Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  ‘D’you hear aboot Burnett?’ Cullen asked.

  ‘What aboot’m?’

  ‘Got mugged.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Naw, seems this dosser-type jumped’m as he was getting into his sister’s car. Ran off wae his hat. Y’know, yon furry thing that looked like a well-shagged squirrel.’

  I nodded. ‘Did he lose anything else?’

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Cullen suddenly exclaimed. You would’ve thought that a spider had bobbed up in his tea. Rapidly, he crossed himself.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘This.’

  He held aloft his crucifix.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I lost it but –’

  ‘Now it’s found, Hallelujah!’

  He shook his head. ‘Naw, naw, it wisnae there, I’m tellin ye. I lost it. Woke up yesterday morning and it was away.’

  ‘Middle age, they call that.’

  ‘Definitely missing, it was.’

  With something approaching religious awe registering on his booze-zapped face, he studied the crucifix. It was like a scene from one of those Pat O’Brien priest movies – the reprobate finds god again – poor script, putrid lighting, and duff acting. ‘I thought the chain must’ve snapped and chrissake . . .’ He turned the revered object over’n over between his fingers. ‘It definitely wasn’t there. I noticed it’d gone when I was shaving.’ This was doubtful; shaving was for Paddy a most dangerous task; while he was doing it he’d eyes for but one thing – safe passage for his tremulous cut-throat blade as it passed over his carotid artery.

  I closed the journal I’d been writing in and went across to increase the tranny’s volume a little. Paddy continued to sit there with the same saft look of piety on’m and a wee mobile nugget of light dartin across his pagan features. I guess at that moment all the catechisms and beatitudes, the novenas and suchlike stuff that Catholic weans’ve tattooed onto their brain lobes when they can’t do much about it had come up with a Jesuit jackpot. To say he was transfigured would’ve been going over the score, but ‘religiously exalted’ wouldn’t have been too far from the mark. The obvious solution, that the sod who’d knocked the crucifix in the first place had simply restored it, seemed light years away from dawning on’m.

  With a couple of electric snorts the tranny cleared its tubes of music then came on with a news bulletin. The usual Sunday morning crap: strife between nations; some daft fart lost on Ben Nevis; a youth stabbed to death in Possilpark (which was hardly news to me!); a compensatory item about the brisk sales xmas trees were producing this year; then – I shushed Paddy as maybe he was about to reveal the Secret of Fatima – Old Pike was dead. He’d perished in the fire. Pike, himself, was in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation. Also detained were three other men who’d not yet been named; all of them were suffering from the effects of smoke. Pike, it seemed, had made valiant efforts to save his father. There was also some guff about Shane, the family pet, having raised the alarm. Although Pike’s flat had been gutted, the fire brigade’d managed to prevent the inferno from spreading to neighbouring homes.

  ‘D’you know them, or something?’ Cullen asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Any more char in that pot?’ Cullen nodded, then lifting the pot from the fire bracket, approached with it.

  ‘One slice or two?’ he asked.

  27

  HAVING BORROWED A coat that I’d last jagged around in during the fifties – the days of wine’n throwsies, with the stains to prove it – Cullen had gone off to mass. Such a figure had he cut with his pouched fish-on-a-slab eyes, brambly chin, and the tail of the gaberdine shortie-mac halfway up his ass, that passersby would’ve promptly taken’m for a drythroat on his way to a shebeen, or maybe even a gangster enroute to some underworld crime bazaar to do a little gun shopping. A more discerning observer, a neighbour, say, might’ve detected the change in the man and remarked off the back of her hand to a companion: ‘Yon Paddy Cullen’s fairly picked himself up since he got back from the swineherding!’ There was no doubting that the miracle of the cross had had an impact on the man: ever since its occurrence he’d gone around with this saft look of piety on his clock that to a pagan like myself soon got to be a bit wearing. I’d no doubt whatsoever that Paddy’s state of grace wouldn’t outlast twelve-thirty p.m. when the Labour Club opened its doors and Auld Nick gave’m a crony’s wink from the fiery pit of a whisky glass.

