Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  The meter thief had no moral qualms about busting the bob-box, none whatsoever. In his opinion the Gas Board had reneged on their end of the deal – namely, to provide him, the consumer, with a continuous and adequate supply of energy. But on the contrary they’d blown down their pervasive and scandalously expensive tubing the equivalent of an industrial raspberry. So weak and so spasmodic had their supply been that Peggy Sampson, next close to his, having popped her old and worried head into the proverbial oven, had, to her utter disgust, wakened to find herself completely undead though suffering from a splitter of a headache. Since the GBH (Gas Board Heavies) frowned on meter break-ins, the orbit of the ‘crime’ would have to be widened to include other knock-likely items. There’d be no use telling even the dimmest of Defective Constables that the only thing taken was the meter’s contents. Even his ponderous neurons would get around to thinking. ‘Wot we’ve got here is an inside job, that’s wot . . .’ Fortunately most items of any real value had long since been removed to Ma Carlyle’s place to be stored there until that joyous day when a Corporation billet could be found for them. To pre-empt a genuine break-in I’d been forced to boot in my own front door which would mean replacing the busted lock. No problem there, plenty of locks to be found all about me. Keys might be harder to locate. Billy Sanquhar, an erstwhile neighbour of mine, on the day of his departure, as his wife’n weans sat peaceably in their covered wagon before riding off into the sunrise that was Castlemilk, had defiantly hurled his keys into his gutted living-room and exclaimed triumphantly: ‘That’s me, Tam – oota fuckin jile at last!’ Unhappily for Billy things hadn’t worked out for I hear that he’s now to be found in a place of confinement to the east of the city famous for its porridge and its absolute mania, bordering on paranoia, for locks’n keys.

  I chucked some sticks into the grate. The fire had burned down to a few pale sparks. With some paraffin I kept in a ginger bottle I soon had a good blaze going. Splay-thighed I crouched there, toasting my chestnuts until enough was enough and I’d to back off some. There was plenty of fuel to be had. At the moment I was burning my way through the Finnegans’ old dresser, the one that’d collapsed and died during their flitting. So too had auld Granny Finnegan. Maybe her ghost was glaring indignantly at me from some corner. ‘In the name of jayziz, would you be lookin’ at that – yon godless proddy chopping up my good furniture and not a bolt of lightning’s come near’m!’

  Sitting by a cheery fire in my rent-free slum, eating a piece’n jam and slurping down a mug of coffee, I’d a wee swatch at The Beano, just to see how my old chums were faring in their timeless world of chortles, japes and tee-hees. Sad to report they all looked a mite jaded, their laughter just a bit hollow for comfort, their wheezes a whole stab crueller. Old jinks in new inks. Somehow the mix didn’t pay off. It was as painful as watching your granny trying to rock’n roll. I took a drawing pin and tacked the comic to a wall so’s I’d remember to take it over to young Jason, should I be granted the privilege of seeing him come Sunday.

  A wee gander at the London Times now, the grown-ups’ ‘comic’ with its dangerous, if not immoral, endorsement of the thrills to be had from monetary speculation. Page after page of jobbers and robbers. Assessment of today’s fancied runners by experts in the financial paddock: ‘Falling Sterling looks capable of outrunning Diving Dollar in the Stock-Exchange Stakes.’ The mysterious reader of this snob-job had left a clue: 14 across – something puzzling about transport: Starts R blank, blank, U, blank . . . a mere moment and yours truly, his mental edge honed to perfection by the Scottish Educational System which enables him to simultaneously operate a lathe, whistle Dixie, and scratch his bum, sees that the answer can only be ‘rebus’, a puzzle game in which a succession of letters and drawings conspire to conceal a word. The real puzzle here was how someone who was capable of fishing from his lexicographical lagoon such exotica as ‘glossectomy’, ‘primagravida’, and ‘furfuraceous’ should have failed to hook in a torpid trout like ‘rebus’.

  ‘Not only that,’ says Jeremiah who has appointed himself chairman of a committee, hastily recruited from my worry centres, ‘what about the snowballs?’

  ‘Well, what aboot them?’

  ‘A thrown snowball implies a thrower, does it not?’

  ‘Granted. But do three thrown snowballs necessarily indicate a trio of pitchers?’

