by George Friel
Then he saw it was indeed the end of the line. He saw the flames leaping from the bright apex of the pyramid and on the slopes, curled with the heat, already licked by eager tongues, he saw the fivers and recognized the imprint of the bank. They seemed to be drawing the flames to themselves like a magnet, and nothing could save them.
As quickly as the stranger recognized the banknotes Savage recognized the stranger Percy had warned them about. He held the bell by the clapper, raised his free hand to hush his brothers, and stepped forward boldly to confront the intruder, a savage chief despising the white man come in quest of native wealth.
‘You’re too late, Mac,’ he announced insolently. ‘That’s the lot there. We couldn’t use it, you’re not going to get it.’
He saw no need to mention the fifty fivers he had inside his leather jacket.
The stranger gawked, his throat working as if he was going to be sick on the spot.
‘You stupid bastard!’ he moaned, and dived at the fire trying to save something, burned his fingers, and yelped.
Savage laughed. The Brotherhood laughed.
The stranger knelt by the victorious fire and whined up at them.
‘Yous didn’t know what you were doing. Yous were too young to get a chance like that. You hadn’t the brains to make use of it. There was enough there to set a man up for life. You could have had heaven on earth wi’ what was there, and you’ve burned it, you’ve burned it. You set all that money on fire! Oh, Christ, yous are mad!’
The Brotherhood gathered round, looking down on him, and then their unconcerned laughter changed to a silent awe when they saw tears rolling down the stranger’s cheeks. They looked away, too embarrassed to watch a grown man weeping like a wean and wringing his hands. The stranger jumped to his feet and went berserk. He dived in amongst them, hitting out viciously, and they yielded ground, retreating to the exit. Then on a common impulse they made an about turn and scattered, leaving him to rake amongst the ashes for at least one whole fiver out of thirty thousand pounds. He didn’t find one.
And while he crouched alone in the air-raid shelter sobbing and cursing, O’Neill and O’Donnell were having a cool pint in the Tappit Hen.
‘Did you see what was in last night’s paper?’ said O’Neill. ‘It’s jist what I was telling you a couple of months back.’
‘Ach, they get swelt-heidit, some of the young yins,’ said O’Donnell. ‘They play a couple of seasons and then they think they’re worth a lot of money so they ask for a transfer. But he’s no’ the first that’s had a quarrel wi’ the Celtic and the club aye gets on without them.’
‘No’ him,’ said O’Neill. ‘The weans that found the money I mean. Though mind you I was wan o’ the first to say he was getting in bad with the club. I seen it coming.’
‘Oh aye, I seen it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Imagine a lad of seventeen finding it and dishing it out to a crowd o’ weans. Of course he had a grievance. They dropped him for the semi-final remember. But you notice they’re no’ saying where it came from.’
‘Maybe they don’t know,’ said O’Neill. ‘That would be a laugh, eh? And I telt ye, that’s only wan o’ them. There’s mair to come yet. You see, it was a matter of discipline, he broke the training. He’s no’ the first star Celtic have dropped before a big game, and anyway they went on and won the Cup without him. A boy of seventeen is all he was, kind of glaikit from what I heard. My good-sister knows his mother. She used to live up the same close.’
‘His mother’s an Orangewoman, she was heartbroken when he signed for the green and white,’ said O’Donnell.
‘No’ his mother, the Phinn wan’s mother,’ said O’Neill.
‘Ah but he was clever, you’ve got to admit it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘I’ve saw him travel the whole length of the park and so help me God you’d think the ball was tied to his laces. He was a real artist, ye canny deny it.’
‘It’s like these modern weapons,’ said O’Neill. ‘Power in the hands o’ folks that’s no’ fit to use it.’
‘He used it all right against the Rangers the last Ne’erday game,’ said O’Donnell. ‘But isn’t it damnable the now? All ye get in the papers on a Saturday night is golf and tennis and cricket. Who the hell’s interested?’
‘No’ him, the weans,’ said O’Neill. ‘All that money. They could never spend that amount o’ money. That’s what I’m trying to tell ye. Power in the hauns o’ folk that’s no’ fit for it. If it had been you or me it would have been different. We could have retired. D’ye know the money spent on armaments every year would let a man no’ need to work mair than two days a week?’
