Any morning now I’d waken to find I’d become a gigantic clockroach. This morning I’d sure felt like one as I lay there on my back swallowing the disgusting globs of mucous that kept gathering in my mouth. And such bitterness. Had I really been the intended victim of a Family murder plot? It hardly seemed likely. Sherman had been given the choice of an unblemished driving licence and the possibility of my death from exposure. Naturally, since he’d convinced himself that his reputation mattered more than my continuing nuisance value, he’d plumped for his own self-esteem. It wasn’t an act of attempted homicide, more one of human carelessness. Similarly, I’d shown carelessness when I’d allowed old Pike to delve into my matchbox even after I’d heard from his own lips that he wasn’t allowed to have a lighted fire in his room. Had I stopped to ask myself why this was, I might’ve twigged.
Although the beaver down by the brook had collected many small twiglets of gossip, I’d small interest in them. I felt completely scunnered. For a start the weather down south had taken a turn for the better. Consequently, the A74 had begun to unclog itself and in bed’n breakers, Greasy Spoons, etc., gear jockeys were being shaken from their enforced hibernation. John McQuade would be amongst them. It’s amazing how I’ve managed – without a flake of evidence, be it noted – to elevate McQuade to gianthood – six-six at the last mention. Also worthy of note, is the barbarian’s beard I’ve clamped on his clock, not to mention having mentally clad’m in a woodfeller’s jacket, capacious enough to meet the muscular spread of Paul Bunyan. I’ve also equipped him with a lethal pair of boots that pack enough steel to armour a Sherman tank. Goliath McQuade – mine own creation! Maybe I’ve been exaggerating, frightening myself. Could be he’s nothing but a wee wetmouth with granny specs and shitty bumper boots, aye’n with the heart of a cockroach. No, I don’t think so somehow. Hadn’t Becky warned me that he was a ‘canaptious big swine’ who’d punch you as soon as look at you. Best not to forget either that she’d lulled me to sleep with a tingling tale of how, during one of the many routine scraps at their wedding he’d punched his favourite brother’s eye clean out of its socket. No way does this mean that I was about to drop wee Matt in it. I’d never do that, not intentionally, no, not even if by tomorrow McQuade’s grown to seven feet and rising. Let’s face it but, when it comes to the pinch (punch) what could I do? I mean I’ve gotten kinda used to looking at things with two eyes, and – no I’m not saying that. If fists start flying I would be in there giving as bad as I got. But let’s live in the world as is – okay? I can’t be expected to protect Lucas every minute of the day. No way was it possible for me to bodyguard’m without a break. I’d a whole stack of problems of my own to sort out. ‘Ach, tae hell wae it,’ as Tiger Wilmott used to say, getting yersel born’s the hard bit, Tam – the rest is aw doonhill . . .’ Tiger, a china of mines, died in the Vicky Infirmary from what he called ‘a floating kidney that discovered it couldnae . . .’ A helluva guy, Tiger, and a smashing goalie.
Thus far Monday’s lived up to its bitch-of-the-week tag. First, had come a real downer: Joe Fiducci was chucking in the towel this very week. He’d intended to hang on for a few weeks more but his son Luigi’d persuaded him that nostalgia was a luxury he couldn’t afford. ‘He’s right,’ the old man nodded as he gave me what might be my penultimate shave from him, ‘yesterday’s never fattened a pig . . .’ I hadn’t heard that one before; it must be one of those proverbs that get maimed in translation. I don’t suppose our own one ‘Mony mickles mak a muckle’ comes out too well in the Tuscan vernacular.
Old Mooney wasn’t in the least upset to hear that he’d soon be out of a job. For this there was a very sound reason – the old bugger wasn’t there to hear it. That he’d done a bunk with my winnings was more or less confirmed by his absence. The chances now of getting at least some of my bread back were melting quicker than the A74 slush. Joe gave me Mooney’s address in Oatlands. It’d do no harm to check it out, just in case the greybeard had really come down with a dose of flu or something.
More gloom awaited me in the Bum Boutique: the plug’d been pulled on Shug. Earlier, a senior crappy-chappie had dropped by to tell’m that his facility had been declared redundant and would be terminated at the year’s end. However, Shug’s dedication to hygenic defecation had not gone unnoticed for he’d been allocated a new location – an uptown crapper, a prospect that didn’t cheer’m any.
