George did walk to the window in this flat and looked out on South East Glasgow. He could see the water towers of Easterhouse and the motorway and the houses and rooftops that just went on and on. And in front of all this, tearing up the view, the other high rises with all the windows and the first slab block yellow and brazen in front of him too.
‘You can do the next one on your own,’ John said.
Flat three had three girls in it. One was from Aberdeen, the other from Lewis and the third from Malaysia.
‘What are you studying, girls?’ George asked, leaning on the chest of drawers that was in the middle of the living room floor. He thought it was an odd place for a chest of drawers but was too interested in the girls’ studies to give it more thought. Nursing, biomedical sciences and sociology, they told him and offered him a cup of tea.
‘No, no, thanks girls. Your flat’s looking great,’ he said and joined John on the landing. In the lift John asked George how he’d got on.
‘Aye, it was a cracking flat,’ George said. ‘I wouldn’t have my chest of drawers in the middle of the room, but.’
‘Am I hearing right?’ John said and looked up at George. Out of the lift on floor twenty-six and up through the fire
door to the stairs.
John took a couple of steps towards the door and gave it a couple of thumps.
When one of the girls opened the door he said, ‘Let me see what’s under your chest of drawers, Marie,’ and she said, ‘Oh John, sorry, we had a wee party and I think somebody dropped a cigarette.’
‘You think.’
‘So we put the chest of drawers over it.’
George gave John a hand to move the chest of drawers. On the carpet was a triangular-shaped burn mark.
‘Some cigarette,’ John said and the girls got a warning and a ticking off about ironing on the carpet and when George and John were in the lift to floor twenty-six John admitted that he didn’t like this aspect of the job because one, he didn’t want to be checking up on how people looked after their houses and two, he didn’t want to be faced with their filth either.
George went into the next flat ready for anything and on the lookout for strategically placed items of furniture.
Iris 1987
‘You never know the minute,’ Iris’s neighbour said because her husband had died and then her son within six months of each other, and now someone had knocked off all the brass on her door, just lifted it while she was still in the house; her bell and her wee ornaments, everything. Life was cruel, she said, and now it seemed bizarre.
‘You’re up to high doh, Margaret,’ Iris said, whose own husband had died too, a few years previously, and just recently she’d fallen in the rain on the wet path below the Chippy Hill and snapped her ankle.
‘They wouldn’t care I’d collected them over twenty year.’
‘No, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t care.’
There was a noise from one of the lifts, chat and coughing, and the women paused while it passed. Margaret shook her head and fiddled with the clasp on her bag.
‘Will you come in for a cup of tea?’ Iris said.
‘No, doll, I’m going to speak to the concierges and see if they’ll give me a lend of their phone. I want to ring Frank and ask him to get me a new nameplate. Just my surname, no initial.’ Frank was her remaining son.
‘That’s it, Margaret.’
Iris’s dog came from the kitchen and Iris put out a hand and held its collar.
‘Are you just in from your work? Go on in. Don’t wait on me,’ Margaret said so Iris shut the door and rubbed her hands together because it was cold and shooed her dog into the living room.
The budgie was fussing in its cage so Iris opened the door and put her hand in, guiding the bird into the room. At the window she watched the weather over Royston and saw a fitful sky. She remembered the time when she was too scared to go near the windows because of the height, too afraid to
stand even to look at the view, let alone clean the glass. She got used to it, but in bad weather, when the house shook, the fear and the vertigo came back. On the field below Shug Skinner walked his Alsatian. It humped its back and shat and Iris thought it made a change to see it shitting on the field rather than the veranda, the dirty pig. She didn’t expect Shug would clear his dog’s shite off the field.
Her daughter wasn’t home and neither was her nephew or son and although it rattled her, not knowing where they were – none of them would be where they ought to be – an hour or two’s peace was appealing. She put her uniform over the back of her chair in her bedroom and changed into her comfortable clothes. Her tubigrip had left ridges of red skin on her bad ankle and Iris scratched before she stood up to get her paper and sort out a cup of tea.
