by John Mayer
It was his black top hat which McLane remembered most vividly. How it seemed to sheen and shine from top to bottom when the daylight caught it. No-one in the Calton had ever seen a top hat worn; except in photos in newspapers and that day the Lord Provost drove by in a carriage on his way to meet The Queen in Glasgow City Chambers. This lord had come into their class with his hat in his hand, which for McLane was something of a disappointment. A few had sniggered at the way he was dressed, but McLane watched open-mouthed as this man seemed to be the centre of gravity for a crowd of important people who were subordinated to peering in from the corridor. Lord Mayfield. That was his name. And he was Scottish, which McLane had found odd. He didn’t speak like anyone McLane had ever heard before. He spoke like The Queen; except of course, his voice was male. But his spoken words had all the same tones that they heard on the radio every Christmas. Clasping his hands in a way none of the children had ever seen done before, this very tall, surprisingly young man smiled cheerily before standing right in front of Elsie McGuigan and Frances McCartney. He was so close that the sharp seams of his striped Marlborough trousers nearly touched their desk. And so tall, that they had to crane their necks looking up at him as he spoke:
‘Boys and girls. Good afternoon. My name is Lord Mayfield and my position in Her Majesty’s Government is that of Secretary of State for Education. Now you may be wondering what that is. Well, it means that I take care of all the schools. Not just in Glasgow, nor even in Scotland. But throughout the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain. And I’m here to see if all is well in your school, here in the Calton.
Now, I’m told by your teacher Mr Thomson and by your Headmaster, that your reading is well advanced and that some of you might even go on to err … some form of further education after leaving here. I certainly hope so.’
Turning to their teacher, Lord Mayfield seemed to bow his head to one side as a sign of some kind. Immediately Mr Thomson announced:
‘Everyone - Mr Thomson had never before referred to the class as ‘everyone’ and never did again - open your copies of Mr Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the page where we left off. Brogan, you’ll read for us. And today you’ll read standing for Lord Mayfield. Now, off you go, Brogan.’
So lost was McLane in his own head that he didn’t hear the Rober telling him he was now properly dressed for the day and could put down his elbows. Watching himself as a boy, as though now some kind of outer worldly spirit, McLane saw that earnest look begin to form on his own young face. The one he always bore when getting ready to come first. In what, didn’t matter. It could be a maths test or a race around the block. It didn’t matter so long as he came first. He could almost feel himself pull back his shoulders, lick his lips, glance down at the first sentence and begin. He wasn’t trying to speak like Lord Mayfield; that would’ve been impossible. But as he read, in his unconscious mind, he’d heard the change develop: and when eventually he’d sat down, Big Joe Mularkey gave his best pal a funny look and passed him a note saying that he didn’t sound like himself any more.
What was even more incredible was that everything he felt and everything he put into that reading, it seemed, had shown on Lord Mayfield’s face. Every time McLane glanced up or paused for breath, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Education was quiet and attentive; wringing those clasped hands with clean shining fingernails as though he was actually sitting in the doorway of a dusty closed down drug store listening to Huckleberry Finn decrying the townspeople who shunned him for his shabby clothes, tattered hat and bare feet.
As he’d read, growing more confident and clear with every sentence, the young Brogan McLane had felt something he was to feel many times in his later life at university and in Parliament House. But the first time he’d felt it was there in Calton School; and it felt powerful. Very powerful, indeed. What he’d felt was the power of properly putting one word in front of another in a way that could hold people spellbound.
A little spellbound himself, McLane more juddered his head than bowed to the servitors; who collectively forgave this newcomer. After all, he came from four hundred miles north in Parliament House.
