by George Friel
The second night we sang it she brazened it out, her skimpy bosom over the windowsill in her eagerness to fight back. She aimed direct at Angus, giving him tit for tat.
‘Away back to the Gorbals where you belong, you badmouthed wee messan!’ she screeched. Then deriding him in unexpected trochaics she sang out, thumping her fists on the sill, ‘Erskine? Bumskin! Canny keep yer nose clean!’
Angus just laughed it off. He didn’t belong to the Gorbals. In all his wanderings he had never lived there. His last address had in fact been in a district so much worse than the decent Gorbals that it is never mentioned outside the city, like a family scandal you don’t talk about to strangers. He was greatly taken with that Bumskin. Although it was so obvious, he had missed it before Wee Annie put her tongue on it, and so had we. She gave us a name for him to balance the song he had given us for her, and he liked her for it. He was broadminded. And because he liked her we learned to like her too, and once we liked her she couldn’t frighten us any more.
I think that baffled her even more than the indictments that she was bowlegged, crosseyed, was always running to the lavatory, and was afflicted with lice in the pubic region. These accusations were, or could be, visibly false. But that we liked her in our own twisted way was an incontrovertible fact. And she was never happy with facts.
Playing at shops in a corner of the backgreen, with broken crockery for money and slabs of clay from the quarry as cakes and bread, Grace Christie moved lightly amidst her playmates and spared only a casual glance at us on the roof of the wash-house and then another at Wee Annie foaming over the staircase window. The flyting failed to interest her and she carried on serving in her shop. But Annie caught a ray from the child’s wandering eyes and was blinded to a silence of shame and contrition. How could little Grace, three storeys below, ever admire and love her if she went on making an exhibition of herself, she asked in her diary that night. She clamped down and played the lady, de haut en bas. Her suspender burst as she leaned over, and one stocking collapsed to her ankle.
‘Sing what you please,’ she called down to Angus. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Go on, sing away!’
He did too.
Every window looking on to the backgreen was up by this time, and the bigbosomed matrons settled their floppy busts and huge forearms on the sill. They beamed gratefully at Angus as he accepted Annie’s invitation, and some of them even cheered. The front row of the choir sang with him at his signal, and the back row threw in a phrase after each line.
Back home in Merrylee,
Without a shirt!
That’s where I wanna be,
Without a shirt!
Right on my mammy’s knee,
Without a shirt!
Annie had asked for that the way she was always running down our district and dragging in a mention of the time she used to live in Merrylee, a far superior area away at the other end of the city, where she claimed her Papa had a big house.
‘It’s as good as the Empress,’ Mrs Green called down the time-chipped face of the tenement to Mrs Christie.
Annie trembled a moment or two before she screeched. Her determination to be dignified was cancelled by the applause our interjected line had earned from the tiered housewives.
‘You dirty wee tinker! It’s a good skelp on the lug you’re needing!’
‘Yer chemeese is hinging oot the windy,’ Angus bawled back. ‘And whit’s mair, yer Paw wis a bouncer in Barra- land.’
‘Go on, give him it, Miss Partridge,’ Mrs Bonnar encouraged her across the building from three up the faraway, Annie’s neighbour on the left and the mother of Robina, or Bobo or Bona as she was variously called, a bonnie lass of nineteen Annie didn’t like at all.
‘Away back where you belong, nobody wants you here, corrupting decent weans,’ Annie obliged. ‘Another cheep out of you and I’ll be right down there.’
She was so far out the window she seemed to be hanging on by her toes.
‘Bring yer granny as well,’ Angus invited her cordially.
He swaggered to the very edge of the roof and gave us a solo.
O the night I took Wee Annie to the ball,
I discovered that she couldn’t dance at all,
For she started to reverse and she fell and bumped her erse,
O the fright I got wi’ Annie at the ball.
