by George Friel
‘It wouldn’t be right, would it?’ she despised the very idea. ‘I don’t know how you can even think of it in your trade. The money’s not yours. In my job it’s not just money pure and simple. It’s something earned that’s theirs not mine.’
Alone, always alone wherever she was, counting in her cubbyhole with a twobar heater, her old typewriter shoved to one side to give her more room at the small table where she worked, she remembered Tommy and felt a warmth flow over her like the warmth when she saw Grace in the baker’s, for she loved Tommy too at times. But he was only her brother. He would have to save himself. He was too old for her to help.
To help Dross get the feel of the borrowed van Tiger got him an hour with it on Wednesday night.
‘Seasy,’ Dross concluded. ‘Sthe same gears as whit I’m usety.’
‘I telt ye ye whirr worryin aboot nothin,’ Tiger lolled beside him, acting and feeling the chauffeurdriven bigshot.
‘Sa good startin wee van,’ Dross granted. ‘That’s the main thing. Aye, I like her. She’ll do.’
‘Sa good omen. Home, James.’
They picked it up again together on Friday morning, no bother at all, and made smoothly for the corner of the escape route over the Canal. A bobby on point duty halted them to let a long funeral crawl across their front.
‘Hellsbells,’ Tiger chewed his pinkie. ‘It’s high bloody time we wis there.’
‘It’s high time you were away.’
Mr Alan’s bald head gleamed genially round the door of Wee Annie’s cubbyhole.
‘I’m just going, Mr Alan,’ she buttoned her coat to the neck, put on her oldfashioned hat, a cloche in felt with a feather.
‘Have you your rummybirella with you?’ the false teeth shone above a genuine smile. ‘I think it’s trying to snow now.’
‘I’ll be all right, Mr Alan. It’s a short walk really, there and back.’
‘It’s not a nice morning for you at all.’
It was a dreich morning for Grace too. It dragged, a proper snail. Miss Galloway was still cross with everybody and the sums were too hard. She got the first one wrong and had no idea how to do the next one. She just sat and looked at her jotter, thinking of last week’s Nature Study lesson on the snail and more aware of an ache in her middle than of the figures in her book. She was hungry. But she couldn’t eat her piece till playtime. She didn’t even know what her mammy had put in the poke. She wondered and guessed. She sat alone in the back seat, longing for the bell.
Dross sat alone in the front seat longing for action. It was the waiting got him. He didn’t like it. And he didn’t like the sickness in his middle, the quivering void, a sensation resembling hunger but craving a different satisfaction. Tiger was lucky. He was out there stretching his legs, enjoying a wee dauner up and down while he was waiting. Even that was some kind of action. Even just hanging about the corner watching for Wee Annie coming back from the bank.
Coming back from the bank she thought she was being followed. Of course she was. There and back by Hardnut and Chocolate in case by chance or appointment she picked up an escort on the way. Her first misgiving came when she passed the public convenience on her left and saw an undersized young fellow standing at the top of the stairs. She thought she had seen him already, on her way in. Indeed she had. That was Hardnut. She didn’t like the way he nodded past her as if he was signalling somebody. That was him giving Chocolate a flash that he had spotted Tiger at the corner and that meant the van was there. Now he crossed over and walked ahead of her to give Tiger the tictac she was coming right behind him. On her right she had the low wall of a derelict site with hard trampled earth behind it where the grass had failed to live. Perhaps someone was crouched behind the wall waiting to jump on her. But she couldn’t believe it. She marched on bravely clutching the big shoppingbag with the wages, and sacked her passing fear.
‘I’m in a public thoroughfare, I’m not away in the jungle where I might be pounced on by a tiger.’
Tiger loitered near the pend while Dross waited in the van round the corner. He saw Hardnut coming and silently waved the good news round to Dross. The victim was approaching. He would time it nicely to walk briskly into the pend like someone business bound and be right at her heels. Hardnut, first to enter the pend, would be joined by Chocolate who would pass her comfortably on the last lap there. They would wait where the dim light of the winter morning was dimmest, close up behind her the moment she put a foot past them. Chocolate would bundle her to Hardnut and Hardnut would give her the stick. Tiger would grab the bag when she fell in an old maid’s panic, all three of them sprint to the back of the van, where the doors were drawn to but not locked, hop in and close the doors, with Dross foot on the clutch, hand on the gears, raring to go.
