Here’s another poser while we’re on the subject: is there a phobia to cover an active dislike of locusts?
‘What?’
‘It’s a locust the day,’ the wee woman repeated.
We were sitting in Doc Munn’s surgery waiting-room. You always got the feeling that you’d just missed the tide when you stopped by here. The place was damper than Noah’s drawers. In a corner a hearty fire blazed, an extravaganza of high leaping flames which would’ve been greatly appreciated had it been a real fire and not a poster of one! (A fireguard Tames the Flames!) Risky place to hang about in: Jenny Armstrong, Doc Munn’s receptionist, was rumoured to’ve snuffed it from triple-pneumonia complicated by seaweed. Munn hadn’t bothered to replace her, so his dwindling panel had to sort themselves out in order of survival – I mean, arrival.
I looked at the woman. ‘A “locust” did you say?’
She nodded, ‘Aye, Doctor Munn’s got a wee touch of the swindles so they’ve brought in a locust.’
I grinned. ‘You mean “a locum” and “a wee touch of the shingles”, don’t you?’
She sniffed, ‘Aye, that’s what I said.’
Archie Flood trailed past the doms table and stood looking at me’n Cullen.
‘Talky’s funeral,’ he said.
‘Aye, what aboot it?’
‘Linn Crematorium, eleven-fifteen the morra. Peacock’s organising a mini-bus. Youse gawn?’
We nodded and he jotted down our names into a notebook. ‘By the way, Archie,’ Cullen asked, ‘will Talky be wearing his new blazer?’
Tim Peacock, the Dog’s owner, breezed in toting a briefcase and a manifest air of well-being. His Doberman, a light salting of snow glittering on its back, trotted along at his heels. Peacock had a fine monied swagger to’m, the sterling snap of a man who worked out daily in the gym of commerce, unafraid to go the limits. He looked around his life-support system and seemed well chuffed by the turnout for such a shitty Monday morning. Murney took his briefcase and lifted the counter flap but for the time being Peacock opted to remain this side of things, chatting to his clientele, demonstrating that even though he wasn’t one of us – and he intended to keep it that way – he wasn’t averse to rubbing shoulders with the riff-raff now’n again, or of telling them the odd joke. The punters in his vicinity (many of them no doubt developing liver-rot on Peacock’s behalf) shuffled their feet, laughed uneasily, and fingered their tumblers in a kind of furtive way. They looked relieved when he at last left’m and went through with Murney into the cramped dookit he used as an office to hear a rendering of accounts.
The locum plucked my medical record from an index file and placed it on the desk. A painful cross-section of my life thus far bound between common slabs of hardboard and secured by a worm-coloured elastic band. What became of these records when you snuffed it? Incinerated were they? Or maybe left to moulder in paper cemeteries, a means of support for archival nosey-parkers whose forte in life is arranging people into columns before marching them up to the top of the page then marching them down again. Such intimate info should be popped into the pine box with its occupant, or be passed to the deceased’s family. Many an absorbing night to be had with the telly switched off, all gathered around the electric log to study what one’s kith’n kin croaked from:
‘It says here that Uncle Bertie died from an infart. See what I told you aboot haudin them in!’
‘Mammy, I thought Granpop bought it from choking on a fishbone. It says here he snuffed it from G-O-N-O-R-R . . .’
‘Give me that at once! Now off to bed with you!’
