All the Colours of the Town

by McIlvanney, Liam

  ‘I’ll tell you about Peter Lyons.’

  Chapter Five

  It started with the flutes. Thin, high, silvery – a sound that seemed too high for human ears, as if you’d acquired the hearing of a dog. The flutes were what carried furthest, not the drums, whose distant footfall kicked in shortly after. Up close, the drums were all you could hear, and the flute-players – eyes flashing irritably between visor and busy lips – might just as well have been miming. But in those first seconds the flutes held their own, and their wispy, weightless whispering was the loudest thing of all.

  You heard it fitfully, at first, in gusts and snatches. There was a moment of uncertainty, a spell of anxious head-twisting when the music seemed to ring from all directions. Then some internal radar pointed down a canyon of vacant street and you ran, at a breathless gallop, to the oncoming clatter.

  When the Walk turned the corner it pulled you up; you stopped short, winded by this glorious irruption. Youths in scarlet tunics and feathered caps swung onto Crosskirk High Street six abreast. Their buttons flashed. Their trouser-legs had stripes up the sides. Burnished flutes were pressed to their lips. They had the shallow perfection of figurines. Behind them came the walkers, in dark suits and clean shirt-collars, tasselled sashes, the women in churchy hats, some of them clutching Bibles and umbrellas. Above them the banners pitched and swayed: dark likenesses of martyrs and reformers, the white smudge of King Billy’s charger.

  The onlookers whooped and clapped as the band approached, the air already pulsing with the drum. Out in front, drawing the roars of the crowd, came Jack the Lad, Cock of the Walk, the boy who swung the stick. He was talisman and witchdoctor. All the fervour of the crowd, all their sense of favour and entitlement was focused on his mobile frame. His specialness was there in all he did: in his rolling monkey-walk; how he crouched and sprang and strutted and twirled. You saw the beauty of it, his wayward figures-of-eight setting off the marchers’ ordered tread, how their gait looked all the straighter for his flourishing arabesques. Grimacing, lolling, acting the goat: he might have been the town drunk were it not for the precision of his hands, the quick wrists busy with the stick. He stretched to send it spinning into the air and then stooped to let it roll across his shoulders or twirl in florid cartwheels round his back. I could watch for ever the sluggish tinkle of his fingers as the baton rode the knuckles of one hand.

  A girls’ accordion band came next, teenagers in pleated kilts and crisp white fitted shirts, and the roaring was different now, lower and more throaty, and the girls lips twitched, as if with incipient laughter, their eyes sliding to take in the crowd.

  I had an urge to cross, to step right out between the bands, make a break for opposite pavement. You couldn’t cross a Walk. You couldn’t pass in front of it. We’d had this hammered into us as kids. The marshals would lift their truncheons in white-gloved hands and the polis would watch them strike you down.

  I didn’t cross. I watched the rest of the parade, the bands from Ayrshire and Ulster, the Toronto band with its maple-leaf flag, marching down the low-roofed street, and when the last drummer banged past the Hall and the crowds moved off behind him, I followed too, down the hill to the Green.

  *

  Two days before this I was in Rix’s office. Jenna, his PA, set a coffee down in front of me. On his desk, where the smirking offspring ought to have been, was the snap of Vinnie Jones reaching behind him to squeeze Paul Gascoigne’s testicles. It was autographed in the bottom corner. Rix’s windows faced west. He left me time to admire the downriver vista – the Armadillo, the Finnieston Crane – before emerging from his inner office.

  Rix didn’t rate me. I knew without him telling me that he thought my stuff was useless. Ponderous, he no doubt deemed it. Wordy, worthy, deficient in – let us say, bite? Malice? The note of personal enmity? Rix’s own editorials had an unruffled viciousness that I enjoyed without wishing to emulate. Someone had told him I’d studied at Oxford and he was eager to let me know that he wasn’t impressed. Why should he be? But I liked to wind him up. As the weeks passed, my copy grew pompously Latinate, I quoted from Bentham and Mill. I dug out my college tie when I knew we’d be meeting.

  I was wearing it now as I told him the story. The story was Peter Lyons. I had a source who could connect him to loyalist paramilitaries in the early 1980s. I knew Rix would jump at this, so instead of talking it up, I found myself demurring: the details were sketchy; the source an unknown, most likely nursing a grievance. Probably it was horseshit.

