Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  The introduction over we all sat down and had tea. It was not, alas, served by yon wee treasure, Florrie Monks, who despite valiant efforts had failed to overcome cancelled bus services and sidewalk snowdrifting in order to be here. Anyway, Florrie usually did for the Shermans in the mornings although now and again if she was free from her prison visits (her sons were Monks by name but not nature – one of the wee gem’s jokes, god bless’r!) she’d toss in the extra hour or so and maybe even do some babysitting. It was left to Phyllis to be ‘mother’ and she poured tea so pale my old man would’ve slung it down the sink, muttering in disgust as he did so, ‘Ants’ piss, that’s what this is. Ants’ piss!’

  Strang, his rosy cheeks dishing out the smiles even when he was cramming a scone into that hole in his beard, began to tattle about some sort of Jesus Jamboree which was taking place the next evening at the Tent Hall, an evangelic nerve-centre not far from Glasgow Cross. I’d been made vaguely aware of its imminence from whispering in the Carlyle camp, gossip about the important personages who’d be attending, real pulse-jerking stuff.

  Stuck in the room’s coldest corner, right next to the goldfish tank, I gazed in at the torpid creatures as they drifted around in their chilled green world. Immortality for shubumpkins? Why not! Creatures far less worthy and not so brawly vested, have been granted divine status. There’s your scarab beetle for a start; those dynasts from the Delta, the sharp lads with the pointy tombs, they weren’t so uppity that they wouldn’t hinge a knee to auld SCARABAEUS SACER. So, why shouldn’t – Beg your pardon? You want to know the nature, dimension and location of the Shubumpkin soul? Jeez, that’s a tough yin. Let’s just say that it’s a wee fart of foreverness which is akin to a bubble in a spirit level and is lodged in the creature’s thorax.

  In a corner a Grandfather clock coughed discreetly before ushering in the hour. ‘Grandfather’ bugger all! Grandfakir was more like it for the thing was no more than five years old. Simulated antiquity, that’s all, like the mane of the immortal pawnbroker, breaking metaphysical wind on Sherman’s armchair. ‘I shake my bleached locks at the runaway pun . . .’ (Sorry, Walt.) On a bookshelf amidst jade and ivory knick-knacks another timepiece, Sir Gulliver Newton, stood knee-deep in Chinese peasantry and told the hour with a series of metallic burps, as if Time gave it heartburn then, abruptly, resumed stolid Presbyterian ticking.

  The elect trio in the lounge, knowing that they’d never die but would go on and on forever, gabbed in that nonchalant manner such self-delusion tends to engender. But his nibs in the corner there, he could feel it all right, the inner jag of his mortality, the certainty that he was for the all-time off. It made no difference whether he went raging ‘against the dying of the light’ just to please Taffy Thomas, or strolled off whistling Colonel Bogie – his personal extinction was assured.

  ‘And can we expect you, Mr Grey?’

  The question had been sprung on me by Strang of the Three Balls.

  ‘Clay,’ I corrected him. ‘The name’s Clay.’ Although going by Phyllis’s scowl ‘Mud’ might’ve been more apt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Clay. I was wondering if you’d be going to the Tent Hall on Saturday evening.’

  Before I could come on with some softly-pedalled response, Eddie had intervened. ‘He’s an atheist,’ he said, his face souring as if he’d caught a whiff of his own personality. ‘He doesn’t believe in anything.’

  ‘Well, if he’s an atheist he believes in that,’ Strang said trickily. ‘But let’m speak for himself. He has a tongue, hasn’t he?’

  A strategy surfaced: lose heavily here; take a right good verbal gubbing. Such humiliation might soften Phyllis some, make her more amenable to the grief I was going to lay on her about my acute shortage of the readies. Would she be willing to delay receipt of the pram money (£7) until I’d got fixed up in Toilville? But of course she would, just so long as I was prepared to pay the required pride-poundage, be willing to do a little metaphorical shoe-licking. At that moment though Strang was checking my Pearly Gate credentials. No, I told’m, I’ve never been to the Tent Halls. Yes, I no longer attended church. No, I did not believe in the existence of God.

  ‘What about prayer?’ he asked.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Ever pray.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Not even in a crisis?’

  ‘I said “never”.’

