All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  I nodded, circled my wrist in a wind-it-on gesture.

  He sat back, frowning.

  ‘Yeah, of course you did. You know everything, Gerry. You know all about them. You know that our friend was involved.’

  All at once, in front of the screens, a large group of passengers lifted their bags and moved off smartly for the far end of the concourse.

  ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘You think I’m making it up?’

  ‘What’s “involved”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said he was involved. Involved how? Doing what?’

  ‘Doing what they did. Fundraising. Safe houses. Going over on the Stranraer boat with a jangle of rods where his spare wheel should be. Use your imagination, Gerry. You’re supposed to be a journalist.’

  When he grimaced, the furrows were deep round his mouth. A scurf of white in the stubble. He’d be early forties, I figured. Ages with Lyons. Maybe a year or two younger.

  ‘What’s your angle, incidentally? Hamish. If I can ask.’

  He held my gaze. He swept the back of his hand down the front of his jacket. I took in the bald leather, the frayed neck of the T-shirt, the grubby jeans.

  I snorted.

  ‘Have you not heard? There’s no money in papers any more. You cannae get decent eccies now, even. I’ll be lucky to get claiming for this.’ I waggled my empty cup.

  He swung the satchel over his head, settled the strap on his shoulder.

  ‘You’re not the only hack in Scotland, Gerry.’ He jerked a thumb towards the platforms. ‘There’s a service to Waverley every fifteen minutes now. Four times an hour.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I stood up. ‘I’ll talk to my editor. If something comes of it, I can maybe get you something. A tip-off fee. Five hundred, tops. And I’d need the photo.’

  He zipped his jacket, turned up the collar.

  ‘Let me ask you something, Hamish. You said it yourself: I’m not the only show in town.’

  He was bending to fasten his satchel and he looked up, flushed, incredulous.

  ‘Christ. You really don’t want this story, do you? What, are you related to this guy? Is he paying you? I mean: fuck.’ He shook his head.

  ‘I never said I didn’t want it. I’m just intrigued. Why I’m so special. Why I get singled out for special treatment. Why is that?’

  His head rode the question like a punch. Then he smiled, an ecstatic disclosure of tainted whites.

  ‘Can’t you guess, Gerry?’ He stood up to leave. ‘I like your work.’

  *

  In the office I googled ‘New Covenanters’. Nothing came up. A few nostalgic namechecks on loyalist websites, and a deluge of evangelical pages devoted to biblical covenants. I tried Lexis-nexis, the UK newspaper archive, but it only goes back to the mid-nineties. I sent an email to Daniel Galt in Research, asking for any references to the New Covenanters in Tribune articles between 1981 and 1994.

  What else? I thought. Then: Lewicki.

  Jan Lewicki was a cop. I’d known him since my time on the newsdesk. Even now, it was me he brought his tips to, when he had them, and I passed them on to Maguire. I also arranged his tip-off fees which, being a cop, he wanted in cash. These days it was harder to get away with cash payments to ‘anonymous’ sources, but for the time being Lewicki did all right by us. I put in the call and he promised to get back to me.

  ‘Who was that?’

  Fiona Maguire was at my elbow. I wondered why my eyes weren’t nipping; her perfume usually announced itself about halfway across the room.

  There wasn’t time to come up with a lie.

  ‘Lewicki.’

  ‘Yeah? Something happening?’

  ‘Who knows? Might be nothing. Might be something.’

  ‘Something big?’

  ‘I think so. Maybe. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Good.’

  She walked away. She didn’t even turn her head, just raised her voice to a measured shout.

  ‘You’re due it.’

  Chapter Two

  Skip James was the only blues singer. All the others sang about pain, they sang about trouble and woe, how their woman left them, how they couldn’t pay their rent, how another mule was kicking in their stall. But the music itself was happy. It buoyed you up, got you going. It eased your pain. None of this happened with Skip. Skip James brought you down and kept you there, pinned you to the floor with clean runs of notes in a minor key. A high, complaining voice that scared you when it didn’t depress you: I’d rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man.

  The Complete Early Recordings was playing while I fixed breakfast. I was cracking eggs into a bowl when the telephone rang.

  ‘Is that Conway Enterprises?’

