Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘There’s more to Nelly Kemp than meets the eye,’ Ma Clay said one day to Mrs Muirhead (later taken by Death while seated on the stairhead lavvy pan doing – as was her custom – a bit of knitting: ‘Cast off while casting on!’ said Da Clay when told of it.) Mrs M. had nodded; ‘Aye, she’s worth a watching that yin!’

  At the time this exchange was less comprehensible to me than Da Clay’s letters ‘from the War’ were proving to be. The writings of a lunatic they looked like, bent and twisted words like an orchard through which a hurricane was racing, scattering the fruit of meaning. Now’n again though, a ripe phrase would accidentally plop into Ma’s hand and she’d shine up yon wee glasses of hers the better to see her windfall and triumphantly declare: ‘Your Da’s feet’ve broke oot again!’ I remember how even Fagan, the street’s bookie, used to kick up a fuss about Da Clay’s ‘prescriptions’. In fact, he refused to accept them unless they were printed out. No way was he going to ‘blind’ himself trying to crack the code of Da’s ten cross roll-ups. But, as I was saying, sometimes Ma Clay’d come out with really weird wee statements which would be communicated with those knowing glances through which parents and other grown-ups semaphored covert information, stuff that ‘wisnae for weans’ ears . . .’ When I was sent from the room because grown-ups’ talk was to take place, I naturally jammed my ear to the cracked door panel. There, I heard such a jumble of nonsense I’d have been as well listening to the Nazified Jacob’s Germanic diatribes. It seemed that ‘yon rid-heided wee besom, her wae the snooty neb that worked in the Empire Dairy’ had a bun in the oven and wisnae sure of the baker. That she’d ‘do away with it’ was on the cards . . . There followed some static about constant baths in boiling hot gin and something unthinkable that was to be done with a knitting needle. Aye, strange times right enough! As for Jacob, he’s said to’ve snuffed it on VE night, overcome by the smoke from the street bonfires. It sounds a touch too convenient but it doesn’t pay to knock a neat ending.

  The bell of Nelly’s shop gave a foggy croak as I shoved open the door. Nelly came with lots of sighs and rheumaticky creakings from her living-room through the back where, no doubt, she’d been pouring over maps of Brazil and Paraguay in the company of Martin Borman and some other grizzle-haired Gestapo merchants. A black shawl covered the crone’s bent and wasted shoulders and spikes of frosty hair stuck out from under her hat, a squashed felt cabbage of a thing. Her face had its usual ‘gone to lunch’ look about it, as if all life had fled its dusty planes to leave only a repertoire of twitches and frowns. Her slippered feet scuffed along the worn waxcloth as she came to position herself behind the counter. For donkeys’ years she’d stood there dispensing Scobie Street’s needs. Here we kids had come with our burning pennies to buy the trashy treasures of childhood: the buttermilk dainties; the soor plooms; hard cakes of toffee; chunks of tablet, marzipan potatoes and all the other sugary muck that’ve made synonyms of prosperity and dentistry.

  Here too could be bought caps for our toy pistols; kites, peeries and dabbities; clay pipes for bubble blowing; and you could have a shot at winning a prize by pushing a number from the Fortune Board with a ‘key’ that looked like a sardine-can opener. In those days the shop was a wellhead of gossip: thousands of character assasinations had taken place in that narrow area between the counter and the bunched sticks and bleach bottles. Granda Gibson used to claim that ‘the knives’re busier in that shop than in Tough’s the Butchers’.

  Nelly had news for me. Somebody had been enquiring after my good self. ‘Aye, a wee fella wae a stripy bunnet and a leather jaicket,’ she told me as her arthritic hand swung over like one of those fairground cranes to drop a packet of cigs before me.

  ‘Was he maybe from the Pools?’ I suggested.

  She made a face at me. ‘A debt collector more likely.’

  ‘What’d he want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A right nosey wee bugger.’

  ‘What’d you tell’m?’

  She sighed, ‘Oh, the usual.’ Nelly got out her battered tick book and began to flap through its debt-scarred pages. ‘I said you’d done a moonlight and left me debt enough to prove I’m daft.’

  ‘Never catch me doing that, Nelly.’

  ‘Aye, so another hunner names in here told me.’ Nelly sniffed as her locked fingers clamped themselves to a page. ‘They pile their stuff onto the back of a lorry and that’s the last you see of them. Saft heart goes wae soft heid, right enough.’

  ‘You’re the saint of Scobie Street, Nelly,’ I assured her. ‘I cross myself everytime I pass your shop.’