  After attending to the cliché of the man on his tod – the delft-chocked sink – I began to round up the scattered empties which, without so much as a ‘gardyloo’, I chucked from the window into the backcourt. In complicity with me, the thick snow cushioned the impact of their fall then set about covering them. It was just as well, for I didn’t want Wattie Mullens to become aware of my tenemental delinquency. During the last summer that’d ever visited Scobie Street – now there’s a sad wee thought – I’d had to pull Wattie up for lobbing packets of shit from his window because his cludgie was knackered, and Rattray, the Factor, had stalled over calling in a plumber. Caused a fly-plague Wattie’s ‘wee presents’ did – the bloody place became the tour centre for Bugland: ‘Doing a Scobie’ became the in-phrase in the Bluebottle Flyaway Brochures. Flight after flight of the droning buggers arrived and not just the blue yins but green and orange as well, and an exotic purple-backed mob who, being a bit on the clannish side exclusively sunned themselves on the midden roofs. Wattie’d asked me if he could use my squat-box until Rattray relented and hired a Yellowglove to make the necessary repairs but I knocked him back; he could take his pestilential ass across to Shug Wylie’s place. As far as I knew he was still doing that. It could well be, though, that he’s started crapping in his own nest again, but there’re some things in life I don’t want to know, far less think, about.

  During the clean-up I came across a full can of lager, a wee reward for facing up to the hoovering singlehanded. I didn’t really get beasted in to my household chores for I’m a staunch believer in the theory of Pellmellicity which holds that, come what may, all things eventually find their rightful places in the gravitational fields. A lacksadaisical piece of charring, I suppose it might be called; a man dividing his attention between a machine that wheezed at his feet like a dropsical pug and a paperback which contained the aphorisms of the Leipzig Lip, would, I suppose, be sight enough to crimp the brow of any zealous dust-distributor.

  Unaware that the ‘pug’ had suffered some sort of inner convulsion, had shocked its system into reverse and was vomiting the contents of its mouldy guts – sweet-wrappers, milktops, fishbones, wool, paper scraps etc. – I reread a particularly piercing comment by Herr Nasty: ‘In order to look for beginnings one must become a crab. The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards.’ At that very moment I glanced down and saw the sick thing at my feet regurgitating domestic history, its wretch-reflex howking so far back into its gut that it’d managed to barf out a daffodil petal. Surely, the bag had been emptied since Spring? With a crochet pin it’d also gobbled I raked amidst yesterday’s leavings. Norman Mailer used up gallons of ink to infer that the fate of anyone can be deduced by an examination of their shit. He was more than vague as to the mechanics of the business but he remained convinced at the end of his convoluted essay that while the yogi-bogy brigade hummed and hawed about the ‘itness’ of existence, more honest progress could be made if we addressed ourselves to the all-pervading stench of Time, in other words, to the essential shittiness of the mind-sanitised cosmos. The crochet pin flicked something from the rubbish. It was a folded pound note, the very one – I was convinced of it – that’d gone missing one rainy Friday and all but wrecked my marriage. Rhona had been too free with her innuendos that the quid in question had more than probably been sucked into the maw of my back pocket. Now, here it was – vindication, proof, the restoration of honour. It’d probably cost me the newly-found note and more to get the sucking thing fixed. Meanwhile, I went over to the broom cupboard and took ou
t the brush’n shovel. ‘I chant the word pre-electric!’

  Having raised some dust and some sweat I soon called it quits and sank into my armchair with a fag and Nietzsche’s nattering. The vibes, though, had gotten loused up and I could no longer connect. I ended up wishing I’d put a match to the book and read the cigarette. I went over to the ‘Black Box’ and stuck on the Dustbowl Ballads. From the piles of books, sheets of paper, maps and stuff, I dug out my notebook and jotted down, ‘A man is vacuum-cleaning his carpet. Machine goes into reverse. Amongst the debris he finds fragments of a suicide note in his wife’s handwriting . . .’ I shoved the notebook aside and took up my current journal. Re-reading the ‘Pike incident’, I clearly saw that despite my avowed self-promise to set down what befell me as objectively as possible, sparing neither my dignity nor pride, I’d come nowhere near such a lofty ideal. It was so easy, this selfsuckering. By the erasure of a verb here, the promotion of an adjective there, through subtle or unsubtle inference, not to mention an irritating prose jauntiness, in essence, the very beat and rhythm of chickenheartedness, I’d managed to camouflage the funk I’d been in throughout the Pike business.

