by George Friel
They ambled on together, a little gang of them, till they caught up with Frank Garson crossing the waste land between the Steamie and the back of Bethel Street, a desolation of hard earth and dockens.
‘Oi, Garsie!’ shouted Savage, a domineering note in his voice.
Garson turned obediently and waited. He was always polite, even to people who were rude to him. Savage came close up and flipped his finger tips against the waiting boy’s nose.
‘When are you gaun tae start taking yer share o’ the lolly?’ he whispered, smiling maliciously.
It vexed him, it provoked him deeply and sharply, that Garson stuck to his position that they ought to report the finding of the money and wouldn’t take any part of it. Garson knew he would never go to the police on his own, especially when they had the money so long, but Savage didn’t know that. He was afraid Garson would turn informer and he wanted to incriminate him by forcing money on him. Being a reasonably intelligent youngster, Garson saw what Savage was up to and he had the wit to see that taking a little would make him just as guilty as taking a lot. He determined from the beginning to take nothing and he was nowhere near yielding now. He would keep his hands clean against the day of reckoning that would certainly come. But he went to the Friday Night Service every week because he enjoyed the strangeness of it in the candlelight. Percy’s sermons and the hymn singing satisfied a longing for communion with his mates. He was lonely, and he needed the Brotherhood, he was still so young.
‘Are ye feart somebody catches ye wi’ a pound note in yer pocket?’ Savage persisted against the silence facing him.
‘I just don’t want any money,’ Garson answered simply. ‘That’s all. I think you’re all making a terrible mistake. And you’ll be sorry one day. You’ll see.’
‘Then you shouldn’t be coming to the cellar at all,’ Savage argued, pushing him away. ‘You’ve no right to be coming to Percy’s Friday Night Services. That’s only for folk that believe in El, like Percy says, it’s no’ for heathens like you that believe in nothing.’
He turned and grinned to the gang that had followed him in pursuit of Garson, amused at his use of Percy’s language and wanting them to be amused too. They watched with dull faces.
‘I go to them because I want to,’ Garson said boldly. ‘I don’t have to defend myself to you. I’ve a right to go. It was I who found the money.’
‘I tellt ye, I tellt ye!’ Savage crowed triumphantly to the gang. ‘Oh boy, oh boy! It was Ai who! Oh brush my shoes, Cherlie! My maw’s a duchess!’
He flicked a finger tip against the tip of Garson’s nose and asked abruptly, ‘How is yer maw noo? Dyever see her?’
The flick in the nose angered Garson. It was surprisingly painful. It made his eyes water. In an instinctive response he hit out at Savage and missed him. Savage cackled and danced round him.
‘Haw, haw! Ye couldna hit a coo on the erse wi’ a banjo!’
Garson lunged again and missed again.
‘Haw, haw, ye hivna got a maw!’ Savage chanted the rude rhyme, and sang on malevolently, ‘Yer maw ran awa’ wi’ a darkie.’
‘She didn’t!’ Garson screamed in a frenzy. Yet it was all he had ever heard said, and his denial was an act of faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe. If he accepted common gossip as the truth then the world was bad, but the world couldn’t be bad. It was good, Percy was good. His father was good. School was good. The stories he read were good. He tried to grapple with Savage, to catch him and choke him, but he was far too slow, and he was blinded with tears of anguish. Then as he blundered and lurched this way and that way, Savage stood stock still and faced up to him.
‘Come on and I’ll fight you then,’ he said, suddenly grim and blood-thirsty.
The Brotherhood formed a ring with a rapid manoeuvre worthy of well-trained troopers, and the surplus members climbed on to the top of the pre-nuclear-age air-raid shelters to watch the fight from there and cheer the winner from a ringside seat.
Garson blinked, trying to see his enemy clearly through tears that reflected a cruel world. He had a brief intuition that the people were evil after all, and if that was how it was there was no use fighting. He was beaten before he started. He was no fighter anyway. He was smaller, sligh- ter, far less of a brawler by build and temperament than Savage. But he had to fight even though it was useless. He would die honourably. He shaped up clumsily, nervously, and while he was still making up his mind whether to lead with the left hand or the right Savage punched him right on the nose with one hand and then bang on the eye with the other.
