The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Eddie said.

  ‘You don’t have –’

  ‘I do,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I’m supposed to choose a coffin. A casket.’ She tried a smile, but her face wouldn’t make it. ‘I don’t want to do it, Eddie. It’s so damn final. I put Jackie in a box and the bloody box goes into the flames and that’s it. That’s the end.’

  ‘Cremation?’

  ‘That’s what Jackie wanted.’

  Flames. Eddie had assumed a burial. He hadn’t anticipated fire. What difference did it make anyway? Fire, earth. He wanted to say something credible about an afterlife, immortality, paradise. He didn’t hold these beliefs. He wished he did, if only to comfort Senga. He walked with her into the street. The cab was waiting, engine running. Eddie opened the back door, helped Senga in. Her perfume was strong.

  She leaned towards the driver and said, ‘McGlashan’s Funeral Home. Do you know it?’

  ‘Riddrie?’ the driver asked. He was a young man with a shaven head that looked as if it had been dipped in wax. ‘That’s the one on Smithycroft Road, is it?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Senga said. She sat back and was quiet a moment as the cab pulled away, then she turned to Eddie. ‘I don’t know what kind of box to pick.’

  ‘We’ll look,’ Eddie said. ‘We’ll choose something.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have wanted anything fancy. He’d have said it was a waste of money paying out huge sums for something you’re just going to burn.’ Senga checked her face in a small compact mirror then snapped the lid shut. ‘He never talked much about dying. He was full of life. So full of it, Eddie.’

  Eddie gazed from the window. The taxi was travelling along Alexandra Parade. The cigarette factories, in which hundreds of young women had once run the machines that rolled the cigarettes, were empty now. The air used to smell of cured tobacco, as if a cloud of the pulverized weed hung over Dennistoun. Eddie remembered the girls at the end of their day’s work, how they wore headscarves and linked arms as they walked along brazenly, gum-chewing and wolf-whistling any young man who passed. They had attitude, he thought, before attitude was invented. Street cred. Gallus.

  Senga opened the window of the cab and the sleeve of her blouse rolled up and Eddie looked at the tattoo and he had a memory of how Jackie had once answered a question Eddie had asked about the difference between Catholics and Protestants.

  Here’s the difference, son. You cut a Catholic’s throat and he bleeds to death. You slash a Protestant’s throat and guess what?

  What, Da?

  He bleeds to death as well.

  And, Da?

  That’s it, Eddie. There’s nothing else, no difference between them.

  Eddie could even place this conversation in the context of a pale blue summer twilight when he and Jackie had been walking along this very street from a cinema where they’d seen a Randolph Scott Western, Ride the High Country. Jackie loved cowboy stuff. Eddie didn’t care what the movie was, he just liked going to the flicks with his dad. He liked how he felt secure in Jackie’s presence. Besides, there was always vanilla ice cream afterwards at a café called the Bungalow a few blocks from the tobacco factories and a waitress named Serafina who gave him extra raspberry sauce.

  Wait …

  Something in the memory struck a wrong chord. He shut his eyes and imagined Jackie burning and the hideous intensity of heat, the coffin rolling towards incineration and Jackie reduced to ash. What was wrong with how Jackie had answered his childish question about religions?

  He felt the warm breeze against his face and Senga’s perfume wafted towards him and he remembered his dad saying, No difference between them, and Senga saying only this morning, Jackie didn’t have a sectarian bone in his body. And then Eddie was spinning back, and the years fell away from him like so many discarded betting slips, and he was standing on the stairs of the Onslow Drive house and the living room was filled with Jackie and his friends, and Eddie could hear the clink of dark-brown beer bottles and rough grown-up masculine laughter, and he could smell the heady reek of strong cigarettes. He paused the memory. Listened. The sound reverberated inside him. Jackie and his mates were singing ‘The Sash My Father Wore’, an Orange anthem, but that didn’t make sense if what Jackie had said was true, and if Senga’s claim was correct: why would Jackie be singing a Protestant song, an anti-Catholic song, why say one thing to your son and then act differently with your pals?