‘Off like the hammers,’ said Tiger, ‘the minute I snatch.’
He saw his two pals walk separately into the pend discreetly ahead of Wee Annie. He watched and waited. He saw her come trudging along. Hands in his overcoat pockets, collar up, hair sleek, shoes shining, he strode in after her. The rehearsals were over. It was time for the play.
By playtime Grace was ravenous. As soon as she put one foot in the yard she tore open her mammy’s poke. A jammy piece and two Abernethy biscuits with butter thick between them. The little lamb wolfed them and then felt better. She wiped her jammy-buttery fingers with a dainty hanky pinched from her big sister’s handbag, and when she shoved the hanky back into her pocket her fingers met another poke. Wee Annie’s sweeties. They didn’t interest her for the moment. She had no appetite for them. Teuch jeans didn’t go with bread-and- jam and buttered-biscuits and she was full up anyway. They would keep. She pulled her coatcollar round her neck. She didn’t usually bother to put her coat on at playtime but all morning the sky had coldly rained a cruel sleet softening to snow or a hard snow sharpening to sleet, blown at an angle by a bitter wind. Snow, snow, sleet, sleet, snow. She was glad when the bell rang the end of playtime. She would thole her teacher for the sake of getting back to a cosy classroom.
‘Right! Everybody up straight! Mouths closed, arms folded!’
The cross teacher, not quite so cross after tea and biscuits, returned to the attack.
The attack? The attack was a failure. There’s no point trying to hide it any longer. There’s no use pretending you can build up suspense when you know all the time there’s nothing to get suspended about. It was bound to fail, Wee Annie being what she was, and Tiger, Hardnut and Chocolate being what they were. Chocolate had a soft centre, Tiger wasn’t swift enough, and Hardnut cracked easily when it came to the bit. They were all in position right enough, right where they should be, just to the very second. But Wee Annie didn’t fall when she was pushed, didn’t even let go. She staggered a little, that was all. And Tiger was so barred from action by her eldritch scream he missed the moment to snatch his chance when she was off balance. The wee woman was on guard at once, hugging her bag like a babe at her breast.
Hardnut gave her a quick clip behind the ear. He should have used his hammerhaft of course, but he had been so taken up during rehearsals with practising just where he would strike he had never practised being quick to the draw. So when he fumbled in his pocket and the haft got stuck in the lining he cut his losses and used the edge of his palm instead. It served. She tottered against Tiger, fell at his feet. Tiger stooped to conquer, grabbed at the bag, gave her an oath for it and called her a stupit bitch for not giving it up. His language didn’t shock her. She had been called names before. She hung on gamely and grimly for death or dear life. She wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t their money and it wasn’t hers to give them. It was other folk’s wages, girls who worked in sweat and steam, machine-minders, pressers and folders and parcellers, vanmen and vanboys, her own earned share and the manager’s salary. She wouldn’t, shouldn’t, she couldn’t let go. Hardnut kicked her on the wrist, but he kicked the hand that was holding the hand that was holding the bag, so she still didn’t let go. And all the time she screamed, partly
from fright, partly from the pain in her skinny wee wrist. Tiger seized her in his fierce claws and tossed her against the wall to rattle her into dropping the bag. Her cloche hat was over one ear and her grey head hit the wall and bounced off. She fell flat. But the bag was under her, and she lay deadly still. They milled round, kicking, but they were scared to move her.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Chocolate softly. He was the first to go. He thought Tiger had killed her, cracked her skull or broken her neck or given her a heart attack. She looked so frail lying there, a skelf of a woman with matchstick legs sprawled out, that Hardnut ran too. And when Chocolate melted and Hardnut cracked Tiger jumped over Wee Annie and chased after them. They were all eager beavers now, keen to be first in the van.