  Rix let me talk, his smile widening. He’d only been here two years, but he knew his readers. In this part of Scotland, sectarianism sold. It was better than sex. Then I showed him the photograph: Peter Lyons – or a man who looked like a younger version of Lyons – in a row of scowling men; the two figures in the foreground, sporting full-face balaclavas and pointing Webleys at the floor; and behind them on the wall, the claret-and-amber UVF flag.

  Rix appraised it like a connoisseur. He got up from his seat, closed the connecting door to Jenna’s office, and brought his chair to my side of the desk. There was a deliberation to Rix’s movements. He never hurried. He seemed to relish the simplest physical action.

  I liked his composure. It reassured me. If the office rumours were right, he had six months to turn the Trib around, two of which had already gone. We were bumping along at 55,000, same as when he took over. Every Tuesday, morning conference was a stampede of suggestions; ruses and stratagems for adding the four or five thousand that might save the title. The mood was hysterical. We were more like a self-help group than a conference of editors. Only Rix stayed calm, shirtsleeved elbows on the table, setting out the week’s agenda with slow chops of his big hands, smiling all around the anxious circle.

  He was smiling now.

  ‘The Boy Wonder,’ he said. ‘Paramilitary of the Year.’

  Two weeks ago, Lyons had won Parliamentarian of the Year at an awards dinner in the Copthorne Hotel. Rix and I had been sitting at his table. He bought us champagne to celebrate. We’d run a profile of him in that Sunday’s paper.

  ‘Who’s the source?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, he’s an unknown. There’s no form.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I turned up my hands.

  ‘I think he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘OK. Let’s find out. Have you spoken to any of the others, the old associates?’

  I mentioned Gordon Orchardton, the New Covenanters. I told him about the Walk that coming Saturday, the big parade in Lyons’s hometown.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Talk to the punters – get them oiled, sing the bloody Sash. See what turns up.’

  I nodded. I ought to go to Belfast too, he said. Do some digging. He could send Martin Moir (he’d cubbed on the News-Letter, after all), but he’d rather I did it.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Gerry.’ I stopped at the door. He smiled up, back on his own side of the desk now. ‘No old pals act this time, yeah?’

  *

  At my own desk I booted up and checked my emails. Rix thought the whole of Scotland was an old pals act, press corps and politicos deep in each other’s pockets, so that only an Englishman – maybe only Norman Rix – could claim to be independent. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but he wasn’t right either. Peter Lyons wasn’t a friend. I’d played Royal Troon with him a couple of times. His kids were the same age as the boys, and he’d brought them to our Paddy’s Day softball game one year. And he was usually good for off-the-records. But he wasn’t a friend, and that wasn’t why I liked him. We all liked Peter Lyons. He was a good politician. He gave good copy. In a parliament of cloggers, he was Georgie Best. To hear some of his acolytes talk, he had saved the new Parliament from dying of embarrassment.

  Lyons was elected to Holyrood in its second term, when the note of disillusion was deafening. Nobody had a good word to say about the Parliament. All the talent had stayed at Westminster. We had gone through three Firs
t Ministers in four years, each more mediocre than the last. The building was still just a hole in the ground, a gluttonous sump of public money. The MSPs themselves were a shambles. Spooked by the cameras, awkward in their stiff three-pieces and trouser-suits, they mumbled and stuttered through slapdash debates. Even our scandals were second-rate – stooshies over office rents and fiddled taxi claims.

  Then Peter Lyons was elected on the Glasgow list. Nobody knew him. He hadn’t been a councillor or Party researcher. He hadn’t even been a member of the Party until the year before. Within a week he was Deputy Minister for Transport; half a year later he was Justice Minister. By the following winter, the scandal had broken. Someone unearthed a photograph of Lyons in the regalia of an Orangeman. He’d been a member of the Order in his teens and early twenties. He threw the stick in the Orange parades. A spokesman for the Catholic hierarchy expressed his sadness and alarm. The Record ran a mock-up of Lyons as William of Orange, astride his white charger. ‘Can You Ride This Out, Peter?’ was the strapline. Remarkably, he did. He went on Good Morning Scotland and spoke about his childhood. Since he’d been a kid, he said, he’d dreamed of being an Orange drum major. In other parts of the country, the wee boy’s dream was playing for Scotland; in Crosskirk it was throwing the stick on the Twelfth. Eventually he’d come to see that there were bigger ambitions, worthier dreams. He’d gone to university, his horizons had expanded. He’d come to see the Order for what it was, and he’d left. He wasn’t a bigot. He had married a Catholic; his two kids were at Catholic school. The story became one of triumph over circumstance, the bright boy rising above the meanness of his origins.