  Would Narcissus have landed himself with Anorexia Nervosa if he’d been encouraged to keep a journal? Probably not. Journal jotheads are to be numbered with shit-wavers, those I-guys who, having produced a stool, cannot bring themselves to commit it to the democracy of the sewer without bidding it a fond and lingering farewell; ditto, the snotamours, those self-weaning bugle blowers who have the nauseating habit of examining the outcome of the nasal explosions – what can they hope to find in their germy hankies – a pearl? or maybe even a ruby? Other members to be associated with the Brotherhood of Journal Keepers are the solo-lovers, that pervy gang of monosexual mirrorgasmic, self-respecting wankers of which Horace Dicky Hart is definitely a member. Me? I’m a journal-junkie, a history-shooter forever craving an ink-fix. I know what I have, all right – Pepys’s Syndrome, that’s what.

  I tried to smoke another fag but my soot-streaked lungs kicked up such a fuss I’d to abandon the idea. I popped the lager can and took a gulp from it. Yeuch, I wouldn’t be going back for the rest; it tasted the way I figured the Clyde would taste this dead-end time of the year – brackish with an undertow of drowned dossers. Right now even Woodie Guthrie’s strident voiced socialism had a man-perishing sound to it. No guesses as to why – Old Pike’s ghost had come to haunt me. Okay, let’s face the facts as I knew’m: I’d been involved in his death but there was, as yet, no proof that I’d been the direct cause of it. The blaze could’ve started through the TV set blowing up or as the result of an electrical fault. Now, it’s a fact of life that you can’t help but affect, even alter or reshape the fate of those around you. Ghosts, after all are ‘holes in the happenings’, and therefore remain potent in their absence. Even if you’ve taken to hermitting it down a fifty foot concrete oubliette, you can’t help but get entangled in the fact of living. But the changes you wreak simply through being, needn’t be for the worse. Let’s say that you stop a guy’n the street to ask directions. This casual, unplanned intrusion into his life could be enough to save’m from meeting up with a certain fateful truck which all his life, from when it was ore in the ground right up to the fully manufactured product, had been on its way to eviscerate him. I didn’t get the chance to analyse this further.

  The knock on the door was unfamiliar to me. It certainly didn’t suggest the beggarly presence of old Wattie out there, for his knock is more an accoustic apology for breathing. Nor was it the sombre knuckling of Eddie Carlyle which invites comparison to the sound of nails being knocked into a coffin lid. I switched off the record player and went out to open the door.

  Becky McQuade stood there. ‘Oh Matt,’ she wailed, ‘am I glad to see you!’

  28

  I, THOMAS PATRICK Cullen Matthew Lucas Clay had to think nimbly in order to keep apace of this drama which had erupted on my doorstep then rapidly spilled into the living-room. Acting – no, more like reacting, to the part thrust upon me, the tripartite role of the Clayculluca, I paced to and fro on the threadbare carpet, while Becky, having flung herself into Rhona’s armchair, had straightway plunged into a tear-sprinkled tale, the sob-plot of which aptly enough centred on a burst water pipe.

  Around midnight, Friday last, a waterpipe had fractured in the McQuades’ apartment and had soon flooded through the ceiling of their downstairs neighbour . . . On receiving no reply to her knocking the neighbour’d contacted Becky’s mother-in-law who lived close at hand. The ‘auld besom’ – Becky’s definition – kept a spare set of keys to allow in tradesmen, etc., when the McQuades were absent. An emergency plumber was called and he’d soon repaired the leak. As a result, of course, an awkward question had emerged: where was Becky? Her mother-in-law had presumed she’d stayed overnight at her sister Peggy’s place along in Oatlands but, come morning, this presumption had been scotched by the arrival on some errand or other of Peggy’s husband. So, an unsuspecting Becky’d arrived home around noon, Saturday, to find herself facing the music. Where had she been all night?

  So hostile, so laced with innuendo had the old woman’s questioning been that gradually it began to take the shape of an interrogation. The upshot was that Becky’d lost her rag and ordered the ‘auld besom’ from her flat. And that was how things stood now – her mother-in-law fizzing with resentment and scarcely able to contain herself as she waited to spill the beans on Becky as soon as McQuade returned.

