Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘Aye, you’re right there, pal,’ says the cabby, ‘we’ll never see the likes of Jim Baxter again, no in oor lifetime.’

  ‘Cough-cough-cough,’ I said. ‘Cough-cough-cough-cough.’

  ‘Do yourself a favour, mate,’ says the driver after I’d heaved myself from his cab, ‘don’t start War’n Peace, and don’t be buying any long-playing records – sounds like there’s only wan mair shirt for you. Ta-ra . . .’

  He gave me a cheery wave then departed.

  Although that God’s reject of a Saturday had pounded my brain to runny porridge, a few neurons still managed to bleep faint warning signals the moment I set foot in my close. Footprints, fat, freshly made ones that went on up the stairs. Whose? They didn’t belong to auld Wattie Mullins, his prints being of the long and narrow sort and, anyway, no way would Mullins be out at this time of night (or morning, was it?). Warily I mounted the stairs. I was chittering and my arm was louping some, especially when a coughing spasm seized on the old bronchial tract, the bone-deep pain would shoot agonies into my crippled wing. The higher I climbed, the fainter the footsteps became. They’d all but vanished by the time my rasping lungs and sodden feet had delivered me the way an ocean dumps its dead on my own half-landing. I stood there, my fairly plain self having become one huge convoluted ear. Listening.

  From the haunted lavvy there came the sounds of heavy breathing: the phantom was in its lair at last. Although our meeting was by now long overdue, I decided that bright morning was the best time for uncanny intros. After all, I’d my broken lungs and singed arm to consider – not forgetting the old ticker, mind you, you only get one per kit; it needs special attention. I was about to tip-toe past the closet’s closed door when the spook’s breathing upped some on tempo and this was accompanied by a quickening series of moans which gradually flowered into that most banal of sounds – the human sneeze! Several human sneezes. Somehow a spook with flu seems a less scary entity: I relaxed. Besides, I figured I knew who the maker of these nasal explosions was. I took out my lighter and flicked it several times without result. No flints! I’d forgotten. So, it was a lighted match that, after kneeing the door open, I shoved into the closet’s darkness. A squadron of fresh sneezes rocketed forth and just about snuffed the match flame.

  ‘Bless you, Paddy!’

  He was sitting on the pan, dressed in the diver’s suit and the helmet was on the floor between his feet with a can of beer and one of stout stuffed into it. One of his hands held an unstoppered, half-bottle of Scotch; the other rose to shield his eyes from the match’s glare.

  ‘S’that you, Tam?’

  ‘Who does it look like?’

  ‘Al Jolson.’

  ‘Eh?’

  He touched his face. ‘You been up a lum or something?’ He struggled to rise. ‘Anyway thank god you’re here.’ He wagged the whisky bottle. ‘Hadnae been for this I’d’ve been fartin icecubes.’

  The reason Paddy had taken to gallivanting around the Gorbals in a diving suit was perfectly rational, nothing bizarre about it, at all. Quite simply, during a quiet night at the Planet, Paddy’d sloped off to the Dog for a couple of crafty ones. As insurance for his return Matt Lucas’d insisted on taking possession of his overcoat and his house keys, a banal ploy since Paddy would’ve walked in his bare scud to the North Pole if he’d been convinced that a bottle of whisky’d been buried beneath it. Anyway, as he passed the Rectifier Room on his way down the stairs he spotted the diving suit lying across wee Matt’s workbench and he stuck it on for a bit of a laugh with the Salty Doggers. After a few goldies and a half gallon of stout Paddy’d reckoned that any attempt to resurface too quickly could be fraught with danger, so he stayed put until closing time then got a lift in Mickey Dalton’s taxi to the Moderation Bar. It was only after John Barleycorn had’m well in his thrall that Cullen remembered about the housekeys being still in his coat-pocket at the now locked-up Planet cinema. Since chapping up his sister while drunk and in charge of a diving suit seemed a trifle dodgy, he’d decided to crash in good old Tam Clay’s pad. And, here he was.

  ‘Tam?’

  ‘Aye, Paddy?’

  ‘They were some sausages were they no?’

  ‘Same wae the lager, ready for it I was.’

