’

  Seated across from him in Madge’s seat, I nodded. As I thought about Matt trapped inside his hardening shell, Old Claustro, another of my phobias, began to twitch its feelers and I hastily shut down on the empathising. Sure, I felt sorry for Lucas, yet, I have to admit it – there was a schoolboyish urge to give way to sniggers tickling around my mirth circuits. Guilt-edged concern? Aye, the nasty taste laughing at sick jokes leaves in your mouth.

  ‘What’s this I’ve been hearing about you getting mugged?’ I asked’m.

  He waved a dismissive hand. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Got your furry hat snaffled – s’that right?’

  He nodded, testily.

  ‘D’you get a gander at’m?’

  ‘If by that you mean – did I see my assailant’s face, the answer is no.’

  ‘How no?’

  ‘Because he wore a mask.’

  ‘A nylon stocking, eh?’

  ‘No, a death mask. One of those cheap Halloween things.’

  ‘Did you go to the oinks? I mean, did you inform the polis?’

  He shook his head: ‘Scarcely worth the bother.’

  ‘Just the same you should –’

  ‘I take it as a sign,’ he began, then a soft cough rolled a phlegmball into his throat and clotted the sentence. He cleared it. ‘I take it to be a sign that my time’s about up. It could scarcely be plainer, could it – Death pinching your crown in broad daylight?’ The scrap of cloth between his hands gave a weak snap-snapping sound as he jerked at it, then he let it fall limply to the desk. He became a little brisker but still hadn’t shrugged off his despondency. ‘Mrs Lucas was upset
, wasn’t she?’

  Upset? That just had to be the nuttiest question since the cub reporter asked the newly-widowed Mrs Lincoln if, despite what’d happened to Abe, had she enjoyed what she’d seen of the play? Of course Mrs Lucas’d been upset. Who could blame’r? One minute she’s working away there in the wee draper’s shop selling nylons and knickers, the next she’s being told that her husband while traipsing around in a Cairo onepiece had been struck down and all but dismantled by a speeding bubble car.

  ‘Well,’ Burnett sighed, ‘at least we can learn from it.’

  Sure we could. I’d always keep in mind from now on the hazards which attend the wearing of pyramid tomb-togs while walking abroad in thoroughfares that’r a-buzz with Clockwork Oranges. Those auto-bubble bams, mad they were. Once their go-needles quivered on the quarter-ton they lost all social control and wanted to speed-whip every damned thing on wheels.

  ‘It’s never too late to learn,’ Burnett informed me. Learn to do what? Drive a bubble car? Take up embroidery? Parachute from a submarine? What was the old duffer on about? Sliding open the desk drawer to his left, Burnett brought out a three-quarter-filled whisky bottle and a couple of tumblers. He unstoppered the bottle and jolted heavy wallops of whisky into each glass. He shoved my drink across the desk to me. After I’d responded to his mumbled toast I took a slug of the neat spirits then lowered my glass. The expected salvo of coughing did not erupt; there were only a few isolated bronchial barks. My lungs had either settled down or were dead. Smashing stuff this whisky. Maybe I should rub some on my elbow.

  ‘You’ll be feeling as ashamed as me, I suppose.’

  I stared across at Burnett. ‘Ashamed?’

  ‘Well, guilty, then?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Medical incompetence, Thomas, that’s what – first-aid illiteracy. Makes me blush just to think of it, both of us standing there, about as useful as a lecture to a drowning man.’ He shook his head. ‘I can still see poor Matthew, lying there like a bag of squashed beetroots.’ He sipped some more whisky. ‘It should be taught in every school in the land.’ He meant ‘first-aid’, not the art of drinking whisky (thirst-aid!). I nodded. He was right of course. Up in the attic with Cullen this morning, if it’d been a genuine emergency then by now the boyo would’ve been a charred log in the civic icebox.