  I paused alongside Becky and said to her in a growly sort of voice: ‘Greeting’ll no help matters. Get a grip of yourself.’

  I resumed my toing and froing.

  Jeremiah considered it was the opportune moment to announce the arrival of this my first home-to-roost chicken. There would be many more to follow he prophesied. I’d nobody to blame but myself for this calamity. Hadn’t it been me who’d scattered the seed in my very own yard? I wasn’t about to deny it. Yet, I admit to being surprised, shocked even, to see Becky McQuade coming through my doorway, closely pursued, no doubt, by an invisible horde of Pandora’s unboxed and unbridled nasties.

  In Scotland, domestic crisis is generally faced up to with the proverbial ‘Nice wee cuppa tea’ or a smoke. I chose the nicotine route, to my regret. The very first puff provoked a lung riot that folded me and all but shut me down for good. It was in a voice that sounded to start with like Donald Duck on helium but which gradually normalised, that I said to Becky: ‘Don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about. Just tell’m you spent the night in a pal’s hoose. Chrissake, surely you’ve got pals?’

  She adjusted her ridiculously small hankie and dabbed with it at her mascara-smudged eyes. ‘You don’t know’m,’ she warbled. ‘He’ll dig’n dig till he gets at the truth.’ Speaking of which, said Jeremiah, why don’t you come clean to her about who you really are?

  He had to be kidding. How’d it look if upon hearing that her husband might soon be on his way to bootalise me I instantly sprung a new identity?

  Don’t you mean brutalise? asked J.

  No, I don’t smartass. I’m talking boots here, size ten tacketties with steel toecaps cratering my corpus crusty.

  Surely you’re aware that by your continuing deception you’ve placed an entirely innocent man in jeopardy? I’d no intention of letting wee Lucas take the bust for my lust. Pity, though, I’d be depriving the newspaper industry of a fine alliterative headline:

  DEEPSEA DIVER DENTED IN DEVON STREET!

  Still dabbing at her streamy eyes with her linen ‘snowflake’, Becky seemed to be regaining control of herself. The thing I found just a wee bit odd was how a woman, weighed down with apprehension at the imminent arrival of her husband who, according to her, would not be slow in dishing out the GBH, could’ve found the concentration and the emotional stamina to mount that magnificent blonde edifice on her head? It looked like the work of a topiarist though, doubtless, it’d been created by her own bare hands, a blowgun, a gallon of hair-lacquer
, a few hundred hairpins, clasps, and side-combs. With its French-combed flying buttresses, curlicues, intricately-coiled donjons and barbicans, it, apart from being a hairstyle, might also qualify as a listed building.

  ‘D’you want a cup of coffee?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. Although she was still doing a bit of facial mopping up, the weeping jag was effectively over. ‘We’ll have to think of something,’ she said. I sat down in my armchair and stared into the fire, the interweaving flames of which were reminiscent of Becky’s hairdo, hoping to spring a few notions from this antique device. The best, or worst, it could come up with was a mutual suicide pact which given that McQuade was snowed-up in his lorry somewhere down the A74 was a mite premature. Slowly, I began to cobble an idea together. It left a lot to be desired but then so does this planet of ours and its maker had a whole seven days at his disposal.

  ‘Listen Becky,’ I said, ‘let’s run this one up the flagpole and see if it’s worth saluting.’ I winced. Only the Yanks can come that movie-talk, make it sound natural. ‘There’s this auld woman lives on’r tod, first door you come to doon in the close. Let me finish. Granny Ferguson she’s called. A bit dolly dimple, she is. Queues for’r pension at three in the morning, talks to’r shadow, y’know the kind of thing. Now Friday night last, after you left the Planet, did you no happen across the auld sowl, plowtering about in the snow she was. Didnae know whether she was going or coming. Being the kindly person you are, you didnae want’r to catch pneumonia. A wee boy told you where the auld woman lived and you took’r hame. You made’r a cuppa tea – no, Ovaltine; she always has Ovaltine last thing. While she drank it you went to look for a neighbour but there didnae seem to be any so you went back to Granny’s flat. She begged you not to leave her. Cried her eyes out, she did. What else could you do but spend the night with’r. In the morning a relative dropped by to take’r off your hands. Well, what d’you think?’