  I looked at the wall-clock: quarter past seven. Lewicki was on nightshift.

  ‘Hold on, Jan.’

  I wiped my hands on a dishcloth and killed the volume on Skip’s lamentations. I fished my notebook from my jacket pocket.

  ‘On you go.’

  The toaster sprung with a violent crash.

  ‘On you go.’

  ‘You got a pen?’

  Jan had called in a favour from Special Branch. He had contacts there. Yes, there was a file on the New Covenanters, but it didn’t amount to much. No one was even sure what the New Covenanters might be. It wasn’t a paramilitary group. It wasn’t even a street gang of the Billy Boys type. It was difficult to know what to call it. A pressure group, maybe. They sent menacing letters to Catholic MPs and known Republican sympathisers. They disrupted Republican marches, wrestled banners to the ground. The group seems to have disbanded, so far as anyone could tell, around 1983. Probably it was a tiny operation, a few guys in someone’s back bedroom. The New Covenanters was mainly a name, Lewicki offered, something to spray on garage walls.

  ‘Thanks anyway, Jan.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘They put out a newsletter. There was a guy lifted for a breach at a Troops Out march in eighty-two. He had a shoulder bag filled with copies of this magazine.’

  I opened the notebook again.

  ‘What was it called?’ I said.

  ‘Rathlin.’

  ‘As in the island?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rathlin Island?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Good. What about the guy, the vendor; what was his name?’

  ‘Thomas Deans.’

  ‘He still about?’

  ‘He’s dead, Gerry.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  I had filled the filter cone with hot water and now it would be close to overflowing. I tried to reach it but the phone cord wouldn’t stretch.

  ‘Yeah.’ Lewicki sighed. ‘But here’s the thing. This guy had a brother: Jacob.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Jacob Deans.’

  Coffee had spilled over the lip of the mug, pooling on the breakfast bar. Lewicki was waiting.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jan, You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Dixie Deans?’

  ‘Right. Jesus.’

  I wrote ‘Dixie Deans’ on the pad. Then the word ‘Maitland’. Deans was a gangster, a local face. One of the Maitland crew. Since Rix had corralled us along the red-top road, we’d seen a lot of Walter Maitland in our pages. According to Martin Moir’s increasingly florid copy, Maitland was the overlord of Glasgow crime, the Clydeside Moriarty. He lived in Cranhill and most of the ‘business’ in the East End – girls, smack, racketeering – went through Maitland. In my own days on the newsdesk I’d covered some of the trials, Maitland’s soldiers, his scuzzy lieutenants. I’d seen them taken down, cuffed hands held aloft in gestures of effete defiance. But mostly they walked, emerging onto the steps amid a sidling scrum of reporters, arms spread in benediction to deliver the victory speech, cheeky-boy grins on their chib-marked maps. This was the photo the papers would carry next morning. People can’t get enough of these stories. It took me a while to appreciate this, but the city likes it
s gangsters. A certain civic affection has always encompassed them, the Fullertons, the Norvals, the Boyles. Gangsters are a local speciality, like charismatic socialists and dour-faced football managers. People connect them to an older Glasgow, a darker, truer city before the stone-cleaning and the logos, Princes Square and the City of Culture. We take solace in their formalised acts of violence, these murders in which everything – location, timing, the disposition of the corpse – has an emblematic aptness, a rhetorical neatness. Bodies dumped in cars, the bullet up the anus, the dead tout clutching a bag of dogshit: the codes are being respected, you feel, protocols observed.

  ‘So what was Deans’s involvement? Was he part of it, the New Covenanters?’

  ‘Nah, not that we know of. It seems a bit, cerebral for Dixie.’

  I could see his point. I’d last encountered Deans at the Sheriff Court, when he’d answered a charge of common assault. The victim had lost four teeth and a part of his ear. Deans had walked – forensics were inconclusive – but no one was fooled. When he passed the victim’s family in the public gallery – they were on their feet and shouting abuse – Deans had cupped a hand to his ear.

  ‘So, what, is Dixie still to the fore?’

  Jan laughed. ‘Christ, you are out of it, Gerry. He’s breathing, but he’s not earning. He’s doing a seven in Saughton. Attempted murder. He tried to pull a guy’s tongue out wi a meat hook. Guy nearly drowned in the blood.’