‘I still say the Celtic could do wi’ mair like him,’ said O’Donnell impatiently. ‘And anyway tell me, what would you do if you hadn’t your work to go to?’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said O’Neill.
GRACE AND MISS PARTIDGE
A NOVEL
CHAPTER ONE
In the tenement where I was born there was an old maid lived all alone in a single-end on the top storey. We always called her Miss Partridge to her face, but behind her back she was Wee Annie. I remember her as a sourfaced, greyhaired, flatchested, lowheeled, round shouldered, undersized crabbit thing, anywhere between fifty and a hundred, though maybe once upon a time she was pretty. Her clothes were as grim and Presbyterian as herself. She frightened me. I used to have nightmares about her. She would be chasing me with a funny big hat on her head and a broomstick in her hand, like the ugly old witch she was, and I had to waken up to escape. I would be at the edge of a cliff, and the only way I could get away from her was to jump over, but I couldn’t jump because I was paralysed with fright. So I cried out, ‘Help, help! Somebody, quick, waken me!’ And calling out like that I wakened myself.
She didn’t like boys, and we couldn’t get playing in peace in the backgreen for her shouting at us over the staircase window. We knew she was just being malicious, for her own window looked on to the main road like the window of any other single-end in the block. She couldn’t hear us at all if she stayed in her own room, and nobody else up the same close with a kitchen window right above our games ever said a word of complaint. It was sheer badness made her come down to the half-landing and hang out the window there to bawl curses at us for the noise we were creating.
No, she didn’t like us, but she liked little girls. It was gruesome to see her sour face uncurdle to a leering sweetness when any of them came near her claws. She stroked them and squeezed them and tickled them and ruffled them, and fed them with buns and sweeties. She never ate sweets herself. She bought them just to give away to her favourites. She took them upstairs for a biscuit and a glass of milk, and if they were very young, round about the age for starting school, she counted the steps aloud in a weird chant as she climbed up three flights clasping their hand. They came out with their nose wrinkled, distastefully holding by the rim a piece of bread and jam or a buttered Abernethy biscuit, made straight for the midden in the backgreen, and chucked Wee Annie’s gift into the ashcan.
The summer all this started was the summer Angus Erskine and Donald Duthie came to our close. Wee Annie left the door of her single-end ajar one evening that bright season and crept downstairs like a cat to the half-landing and leaned out the staircase window. The girls had taken over the backgreen since teatime, but we didn’t mind. We sprawled on the wash-house roof and listened to the singing games, ‘O What is Mary Weeping For’, ‘Queen Mary, Queen Mary, My Age is Sixteen’, ‘I Sent a Letter to My Love’, ‘The Big Ship Sailing through the Eely- Alley-O’, and all the rest of them. We weren’t bothered. We thought we were adding to the fun of the broad evening by ribald interruptions and bawdy variations. But there was bliss on Wee Annie’s face. She was no longer the old maid Miss Partridge, wicked old witch. She was a mild and benevolent eagle, watching from her eyry the antics of the earthbound little lambs, and her beak moved in happy time with the anonymous melodies that pleased the setting sun. The moment she appeared we were silent, fea
ring her curse would fall upon us. We cut off our joco parodies as abruptly as you would turn off a radio when you had heard enough. We knelt on the flat roof like dumb oxen, with patient downcast eyes, listening as reverently as if we were stalled in church listening to the choir, so scared we were of Wee Annie three storeys above us, an ugly old bird hovering in the golden sky of our westering holidays.
She listened till the light thickened and the little ones were tired of dancing round in a han dlinked circle. When they began to niggle at each other and toddle off in twos and threes she tutted and turned from the window, sadly rubbing her skinny elbows scraped by the stone sill. Then swiftly, craftily, she winged down the stairs to the close, hoping to catch Grace Christie on the way up. Grace was a dainty elf, a teacher’s pet. She lived on the first storey. She was Wee Annie’s current favourite.
