by George Friel
‘A glass and a pint!’ O’Donnell repeated in alarm, his Irish eyes reproachful. ‘Do ye think I’ve been robbin’ a bank? Ye’ll have a half and a half-pint and like it.’
They stood in reverent silence till they were served.
‘Funny you saying robbing a bank,’ said O’Neill. ‘I was just reading in the paper there coming in on the bus. See the Colonel’s deid.’
‘Oh aye, the Colonel, aye, so he’s deid, is he,’ said O’Donnell. Not until he had put a little water in the whiskies did he try to understand what they were talking about. He frowned. ‘How do ye mean, the Colonel?’
‘The Colonel I mean,’ said O’Neill. ‘Him they got for the Anderston bank robbery. He’s deid.’
‘Oh, I see, God rest his soul,’ said O’Donnell with routine sorrow in his flat voice.
‘The paper was saying he died in jail,’ said O’Neill. ‘Well, no’ in the jail exactly, it was in the infirmary, but he was still in jail of course because it was eight years he got.’
‘Funny,’ said O’Donnell. ‘That other bloke they got for the Ibrox bank robbery, he died in jail last month as well.’
‘Aye, it makes ye think,’ said O’Neill. ‘He was a Canadian.’
‘No, he was an Australian,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Or his pal was an Australian or wan o’ them was an Australian but no’ a Canadian.’
‘No, he was a Canadian all right,’ said O’Neill.
‘No, an Australian,’ said O’Donnell, finishing his whisky and elevating his beer.
‘Ach, ye’re thinking o’ the Ibrox bank,’ said O’Neill. ‘That was the Major, no’ the Colonel. The monocled Major they called him. ‘He was an Australian but it was his pal that died no’ him. But the Colonel was a Canadian so he was, it was the Major was an Australian.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ O’Donnell complained. ‘He was an Australian, him or his mate. Wan o’ them.’
‘Funny how these blokes come to Glasgow,’ said O’Neill. He shook the dregs of his whisky glass into his beer.
‘Ach, there’s a lot o’ folks come to Glasgow for the country roon aboot,’ said O’Donnell. ‘They’ve heard o’ the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.’
‘It’s no’ the banks o’ Loch Lomond they fellows came for,’ O’Neill retorted, pouting over the half-pint he was raising to his lips. He sipped and went on. ‘It’s the Royal Bank and the Clydesdale Bank and the Commercial Bank and the Bank of Scotland and the British Linen Bank, that’s what they came for. Ye know, there’s been a wheen o’ bank robberies in Glasgow in the last five or six year. Just you think back.’
‘Ach, I don’t know,’ said O’Donnell. ‘See the Bhoys is doing well the now. Were you there on Saturday?’
‘Aye I was there,’ said O’Neill. ‘But they’re no’ that clever. The polis aye catch up on them sooner or later so they do. The trouble with the Bhoys is they never keep it up. They go away and let the Thistle or the Thirds beat them when ye least expect it.’
‘I don’t mind so long as they beat the Rangers,’ O’Donnell replied nonchalantly, offering his mate a cigarette. ‘Here! But the polis are no’ that clever either. They get them but they don’t get the money.’
‘Ye’re right there,’ said O’Neill. ‘It says in the paper there’s thirty thousand pound still missing. But the Bhoys has got youth on their side, that’s mair nor the Rangers have. You can see it in the paper there for yourself.’
O’Donnell looked at O’Neill’s paper.
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘It was just the same wi’ the Ibrox robbery. Forty thousand it was they didn’t get. But I’d never take the Bhoys in my coupon.’
‘Oh naw, neither would I,’ said O’Neill. ‘And then there’s Napper Kennedy. Maryhill. They got him in Dublin but they never got the money. Oh naw, I’d never take them in the pools. Ye canna trust them.’
‘They got some of it did they no’?’ said O’Donnell. ‘Somebody left a suitcase in the left luggage. It was his brother wasn’t it in the Central Station?’