  Eddie opened his eyes. Somebody had shouted: Death to the Fenian cunts. Then there was more laughter. A beer party, drunks, anything was possible. So Jackie and his mates sometimes sang Orange songs when they were inebriated, so fucking what? That didn’t make Jackie a bigot. Eddie didn’t doubt that when Jackie said there was no difference between Catholics and Protestants he was telling the truth. It was just that he felt obliged to act differently with his drinking pals and sing whatever they were singing, that was all. One of the gang. O My Father Was An Orangeman, In the Good Old Days of Yore … The words faded in Eddie’s head. He’d never had any reason to memorize them. He hadn’t been brought up in a sectarian environment. Flora never spoke of religion. But it jarred him now to be struck by this particular memory, which felt ugly and menacing –

  ‘Something wrong, Eddie?’

  He turned to Senga. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘Let me guess. New York. You were thinking about your family.’

  ‘You’re clairvoyant,’ Eddie said.

  ‘You miss them.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Eddie experienced a flush of tenderness towards her and touched the back of her hand, feeling the big emerald ring on her wedding finger. The common-law wife’s ring of respectability. He let his fingertips rest a moment against the stone. Senga’s flesh was warm.

  It wasn’t a good time to ask her questions, but it was never going to be a good time. ‘Tell me. Does the name Tommy G mean anything to you?’

  ‘Who? Tommy G? No.’

  ‘He’s a black guy. English accent.’ He’s vicious, Senga, he attacked Joyce: but he didn’t append this information. ‘He was acquainted with Jackie.’

  ‘People drifted in and out of Jackie’s life,’ Senga said. ‘I couldn’t keep track. Some he introduced me to. Some he didn’t. Tommy G, no, I’d remember that name, I think. And I don’t remember any black man.’ She ignored the No-Smoking sign, lit a cigarette.

  A dead end. A door clanging shut.

  Eddie saw the massive structure of Barlinnie Prison loom up beyond the houses in the district of Riddrie, so dense and grey it swallowed the light of the afternoon sun. Row after row of narrow barred windows; men shut away in small cells. Jackie’s alma mater, he thought. What was it Flora had said? He was never quite the same after jail. He was harder under the surface. The prison seemed impregnable, impossible to escape. Maybe when a man left this place he took some of it with him. Perhaps Flora had been right and Jackie had walked out of Barlinnie a different person, one inducted in the ways of crime and cruelty. But Flora’s view was coloured by loss and bitterness: how could it be accurate?

  The taxi stopped. Senga got out, pressed money into the cabby’s hand. McGlashan’s Funeral Home was a redbrick building; the name of the firm had been painted, in sombre gilt script, on the curtained window.

  Senga said, ‘I hate this.’

  Eddie led her with gentle pressure towards the door. ‘We’ll be in and out in a couple of minutes, Senga. If you don’t feel like talking, leave it to me.’

  She dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the ground, crushed it with her foot. The cab pulled away, leaving a scent of diesel on the air. Eddie opened the door of McGlashan’s and a bell rang, and Senga hesitated a second before she stepped inside. The place, air-conditioned and cool, was shadowy. People who deal in the disposal of the dead don’t need bright lights. They want shady corners, an easy sense of peace and eternity.

  A man appeared in a doorway. He wore a three-piece black suit and a black tie with a large knot that had slipped slightly
to one side. He had a drinker’s red-tinted nose and he sniffed a lot.

  ‘Robert Crichton?’ Senga asked. ‘We have an appointment.’

  The man nodded. ‘Mrs Craig?’

  ‘Ms Craig actually.’

  Crichton took her hand. He turned his face to Eddie. His breath smelled of gin.

  ‘I’m the deceased’s son,’ Eddie said.

  Crichton went directly into his spiel. ‘This is always a sorry time. No matter what the circumstances are. You have my condolences. My most serious regrets. McGlashan’s is totally at your service …’ He led Eddie and Senga inside a room filled with coffins, dark glossy boxes in which muted overhead lights were reflected.

  Crichton touched surfaces with a loving gesture, trailing his nail-bitten fingers across lacquered wood and brass handles and satin interiors. Senga stood very still, surveying the room with the look of a woman wishing herself elsewhere, because this, this damn showroom, was her idea of hell. All these bloody boxes and bolting Jackie down beneath a lid and turning the screws and into the fires with him. Bone-pale, she found a chair and sat down and gazed into, her hands.