Once out in the Outer Hall, where kings and queens had lain in state, it was Ababuo who broke first. In her royal blue pleated skirt, scarlet school blazer and ribbon-trimmed blue hat, with her corn-rowed hair pinned up, she was every inch the daughter of a peer of the realm and a Queen’s Counsel in Parliament House. Nevertheless, she could no longer hold back the events of the last hour. First, it was a sniffle into her handkerchief, but quickly her tears had flooded so voluminously that she had to fling herself into Joanne’s loving arms. Looking into each other’s eyes, Brogan and Joanne McLane had to hold back their own tears; as they could only imagine the vastness of the journey that Ababuo was now sensing. She now lived in the plush Edinburgh surroundings of her adopted parents’ home, four hundred miles away. But whilst her adopted father was being installed in the House of Lords, her thoughts had slipped back through a worm hole she thought had closed forever, to the mud and grass hut where she’d been born and the drunken screeching of Mbarra’s men as they wildly chopped through the roof and through the limbs of her birth father who’d dared to defend his family and their village.
Standing in a little huddle, with tourists and guides passing by, the three of them felt closer to each other than at any time since she’d come to them. With Joanne tending to the drying of tears and the fixing of make-up, McLane looked around, hoping that no press were nearby to intrude upon this most personal of moments. By and by, they gathered themselves together and, with Ababuo in the middle, began to march proudly hand in hand towards the sunlight and the lunch that awaited them in the Members’ Dining Room.
Laughing at little moments recalled but not recorded, eating their way through the caviar, the line-caught fish, the giant Aberdeen Angus steaks and every few moments congratulating him again, the family dined in style until the last drop of Maison Veuve Clicquot’s finest champagne had been quaffed.
Back in their adjoining hotel suites, Joanne poured three glasses of the same champagne; allowing Ababuo to have a glass with them. Out on the balcony overlooking Old Father Thames, they toasted:
‘To good times as a family. There’s nothing more important.’
While they were clinking glasses, the doorbell to the parents’ suite rang. Thinking that it may be more flowers or messages of good wishes from the House, they tried to ignore the ringing. But whoever was at the door seemed to be very eager to have them open it. Leaving Ababuo and Joanne to swig their champagne and hug each other ever more tightly, it was McLane who opened the door. There stood the hotel manager bearing a piece of paper that looked eerily familiar. Reaching out, McLane looked the man in the face:
‘Well? What on earth can this be?’
The manager’s tone was sincere and apologetic, but he had the air of business about him: ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, sir, particularly on such an auspicious day. We didn’t think it wise to trouble you in the House, but a few hours ago this was emailed to our office.’
Looking down at the single sheet, McLane did indeed instantly recognise the familiar form he’d many times used in court. Running his fingers back through his hair and half turning away, he despaired:
‘Oh NO!
The manager’s persistence was tinged with politeness itself: ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, sir. I apologise for reading this as it came in. It seems as though a Mrs Jean Mularkey and a Mrs Isabella McLane have been arrested in Glasgow for threatening to assault and burn down the house of a Glasgow City Councillor. As far as I know, they’re being held in Glasgow ‘A’ Division Police HQ, sir; and insist upon your return at your earliest convenience.’
Letting out a huge sigh, McLane looked over his shoulder at Ababuo and Joanne, their arms linked, laughing and giggling out on the balcony. The fact that Ababuo was still 16 years old but drinking the best champagne in the hotel, seemed to escape the manager’s attention. Pulling out a £20 no
te and slipping it into the man’s top pocket, Baron McLane winked at the manager:
‘Erm, is there any possibility that you could you bring this back tomorrow morning; say around ten thirty?’
With only the slightest flutter of his eyes and bow of his head, the man silently retrieved the sheet, turned on his heel and seemed to disappear into thin air: the way the best hotel managers do.
~~~o~~~
End of Part Two
Part Three : Enemies Within and Without
Chapter 14
Along the stone slabbed corridor, municipal grey and dull dark green, in brown janitorial dust coat and flapping brown trousers nearly as old as himself, the only servitor allowed up here wearily pushed his trolley: the rubber wheels making the same squeak they had for the last eighteen years. In his plastic tray lay a single manila envelope. Ordinarily, according to last year’s Memo on inefficient single journeys around this vast building, it should have waited with the rest of the mail and come up the following morning. However, on receiving the Memo, no-one expected it to apply to him. That was just understood. At his glass door, the servitor gently bent the envelope so as not to fold it, but just narrow it enough so that he could ease it through the letter box and let it fall into the wire basket.