Annie caught her that night as planned, on the half- landing just outside the lavatory door. She jerked to a stop, her claw at her beak as if she was alarmed at bumping into anybody at all on that dim and silent staircase, remote from the traffic on the main road, totally withdrawn from the teeming life of the city. That was her pretending she was surprised to see Grace. Then she gave herself away by showing she had been watching her all evening.
‘Ach, you must be tired, my wee hen!’ She stopped the child, cuddling her shoulder. ‘And thirsty too, eh? After all that singing and dancing. Come on you up with me and I’ll give you a nice glass of lemonade before you go to your bed. And I think I’ve got a cake for you. You like cakes, ee, don’t you now?’
Grace stared up at her. She was a solemn thing with a pretty face, but behind her big blank eyes there was a sharp enough little brain. I think she saw through Annie right from the start and knew what was wrong before Annie herself did. Such bright children have their own intuition even though they haven’t got the words for it. But she preferred to bend like a reed. She knew if she showed any alarm it would only make Wee Annie worse. Even at that age, she was about ten at the time, she knew a jealous nature when she met it. And cautious of the cruelties that go with jealousy she played safe with a passive obedience. She let the old bird pick her up and carry her off to the Partridge nest, three up the middle. Maybe it was worth suffering for the sake of the lemonade. She was very fond of lemonade, and Annie always had the fizzy kind that tickled your nose. Grace liked that sensation. It interested her. She tried to understand it every time she got it. But it always escaped her, so she had always to try again by drinking more lemonade.
Before she got any she had to put up with being led over to the sink at the window and stuck there beside a talkative parrot in a standard cage while Wee Annie held her by the ears and looked her lovingly up and down, tenderly, more than maternally.
‘Let me see your wee hands,’ Annie commanded, granting what she thought was an affectionate smile. But I remember her teeth were revolting. She showed yellow canines when she grinned, and a top incisor was missing.
Grace showed her hands. She was much given to silent obedience.
‘O-my-O-my! What dirty paws, you horrid little beast!’ Annie gloated, cuddling them in her own. ‘That’s what comes of playing with all those boys. Boys! Oh boys! They’re terrible, so they are.’
‘I wasn’t playing with boys,’ Grace slipped in a footnote. In spite of her silent nature she had a stubborn tendency to correct errors of fact.
‘No, maybe not tonight, but other nights, eh?’ Annie tickled her ribs. ‘And you know, it sticks, Grace darling, it sticks. Once you let a boy touch you – well!’
‘I don’t play with boys,’ Grace muttered.
‘You don’t like boys, eh, do you?’ Annie lilted encouragingly.
Grace just looked at her. She had no answer to that question at that time.
‘You don’t let boys cuddle you or tickle you, now do you?’ Annie asked severely. ‘Tell me the truth.’
She didn’t wait for an answer. She didn’t want one. Her pleasure lay in asking the question, and she was happy just to be blethering to the defenceless child. She lifted a flannel from a celluloid dish above the sink and went on blethering as she washed Grace’s hands, fondling each in turn, rinsing away the grime of the evening under the swan-neck tap.
‘Don’t you ever play with the boys, Grace dear. A lovely wee girl like you is too good for boys. Boys aren’t nice. You’ll know what I mean when you get older, and you’ll thank me for it. Boys always want to, I’ll tell you some day. O-my-O-my! Just look at those knees. That’s what comes of playing Kneel Down Kiss the Ground. They’re all mucky, you silly wee thing.’
She knelt and washed the child’s knees with the soapy flannel, travelled slowly down the sturdy legs that were in fact quite clean and up the stalwart thighs to the brief knickers. And when that was done she went over it all again, massaging the legs from knickers to ankles with a skimpy towel, lingering over each limb.
‘You said lemonade,’ said Grace.
When she’d got what she wanted she edged to get out. Annie pecked after her to keep her longer, but there was a rude knocking at the door. It was Grace’s mother looking for her.
‘Aye, I thought she was here,’ Mrs Christie said sourly. She was a big woman, in whose worried face you could dimly make out the pretty features of Grace through the fog of the years. She hustled Grace outside while Annie bowed and scraped.