  ‘That’s not the point – you were targeted by an unknown assailant or assailants.’

  ‘That’s right, go on.’

  ‘Well, what if it’s a knife next time? A gun, even a rifle?’

  ‘Why should anyone throw a gun or a rifle at me?’

  ‘The question you should be asking yourself is –’

  The door got chapped.

  I knew before I’d opened it who’d be out there. Wattie Mullens. On the scrounge again. Scarcely a day went by that didn’t find’m on my doorstep begging like a sly old monk. Mostly what he was after was company, but since he was such a boring old fart he got only a modicum of my fraternal feelings. Rhona was always willing to while away a half’n hour or so with’m; she’d spend even longer with Granny Ferguson, although it was plain for all to see that the half-blind old kneecreaker was no longer the full shilling. I’ve seen her having an animated chat with an empty chair; every day invisible callers crowd into her living-room to keep her company. Rhona was always nipping down with a bowl of soup, a slice of cake, and whatnot. I did what I could for the auld yin but she stubbornly refused to update my image, so that I remained the snottery-nosed tyke of my early days, the begonia-batterer, the very sight of whom made her froth up like a pan of boiling milk.

  ‘Just a wee tate sugar, Tommy, lad.’

  Between his coarse mitts Wattie extended to me the sugar bowl. He wore the usual crap: baggy pants, stained grey cardigan, and a collarless shirt fastened at its neck by a safety-pin. His face, with its bonal trickery, would’ve delighted a woodcarver. The auld midden was beginning to smell like something that’d been left to rot in a drawer. These days he was looking more like one of those flayed punters who’d staggered from the Nazi deathcamps. He seemed to subsist on a diet of baked beans, cream crackers, and a potent fortified wine. Rhona’d put him in contact with a social worker but more often than not by the time she called he’d be off on one of his jaunts, his favoured places being the Glasgow Green and Richmond Park where I saw him once arguing the toss with a hissing swan at the Ducksy. He was also said to have a liking for hanging around the lassies’ school playground, especially when they were playing netball in their navy blue knickers and white blouses – randy old devil! In his cheeky way he slippered in at my back. ‘Have you been burgled, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Burgled?’

  He nodded as he looked around the place which, I’ll be first to admit, was in a state of some disorder. He nodded. ‘Aye, gave you a right turning ower, eh?’ His gaze raked across the kitchen table with its mess of typewritten sheets, journals, notebooks, maps, mags, and what-not scattered over it, ‘Away wae your tipper-tapper as well, eh?’ He sneezed twice, so violently you could almost hear his bones chiming. ‘Is the wife no in then?’

  ‘Aye, there she is – hanging on the pulley,’ I said as I knelt at the food cupboard.

  Wattie jiggled about at my back. ‘Forgetting she was in by . . . Is that salmon you have there? My, it’s been a long while since I had a peck of salmon, and semolina in cans noo! Whatever next?’

  I gave’m the filled sugar bowl but the fly old devil wasn’t for returning to his flat right away. He mouthed the familiar drivel about what a comfort it was to be blessed with such a good neighbour, then he pottered over to the sink and keeked through the window. ‘They’re making a right hole ower there, eh?’ he said, his weepy eyes staring out into the blackness in which a semi-demolished tenement was definitely not visible. He nodded. ‘Tough old buggers they buildings but. No like the eggboxes they’re stickin up noo. Aye, wan shout’ll be enough to bring them doon, so it will.’

 
He came over and planted himself in Rhona’s armchair. ‘See you’ve got a good bleezer on.’ He stretched his hands out to the crackling flames. ‘Cannae thole a black grate these days. Ma bones’re stapped wae ice, so they are. Plenty of kinneling to be got but.’ He scratched his scrawny chest, causing panic in the colony, no doubt. ‘And the price of coal! God love us, we’ll soon be queueing up at the jewellers for it.’ He shook his head. ‘And tae think I must’ve lugged a thoosand tons of the stuff on my back tae. Maggie, god rest’re, never had tae hinge her back tae mend oor fire – bunker aye full tae the gunnels, so it was.’

  He stared into the heaped sugar bowl as if it was a crystal in which he could see shapes from the past arising. ‘Ach, the days of the auld hairy engine is finished so they are. Nineteen forty-seven it was, hellish winter yon. Cauld enough tae make a polar bear greet; snaw never aff the grun. Big Troy, as fine a Clydesdale as ever champed oats, slipped and snapped his leg . . .’

