by George Friel
Mr Christie flapped and slapped and tapped his Sunday paper into its original folds. Smoothed it across his knees. Glared. Stared. His Adam’s apple went up and down.
‘What are you telling us all this for?’ Mrs Christie demanded, towering over him, glowering over him, daring him to go on.
‘Smatter of fact,’ Tommy muttered. ‘I don’t like to say it but I’m a wee bit frightened sometimes. That wee girl was called Grace too. You know, like your wee girl. Is she in? She’s got this idea about God’s grace and you’ve got to answer for it.’
‘She’s ben wi big Aggie,’ said Mr Christie.
‘Are you trying to tell us she’s after our Gracie?’ Mrs Christie asked at the same time as her husband spoke. ‘She’s very fond of your Grace,’ Tommy answered bravely. ‘That’s what I mean. I thought I ought to warn you. Keep her away from her. Don’t let her ever get her by herself. Don’t let Grace go into her house.’
‘You should tell the polis if it’s like that,’ Mrs Christie was nearly shouting. ‘And if you don’t I will.’
Then they were all talking at once.
‘The woman should be locked up, so she should,’ said Mr Christie. ‘A bloody menace like that and you walk in here …’
‘Send them across the frontier?’ said Mrs Christie. ‘What’s that …’
‘… as if it was just a wee fancy she had …’
‘… meant to mean, tell me that.’
‘… to go murdering weans.’
‘She only wants to save them,’ said Tommy. ‘She thinks’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Mr Christie. Three heartfelt syllables equally stressed.
‘… she’s being kind to them,’ Tommy ended sickly.
The husband and wife nattered at him, clattered and battered and splattered at him, and he just sat there with his head bowed under the clamouring of their words. For nothing now mattered to him. He had done what he came to do.
‘But I can’t go to the police,’ he said wearily when they stopped for breath. ‘What amI to tell them? I’ve no proof.’
‘If she’s been in a home,’ said Mrs Christie.
‘She left it,’ said Tommy. ‘She walked out and nobody was there to stop her. She’s been out ever since. She’s as sane as you or me as far as the law goes. If I go to the police what do I say?’
‘I know what I’d say,’ said Mr Christie.
‘Aye, but you couldn’t prove it,’ said Tommy. ‘That’s the point. And the police wouldn’t thank you. I doubt if they’d listen. They’ve enough to bother them. And maybe she’s all right now. I could be wrong you see.’
‘Then what the hell are you making this fuss for?’
Tommy by the lapels of his Sunday suit.
‘Frightening decent folk out their wits,’ Mrs Christie pulled her husband away.
‘Cause maybe I could be right,’ Tommy cowered under Mr Christie’s raised hand. ‘I’d hate if anything happened and I’d held my tongue and never warned you. I’ll try to persuade her to go in again as a voluntary patient but I haven’t much hope.’
‘America,’ said Mr Christie, so baffled he harped back, sure Tommy was a fantastic liar. ‘I never knew she was in America. She’s lived here all her life. When the hell was she ever in America?’
‘Oh, she was in America all right,’ Tommy took him up gladly on that point. ‘She married an American soldier during the war. But she dropped her married name when she came back here. Something went wrong. He was taking her to a farm in Nebraska. It was his old folks’ place, oh a real sainted pair they were according to him, and they’d give her a rare welcome and then the farm would be his. He told her the tale you see but it was nothing like what he promised, and they didn’t get on somehow and she came home. She’s an educated woman you know, shorthand and typing and book-keeping, she can earn her living anywhere. But she’d never talk about it. About what went wrong I mean.’