‘Aye, they got five thousand,’ said O’Neill. ‘Nothing much. There was mair nor thirty thousand they never got yet. And there’s Charlie Hope, him that done the Partick bank. He never got as far as Dublin. They got him in his club in St Vincent Street. A bridge club he called it, some bridge club. But they got damn all else but the smell o’ his cigar. That was another thirty or forty thousand job. They boys have something to come out to so they have.’
‘Ach, they’ll never get near it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘What I say is, the Bhoys ought to spend money on a good inside forward. They’ve got a lot o’ good young yins but the young yins need an auld heid. They’ll no’ even get gaun to the lavatory without somebody on their tail.’
‘Ach, I don’t know about that,’ O’Neill shrugged. ‘They’ve got ways and means I’ll bet you. They don’t go to all that trouble for nothing. Where would ye get a good inside forward anyway? They’ve spent good money before this and it’s been money wasted. They’re better sticking tae what they’ve got.’
‘Trouble, aye it’s trouble all right,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Eight or nine years they get, every time. But you’re right enough I suppose, some of their best servants was players they got for nothing.’
‘Well, so what?’ O’Neill asked. ‘Would you no’ do eight or nine year to come out tae thirty or forty thousand?’
‘Aye, if I was coming out tae it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘But that’s what I’m arguing, they’ll no’ come out tae it. The minute they touch it they’ll be lifted.’
‘But they’ve served their time, haven’t they?’ said O’Neill. ‘They canny put them in jail twice for the wan offence.’
‘That’s murder you’re thinking of,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Robbery’s different. Sure they’d take the money from them, wouldn’t they? They’d never let them get away wi’ it. That would make it too easy. I’d do it myself for eight or nine year.’
‘But suppose somebody else has been keeping it to feed it back to them when they come out, ye know, in regular payments, quiet like.’
‘Who could they trust to keep thirty or forty thousand for them?’ O’Donnell asked derisively. ‘Would you trust anybody wi’ that amount o’ money if you were inside for eight or nine year?’
‘I don’t know,’ said O’Neill thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never had that amount o’ money. Maybe ye could if ye made it worth their while. What’ll ye have?’
‘Just as a matter of interest, how many is that now?’ O’Donnell asked.
‘It’s only yer second,’ said O’Neill. ‘You put the first wan up when we came in and that’s all we’ve had. Do ye want the same again?’
‘Naw, no’ the drinks, the bank robberies I mean ye’re talking about,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Anderston, Ibrox, Maryhill, Whiteinch, that’s four at least.’
‘Oh, there’s been a lot mair nor that,’ said O’Neill. ‘And tae think it’s a’ lying somewhere! They’re a’ inside and the money’s outside. Thirty thousand here and forty thousand there and the same again and mair. It would break yer heart just thinking about it.’
‘Aye, it would be a bit of all right finding even wan o’ they stacks. Will ye be up seeing the Bhoys on Saturday?’
‘Aye, ye could find it but would ye have the nerve tae spend it?’ said O’Neill. ‘Och aye, I’ll be there all right.’
‘I’ll see ye here at two o’clock then,’ said O’Donnell. ‘I like seeing the Bhoys when they’re doing well.’
‘But I’ll see ye before then,’ said O’Neill. ‘Ye’ll be in here the night aboot eight, will ye no’?’
‘Och aye, sure,’ said O’Donnell. ‘The Bhoys is drawing big money the now all right.’
‘Forty-five thousand there last Saturday,’ said O’Neill.
They took no more after O’Neill had returned O’Donnell’s hospitality. They were two steady working-men, and they went straight home for their tea after their second drink. They knew they would be back in the same pub in a coup
le of hours. And besides Glasgow’s plague of bank robberies there was the state of the Yards on the Clyde to discuss, and there was the Celtic football team to talk about. For two Glasgow Irishmen that was a topic as inexhaustible as the weather to two Englishmen.
