Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

  Then, of course, there had been the Three Wise Guys.

  Now they’d definitely been taking the piss. There they were standing at the Richmond Park gates opposite Dalmeny Street, looking like an ancient picket line somebody’d forgotten to call off. Taking a pot shot at Fate I’d gone up to them. There’s little point in describing them since that’d mean scratching around for adjectives denoting ripeness, not to mention similies for senility. Best maybe to fall back on Mr Whitman’s vivid phrase and to say that they made up a trio of ‘grave bafflers’, and to skip snide remarks about their skin deterioration. After all, if my skin’d fought two major wars it wouldn’t’ve been in any great shape either. One of the ancients had this medal pinned to the lapel of his worsted overcoat and – No, that’s baloney – there was bugger all medal, I’d simply awarded it so’s I’d have a prop to hang future dialogue on. But the auld joker did keep touching, with fingers that wouldn’t have disgraced a dead pianist, the very spot where the medal would’ve been pinned, had there been one. Words can sure get into a right clutter sometimes. The grind of grammar. ‘Thomas Clay, tell the class what syntax is.’ ‘Sir, it’s the amount deducted by the Inland Revenue from a prostitute’s earnings.’

  I got off to a bad start with the antique trio when, misinterpreting their lack of speech for silence – actually they were reflecting on a remark made prior to my arrival – I blurted out a callow query re the possible whereabouts of a Mr Francis Mooney, erstwhile employee of Signor Giuseppe Fiducci, locksmith to the riff-raff of Gorbals and environs.

  ‘Time to change the rules,’ said one of them.

  ‘Suppose so,’ said the man lacking a medal.

  ‘You mean wrote doon?’ queried the third member.

  ‘I didnae say that.’

  ‘Change,’ emphasised the medal-less one.

  ‘The British Constitution,’ the third one now mumbled.

  ‘What aboot it?’

  ‘No wrote doon either, so it’s no.’

  ‘How come you’re talking aboot it, then? If it’s no wrote doon it disnae exist.’

  ‘Canna trust what’s written on air.’

  ‘What’s NO written, you mean.’

  ‘Mince,’ said the one who’d the air of a leader about’m. ‘The Ruskie’s have one. But it might as well’ve been tattooed on Joe Stalin’s arse for all the good it’s done them.’

  A nodding of heads endorsed this.

  I didn’t jump in right away with a repeat of my Mooney question. Just as well, for their chief had one shot in his verbal locker:

  ‘No a whole pain left,’ he said. ‘Not a single dampt one.’

  This opaque remark seemed to have the effect of restoring me to flesh’n blood again, rescuing me in the nick of time from vapouring off like the silvery outgoings of breaths from their mouths and nostrils. Their rheumy eyes roamed over me, as if patches of flesh’n cloth were cohering into something vaguely human. I was taken into their heads and through the occult interlocking processes of oldthink they simultaneously – their smirks told all – arrived at the conclusion that I scarcely outranked in significance the scrap of yellow paper which happened by at that moment bearing the announcement that the Beetles, the Dab Four, could be seen at the Planet Cinema in Scobie Street, this very day, and also tomorrow . . . another blatant lie blowing about the universe.

  The one who’d been the prime speaker pondered for some time before he chose to respond to my query. He nodded, then with a vague wave of his walking stick, said: ‘The rest.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The Auld Folks’ Rest at the Ducksy,’ said the one in the worsted overcoat.

  ‘Are we talking about the same Mooney?’ I asked. ‘He’s a barber and –’

  ‘Aye, his daughter’s merrit tae Brendan Brannigan. Lives wae them.’

  I nodded, ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Seen’m in the Rest bout an hour ago.’

  Not a word of it did I believe. Mooney might’ve been pushing sixty but no way could I see’m trekking off to a kneecreakers’ neuk on a snowy Monday morning.

