His gloved hand stroked his chin. ‘Did yours curl up and die, then?’ he asked, referring sarkily to bygone days when I’d let my chin do its own thing; not, in Rhona’s judgement, a great success. Phyllis opined that it made me look like a horse with its feeding bag on which, in her opinion, was a considerable improvement. Since Horace and I both utterly detested one another our chit-chat soon fizzled out and once more he took up his whistling.
I first met Horace when I hung about the Chameleon Bar, an upcity pub which was one of the first into C & W music. That was around the time when singing cowboys drifted in from the electronic prairies, rhinestoned dudes all riding the gravy train which had been set in motion by the Carter family. I’d been a regular punter at the Chameleon just when the old haunting tone of American folk music was giving way to the voice of protest (as if Woodie Guthrie’s life hadn’t been one long, agonised howl at the world!) Singers like Dylan and Baez had joined the pantheon of photographs which covered the pub’s walls, but I continued to dig the old stalwarts like Jimmie Rodgers, Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly, Betty Lomax and, of course, Hank Williams and George Jones. From them you got stuff that resonated with hard-times America, a tonal bleakness that spoke of a world of wet freightyards, hobo woodsmoke, and night trains coming down. We used to have some good rap sessions in the old Chameleon, me’n Ciggy McQueen, Benny Spencer, Frank Lipton and Caz Carruthers. Horace had hung around our company like a sort of pestilent mascot, a bug to tread on when life got boring. It has to be admitted that I’d stamped on’m more often than anyone else had.
Maybe to shut off his mouth-music and to allay my curiosity, I asked Horace what’d become of the old gang. Did they still jar in the Chameleon? He slipped down from his stool and reluctantly, I did likewise and came around the pillar to meet him. Since halitosis was a marked feature of his three-dimensional entity I breathed shallower than a guppy and stuck away my lager so rapidly my Adam’s apple must’ve been a blur. In that incredible plummy voice of his, his vodka’n orange clutched in a hand that was now stripped of its glove to reveal the opening spoors of a dermatological newcomer, he explained that the old folk-train’s lum had been belching dreamsmoke and had eventually been derailed by a succession of drug busts. All had not been lost, however, since the selfsame choo-choo was now to be found stationed in a rowdy bar up the Possil. Yes, most of the old crowd were to be found there, although Mountain Maxwell, the humdinger-twelve-stringer, had ‘changed instruments’, a coy way of saying that he’d snuffed it – a harp for a guitar. The big man’d been taken out by a massive stroke. Who? Ciggy McQueen? Yes, he was still hanging around. Benny Spencer and Lipton too. Caz Carruthers, though had gone Stateside and the last heard of him was that he was doing his DJ for a radio station in Seattle or somesuch place. Horace now went on to explain that he himself only looked in occasionally; since his last op he’d had to cut back on the booze. Hastily, I smacked my glass on the counter. ‘Have to split man, too bad we didn’t bump into each other earlier. What?’
‘Why don’t you come to the shindig?’
‘Shindig?’
He nodded and the dead crow on his noggin all but shook loose. ‘The lads always have a bit of a do after the pub shuts. Ciggy’ll be there, Lipton too I imagine.’
‘Where’s it at?’
‘Up Possilpark. Be a great night.’
‘You going then?’
When he nodded I didn’t think to ask myself why anyone’d invite typhoid to a party. Horace was a reminder to all that life is a risky biz – having him in close proximity to you was as chancy as playing tig in a leper colony. For the first time on that screwed-up Saturday I began to get positive vibes. Maybe a few live embers could be coaxed from the ashes after all. I began to get really hepped up about seeing Ciggy McQueen, Lipton, et al. It’d most probably involve a carry-out though. I put this to Horace and he nodded. ‘We’ll go halfers for the booze, all right?’
‘You’re on,’ I said, and on impulse shook his Martian mitt where the purplish lumplings seemed definitely to be multiplying.