  ‘Aye, cross the road’s more like it. High time that wife of yours was hame. She’d soon square your tail.’ Her dusty face puckered in sympathy. ‘How is the poor sowl, then?’

  ‘No bad, Nelly. A bit browned off at times, that’s all.’

  She nodded. ‘Aye, it’s a funny business this new-fangled blood-pressure thing. Had nothing like that in the auld days.’

  Nelly peered closer at the tick book, her lips working silently as she totted up the debt. I gave a familiar cough. ‘Eh, Nelly, how aboot sticking this week back in the fridge? You know how it is . . . Christmas and that.’

  She shook her head, then with a sigh looked around her dusty hole of a shop, at its sagging shelves along which were lined cardboard boxes; at the piled-up sweetie jars, the festive spread of comics and magazines on the counter. ‘I’d be as well turning this into a dampt soup kitchen and be done with it,’ she lamented.

  ‘I’ve an insurance policy about due, Nelly.’

  She sniffed again. ‘Aye, you’re well covered Tommy Clay – jist like the Titanic.’ She crooked her only mobile finger. ‘Half of it then, c’mon.’

  ‘Give’s a break, Nelly, eh?’

  She was not for budging. ‘I promised that wee Mammy of yours, God rest’r, that I’d keep an eye on you. No managing very well, am I? C’mon laddie, let’s be having it.’

  The auld bugger made me fork up. Half the tick was down to ciggies. I could’ve reminded her that she’d encouraged my smoking habit with her two-fags-and-a-match policy back in the days when I’d been weaned off the cinnamon sticks by the fearsome Vic Rudge who made it a rule that all members of the Scobie Hatchet had to be smokers. The fly bastard had made ten Woodbines the obligatory membership fee, the tribute to be kept by him, of course, in the gang’s ‘cough box’.

  ‘When you moving to Bearsden, Nelly?’ I asked her while pocketing my change and the twenty smokes.

  ‘Bearsden!’ she yelped. ‘It’s a single-end in the cemetery’s my next stop.’ She slammed the tick book shut on all of those names, the owners of which had undoubtedly been vocal and sincere-sounding in their promises to settle their outstanding accounts. I suppose if they hadn’t welshed on their commitments she’d have been able to go on a world cruise. Must have plenty squirrelled away but the bulk of it was destined for her dodgy nephew who did her banking business. Her natural bent for nosiness now asserted itself. ‘Have you no had word of a new hoose yet, Tommy?’

  I shook my head. ‘I think they’re waiting till the wife’s by, just’n case she has quads.’

  ‘God forgive you, Tommy Clay.’ She thumped the tick book into a drawer. ‘Did you hear about the Wotherspoons then?’

  ‘What about’m?’

  ‘Just two points short of a back’n front in wan of the good bits up by.’

  I shrugged. ‘Christ, I think I’d them down for a home win, tae!’

  ‘Whut?’

  ‘Nothing, Nelly.’ I made for the door. A man couldn’t spare the time to hang around spitberrying with a Nazi sympathiser. There were important things to be done. A man must be about his adult affairs, see to his heavy responsibilities. I suddenly remembered something and returned to the counter. ‘I’ll have that,’ I said, pointing to a comic.

  ‘The Beano, you mean?’

  I nodded, ‘And a packet of Jelly Babies.’

  8
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  SNOW RASPED UNDER my tread as I made my way down Scobie Street. I passed Greasy Tam’s knackered fish’n chip shop. The place hissed with fractured water pipes and although it was too dark to see I knew that the big salmon that’d swum above the frying pans lay now in a shatter of blue scales on the floor. Tam’d kicked the bucket shortly after he’d clinched the padlock on his premises. Rumour has it that he died from a ‘sudden bath’ though this isn’t very likely. He’ll be down in Hell right now peeling totties for Heaven’s endless round of purveys. It was odds-on too that he still hadn’t changed his apron.

  I stepped into a closemouth to light a fag. Cyclops, a black one-eyed cat, came and plonked himself dispiritedly down on his bum. Its long whiskers fankled in the shrewd breeze. It stared up at me, seemed to be dumbly imploring me to tell it why there were no fishheads or meatscraps to be found in the middens anymore – those cat restaurants where moggies met to talk pussy and exchange fleas. Cyclops should’ve taken notice of the Great Scabby Exodus when the squeal had gone out in the rodent world and the rats had come scuttering from their verminous nooks, from cellars, attics, backcourt washhouses, not forgetting the dunnies, squeaking out into the open, furring the street and pavements as they squirmed off like a pestilent grey snake while adults and teenagers clubbed and stoned them in an orgy of slaughter. House-rats desert kaput tenements just as surely as their marine mates quitted sinking ships – but try telling that to an empty-bellied one-eyed moggy!