  But why should this trio of geriatrics try to bumsteer me? Where was their gain? Probably none sought – they were just chalking one up for the kneecreakers’ division, elbowing me in the eye while the celestial RePs attention was elsewhere. Mind you, it wasn’t impossible that Mooney, unable to face up to the prospect of returning home (and who could blame him for that?) had slunk off to the Rest to get his cold, fleshless behind against its cast-iron stove, planning to remain there until eleven a.m., that uplifting hour when courage could at last be purchased in the shape of alcohol’s delicious poisons ‘through teardrops of gold or scorching pints, cold’. It wasn’t likely that I’d find’m in the Rest but I’d still have to check it out. Mumbling my thanks I crunched into the snowy park and crossed the wee bridge beneath which the Jenny’s Burn, a sort of ochre-bronze shade today (it derived its colouring from whichever effluent had been discharged from the poisonous kidney of the nearby chemical plant) snaked away beneath phosphorescent trees to its turbid tryst with the Clyde which took place under the planked bridge at the foot of Cuddy’s Brae.

  An odd thing occurred as I plodded along under a bright canopy of snowbearing trees; I passed what might be called a ‘grumble of greybeards’ for they all looked as if they’d been mugged for their pension books. As they conversed in angry-sounding tones one of them who’d been bad-eyeing me something rotten flourished his walking stick and shouted: ‘They should’ve all been drooned at birth – the hale jing bang o’ them.’ His whiskery gang murmured their agreement, and stamped their poorly-shod feet on the bluish glints of the snow-ruts. All the way to the Rest I was to be the target of similar geriatric sour looks. In fact, I so incensed one auld punter that he let fly a tobacco-stained spittle in my direction but it was so poorly aimed it landed on the skip of another codger’s bunnet. I left them snarling at each other while my snow-clotted steps took me round to the pond-side of the low building which housed the Old Folks’ Rest as well as the premises of a model boat club. More pensioners in groups of two’n three speckled the snowscape. Such a scene would’ve had Lowry reaching excitedly for his sketch-pad. Right up his street, these diminutive and disconsolate figures who’d been exiled from their erstwhile heaven by a gang of vandals that’d struck during the night, and had busted every window as well as sprayed every wall, interior and exterior with gangland graffiti, the brutish, dayglo signatures of the braindead.

  Paralleling this calamity was the one which had befallen the swans and ducks. Until now the pampered fowl had taken the pond to be their man-given sanctuary, but in the night the pond had frozen over and had forced them from their habitat. The irridescent quackers displayed a comical astonishment at the swim-denying change that’d overtaken their hitherto resilient element. Nevertheless, they seemed to be enjoying the novelty as they cavorted and capered around. The swans though took unkindly to the change that’d been forced on them. Huddling together, they looked shorn of dignity as they flexed their serpentine necks and rattled their orange bills on the hard iceplate.

  I asked a few greybeards if they’d seen Mooney on their enforced extra-mural travels but from each of them received either a grunt or glower – sometimes both – anyway, the very shortest of shrifts. Obviously they’d me down for one of the tribe that’d raided Fort Senility in the night, who’d poured through the busted windows to take out their societal beefs on a few scraps of helpless furniture.

  Before leaving, one of them, their leader probably, had left behind a personality clue – right there in the centre of a ripped draughtsboard was a massive, whorling clot of subhuman shit.

  A sudden cracking sound jerked my gaze towards the gelid pond. No, it wasn’t my thrumming elbow going for broke – it was the concussive report of the armoured water being breached by a sledgehammer. The hammer was wielded by a parks employee in citron-yellow thigh waders. Within a few minutes he’d smashed a wide hole in the groaning ice. The freed water chur
ned and heaved, splinters and iceshards surfaced then sank again. The notion that the seething waters were boiling persisted beyond the margins of logic. I took an almost childish enjoyment in the spectacle, being especially delighted at the hissing white fractures that forked far out into the still intact integument, messengers bearing news of the mayhem to come.

  The ducks stampeded pell-mell into the black swirling water, but the swans, being the huffy, stuck-up buggers that they are, insisted on separate launchings, sliding into the pond a slow one at a time. At that moment a camera-clicking gnome appeared on the scene and began to shoot off with amazing rapidity what must’ve been about an entire film roll while the fowl, still excited by the novelty of it all, butted their breasts against the ice hole’s jagged rim but gradually learned to accept their limitations. The mini-snapper had accentuated his gnomelike appearance by wearing a pea-green anorak with peaked hood, black needlecord trousers, lumpy looking boots and a vivid white beard that poured in a small snowy cataract onto his well-buttoned chest.