22
HEADING WESTWARDS IN the company of a whistling dwarf, my stomach dancing from the stink of him, my disquiet mounting at the taxi-meter’s hyper-activity, I found that the compiler of this monochrome evening had prepared an elegant coincidence, arranging for it to flower at Glasgow Cross. Our cab, which seemed to’ve a turtle instead of a tiger in its tank, had just settled for a quick snooze at a set of traffic lights when an ambulance giving it the crisis bit – flashing lights and yowling siren – came breenging from the Saltmarket, shot across the mouths of London Road and the Gallowgate, and went wailing up the High Street. Immediately behind the ambulance there came a hearse, complete with snuff box, and going at a fair lick for that normally sedate vehicle. Our driver grinned from his smoky compartment. ‘Business must be slack, eh?’ I was smiling at that one when I saw, following the hearse, a black Volkswagen Beetle. Although its roof was thick with snow its number plates had been cleared, and it was because of this I was able to confirm that it was none other than Eddie Carlyle’s car. Eddie and his mother’d been attending the Jesus Jamboree at the Tent Halls. Right now they were heading in the wrong direction for home but being kind and thoughtful Christians they were no doubt giving someone a lift. I’m not too superstitious, but I could’ve definitely done without that bizarre nocturnal convoy. The same goes only double I suppose for the victim in the ambulance, or the bod in the box, assuming that there was one. It was really far-out. Why should a hearse be going like the clappers through the streets of Glasgow at this time of night? Definitely one for the ‘ideas notebook’; ‘While they tried to assure him that he was okay, that he was going to make it, Clay, squinting through the ambulance’s rear window, saw that they were about to be overtaken by a hearse . . .’
Well, we’re in that fix from day one – all of us, right? Nowt to be done about it. Could’ve done without the heavy reminders but. Prompted by the sight of the ambulance Horace laid off his Ronnie Ronalding to announce the forthcoming event of his revolutionary hip-joint operation. I wasn’t sure if by ‘revolutionary’ he meant that he was going to be fitted with a revolving hip; or that the surgeons intended to circle him on rollerskates while they were wielding their scalpels; or that he was to become the beneficiary of some medical neo-wizardry. Who cared? Hearses and hip-joints were hardly a turn-on for the generation of an upbeat party mood.
‘I’ll be one of the first in Scotland to get it,’ Horace boasted.
Hip-hip-hoo-fuck’n-ray!
Let’s say it as is – it wasn’t so much having witnessed the meatwagon and the corpse-crate charging through Glasgow Cross that was bugging me as Argyle Street crackled blackly under our tyres. No, it was that bloody Beetle that was getting to me, the way it’d ran so darkly across my path (can a snow-smothered car do anything ‘darkly’? Aye, if it’s intent I’m getting at) with its moral backspray which’d all but doused the wee fire of optimism I’d been blowing, flame by flame, to life.
‘What’re you playing at, boy?’ a voice suddenly asked inside my whoozy head. It was Jeremiah, of course, crudely impersonating ‘Bunsen’ Turner, my old chemistry teacher, a man with frosty mandibles that squeaked when he was moved to verbal rage – about once every three minutes. This’d been the very man who’d told me after I’d ballsed up some cosmically significant piece of test-tubery that I’d never amount to more than a ‘pig’s fart in a cracked bottle’, a vulgarity that’d been received with much chortling from those bright sparks who’d somehow or other managed to hatch crystals from a solution of copper sulphate. What was I supposed to be doing? Jeremiah wanted to know. I mentally shrugged. I was just going to see a few pals, y’know, to shake hands with yesterday. Where was the harm in that? I knew in my heart of hearts that it was a futile pursuit, about as pointless as cheating at Solitaire. It’s an odd thing how the gift of recall so quickly degenerates into nostalgia. The neurologists know all about what’s going on inside that thought termitari
um we call the brain; any day now they’ll announce the chemical’s identity, you know, the one that can remind you that your mother once wore a hat which so strongly resembled a snail that it slowed down her thought processes. The act of remembering is nothing to get mystical about. After all, it’s merely the reactivation of neurological patterns laid down in the cortex and –
‘Chuck that!’ snaps the voice in my head. ‘Don’t try to snow us with that quasi-medical mush. Let’s face some home truths, Clay; you’re a moral skunk, a feculent fuckup of a man. This diseased midget by your side, this homunculus, is by comparison as pure as the –’
‘For chrissake, Horace,’ I grumbled as I stared out at the driven snow, where is this fuck’n place?’