‘I was just giving her a wee bite for her supper,’ she twittered.
‘She’s well enough fed in her own house, thank you,’ Mrs Christie broadcast over her shoulder.
‘She was washing my hands and legs,’ Grace remarked out on the stairhead, raising one leg and looking casually at the ankle.
‘She’d do better if she washed herself.’ Mrs Christie pushed Grace downstairs, ostensibly answering her but making sure Wee Annie heard her too.
It was an unfair cut, for though she was always drab Wee Annie was quite clean. She had to be, working where she did. She was the wages-clerk and despatch-clerk and answered the phone in our little local laundry before it was taken over by the big Lavanta Company.
‘How many tellings do you need, girl?’ Mrs Christie scolded Grace all the way down. ‘It’s a good skelpin you’re asking for. I’m sick tired telling you to come straight up to your own house when you’re done playing. You’ve got my heart fair roastit, the way you carry on with that auld bitch.’
Annie listened till she heard the Christies’ door bang, then she closed her own door quietly, leaned against it and wept.
‘All I get is insults,’ she whimpered. ‘And that poor wee soul, she gets no love at all.’
She used her hankie and snivelled over to the only other living thing she loved, her pet parrot, an old bird even uglier than herself. She called it Shelley. I never found out why even after she was dead. She fed it, spoke to it, listened to it, slipped down to the lavatory, came back up and made a cup of cocoa. She sipped it at the kitchen- table, sitting in peace and quiet, writing up her diary. I have it now. She had the oldfashioned copperplate style of writing, thin up and thick down.
It was a bad summer for her, that summer. Mrs Christie’s insult wasn’t the only one she had to thole before the dark nights came back and there was no more playing in the back green. We got an immigrant from another world, a wise man from the east, Angus Erskine, a tinkerfaced oddity in secondhand clothes and boots too big for him, a juvenile delinquent who had plunked his way through a dozen schools on both sides of the river, a vagrant who had come to our douce land as territory where his name had travelled ahead of him and ensured him respect. He was a minstrel born out of time, a joker who feared neither policeman nor teacher. The absurdity of his clothes, which should have made him a laughingstock, was appropriate to the absurdity of his character. Whatever he wore, he wore with a swagger, and nobody laughed at him because he laughed at them first. Wee Annie didn’t frighten him, she amused him. He preached to us, he converted us, he brought us into his communion of irreverence. He took us over completely, he bossed us
, rehearsed us, grilled us and drilled us. He taught us saucy words and used old tunes for a choral attack on Wee Annie before he had been a fortnight with us. So there we were this fine summer night, bursting to sing. And the moment Wee Annie came hanging out the staircase window we hailed her neb with a crescendo shout and exploded into a chorus that staggered jovially round the melody of ‘Come ower the Stream, Charlie’.
O funny Wee Annie
Never sits on her fanny,
She hings oot the windy tae gie us a fright.
She’s bandy, she’s skelly,
Aye scratching her belly,
She gangs tae the cludgie ten times every night.
She was speechless the first time we sang it to her. She drew away from the window, gnawing her knuckles, and fluttered upstairs like a frightened sparrow. She tried to find consolation in talking to Shelley, smiling at his cheerful replies, but the dialect word cludgie seemed to persist even in Shelley’s friendly squawking, and it went on echoing in her head, offending her primness. She was shocked, she was even wounded, at the unwarranted slight on her continence, for the cludgie was the watercloset on each half-landing, serving all the tenants on the flat above. She felt degraded enough having to go there at all. She had been reared in a superior tenement where every house had an inside-toilet. But now she was old and alone, reduced to living in a single-end, a little cell sandwiched between a room-and-kitchen on either side of her. It was a painful come-down for her, but all she could afford. She didn’t mind so much having to wash her feet in the sink at the window and have a bath piece-peel, but the cludgie was a constant offence to her.
I suppose she must have got used to our chant eventually, for we serenaded her with it every night till the clocks were put back, and even the boy who delivered her milk was tipped off by Angus to whistle ‘Come ower the Stream, Charlie’ as he rattled at her door, so that she got it in the morning too.