In the van Dross had been having the fidgets. They were taking too long. He wasn’t sure what he heard at first. All he was sure of was the job should take seconds, not minutes. He knew what he heard all right when he heard the second scream, and he hopped out of the van doublequick when the scream became screams. It was a case of every man for himself and no van for anybody. He hared up to the Canal bank, beetled along the waterside till he came to a path that would take him back to the streets, loped down it like a frightened rabbit, and walked calmly in safety only when he struck the main road again and mingled with the gadding crowd.
‘That is not allowed,’ said Miss Galloway, mellowing now she had got over the worst of the morning. ‘Who’s next? Spell allowed.’
Next stood up, spelled it, said it, and sat down.
‘He spoke his thoughts aloud. Spell aloud.’
Grace stood up, spelled it, said it, and sat down. Smiled to her teacher, grateful. Miss Galloway was in a good mood again. That was easy.
Hardrunning Hardnut outpaced Chocolate. He was the first to reach the van. He raced to the front to warn the driver, saw the cabin empty, knew what Dross had done and what had made him do it, flourished a signal to Chocolate, who mimed it back to Tiger, and they galloped off in all directions. They knew they’d meet again, they knew where, they knew when.
When Wee Annie first screamed the girls in the laundry, like Dross, weren’t sure what they heard. But like Dross they knew what it was when it went on.
‘It’s Miss Partridge! That’s who it is! It’s Farty-Party! It’s our Wee Annie. Somebody’s after our lolly, that’s what it is.’
All tools down, everybody out. All in a scurry, bright legs twinkling, slim legs flashing, thick legs bounding, lassies in a clamour, spinsters screeching, widows wailing, gallus wenches, warrior women, all yelling to be first, fleetfooted across the yard to the pend.
With glazed eyes she saw them come, ministering angels all in white flying on wings of mercy to bear her up in their hands, blonde Sarah Finn bending over her blue-eyed and ramstam behind her Jean and Jess and all the other seraphim, hands reverently clasped at her suffering, praying for her, with others winging forward to raise her from her fallen state to be rewarded for ever in heaven for doing her duty even unto death. Last but not least, behind the angelic choir the Lord himself.
‘Oh Mistralan,’ she moaned, near fainting in a fog. She couldn’t look up at him, it made her head ache. And hearing them sighing over her hooded eyes she bridged the years and heard in the babble of many remote voices her father reading to her before he made her read it back to him.
—Lift her up tenderly.
—Lift her with care.
‘Bashed on the head she’s been!’
‘Our wages there?’
‘Phone for an ambulance, phone for the police,’ cried Mr Alan.
The manager scampered yes-sirring back to the office.
‘Yes, they’re all there,’ she mumbled, remumbled and fumbled as they put her together again. ‘That scum didn’t get them. It’s just that I had a wee fall. It’s my wrist. Oh, my head! It’s my hand and my head.’
One hand drooped limply, the palm snapped at the stem.
‘Oh Father, oh Papa,’ she whispered as the white angels took her aloft. Before the ambulance came she fainted at last in thickening darkness.
Darkness drifted over the city. The snow had stopped. The sleet had ceased. Mist wandered from the river, shrouded the city centre and the suburbs. Grace flew for dinner through obscure streets, a frightened sparrow. The chill and the damp and the swirling fog seeped into her mouth, searched round her teeth and whispered with malice at a molar.
‘Mammy, I’ve got toothache,’ she wailed. ‘It’s away at the back.’
That was the seeds of the strawberry jam on an uncrowned grinder. Like most Glasgow children at that time Grace had poor teeth, deficient in calcium because of the water from Loch Katrine the dentists said.
‘You’d better get it out then, hadn’t you,’ said her mother casually, accepting toothache as normal in a child’s life. ‘Stop girning and take your dinner.’
‘But I don’t think I can eat,’ Grace lamented. ‘I can’t chew with it. I think it’s shoogly.’
‘It’s only soup,’ her mother pushed her into a chair. ‘You don’t need to chew it. Good Scotch broth. It’ll warm you up. Right to your toes. You can soak a roll in it and you won’t have to do any chewing.’