The locum was probably still in his early thirties but already a ‘penalty spot’ was opening at the crown of his soft blond hair. Chilly looking bugger. His response to my comradely good morning was a curt hand-signal for me to park myself on the hard chair in front of his desk. Just from looking at’m it was obvious that he was of that pragmatic school which holds that a demonstration of objectivity towards patients was the benchmark of good medicine. Not so, old Doc Munn. A fat, friendly soul, he always made a point of asking you to recount your current dreams. I doubted if this organic mechanic who frowned over the desk at me would be interested in such mundane matters. As he with cold finger flicks worked his way through my file, I seriously considered jacking it in, of marching to Hell out of this dump and rejoining the clockroaches. Aye, despite my genuinely sore arm, my prickly lungs, I might just’ve done that if the locum, a real sneaky bastard, hadn’t dropped his pen to the floor, the object of this being, of course, to induce me to bend and retrieve it for’m, thereby proving that my dicky dorsal was mythical. No fuck’n way, locust! He told me to strip to the waist and after I’d done so he enquired how I’d come by my body bruises. He frowned at my explanation that they were due to a fall then he got stuck into my back with such digital vigour you would’ve thought that MALINGERER was branded across it in bold lettering. ‘Does that hurt? What kind of pain? Sharp or dull? Here, especially . . . Hm . . .’ He told me to get dressed again. My stooning elbow was cursorily examined then dismissed. ‘Badly bruised, that’s all – nothing broken.’ He reached for his panel pad. As he scribbled on it I asked after Doc Munn’s health which going by the locust’s frown he considered to be a gross social gaffe on my part, an impertinence. Imagine! A common member of the W.C. an abject clockroach, enquiring after the health of a physician! Next thing you’ll know GPs will be getting accosted in the streets by the lowly pests, bullied into conversations without appointments, having, without benefit of consultancy, to give impromptu opinions on the coming weather, assessments on the durability of Polish working boots, and whatever else comes into the pinheads of their loutish interlocutors. This is what came from allowing crass movies about the pranks of student doctors to be widely circulated, of permitting dangerous books like Black’s Medical Dictionary to fall into the germy feelers of the clockroach tribe, glimmerbrains, all of them, who without so much as a blink will assure you that, for instance ‘the Arch of Aorta’ is to be found within walking distance of Athens, and that the Great Saphenous had been a famous Hungarian conjuror.
With a kind of ‘this’ll-fix-you-chummy’ sneer on his chops the doctor ripped my Medical Certificate from the pad and with the backs of his fingers steered it across the desk in my direction. I studied it. Well, well, here’s a to-do – he’s awarded me the Cobbler’s Line, the one before the last. Seven days from now, it was his judgement, I’d be able to scurry on the factory floor with the best of them: it was his further opinion that this time I’d be able to contribute a really sustained chunk of pillar-to-posting.
Amazing beasties these prophetic locusts!
‘Am I talking to myself, or what?’ asked Paddy Cullen.
‘No, I’m listening – carry on.’
‘What was I saying?’
‘Eh, about Peacock’s new pub.’
‘Fucksake, Tam – that’s history!’
‘Naw, Lucas – you were on about him. Right?’
Cullen nodded. ‘A mummy wae specs oan – s’that no the limit, eh?’
‘Well, there was yon centurian wae the wrist-watch, mind? What was the movie? Quo Vadis, I think . . .’
‘And blood as well, for ony favour,’ Cullen went on, ignoring my reference to the Roman with the Rolex. ‘Any diddy knows that they always drained mummies afore wrapping them. Says Burnett, “Aye, maybe, but it proves one thing, Patrick – you ken bugger aw about show-biz”.’
‘Maybe he has a point.’
‘Eh?’
‘Another pint?’
‘Aye, on ye go.’ He laid a ten bob note on the table. ‘Get’s a pack of smokes as well, Tam.’
While I waited for Sanny Stirrat to pour the drinks, the door opened and in sauntered this dressed in black punter, like a pint-sized Johnny Cash he was in his black leather, six buttons, kneedrop-level coat, his black cavalry-twill trousers, the leg bottoms of which’d been stuffed into a class pair of boots that would’ve sounded right and looked just dandy o
n the plankwalks of Tombstone. And what about the skull-warmer! Black leather again, man. A leather Homburg? Aint such a beast. Well, there sure is now!
Didn’t Pap used to say as he was forking up them black-eyed peas never to trust a man who turns out dressed in black after a snowfall? But all you beer-guzzling, welfare chisellers can relax, roll away your furtive looks and ready-to-run tenseness for this sombre looking doggy shaking snowsmuts from its hat is certainly no broo-sniffer from NAB county who’ll try to sidewind you into his confidence, the way those varmints do. Forget that croc-skinned briefcase he’s toting – there aint no welfare teeth in there shaping to put the tax-payers’ bite on you: NAB county no-gooders would never dream of packing such a giveaway as a crockosmile briefcase. Be easier trying to remain inconspicuous with a double-b. shotgun down your pants. Best to put it thisaway – whoever you think this small black coyote is – he aint. There, can’t say plainer’n that.