They let him go with douce Scots thanks. But the thanks were as cold and lumpy as yesterday’s porridge because what he had come to tell them wasn’t the kind of information they could feel grateful to have. If they were to take it seriously it was a worry beyond their coping with, and if they tried to sneer it off as rubbish they were doubtful till they worried again. The idea that any woman could be so base as to murder a little girl upset the even tenor of their ways. They called Grace in from the front room. They gave her together and in turn the strictest instructions never to visit Miss Partridge, never to be alone with her, to have nothing at all to do with her. Grace listened with no expression. She was a self-disciplined child, accustomed to hiding what she was thinking and what she was feeling. She was what simple folk call deep. And a contrary child too. Her parents didn’t know that from the moment the conversation got loud she and Agnes had been listening behind the door. They heard only the end of the dialogue, only enough to puzzle them. And Grace thought that if funny Wee Annie was all that dangerous and mysterious it would be interesting, perhaps even exciting, to keep in with her and find out what it was all about.
CHAPTER SIX
Angus Erskine, the vulgar bard who had serenaded Wee Annie a summer earlier, was now King of the Backcourt and All Adjacent Territories, from Ruchill Park to the Botanic Gardens, and from the Coal Hills at Dawsholm to the Elephant’s Grave at Kelvin Bridge. He was also, by his own creation, Earl of Angus. Having no clear idea of class distinctions, degrees of nobility and order of precedence, not even aware of the difference between a baronet and a knight, he saw nothing out of place in being a King and an Earl too. He created himself Earl of Angus one balmy spring afternoon when Miss Galloway (requiescat in pace) gave us a history lesson about Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus. She told us with great dramatic effect, suiting the action to the word, how he had hanged somebody over some bridge and that was why he was called Bell-the-Cat. I’ve forgotten the details. I don’t think I followed them very well in the first place, but I can clearly remember Miss Galloway’s fingers as a rope round her neck and her tongue lolling out between her loose dentures. We called Miss Galloway Lucy because Shoe Lur- insky heard another teacher call her that in the corridor one morning as the lines were tramping in to Miss McCandlish hammering at the ‘Village Blacksmith’ on the piano in the Assembly Hall. She may have been Lucy, but she was never lucid. I have a thousand and one pictures of gruesome facts and gay, peculiar items and strange, stranger than fiction they were, the ants crossing the Limpopo and lemmings drowning themselves in the sea as she sank to the rough boards of the classroom floor, swimming ever more and more weakly, swallows winging south with the turn of the season, finding their way by some mysterious guidance the way she found a route from her desk to the door with her eyes shut as she flapped her hands, the greenwood of yesterday changing into the coal of today as she rolled her shoulder blades and pressed herself down to her knees with her ringed fingers splayed across her skull, but I have no certain recollection of what she was trying to prove by her various performances. Still, she was a great teacher. She died in Woodilee Mental Hospital out at Lenzie, God rest her.
When she got on to Archibald Douglas and him being Earl of Angus, our Angus in the back corner seat of disgrace for inattention and insubordination took the point at once. We turned round to give him a smile because Lucy had innocently mentioned his name. He stood up and bowed, clasped his hands above his untrimmed thatch and made an arc of acknowledgement. Then he jabbed his chest with the index finger of his left paw, the right one out with the thumb up, and in a hoarse whisper informed us, ‘Smee!’
Lucy missed it. She was at the blackboard writing out the name Cochrane. I can remember that for sure because Andrew Cochrane was our local grocer, but I’ve forgotten how he came into the story of the Earl of Angus. Our Cochrane had a cat, or rather the man in charge of our branch had a cat, for Andrew Cochrane himself was a superman of distant space who merely sanctified the shop with his name and the word Limited after it. Inspired by Miss Galloway’s thrilling lesson Angus pinched the r
ibbon from Lizzie Graham’s ponytail, pinched a wee bell from a toy harness set in Woolworth’s, slung the bell on to the ribbon, tied ribbon and bell round the neck of Cochrane’s big fat lazy cat, and legitimised himself as Angus Bell-the-Cat, Earl of Angus. Thereafter, history was his favourite subject, and he knew more about the Red and Black Douglases than ever I did. In his teens he read a lot about the American and French Revolutions because he had caught up on Tom Paine through looking for the Erskines in history after he had tired of the Earls of Angus, so oddly may an innocent teacher’s words warp the mind of the growing boy. (In case you don’t know, Lord Thomas Erskine, the youngest son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, thought the French Revolution was a good thing and became a great pal of Tom Paine. I didn’t know, till Angus told me.)
