Malcolm from Avonspark Street ran towards the next tunnel, the one close to Petershill Station, with electric pylons either side. He pointed at a bird’s nest high up one of the pylons. If they climbed it, they could stretch for the eggs, he said. Davie wanted to climb. He thought the nest might be a kestrel’s nest and he wanted to be the one to take an egg from it. Brendan climbed the other pylon, to stretch his legs, he said. The other boys watched from below.
‘Oh boys, I think there’s going to be eggs,’ Davie said, as he reached his hand towards the nest.
‘Bring them down, bring them down!’ the boys shouted and one of them hurled a stick past Davie’s head that clattered against the pylon.
‘Fucking pack that in,’ Davie said.
Brendan climbed higher up the other pylon and sat casually on the metal. ‘How many’s in there, Davie?’ he said. Then he spat at the boys on the ground below and got Malcolm from Avonspark Street on the head. Malcolm told him he had better
stay up that pylon because he would knock him out when he came down.
Davie stretched as far as he could stretch. He walked his fingers along an egg and rolled it into his grip.
‘Got one.’
Brendan spat again at the boys. Spit hit a wire, making it hiss.
‘What eggs are they?’ wee James Ryan asked.
‘Kestrel.’ He’d been right.
‘Oh ya beauty,’ Brendan said.
‘Come on Davie, man, bring it down,’ the boys said.
‘I will.’ His hand that held the pylon was sweaty.
‘How many’s in there?’ Brendan asked again. ‘I want one.’ Davie transferred the egg to his other hand, managing to keep the egg cushioned in his palm while gripping the pylon
with his fingertips. He stretched again and counted the eggs.
‘Four,’ he said. ‘I’ll just take the one.’
‘Bring it down,’ the boys said again.
Tam and Malcolm from Avonspark Street began to argue about who should keep the kestrel egg. Brendan spat again and the wire hissed.
‘Listen to that, boys,’ he said.
Davie manoeuvred himself away from the nest and took the egg out of his precarious grip. He breathed out. And as he rested, holding his body close to the pylon with the egg clutched in his fist close to his heart, he heard the explosion and saw Brendan fall from the pylon onto the tunnel and slip to the track and dirt below. Brendan lay as if he was still falling, as if the rude ground had stopped him when he wasn’t ready to be stopped. When he didn’t move his friends came to him and Davie climbed down the pylon.
‘Is he breathing?’
‘Brendan,’ his brother said.
‘Take his pulse.’
‘Brendan,’ his brother said.
‘Don’t move him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not supposed to.’
‘Brendan.’
‘Can you feel his pulse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let me try.’
‘I saw him move.’
‘No he didn’t.’
‘Brendan.’
‘Come on Brendan, wake up.’
‘Brendan.’
‘Is he dead?’
They were crying. All of them. The big tough boys were breathless and crying. They ran to the people at the bus stop by Petershill Station, who stood with their papers and hand- bags like figures in a painting, and they shouted and pointed the way they’d come and said with their red desperate faces that their friend’s been burnt and please, please help them. But the people at the bus stop, perhaps scared of the big tough crying boys who charged up the embankment, didn’t help them. So the boys ran to the hospital on Petershill Road and Davie felt the egg knocking about his pocket as he ran and he took it and threw it and didn’t look to see where it landed and he and the boys ran screaming to the front gate where they saw the security guard who they knew because he was a man from the Red Road Flats.
‘It’s all right boys,’ the man said. ‘I’ll get it sorted.’
‘Brendan,’ said Brendan’s brother.
‘That’s his brother,’ Davie said as the security man used his radio.
‘Stay here, I’ll get it sorted.’
The boys hung on to the man’s actions, staring and weeping. When they heard the sirens Davie wanted to run away and so did the other boys but the security man said, ‘You need to stay and show them where your friend is.’ They stayed.
When the police and the ambulance men returned, they carried a stretcher with a red blanket over it and they took Brendan away.
