This Road is Red

by Alison Irvine

  ‘I found it by the fire escape door,’ George said and put the cat against his chest like a baby and stroked its back. The cat wriggled then curled itself into George’s lap.

  ‘Whose is it? Is it hungry?’

  ‘I don’t know. It kept following me. It wouldn’t leave me. Go put some milk in a bowl, John.’

  John got up from his chair and went out the back to the fridge. He splashed some milk into a bowl and put it on the floor in the office. ‘It’s the bowl Moira uses for her cereal but she won’t mind,’ he said.

  The cat lapped the milk until there was none left in the bowl and sat neatly next to it.

  ‘Put a bit more in,’ George said.

  John did so, for the cat, although he wasn’t sure why George couldn’t get up and do it himself.

  The cat drank the rest of the milk.

  ‘We’d better leave some for Allan and Moira’s tea,’ John said and put the milk back into the fridge.

  ‘How about that tin of tuna of Moira’s? We’ll get her another one tomorrow.’

  ‘How about it?’ John said.

  He took the tin and a can opener and put the bowl on his desk. The cat leapt onto the desk and watched him open the can and fork out some chunks of tuna and brine. When he put the bowl on the floor the cat jumped down and ate.

  ‘I don’t think that cat’s eaten for days,’ George said. ‘So, what will we call him?’

  John looked at the cat and said, ‘Toots. He’s only a wee baby cat. Toots.’

  George said, ‘Not Red as in Red Road Court?’

  ‘No. Toots. Allan won’t let us keep it.’

  ‘We’ll keep it quiet for a bit.’

  The cat cleaned its whiskers with its paws and curled up under the desk on top of a hold-all that contained George’s running kit, just in case he ever felt like running home.

  John noticed the funeral cortege first. On the cctv monitor a slow procession of black cars and ordinary cars came down Red Road. Slow and dignified. The first hearse stopped beyond Ten Red Road opposite the ymca building and the other cars stopped behind it. John and George went through to the office at the back and stood on the veranda in their shirt sleeves. Instinctively John thought about lighting up but he kept his cigarettes in his pocket and watched the line of cars. Barely a noise on Red Road except the hum of engines. The air respectful. No wind. A bitterly cold white day.

  ‘Who is it?’ George said.

  ‘I don’t know. An old mainstream? Look at the Glasgow families in the car.’

  Faces turned towards them, tipped to look at the high towers.

  ‘Not Agnes?’

  ‘Her family would have let us know, surely. We’d have gone.’

  ‘Look.’

  In front of them, elderly folk came from the doors of Alive and Kicking and stood in coats and hats in the forecourt. They looked down at the funeral procession.

  ‘One of the old folk.’

  ‘Funny we don’t know who it was and we’ve been here so long.’

  ‘We’ll ask the concierges on Petershill Drive.’

  People on the street stayed still. Mothers held pram handles, men stood with arms by their sides, phones clutched in their hands. A boy tugged his dog to sit by his legs. Mainstreams. Asylums. Passersby. Still.

  The cortege began to move and the first hearse drove around the roundabout and came back up Red Road. Full of flowers. A honey-coloured coffin. The drivers in black coats looking straight up the road. The other cars looped around the roundabout. Some cars peeled off down Petershill Drive and drove fast away. But most of the cars were there for the pro- cession and came back up Red Road behind the cortege, the passengers’ faces turned again towards the flats, while the coffin lay straight and flat in the hearse, the passengers turning for one last look at Red Road.

  George and John came out of the cold and worked the rest of their shift. Seven days on, four days off. Seven days on, four days off. Switch to nights. Seven days on, four days off. Seven days on, four days off. And so on. And so on. And so on. Till the tenants were gone and the buildings only steel and girders and ghosts’ stories.

  Epilogue

  RICKY’S BACK. He’s read about the demolition in the Evening Times and wants to see his old house. A woman with a pram pushes a toddler on a swing in the swing park on Petershill Drive. A man, bent as if he would fall but for his legs continuing to move, passes by with message bags. And there’s nobody else. A few parked cars. Perhaps the sound of children playing in the nursery, or perhaps the sound of faraway seagulls. In the Safedem office, Ricky waits for the manager to come off the telephone and sees on the wall a diagram of his slab block; Two-one-three, One-eight-three and One-five-three Petershill Drive. Every house is marked as a square and some of the squares have crosses in them.