Although the Dog was by no means full its strangers alert system still functioned, a fact evidenced by a dip in the pub’s vocal output as the Man in Black entered, a blip of silence () passing through, a mere falter in the gabstream but enough to indicate that the new face had been noted and was being watched. As a matter of fact I’d passed this self-same dude this very morning as I was on my way to Oatlands to have my eardrums reshaped by the formidable Mrs Brannigan. ‘Nothing occult in there,’ as the whisky-priest said to the spookhunter, ‘ ’ceptin your ornery talkaday skull – but it lights up sometimes.’ This a.m. I’d encountered Lucas twice, the first eyeballing being when he was in his projectionist gear and trying to scissor’n cement some continuity into a tattered horror movie: the second time of sighting was through the Maggot’s window when he’d been wearing his Egyptian Big Sleep outfit and looking a right tube with those specs of his clinging to his swaddled conk. He’d nudged aside an old dosser then peered in at us as we wolfed our ‘Suicide Sams’. Evidently, we hadn’t rated a handbill since I suppose he figured we’d be the wrong side of a stomach pump come curtain time.
The stranger got himself one of those wicked wee Scottish ales that usually frequent the lower shelves and are much admired for their sharpness and strength by us bovine boozers as we mill around the draught-trough for our brewer’s fart-in-a-tumbler. With his glass inverted over the bottle, making little chinking sounds, he of the black duds crossed to park himself at the table adjacent to the one at which Paddy with enormous optimism and hand-trembling clumsiness was trying to inveigle a fresh flint into his lighter.
Stirrat, who has a rep for his skill in bringing a pint of the Hammond Innes to a state bordering on platonic perfection was cossetting the stout so much you would’ve thought that his job in Peacock’s new liver-grinder depended on it. Such fastidiousness is due some praise I suppose, if only the bugger would stop pouring my lager with all the grace and charm of a cow pishing in the byre.
Just as old movies get eaten by the sprocket teeth that bring them to light, and their continuity becomes damaged by the repair work, revealing this with a series of visual hiccups; their auditory equivalent (), a further pulse of silence, passed amongst us as the door wafted in yet another unknown (was it snowing strangers out there?) Speaking of movies, this hombre was a natch for the ‘Black Hats Brigade’, what with his blocky shoulders and a face on’m like a Marines’ drill sergeant who’d been Purple-Hearted in ‘Nam. A guy then who’d been a kick short on kindness ever since. He’d an exceptional jaw structure, this honcho, the kind a punch from Muhammad Ali might’ve knuckle-wrecked itself on. And didn’t his chin pack this deep whorling dimple which wasn’t prettifying at all, but was a mean looking twister like the indent left by a healed bullet wound. Dressed in a plaid zipper-jacket over a navy boilersuit, his black hair was mostly covered by this black-knitted teapot-cosy affair, the kind tough wharvesmen do their Hollywood number in to a background of dismal-sounding foghorns and the slow slapping of oily waves along the rusty hulls of sea-tramps. Wardrobe had overdone it with the Zapata moustache, though, a whole wedge too much of the theatrical, it was. And surely the director was regretting by now his insistence on yon George Raft coinflippance – substituting a bunch of car-keys made no weightier impact.
Zapata (we might as well make use of that sub-nostril joke-fringe until we can get a handle on the brute) gave us all the once-over, the twice-over in fact, then his gaze returned along the human rail of jumpy welfare wanglers before he, himself, became part of it by pushing his big shiny boots into a gap and signalling to Harry Moffat with quirking forefinger. The humped one and the unknown did a bit of rapping but fresh uproar from the doms table plus a loud argy-bargy nearby about which route the old red tramcar had taken rowdied out any chance I had of hearing what the big guy was quizzing Harry about. Harry, his old eyes touring faces locked onto Cullen’s. His finger now rose to point: That’s your man, there. The stranger nodded then moved – drinkless, I noted – in Paddy’s direction.
When I got back to the table with the drinks and Paddy’s fags, Zapata, who’d planted himself on my chair was saying to Cullen in an amused but disbelieving tone, ‘You’re having me on – must be.’
From a small white envelope Cullen tipped yet another flint onto his vibrating palm, then pinching the elusive particle between thumb’n forefinger, he tried to maneouvre it into the lighter’s aperture. ‘It might be hard to swally but – shit!’ The flint skited away, was lost. He nodded towards me, ‘Tam here’ll tell ye.’