Garson yelped and wept, and Savage hit him in the stomach. He put his hands there to console the shock and Savage smacked him on the ear. In a few seconds he was a quivering helpless morsel of inadequate boyhood. Blood came down his nose over his lips and he was squeamish at the salty taste of it, the water brimming over his eyes kept him from seeing right, and the bells ringing in his ear made him lose all sense of balance and direction. He stumbled and flailed. Still he wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t turn and run. He didn’t know where to run to. He kept on trying to fight, but he had no idea of fighting. Savage was radiant with the lust of punishment. He had no mercy. He was a wily battering ram, and Garson was the young lamb bleating at the slaughter.
Skinny filtered silently through the rowdy mob as soon as he saw it was a case of murder, and ran for Percy. He found him with his big feet in Tulip Place and his head in the clouds. He was thinking about the stranger. He was always thinking about the stranger. But now he was beginning to feel safe again, it was so long since he had seen him. He was rather proud of his plan for making sure nobody entered or left the cellar if there was anyone odd hanging about the corner: one of the Brotherhood stayed outside at every service and if he saw any stranger he was to play in Tulip Place and keep kicking a ball against the cellar door as if he was practising shooting and collecting rebounds. That was the warning. A simple signal that no stranger could recognize for what it was, Percy was sure. So far there had been no need for the sentry to kick a ball against the door. Perhaps the stranger had gone away for good. Perhaps he was in jail. He looked a real jail-type. Whatever he was he didn’t seem to be a danger any longer.
Last to leave the cellar, the dreaming lord of uncounted wealth, Percy paid off the sentry and ambled down Tulip Place in grim meditation, welcoming the headache it gave him as the price he had to pay for being a thinker. It was all very well looking after a crowd of ungrateful schoolboys, but it was time he did something for himself too. He had his career to think of. All this time gone and he hadn’t even got around to finishing that Ode to Speed he had started.
‘Savage is killing Garson!’ Skinny yelled, grabbing the Regent by one gaunt wrist and shaking it madly.
‘Whit are ye talking aboot noo?’ Percy grumbled crossly. He left the island in the Mediterranean where he had a patio or hacienda or something like that, he wasn’t sure which, but he had in mind a big house with a verandah, and came unwillingly back to Tulip Place.
‘He’s fighting him and Garson canny fight,’ Skinny explained in a hurry. ‘It’s blue murder so it is. Come on and stop it, Percy! Please! Afore he kills him. Ye ought to see the state he’s in, it’s terrible!’
‘Whit way could you no’ stop it?’ Percy demanded, forced to trot as Skinny, still clutching his wrist, turned and raced across the street, through a close, across the back-court, and over to the waste land beside the Steamie. ‘Or Specky? Fat lot o’ use there was making yous somebody. You never use the authority I gave you. How would it be if I just let yous all do whit ye like? Tell me that.’
He grumbled all the way, but Skinny said nothing. He let Percy grumble. He saw no point answering such daft questions. How could he ever stop Savage hitting anybody he wanted to hit? There were things you just had to give in to and put up with, like the brute force of Savage. He had taken a big enough risk running away to fetch Percy. He could only hope that in the excitement nobody would notice it was he who brought Percy a
long and that he would be safe from the later vengeance of Savage for spoiling him of his prey.
The Brotherhood opened to let Percy get into the ring and he splay-footed indignantly over to Savage, who was kicking Garson in the ribs as the boy cowered on the ground with his head in his arms and his shoulders shaking with sobs. Percy hit Savage an open-handed smack across the face, so hard that the sound was clearly heard by the spectators on top of the air-raid shelters, and they gasped an ‘Oo-oo-oo!’ of mingled delight and alarm at the violence of the blow.
‘You chuck that!’ Percy shouted angrily. ‘Or I’ll give you a kicking, so I will. You’re nothing but a big bully. You think you can settle everything by force. Whatever you’re fighting about fighting proves nothing. I’ve tellt ye that before. Can ye no’ take a telling?’