Maybe he sang another verse, but the cheers drowned the words. And poor Wee Annie! Her beak darted left to Mrs Bonnar and right to Mrs Stockwell, looking for crumbs of comfort. She clucked down to Mrs Green, widow and school-cleaner in the single-end below her own, a sharp character who backed the horses and went out to whist-drives and music-halls and told fortunes from teacups. She yammered to the rest of her neighbours, and everywhere she was mocked by screams of vulgar laughter. On the first storey there was Grace’s mother, smirking away to herself, and at her right there was Mrs Blair, wife of grumfy old Daddy Blair who had the barber’s shop at the close-mouth, but he was too fond of the whisky to be doing much. In the single-end between them was old Sandy McKay, a retired Scots comic who boasted he was the first local boy to play the Empire, but he was out at the Metropole that night, getting in on his card.
The uproar put Wee Annie in a panic. She gave in and flapped upstairs on damaged wings to talk to Shelley. But Grace was still in her mind. She wanted to put herself right with Grace. She knelt at her bedside for five minutes and prayed for Grace, bidding Shelley pray with her. Then she clawed up the side of a chair to her feet and wrote a few lines in her diary before preparing to swoop down on her victim. She judged the time well enough, reaching the first half-landing just as Grace was coming up. But Grace was popular, too popular for Annie, who wanted her alone. She had three other brownies with her, wee Susan Greenwood, a chubby child with blonde hair, a little dumpling with rosy cheeks, Betty Rodgers, nebby and spectacled, an eager clype, plus Sandra Laird, too sweet to be wholesome, a hanger-on, a cipher of no value except according to whom she tagged behind. They clambered up the steep stairs together, chattering a childish quarrel. She wanted to stop them, but they simply ignored her. The fresh breeze of their passing blew her aside like an autumn leaf and she had no chance to accost Grace.
She heard them all go into Grace’s house, heard the door bang behind them, and she stuck in a corner of the landing gnawing her knuckles again. That was the night she found she loved Grace. Before then, she had only been fond of her amongst other children. She had only wanted Grace to love her. Now her disappointment pushed her into an exclusive love of Grace and she was jealous of the children who came between them.
She went back to her diary, but she was too upset at losing Grace to write much. She tried her bible, a big one, and read at chance. She was a bible-lover, looking for guidance in passages that caught her eye, and she read aloud to herself in lonely fervour.
‘And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither and I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand and full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written.’
She had only heard one or other of the seven angels talking to her like that a few times, though it was often she listened for them. But Papa came with his heavenly companions and talked to her many a time in the solitude of her single-end after midnight, just as real as Shelley talking to her.
It was nearly one in the morning when she closed her good book and hopped down the empty stairs for a breath of air at the close-mouth, her bible under her oxter. She was standing there, at peace with a
world she knew was beneath her and nothing but the silent street in front of her, when a girl came pegging along on high heels with her boyfriend. It was Bobo, hanging on to Duncan Ross, a smart youth with brilliant black hair, an ex-juvenile delinquent. He had raided his granny’s gasmeter when he was ten, set fire to his headmaster’s room when he was eleven, pinched a camera from a drunk American sailor when he was twelve, and between thirteen and sixteen he had been charged with housebreaking, theft, obtaining money by false pretences, and carrying an offensive weapon. But at this time he was honestly employed in looking for a job. Dross or Drossy was his local name.
Bobo was wearing her new swagger red coat, walking with it hanging open to show off her lownecked summer dress. On the lapel of the coat she had a large gilt brooch fashioned as a scrolled capital B to encourage the boys to guess her name, though that went back to the days before she started going steady with Dross, and round her neck she wore a golden necklace with little lockets of various shapes dangling from it, and on her ears she had pearl- coloured earrings. She was a blonde, and she made such an impression round and about that even the boys still at primary school turned to look at her. Because she always dressed to draw attention to her bust if you saw her advancing, and to her bottom if you saw her retreating, and to her hips and legs whichever way you saw her, she had a reputation, and Wee Annie was sure she was immodest.