  ‘Nice.’

  I rang off and mopped up the coffee.

  After breakfast I phoned Doug Haddow at the Mitchell. I’d known Doug from my postgrad days, when I’d studied in Special Collections during vacations. There was no mention of Rathlin in the online catalogue – I’d checked it on the laptop as I drank my coffee – but I knew that parts of the Glasgow Collection were still uncatalogued. Doug came on the line, and, in his smoker’s pneumatic rasp, confirmed this. He told me there were substantial holdings of political ephemera – pamphlets, election leaflets, party newsletters and so on – that they’d only begun to process. He’d have a look when he found a spare half-hour.

  Two hours later, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang again. He’d found it. Issued fortnightly for the best part of a year. Rathlin: The Magazine of the New Covenanters. I rang off and grabbed my jacket.

  *

  The Mitchell Library on North Street. Ten yards from its entrance the traffic churns past in a vast concrete trench. The lorries and cars make the building look transient; at any moment it might take flight in search of its proper context. I paused on the flyover. Even in the fifties, before the motorway ripped through the city, marooning the West End, the Mitchell must have looked incongruous, rising in its pompous bulk above the tenements of Charing Cross. An enormous dome; two vast assertive wings; the balconies and balustrades and columns: it looks less like a library than a presidential palace, the Capitol of a toppled dynasty. Inside, attendants in lugubrious green uniforms would be stationed in the chequerboard corridors, pacing the lacquered leagues of panelled mahogany, glancing through sheets of gilt-lettered glass. They should have sited it here, I reflected, the new Parliament. It looks more like a parliament than the Parliament does.

  I climbed the steps and pushed the heavy doors, took the stairs to Floor 2. Archives and Special Collections was empty, and I chose my old desk, beside the windows on the back wall. Within a minute Doug Haddow was padding across from the counter, gripping a brown cardboard box-file.

  ‘It’s not a complete run,’ he said. ‘There are three or four issues missing. Still, it’s as good as you’re going to get.’ He hovered for a few seconds, ran his hand through his sparse hair, primping the sandy tuft at the front. He looked as if he was about to ask me something, maybe reminisce about old times, but another reader had materialised at the counter. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’

  ‘Good man, Doug.’

  I opened the box and riffled through the magazines, laid them out on the desk like a game of patience. There were nineteen issues, running from September 1981 through to July 1982. Three rows of six and one left over. I slipped my jacket over the back of my chair and started to read.

  The early numbers were winningly crap. Issue 1 was eight typewritten sheets, folded and stapled. Photocopying had thickened some of the font and obliterated all gradations of shade in the photographs, lending them the starkness of Reformation woodcuts. The cover price – fifty pence – had been added in marker. The title was shakily stencilled over a hamfisted logo depicting a handshake.

  Still, things picked up quickly. By the fourth number there was a glossy cover, and the title appeared in bright royal blue. But issue seven was where it really changed. Now the format was A4. The four-colour cover was nicely composed, a long-shot of Edward Carson’s statue at Stormont flanked by cover lines flagging that issue’s themes. A set of interlocking hexagons provided the logo beneath a title in forty-point Arial. Inside, the copy was laid out in neat double columns, with photographs in high resolution. The cover price had doubled, but either sales had been notably brisk, or someone had thrown money at the magazine.

  For the rest of that afternoon, I never stirred from my seat. I read Rathlin all the way through – nineteen issues, a nearly complete run. It was a weird, heterogeneous mix. The editorials assessed the state of play in Ulster, both military and political, with a plausible – if partisan – logic. But then there were scare stories of clerical abuse, tales of priestly concupiscence – nuns ravished by cardinals, their bastard babies smothered at birth – that might have been fashioned by Melville or Knox. In between there were interviews with paramilitary spokesmen, and messages of support for Loyalist prisoners. There was a poetry corner, full of doggerel ballads in praise of fallen comrades. A lot of the articles were unattributed, and a colourful range of pseudonyms – ‘Cuchulain’, ‘Ulster Defender’, ‘John Knox’, ‘Peden the Prophet’ – was pressed into service. But I spotted one article, and then another, seven in all, that carried a by-line: ‘Gordon Orchardton’. I tried to think what the name might signify, what resonance it possessed. Was it the name of a famous Reformer, a Protestant martyr? I didn’t think so. It looked to me like an actual name. I put it in my notebook.