  Crichton whispered to Eddie. ‘She’s not taking it well. It’s hard. We’ll do everything we possibly can. You’re in good hands here … Shall we price some models?’

  Eddie scanned the boxes. ‘What difference does the price make?’ he asked.

  ‘It depends. The kind of send-off you want to give the departed. The matter of your budget, naturally.’

  ‘You don’t exactly budget for your father’s murder,’ Eddie said. ‘It doesn’t come into your general financial plans.’ This room annoyed him. The boxes irritated him. Crichton’s breath was offensive. They were supposed to be selling more than coffins here; factors like composure and calm came into the transaction. Eddie wasn’t feeling calm. He hated the whole thing. Death was absurd, violent death more so. A gunshot in the night, a flash at twilight, snuffed out.

  Crichton said, ‘Well, murder, of course, you don’t anticipate, you can’t, I mean –’

  ‘Damn right you don’t anticipate,’ Eddie said.

  Crichton pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger as if he were about to plunge his face under water. Then he laid his hands on the edge of a shiny black casket whose interior was lined with off-white satin.

  ‘This one is a bargain,’ he said. ‘And very handsome too.’

  ‘And what do you call inexpensive?’ Eddie asked.

  Crichton mentioned a figure that Eddie tried to convert into dollars. He found himself gazing at Crichton’s chewed nails and thinking it apt that a sordid little man with boozy breath and an off-centre necktie was the one to sell corpse containers, worm boxes.

  Eddie touched the coffin. The wood was slick. Flames would peel the lacquer off in microseconds. ‘It’ll do,’ he said. ‘You take plastic?’

  ‘Visa. Mastercard. We require, ah, a twenty per cent deposit.’ Eddie gave him his Visa card and Crichton went off to swipe it through a machine.

  Eddie walked to where Senga sat. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Did you choose that one, Eddie?’ she asked. She pointed to the black casket.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘It’s nice. I’ll repay you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I insist, Eddie.’

  Crichton came back with the credit card and receipt. Eddie scrawled his name quickly on the slip, then escorted Senga in the direction of the front door. Outside, they stood together in Smithycroft Road, small shops behind them and square grey suburban houses facing them; the leaves of dense trees floated sunlight back into their eyes. Eddie put a comforting arm round Senga’s shoulders and she inclined her head towards him. Neither of them spoke for a long time: death laid a veneer of silence over them.

  Then Eddie drew his arm away and said, ‘Tell me a little more about Haggs. Is he well known in this city?’

  ‘How do you mean, well known?’

  ‘Would he be well known in … oh, let’s say, law-enforcement circles?’

  ‘You mean would the police know him? Of course they would. He was tried four or five years ago for – what’s the expression – tampering with a jury? It made a big splash in the papers at the time. He walked away without a blemish.’

  Senga slipped an arm through Eddie’s and they walked together in the direction of Cumbernauld Road, where they finally stopped outside the public library, an octagonal building with a view of Barlinnie, and waited for a passing taxi.

  ‘Where does he live?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Rouken Glen. I’ve got the address somewhere.’

  ‘I’d like it,’ he said.

  She spotted a taxi and raised a hand and the cab braked. She climbed inside ahead of Eddie and asked, ‘Why?’

  26

  ‘He calls me, orders me to find Billy McQueen. I don’t care what it takes, he says, find him. Break a few skulls if you have to.’ John Twiddie slurped up a good measure of McEwan’s heavy into the funnel of his mouth. ‘Haggs gets on my tits something serious. Go here. Do this. Do that. I’m like a dog on a leash, doll.’

  Rita was busy rearranging her rings. She liked to move them around. It’s true what people said, she thought; variety is the spice of life. She liked the reflections the little gems made. She finished her Bailey’s and stuck the glass on the counter and tilted her head to catch the afternoon sun that came in at an angle through the window of the upstairs bar at the Ubiquitous Chip in the West End of the city.

  ‘And where do I find Billy McQueen? Eh? Where do I start looking? I don’t know the guy.’ Twiddie drained his pint. His nose throbbed where the stud was situated. ‘He’s not at his house, Haggs says. So give that a body swerve. He might be in England, Haggs says.’