‘Just a load of poofs and poncers up there,’ he grumbled. ‘No a decent shit amongst them.’
In Shug’s dookit a buff-coloured envelope awaited my arrival. Opening it, I found myself to be in communication with the Glasgow Housing Dept. Curtly, for they are as economical with their words as they are with their smiles, I was instructed to attend their Castlemilk office this coming Friday regarding the allocation of a flat in the said district. Some years ago this might’ve been bracing news but today it had all the allure of a cable which read:
‘PACK CASES STOP COME AT ONCE STOP HAVE WANGLED US A BERTH ON TITANIC . . .’
‘Bad news?’ Shug’d asked me.
I nodded. ‘I’ve got ma call-up papers for Legoland.’
‘Ach, I don’t know,’ Shug said. ‘You could dae a lot worse than Castlemilk. They used tae be climbing ower each other’s shooders tae get a hoose up there.’
I took a bite of Shug’s char. ‘Naw, if I’m goin anywhere it’ll be Myrtle Park. High flats, maybe, but it’s only a corner kick fae Hampden Park.’
‘Have you enough points for the like o’there?’
‘Should think so. Wean on the road, being made homeless – that’s enough to be goin on wae.’
‘But you’re no workin.’
‘Soon will be but.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Banana straightener.’
Shug grinned and gave one of his elegant wee sniffs. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘there’s wan blessing so there is.’
‘What’s that?’
He nodded towards the diving suit which I was returning to the Planet on behalf of Cullen. ‘When you’re up the Milk and get a notion for a pint – at least you’ll have the clobber for it!’
34
AND SO IT transpired that with an unravelling psyche I sloshed the slush across to the doomed Planet with a fake diving suit slung over my shoulder, its helmet carried in yon gallus underarm way those Yankee astronauts tote their star-lids. I also carried with me an unholy alliance of viruses which was sweeping to victory on all fronts. My louping elbow was fast reaching that mark on the painometer where shrieking and gnashing of teeth can no longer be stifled. A right flock of ravens, I agree. But, not to worry, I’ve been down before, like that time, for instance, when I copped a dose of the Spanish Blues. I’d been smitten by a book, the work of yon doyen of the dolorous, Miguel de Unamuno. The initial swigs from his cosmic cocktail with its base of heavy pessimism produced a sense of existential vertigo you might expect to get from hopping around backwards on a hinged pogo-stick with a coal scuttle jammed on your head. But, all things pass, as Emily Dodds, cinema cleaner, might’ve said as I trailed some sidewalk reality across the muck-whorls her symbolist mop was making on the vestibule’s terrazzo floor. ‘Up yours too, dipstick,’ I said in reaction to her scowls and headshakes, and might’ve got grosser still if she hadn’t been stone deaf.
A tip I got from a manic depressive concerning the common blues was ‘never to try to make it say its name’. In other words don’t analyse its whys and wherefroms. Can’t do a thing about it anyhow. It’s just mental bad weather passing over, its mean rain coming down on more heads than your own one. At the heart of the conventional blues as articulated, say, by an old negro hunkered over his harmonica on the stoop of his lean-to shack, is resignation. Yeah, his baby had indeed done gon’n left’m, and he can take it for sure she definitely aint a-coming back. No, siree. Sing it, man!
Now, I promised my lovely lady
I’d dress’r in pearls and silk,
But now she’s wearing charity
We got the blues,
Yeah, we got those damned and deserted
Damp walls blues . . .
Too right, they have. But for all its hangdog charm, the common blues is losers’ music, failure resonating from a busted guitar. It’s an extreme expression of a sort of parochial pessimism, a much diluted extract from the draughts of deep angst as poured by Unamuno, Sartre, Camus et al. These spectators of the void were dealing with the same terror which seized Pascal’s heart when staring up at the starry abyss he felt the full weight of his snuffability. I suppose what gloomy Miguel had been drawing my reluctant attention to was the fact that the universe at large doesn’t give a toss for us earthlings – worse still, it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t give a toss!