Someone chapped her door. The dog barked.
‘Zeus, baby, stay!’ Iris said and the dog sat and panted at the entrance to the living room.
It was another neighbour, Colleen from across the hall, sad and worried-looking, her husband standing behind her in their doorway.
‘Is your nephew still staying with you?’ Colleen asked.
‘Aye. How?’
‘Because my house has been broken into and I may as well tell you I think it was him that done it.’
Iris held up her hand. ‘Now wait a wee minute,’ she said. Her neighbour glanced at her husband and said, ‘Iris, I’m
sorry, but we know it was him.’
‘Have you got any proof?’
‘Aye, he was on the landing, wasn’t he Jim?’ Jim nodded. ‘Aye.’
‘That doesn’t mean he did it.’
Colleen explained how he was hanging about the landing as they left to go out in the morning – told them he was waiting on
Iris’s son to finish getting ready. When they returned, their front door was open and their television and video gone.
The couple were no bother. His pipe-smoke and her mince wafted onto the landing whenever they opened their door. Iris loved the way they dressed up for each day, Colleen with the elegant waves in her hair and Jim with his tidy shirts and jumpers. Iris remembered how Jim had hated retiring from his work as he said his body and brain were still firing and he ought to be using them. This is how we can improve life for the working classes, he told her often. He read and sang and redecorated. And Colleen knitted. A pair of good souls who asked her occasionally to get their paper and rolls when Iris got hers and Iris obliged, noting the trembling of Jim’s hands and Colleen’s cough as they took their messages from her. She was in no mood for accusations today, however.
‘Right, leave it with me,’ she growled and left them on the doorstep.
Nothing in the house. No telly or video stashed behind the couch. Zeus was frisky and followed Iris about the house.
‘Stay! Baby!’ Iris roared. The dog collapsed in obedience.
‘Right, well, I can assure you there’s nothing in my house.’ Her hand gripped the edge of the door, ready to push it shut then slam it. But she noticed Colleen’s watery eyes – another one crying on her doorstep – and she slowed herself down.
‘You’re welcome to come in and see for yourselves,’ she said. ‘This time, I can assure you, it’s not him.’
‘No. Come on Colleen,’ Jim said, his hand around her shoulders as they folded themselves back into their doorway.
‘What will you do for your telly?’ Iris asked, remembering that she had her shows she wanted to watch.
‘I expect we’ll go to Rediffusion on Springburn Road – it’s where we got the other one,’ Jim said.
‘Right then.’ Iris paused. ‘You can come in my house and watch my telly if you want.’
‘Oh no, hen, the radio will do for now.’
Jim and Colleen waved and Iris shut the door on the polished landing floor.
The dog followed her into the living room and curled himself next to her as she sat on the couch, stretching her bad leg out in front of her, reaching for the remote control and switching on her own television tha
t her reformed, on-his-last-chance nephew would know better than to go near.
When the windows became black and Iris had pulled the curtains on the wind and the rain, her daughter came home smelling of mud. She crashed into the living room, her skin sweaty and her fingers dirty.
‘Ma, I’m starving,’ she said and Iris watched her eat the piece she’d made and covered in clingfilm.
‘Where’s your brother?’
‘At the new girlfriend’s.’
‘I don’t like you dogging school,’ Iris said and Pamela ignored her, tearing at the bread with her teeth, kicking off her DM boots while she chewed. Pamela no longer pretended to go to school, wearing her uniform to leave the house and changing at a friend’s house. Normally she came home for her tea and left again to hang about with her pals.
Iris always said it, ‘I’ll send you to Balloch if you go off the rails,’ and Pamela always replied, ‘Aunty Jessica can’t even raise her own weans.’
It reminded Iris. ‘Colleen and Jim across the hall are accusing your cousin of nicking their telly and video.’
Pamela laughed and pulled her legs underneath her, reaching across the table for one of her ma’s cigarettes.
‘If he has, he’s an eejit,’ she said.
Iris loved her daughter. ‘I telt them in no uncertain terms that he hadn’t done it,’ she said and she lit up too, and blew fierce smoke into the room.
