All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  And who could blame them? Not me, who lived in a ‘bought’ house – still, in eighties Mureton, a sign of poshness. Why shouldn’t my granny’s neighbours own their homes? But it depressed me, on my Sunday walk to Gran’s, the sad brashness of these lacquered doors, the hanging baskets and carriage lamps. The doors were too big for the houses. They altered the scale. They made all the houses look like Wendy houses.

  The cab had slowed to walking pace, the driving craning out at the numbers.

  ‘Thirty-seven? Here we go.’

  I paid up and got out.

  I was halfway up the path when a head poked out of the door.

  ‘Gerry Conway?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The door closed and then opened and a white dog landed on the top step, skittered down onto the path, barking.

  ‘He’s due his walk.’

  The door clapped shut and the man came down the path, zipping his jerkin. I swithered about shaking hands but his hands were already jammed in his pockets so I lifted my chin to his own curt nod. He walked at a ferocious clip, his heels in their glossy derbies striking the pavement, and, short as he was, I’d a job to keep up. A couple of times I tried to bring up the subject of Rathlin, the New Covenanters, but he turned aside, or yanked the dog’s lead, and cut me short. At one point the dog hunched on a grass verge and squeezed out a long thin caramel-coloured shit, which we simply left, nestling in the uncut grass.

  At the top of the brae was a line of shops. A chippy, a Spar, an off-licence, a bookie’s. Outside the Spar, Orchardton handed me the leash.

  ‘Two minutes.’

  I went for a walk while he shopped. I lit a Bolivar no. 3 – the first of the day – and strolled down the wee parade of shops. At the far end was a patch of gravel and a bus stop. Some kids were hanging around, teens in lurid white sportswear and some smaller boys. Sandy stopped at the bus shelter, cocked his leg. The shelter was fairly new, with scuffed Perspex panels, magic-markered in a cursive female hand: ‘Jody B f’s Ryan M.’ A wee boy of five or six was poking the ground with a coloured stick.

  One of the youths broke off from the group.

  ‘Get us a carry-out, mister?’

  His tone was perfunctory, bored, like this was a formal exchange with ordered responses.

  ‘I don’t think so, son.’

  It was ten past four in the afternoon.

  He kept coming, leading with his shoulders, arms hanging loose before his torso in a manner familiar from rap videos.

  I could smell his breath – fiery, rank – when he stopped in front of me.

  ‘Gie’s a light then.’

  I tapped my pockets for the plastic lighter, handed it over.

  ‘Cheers.’

  He lit his cigarette and then tossed the lighter towards his mates. One of them stooped to pick it up, stowed it in his tracksuit pocket.

  ‘Later, big man.’

  He turned and swung back to the group.

  The wee boy was crouched down beside me, petting Sandy. I noticed his stick: it was a miniature baton, a half-sized mace, its shaft patterned with tiny Union flags.

  Gordon Orchardton came out of the minimarket holding a carrier bag. He raised his arm in an awkward, oddly poignant salute. I tugged on the leash.

  Back at the house, he unclipped the dog and it scrambled up on the armchair, standing on the headrest with its front paws on the windowsill.

  ‘Hey!’

  He swept the dog to the floor and motioned for me to sit.

  ‘Wait there a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He came back grinning, holding it out on his open palms.

  ‘What’s this?’

  It was a toy gun, a rifle, full-sized, carved from a light-coloured wood. I turned it over in the light from the window. The workmanship was basic, the edges blunt; it was home-made, something a dexterous uncle might knock up for a boy.

  ‘I used to play with that when I was a kid,’ Orchardton said. ‘I ran about the back green, kidding on I was a commando. All the other weans had proper guns – toys, I mean, die-cast replicas that fired caps, but I loved that thing.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘My da used to say to me, “You watch what you’re doing with that, Gordy. That stick saved Ulster.” That’s what he always said: “That stick saved Ulster.” For years I never knew what he meant. Then one day he told me the story.’

  He motioned for the rifle and I handed it back. He gripped it in his fist and shook it.