  ‘Tam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You cannae beat a bit scoff, sure ye cannae?’

  I was in bed, lying on my back, and nursing my sore arm. Paddy had an oddball aversion to beds and did most of his kipping in chairs – at the moment he was stretched out between a couple of armchairs with some blankets thrown over him. In a moment of alcoholic revelation I’d once heard Paddy refer to beds as, ‘They fuck’n grave-trainers.’ His dislike of beds, though, isn’t a lifelong one; it began, as I recall, around the beginning of the sixties when a whole scad of popstars were snuffing it through ingesting their own puke while stoned out of their tiny nutshells. ‘Remember Kopax Brazil,’ Paddy’d warn, then, to your inevitable response he’d groan, ‘of course you havnae heard of the fucker – he ate the same supper twice, didn’t he?’ ‘Remember Kopax Brazil’ became one of our coded phrases which, in this case, meant that Old Morto didn’t give squat for talent, either when it was in bed or in bud.

  Firelight flickered on the walls, just as it had the night before when Becky McQuade told me of how at her wedding McQuade had punched his brother Pat’s eye clean out of its socket. Pat, according to Becky, was McQuade’s favourite brother. What might happen to those folk he didn’t dig was something I preferred not to dwell on. The living-room smelled of our recent cook-up: we’d sorted away flat sausages, tottie scones, and eggs, some black pudding, and thick slices of heavily-buttered bread, the lot washed down, in my own case with lager while Paddy saw off the can of stout and some of his whisky. Wolfing breakfast in the smaw hours; life was becoming more’n’more ballsed up.

  ‘Know what I was thinking, Tam?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘That there’ll soon be fuckaw left. In a couple of months just empty space.’

  ‘Aye, it makes you think.’

  ‘Nae Salty Dog, nae Planet, the shops away as well. Bugger all left. Christ, even the Jerries couldnae manage that.’

  On he droned while his shadow on the wall from time to time raised its shadow bottle to its shadow lips. His theme throughout was transience, the swift and continuing loss of familiar landmarks. I grunted the odd reply, but mostly I was thinking, not so much about how tenements, iron bridges and marble banks soon enough become fog in the air; no, I was considering the things in life that aggrandise themselves and become a burden too heavy for our glass frames – sickness, disappointments, the ache of years life freights us with. What was it all for?

  ‘What’d you get up to the night?’ Cullen was asking.

  ‘Nothing much. I was taken for a hurl by a poison dwarf, made a prisoner in a giant’s castle, nearly eaten by a wolf, then I torched a pensioner’s bedroom.’

  Paddy chuckled. ‘Ask a daft question.’

  With my good arm I punched some shape into my pillow. ‘Paddy.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘How come you go to chapel?’

  ‘Coz it’s there, I suppose.’

  ‘D’you believe in this heaven’n hell stuff, then?’

  ‘Aye, definitely. If it wisnae true there widnae be sausages.’

  ‘That’s helluva deep that, Paddy.’

  ‘You Proddies are dead ignorant, so youse are.’

  ‘Good night, Paddy.’

  ‘Night Tam.’

  25

  WE SAT IN a small restaurant with red chequered cloths on the tables and with tiny impressionistic paintings – stamps from the foreign countries of the mind – decorating every inch of the ceiling. The proprietor’s name, which had been inveigled into the plate-glass, appeared as a straggling little vine of conceit beneath the brawny efflorescence of the establishment’s name, ‘La Veglia’, solar forgeries of which scattered themselves with chlorophyllous abandon amongst the animated di
ners. For instance, on the pale brow of my companion, Mrs Rebecca McQuade, a verdant ‘I’ could be seen to flare then dim again like an unresolved ego problem. Dressed entirely in white, for she’d newly come from attending her husband’s funeral, she lighted an elegantly stemmed clay pipe which had tiny pink rosettes embossed on its cheeks and gracefully sipped dainty wisps of smoke from it. Merrily, we were discussing her husband’s fortuitous demise – trekking through the Arctic on some glimmerbrained expedition to bring the haggis to the Eskimos he’d been struck dead by a school bus driven by Joe Stalin on a day as fair as any you might expect to enjoy in heaven. On the table between Rebecca and myself stood a tall bottle of blonde wine which – the fantasy of sots – no matter how often we replenished our glasses from it, remained undiminished. Very pleasant it was, this amiable tête-à-tête; not even the presence of Eddie Carlyle, who with lugubrious servility was trying to pass himself off as a waiter – his continual hrrumphing was a dead giveaway as I suppose, were the green rubber boots he’d chosen to don – could dilute our enjoyment.