  In my brathood I’d done a whole mess of praying: ‘This night as I lie down to sleep, I pray Thee Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake – then geeza nudge for goodness sake!’ This was Da Clay’s jokey version and there were ructions in the auld homestead when Ma heard me lipping it. Skint though we always were in those days, Ma Clay made sure I’d a penny to rattle into God’s rainy-day box (only, as I recall, it was really a velvet bag). Uncollectable now, of course, those donations; a closed account which no longer attracted interest. The George Bleaker Memorial Church: who was this guy Bleaker that they’d seen fit to pile grey stone upon grey stone in his memory? The holy gloom of that place did for my fledgeling soul, that’s for sure. The Reverend Humphrey Weaver had merely acted as its embalmer with his needling attacks on its sinwom state. Angels disguised as house spiders, he told us openmouthed goslings, watched from nooks in our bedrooms to see what we got up to. Every time you committed a sin, according to Revd Weaver, a knot was tied in your sin-thread; when the time came for you to present yourself at the Pearly Gates, St Peter would demand to see your sin-thread; if your knots exceeded a certain amount he’d snap at you: ‘Go away – you’re far too knotty to get in here!’ Maybe this was the reason for the high mortality rate of the leggy beasties in and around the Scabby! The stink of the Bleaker Memorial still clings to its roofless ruin to this day although not with the same potency, of course. A unique guff it had been, a gagging odour of newly-raked bones and corpse-ash, a stink of rotted bibles and regret. Aye, and what had we to regret if not our poverty? ‘Much more!’ Weaver would cry. ‘You should regret drawing a breath if you have not thanked the Lord for it!’ We should also regret bemoaning the need to toil, to sweat and to grieve. Had not Providence made each and every one of us spiritual millionaires? Old John Scobie, the conchy bard, had hit the coffin-nail on the head when he’d penned his ‘Weaver’s Tale’:

  Yon kirk’s an awfu guff aboot it,

  of Satan’s oxters, I don’t doot it.

  A stench of roasted flesh’n shit:

  Waur than Calvin birlin oan Hell’s spit!

  The Bleaker Memorial Church reminds me of one of those fairground arcade machines where the dropping of a coin animates some dusty drama, usually of a haunted house or an execution. You dropped your penny into ‘God’s Purse’, a prissy velveteen bag dangled before you on the end of a pole by a soorfaced elder then, much like the mannikin priest in the amusements machine who was to be seen jerkily rising to read scripture to the condemned man, the Reverend Weaver would pop up in his pulpit, rock to’n fro for a few moments before his mouth began to flap and the ‘Word of Nod’ (another of Da Clay’s sardonic amendments) fell upon the congregation like a shower of dead ashes.

  My mouth had gone ahead of me, always a dodgy procedure. What had it been on about so far? Ach, yon ‘suffer the weans’ stuff. You would’ve thought by now it would’ve tired tugging at that stale udder. What a repertoire of frowns Her Haughtiness could muster. Eddie looked equally aggrieved; his round barometer of a face warned of stormy times to come. Both Carlyles of course recalled that there was a trapdoor for the unwary concealed in the gab-structure I was erecting. You could see the pair of them flinching when the rubicund gnome stomped around on the planking of my argument, testing the soundness of it. And, as he’d been intended to, he soon found the major flaw in the joinery. Aware of this I kept rumbling on like the Bleaker Memorial’s organ.

  Long after the yellow fingers of Auld Warnock had quit its equally yellow keys – he’d held up his hands to pr
ove his lack of complicity – it’d growled on, composing a hymn of fiendish complexity, much to the frustration of the Reverend Weaver who’d already risen, his as-yet unhurled thunderbolts cooling the longer he’d been delayed. Talking about that kist o’ whussles, we kids used to think that it was haunted and – but, I’ll have to give way . . . Santa seems keen to insert his clause.