But soon, much sooner than I’d expected, my downbeat mood was lifted some as I climbed the stairs to the lounge by the visions of Maureen O’Hara, Barbara Stanwyck, Doris Day and Esther Williams, all of them still up there in their gilt frames, and, as always, dispersing the gloom with the ivory lanterns of their smiles, beaming down on me from the tinselly ramparts of the Hollywood Dream. I saluted each of them with an admiring glance and didn’t forget to waggle my ears at Clark Gable whose good looks, alas, had succumbed to a green rash which tended to make’m look like a pissed-off Martian. Alan Ladd, though, is still in tip-top condition – sharp as a Bowie knife. I paid my respects to’m by pausing for a moment before his picture. Ladd is the patron saint of punters, the wee man with the big heart, the guy who stoically takes it on the chin for as long as is bearable before he quietly reaches for his gunbelt. Ladd is family, sired on me by celluloid when I was at an impressionable age, that fractured time when the old man was barnstorming in and out of my life like a boozy comedian, stopping by a while to crack some jokes, break a few promises, before he tap-danced offstage again. In his absence, I’d taken my troubles to Mr Ladd. Even if he was busy, maybe serving two years before the mast, or chute-dropping on a Jerry bridgehead, he’d always take time out in one of my dreams to say where it was at. I came to rely on him, that’s what made this picture a kind of icon for me, why I’d asked Old Burnett to let me have it when the Planet ran its last reel.
Something interesting seemed to be taking place inside Burnett’s office. Exchanging the role of bypasser for that of eavesdropper I paused to listen. First, the doomy sounds of Madge Dawkins, Burnett’s secretary, sobbing. Unusual, this aint. Madge cries so often and so copiously that a guttering system strapped to her long, tremulous chin would’ve saved her a fortune in nose tissues. In a latter-day Canute role, Burnett was trying to baulk the salty tide with a series of tepid-sounding there-theres and phrases like, ‘Don’t take on so’, and ‘No need to upset yourself like this . . .’ While it seemed that he was succeeding in screwing off her tap Burnett’s sympathetic patter was frequently pervaded by unaccountable cloth-rending noises. Had I stumbled upon the unthinkable – the defloration of Madge Dawkins, professional virgin? The rip-ripping sounds were driving MacDougall to an incredible pitch of randy conjecture. If I was to barge in would I find the air thick with flying lingerie and Burnett and Dawkins in – no, it was a combination too bizarre to envisage. Let’s grab an eyeful anyhow, said MacDougall, all but bursting with prurience. For sure, there was a sexual shimmer to their duologue:
Burnett: No, hold it there, my dear. A little more firmly. Yes, that’s the way (rip-rip).
Madge: I j-just can’t (rest of sentence muffled due to resumed snivelling).
Burnett: Well, what with the loss of your poor mother and (rip-rip) so on, you’ve had more than enough on your plate. This is certainly tougher’n I expected (rip-rip). There, that’s got it. Just drop’m on the floor my dear . . .
Madge: (wailing still) But a mummy picture for Christmas – that’s just awful!
Burnett: It’ll only be for a couple of nights. (rip-rip). We’re closed Christmas Day, don’t forget. And another way to look at it (rip-rip), we’ll have the Beetles for three nights now. We’ll soon have things fixed up – never fear, you’ll see. (rip-rip).
Resuming my bypasser role I moved towards the door in the corner. Going up the flights of stone stairs I was diverted from my aches’n pains by my childish sniggerings. It seemed that Madge had screwed up the film bookings and landed the Planet with a mummy-movie instead of the Yellow Sub thing. Hilarious! ‘And for our Yuletide attraction we present: ‘The Turkey Came Dressed!’ Poor old Madge, surely she didn’t deserve to have her petticoat ripped off because she’d made a clerical error. On the second top landing I paused to catch my breath.
RECTIFIER ROOM – KEEP OUT.
Every time I read those words stencilled on the workshop door (they are theatrically underlined by a zig-zagging lightning bolt) I recall the Orwellian Room 101 in which Winston Smith and other crimethinkers came face-to-face with their dominant dread, the one in which the loudest scream was but a quiet prelude, an indulgence almost, before the messy business of wrenching the ego from its socket began.