  After a time Talky Sloan appeared with something concealed beneath his coat. The hidden object turned out to be a human skull which he placed on the table beside me. Having done this he launched into a verbose account of the delay he’d suffered at the customs all because he’d lacked a certain document which had only been legitimised that very morning. To Talky’s claim that the document was still in the birth channel, that the existence of it had not yet attained reality, the customs officer had slyly asked: ‘If it don’t exist how come we’re discussing it?’ It was an altogether tedious tale which was mercifully abrogated by a blacksmith who in his leather apron, spiked with tools, came clanking in. He was brandishing a pair of lengthy tongs in the jaws of which there was clamped a glowing horseshoe. Acrid smoke filled the restaurant when Vulcan, with great deliberation, as if he was performing a bizarre coronation ceremony, lodged the fiery ‘crown’ around the skull’s brow. Immediately, the blower in the corner coughed into life and a grating voice said, ‘They’re under orders!’ I leapt to my feet but Strang, dressed as a dentist, and wearing in addition a blood-spattered clerical collar, shouted, ‘I can’t stop it!’ as again and again, he tried to staunch the life-taking torrent from my mouth. He shook his head and stepped back a pace. ‘It’s no use – you’re gushing like a tap!’ He held up a fur-coat and its crimson lining oozed to the floor. Whimpering, I tried to lift it. Rhona, with a child in her arms, appeared. She was dressed for a funeral. ‘Hurry,’ she urged. ‘They’ve found out!’ We ran together down a segmented bone corridor where workmen with blowlamps were trying to fuse broken sections of the breached wall. Lights writhed in ceiling sockets and giant scarab beetles ran muttering about our feet. Although all of these creatures were winged not one of them chose to take flight. Rhona fell: still clutching the baby she went skimming along the floor then, with a voluptuous smile, vanished into a wall cavity. I charged through the doorway and found Paddy Cullen in harlequin dress seated on a lavatory pan. He was eating slimy objects – maggots maybe – from a diver’s helmet. He invited me to share his pullulating meal. ‘Make a good arm poultice,’ he suggested.

  I shouldered my way through a flimsy wall into the Planet’s Rectifier Room. Da Clay was there. He took up a glass billiard cue then proceeded to poke it through the Rectifier’s grid. This provoked an electric growl from Freddy, the luminous ape who was imprisoned at the heart of the machine. From a spigot at the base of the howling apparatus Da Clay now let flow a torrent of molten metal into a clay cup which he then passed to me. I drank from the cup and immediately ulcers flowered on my tongue and palate, and all the soft machinery of my throat seemed to be eroding. Naked, except for his shiny shoes Da Clay performed a robotic-looking waltz with Phyllis Sherman, who wore only a pair of blue silk panties and stiletto-heeled shoes. I tried to shout a warning to my father but my voice had been burned out. Alone now, for his partner had become a she-wolf that sat upon its grey haunches and gave vent to long desolating howls, Da Clay danced around the Rectifier, ululating like, a shaman. The head of a child, a monstrous head began to solidify in the machine’s shrieking mists. ‘Behold!’ my old man cried, ‘the head of the Gorgon!’

  In panic, I seized the head from the Rectifier, then shoving it beneath my Lifebuoy’s jersey – the same way I as a kid used to conceal my bible from sabbath scorners like Hatchet Hannah or Vic Rudge, I ran from the chamber. A pack of wolves began to pursue me. Through grey street after grey street I ran. My boots struck sparks from the cobbles but the wolves were gaining on me. I sprang up a fragile staircase that was made from dust’n moonbeams and it collapsed with a silvery sigh in my wake. My arm was suddenly seized by the rending fangs of some creature. I struggled through a skylight onto the roof of an immensely tall building. Still wrestling with the thing that’d laid its tenacious teeth on me I let the head fall from beneath my jersey. It went bounding down the moss-scabbed slates and lodged itself in the guttering. I stared down at it: mutilated by its fall, grey and ferocious looking in the moonlight, the face of Pike glared up at me. I felt the power being sucked from my hand (my other one had been reduced to a fingerless mash of bone’n gristle) and my grip slackened. Slowly at first then rapidly gaining momentum, I went slithering down the incline . . .