  ‘Good heavens, lad, is that the best you can do? I’ve heard better from a junior bible class.’ He dug his forefinger into the chair’s cushioned arm and it was as if he’d pressed a button and sent a surge of power coursing through his theological machinery. ‘To start with, Calvin was French, not Swiss. You’re probably getting confused by the lengthy time he spent in Geneva, having fled there from the wrath of administration for his pro-Protestant activities. Getting his nationality wrong is bad enough, but to compound this error by associating Calvin’s doctrine of Predestination with the frail grammar of a Sunday School teacher you once had, well, that’s absolute claptrap. You say this youth – I take it he was a young person? – yes, you say that he made the mistake of believing that Jesus said: “Suffer little children to come unto me”, instead of “Suffer THE little Children to come unto me”, and as a consequence he misinterpreted “suffer” to mean the “endurance of pain” instead of “to allow” or “to permit” which is, of course, the archaic meaning of the word. Be that as it may, to go on from there to make the ludicrous insinuation that Calvin was under a similar delusion and that this bred in him a sort of Inquisitional lust for the destruction of all heretics be they children or adults – it’s just plain daft.’ He hitched forward on the armchair. ‘In fact, Mr Clay, I’d go as far as to say that your notions of Calvinism are dafter still.’ He laughed and skiffed his palms against each other. ‘It’s my belief that you wouldn’t recognise Calvinist Predestination if it alighted on your nose and read aloud the Institutes from cover to cover. Allow me,’ the hobgoblin continued, ‘to unravel that ball of wool and thistles you’ve presented as an argument. Far from being a “baby burner” – your own crude and thoroughly malicious phrase – Calvin based his beliefs on the following principles: one, as a result of Adam’s fall, Man has become totally depraved; two, the power of God’s will is absolutely unchallengeable . . .’

  As Strang continued to rub my nose in it Phyllis got to her feet and began unobstrusively to transfer the tea things to a hostess trolley. Unlike her brother who was openly gloating, her face remained expressionless. But no doubt she was relishing the sight of me being verbally taken apart. Eddie had actually stuck his head above the rim of that slit trench in which for a lifetime he’d been crouching, hiding from the world’s alarms. His smirk deepened as Strang’s dialectic artillery pounded my fortifications to rubble. ‘Gentlemen, let’s synchronise our watches!’ Eddie compared the time on his wrist-gizmo with that of the Grand Fakir clock in the corner.

  ‘. . . And since man has no will of his own the superiority of faith to do good works is self-evident; three, there is no salvation by an act of man’s will but only through the given grace of God . . .’

  Phyllis guided the tinkling trolley from the room. Ostensibly taking up the cudgels on my own behalf I managed to slow the Calvinist express and to come on at him with some existentialist stuff. Let’s see how he could handle a Sartrean special en route between Nothingness and Nowhere-to-Go. He listened to my spiel politely enough but obviously without much interest. Eventually I ran out of steam and came to a halt.

  Strang sighed. ‘It’s an odd thing,’ he remarked, ‘but so many young men these days seem to be talking about Nothing.’

  I surveyed my opponent over the wreckage of my opening gambit and faced the paradox of inviting defeat without too much loss of face. Eddie’s peripheral smirks were getting through to me. My initial thrusts, so confident of finding the soft underbelly of christianity, had snapped on an unexpectedly tough shield.

  ‘This Devil you talk about?’ I queried, ‘Where d’you accommodate him in the scheme of things?’

  Strang shrugged his shoulders. ‘As a Christian it is my duty NOT to accommodate him. On the contrary, I must always try to make him as uncomfortable as possible. “In the scheme of things”, as you put it, the Devil is nothing more than God’s shadow, a dark mimic created by its exclusion from light. Lacking God it would have no shape and, but for we sinners, it would certainly have no substance. The Devil, in fact, is nothing more than our guile for defeating our own ends.’

  ‘C’mon,’ I chivvied, ‘that’s like a bloke shaving off his remaining hair to cover his baldness.’

  Strang laughed. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘Need I remind you Mr Clay, that man’s mind teems with error? He is swarming with falsity, a hive of indiscretions, ever busy making the bitter honey of sin.’ He laid both of his arms along the chair’s broad ledges. What an old ham he was! ‘I can see in you so much resembling myself at a similar age . . .’

  The windbag’s rhetorical sigh dutifully followed.