But he had other interests besides history. He was interested in girls. In the light of our religion before he came to our shores his sermons on their place in life were downright heresy, but like a true revolutionary he obliterated the old doctrine and made his heresy the new orthodoxy. And like a true revolutionary he bided his time till the situation was ripe. No abortive putsch ahead of the masses for our Angus. To begin with, he took things as he found them. We played with the girls now and again, especially when Big Tonalt shepherded us, and thought nothing of it. They were just mass-produced units making up the number required for whatever game was next. When he began his foreign mission Angus lured us away from them, as if to make the heart grow fonder with abstinence. We withdrew from the backcourt and fought for local fame as tough hombres in the badlands with him as boss of the territory. But the withdrawal was followed by a return when the spring came back bringing summer at her heels. Angus abdicated his kingdom. He became a preaching friar, spreading what was to us a novel view of the proper organisation of our society and the most rewarding pursuits for its members. After growing up into a warrior community, raiding our neighbours for the sheer lust of power, and even when we were at peace with them obstructing their journey through any close, backcourt, street, lane or cowp we controlled, behaving like the frontier guards of a people’s democracy, happy when we saw the timid traveller afraid of our veto on his visa, we were converted by Angus during one joyful, glorious, panting summer season into a band of girlchasers seeking nightly adventures. And the girls were no longer neuter nouns making up the complement of a team. Angus knew their mysteries. He explained they were different.
It sorely grieved Big Tonalt. He had lost us in the long weeks when we were away empire-building. When he saw he had lost the girls too he floundered in loneliness, a cold fish in a daughterless bowl. They were too busy running from us to have time to run to him. Gone were the days when he could call us children and play No Roost with us, never again would he join hands with the girls singing clockwise ‘I Sent a Letter to My Love’, ‘She is Handsome, She is Pretty’, or ‘There Stands a Lady on the Mountain’, and unsung for evermore were all their other songs of pastoral love expressing the coiled longings of their unconscious spring. So Big Tonalt gave in. He had his own worries that summer, and after our season of war we were left in peace to get the right girls into ploys invented and produced, devised and improvised, directed and orches¬>#QC::Hyphen#<<< trated by the talented Angus, the choreography supplied by the girls themselves. Their footwork came back to me some years later when I first read of that Papal Sylvia
Who runs, but hopes she does not run unseen.
With a kind glance at her pursuer flies,
So much at variance are her feet and eyes.
Angus was even washing his face and hands every day by this time, and he was strangely better dressed and altogether smarter than he had been. He kept his dark hair tidy with a massage of brilliantine or butter, and he looked a real little gipsy the way one grease-flattened lock drooped over his forehead, nearly touching his brown eyes. The foreign cut and colour of him was especially strong when he smiled, for he had good white teeth, an unusual thing amongst us. Maybe that was why he turned on a smile so often, a bright beam that lit up his tanned face with sunshine. When lesser boys lost the head with an enemy and got tangled in a costly battle, Angus just smiled and by the unrelenting fixity of his smile intimidated his opponent into unconditional surrender. For his friends he had an extra broadness to the beam, but the super one was for the girls. He treated them as if he was a gallant cavalier and they were ladies of the court. Maybe it was his interest in history affected his behaviour. For the climax of his act he had a simple little trick. He would take a girl’s hand and raise it to his lips, bending over with his heels together, an absurd performance that made us think he was going sloppy the first time we saw it. But at the embarrassing moment when his lips smacked it turned out to be the back of his own hand he was kissing. He went on getting a twitter and a giggle for it even after it was familiar to the girls, and through acting the clown like that, a flippant don john, a tenement casanova, he got closer to them than any of his disciples, solemn types obsessed with the obscure implications of his doctrine, just as an unlettered saint is nearer to God than the tormented theologians who try to understand Him.