As the sealed envelope fell and the servitor silently pushed back against the spring of the big brass letter box, sitting at his desk, the chairman didn’t even flinch. The red wax seals surrounding pink legal string were the give-away. Over the years, he’d seen many such deliveries. Claims by injured workmen who’d fallen from gantries. Drunk, the Council always claimed. From kitchen staff who’d burned themselves by stirring boiling soup while at the same time flirting with kitchen maids. And occasionally from some evicted tenant or other who’d been led up the garden path by some young lawyer talking about Judicial Review of Administrative Action: something they’d learned a little about in university. All such claims were received, defended, obfuscated and despatched in the same way. Didn’t these idiots know that the Council had lawyers whose job it was to get out of bed in the morning and ensure that these bogus drains on Council resources were fought to the bitter end with public money?
For the rest of the day the envelope lay tilted and caught by three corners in the wire basket. Ignored and derided, it could wait. There hadn’t been time to raise a court action. Similarly, there hadn’t been time to write their apologies, far less have them approved by the legal department and sent to the public prosecutor for his next move. No. This was just a puff of wind bringing a few molecules of something in the air from the other side of the battlefield. These smells always preceded any real action. So there was no need to open the thing.
At exactly seven thirty as he was tidying his desk for the night, the chairman slipped his fingers under his desktop and pulled open the sliding section above three drawers. On the slab lay a single sheet of paper with no heading at the top, no form number in the corner nor anything at all to suggest that it was official Glasgow City Council paper. Without even taking it out and placing it on his desk, the chairman picked up a pencil marked with the sign of a stonemason’s square and compass and wrote at the top: ‘Opening move made as expected.’
With his coat on and sure that no-one could ever prove what he was about to do, the chairman stepped into the ante-room beside his office. Looking down on the cardboard community so skilfully pasted together by the City Architect’s staff, the chairman bent over the eastern side of the model and identified an address. From the sideboard drawer he brought out a letter opener. Sharp as any razor, he admired its cold steel blade. Gripping the handle tightly in his right hand, the chairman sliced through the very cardboard walls of the tenement he’d identified and spat onto its roof and pencil-drawn windows. Confident that on the waxed cardboard surface his saliva would by morning have evaporated, the chairman buttoned up his coat, opened his door and left his office. As he walked the corridor to the lift, in his mind he saw that envelope lying awkwardly as though trapped in solitary confinement. Using his finger like the dagger he’d just had in his hand, he pressed and twisted the lift button.
Marching more quickly than usual towards the tube station, the chairman slowed, opened his top coat button, loosened his tie and let in some night air. Rebuking himself for allowing emotion to get in, he inwardly said three times that there was no need to break his habit. Blinking as he walked, he reprieved himself; his quick pace and perspiration had been just natural reactions to the beginning of a war he’d waited patiently for nearly thirty years to start.
~~~o~~~
Chapter 15
The Calton Bar had always been a Free House. Un-affiliated to any big brewery or distillery, the landlord had always been free to source his own beers and spirits, set his own prices, create his own ambiance and attract his own customers. The Calton Bar was, in the old sense of the term ‘pub’, a real public house. Truly, for about a thousand people, it was a home from home. This afternoon, Lenny was exercising one of his freedoms: his right to close any time he felt like it.
The bells of the ‘Three Kirks’ within hearing range hadn’t yet struck six and still in his white apron, his appearance on the street surprised quite a few people passing by. Dropping the long black iron bolt down into its hole, Lenny didn’t look for approval from anyone as, on the other of the double doors, he hung a simple white plastic sign which had been in the Calton Bar since the 1950s. On it, just one word was etched in black. It said ‘SHUT’.