  The workman, his ice-wrecking mission completed to his, if not to the moody swans’ satisfaction, began to wade ashore. His lemon thigh-waders shed chaotic reflections, so that he moved landwards as if tagged by a flickering spotlight. His sledgehammer across his shoulder, he moved directly towards myself and on reaching the pond’s perimeter onto which the oily water fell with sullen slaps, he stretched a hand out. With my good arm I drew him up alongside me, and with a grunt of thanks he stood there letting water stream off his waders while from the bib pocket of his overalls he fished out a squashed fag packet and awkwardly, for he was working one-handed, the other one being fully occupied with holding the sledgehammer, he got the ciggy between his lips. I dug out my matches and struck one for him. It was then that I realised that this commonplace little scene was being recorded for posterity by the eye of the gnome’s camera, blinking inquisitively in the direction of myself and the parks worker. Click-click-click-click – how much film could that smilebox hold? Talk about Roy Rogers’ sixty shooter! Suddenly, the impromptu session was over. The worker turned away, trailing a silver-blue smoke scarf and the gnome vamoosed in the opposite direction without so much as a squeak of thanks.

  ‘Hey, hang on a tick!’

  He heard me all right but went on just the same, lumps of snow flying up from beneath his boots. I decided against giving him chase. What the hell! The gnome in his pea-green jacket vanished behind a screen of birches which, coated with snow, looked like they’d just had a fresh paint job. I imagined the sawn-off David Bailey trotting up to a huge hinged toadstool, lifting its whited cap, then vanishing inside. An oddball event right enough. Metaphysical muggery. What was making me so uptight? A wee touch of the atavistics, eh? Fear of soul-possession as exemplified by the jungle innocents when first confronted by the white man’s spirit-snatcher. In the eerie red glow of his cave the goblin would conjure up my likeness, stirring it around in a white enamel dish until the image was cooked then hypo-fixed. The hanging process would follow.

  Meanwhile, the disinherited greybeards were drifting off along the various exit paths. The parks workman, whose image, like mine, was a prisoner of the gnome’s soulbox, was sweeping tinkling ice-shards from the pond rim into the agitated water while, behind him, a fellow worker was brooming smashed glass from the defiled interior of the Old Folks’ Rest.

  Sam Breene, the Maggot’s proprietor, waved a dismissive hand at the dosser who still stood at the window and stared in at us as we gave our ulcers laldy and mopped up blobs of botulism with wads of grey bread. The husk ignored Breene’s shooing gestures and went on watching every bite that went down my throat. Should I save’m a chocky biscuit? ‘Have this Wagon Wheel on me, my good man . . .’ It looked like his wagon was running on split axles. Aye, when you thought about it, there’s always somebody worse off than yourself. Maybe in that black tenement across the road there was a cancer victim enviously eyeing the dosser and saying to himself: ‘Would you look at yon ragbag; he staggers around all day in laughing shoes and third-hand tatters, wide open to the wind’n rain. He probably eats rats and drinks from puddles, yet, there he is, able to walk around, aye’n for years to come. While, I, who took care of myself, wore the right clobber, ate health foods, chucked smoking and packed in the booze – I’m for the bloody off . . .’ The irony of it. Rhona was fond of quoting yon saying: ‘I cried because I’d no shoes until I met a man with no feet.’ I’d been quite taken by it when first I heard it but now I can see it’s just a lump of keech wrapped in chrissy paper. Having no feet I laugh coz I’ll never have corns or bunions! Another way to look at it.

  Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if despite his move-along gestures to the tattered one, Breene was actually payrolling him. It could well be that he’s hired’m to stand out there so that his clientele, a real tatty lot, could, as we lapped up our dogmush, relish still further the piquancy of one-upmanship, something we rarely encountered in our flavourless lives. But how far were any of us from the degradation of that loser who stared in through the steamy window? Maybe only a thousand heartbeats or so: the death of a partner; the loss of a job; the tumble down the stairs of some ambition; awakening one morning to find yourself colonised by a mood which progressively thickens like a cataract; any one of these calamities could be enough to send you looking for brotherly love on a bombsite, squalling, aye, maybe even murdering, for a mouthful of hair-lacquer, lying down until dawn amidst ratshit and ashes. Breene finally went outside and chased the dosser. He returned with a self-righteous gloss to his cheeks and began to rattle crockery onto a rusty tray.