‘Have I taken your seat?’ Zapata asked but without the apologetic half-budging movement that should’ve accompanied the question.
‘It’s awright, this hard yin’ll dae me,’ I said in deference to the man’s muscles, and, of course, his big shiny boots.
There was something about those boots of his . . .?
The short black stranger, I noted, was doing the Express crossword (its big one). He was jabbing solutions into the grid at a phenomenal speed. He must pack some nifty neurons under that leathery Homburg of his.
Yet another flint trickled from the envelope onto Paddy’s hand. With a nod towards Zapata, he said, ‘Tam, this here’s Matt’s nephew – Billy Lucas. Uh . . .?’
I removed flint and lighter from Cullen. He nodded his approval. ‘Aye, this pub’s started tae get helluva shaky since they started the demolishing.’
Lucas grinned and looked around himself. ‘Some place eh? First shop I’ve ever been in that still has sawdust on the floor.’
Endorsing his theory that the greyer its whiskers the better the joke, Paddy shook his head. ‘Naw, naw, that’s no sawdust – yon’s yesterday’s furniture.’ The big guy made with the guffaws anyway. Paddy took up his fags, shook one out for me, but had his offer turned down by Lucas. A non-smoking, teetotaller – what was he doing sitting at this table? Aye, and in my chair as well!
‘As I was saying, Tam – this is Matt’s nephew. I’ve been trying to break it gently to’m that his Uncle Matt’s gone roon the twist.’ He helped himself to one of my matches, and lighting up a fag, went on. ‘So, maybe you’d like to fill’m in on what wee Matt’s up to right now.’
Shiny boots?
And so it was told, the bizarre tale of the urban mummy that wore specs and wellies and was at this very moment promoting its curse in a post-slum necropolis called the Gorbals.
With the flint replaced I took a tanner and tightened the lighter’s retaining screw. I flicked the sparker-wheel and a light immediately sprang on inside my head. Coincidence, that arch-plagiarist, seeing that I was over-involved with the pangs of this inner enlightenment, snatched the required dialogue from the lips of Frank Wyper who sat at an entirely different table indulging his habit for levity at the expense of his boozing crony, Ned Dorman: ‘Take a look at that folks – I think the sun’s starting to keek through. The fog’s definitely lifting. Any minute now this tree stump’ll start talking . . .!’
Maybe I’d deserved the sarky clapping but. What a dumbkopf! Compared with me, Dorman was a polymath. Who else c
ould this lumber-jacketed, big-footed giant be but McQuade? Hadn’t I chosen his very wardrobe? The ghost of the beard recommended by me loaned a bluish sheen to his jaws and chin. Billy Lucas his brimstoned arse! This was Becky’s betrothed brute all right. He must’ve kicked Matt Lucas’s name out of her; now he was here to perform a frontal lobotomy on the wee man with his size ten boots. One glance at’m told you what he was – a murder machine, that’s what. If this demolisher, this walking sledgehammer, ever caught up with Matt, then the wee man would be wheeled into the mortuary on three different trollies.
John McQuade, alias Billy Lucas, alias Zapata, had smiled and shaken his head incredulously throughout the tale of the walking mummy. A good performance for somebody who surely thought he was being conned. It certainly had all the hallmarks of a sting. Either that or somebody’d stuck on the wrong reel: wasn’t Lucas supposed to be swathed in bandages after he tangled with McQuade? Must be a bit of a pisser arriving to fulfil a slaying contract only to find your mark had already been seconded to the army of the living dead? Why this bantering tone? asked a shocked Jeremiah. Surely I wasn’t going to leave the unfortunate Mr Lucas to the far from tender mercies of this thug? I’ve already said I wouldn’t. How many times would I have to repeat it – no way was Lucas going to take my lumps. Okay?
‘Is it urgent like?’ Cullen asked Lucas as he stuck his lighter away with a nod of thanks in my direction.
McQuade shook his head. Murderous eyes. Plausible tongue. No, not bad news or anything like that. His uncle, you see, had been saving hard to buy a wee second-hand car – nothing fancy, but not a banger either. A wee Singer Chamois had turned up at the garage where he worked. In right good nick it was. He thought it’d be worthwhile for his uncle to give it a looksee. That was all.
‘He might drop by for a pint,’ Cullen said. ‘Helluva thirsty craturs mummies are.’
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