  As the old man’s memory began to slide down the slope of that legendary winter I tossed him a fag which he eagerly lighted, although its immediate effect was to double him over in a fit of coughing so powerful and so prolonged I expected to see his lungs flop onto the carpet. He gradually recovered, clambering onto each breath like an old turtle onto a rock. He left shortly afterwards, some ciggies and the tin of semolina he’d coveted the richer. But before I’d got the door shut on’m, he said: ‘Oh aye, Tommy, I meant to tell ye, there was a bloke lookin for you the day.’

  ‘A wee guy, striped bunnet, leather jacket?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s’m.’

  ‘Say what he was after, did he?’

  ‘Naw, just a lot of daft blether.’

  ‘What aboot?’

  ‘Wish-washy kin o’stuff. Cannae remember. Was he wan of they bampots fae the papers aboot your burglary, then?’

  ‘Aye – Pat Roller himself. Be seeing you, Wattie.’

  With Wattie gone the worry committee, led by Jeremiah, trudged in once more, but I lighted a fag and chased them. Sure, there was plenty to be thinking about: the snowball pitcher(s): the London Times’ mystery man (or woman – it doesn’t pay to have mind-set); the snooping leatherback. Something seemed to be coming down and I’d the notion I wouldn’t know what until it had ricocheted from my turnip. I was proved right almost immediately – something did in fact come down, namely The Beano I’d tacked to the wall. Granny Finnegan’s ghost strikes again!

  Later, sitting by the fire’s garrulous flames with wan images leaking from my fourteen-inch telly, I wrote up the day’s events so far in my current journal. Granda Gibson had been the instigator of what had become a lifelong habit for me. I was around twelve or thirteen at the time. I remember how exasperated he’d become as he guddled in a box of snapshots for a particular photo he wanted to show me. As he let pour from his hand a little cascade of sepia images he muttered, ‘What this family needs is a historian, somebody to put its days into order. Right there’n then I’d volunteered for the job and, what’s more, had stuck to it. Around twenty or so volumes, starting with modest jotters, but as my powers of expression increased so too did the journals in size’n girth.

  On the TV a deepsea diver was to be seen wagging a penknife at a shark that looked about as long and twice as powerful as an American locomotive. I grinned. ‘Go on wee Matt Lucas! I’ll have it wae chips.’ The shark who didn’t have his brain millions of years for nothing, neatly, with his fabled choppers, snipped a yard or so from the diver’s airline then backed away in brute astonishment as its victim gave an overwrought impression of a washing machine gone manic.

  ‘That’s that, Matt!’

  9

  MATERNITIES HAVE A fine tang of life to them, an invigorating ozone quite unlike those fetid airs which haunt the paindoms of infirmaries. The visitors who’d flocked here before me had left a scattering of imprints on the rubber floor-tiling; by now these early birds would’ve found their apportioned twigs on the great tree of birth and would be well into chit-chat about nest building and grublore. I entered a long corridor which was vibrant with the calls, cries, and mewlings of fledgeling days. Everywhere I glanced my eyes were strobed by gleam and glint, the shimmering of festive foils, fairy lamps, and paper bunting.

  I’d brought Rhona some tangerines. How very xmassy they looked in their foil jackets as they nestled there at the base of the red netbag. I’d also brought her a magazine which had drained vatfuls of ink to recount the marital leapfrogging of a lightweight actress who’d acquired a large following, not to mention a large behind, and achieved apotheosis after playing a royal asp-licker in Tony and Cleo.

  A nurse trotted past, followed a few paces later by a pair of glum-looking porters. I gave them a friendly nod but in return got a severe scowling. Aye, quite right, too: friendly nods won’t put milk in a wean’s belly nor will they put coal in the grate. Never mind your widow’s mite, mate – just try living on the porters’ pittance, see how much bread that’ll butter. For starters, you’ll have to forego fripperies like glossy mags and tangafucknrines.

  A consultant, well, a guy in a white coat with a stethoscope coiled like an asp in one of its pockets and the air of a baby-boffin about’m, went by. From his consultative lips there came birding Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’, a tune which for some reason lays a hex on me. The corridor went on and on. Radiators sweated and grumbled. A wall crack which secretly fed on darkness and human indolence had stolen yet another inch towards its anarchic dream of downfall and rubble. I passed an xmas tree and saw myriads of tiny clays marooned on the shiny contours of appleglass planets.

