‘For fucksake – keep your mind on the road!’ bawled Rudge.
He looks rattled. I’ve never seen a rattled Rudge before. Weird it looks, like Jack Sherman without his Greg’s. Barefaced robbery. Denuded of power. I wonder if the crossroads hex I put on’m worked. Don’t shake your head at the idea, Jack – it might just drop off. Oops! I turn my indignant face to Rudge: ‘D’you see that bass – flinging his anchors oan at the last minute . . .’ Rudge was in a flap. He looked like somebody’d opened the window and chucked a fizzing Molotov cocktail into his lap. I scowled at the unseen driver in front. You’ll get a crumpled tin arse the next time you try that brink-braking on me, chummy. Now, shouldn’t I be on the inside if I’m to take the filter? Aye, so I should be. Here goes. There, nifty bit of steering that, even if Rudge doesn’t seem to think so, him and those hornblowing kerb-huggers by the sound of it.
Rudge made me stop, told me to wait, got out, then scurried round a corner. Maybe he was heading for a pub toilet to discard his ruined Y-fronts or had stopped by its courage-refill counter for a big glass of Novocaine. When he came back he was clutching a discreet little package wrapped in confectionary paper and tied with red ribbon. My, he must be fond of that sister-in-law of his: chocs and whisky!
‘Eleanor Rigby, she leaves her face in the glass by the door . . .’ the lovable Liverpudlians were chanting from Rudge’s recently acquired quadrophonic tape-system – the last word on in-car entertainment. I dirged along with the Dab Four, those poor unfortunates who’d wakened up in a cavern to find themselves transmogrified into Beatles, a horrific experience for all concerned, I’m sure. As the Maharishi Yogi didn’t tell them (presumably he was too busy laughing into his moneybag), ‘Fame is a two-headed adder – one at either end.’ A koan worth the considering as they watch their wormlike tunes fleeing their applegreen heads – Mac’s too sweet, Lennon too sour. Good to hum along to though, and I did just that while Rudge fussed like an old maiden aunt about my gear changing, my accelerating, my braking, my everything to do with the art of driving. Towel vans, I suppose, can rub off the finer points of negotiating your way through traffic in an over-autofied city. But I wasn’t to know that, was I?
Aye, it was really fab, humming about that poor Rigby lassie and about all the lonely people, weaving through the lumpen traffic-flow on those sporty wheels, the very epitomy of dash and freedom, all the more enhanced by my unkempt appearance, the hippie rags, combat-jacket, denims and so on, which my fellow travellers with their envious-looking, lateral glances no doubt took to be the sartorial eccentricity of a social high-flier. But who could that hunched Harris-Tweedy person beside’m be? A hoodlum’s jaw on him but all its menace lost by the frantic lip-chewing look of him, the way from time to time he’d fling his hands in the air, his peepers popping. Probably he was the driver’s big brother, a manic type being returned to a private clinic where a cure for his class delusions would prove of no avail.
When we arrived at Vic’s destination and I’d parked the car amongst a flock of similar beasts huddled as if for warmth near a block of flats – and not a dented bumper or scraped wing to show for it, I said to him: ‘I really lapped that up, Vic. No kiddin. Wish noo I’d agreed to drive it hame for you. Nifty job.’
But it seemed that I’d flunked the test. Without a word he passed me the small sheet bearing the Queen’s photo and some illiterate’s scribbled promise-to-pay, then with a jerking thumb indicated that I should vamoose. I got out and stood in the slush. ‘Be seeing you Vic.’
It must’ve sounded like a threat. He nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah, see you Tam.’ Sitting there in the car’s cockpit he’d the stricken kind of look you’d expect to see on the face of a kamikaze pilot who can’t quite figure how he’s managed to land his suicide-crate intact.
I slammed the door shut, then went splashing along the thawing pavement.
42
EFFIE, MY PERSONAL Harpy – that’s right, the one who looked like Nobby Stiles with teeth – has vamoosed. No kidding, she’s up’n offed, gone, departed, flown the coop, left without so much as a note scribbled in her green blood, a poisoned chalice, or a dagger through my portrait.
Aye, you’re right – I’ve never mentioned Effie before. And for a very good reason: she warned me (what a ticklesome buzz the past tense gives to the palate!) that any reference to herself, specifically or by innuendo, would result in a triple misfortune coming down on my brainbox. The same conditions applied to her chums: Jonah, Circe, Medusa, and Fred Doakes of Boston. However, she gave me a free hand in my dealings with Fate whom I was at liberty to rubbish and I could bad-mouth that fortune cookie, Kismet, as often and as crudely as I wanted to. Pardon? How’n the hell would I know who Fred Doakes is? D’you think I hang around with that bunch of snake-haired, long-fanged, multi-headed bunch of life-meddling creeps? No way! Anyway, I’ve never been to Boston, not even to the one in Lines.
How do I know that Effie’s really gone? Well, how do you know whether your head is or is not up a camel’s ass? You just know. And what a difference her departure has wrought: hitherto clamped and curtained windows are flung open; light pervades my being; from the cellar arises the sounds of scrubbing, brooming, and hosing; up there on the shingles carpenters’ hammers go tick-tock-tick; while through in the mezzanine the brush of a decorator goes slip-slap-slop. (Incidentally, I’m a bit hazy about the purpose or location of the mezza-whatsit, but it sounds like a fine thing to own.)
But maybe I’d better trim back a little on these effusions of elation, just in case another harpy is in the vicinity with her fire-coal eyes on the lookout for a vacant shoulder. Come again? What’s the real reason for my sudden upsurge in optimism? Sorry, that’s for Rhona to hear first. Aye, you’ve got it, for her ears only. Right now, I’ve a sacrifice to make, this being the customary gesture, a way of demonstrating one’s thanks for the harpyless future. There’s nothing those domestic gods like better than a wee bit buttering up, to be propitiated. Speaking of which, I was well propishiated last night, propishiated clean out of my skull. A lush in the westend slush.
I’ve decided what my sacrifice should be – to pack in smoking. I’m going to chuck it right now, this very minute, so that when my feet hit the rug they’ll be attached to a non-smoker. To mark the occasion, a wee ceremony is called for: ‘The Lowering of the Fag’. After I’d had my last draw on my final cigarette I broke the beast’s back in the ashtray with my thumb. From the pressure-splits in the tube its amber guts extruded, while around its writhing but rapidly perishing head sparks seethed like a crisis of red ants and, in a twinkling, disappeared. This completed the ritual. I dumped the carcinogenic crap on the bedside table: I was now a non-smoker.
My lungs, a pair of cynical wheezers, hailed the news with a round of coughs, as if saying in response to my pledge of a fresh-air future: ‘Aye, we’ll believe that when we breathe it!’ Cautiously now I lowered my throbbing gourd onto the pillow. A giant woodpecker inside my head was trying to trepan his way to freedom – any minute now his beak would cleave through my forehead. I closed my eyes. For a while, I lay there watching tiny bugs of light swarming in that most personal of darknesses. Wasn’t this what the physicists saw when they peered into their dark hives of decaying atoms – the unpatterned awfulness at the root of things? Stability is an illusion – the world’s a bag of bees God pokes at with a stick and growls – ‘Make honey, damn you!’
C’mon can that stuff. No gloom today. I hereby declare this to be a holiday. Clay Day. I shall disport myself in a carnival manner. I shall seek out laughter and bring cheer to my fellow punters and punteresses. The telling of jokes – a most beneficial social occupation. A cloud on the horizon, though. Don’t pay attention – maybe it’ll pass over. Talky Sloan’s funeral is today. Damn. Maybe I’ll skip it. Let the dead bury the dead. Maybe he’ll not show. Talk his way out of it.
I rose and flung some clothes about my chittering frame. Crossing to the sink I leaned across it and rubbed a patch in the misty pane. I
peered through it: a thaw was underway, albeit a slow one: icicles hanging from the midden roof were grudgingly casting their pearls; here and there holes had melted in the slum snowscape so that there was a warmer, dappled look to the morning.
I soon had a fine fire purring in the hearth. I sat close to the blaze and tried to convince my dead man’s bones that a thaw’d been declared to which they were invited.
Outside, on the stairs, someone dropped a grandfather clock.
Well, that’s what it sounded like, a pandemonium of chimes, gongs, breaking glass and rupturing clockwork, plus a myriad of tinier dins riding on the backs of these major ones, a cog-busting explosion which, instead of dying away, on the contrary was augmented as the clock went down the stairs with a cracked chime uproar, gathering speed so that when it struck the wall outside my door it smashed itself to instant Time-dross.
I flung the door wide. I’d expected to see a wrecked Grandfather clock laid out on my landing, its casing awry, its brassy guts, all yon complicated gearing which gives the tick its tock, spilled out in shameful exposure – and that’s more or less what I did see, but with one major distinction: this was my Grandfather’s Grandfather clock!
Looking a whiter shade of pale, auld Wattie Mullens stood crouched on the edge of his half-landing, as if he was trying to psych himself into hurling himself down the stairs. Something that sounded like a bird screech broke from his mouth then, in a creepy, slow-motion parody of the knee-splayed style of the descent adopted by him in his coal-heaving days when, all muck’n muscle, he’d come breenging down the stairs, whistling an Orange Flute tune.
Like an ambulance man examining a road accident victim for signs of life though it was plain to see the head was missing, I knelt alongside the mangled clock and ran my hands over what had undoubtedly been Granda Gibson’s finest carpentry piece. As the agitated and trembling greybeard stepped onto the landing beside me, from the tip of the clock’s big hand I plucked a piece of notepaper. I smoothed it out and ran my eyes across the cramped handwriting of Eddie Carlyle.
It held no surprises, as snottery as he himself was. Ma Carlyle (hadn’t he warned me?) would not have the infested clock in her house. I wasn’t to forget that I was to attend xmas dinner at the Carlyles’, this year. I was to remember’n be prompt and his mother suggested that I should take the opportunity to get a haircut for it and to wear something more appropriate than that ‘old soup-queue jacket’ I seemed to favour. I was also to remember to be sober . . . signed: Edward Carlyle, a signature as bleak and devoid of ornamentation as the man himself, the kind you see at the foot of execution lists and Parole refusals. Xmas dinner at the Carlyles’, eh? Somehow, I couldn’t help but feel that an invite from Eva and Adolf to join them in the Bunker for an ‘End to Hostilities’ cyanide thrash would sound more inviting.
Wattie gave a wee stagger. I glanced up at’m. He looked like he was about to pop an artery. I rose quickly and placed my arm, my good one, about his shaking shoulders: ‘C’mon, auld yin, we’ll have a wee swig of tea. What d’you say? A cuppa tea makes you fit as a flea.’ I grinned at’m. ‘My auld man used to say that a lot. He was a helluva guy for the sayings.’
‘Your auld man was the salt of the earth Tommy, so he was,’ Wattie said with a fervent ring to his voice. ‘And your mither tae . . . great wee wummin. And see your wife . . .’
‘C’mon, Wattie, you’ll have me blushing.’
I’m still a touch propishiated. Too much jollification. Well, I’d something to celebrate, hadn’t I? I’d stuck one away at last into Vic Rudge’s net. That made the score about 150-1; no hope of equalising but at least it took the bad look of it away, saved myself from a whitewash. I savoured retro-shots of Vic trying out his facial panic muscles, maybe for the first time; whole nerve chains caught napping. He’d been right, yon towel van had screwed up my driving.
A minor mystery was solved during the tea-drinking session – the identity of the Closet Ghost came out. It’d been Wattie, of course. Who else, when you thought about it. Keeping his head lowered, so that his words were hard to make out, he confessed to using my wc from time to time, either when he’d got ‘caught short’ or the weather made a visit to Shug Wylie’s place difficult, if not dangerous; another thing was the fact that the Bum Boutique was shut during the evenings and, as well I knew, diarrhoea didn’t pay no mind to clocks nor watches, and the same went for dysentery. He nodded when I put it to’m that he’d brought the London Times to the bog, Friday last. He agreed that it was more than likely, for he was always bringing newspapers and mags, from his rambles. His memory, he claimed, was ‘hellish poor’, waur even than the auld yin doon in the close. Sometimes he’d go to check his nameplate on his front door to find out who he was. Aye, and afore he’d got back to the kitchen he’d forgotten again. As to the empty carton of Passing Clouds fags, he’d saved ciggy-packets when he was a boy and although his collection had long been scattered to the four winds, auld habits died hard. I considered the other minor puzzles, like who the leather-jacketed snoop had been, also the ‘Kelvingrove Kidnap’ and came up with prosaic solutions to both. It was more than probable that the Futility Furnishing Co. had stuck a financial agent on my tail and that the ‘doppelganger’ incident had been three-quarters imagination on young Jason’s part to a quarter of panic on mines. Hadn’t the guy taken’m to an artguard as soon as he’d laid eyes on Jason? But they’d played a wee game as they watched me buzzing around like a wonky dalek.