  ‘Yes, how busily I flitted from one book to the next, ransacking the treasures of the Garden of Knowledge, gathering up the intellectual pollen, winging home at the day’s end with my mixed bag of “scientific certitudes”?’ The appeal seemed to be addressed to an invisible audience which, judging by the direction of his gaze, had hidden itself behind the xmas tree. ‘You loot one mind, and then another.’ (A languid hand-wave here.) ‘And so it goes on. Busy doing nothing . . .’ He shook his bleached locks. ‘There’s lots of sunshine about in youth, Mr Clay. But it gets dark all too soon, believe me. Then what d’you find, eh?’ Behind the garish spruce the audience was holding its collective breath. ‘You find that all of those gaudy minds, so open and alluring, have curled up into themselves and are feeding on nothing but their own separate darknesses.’ The gestural cliché of beard-stroking now occurred. ‘And you can be sure that every one of those shrivelled blooms is now parasitical with doubt, is host to a million bugs of dread.’

  Thrusting suddenly into the lounge as if an over-dramatic director had given her an almighty push, there entered in haste a mother with a bloodstreaked child in her arms. ‘Look what I found in the linen cupboard,’ she declared then, in mock rage, wagged a fist in the gory but grinning boy’s face. ‘He’s got ketchup everywhere.’ She gave him a little shake. ‘I’ll shoot the boots off you, m’lad.’

  Catching me, so to speak, between faces, one registering fading shock, the other growing relief, the boy held out both arms to me. ‘Uncle Tommy, when did you come?’ His evident delight at seeing myself, while giving me a charge, seemed to make his parent cross. Although Jason tried to wiggle free, he was held tightly in a mother-fast lock. How insultingly wary she looked. ‘Uncle Tommy,’ the boy now asked, ‘are you still taking me to the Garralies?’

  Phyllis corrected him, ‘The Kelvingrove Art Gallery.’

  ‘Are you?’ Jason appealed directly to me but before I could say yeah or nay, mummy jabbed in. ‘It all depends on the weather.’

  Aye, whether she could come up with an excuse to wreck the outing! The kid was loose with live matches in a gunpowder store and didn’t know it. ‘C’mon, scamp,’ Mother Sherman said, ‘it’s an early bath for you.’

  ‘But it isn’t night yet,’ the saucy smout declared. ‘Sleepy Sam won’t be for ages yet?’

  Phyllis frowned, ‘Sleepy who?’

  The boy laughed. ‘Sleepy Sam. He comes and biffs you with a bag of soot. Doesn’t he Uncle Tom?’

  Phyllis gave me that look which meant, ‘Filling his head with rubbish again, were you?’

  Jason was still straining towards me. ‘Uncle Tommy, are there really men-in-armour at the Ga –’

  ‘The museum?’ I nodded. ‘That’s right, kiddo, horses too.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Strang said as he slid down off the slopes of the financial giant’s bumrest. ‘I’d better get the ones under my bonnet on the move.’ Catching the boy’s mystified gaze, he chuckled. ‘I’m talking about the horses under my car bonnet, lad
die.’ He raised a hand to ruffle his grizzled thatch. ‘Did you think I stabled them up here?’ He was allowed to chuck the boy under the chin, even to pat his head and, with only the mildest of ritual disapproval which usually attend such proceedings, he was even permitted to slip a silvery coin into Jason’s grasp. The last time I’d tried to do something avuncular like that I’d been on the receiving end of a stem put-down by Phyllis. ‘How’s he expected to know the difference between you and some old pervert trying to ply him with money in the street?’ had been her astounding and, I admit it, wounding condemnation.

  ‘I’ll get your coat,’ Phyllis said to Strang then bore Jason away so quickly from the sight and sound of me that the closing door nipped off the tail-end of the lad’s ‘Goodnight, Uncle Tommy.’ Uncle Eddie, whom the boy always ignored, because Uncle Eddie found such small fry too big to handle, stood with his back to us apparently very interested in the xmas cards whose sugary sentiments glued fragmenting friendships together for yet another annum. What a lonely bugger he was, but as miserable as sin with it. The archetypal mean man, Eddie was; he who as old Walt once observed, ‘Walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud’. With a pang I suddenly recalled my own Uncle Norman who always seemed able to pluck from his pocket a florin he’d been roasting on his thigh all the day to give to his favourite and only nephew. ‘Well, that’s another Clay gone to clay,’ my old man had said as we plodded from the muddy glumness of that wee Dumfries cemetery.