  ‘England? Big place, England.’

  ‘Needle in a fucking haystack, hen.’

  Rita was finally satisfied with the arrangement of her rings. ‘You have to respect Haggs. He’s a self-made man. He’s seen you all right with a few quid. You don’t have to love him.’

  Twiddie made a hawing sound, meaning mibbe, mibbe not. He was thinking of the way the van had caught fire last night. He was remembering flames filling the front, and black smoke drifting towards the wasteland, and the alkies waking up and pushing aside their sheets of newspaper and watching the van smoke and fizz for a time, then they crawled back under their papers or into their threadbare sleeping bags and wondered if they were having DTs.

  Through the dull ache of hangover, Twiddie remembered the sound of the fire brigade in the distance, then him and Rita running away from the scene. Holding hands, laughing, collapsing near an old railway arch. And still laughing. They had fun together, and Twiddie liked that. He thought Rita was a knock-out in the looks division. She was sexy, firm tits, easy to arouse, keen to please.

  Twiddie ordered two more drinks. Heavy for him, Bailey’s for her. McQueen, one-legged man. How bloody hard could it be to track down Wan-Fittit?

  He’d make some phone calls. He’d leave a few questions out there in the right places and mibbe get a few answers. He picked up his pint and winked at Rita. She leaned forward on her stool and adjusted the knot of his tie, which was an Armani knock-off, red with small pink dots. Twiddie thought it went well with his counterfeit Versace suit, a three-piece black number with very short lapels.

  He set down his glass and spoke quietly. ‘If that old fucker Mallon had talked, then we wouldn’t have this shite to wade through –’

  ‘If is a wee word with a big meaning,’ Rita said. She adjusted the gold-plated paperclip that pierced her left earlobe then she poked Twiddie in the chest. ‘Why don’t you just make your phone calls, lover?’

  ‘Will do.’

  Twiddie looked round the bar. The clientele was mixed, some shabbies hanging about in the hope of a free pint from passing acquaintances, a few low-class criminal types, a well-known author and a gaggle of his girlie acolytes, an undercover detective Twiddie made immediately, a drunken Austral
ian woman who kept wanting to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ only to be shushed every time she uttered a few notes. It was a drab sort of place, but fashionably situated in a narrow lane close to Byres Road, where an assortment of students and trendies shopped and ate. Twiddie, who’d been born in the clapped-out Cranhill housing estate in the east of the city, the Drug Casbah, thought he’d come up in the world when he drank in The Ubi.

  He found a quiet corner where he could use his cellphone. Reception wasn’t terrific but at least he had a good view of Rita sitting up on her stool, long legs and red leather miniskirt and some spangled stuff in her hair that sparkled when the sun caught it. She looked a picture. A wanker’s dream. He loved when they went to clubs and she danced her arse off for hours.

  Twiddie punched in numbers. He talked to people in different parts of the city. Mad Cross-Eyed Logan, who ran betting shops in Shawlands and Govan, said he hadn’t seen McQueen in months. Bobby McPherson, operator of a profitable ticket-forging enterprise and nicknamed Bobby Christ because of his intense religious beliefs, said he hadn’t heard a dicky bird about Wan-Fittit in weeks. Patrick ‘The Cowboy’ O’Hare, who’d once borrowed heavily from McQueen to establish a chain of dry-cleaning establishments throughout the city, said he no longer did business with Billy, and his loans were all paid off. Teejay Guptah, owner of the Patna Palace Curry House in Bath Street, said he thought he’d seen McQueen the day before yesterday near George Square, but he wouldn’t swear to it.

  He made one last call, this time to Gio the Gasman, so-called on account of his occasional habit of wearing a World War II gas mask because he was allergic to petrol fumes and pollen. Most of the time the Gasman hung out on the corner of Sauchiehall Street and Dalhousie Street, chain-smoking cigarettes hand-rolled in dark brown paper. He spent hours watching the street, grooving to the sounds of his Walkman.

  He answered Twiddie’s call with his usual greeting. ‘Hazzo.’

  Twiddie asked, ‘You know Wan-Fittit McQueen? You know his house?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Gio.

  Twiddie mentioned the address in Novar Drive, Hyndland. ‘I want you to go there. Keep an eye open for him.’