According to the auld rogue, he’d been taking the clock up to his own flat for safe-keeping, and he’d been intending to return it as soon as he’d heard me moving around. Again, I assured him that the ticker was a candidate for the midden and he wasn’t to worry himself unduly. I gave’m the fags, about half a carton’s worth, and while he was going through his tedious rigmarole about ‘good neighbours being the finest treasure to be found on earth’, I was kind of shooing him out, muttering gruffly, ‘Aye, and may the sun shine on your crops tae, Wattie . . .’
43
I’D MISSED MY last shave at the hands of Joe Fiducci.
He was apologetic, desolated even, but there it was. All the tools of his trade had been packed away. He, himself, would be leaving soon. He awaited the return of Luigi, his son – gone to attend a business matter – then he’d be off. Joe’s wife was not too well this morning, he worried about her. He was sorry he couldn’t even offer a farewell cuppa, but the water –
I waved aside his apologies. If it was okay I’d have a last wee puff then be on my way. ‘Of course, of course . . .’ He was double-banking on the apologies and thank-yous this morning, one of his mannerisms when he was uptight about something. These had variations but the most common were: ‘Thank you, thanks’, ‘Definitely, for sure’, or ‘I’m sorry, so sorry . . .’
It was my turn to look foolish, or maybe even heroic when, having said I was for a smoke and was therefore expected to go through the pre-light-up ritual, the production of cigs for a start, the lighter, and so on, here I was saying instead: ‘Ach, I’ll no bother – smoking too much these days, anyway.’ And to back this up had a fit of coughing which didn’t sound in the least theatrical.
Joe nodded his approval. ‘Was I in a hurry?’ he asked.
‘Was I ever?’ I replied. We both smiled over a mutual memory.
‘You need to get some hurry into your life, Tommy,’ he’d said to me one day, ‘worry comes later but hurry is now, when you’re young, when every way you turn there’s another winning-post. The black car days soon creep up on you. Nobody wants to win a black car race, Tommy, but somebody has to lead the procession, eh, somebody gotta be the . . .’ He’d hesitated.
‘Pall-guy?’ I’d suggested, and we’d both had a good laugh.
Well, Joe, old pal, here’s another black car day. But maybe I’ll chuck funerals as well as fags. I hadn’t much respect for Talky when he was alive, so why pay my respects now? Anyway I’m bloody tired looking into the filth-holes of graves, of delivering blood
-kin and pub-kin to yon grisly furnace doors. Christ, getting morbid and it’s not even opening-time yet. ‘Sorry, Joe – what was that?’
He was asking a very droll question: would I mind looking after the shop for a bit. I smiled, convinced he was joking for the two shop-strippers were already to hand and in the very process of robbing it of its assets – both men looked similar in their bunnets and blue boilersuits and in their slow, almost langorous way of going about things. Their problem right now seemed to concern the best method of removing a wall mirror. I would’ve thought that unscrewing the screws was a logical choice, but then I’m merely an amateur loafer – these guys were real pros. Luigi had obviously hired them; you could tell by the way they were keeping a casual-looking but nevertheless constant scan on the go for his return. The old man they could ignore, for he was obviously loath to see his mirror wall coming down, watch the old familiarity of his place being vandalised in slow-motion. Joe was being serious – he was asking me to mind the shop! He’d a prescription to pick up for his wife, and a few cheerios to say.
Swing Hammer Swing! Page 37