  Lyons had grown up in Lanarkshire, in an ex-mining village gone to seed, a sleet-stung bunker of cold grey stone. As Catholics, we mythologised these places, spoke of them with a shiver of dread. Harthill. Larkhall. Crosskirk. Even the names had a spondaic bluntness, a fearsome Prod foursquareness. You shook your head when you spoke them, made that noise you make when you’ve swallowed something burny. Now I was heading down the M74 on the morning of the Twelfth, peering through the smirr for the Crosskirk turn-off.

  I’d never been to Lyons’s home town. ‘Bitter’ was the term you’d hear. A bitter town. We had a kind of league table of bitterness, with all the shitty towns of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire graded by how much they hated Catholics.

  The turn-off appeared, and I swung onto a B-road. The rain was clearing now, claustral shafts of sunlight falling on hedges and fields. Lanarkshire was shining in the rinsed air, nothing at all like the slagheap I’d envisioned. The road skirted a field, and through a break in the hedge I saw a hare skittering off down the furrows. I opened the sunroof to birdsong and branches.

  I thought about Mureton. On our bitterness league table, my hometown wasn’t high. No one ever called me a Fenian bastard. I never felt menaced coming home from school. That doesn’t mean we weren’t keeping score. You knew how many Catholic bank managers there were in town, how many Catholic GPs, how many lawyers. The pub I drank in – the Star Inn (prop. J. Molloy) – was known as the Vatican. There were occasions when someone, hearing your surname, would narrow his eyes – ‘Conway?’ – and roll your name around his mouth, tasting something sour, and his silence would have the shape and weight of four unspoken words: That’s a Fenian name.

  St Michael’s, Mureton’s Catholic Church, stood on a hill beside the train station, in what had been a slum quarter. For decades it had been hidden from view by the great black facade of the town’s Infirmary, but when the hospital was demolished and the chapel stood alone against the skyline, visible from almost everywhere in town, the town didn’t like it. People complained about the old Infirmary, what a shame it was to see it go. What really riled them was the view it left behind, the papish chapel, brazen there, at the crown of the brae. Let them go to the devil in their own way, if that’s what they wanted. Did they have to shove it down your throat?

  But did I ever feel threatened or even put upon? You knew you were different, and when St Michael’s played away, and we took the field in our Milanese red-and-black stripes, there was an edge to some of the touchline shouts. All those urgings to get stuck in, get intae this shower; you wondered if this vehemence was matched at every fixture. But our sense of grievance was sedulously nurtured, stoked more by tribal memories of shipyard gangers and hiring fairs than by anything in our daily lives. Our ire was reserved for SPL referees and perceived acts of bias against Glasgow Celtic Football Club.

  The sky had cleared. Up ahead some walkers turned to watch me approach. Three lassies – they had mounted the grass verge at the sound of the car, and now their skinny arms stuck into the road. A thin cheer rose as I slowed just beyond them. There was a bit of confabbing and then two climbed into the back as the other – the pretty one, evidently – slid in beside me.

  ‘You going to the Walk, mister?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Can you take us right into Crosskirk?’

  ‘If you’ll help me find it.’

  ‘You’ve never been?’

  They were relaxed now, proprietorial, leaning forward in their seats, pointing out the turnings. The smell of them – lemony, chemical – filled the car.

  ‘You’ve never been to the Walk?’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘It’s major, man. There’s bands from Ireland, all over. Canada. The Walk goes on for ever.’

  ‘Scooby,’ said the one right behind me. ‘Nice ride. Is it turbo, mister?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘Hey, he looks like a pimp now,’ said the one beside me. ‘We’re his bitches. D’you feel like a pimp, man?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘You’re mental, Diane.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Gerry.’

  ‘Gerry!’ They mugged disbelief. ‘Gerry? You a pape?’