For some time now we’d been zipping here’n there amongst pearly Possil streets with a blizzard of debt raging in the fare’s meter and a driver who was pursuing a topography that’d been mapped by his own mercenary mind and which bore no correspondence with the urban reality. (I was sure that this was the second time I’d seen the Blind Asylum go by). We were definitely retracing our tyremarks, had in fact been doing so since Horace’s original guess as to the whereabouts of the shindig had backfired.
‘We must’ve overran it,’ he whined. ‘I know the street is after a red furniture shop and a surgery.’ When I uttered an oath he complained that everything looked the same in the snow. Different, he meant. How could things look the same? ‘Try the next one, driver,’ he instructed in that fruity voice of his. ‘I think I’m starting to get my bearings.’ So long as his meter kept hoovering up a bob a minute, the driver didn’t object to skittering from one location to another, in fact, he seemed more than willing to explore every backstreet, sidestreet, and frontstreet Possilpark had to offer. I should’ve known better, allowing myself to be driven off to an address as vague as the one supplied by Horace as we clambered into the cab, for after naming a street, he’d added: ‘At least I think it’s called that, but I’ll know as soon as we get there.’
This Hubris business the old Greeks went on about, this was me getting a double dose of the stuff. I could almost hear them, yon Olympus mob, sitting around in their nightshirts and scoffing grapes. ‘See this Clay fella, no playin the game so he’s no. Wife in hospital and him nookying around like he’s single or something. No giving a monkey’s. Time we put a spoke in his wheel . . .’
Aye, they’d done that all right – and how; trapped inside a money-mincer on a Saturday night with an amnesiac dwarf!
The longer I sat there the more I got to feel like a participant in one of those arty-farty movies they show up the Cosmo. Le Taxi they’d’ve called this one with maybe Jean Gabin as the cab driver, myself played by Alain Delon (well, why not – it’s my movie!), and with José Ferrer recreating his Lautrec role as Horace. The film, as is the wont of yon avant-garde guff, would’ve been a boring mile or so of speckled celluloid which depicted nothing more than a repeated shot of a taxi being pelted by luminous snowballs as it entered then reversed from the same street. While this is going on Gabin grins evilly at his clients through the rear mirror; Horace Lautrec, whistling furiously, goggles through the patch he’s rubbed clear in the steamy window; Delon, meanwhile, is seen metamorphosing into a fares meter, a nasty metallic business of which the first indications are the ghosts of rapidly multiplying numbers flickering across his eyeballs. Slowly, but not all that slowly, the meter was turning to solid gold; there was about half a week’s wages in there now. And it wasn’t as if we could cut our losses by getting out, paying off Onassis, then hoofing it to wherever the ding-dong was. Wandering around Saracen Cross with a pokeful of beercans was about as safe as Haffey’s goalmouth, Wembley ‘61. There were gangs hereabouts that made the Hell’s Angels look like mobile monks.
The carry-out bag in Horace’s lap rustled as he leaned forward. ‘Down here, I think, driver.’ We went lurching down a street that looked as if the Luftwaffe had only just left it after a highly successful bombing raid. On a gapsite between two crumbling tenements a bonfire was blazing and lethal-looking kids galloped around it. These mini-Goths were skelping each other with snowballs, while others, seemingly finding this pastime to be too tame were heaving bricks and knuckles of iron at each other. Already, snowballs were cracking against the cab’s windows as it hirpled over the snow-covered debris which gave the street its sinister lumpy appearance. On its back near the bonfire lay the shell of a Hillman Minx; snow melted from its underparts as a small brat, the perfect sociological model of your multi-deprived urbanite, was being compelled by his hooligan genes to give the Minx’s exhaust pipe laldy with a length of steel tubing. Graffiti, the psoriasis of the slums, besmirched every wall – threats and more threats, the territorial claims of gangland. We lurched past jiggered shops, their windows boarded up, though some of the planking had been swiped, probably by the bonfire merchants. Since the only tenement windows that could be seen were bedroom ones, they were mostly unlit, giving these demi-buildings a deserted appearance. At the bottom of the street but – it must’ve been the swanky end! – a few brave xmas trees glowed here’n there. Every now’n again a curtain was tweaked aside as tenementers checked out what was no doubt the rare phenomenon of a cab in their midst.