  Do Maternities have mortuaries? The question was prompted by the sight of a porter who approached me pushing a trolley upon which lay a sheet-swaddled form. The porter was a swaggering lout with a napperful of blazing red hair and a beard of the same colour burning along his jawbones, which were set in the whistle-mode so that his lips could trill some tum-tiddily-tum-tum lug-sickener from Gilb and Sullv. The figure on the trolley wasn’t completely swaddled – its feet bared their soles to me and starkly semaphored that they’d have no further need for shoes and socks. Some poor woman taken in labour? No, definitely not! I’d’ve laid a sawbuck to a cent that this pair of peds belonged to a man!

  Rhona’s ward sister had an apt name for one of her profession – Pulham. As soon as I heard it I felt the pressure begin to mount in that spare lobe my brain uses as a neural trashcan, a coup for the mind’s ordures, the psychic equivalents of sapped teabags, fishheads, and veg. peelings. Inevitably, the trashcan popped its lid and out leapt this cankerous doggerel:

  Thrust, mother, thrust

  From your natal cord unspool’m.

  Thrust, mother thrust!

  And as you push – I’ll Pulham!’

  I’ve some cheek coming that snash. Pain is no joke – especially birth pain. The very thought of giving birth makes my eyeballs sweat. Imagine serving as the escape tunnel for a nine-pounder from Wombsville as it, all jaggy knees and elbows, goes for broke after its prime breath! I remember watching TV this day and an old dame came on. I figured from her genteel appearance that we were about to learn how to make crepe suzette using only digestive biscuits, or how to construct a deluxe bumpaper holder, using platinum paperclips and a handful of rubies. But instead, doesn’t she start to rabbit about what giving birth really felt like. Quoth she: ‘With the fingers of both hands take a firm grip of your upper lip. Now, keeping a tight hold on it, peel your lip from your gum then in one continuous movement yank it up over your nose, brow and bonce, securing it with a knot behind the ears . . .’

  No, I’m not into such grief. When it comes to pain, hurt, ache, twinge, sting or spasm, I’m kin to the goofer who got manhandled from the Stoic’s Club for complaining that its chairs were too hard. Talk about windy? Just call me Chicago! Show yours truly an injection kit, dental pliers, or a suture needle, and I’ll show you a fainting on a scale that would bring a sneer to the lips of even the most squeamish of Vi
ctorian lady novelists.

  About as comforting as would be the sight of a burning petrol station to a roadweary driver riding a tankful of echoes was the view ahead of me: Sister Pulham, the Maternity Medusa stood guard at the entrance to Rhona’s ward, waiting with her petrifying glare to turn late-arriving hubbies into Mr Frosties. Although she’d her back to me she wasn’t any easier on the eye – that rear of hers, for instance, could’ve roosted a colony of gannets. Although I was fully twenty feet or so from her I could feel the animosity coming off her like heat from a foxhole, I mean, a stokehole. The handle of the netbag had wound itself tightly about my forefinger and I’d to pause to let it unwind. This proved to be fortunate for while I was rubbing at my corpsy digit, trying to entice it back into my bloodflow, doesn’t this bloke with a tan Fedora on his loaf and a flash camel-haired coat hung around his shoulders (two humps – one to either shoulder which made’m look like a Yankee linebacker who’d been chopped off at the knees) come stepping in a fancy pair of pavement prancers from Rhona’s ward and without seeming to consider the enormity of his actions went bouncily up to Sister P. and, eyelevelling her stony globes, began to lay some grief on her. This guy deserved either a medal for bravery or rubber cutlery for lunacy. The Sister’s response was painfully predictable: before Fedora Fred knew what was coming down he was all but bundled into the Sister’s office, the door of which closed with a glassy smack. There he was, bottled up like a lab rat in a maze. And just as that rodent gets a volt-jolt across its raisins every time it touches the wrong button, so the now bewildered-looking flatbelly got smacked down on a move he’d intended to be conciliatory: ‘Mr Hoxton, try to remember that we’re running a maternity hospital here – not a holiday camp.’