That was Robina Bonnar, our local belle Bobo. She swayed elegantly past Annie at the close-mouth since Annie stood bang in the centre and wouldn’t budge, even though Dross piped up politely, ‘Scuse us, ole girl.’
‘Scarlet whore,’ Wee Annie said to herself, staring straight ahead without the least glimmer of acknowledgement, but unfortunately she said it aloud. ‘Mother of harlots.’
Bobo and Dross braked together on the same foot as they heard her, thought better of it at once in the silent agreement of young lovers, and marched round to the back close to kiss and cuddle a good-night.
‘The body is not for fornication but for the Lord,’ Annie suddenly declared, turning her back on the street and addressing the close.
She couldn’t see Bobo and Dross, because the close turned sharply at the foot of the stairs before it led to the backgreen. That was why Bobo used the back-close when she was entertaining Dross.
‘I’ll do that ole bitch yet, so I will but,’ Dross muttered, delayed by that unfavourable wind from setting out on a voyage of exploration.
‘Scarlet whore!’ Bobo whispered. ‘I like that! Declare to God, some folk think cause you wear a red coat you’re a loose woman.’
Annie faced the street again, bayed to the moon above the regimented chimney stacks of the tenements, and raised her hands as if she would claw it down from the night sky. When she turned to go up to her parrot the sound of scuffling and whispering from the back close gave her a painful spasm of pure hate for Bobo, like a dagger shoved into her middle. She halted at the foot of the stairs, took a deep breath, and then shouted through the close.
‘O backsliding daughter, saying, Who shall come unto me? The Lord will judge thee according to thy ways.’
She loitered a moment longer. Silence answered her or ignored her. She laughed shrilly twice over, and satisfied that the scuffling had stopped she soared lightly to her eyry.
‘That sorted them,’ she said with a chuckling pech on the way upstairs.
‘The badminded bitch,’ Bobo breathed, listening for her going up. ‘What kind of way’s that to talk?’
‘She has temporarily lost possession of her cranium,’ Dross smoothed her before taking new soundings for his voyage. ‘She’s aff her nut. Her mind’s aye on hough- magandy. Come on.’
‘Get off!’ Bobo pushed. ‘You’re not on, brother. That one’s put me out the mood.’
Three storeys above them, in her little brick box between the Bonnars and the Stockwells, Wee Annie read in the good book again before she went to bed. She sat at her bare table and meditated about the Fall of Babylon and Bobo, about sin and the saving grace of the Lord. The grace of the Lord reminded her of Grace Christie, and a great fear came over her that Grace would grow up to be like Bobo. She swallowed two codeine tablets to help her to sleep and prayed for grace to deliver her from evil. At that very moment she received the first obscure intimations of how the Lord had laid on her the task of delivering Grace from evil, and her Papa came to advise her.
CHAPTER TWO
Donald Duthie from the Isle of Skye came up our close that summer as a lodger. He had the front room in Mrs Stockwell’s house. He was a gangling clumsy fellow, a bit of a gomeril, with a deep, deep voice and a Highland accent. Most of us called him Big Tonalt, though Angus said he was Bluebeard because his chin was always the colour of faded ink. He had a big nose, big ears, pop eyes, and his hands seemed all wrists. His feet would have made any policeman’s look like Cinderella’s, and he wore the same suit from the first day I saw him till the day he died.
He was an Arts student, but we got the idea he was a Divinity student, maybe because his cousin Hugh Main once remarked to my mother Donald would end up in the ministry. Donald himself supported us in our error by behaving like a minister in a Youth Club every time he intruded on our games. When we were gathered together in the back-green he used to come down on us like the Holy Ghost descending on the Apostles and try to organise us. But he was far too familiar for our comfort, and when he trotted round the circle singing Ma pot’s bilin, ma hen’s layin, he looked just plain daft. What particularly sickened us was a bad habit he had of calling us ‘children’. It was, ‘Now children, join hands in a circle!’ or ‘Gather round, children! Who knows how to play No Roost?’