On the way to afternoon school her woollen fingers met the poke of tough toffees again.
‘Oh, hullo! I’d forgotten about you!’
‘Aye, it’s a fine thing,’ they complained. ‘You get us for nothing and you canny even be bothered to—’
‘Well, not just now,’ she interrupted, caressing them tenderly. ‘Maybe tonight. If it wasn’t I’ve got toothache of course I would.’
‘So long as you remember you’ve still got us,’ said a big one, nearly bursting through the poke in his eagerness to be spokesman for the rest. ‘And don’t forget we come from Wee Annie.’
Wee Annie was whipped off to hospital. Mr Alan went with her, waited for the verdict, his heart troubled for the fate of his faithful servant, full of hate for the neds who had caused such alarm and dismay.
Alarm and dismay in the Phoenix that night. Everybody up Wee Annie’s close knew inside five minutes she had been attacked, and by teatime she was dead, she wasn’t dead, she had been robbed of the lot, she was quite safe and hadn’t lost a penny, she had died at her post saving the wages from a bandit with a German pistol, she had saved her life by handing over the money when a masked man threatened her with a chisel, she had been set on by one man, two men, three men, four men (and a dog), she was dead, she wasn’t dead, she was dying.
Jess and Yowyow, Yoyo and Jean, cornered in whispers, kept asking for Tommy Partridge. But he wasn’t in. Because he lived a goodly distance from the laundry and the rumour-centre, or because he was only her brother, he was the last to get the news, and when he should have been on duty making jokes with the soaks at the bar, acting dad to each lass and her lad in the lounge, he was kicking his heels in long corridors till he could get in to see her. Bobo turned up in the Phoenix that night, the first time for four months, joined her old mates as if she had never been away, sat facing them, her back to the door, pretended to be casual without a care in the world but had to ask over the first drink if they had heard anything fresh. She couldn’t explain why she was so upset, and she couldn’t hide it.
‘Nutta thing,’ said Jess. ‘We was asking too. But Tommy’s not in. Oh, she was a terrible sight when we saw her.’
‘Sawful, isn’t it?’ said Jean. ‘I tell ye ye’re no safe in this city nowadays. She looked that funny with her hat over one eye.’
‘She was lying there sprawled out like a frog with her clothes up her legs,’ said Jess. ‘And the blood! Oh my, the blood!’
‘They musta hit her on the head with a hammer,’ said Jean. ‘The blood was coming down over her eyes.’
‘Have you been seeing Dross lately?’ asked Jean.
The question was malicious. She knew damn fine Bobo and Dross had quarrelled months ago and never made up. A second barb of malice was the insinuation that Dross was as likely as a
nyone else to be mixed up in the affair, to have gone to work seriously on an idea they had all joked about long, long ago when they were all one big happy family.
‘No,’ said Bobo. ‘I never see him now somehow. It’s an awful business. I can’t pretend I like her. But still and all, she’s a puir wee soul. And Hugh Main always used to say I should try to understand her. I’ve no idea what he’s doing these days.’
‘Seen him last week,’ said Yoyo. ‘You’d think he’d won the pools the way he was dressed. Oh, a rare coat he had on! But there was no dame with him.’
‘No?’ said Bobo politely, past caring.
‘Talking about dames,’ Yoyo carried on.
‘Must we?’ Jean interrogated.
‘Must tell yous a funny one,’ Yoyo persisted, missing the malaise heavy on the rest of them. He bashed on brightly.
‘Who did I see coming out the garage the other night but big Alec, him that has the Volkswagen, and you know what he was carryin? So help ma Boab, a big can of antifreeze! And him all dressed up like gaun out on a date. So I says to him, where the hell are ye gaun wi that, I says. You’d never guess what he came out with. I’m gaun to meet the girlfriend, says he.’
He looked round the cold silence, searching for a smile.
‘It was the way he said it. This big can of antifreeze.’
‘You’re away off,’ said Yowyow. ‘Sorry, pal. Wrong time, wrong place.’
‘Aye, all right, we get it,’ said Jean. ‘My God, look!’