CHAPTER TWO
That same evening, in the Bute Hall, the Glasgow University Choral Society and the University Orchestra gave a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. It was damned with faint praise by the music critic of the local paper, a sour Scotsman who complained of the acoustics and found the choir’s hundred and eight voices too light for the place and purpose. O’Neill and O’Donnell, like most people in the city, didn’t know the Mass was being sung by the University Choral Society, so they weren’t present. They were back in the Tappit Hen before the Sanctus. But among those who did attend the Bute Hall was the unwitting hero of this true narrative, a culture-hungry teenager who had failed in his eleven-plus examination and come to life at sixteen, just after he left school. He was working as a packer in the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society in Nelson Street, but he knew he deserved something a lot better. He went about his daily chores with a dagger of bitterness against a system that had refused him a higher education just because he didn’t happen to pass an examination when he was only twelve. He tried to educate himself. He went to the public library every night and brought home books on philosophy, psychology, economics, and the history of art from the cave-paintings to Picasso. He found his pleasure in the very act of borrowing them. When the girl stamped the date-label and filed the title-slips with his tickets he was sure she admired and respected him. Nobody else in his unjust position would have had the courage and intelligence to borrow such books. He had always to take them back before he had time to read them, but he felt that even having them in the house was something. To see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the kitchen dresser alongside the first volume of Marx’s Capital was a great consolation to him. You never knew who might come in and see them. It only annoyed his mother. She had no patience with him.
‘It’s high time you took them books back,’ she scolded him every time she dusted the dresser where she displayed her grandmother’s two brass candlesticks, the four large seashells she had brought home from her holiday at Millport the year she was married, a photo of her mother in a white-metal frame, a snap of her brother when he was a sergeant with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Singapore, an enamelled tray showing two pastoral lovers beside a rustic bridge, and her bottle of cough mixture. ‘How can I keep this corner tidy if you clutter it up with books? And they’re all overdue and I never see you open them anyway.’
‘You don’t see all I do,’ he answered, looking down on her from a great height.
‘There’s sevenpence to pay on each of them,’ she complained the night he was getting ready to go to the Bute Hall. ‘You might as well buy the damn things, the money you spend in fines. Do you think I’ve nothing to do with my money but give it to you to pay for all the books you keep past their time?’
‘Money, money, money! All you can think of is money!’
He was peevish with her. She was always nagging him since his father died a month ago.
‘Somebody’s got to think about it,’ she said, her head high, acting the calm lady to his bad temper. ‘Of course, you’re Lord Muck of Glabber Castle, you’re too high and mighty to bother about money. I’d have thought now your poor father’s dead at least you’d try and help your mother. You’ve only one mother in this world, you know, my boy.’
She wiped her eyes with a dirty hankie, and went ruthlessly on.
‘Your poor father’s no’ here any longer to look after us now, ye know. Him dying the way he did. Puffed out like a candle. Wan minute he was there, the next he wasna. It’s something I’ll never get over. The day after his brother was killed. No’ that he was any good. But your poor father was a good man. Do anything for anybody. Worked hard all his days. Then just to die like that, down in the cellar all by himself. And then they tried to tell me it was his heart. Funny he never complained about his heart before. Of course him and Sammy was twins. They was born together and I suppose they had to go together. Well, near enough. Sammy was killed on the Friday and your poor father was found dead the next day, couldny ha’ been more than a couple of hours after he heard about it. Makes you think. You ought to be helping me, no’ annoying me the way you do.’
She sniffed wetly, and his nerves jangled at the sound of air through mucus.
‘I’m helping all I can,’ he said dourly. ‘But I never get a bloody word of thanks for it. Don’t forget it’s me pays the rent for the house.’
‘You’re lucky to have a house at all to pay the rent for,’ she snapped, her nose clear again for a minute. ‘Don’t forget we lost a good house rent-free when your father went and died.’
‘Some house,’ he gibed, surveying her as if he was estimating her height and weight. How could he, so tall and handsome, come from such a shrivelled thing as this crabbit woman with grey hair, mournful eyes, a flat chest and skinny legs with black cotton stockings? It was another injustice. He should have had a beautiful elegant mother with shapely legs and a bosom like the advert for a shaving soap, not too much and not too little, a mother who would inspire him to write the poetry he knew he could write if only he could get peace and quiet. ‘A janitor’s house in the school playground! That’s a fine house! Living right in the middle of the slum where he worked.’