We were sure we had known it before he was born, he made us feel that much older than he was. And anyway the first time he ever saw No Roost played was when he saw us play it. But we let him shepherd us rather than snub him. And all this, of course, was before he saw Bobo in her underwear.
The girls had a great store of pity for him, but they were too young for their pity to be of much use to a grown man. I think now that when he came grinning and basso-pro- funding his way into our games he was practising to be a minister visiting the Sunday School, trying to obey the divine injunction, Suffer little children. The trouble was it was the little children suffered him. One thing that struck me even then was how suddenly his expression changed when his visitation was over, his tour of duty I suppose it was for him. The cheery smile of fatherly interest went out like a light and his face was unmasked in lines of invincible unhappiness, as if he knew himself the victim of that most wounding of all our childish virtues, tolerance.
His landlords, the Stockwells, were a douce Church of Scotland couple. Mr Stockwell was a retired railway worker, a shunter I think he was, and Mrs Stockwell served behind the counter in Strathdee’s the baker down the street on Friday nights and Saturdays to earn a few bob. Their children were grown-up, married and scattered, and might as well never have been born for all the difference they made. So the deserted parents lived a limited, lonely life, like some primitive twin-cellular or¬>>#QC::Hyphen#<<< ganism suspended in the fluid of daily circumstances. They would never have taken in any Tom, Dick or Harry as a lodger. It was unusual for people up a close like ours to have lodgers at all, though in fact it was the only wally close in the block, and Mrs Tumelty across the street, where they were all wally closes, once had a medical student for two years, an Indian he was I remember. But the Stockwells were finding things a bit tight on his railway pension and what she got for her part-time job in Strathdee’s. They needed more money. They lived and ate in the kitchen and slept in the recess bed there, and never used the front room. But it was a well-furnished place. After all, Mr Stockwell had been in a steady job all his life. He could afford to get in some good stuff over the years. To keep the front room unoccupied seemed a waste of capital crying aloud to be invested. And a student wasn’t just a vulgar lodger they took for the sake of his rent-money. He had a touch of class. He wasn’t their lodger, h
e was ‘Mr Duthie, our student’.
Keen to show himself a true Scotsman of the old school, a working man who had read a bit in his time and could debate the questions of the day and of eternity with anybody, Mr Stockwell used to keep Donald stuck at the table in the kitchen after tea so that he could get him on to a discussion of politics, morals and theology. Many a night he made capital topics of the Welfare State and the Independence of the Individual, Fornication and Teenage Morality, Free Will and God’s Omniscience, Predestination and Redemption, Sin, Repentance, Faith and Good Works. Theology was his favourite theme, and it first came up because Mrs Stockwell was something of a Calvinist in the slant of her mind.
‘If it’s for ye it’ll no gang past ye, that’s what I aye say,’ was her regular contribution of sympathy if anyone dared mention to her the misfortune of a neighbour, the sudden death of a husband, a diagnosis of cancer in a young mother, or the death of a child by drowning in the Canal round the corner.
Mr Stockwell was delighted the first time she said it in front of their lodger. He swooped at the chance to raise a conversational scrap into a theological principle which he could dispute with a student from the Isle of Skye. He was a simple soul, and he thought every Scots divinity student was a Calvinist. Big Donald was too shy to explain he was neither a divinity student nor a Calvinist. He was always willing to defend any position imputed to him.
‘Aye, that’s one of your sayings, Jenny,’ Mr Stockwell pounced. ‘But I must say I’m no all that sure I can see my way to accept the complications of it. It would take you on to predestination. Would ye care to gie us your opinion of predestination, Mr Duthie, sir, and I’ll tell ye what I think.’
‘Well, of course, God’s ways are beyond us,’ Donald answered shrewdly. ‘Who are we to question with our puny knowledge why some are chosen and some are rejected?’