  As I moved on again I passed Bucky Lyons’ dead dream where it stood snow-webbed in the gutter. A black Singer Gazelle, it’d been picked clean by the auto vultures. Flex dangled from its looted lamps but nothing of value remained: stripped from boot to bumper. I recalled the sunny day Bucky’d come puttering home in it, so proud of his fifty quid prize. ‘She’s auld, but reliable Tam,’ he informed me, no doubt echoing the salesman’s spiel. Gleaming there in the sunlight it hadn’t looked too bad at that. ‘Just the job for wee runs doon the coast, eh?’

  In fact, the ‘runs’ had gone no further than around the block, and the running had been done by a bunch of corner fellas who pushed from behind while Bucky at the wheel shouted excitedly, ‘The slope, lads – she’ll start on the slope!’ It soon became evident that the slope existed more in Bucky’s head than in reality. Still, it made for a good Sunday afternoon’s entertainment. The Scobie Street folk would line their elbows along their cushioned window sills and call good-naturedly to one another while they waited for the ‘show’ to begin. And begin it would with a cry of ‘Here they’re noo!’ and Bucky’s banger’d come slowly around the corner propelled by leg-power, lung-power, and sheer willpower, its petrol sloshing uselessly around in its tank. Bucky’s wife and glum weans watched from their window, their briny dreams of cockleshells and crabs fading Sunday by Sunday until the pantomime was over and the Gazelle had been mounted on bricks and Bucky had taken to living under it so that his bootsoles soon became more familiar than his face.

  It stopped, my body did, seized up without my say-so. Sensing disaster it immediately identified that condition so distressing to us humans – the loss of light. The street-lamp that had stood opposite my close, old faithful with his attendant gang of shadows, had been extinguished. I saw the image of the engineer’s bulbous index finger as it skimmed down a column of names, pausing at Scobie Street where the fresh spoor of an asterisk indicated the footnote: ‘Cleared for Demolition’. But this Mr Snuffit will effect no drastic eclipse but will compassionately proceed with a diminution of light, a lid slowly closing on a civic coffin; but darkness all too soon, my friends – hurry!

  Tactile almost, this blackness, a clingy nothingness such as was daily endured by Old Salter, a Salty Dog regular who suffered the triple deprivation of sight, hearing and speech. I plunge into it, wade my way towards the close where a canary hops jauntily within its glass cage. What friendly chirrups of light! Keep singing, whatever you do. Don’t stop! Safe on dry land I turn to help my shadow ashore. I grin at my funk. Jumpy as spit on a hob.

  Something white blazed past my head and glissaded along the close wall, undoing itself as it went, before disintegrating with a crystalline explosion. A snowball, a banal, kneaded-by-human-hand snowball. I turned, easily catching up with my grin which was so anxious to prove how amused it was by the prank. Nothing to be seen out there of course except the dark inner lid of the dead street. Another snowball was pitched. It flew in from the dark with a precision that lacked all jollity and pinned a white tag over my heart. I brushed the cold fragments from my chest and turned, heading for the reassuring light. Reassurance against what? A couple of snawballs for heaven’s sake, lobbed at me no doubt by a passing schoolboy, an urchin’s way of wishing me a festive howdy. As I went up the stairs two at a time to stretch my legs, I heard a third snowball spending itself uselessly against the close’s rear wall.

  Silence and dust upon the stairs and the welcoming glimmer of a gas mantle on each landing; kept burning night’n day for fear auld Wattie Mullens or myself should fall and break our necks – but wishing we would elsewhere. Doors closed on their last slams and sheets of corrugated iron nailed over most of them. An empty screwtap’n a doll’s head on the landing where wee ‘Creepy’ Crawley had made his last stand against the ‘Tallymen’ by sticking up a notice board which bore the legend: ‘Dept of Housing. WARNING! Proceed no further – property dangerous beyond this point: Master of Works.’ I’d helped Creepy with his spelling but otherwise steered clear of him. Just as well, for they’d come for him, those sharks who don’t know the meaning of danger. I’d re-erected the notice after Creepy had been taken to the Victoria Infirmary for re-assembly; it just might give pause to any predator who was on my trail for one reason or another. But someone had stolen it. That wee punter in Nelly Kemp’s shop for instance, him of the stripy head. What species of piranha was he? Surely Gas Board meter-collectors weren’t buggering around in zebra bunnets and leather jackets these days?