  It was six o’clock when I turned the last page of Issue 19. Doug’s shift had finished – a middle-aged woman was at the issue-desk computer – and the reading room was empty. I put the magazines back in the box-file and carried it across.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘Tell Doug I owe him one.’

  Something in her smile made me pause, and I wondered if she and Doug might not be an item.

  ‘A pint, would that be? Whyn’t you buy him it. He’ll be over the road.’ She hefted the box-file. ‘As ever.’

  ‘Thanks. I might do that.’

  *

  I left the Mitchell by the side entrance. The Avalon Bar is across the way, on the corner of Kent Road and Cleveland Street. Above the curtain on its bright brass rail I could see the heads of the drinkers. There he was, sure enough, on a stool at the bar, his bald crown shining under the gantry spots, nodding at something the barman was saying. I turned away and walked towards the M8. I fancied a drink but I knew, if I got ensconced with Doug Haddow, the next time I’d see pavement would be when the bar staff were shouting ‘Time’.

  I crossed the expressway and headed into town. Bath Street was deserted, the office workers finished for the night, the basement antique shops shuttered and dark. It was the lull before the onslaught, the furious merriment of Friday night. The few pedestrians moved quickly, as if observing some secret curfew. I lit a number 3, with its oddly effete, short-sighted-looking portrait of Simón Bolívar – ‘The Liberator’ – on the band, and rolled its creamy smoke around my tongue. I liked this time of the week. The whole city knocking off work and me with it all still to do. Three stories and an editorial. It gave me a virtuous glow, but no harm, I figured, in topping it up. I looked in at the Horseshoe for a pint of Deuchars and a pie-and-beans at the bar.
Outside Central I took a cab and leaned back as we crossed the river.

  My wallet was pressing into my back. I tugged it from my hip pocket and felt the folded sheet of paper. I spread it on the seat beside me. There was a tension in the group, an air of suppressed hilarity, as if they’d been joking ten seconds before, and had to compose themselves for the camera. There was something too emphatic in the sombreness of the faces, the shadowed tightness of the mouths, the brows’ deep compression. Only Lyons was different, his features caught in a midway blur, a sinuosity of the lips suggesting laughter. His face was somehow clearer than the others, as if the flash had fallen full on him or else a mirror had thrown its refulgence his way. His eyes behind the lenses were bright. It was the face of a tourist, an autograph hunter.

  The cab had stopped. The ‘B’ of TRIBUNE had gone out, the neon shorted. I fished in my wallet for a note.

  *

  On Sunday evening I stood in the kitchen, making the boys’ tea. Muddy Waters on the sound system: ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’. James was playing with his action figures on the kitchen table. Roddy was through in the living room; incidental music from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone rose in intermittent crescendos above Muddy’s slide work.

  Pasta and smoked haddock. It’s my speciality – at least, it’s something I can do, something quick and unfuckupable that the boys appear to like. I took the smokies out of the fridge. These were the real thing: blackened, stiff, the tails still bound with twine. I loved to prepare them. You microwave the fish for sixty seconds. Then you prop it on a plate and press down firmly on the spine. You feel a crack and the whole fish subsides, collapsing into itself. When you flip it over the haddock opens like a missal. You peel the spine like a silk ribbon and the flesh comes away in moist flakes, thick bite-size discs.

  The day had gone well. In the morning we’d been to the Botanics and played hide-and-seek in the Kibble Palace, dodging around the primeval ferns. We lunched in McDonald’s and played a game where we pretended that James was invisible. Then we took the Underground into town, James woo-hooing in the echoey tunnels (‘Dad, another James is copying me’), and Roddy straphanging in the half-empty carriage. On Buchanan Street Roddy put a pound in a busker’s guitar case and walked back with that stiff-legged, sheepish look that always makes me want to laugh. In the toyshop I vetoed Rod’s initial choice – a Ninja sword that made electronic slashing sounds – and steered him to a Playmobil motorbike. James chose a pair of jousting knights. In the bookshop we bought Tintin in Tibet.