  I was all but through with my brooding when an idea sowed itself in my mind then, as in one of those botanical films they used to bore us with at school, it raced through its growth stages at a velocity well beyond the needs of chlorophyll. The motion quickly acquired a crop of forbidden fruit as from deep within my cerebellum a resonating voice said: ‘Drop out, Tom!’ A worthy suggestion – to vanish, go, disappear, be seen nevermore. Jack Sherman, being interviewed by the oinks: ‘You claim that Mr Clay was dropped from your car at approximately 2100 hours. He’d insisted on walking, said he wanted some fresh air . . .’ Would Sherman experience remorse? Not a bit of it. Phyllis would probably skip for joy when she heard the news, as would Ma Carlyle and Eddie. And Rhona? Poor Rhona, she’d miss me for a time. Widow’s weeds and a babe-in-arms. She’d probably move in with the Carlyles. Aye, it was definitely time to go.

  Out into the fake street with its cottonwool snow. The dosser was lurking in a hastily-assembled plywood close (watch, wet paint!) He was probably thanking his mucky stars that this wasn’t happening in the real world, the ideal one, that is. Still, you just had to make do with the script old sweaty Fate tosses at you. Like a rooky actor the dosser mumbled his lines prior to their delivery, chewed them over to extract the max in dramatic flavour.

  ‘Hey, Jimmy, see’s the bus-fare tae the Western. It’s ma brother – his tea’s jist aboot oot.’ A tricky enough wee line but he delivers it with spot-on fidelity, accompanying it with deferential expression and just a pinch of arrogance, enough to convincingly carry it off. Unfortunately, the gobful of bacteria he nonchalantly hocks into the wind to enhance the authenticity of his delivery is promptly returned and smears itself across my toecap. This justifies a fine of some sort, and my fingers rooting about in my denim pockets allow halfcrowns and florins to squirm through them until I’m able to present’m with a warm-hearted bob.

  ‘Hope your bree makes it, pal,’ I tell’m.

  He saluted my generosity by raising two fingers to the peak of his gungy bunnet. ‘Ta, sodger, you’re aw fuck’n heart, so ye are . . .’

  37

  IN THE DOG with Paddy Cullen.

  Our table was near – too near – the doms table. Those rowdy spot-mortems mired the first and holiest hour with expletives. Dominoes shouldn’t be allowed before noon, or at least they should be played quietly out of respect for those who’d come here to muffle their
own private dins. Sad Sam Murney, obviously aware of this, warned the spotty ones to moderate their language. Smirks all around at the players’ affected response. ‘Give’m a swirl, Cyril,’ said Billy Bannerman as he cuffed the sleepers into play, while Buff Thomas in a fruity voice cautioned his partner to, ‘Keep your eyes on the game, old chap, or else we’ll be acquiring an elderly relative . . .’

  Cullen eyed me for a moment, his mouth shaped for words but settled instead for a gulp of stout; moistening the roots of speech – overdoing it, as usual. He clonked his froth-laced tumbler onto the seasoned oak.

  ‘You still in the cream puff, or what?’

  I shook my head. No, I wasn’t in the huff. Narked maybe, aye, a bit miffed as one is wont to be when it’s leaked to the public domain that chunks of your mental territories’ve been invaded, taken over by phobiac squatters. Anyway, most folk had a phobia of some kind. Granda Gibson, for instance had a terror of canaries – even just one on the loose got’m into a right flutter. His idea of Hell (his room 101) was being trapped forever in a coalmine that throbbed with the wings and piercing shrieks of free-flying canaries. And Ma Clay, she used to – ach, what does it matter. Cullen himself couldn’t claim that all was well in his own attic, could he? I mean, lying there on his belly papping coins through a roof-hole at a deaf scrublady. According to Cullen he’d been penny-dropping wee Emily Dodds before I’d entered the attic, and that when he’d heard me coming through the doorway he’d just kept his head down to see how I’d react. Sure, he knew about my fear of heights, but he’d hardly expected me to throw a trauma that’d take me to within a whisker of nurseryland.