Her daughter’s hair was long and curly. A pal had helped her perm it in the bathroom and it had taken them all day. She had lively eyes and a recklessness about her – as if her body couldn’t cope with the speed of itself.
‘He told me he’s staying off the drugs.’
‘Is he what?’ Pamela said and picked at a nail. She left the room and Iris heard her opening the fridge in the kitchen.
‘I like him,’ Pamela said when she came back. ‘He’s all right.’
‘Well, I told Jessica I’d look after him.’
The wind shook the walls of the house and the milk swayed in Pamela’s glass. The budgie flew from surface to surface making a racket.
‘Bastarding wind, pack it in!’ Iris shouted and her daughter laughed and Iris patted Zeus who was whining on the couch next to her.
Pamela joined her mother and the dog on the couch. ‘Ma, you hung my clothes up in the drying room didn’t you?’ she said.
Iris said she did.
‘Because my tops were still there but my tracksuit wasn’t and it’s not in my room.’
‘I washed your tracksuit with your tops and other stuff and I hung them all up.’
‘Well some bastard’s pinched it.’
‘Some bastard’s taking the piss out of us.’ Iris told Pamela about their neighbour’s brass and wondered if the same person was going round taking everyone’s stuff.
Pamela stubbed her cigarette out and swore at the walls. Iris turned the volume of the television up.
She heard her daughter crying in her room when they’d both gone to bed. At first she’d thought it was the wind at the windows because the foul weather was raging on but as Iris lay there, her arm still stretched and touching the switch of her bedside lamp she recognised her daughter’s sobs. ‘Hen,’ she called and tapped the wall gently. A thump came back, then more sobs. So Iris swung her good leg and then her bad leg onto the floor and tiptoed past her sleeping dog, into her daughter’s room. It was the same. ‘I miss my da,’ Pamela said and there was pain in every sob, her eyes clenched shut, her fingers at her cheeks. Iris patted her daughter’s hot back and shoulders, smoothed the nightie over her skin and shook her head in the dark. It wasn’t going away, her daughter’s grief. It had trapped her, invaded her, led her one way and then another. The house swayed and Iris gasped. Pamela laughed. ‘Bastarding wind,’ she said and pulled the duvet over her shoulders.
Iris was just about to switch off her bedside light when she noticed the bolt undone on the door to her back stairs. Opening the door and checking the adjoining door’s bolt, which was undone too, she thought of her nephew. The master criminal. It was a perfect way of getting in and out of her house, unseen. Knowing she was bound to find something, she checked the bed and her bottom drawer and flung open the wardrobe. Inside the wardrobe, on top of her shoe rack, wrapped in towels were wall clocks. Four of them. The thieving wee shite.
Sleep was not necessary for Iris that night. She sat in her robe, as her budgie’s cage swung and great showers of rain crashed onto her windows, and waited for her nephew. She would wait all night if she had to but knew it might not be too long before he showed himself, not liking the rain, not wanting to be humphing stolen goods about in inclement weather. As soon as she heard the key in the lock she was up, finger pointing, roaring.
‘Right, you!’ she said and skelped his baseball-capped head. ‘Out. You’re not staying here. Take your clothes and your wall clocks and fuck off.’
‘Aunty Iris, I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ he said and Iris jabbed her finger into his face.
‘I’m not a fool. You’re the wee fool,’ she said. ‘I told your ma
I’d help you start again here, but no, you’ve been stealing other people’s stuff and storing it in my wardrobe. I had poor Colleen and Jim at my door this afternoon. No telly and video. At least you didn’t have the cheek to plank that in my house too.’
‘Aunty Iris, let me stay. I’ll give you one of the wall clocks.’
‘I’ve got a fucking wall clock. Out. Clock off.’ She slammed her door and put on the chain.
‘Aunty Iris,’ he tried the letter box.
‘Zeus, bite!’ Iris said and her letter box crashed shut.