Inside, sitting beside each other, squeezed into two simple wooden chairs that were over a hundred years old, looking more than a little sheepish, old Jean Mularkey and Bella McLane hadn’t felt so foolish since they were schoolgirls. Two arcs of about twenty chairs had been arranged to face a table which had three chairs behind it. Facing the crowd, Auld Faither sat in the one on the right while Big Joe Mularkey sat to the left. The high-backed worn oak chair in the centre had come from a posh house clearance so long ago that no-one could remember when this masterpiece of woodwork had been acquired. Some said it was big Angus from Argyle who’d brought it down specially for The Duke to sit in during the trial of that scumbag who assaulted Jean Mularkey and Agnes McLane after their big win on the Grand National horse race. That was the night young Brogan had shown he’d come of age by pronouncing a sentence on his mother’s attacker that was worse than instant death: instead Brogan had seen a way for the attacker to suffer life-long humiliation. It was the widest chair Lenny had, and was of course, unoccupied. The two women were seated right in front of the table and although there were a couple of dozen people on either side of them, everyone in the bar could sense that it was old Jean and wee Bella who were on trial.
As they waited, Auld Faither didn’t say a word to them. Jean’s son, Big Joe, had similarly bitten his tongue and was looking everywhere except at his mother. Even the friends who’d dragged the two women out of the meeting with the city officials were now keeping their own counsel. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, what he’d say. But he wasn’t here yet. He was flying up from London: something that was as foreign to the hundred or so souls crammed in to the Calton Bar as pigs flying over their beloved Celtic Park football ground.
When his phone buzzed, Big Joe Mularkey opened the thing and put on his new reading glasses. Having read the message, he whispered into Auld Faither’s ear: ‘He’s out of the airport and driving here now. Joanne and Ababuo are going on to Edinburgh.’
While everyone waited, Lenny’s two barmaids stretched over heads, slipped through small gaps and generally did a sterling job in delivering beers and hot steak pies to the crowd waiting for the man who would chair this gathering called by Auld Faither. With the minutes passing, the best estimates of how long it would take him to get from the airport came and went. Auld Faither was just about to apologise to everyone again when they heard the sound of his hand-made shoes on the old flagstones in the lane and the back door opening. In exactly the same way that people automatically stand for a judge coming
onto the bench, those who had seats got to their feet. Just as the Red Sea did for the Israelites, a seemingly solid mass of people found a way to form a corridor, allowing him to take his seat. After making himself comfortable, shaking hands with Auld Faither and whispering something into Big Joe’s ear, Brogan McLane reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a Mont Blanc pen. Raising his eyes to the two women on the other side of the table, McLane didn’t hesitate. Looking them both straight in the face, he didn’t see the women who’d fed him as a boy and comforted him in the loss of his mother; he saw red:
‘What the …? Wha’did you two think you were doing? No. Don’t answer that. You obviously weren’t thinking at all. Do you have any idea how this has set things back? You could’ve blown the whole thing! Between you, blown the whole thing for every family represented here today. Do you get that?’
Never having been one to allow anyone to speak to her in that way, old Jean was just about to return fire, when Bella gripped her hand. Leaning forward, Bella looked her nephew in the face:
‘We’re sorry Brogan. Really, we are. Isn’t that right Jean?’
Everyone in the Calton Bar had seen Bella McLane squeeze her old friend’s hand and everyone heard Jean loud and clear. Nodding her head and with tears almost coming, old Jean looked first at her son, then at Auld Faither and lastly at the boy who’d been born within a few minutes of her own son and only half a yard away:
‘Aye, Brogan. We are. It was just that she was such a bitch with her ‘You’ll make lovely new friends from Bangladesh’. I don’t even know where bloody Bangladesh is.’
Drawing in a lot of breath and shaking his head, McLane was about to let them have both barrels between the eyes when again, his aunt Bella dug her nails into her friend’s flesh. Old Jean immediately closed her eyes, stopped her tirade and dropped her head. Letting his breathing come back to equilibrium, McLane kept only a touch of steel in his tone:
