Burnett, sensing my sympathy with it, went on to expand his idea to everyone in society, from glimmerbrains to genius, being made conversant with at least the fundamentals of first-aid and the rendering thereof. Your average punter usually hadn’t the smokiest notion as to the function, let alone the locations, of most of his or her major organs. Yon thick bugger, Toland, for instance, spouting off about some accident he’d seen: ‘This guy’s erm was laid open fae wrist tae elbow, nae kiddin – you could see aw the liver hinging oot . . .’ What a dummy! He’d be a passed fireman by now, able to take the odd driving turn. If the public but knew about some of the brammers they entrusted their lives to, footplate freakos, speed-jockeys without a nerve in their bodies and an equal dearth of brain cells, they wouldn’t be sitting back there in their glazed trucks reading the papers and mags with such complacency. Not even if I’d a free pass and Kim Novak to fan me with’r knickers all the way to London, would I board a train if I learned in advance that The Shagger or big Suicide Slattery were at the controls. You would need a helluva lot more than first-aid knowledge to survive a trip with those headcases.
As Burnett droned on about his ‘universal first-aid’ I thought of some of the drawbacks to his notion. Think of a bus packed from floor to roof with proficient first-aiders, and all of them arguing the toss about the best way to treat this poor guy who’s just folded with a cracked pump. Before you knew it they’d be at each other’s throats flourishing their competence certificates and their ‘First-Class First-Aider’ scrolls, a mêlée which would degenerate into a free-for-all in which there’d be much exchanging of highly accurate punches and way-off surmise.
With his ‘lecture’ completed Burnett delved his hand once more into the drawer to his left and fished out a screwdriver. Wriggling from his chair’s embrace he rose and withdrew from the corner a short pair of steps. Equipped with these two mundane items he waddled to the door. ‘Won’t be a jiffy,’ he said, and went out. I suppose if his kit had also included a length of rope I might’ve got to my feet and followed him to check out his intentions, both from concern for his welfare, and from curiosity for its own sake.
I helped myself to some more Scotch then as I sipped it took an eye-stroll around the office. Gravure prints of vintage racing cars lapped the timber panelled walls. There were signed photographs too, amongst which was featured a much younger-looking Burnett exchanging a handshake with a lugubrious Charles Laughton; in another picture Cary Grant was to be seen with his arm about Burnett’s shoulder, the latter grinning at some wisecrack the urbane star had just made, probably at the photographer’s expense – real buddy-buddies they looked. Pride of place in the collection was given to a framed picture of Bette Davis who’d mugged a sexy pout for the camera but had ended up looking like she’d just swallowed a stickleback . . .
The photo I liked best was one of Burnett got up in cowboy dude gear, topped off with an outsized Stetson that could’ve kept the Nevada desert in shade. Bygone goofy days of yore. Now there was a piece of headgear really worth mugging for! Paddy Cullen assured me that most of the photos were fakes. He claimed that the nearest Burnett had ever got to a Hollywood star had been during Roy Rogers’ visit to Glasgow when Trigger’s stand-in had shat on his brogue shoes.
I soaked up some more booze. Nice stuff – a ten-year-old blend, made before I’d wised up to what a mean old customer John Barleycorn can be, when I’d got to hanging around with’m and fooled myself into believing that a whisky-stain on my shirtfront was a badge of manhood. Right now though it was doing what it was best at, laying a warmth around me as soothing as a woman’s arms, perking me up some, excluding my feet, of course. Why’d there never seem to be enough heat going around to spare some for the old tootsies? Go on with that stuff about a woman’s arms, said a lulled MacDougall. That was nice that stuff . . .
I kicked off my shoes and thrust my feet towards the electric fire. I was getting to be quite comfy now – except for my nagging elbow. Sitting there on a would-be-suicide’s floral-cushioned throne. This was her view of the world, her peculiar vision-slant on its doings. Not much to sustain an optimistic outlook on life, it had to be admitted, but not grim enough either to justify taking the exit-only narco route. They were quite right to call suicide a crime. It was. To seek to induce that stupefying blackness which’ll come in its own bad time – it’s one of existence’s dependables – to flirt with the onset of that forever-in-darkness-floating, that’s just got to be criminal, aye, even if it’s your fate to be a weeping creature called Madge who’s stuck for five days a week in the office of a half-mad film exhibitor typing invoices in duplicate and suicide notes in triplicate.
At that moment I got a déjà-vu nudge in the ribs: ‘Hey,’ a familiar voice said in my ear: ‘this is where we came in!’
39
IN THEIR DEFENCE of Okinawa, Japanese suicide pilots had little more than a week to learn how best to make their worst-possible landing. Then off they went on a wing and a prayer, their doomed heads swathed in solar head-bands, proud to a man of the honour bestowed upon them and fully assured of their memorials in the Yasakuni Shrine.
Me, I don’t have the stuff such kamikaze heroes are made from; I lack their philosophical bottle when the universal Hit Man happens along. It wasn’t then with a martyr’s hymn on my lips that, alongside McQuade, I crunched through the trashed snow to his car, a Rover 2000, which was parked in front of the steeple-shorn Bleaker Memorial Church. The building itself had been stricken from God’s payroll so that it lacked the authority now to grant sanctuary, a privilege it had always lacked as far as I was concerned. Aye, even when it’d been hooked into the theological power grid.
Olive green paintwork and clinging swathes of snow loaned McQuade’s Rover a camouflaged appearance and reminded me of its possible sameness of purpose to the Nakajima ki 115, the Jap one-trip special plane. An apt comparison, maybe, but with one major difference – your kamikaze goons couldn’t wait to off themselves, whereas I was definitely leery of this self-immolation lark. I’d need some time to get used to the idea – let’s say another forty years or so.
If events in my life continued to take turns for the worse (on the Jeremiah Channel I could see a horned and forktailed weather-man ramming storm-pins into my effigy) then this could be it – I can do without the sarcastic violin, if you please! – my last car ride.
WEAVER: Not for God, not even for me, Tommy, but for the kids from the Scabby, I want you to take this ride like a broken man, let your lasting image be one of cowardice, let those street bronchos remember you as Tommy Clay – the dude who chickened.
For some time now I’ve been getting the cracked-jorry bounce around Fortune’s bent wheel, catching all the downmouth numbers, every pause making me poorer, sorer, and okay, I admit it, scareder. Know what I’d settle for right now? I’ll tell you, a simple game of Solitaire. That’s right, with a cool lager at my elbow, working those friendly pasteboards on a sunny table at a window that looks onto a quiet little town where all the clocks have stopped.
McQuade began to cuff a snow layer from the car’s windscreen: I did likewise to the rear window. Not so long ago the working-class folks had sheeted up their windows to signify a bereavement (the McKinnons up 69 hung out a flag – but that’s another story). Playing at the scummy edges of backcourt fever-puddles we kids would keep pitching big-eyed glances up at the blanked-out windows, and we’d whisper to newcomers: ‘Somebody’s deid in that hoose, so they are.’ It was changed days now: out of grudging respect the telly’s volume might get lowered a tickle, but that’s the only concession you’re about to get, ‘cepting of course, some completely undisturbed shuteye. I think it was La Rochefoucauld, either him, or Shug Wylie, who said that a cheapened attitude towards death inevitably follows from an impoverished response to life. Aye, the telly with or without commercials, must go on.
We both got into the car; the doors slammed.
Sayonara!
McQuade switched on the ignition then
the heater. ‘Any ideas?’ he asked.
‘Oatlands,’ I responded with a suspicious alacrity. ‘You take the first right, then –’
‘It’s okay, I know Oatlands.’ He released the handbrake. ‘That’s where the Fast Laundry Service is – right?’
‘Laundry Service?’
‘Aye, Shawfield greyhound track – where the punters get taken to the cleaners.’
An assassin’s laugh alongside a victim’s sheepish grin. Like a Russian pause, a solemn wee sitdown before a major journey, we waited while the heater did its work. I gazed at the clotted windscreen, at the melting away of the ice, the ruthless expungement of snowflakes parachuted in to try’n preserve the wintry bridgehead. Outwardly, I suppose I looked calm enough, but in reality my bowels were in that state of nerve-riot which can best be simulated by tossing a live mongoose into a bucket of cobras. The wipers wagged and music came hurling at us from stereo speakers . . . ‘ . . . drinka . . . drinka, drink to Lily the Pink, the pink, the pink – saviour of the human rayhayhace . . .’ McQuade reached out and dropped the volume. Who was that group again? The Scaffold? Think so. Aye, build mines high – a long fall for such a wee drop of blood.
The Rover’s tyres eased from their snowy sockets then moved from the muffled kerb. Soon we were passing through virgin territory, the white spread of those blank pages upon which housing planners and designers – those licensed vandals – had been naively tendered by the City Blethers to amplify those examples of architectural doodling they’d already jotted into the Projects margins. The concreted concepts that’d been erected so far had a sort of penitentiary glaze to them, a visual smack of censure. What else were high flats but punishment blocks – vertical Barlinnies? Agreed, the amenities available to the new Gorbalsonians were far and away superior to the disgusting dearth of them in the demolished slums, but wasn’t having your own toilet and bath too high a price to pay for the privilege of living in a cemetery with traffic lamps?
I’d fixed on Oatlands because I reckoned that Burnett and the mobile Sore Finger would, because of the weather, enact their publicity fantasy closer to home. Now I know Oatlands folk’re a hardy breed but I can’t see any of them being willing to desert a warm telly, pile on about a half-hundred-weight of Arctic togs, then hit the slush trail to a pesthole called the Planet Cinema where he or she’d be hard put to find a seat with its legs intact, its arms and cushion unripped, and not in the proximity of the gang of horny dossers that groped anything that moved – gender irrelevant – but preferably handy for an exit, an essential safeguard during the cinema’s roof-fall season. Who’d endure such hassle just to peer at the ludicrous perambulations of some fusty old sand-stiff – a movie that might, but most likely would not, be shown in sequence because its co-projectionists were a pair of juiceheads who’d be lucky to see the screen, never mind the shadows writhing on it? Only one bod shuffles to mind, a certifiable mummy-freako name of Joe Shovel. Joe, however, is barred from the Planet for swigging ‘deathylated spirits’ during the screening of The Song of Bernadette. Joe claims to be a reincarnation of King Tut himself. I’ll grant’m this much – he’s certainly got the skin for it. Another reason I’d picked on Oatlands was Old Mooney; chances were I might spot’m being transferred to another ‘safe house’ by the Sooside Maquis.
‘You slipped a socket or something?’ growls my very own backseat driver.
We drifted onto Caledonia Road, ghosted on past Naeburn Street, kept on rolling alongside the Southern Necropolis. On our right were powdery bursts of snow blown from the tips of obelisks and lofty headstones which could be seen jutting above the icy rim of the graveyard’s containing wall. To our left we were bypassing another cemetery, but with a major difference – this one was for the living: bleak assemblages of interlocked concrete, pitted windows . . .
The back-seat driver was in my ear again: ‘C’mon Tommy, wise up. This aint no car – it’s a fuck’n tumbril! So, let’s drop the George Washington crap. No way’re you going to tell Godzilla here that you’ve made the humpbacked monster with his wife. Listen son, we’re not talking a busted smile or a dented ribcage, here. We’re talking terminal. Have yourself a good look at this guy. If he’s not an ice-merchant then Atilla the Hun wore a frock. He’ll off you without blinking. Stabbed, slabbed, and tabbed – s’that what you’re wanting? Get it together, Tommy. The Planet’s going down the tubes, Lucas’ll soon be on welfare, just another tired arse mooching around, one more fart in the charity pipeline. But for you Tommy, it’s still all there – dazzling days yet to come. You’ve got prime stocks in the future market, son. Don’t go screwing things up with this virtue crap. Who’s to know? Nobody. Do nothing, Tommy. Let it ride . . .
We were approaching the junction with Rutherglen Road. As we went through it I got to wondering how I’d handle the fraught situation if I happened to be around when McQuade finally caught up with wee Lucas. Their meeting was unavoidable for obviously diversionary manoeuvres like this one wouldn’t always present themselves. What would I really do? What would I say? The script I cobbled together was ludicrous: I give but a sample of its putrid dialogue: ‘Listen big man – it’s me you’re after. He (Lucas) has got nothing to do with it . . .’ Desperate stuff. A sharper approach required. ‘Big Man, listen to me – your wife is beaverless, hasn’t got any hair – there. Clean-shaven, bare as a nun’s napper. And she’s got a mole on’r left thigh . . .’ What drivel.
As we passed the snowed-up rinks of the bowling green a visual puzzle presented itself: at the heart of the green there was a scattering of footprints. Big deal, eh! I could hardly wait to get back home to get it down in my journal: ‘Footprints on Rink 1 of bowling green. Blueprints, really, made by children running in a circle. But, something odd: no footprints to show where the gang of merry youngsters had entered the rink nor any sign of those they should’ve made when they’d exited. How’d it been done? Had they dropped onto it by chopper? Or had they tunnelled their way to –’
A shout was suddenly loosed from McQuade’s throat. Simultaneously, he brought the car to a skidding halt in the gutter. I followed his pointing finger. Across the road on the cleared site where McNab’s pub had stood a mummy was being harried and baited by a gang of glimmerbrains. As we watched the mummy floundering amongst the mounds of covered bricks and other demolition trash, it tripped over one of its unravelled bandages and almost went down. Recovering, it turned to the converging mob and held up its swathed arms in a gesture of appeal, but there didn’t seem to be a mummyphile amongst the vicious little pricks. Snowballs kept on battering the mummy from all angles. Eventually a one-pounder took it full in the wrapped face and with a bright snowburst carried off the specs that’d made the mummy such a figure of ridicule. On the edge of the turmoil Burnett could be seen dithering, but his appeals to the hooligans were about as effective as an optimist trying to piss out a forest fire. Even the so-called adults gathering at the spot were grinning, as if this piece of street theatre had been laid on for their personal amusement.
Poor wee Lucas – his troubles had only just begun, for while he was still down on his knees, scrabbling in the snow for his specs, from stage left there entered at speed a hysterical mongrel with so many teeth glittering in its red mouth you would’ve thought that its mother’d been humped by a crocodile. As the cur with vicious lunges sought to get a fang-hold on Matt’s already tattered rear, two other characters necessary to infuse a further element of farce into the drama were steadily approaching: first of all came the skinniest bloke I’d ever seen (and that includes Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh!) Clad in yellow oilskins, and with a bulbous black helmet lodged on his grapefruit-sized head, he looked like a pencil I’d once owned. This skinnymalink was riding an equally emaciated-looking motorbike; so thin was this machine, so one-dimensional, it must’ve been manufactured during a period of industrial famine. Behind this skeletal rider came an orange bubble car, a real juiced-up wee Jaffa, possibly powered by a hairdryer motor, and blinding along at a speed w
ell into the upper thirties.
When I was a kid I saved matchbox labels. I remember an unswappable favourite which pictured an elephant and a croc having a jungle dust-up. The pachyderm was getting a right good gubbing for the wily croc had managed to get its gnashers around Nelly’s trunk and was dragging her into its swamp. Now, as the apocalyptical rider and the bubble car approached and were beginning to edge into the picture, wee Matt was, like the elephant, in deep shit. The dog had’m by the belly-bindings, or at least, by one of them, and was viciously hauling on it. Possibly in an effort to get more purchase from the soles of his skidding wellies, Lucas was dragging his attacker in the direction of the pavement. At that moment a stick, maybe even a crowbar, came whirling through the air. Targeted, no doubt, on Matt, it fell short and stoved in the mongrel’s ribs. The impact must’ve been hellish sore for the bag of fleas, with a loud yelp, leapt about a yard’n the air, landed, started to run off, but after a few hirpling steps it keeled over and lay quivering on the slushy pavement. The kids, their grubby faces puckering in sympathy (such sentimental little sods!), crowded around it.
Lucas, meanwhile, was having spectacular problems of his own. When the taut swathing had suddenly become dogless he’d staggered backwards onto the pavement and only managed to halt at its edge, his arms flailing, his back to the passing traffic. Teetering, it looked an odds-on cert he was going to get messily involved with the traction of a speeding SMT bus. Whether he would’ve made it – recovered his balance – will never be known for at that moment, the wind, picking up the trailing cloth strip, sneaked it out onto the road and made an impromptu winner’s tape for the fast approaching motorbike. Several events happened together, a chord of disaster; the tape got fankled in the motorbike’s front wheel; the swathing was snapped taut; wee Matt, like a peerie released from its whip, went birling along the kerb edge before finally spinning out into the path of the oncoming bubble car.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 34