At his funeral, the boys wore their darkest, smartest clothes and didn’t like to look at each other. Afterwards Davie sat with Kes on his veranda and stayed there till it was dark, looking down at his trousered legs, tracing his finger over the nylon, or slumping his head against the wall and staying as still as he could, watching Kes peck and preen and peer sharply at her world.
On his own, he rode his bike to the Campsie Fells and freed Kes. He left her jesses on and turned his back. She would survive, he thought. That night he returned to the railway tracks and hurled hard stones at the Germiston gang.
John McNally
There’s a wee story. I was in the local. There was a power cut. Mind the power cuts? No light or anything. No lifts. The lights went out at certain times. And well, I walked up twenty-seven storeys. I was up the wrong flat. I had to walk down again. And this is the God’s truth. I walked up and I was stone cold sober. Twenty-seven storeys. Well I couldn’t believe it when I saw the door. Good job I never tried to open it.
Jennifer 1977
A bag of sugar, butter, condensed milk. Heated in a pan. Not boiled or else the mixture would turn to treacle. Spread flat to cool in a tin. Then cut and bagged and sold at chapel. Jennifer’s fingers still tasted of the tablet she’d made at Guides. Almost too old to be going now and preferring the lure of the town and the boys from school, she went, still, out of habit, because of her pals and because of nights like the one she’d just had where they made more tablet than she’d ever seen. The Guide leader had given all the girls a couple of pieces to take away with them and Jennifer ate a chunk while she waited for the lift.
Two boys, younger than Jennifer and new to the building but already running riot in it, were in the lift when it arrived. They didn’t get out, and as Jennifer stepped in, they pressed all the buttons to all the floors using a stick because the plastic buttons had long been burned off. The boys leaned against the walls and stared at Jennifer.
‘What are you eating?’ one said.
‘Tablet.’
‘Any left?’
‘Nup.’ She smiled.
The lift made its slow climb up the building. The boys had quick eyes and nervous legs, yet they stared too, as if they were interested in Jennifer.
At floor fourteen they ran between the closing doors and shouted back, ‘We seen you winching on the back stair!’
Jennifer laughed but was glad her father or anyone she knew wasn’t with her. She wondered if her brother knew who the boys were. They were his age.
The boys ran like rats in the building. They took turns to climb through the fireman’s hatch in the lift’s ceiling and sit on the top in the dark, not moving and holding on tight as the lift went up and down. It was the berries. They returned, legs first, jumping to the floor of the lift, their faces worn out from adrenaline. Oh man, try it from the very top to the bottom. We’ll put it on the fireman’s switch so it won’t stop at any floors. Outside they found a jobby and wrapped it in newspaper. It stank. One of the boys held it in front of him, away from his
nose. The other felt for the matches in his pocket. They took it in the lift to the floor where the miserable git lived, put it outside his door and bent down to set fire to a corner of the paper. It took off beautifully. Three loud thumps on his door and then they raced through the fire door to the stairs and watched through the glass. Five, four, three, two, one. He o
pened his door in his dressing gown and slippers and black- rimmed spectacles, and his eyes and mouth were holes of surprise when he saw his burning doorstep. Three huge steps with his slippered foot onto the flames. A pause, surprise again and that sweet look of disgust at the shite on his slipper. The boys took off and howled and whooped down the stair and didn’t care that they were giving themselves away because that old cunt wouldn’t have the legs to chase them. What a laugh.
When Jennifer was in the bathroom she heard the lifts going up and down and shouts and thuds and supposed the boys were still playing. She took off the make-up that her mother had shown her how to apply and splashed her face with water. When she pressed a towel to her cheeks and eyes she could smell the roof; she could always tell when her mother had dried clothes at the top. There’d been a good wind today. She cleaned her teeth. Murmurings from her parents as they tidied up. She put the boots she’d borrowed from her mother back in the wardrobe. A glass of milk and a glance at the news and then bed.
From out of black sleep, her father woke her. Her eyes stung in the bright room.
‘Get up now! Move!’ he said.
She didn’t have time to speak. He pulled at her arm, drag- ging her up.