  ‘It’s a dummy rifle,’ he said. ‘It’s not a toy, it’s a dummy. My granda used it in Carson’s UVF. Before they got the real guns, they trained with these. He took it on manoeuvres. All these men marching about the hillsides with kid-on guns.’

  ‘Your grandad was in the UVF?’

  ‘This is the original UVF I’m talking about. In 1912. Not the current lot. Not the gangsters. It was like a people’s army, to resist Home Rule. Then the war happened and they all joined up together. The whole UVF. One minute they were getting ready to take on the government; next thing they’re in France, ready to die for King and Country.

  ‘The army let them stay as a unit. They called it the 36th Ulster Division, but basically it was the UVF. My granda went out with the Armagh battalion. He fought at Thiepval Wood. He was with Blacker’s Boys – the Armagh lot. Six hundred of them went over the top and only sixty came back. There’s a letter in the drawer there, where he tells my granny. He says he’s the only one in his street still alive: all the boys from Scotch Street joined up together, and he was the only one left. They went over the top with their sashes on, shouting “God Save Ulster” and “Fuck the Pope”.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the story, anyway.’

  The dog was at his feet now, sniffing his shoes, and he squatted down to pet it, gripping the gun by its stock.

  ‘After that, there was no way the Brits could force us into a republic. So the six counties stayed British.’

  He straightened up.

  ‘Anyway, there it is.’ He frowned at the hunk of wood in his hands. ‘The stick that saved Ulster.’

  *

  We took our coffee in the conservatory. Like his fancy front door it was too big for the ex-council house, ending six yards shy of his wooden back fence. In next-door’s garden a wee boy was playing on a plastic chute, scrambling up the ladder, dipping down the short slide and tearing round to start again.

  Orchardton didn’t touch his coffee. The biscuits he’d bought at the Spar lay neglected on a side plate. He just spoke, almost without drawing breath, looking across to the blue Garnock hills. Now that we’d started he seemed to find relief in talking. His voice was unhurried, authoritative, as if he’d expected such an encounter for years, and had marshalled his memories in preparation. He lit a cigarette and told me about his family, about his childhood in the East End, the boyhood trips to Northern Ireland, summer holidays in Bangor and Portstewart. In next-door’s garden the wee boy played on his chute, up and down, up and down. At one point I took out the Dictaphone and mimed setting it on the coffee table. Orchardton’s eyes tracked from the window to the device and he nodded, once, the flow of his talk never breaking, moving on to the next anecdote.

  Later that night, at my desk in Clouston Street, I tried to piece it together, put his spooling memories into order. Orchardton’s dad had come over from Belfast in 1946 with a suitcase and a demob suit. He had friends in Glasgow so he settled there, in a model lodging-house in the Calton. A friend got him a start in Templeton’s Carpet Factory. He married a local girl and they flitted to the top-floor flat of a Brigton tenement. This is where Gordon was born, the middle kid of three, in a two-room-and-kitchen in Baltic Street.

  He spoke fondly of Brigton, of the tight, hard life of the tenements. The smoky stone. The stink of shit from the stairhead lavvies. Aunties and uncles passing in and out all day, the front room always busy. Brigton was the known world, a place unto itself. There were old guys in the pubs who could remember when it was a separate village
and still spoke about ‘going into Glasgow’. In Baltic Street some of the families were from home; you’d spot Orange lilies in the windows every Twelfth, little twists of colour like votive candles. Gordon’s father joined the Orange Order and the Brigton Burns Club. Gordon joined too, when he turned sixteen. He was asked to join a gang – the Baltic Fleet, a posse of housebreakers and petty extortioners from the neighbourhood – but declined. The Order was strict about this – you didn’t run in gangs. You didn’t swear. You aspired to lead an upright Christian life. Anyway, the gangs were on the way out, everyone said. It was nothing like the old days. Even the Billy Boys was just a name, a song you sang on the subway to Ibrox. Up to our knees in Fenian blood, Surrender or you’ll die! ‘King’ Billy Fullerton was still around, though, working the door at a local snooker club. You saw him on the street sometimes, standing on the corner of Orr Street and London Road, a short man in a brown suit, chatting with the men beside the bandstand, leaning back to spit into the street.