  ‘I’m a journalist.’

  I slowed for an oncoming lorry.

  ‘Are you writing it up for the paper; the Walk?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Will you put us in?’

  ‘What paper is it?’

  ‘Where’s your photographer?’ Diane struck a poledance pose, hands above her head.

  ‘It’s the Tribune on Sunday. I don’t have one.’

  ‘Too bad.’ She pulled the visor down, checked herself in the mirror, rubbed a finger along her teeth.

  ‘Hey, you got anything to drink?’

  ‘There’s some water.’ I nodded towards the glove compartment. ‘In there.’

  ‘He’s looking at your legs, Diane.’

  ‘Dirty bugger.’

  She paused with the bottle in her hand.

  ‘Are you looking at my legs?’

  ‘No, I–’

  ‘How no?’

  The three of them sputtered, the two in the back leaning together till their heads touched. I looked around at Diane again. The set of her lips, or the line of her nose: something was familiar. I seemed to know her. Before I could place it we had reached Crosskirk, its long main street of brown sandstone.

  ‘Can you drop us at the puggies?’

  At the amusements arcade they climbed out and were swallowed up in the dark and noise and coloured lights. Two boys in Rangers tops by the door turned to check out their arses then glared back at me. Diane spun round, once, a cute 360 turn: a flash of teeth, a quick twist of the wrist, a ripple of white pleated skirt.

  I drove up the High Street, past Boots the Chemist, the Masonic Lodge, Blockbuster Video, the British Legion. A stylised eye on a billboard advertised the current series of Big Brother. I passed a mural, stiff-limbed figures in balaclavas and black combat jackets, hardware held aloft: ‘UFF 2nd BATT C COMPANY’. A knot of boys at the war memorial turned to watch me pass. Old fears began to surface. How Catholic did you look? Could people tell? Was the Forester’s dark bottle-green green enough to arouse suspicion?

  Near the top of the hill, tied to a lamp-post was a cardboard sign with an arrow, a c
apital P and the logo of an Orangeman (bowler hat and chevron-shaped sash). I followed the arrow to a big stretch of wasteground in what looked to have been an industrial estate. It was busy already: buses and cars parked in makeshift lines. I left the Forester beside a Parks of Hamilton coach and headed out to see the fun.

  I like the Walk. I know you’re not supposed to. I know it’s a throwback, a discharge of hate, a line of orange pus clogging the streets of central Scotland. But I like it anyway. I like the cheap music, its belligerent jauntiness. I like the crisp gunfire of the snares. I like the band uniforms and the hats and the apocalyptic names stencilled on the Lambeg drums: Cragside Truth Defenders; Denfield Martyrs Memorial Band; Pride of Glengarnock Fifes and Drums.

  For most folk, a parade’s an excuse to throw off restraint. In most parades, the participants take their cue from the bands; you think of Rio, its swirl of sequins and ostrich feathers, the bobbing phalanxes of militant Sowetans, Pamplona’s neckerchiefed riau-riau dancers. And then there’s Scotland’s Orangemen. Here they come, in their Sunday suits, dark, with just that grudging flash of colour at the shoulders, step by dispassionate step, Bibles closed, umbrellas rolled. Lenten faces and tight, teetotal lips. It’s a carnival of restraint, a flaunting of continence. The music rolls past, sends out its invitation to swagger and reel. But the marchers step carefully on, unmoved, without the least roll of the hips.

  All except for the drum major, who dances enough for everyone. He takes up the shortfall, whirling and spinning, knocking himself out. All their sinful urges, all the demons of the tribe: he takes them into himself and dances them out. He’s the leader, but there’s something sacrificial too, like he’s some kind of outcast or scapegoat. He’s a mock monarch, the King of the Wood, raising a bandaged fist to pluck his sceptre from the skies.

  On the sidelines, parts of the crowd catch the infection. They surrender to the music, cavorting on the pavement, drunkenly Stripping the Willow. But after all, these are only spectators, and the Order, in its official pronouncements, likes to stress its disapproval of hangers-on. Is this what bothers the high-ups, I wonder? Not the drunkenness and the battle songs, the tally of cautions for breach of the peace. Just the sheer enjoyment, the looks on the faces? The music plays and people dance.