He glared down at Savage, heaving with temper, and Savage rubbed his cheek and grinned up at him amiably. He wasn’t bothered. His lust was satisfied. A smack on the face was a small price to pay for leaving Garson a bloody weeping humiliated victim on the ground. His father had hit him harder often for nothing.
Percy shook him at the throat, almost lifting him off the ground, and Savage wriggled and wrenched himself away.
‘It was nothing,’ he said innocently. ‘Keep the heid, Percy. The wee fella wanted to have a square go so I gave him wan and he couldny take it, that was a’. You don’t need to start shouting the odds aboot it.’
Garson got on his knees, then on his feet, and brushed himself with trembling hands, little soft white hands that couldn’t have punched a bus-ticket. His lower lip was going as if he had a permanent stammer and he was still crying.
Percy wanted to comfort him, to stand up for him, to avenge him. His brain was in a mist of pity. But he had sworn never to have favourites in the Brotherhood because that would only cause strife and jealousy. He swallowed his loving anguish for the unfriended boy till the bitterness of it made him grue. Then he spoke out harshly, shaking Garson as he had shaken Savage.
‘What do you want to go starting fights for? You know damn fine you’re no’ a match for Sheuchie Savage, ye wee fool!’
Garson suffered the shaking patiently as long as it lasted, and the moment he was released he turned and went away. The mob opened an alley for him and let him pass along without a whisper of sympathy or a hand raised to console him with a pat on the back, and he went off shaking his head as if Percy’s large hand was still at his collar.
‘Ye’re a horde of ruffians!’ Percy cried in exasperation, feeling he had let Garson down but not knowing what else he could have done.
‘Yous that was watching and made no attempt to stop it, yous are just as bad as Savage, only worse. We’ve got all this – all this—’
He paused and the Adam’s apple in his scraggy neck moved up and down, but it was a crisis to him and he had to say it.
‘All this money. Aye, all this money. Yous know damn well what I mean. We’ve got all this money and yous canny live in peace. I give yous up! Come on, get away home all of yous! Scram! Come on, run, run, run! Every one of yous, beat it!’
Normally the false plural slipped from him only now and again. He had learned it was wrong, and he was trying hard to stop using it. But he was too angry to think of his grammar.
He waved his gang away with open hands like a farmer’s wife shooing hens, and those on the ground dispersed slowly, resenting his command to run, and those on the roof of the air-raid shelters jumped down and mixed guiltily with their brethren. In a few moments Percy was all alone in the waste land.
‘Hate!’ he muttered unhappily. ‘It’s only brought hate. Those two hate each other. It could have made them so happy if they would only be reasonable. I should have made them make it up before wee Frankie went away. I should have made them shake hands and be friends. It’s an awful job, making yourself responsible for folks that hasn’t been brought up to what’s right.’
CHAPTER NINE
Mr Garson was a lonely man, a dour man. He wasn’t given to complaining and he suffered many daily injustices rather than make a fuss, but when he came home from the garage that evening and saw his son’s black eye and puffed lips he was just a little bit angry. He was willing to take it as natural that boys should fight now and again, but this hadn’t been a fight, it looked more like assault and battery. He wanted to know what had happened, but he couldn’t get anything out of the boy, so he shook him by the shoulder in an impatient attempt to make him speak. The boy winced and yelped.
‘Take your shirt off,’ said Mr Garson sharply. He hadn’t grasped him all that roughly, there was no need for such a cry of pain unless the damage was as great elsewhere as it was on the face. He suspected it was, and he wanted to make sure.
Garson stripped grudgingly to the waist, embarrassed to be half-naked in the kitchen under the glowering eye of his unfriendly father. His shoulders were bruised, and his flanks were black and blue where Savage had kicked him.
‘You tell me who did that to you or I’ll give you worse,’ said Mr Garson, quite cold.
The boy would have told him gladly if he had been thawed by a warm sympathy, he would have enjoyed weeping out the name if he had been consoled and pitied, but the cold threat froze him.
‘I’m warning you,’ said Mr Garson with a frightening sincerity, ‘You’d better tell me.’