  26

  JUST AS SOCRATES died from the feet upwards, so Paddy Cullen came from sleep in the same direction. I stopped writing to watch. First, a quivering in the toes, a dabbling with them in the flux of day, then retreat; but soon, renewed animation as the toes now fan out through sock holes, like sea anenomes’ feelers, to nibble at the light; wavelets of energy pulse upwards through the legs before lapping into the pelvic area and on higher into the trunk; the arms and hands reluctantly follow. But for a long time yet the head resists the Cullenizing process. At last, the eyes spring like deck hatch covers and the unsheathed gaze blearily takes a fix on the ceiling’s worn chart. Positional readings are taken – the SS Cullen is underway.

  ‘Good morning, Paddy (cough-cough).’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  He sat up and began to scratch himself. Jeezus, he looked like he’d aged by a decade during the night. He began to search around himself, a sort of threshing movement that became more frantic the longer it went on. His hands delved beneath the blankets. ‘Gotcha!’ He fished out a rancid-looking upper-denture plate. He clicked it into place like a machine part and instantly looked two days younger. ‘Thought auld Shanksy had’m again,’ he growled. His feet swung onto the floor. ‘S’that char you’re drinkin?’

  I nodded towards the blackened teapot that sat on a fire-bracket with a cheek to the flames. ‘Bit stewed.’

  ‘Aye, like masel.’

  He seized hold of the teapot and jawed some tea into a mug and heaped in about four sugars. Next, he got down on his hunkers and groaned around for a bit until he’d found his whisky bottle. He held it up to check its contents; about a man-sized slug remained. This he poured into his tea then, no doubt respectful of his moiled headgear, quietly paddled a teaspoon in the turbid stuff. He downed several gulps of the char which I figured must be as flavoursome as a cheap paintstripper.

  ‘Time’s it?’ he asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Your feet must’ve knackered the clock. Stick on the tranny.’

  ‘No be able to hear it wae you barking like a seal.’ He got up, dragging the blankets on the floor, crossed to the mantelpiece and tuned in to ‘Slipped Discs’, a prog. in which the jock took requests from his listeners regarding which record they would like to hear publicly demolished – this was done by sound-effects which were meant to convey the impression of an almighty sledgehammer pounding a record to vinyl dust before our very ears. The world of Disney Exist kept stealthily extending its borders. What with pools panel experts inventing imaginary soccer results and Scottish disc-jockeys with transatlantic twangs to their verbal gibberish pretending to be demolishing – ach, why go on? Scunnersome, that was the very w
ord for it – scunnersome. Cullen dragged the blankets back to Rhona’s armchair and dumped his fat butt into it. He wriggled his yellow toes in the direction of the fire. ‘What you up to?’ he enquired.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Who you writing tae?’

  ‘Myself, I suppose.’

  ‘Yersel?’

  ‘Aye, it’s a kinda diary.’

  He frowned. ‘You write things doon that’ve happened to you – s’that it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Like “Today I scratched my bum – yesterday, I didnae bother”?’

  ‘The very thing.’

  ‘Complete waste of bloody time!’ He glanced over at me as I tenderly stroked my throbbing arm. ‘Is the auld wing still playing you up?’ He shook his head. ‘Many a time I’ve decked it efter havin a bucket – but never through trippin ower the damned thing. Anyway, if that bark of yours keeps up you’ll have kicked the bucket afore the arm draps aff.’

  ‘Ta, Paddy.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Paddy began to hum along with a so-called ‘doomed disc’ they were lining up for pretended pulverisation. Good, it was ‘Stranger On The Shore’ that was under the Hammer. Unlucky song, my ass. How could there be such a thing? If it was possible then there’d have to be ‘lucky songs’ as well.