Iris watched the television for a while to calm herself. Her budgie’s cage swayed with the wind outside but the budgie slept. It was quiet in her daughter’s room so, finally, as if up in the boughs of some great creaking tree, Iris slept too.
Pamela 1987
The lift opened at floor fourteen and Shug Skinner got in with his Alsatian. The dog sniffed her Farah trousers and Pamela showed it the sole of her trainer when Shug Skinner wasn’t looking.
‘Can you smell Zeus?’ she asked it, to wind Shug Skinner up. Shug Skinner tugged on his dog’s lead. ‘How’s your ma?’
‘Aye, she’s fine.’
Two men with suitcases got on at floor seven. Margaret Anderson got on at floor six and spoke to Shug Skinner, telling him about her lost brass ornaments. More people got in, including two prams and a priest and Pamela stood as close as she could to the side of the lift to give them room. Shug Skinner’s dog stretched its head in her direction and Pamela bared her teeth at it, checking first that Shug Skinner wasn’t watching.
‘Shall we do the mats again?’ said Nicola when they’d met by the slab block nearest the shops. The concrete underfoot was patchy with rain, the buildings themselves dull and cold-looking. They lit up cigarettes first and walked round the entrance to the bingo to the shops.
‘Nah,’ Pamela said.
‘Shall we go to your house then?’
‘Nah. My ma’s off work.’
‘Shall we get wasted?’
‘That’s my tracksuit,’ Pamela said.
Pamela pushed her hair out of her face and stared at a boy, about her age, standing at the burger van. He put his hand in his pocket and paid the vendor for a roll. He let go the paper napkin and it fluttered to the floor. Taking a step towards the boy, Pamela saw the man from the burger van come out of the side of his van and stoop to pick up the napkin. He said some- thing to the boy which Pamela didn’t hear and neither must the boy because he walked on and didn’t turn round, biting the roll as he walked. Pamela walked faster. Nicola followed behind and when Pamela reached the boy the first thing she did was snatch his roll from his hands and hold it in her out- stretched arm.
‘What?’ the boy said and made an attempt to grab his roll back and when that failed he angled his shoulder and elbow into Pamela, perhaps to barge her, but Pamela wasn’t fazed because she liked to fight
and if he’d ever been to where the gangs fought at night above the blind tunnel he’d have seen her there wailing and ducking and lashing and hurling what- ever weapons she could find.
‘I’m not giving you your roll back till you give me my tracksuit.’
The boy looked surprised, as if that was the last thing he expected to hear.
‘What? It’s my tracksuit,’ he said.
‘No it isn’t. And I can tell you why. See on your arm, your left one, there’s a wee burn mark. I done that by accident when I was looking for my door key and couldn’t get in the house.’ The boy scowled and checked his sleeve, casually, as if checking for dog hairs.
Pamela grabbed the material between thumb and forefinger and pointed to the burn mark.
‘There. Thieving wee shite.’
‘I didn’t steal it. My ma bought it for me.’
The boy’s disgruntled face and his open mouth threw Pamela. The kid was riled and looked ready to sprint away. There was something about him that was earnest.
‘Who did your ma buy it from?’
‘Her pal from the pub.’
‘Right. Her pal from the pub,’ Pamela said. ‘Well, her pal from the pub has lifted it from my drying room and flogged it to her. Off.’
The boy didn’t hesitate. He looked down at his chest and unzipped the tracksuit top. He shrugged his arms from the top’s sleeves. Pamela took the top from him and tied it round her waist. The three of them stood for an instant staring at the boy’s tracky bottoms. A seagull cawed above their heads. A woman wheeled a tartan trolley out of Kwik Save. The smell of sweet onions wafted on the breeze. A rusting car painted gold, with suitcases on its roof rack drove slowly in and out of the concrete area where the shops were. Pamela didn’t know what to say. Her friend did.
‘Off,’ Nicola said.
‘No way.’ The boy hitched the tracky trousers high up his waist.
‘Off. Now,’ her friend said and the boy looked about him, up at the sky where the seagull still flew and behind him towards the slab block.
‘Can I take them off over there?’ he asked and Pamela said,
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