I shoved open its door. No Thought Police awaited me there. But there was a monster of sorts – a snoozing Frankenstein job called Freddy. I like to think of Freddy – don’t ask my why – as being sort of luminous ape-in-the-making. To activate him you don’t have to wait around for a suitable thunderstorm to plug into. Nope, Freddy starts bopping the moment an ironclad wall switch is thrown. Housed in a steel-meshed cage to which Danger tags had been hung (more thunderbolts, by Jove!), once Freddy gets juiced up, he starts to shake those pulsating chains of his and what I whimsically imagine to be ‘thoughts’, albeit, primitive ones, arc in crackling salvos from his glass chamber head, a real sizzling discharge for Frankenstein freaks like me, all the amethyst and blue excitements you could hope to see, not forgetting the sound-effects, the beast’s electric howlings as it storms the tree of life.
‘What is it?’ I asked Paddy Cullen one day.
‘It’s a rectifier called Freddy,’ he replied.
‘Aye, but what’s it for?’
‘Well,’ said Paddy, ‘it’s no for cookin mince, that’s for sure. Freddy disnae like mince.’
Maybe not – but Cullen sure loved talking it. He’d attended Stowe College during his apprenticeship to pick up, as he put it, ‘A wee daud of electrical know-how.’ But the only thing that’d stuck was Ohms Law, which according to Paddy is, ‘Never clap strange electricity – the bugger could bite ye!’
I dumped the diving suit and helmet on the workshop bench which was cluttered with tools and speckled with sawdust and wood-shavings. Caught in the cold jaws of the vice was the hull of a model ship Lucas’d been working on. The wee man was dead knacky with his hands, and currently he was earning some nice bread by making and flogging bedside lampships. Lucas had told me that he’d been saving hard to get something really special for his wife to mark their silver anniversary. I stroked the wood’s smooth grain and thought again of McQuade trucking up the A74, every heartbeat a wheel-turn closer. Jeremiah’d been right last Saturday. I should’ve come clean with Becky instead of allowing Lucas to become my sexual stand-in. Yon crappy expedient I’d laid on’r about Granny Ferguson; somehow I couldn’t see her going through with it. More than obvious it’d been that she hadn’t thought much of it.
‘I hear,’ I said as I joined Lucas in the spoolroom, ‘that Madge’s got’r flickers in a twist again.’
Lucas nodded, ‘Aye, ever since her mother died she’s been going aboot in a dwam. That bag of hers is like a chemist’s midden, so it is.’
According to Lucas, the Mummy’s Curse must’ve got to the film as well; every reel was poxed with flaky joints and torn sprocket tracks. ‘You should see the cue marks,’ he grumbled as he worked at the rewind bench with cement and scissors. ‘Talk aboot flak!’ He nodded towards the steam-hazed kettle in the corner. ‘That’s just off the boil.’
I shook my head. ‘No thanks, had some char wae Shug.’ I heaved myself onto the spool-safe and drew up my legs.
‘Has Paddy no trapped yet?’
Lucas jerked a thumb ceilingwards.
‘What’s he doing up there?’
‘Skiving most likely.’ He flipped up the joining-block clamp and examined the repair.
‘Is he okay?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Paddy – he’s no got a bevvy on’m? I mean . . . up on they catwalks’.
Lucas began to caw the spool rewinder but only a yard or so of film had skimmed between his thumb and index finger before another loose joint turned up. He sighed and took up the scissors again. ‘Done a bunk on me, Saturday night.’
‘Paddy did?’
‘I’d to go withoot a break.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I joked, ‘by the look of that mummy crap you’ll have plenty of breaks the night.’
Lucas went on with his beef. ‘Another thing, I’d to haul they film cases up here myself this morning. You’d think he’d at least take a shot of making up the programme. Fair’s fair. Enough on ma plate as it is.’
‘How come?’
‘Ach, Mr Burnett’s asked me to do some more leafletting. You know, tae cover up Madge’s boo-boo.’
‘You mean – bugger aboot’n that diving gear again?’
Obviously embarrassed, his head waggled. ‘No exactly – it’s a mummy this time.’
‘A mummy!’
‘Aye. He found this auld decorator’s sheet, y’know, for the bandages, like.’
So that’s what the sounds from Burnett’s office’d been – him and Madge making mummy wrappings. Any glimmerbrain could’ve guessed that!
‘You’ve flipped, Matt. Definitely gone round the twist. Okay, there’s an excuse for Burnett – he’s been out to lunch for years, but . . .’
‘Ach, ma face’ll be covered so who’s to know. Widnae catch me doing it otherwise.’ The clamp snapped down on another join. ‘Anyway, it’s always another dollar towards the wife’s pressy.’
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