The boy had a brief fantasy of his father fighting Savage’s father to avenge the family honour, but he knew that was absurd. His father was too proud even to speak to Savage’s father, far less fight him in the back-court or the waste land. Nor would he rush out to look for Savage and smack his ear. That was just as absurd. He just wanted to know for the sake of knowing. All right then, why shouldn’t he tell? He kept his silence for a little longer till he didn’t feel quite so frozen inside and then he told.
Mr Garson took time off from the garage on Monday morning and went to the school. He didn’t know what he wanted exactly, he certainly didn’t want vengeance, but he did want to make a protest and get some kind of assurance it wouldn’t happen again. He thought he was likelier to get that from the headmaster than from the parents. Mr Daunders promised to look into it, he offered to have Savage brought in right away and invited Mr Garson to remain and see the boy for himself. Mr Garson said he would rather not.
‘So long as you promise me to make sure he gets a lesson, I’ll leave it to you,’ he said respectfully. He was only a motor-mechanic, and he looked up to Mr Daunders as an educated man.
‘I’ll give him a lesson all right,’ Mr Daunders promised cordially. ‘We could do with more pupils like your boy, always clean and smart and industrious, but you see every school has its Savages and that’s what makes our job so difficult. It’s one long struggle against the jungle here.’
They parted at the door of the headmaster’s room, both talking at once in polite expression of mutual trust.
‘I’ll leave him to you,’ said Mr Garson.
‘You can safely leave him to me,’ said Mr Daunders. ‘I wish we had more decent parents like you, Mr Garson.’
He sent for Savage at once and lectured him on the immorality of bullying. For all his confident promises to Mr Garson he wasn’t sure of the best way to handle it. He was a good man, a reasonable man, unwilling to damn any boy till he had tried hard to save him. He saw little sense telling Savage it was wrong to think that the use of superior physical force was a good thing, and then going on to give him a lathering with a Lochgelly. It was the use of force he had to discredit. He spoke sternly but reasonably. He tried to make Savage see the dangers of living by jungle law. Savage slouched insolently, his black leather jerkin, with the zip unfastened, bulging out in front of his broad chest. He was a big boy, but Mr Daunders was a man. He looked down on him.
‘I’ve told you before not to wear that belt,’ he said severely, ‘Take it off. You don’t need it.’
Savage took off an Army webbing belt and rolled it in his hand. Many a fight he had won with it.
‘Whe
re did you get that jacket, by the way?’ Mr Daunders asked curiously. He knew quality when he saw it, and he knew that Savage’s father could never afford the price of it. ‘I haven’t seen you wearing it before.’
‘My Granny bought me it,’ said Savage.
‘For your birthday?’ Mr Daunders asked, a vague memory of something he had heard before putting an ironic edge on his question.
‘ ’Sright,’ Savage nodded willingly, leering up as Mr Daunders looked down. He understood too late what the headmaster was staring at. The bulge of the jacket exposed the lining.
‘And what’s that you’ve got in there?’ Mr Daunders asked gently, simply gesturing to the lining of the jacket. He was too careful ever to touch a boy’s clothing.
Savage’s hand flashed to the four pound notes he had pinned inside the jacket that morning.
‘Let me see it,’ said Mr Daunders.
Savage knew when he was caught. He unpinned the notes and handed them over. He wasn’t bothered. He had plenty more.
Mr Daunders scowled at the notes. He didn’t like it at all.
‘What are you doing with these pinned in your jacket?’ he cried in bewilderment. It was always the same. One inquiry always led into another you hadn’t expected. You started to question a boy who had simply played truant and before you had finished finding out where he went, you were on the track of a series of thefts from shops and lorries.
‘That’s where Maverick keeps his money,’ Savage stalled.
Mr Daunders wouldn’t admit to a scruffy schoolboy that he too followed the adventures of Maverick.
‘Whose class is he in?’ he asked judicially.
‘He’s no’ in a class, he’s on the telly,’ Savage explained.
‘That hardly tells me what you’re doing with four pound notes pinned inside a very expensive leather jacket, does it?’ Mr Daunders murmured.