  Then the sixties came and they tore the district down. Whole streets reduced to rubble overnight. It was worse than the Blitz, the old ones said. Folk moved out, to the new schemes at Drumchapel and Easterhouse, or away altogether to a New Town maisonette. The Orchardtons moved to the coast, to a pebble-dash semi in Irvine New Town. A postage-stamp lawn and an indoor toilet. Salty air and the peaks of Arran. Gordon was eighteen at the time.

  Everything changed when they moved to the coast. Gordon’s da got a job in a local hotel, where he worked as porter and receptionist and odd-job man. Every morning he left for work in a shirt and tie instead of his carpet-factory overalls. He was a different man. He seemed precipitately old, a diminished figure, spruce and obliging, with his pullovers and his neatly shed grey hair. He swore less. He joined a bowling club and fell away from the Lodge. Their neighbours, in the council semi on a split new estate, were a Catholic family, a retired couple with grown-up daughters. Jimmy Farren was a former train driver. He’d fought at Monte Cassino. He and Gordon’s da went bowling together. They walked their dogs on the moor on Sunday mornings, traded shorts and light ale chasers in the Spinning Wheel in the afternoons. Suddenly, the old animosities had lifted. The heavy weather of bigotry had cleared. It seemed something they had left behind in Glasgow, something mixed up with football crowds and blackened stonework and the rattling of trams, something that had no place amid the hopeful geometry of the new estate. When the new Trinitron brought images of the latest Ulster mayhem, Gordon’s da changed channels, reached under his armchair for another tinnie.

  Everyone was thriving: his ma and da, his wee sister; everyone adjusting to the new life. Gordon wasn’t. He hated Irvine. He felt like an alien in the coastal town, walking its narrow streets. He never got used to it, the racket of the gulls, the fresh dirty whiff of the sea. The naff accents, the slow speech of the locals. They said ‘ken’ instead of ‘know’, like something out of Doctor Finlay. He stood on the walkway of the bright glass shopping precinct, staring at the river, at the spire of the old sandstone kirk, out of place amid all that newness. As often as he could, he caught the bus back to the city. He still had friends in Brigton, uncles and cousins, in streets waiting demolition. He kipped on their floors, in their old box-beds. On match days they’d travel out to Ibrox and then hit some of the old pubs – the Grey Mare, the King George – before Gordon caught his bus back to the coast. There was an Uncle Ian, who took Gordon to the pub after every home game. He was a foreman at Arrol’s steel-works and sometimes, when they met up, he’d tap a folded fiver into Gordon’s top pocket. He knew all about whisky, single malts, the features of the various regions, how a Lowland differed from a Speyside, the protocol of tasting, how a tulip-shaped glass was best, and a little splash of water released the nose. Islays were his favourites: Ardbeg, Laphraoig, Lagavulin. The reek of peat and iodine. ‘Hospital bandages,’ he’d gasp, a wash of ecstasy on his face, as he lifted his nose from a tumbler of malt.

  Then one day Gordon came home to a different house. A queer tightness in the air as he closed the door behind him. No answer to his shouted greeting, though both his parents were home. He found them in the kitchen, a paper on the table between them. Uncle Ian: his strange familiar face on the cover of the Evening Times. Headshots of five other guys. According to the story, Ian was OC of the Brigton UVF cell that bombed the Clelland Bar. They hit another bar on the same night – the Old Barns in the Calton. Celtic pubs. No one was killed but they might well have been. The buildings were gutted. The getaway driver shopped them and the whole cell went down. The trial at the Sherriff Court lasted barely two weeks. Nobody walked. Two of the gang got sixteen years: the rest – Uncle Ian among them – landed eighteen.