It was one of those disciples who put the ball on the slates trying to imitate Angus. That was Keechie McGibbon. But he hadn’t the touch. Besides being a two-faced ape, he was a lowbrowed, pigeyed, hamfisted, unwashed nuisance with two left feet, and not in his right mind the blue and gold evening he bundled Grace Christie in a corner of the backcourt across from the midden. The usual game was all good clean fun so long as Angus was boss. He made two innings of it. The boys gave the girls three minutes start to run off and hide and then chased after them through all the closes, dunnies and stairs far and near, though to make the game playable at all we had eventually to set bounds to the territory they could fairly use. When she was captured a girl was hustled back to the den in the backcourt and kept there in charge of a guard known as the boxie till all her pals were captured too. The duty of boxie was of course given to the halt, the lame and the blind, the cissies and jessies. But all prisoners were freed if one of their side was clever enough to get to the den unseen, race through it without being grabbed by the boxie, and scream, ‘Ree-leece!’ Then we had to start all over again. Under the wise rule of Angus we didn’t mind. Taking a struggling prisoner to the box allowed as many opportunities of wrestling and wriggling and cuddling and tickling as you cared to take, according to your temperament or your prisoner. The sun seemed to hang long in the western sky to keep a solitary eye on us in those summery evenings. Nobody else watched, except of course Miss Partridge.
We had all the girls in the box this time except the crafty Grace Christie. She was a moocher. She had a tiresome habit of lurking up some nearby close and darting out to release the rest of her team while we were combing the Garrioch dunnies down at the Kelvin for her. But a signal received at our HQ reported two runners hot on her scent and her delivery under escort could be expected any minute. So we all stayed round the den, ready to help the boxie and make sure no Grace would break through however suddenly she appeared. To entertain us Angus sported with big Lizzie Graham, a sonsy lump of unblushing girlhood as gallus as himself with a slight cast in her left eye.
They danced to each other in a pad dy do they had recently invented and were still elaborating, for they were as predestined a doubleturn as ham and eggs. It was a twisted caper, by Can-Can out of Minuet and they were inspired to improvise a coda to it, producing by telepathic collaboration what Angus called a dance apacheonata, a rough and tumble that made Wee Annie scowl as she hung out the staircase window. Lizzie curtsied to her partner, the skirt of her shortsleeved summer dress held high and wide between her thumbs and forefingers, her pinkies demurely extended, and tapped a retreat on her tiptoes while Angus, with his lean gipsy belly stuck out, trotted towards her. His rigid arms moved alternately like a couple of pistons, his fingers folded into his palms and his thumbs pointing stiffly at Lizzie. When it seemed they must come together frontally because Angus was advancing faster than Lizzie was
retreating, they shyly reversed and bent away from each other. The promised conjunction was made by a bump of their bottoms, with Lizzie lifting her skirt to let the jeans Angus had on meet the gym trunks she was plainly wearing. Insulted by the snub Angus whirled round like an entry cat and swung her round and off her feet. She returned to earth the fourth time round and braked suddenly on one foot, then threw him away with such nicely judged violence that he staggered drunkenly backwards, on the point of overbalancing any moment and falling flat on his seat. To compensate for the danger he lurched forward and seemed about to fall flat on his face instead. He avoided both tumbles by doing a double somersault under the friendly eye of our sinking sun, and Lizzie scampered away from him in crisscross steps, waiting in mimed alarm for his descent. He landed lightly on his feet and snatched her again, all in one movement, and she flopped like a brokenstemmed daffodil. Supporting her with one hand on the small of her back, he had her almost parallel to the ground from head to knee, her legs open, and with the other hand he tenderly stroked his own sleek hair as he gazed fiercely into her skelly eyes.