‘Shoes, coat, out now!’ he said and he left her room and she heard him waking up her brother who cried a distressed, sleep-filled moan.
‘Wake up James, this is serious,’ he said.
Her mother came into her room. She said, ‘Jennifer, are you ready?’
Her mother wore her coat and slippers and carried her handbag. ‘There’s a fire,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘A few floors below.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Yes. Hurry up now.’
The faint smell of burning, she recognised it now. It took her seconds to put on her coat and shoes. Her father was pushing her brother out of his bedroom.
‘My football cards!’ Her brother reached into his room but Jennifer’s father turned James’s shoulders back towards the door.
‘I should take the photos in case it all goes up,’ her mother said.
‘No, no, out, all of you!’
Jennifer smelled the fierce smoke when she stepped onto the back stairs. Clanging footsteps above and below them. She held onto the rail as she walked and listened to one of their neighbours.
‘It’s on twenty-three floor,’ he said. ‘One of the empty flats.’ Lights were on in other buildings. No stars. Smoke low in
the sky. Streetlights showing empty streets, except for fire engines. Jennifer was out of breath. She thought she might fall. Her mother coughed and sounded like she would never stop.
‘Mind your backs folks!’ A man’s voice shouted from above them. And then again, violently, ‘Mind your backs!’ and Jennifer looked up and saw firemen. She stood close to the wall and let them pass. They carried a colleague who lay flat in their arms, black streaks on his face, his eyes closed, the toes of his boots pointing to the ceiling. The firemen travelled fast down the metal stairs.
‘Is he dead?’ she heard James ask.
‘Shoosh, son,’ her father said. Then, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he’s injured. The heat.’
An elderly couple, Jennifer knew them, they lived on the sixteenth floor, struggled down the stairs ahead of them and Jennifer slowed as people in front of her slowed.
‘Go by us,’ the elderly man said.
‘Don’t be daft,’ somebody said.
The elderly woman began to cry. ‘I can’t go any faster,’ she said. ‘I can’t go any faster.’
‘You’re all right, hen,’ somebody else said and they all slowed on the stairs.
The sprinklers came on above their heads and wet their hair and shoulders and made the stairs slippery.
‘I didn’t know they had sprinklers,’ said Jennifer’s mother. Jennifer saw more fire engines coming from all the main roads that led to Red Road. Gusts of smoke-smelling air came at them on the stairs. More firemen charged up, their heavy boots ringing on the metal, quick in their heavy gear, tanks on
their backs and masks on their faces.
Jennifer and her family reached the ground and stood in Red Road looking up at the fire which was full and blazing. A fat cloud of fire, cloying and smothering and swallowing the windows and verandas and sides of the building. Residents gathered in the street, looking at the fire. People shouted from their verandas in the long block opposite, and all around them there were voices and screams and sirens.
Jennifer’s father gathered his family to him and said, ‘Are we all right? Is everyone okay?’ and Jennifer and her mother and James nodded and turned their heads back to the fire.
‘My wedding dress is up there,’ a girl shouted and stretched her white arms out. ‘Oh God, my wedding dress is hanging up in my burning house.’
She cried and a woman put her arms around her and the
girl put her hands over her face. Jennifer knew she was getting married to Christopher McGeady who she’d met at the Sky Lounge and they were going on their honeymoon to the Isle of Mull and she’d had her dress made by her aunty who was a seamstress.
‘My poor wedding dress!’ the girl howled.
Somebody opened the doors to the school and somebody else shouted to the people in the street that they could take the weans in there to sleep for the night. Men and women carrying sleeping children walked through the crowd towards the school. Most of the adults stood and watched and Jennifer watched too because it was horrifying and wondrous. She thought of her house with all their things in it.
‘I took my budgie and my policies,’ she heard Simon Forbes say and he laughed because he joked about everything. He’d been on his own for years but he always joked. His budgie cage swung as he talked.
‘Did you bring your policies, Ma?’ Jennifer asked.
‘We don’t have policies,’ her mother said and because there was nowhere else to go they walked towards the school with the other tenants who wandered about dazed and upset in their nightgowns and pyjamas. They stepped onto the pavement as another screaming fire engine came down the road. The fire was still huge and billowing, the wind pushing it round the sides of the building. They left the people in the street and watched the fire from the doorway of the school, unable to take their eyes off it.
Morning. Smoky, burnt air. Ten Red Road standing spent, chastised, with blackened sides and gaping windows, the top floors skewed and aslant. Officials stood outside its doors while residents of other buildings went about, going into the shops or walking to the bus stop. A man from the Corporation taped a sign to the door.
‘You can’t come in.’
‘My house is in there.’
‘That makes no difference.’ His face was tired, as if he’d been up all night, which he probably had. Jim didn’t try to argue.
‘Have you any idea when we’ll be allowed back in?’
‘A day or so, maybe. They might let you in to get essentials, I don’t know.’ The man from the Corporation nodded towards the primary school. ‘There’s a meeting in there at twelve.’
Jim put his hands in the pockets of his coat.
‘Was anybody hurt? It was some fire.’
The man used his teeth to tear a piece of sellotape and smoothed it softly over his sign.
‘Aye, it was some fire. A wee boy lost his life,’ he said and
Jim let his breath out in a sigh.
Red Road was quiet, the news about the boy silencing any laugh- ter or chat. Just the seagulls, louder than ever, cried out. Jim spoke to a neighbour who’d also slept in the primary school overnight and now couldn’t stop staring at the building, he said. He wore his slippers and dressing gown, and his pyjama trousers hung over the backs of his slippers, touching the ground. The men stood on the corner and Jim’s neighbour rolled a cigarette.
‘The firemen couldn’t get in to twenty-three/two for ages.’
‘Is that where it started, aye?’
‘Aye, twenty-three/two.’
&
nbsp; ‘That house was empty.’
‘They’d left their furnishings though. It must have seemed like a playground for a couple of wee boys.’
‘Do you know the family?’
‘No. One boy got out alive, I don’t know how. A miracle if you ask me. The other boy, he didn’t survive.’
‘His parents, the poor souls.’
‘Devastated, I bet.’
Jim’s neighbour put his tobacco in the pocket of his robe.
‘I gave my lighter to a fella in the school this morning,’ he said,
‘and he never gave it back.’
‘I don’t smoke, pal,’ Jim said and his neighbour walked away to the paper shop to see if anybody there would light his smoke for him or let him have some matches for free.
The meeting in the school was crowded with people standing up at the back and at the sides of the rows of chairs. The people from the Corporation held out placatory palms when somebody mentioned asbestos. The injured fireman, it turned out, had inhaled the asbestos and smoke and collapsed. It lined the ceilings and walls, they knew that.
‘We’re going to make it safe,’ an official said.
‘The whole building’s at a tilt,’ someone else said. Which it was. The fire’s heat had buckled the building’s steel insides.
‘Yes, that’s why we’ll move some of you out for a wee while. Everyone from floor nineteen and above.’
‘Where?’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘When can we go in and get our belongings? We’ve got nothing here.’
Some of the men and women got angry and many of the folk were desperate to get out of Red Road anyway, so they used the fire as an excuse to insist on never coming back.
‘We like Red Road, don’t we?’ Jennifer heard her father say to her mother. ‘It’s handy for our work, I know, but we like it anyway, despite its problems.’
‘Aye, I don’t want to move,’ Jennifer’s mother said and they listened as the men and women at the meeting got angrier and angrier.
Finlay McKay
We had two bedrooms and a box room. You could put a bed in the box room and a wee bit of furniture and it had no windows so you were in complete darkness. Any time of the day, it could be any season, and it would be complete darkness and you’d wake up and couldn’t see your arm or your hand in front of your face. It was great for hangovers. My mum put a drying rail up and that’s where she’d hang the washing, in this tiny wee box room. It must only have been about seven feet long and three feet wide.
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