  When Uncle Ian went to jail, that’s when it started for Gordon. That’s when he gave up on home, more or less, on his ma and da and sister and the house by the sea. At home, Uncle Ian was never mentioned. It was as if he didn’t exist. Gordon’s da wouldn’t hear the man’s name in his house. He wouldn’t let his wife visit her brother in jail. Only Gordon went, once a month at first and then every week, sitting across a table in Barlinnie. Uncle Ian in his pinstriped prison shirt, footering with a box of matches, asking about streets that no longer existed. They talked about Brigton. Gordon asked about Belfast on the Twelfth. Uncle Ian told him the stories, going over on the ferry, the things you could stash in a Lambeg drum – sticks of gelly, detonators, TA pistols. Over the months Gordon got close to his uncle. He moved back to the city. He found a bedsit on Alexandra Parade, and hung around Bridgeton, the UVF pubs, holding court at the bar, trading on his uncle’s name. One Saturday he queued in Terry’s Tattoo Parlour, had a red hand done on his shoulder, ‘For God and Ulster’ in a scroll underneath.

  It was in one of these bars that the idea struck him. A kind of secret society. A coven of Scots Loyalists, dedicated to the cause of Ulster. Something needed to be done. Anyone could see it. Since the Hunger Strikes, the city had been changing. The Taigs were organising. Flute bands had sprung up in Coatbridge and Dumbarton, with names like the Crossmaglen Patriots and the James Connolly Memorial. Every few weeks there was a rally in the city centre: Troops Out; Time to Go. His own streets were falling to the enemy.

  So he fought back. He invented the New Covenanters. It started small and stayed that way; never more than a score of members. Guys from the Criterion. Guys from the Lodge. Just guys he thought might be interested. They were flattered to be asked. They took it seriously, the military structure, the weekly roll-calls in Orchardton’s flat, before adjourning to the pub. One of the guys had been a sergeant in the Royal Scots, and he led monthly classes in weapon handling and fieldcraft. Manoeuvres on the Fenwick Moors. There was ‘intelligence’. They collected information on RCs in sensitive jobs. RCs in politics and the media. They compiled lists of names and addresses.

  I smiled. ‘I’d have been one of your targets.’

  He looked round from the window. He didn’t smile.

  ‘You’d never have got the job.’ He stubbed his fag out in the saucer. ‘Not in they days.’

  Sometimes they printed the names and addresses in their newsletter. They hawked the paper in the match-day streets, in the pubs round Ibrox. Some nights they took a collection; they jiggled tins with ‘Loyalist Prisoners Welfare’ on the sides. The money poured in: loose change, folded fivers and ten-spots. Everyone eager to give to the cause. The landlords would weigh in with something, a couple of fifties from the till. It felt good to be doing something.

  He leaned forward, flicked his ash into a saucer.

  ‘It was different then, it was all different. There was no peace process or any of that. It was murder, pure and simple: naked bloody murder. Our side as well, but we’d been getting it for years. You saw it on the news, every other night; our people getting slaughtered right and left. Bloody Friday? I was there son, the week before, for the Twelfth; I was barely home a week and I turn on the box. The polis scraping the bodies affy walls. Filling bin-bags wi skittery bits o
f people. Our people. And who’s helping them?’

  Some ash had spilled onto the table and he swept it into a cupped hand and shook it into the saucer.

  ‘Maggie Thatcher? She’s talking to the Provies. Haughey, a fucking gun-runner. A Provie gun-runner, sipping sherry in Downing Street.’

  He sat back, peering out to the blue hills. ‘The Taigs had it all, son, no offence.’ He turned to face me, thumb and fingers flicking up as he counted it off: ‘The South. The Yanks. Ted Fucking Kennedy. Guns from Libya, Semtex from the Czechs. Who did our boys have?’ He opened his arms, as if he might embrace me. ‘Us. And if we didnae step up? Pwhh.’

  He turned back to the window. The wee boy next door had gone back in.

  ‘Did Peter Lyons step up?’

  He looked round.

  ‘Peter Lyons?’

  ‘Aye. Peter Lyons. Did he step up?’

  Orchardton leaned back in his chair. For the first time that day he really looked at me, his chin tipping jauntily back, the tight brown jowls almost creased in a smile. Over his shoulder a jet climbed the sky, its fuselage glinting pinkly in the failing light. Chimes sounded thinly in the distance, the perfunctory tones of an ice-cream van.

  ‘You want to know about Peter Lyons?’ he said. He leaned over to the Dictaphone, pressed the off button.