Obeying Horace’s instructions, the taxi driver brought the cab to a halt. In the close opposite us a nervy gas-mantle jittered light along the flayed walls. Snowballs continued to thud against the taxi. I glanced through the rear window; the apaches had multiplied which made me nervous. What if they’d tired of burning wood and were on the lookout for a more novel combustible? The same thought must’ve paid a call on our cab driver for while I took it that he was raking around for a sack large enough to hold our fare, he, in fact, brought out a truncheon, a heavy-looking fuzz-issue noggin-tapper. This he placed by his side. Interesting.
‘I’ll just check it out,’ said Horace as he opened the door and was on the point of taking his leave.
I grabbed at his arm. ‘Check what?’
He blinked at me indignantly then pointed to a lit window, one-up-left. ‘That’s it. Best to make sure there’s been no change of venue. Take us ages to get another cab.’
I nodded; it made sense. Horace stepped from the cab then began to fumble with the carry-out bag. From it he withdrew a paper-wrapped half-bottle. ‘Your whisky,’ he said as he passed it into me. I took it and stuck it away. The driver was taking a beady interest in the proceedings. I jived my thumb on my index finger. ‘The moolah, Horace. We agreed to split the fare, right?’
At that moment the little sod was caught in the vortex of some well-aimed snowballs – one of the missiles almost hooked the specs from his face, while another one nearly had it away with his wig. ‘I’ll fully reimburse you when you come up.’ More direct hits flared on his back as he scurried to the closemouth. He paused there, then turning, one arm raised to ward off the salvo of incoming snowballs, he shouted: ‘I’ll give you the okay from the window. Keep watching . . .’ Swatting snow from his coat, he legged it up the close and had soon vanished into its murky flickerings.
While I kept tabs on the window, awaiting the summons to Joyville, the driver abruptly demanded his fare. I’d no choice but to hand over the best part of next week’s housekeeping money. I think the bugger was even expecting a tip – a rap around the earhole would’ve been more like it. The fleecing moment had unhooked my attention from the window and as my gaze returned to it I was just in time to see its curtain twitch back into place. It must’ve been Horace giving me the come-up wave. Not that it mattered, for the driver – an impulsive chap – had decided to get shot of me. After an increase in the bombardment (some of the thrown objects were definitely not snowballs), he snapped: ‘Right, pal, that’s it – eff-off!’ Some gratitude; I’d given him enough for a downpayment on two flank musquash fur-coats and, yet, here he was – ‘D’you hear me, china?’ His lifting of the fuzz-stick was, I thought, a bit over-dramatic. Mind you, I could’ve done with that skull-lumper when, seconds later, a
fter hitting the pavement at speed, I nevertheless got everything those multi-deprived morons could bring to hand, snowballs, stank lids, boulders, you name it. Cursing them on the hoof, I fled up the close.
As I jouked around the close’s elbow and prepared to launch myself up the first flight of stairs, I scarcely gave the driver a thought, though it was on the cards that his cab would be reduced to a metallic smear and he’d end up having his balls barbecued – one can but pray. I glanced at the nameplate on the door to my left: J. Frost. Very apt that was for there was a draught, cold enough to freeze the plums from an Eskimo, raking down the stairs from the smashed window on the half-landing.
But all was not bleakness and blight: a youthful slum-ite on a creative jag had sprayed a spider’s web on the wall, its silver threads cast in just the right position to catch the glances of upwards plodders. A niftily executed job this web was, complete with the Reverend Humphrey Weaver, himself, who squatted at the heart of the matter in his spider disguise, dreaming sermons. No doubt chuffed by this artistic effort Possil’s Picasso’d gone on to depict the intricacies of the female pudendum and its interaction with the male reamer, a conjunction not consummated and which gave rise to the risible notion that the randy sprayer’d been interrupted by a parental clout on the lug just as he was getting to the tickly bit: coitus interruptus! The stairhead bog had an occupant who, judging from his pained grunts and groans, was pressing hard to relieve himself of a jaggy brick. I hoped for his sake that he’d a gasmask in there with’m. Holding my breath until I was by the cludgie door I went up the second flight of stairs. The murals here were the work of lesser artists, humdrum hooligans who’d been unable to raise their game above gangland conceits.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 18