‘It was a bigger and better house than this,’ she shouted. ‘Who could I bring here, a room and kitchen up a dirty close with a stairhead lavatory, and a single-end on each landing? You never think what a come-down it is for me to have to go out to work and be a cleaner in the very school where your father was the janitor for fifteen year, aye, and his job was jist as important as the headmaster’s I can tell ye. He saw them come and he saw them go, and they’d all have been lost without him. He kept them right. And now I’ve got to be a cleaner there and live in a room and kitchen that looks right on to the four-apartment house I had rent- free in the playground. It just shows you how life treats you.’
‘You’re just after saying we’re lucky to be here,’ he stabbed quickly back, gloating over her cracked temper. ‘Lucky that big fat drip Nancy went to Canada. Ha-Ha! That was a bit of luck all right. If ever a dame got on my nerves it was her with her very coarse veins. A real intellectual topic of conversation she had!’
‘You’ll please me if you speak of your Aunt Nancy with proper respect for your elders,’ she said stiffly, on her dignity as a lady again. ‘If your Aunt Nancy hadn’t got the factor to agree to us getting her house I don’t know where we could have went I’m sure. And just having to flit across the street from the school was a big saving. If we’d had to pay for all our furniture getting took somewhere across the river it would have cost us a lot of money I can tell you. But you never think of that. You’ve a mind above money, like.’
‘You aye come back to money, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’d think that was all there was in this life, money, the way you talk, you’ve no idea of art and philosophy and – and—’
He was stuck for a moment for another subject, to let her see what a superior mind he had.
‘And poetry and the drama,’ he added quickly, remembering the card above the shelves in the far corner of the library. ‘You’ve never lived. I’ve lived, so I have. I’ve read the great poets, it’s more than you ever done. You, you’ve no idea of culture.’
‘Have you?’ she asked him very coolly, cutting him deep. ‘You couldn’t even pass your qually and you try and kid me about culture. You never read the half of the books you bring in here.’
‘Ach!’ he snarled at her.
‘Another thing,’ she pursued him cruelly, turning from the cracked, mottled sink where the window looked across Bethel Street to the ancient school where her husband had worked. ‘It’s high time you stopped hanging about the backcourt and going across there to the playground every night. If you could ju
st see yourself! Be your age. It looks daft, a big fellow like you playing with wee boys at school.’
‘I’m not playing with them,’ he answered proudly. ‘I’m helping them. They come to me for advice. Cause I’m older and cause I know more than they do. I’m trying to learn them. If I’d had somebody to guide me the way I guide them when I was their age I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I wouldn’t.’
‘A crowd of scabby gangsters,’ his mother muttered. ‘There’s no’ a shop in the street safe from them.’
‘Okay they’ve got a gang,’ he admitted generously. ‘And what’s wrong with having a gang? A gang is only the expression of the primitive need for a community. You read any book on child-psychology, that’ll tell you. People feel they must belong. I mean ordinary people. And these lads aren’t even ordinary. They’re a lot of poor dirty neglected children with nobody to shower love on them.’
‘Shower,’ his mother sniffed, having trouble with her nose again. ‘They’re a shower all right. Shower o’ bastards.’
‘Their parents have no interest in them,’ he went on, making a speech at her, ‘and they’ve no interest in their parents. They were born in the jungle and their whole existence is one fierce struggle to survive. The only law they know is the law of the jungle and they’re beginning to learn its disadvantages. So they come to me and I try to learn them to live according to the law of law and order. They see you’ve got to have someone to appeal to so they come to me. I’m their referee. They rely on me for to see justice done. I’m the lawman. I’m the judge. Cause I stand above it so I can see it. Boys are like Jews, they’re different from the people round about them. And where would the Jews have been if they hadn’t had Moses to give them the Law?’
‘Ach!’ his mother derided him. ‘Playing wi’ a lot o’ weans and ye call yourself Moses!’