  My brave whistling ceased as I stepped onto my half-landing. The stairhead cludgie door was ajar, which it hadn’t been when I’d left. Not that I kept it locked, of course, since I went along with the thievish logic of ‘what’s secured means most insured’, though I doubt if lead-lifters apply such logic. I took out my lighter and poked its jittery flame into the dark closet. I relaxed. The catch of the wee window had worked itself free and the draught must have been strong enough to shove open the door. The lighter flame blew out as I secured the catch. But I flicked it on again and shielded it with my hand. On the floor a Jiffy bleach bottle had gathered a few snowflakes about its dull shoulders, giving itself a festive air.

  Fourteen bums from a single landing had shared this wally throne; the Muirheads and the Finnegans, the Wilsons, not forgetting the Sanquhars and the Clays too, of course. Big Paddy Finnegan, a docker, used to stink the place out with his Saturday gut of stout. Sometimes when I was in here, maybe doing a bit of hand-gliding over a picture of Esther Williams in a one-piece bathing suit, Finnegan would storm down to fist the door and bawl through its cracks: ‘C’mon, get your proddy arse off that mantrap – there’s some serious shiting to be done here!’ Up 37 Scobie Street only three apartments remained occupied: in the close, Auld Granny Ferguson and her company of spooks; Rhona and me, two up on the right; and directly above us – worse luck – Wattie Mullens, coalheaver, retired.

  From the moment I looked into the cludgie something had been trying to grab my attention. I finally got a fix on what it was: wedged between the rusted claws of the bumpaper holder was a copy of the London Times. Now the fact that this upperclass rag had a sales demand in the Gorbals on par with the purchasing ratio of gumboots and brollies in the Sahara, made its presence in my cludgie all the more bizarre. What was even more mind-blowing was the fact that it bore today’s date: December 20th. The image of a dapper, bowler-hatted gent sitting on the edge of the biffy doing the crossword (it was all but completed) kept trying to assert itself but reason refuted this. It was just conce
ivable that a London Times reader might’ve had some reason to venture into the Gorbals, but that he should penetrate to the very heart of the Scabby itself scarcely seemed credible. Yet, somebody had done so. Here was the proof in black’n white. Who then? An ace gumshoe hired by Ma Carlyle or Phyllis Sherman to rake some dirt up on me, anything that’d serve as a wedge to split myself and Rhona apart? Naw, that was a load of balls. What about the wee leatherback then? Could’ve been him right enough. An agent from the Futility Furnishing Company, here in the flesh to express his client’s concern about not having heard from me in such a long suspicious time. Since the bleach bottle refused to confirm or deny my conjectures on the grounds that it might incriminate itself, I left the cludgie and ‘ascended to my nest in the fissure of the cliff’.

  Home sweet home consisted of a couple of rooms linked by a lobby where the electric meter munched amps and the floorboards crackled like a pensioners’ prayer meeting. The kitchen looked into the backcourt, the bedroom into the street. Dampness was a way of life: shoes left under the bed turned blue and given fifty or so more years the Scabby would’ve bred the first domestic water rat.

  I stuck the kettle under the tap and let a thread of water unwind into it. Our geyser was knackered. Curdie Frame, the bloke I’d got in to fix it, claimed it needed some kind of hard-to-find gadget and had gone off to look for it in Sumatra or Afghanistan. I don’t really expect to see Curdie, the gizmo, or my two quid, surfacing this side of eternity. If they do then I’ll stick the bread on Thistle to win the League. When I’d accumulated enough Loch K. to brew a mug of coffee I set the kettle on a ring of the gas cooker and put a light under it. Pressure was low. I went out to the lobby meter and worked the lobba-bob routine. The meter’s cashbox had been jemmied and its contents returned to general circulation. Theoretically unlimited gas supplies could now be tapped by clanking the same shilling through the meter’s guts as often as required. I say ‘theoretically’ because the gas supply was almost neglible. One of these days, very soon now, I would have to report the theft from the meter’s cashbox. Luckily I’d a good description of the therm-thief: he was a man in his mid-to-late twenties, around five-eleven in height; lean of build; ten, maybe eleven stones; long, dirty fair hair, nothing special in the looks department; a blue-eyed post-hippie mess with scuffed suede boots and faded jeans; Marine combat jacket, and threadbare sweater; he affects no jewellery whatsoever, his sole concession to ornamentation being a CND button.