  ‘The crosses show that we’ve safely removed the asbestos,’

  the manager says. He gives Ricky a hard hat.

  When they walk outside the manager points out the tents that the workmen go into when they leave the building.

  ‘We don’t cut any corners with asbestos,’ he says. ‘We have a three-stage airlock. One metre by one metre squared; three of them. In the first one, they hoover themselves down, in the second one they strip off and give themselves a wash with their masks still on, in the third one they put on a clean pair of over- alls and make their way to the shower unit. And then they go through the whole process again. Overalls off, paper under- wear and masks still on, soap, shampoo, and then everything gets stripped off.’

  ‘We used to break chunks of asbestos off the veranda and use them as chalk,’ Ricky says and the manager shakes his head and seems as if he is about to speak, but doesn’t.

  There is metal fencing around the slab block. The building looks sickly with its pale cladding and hollow windows. It’s

  derelict and huge; a useless hulk of a building that’s too dangerous to topple.

  ‘So, you’re One-five-three? We haven’t started on that one yet.’

  ‘Aye. That’s mine,’ Ricky says and points up the building to the top and counts down the windows to the twenty-fifth floor. He finds Julie’s house in Two-one-three. ‘And that one’, he turns away from his own block and looks up Petershill Drive, ‘that’s Tommy’s.’ He makes sure he finds their windows. It’s important to see the actual windows on the actual buildings.

  ‘Have you been back since?’ the man asks.

  ‘Not to my old house. I was back on a job once, a kitchen fire, but it was in Sixty-three.’

  ‘So you’re a fireman?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  They go in, and the man takes charge, opening the doors, pressing the buttons on the lift and holding the keys as if it’s Ricky’s first time. Back come the memories.

  Davie’s up from London to visit his ma. He can’t stop thinking about Red Road. He doesn’t keep kestrels. He doesn’t even have a pet. He drives one day to Red Road. Doesn’t get out of the car but stops outside Thirty-three Petershill Drive which is now the ymca. That’s mine, he says as he, like Ricky, finds his windows on floor six. The veranda where his kestrel and the other birds lived has washing flapping behind the pigeon net. Sheets and towels and pillow cases. Another big family, he presumes, like his own.

  Kat drives back to Glasgow on the M77. She loves the view of Glasgow as the motorway crests the edge of the city before it crosses the Clyde. She sees all the high rises and she sees Red Road. She picks out the building that is Ten Red Road and says that’s mine. High rises are the bones of a city, she believes, and her own bones were shaped by living there, she knows. It took her years before she lived as long anywhere else.

  Jennifer lives in Stirling and makes tablet whenever she’s time. It’s the longest she’s been away from Red Road; the last time she saw her old home was the slow drive-by when she sat in an under- taker’s car with James and their families. She plays Irish folk songs, for her father, and keeps herself nice and well-groomed, for her mother.
James returns from Leeds from time to time.

  Pamela tells Iris that every time she goes by their old house, twenty-four/three in Sixty-three, she looks up and can spot their house easily. There’s still the black mark from the fire on the veranda below. That’s ours, she always says. She’s been clean for eight years. Her ma is as strong as she always was with a house full of weans as it always was.

  May sings in the concert party at Alive and Kicking. She’s moved from Red Road but she hasn’t gone far and she’ll never go far. Her second husband was a good man but he died. Her son grew up to be a fine boy – all his pals did from the back slab block. She won’t have anything to do with the demolition, won’t look as the skin is peeled off her home and the steel left naked underneath. She’ll just look out to the audience in the hall of Alive and Kicking and sing until that’s gone too.

  Jim’s already gone, we know that. He didn’t have to move from his home of forty-four years, and that will have suited him.

  Betty and Douglas, they’re gone too. Him, some years back, her not so long ago at all. She drank whisky until the day she died in her tidy living room. The weans stopped coming through her house to the back stairs when they built the add-on stairs. She missed them.

  Ermira is in another high rise in another part of the city. She has a son and she’s waiting for her own block to be demolished. Perhaps then she’ll have a garden like her mother and father. They moved to one of the new builds a few streets along. She meets on a Thursday with other Albanian women, the ones who didn’t return to Kosovo when the war was over, many of whom are trained as hairdressers or chefs thanks to her brother-in-law. When she’s inside her flat she stands at the window with her son in her arms and looks across the city to Red Road, back to where she started.

  Thandie and Mhambi are in a bigger house in Roystonhill. That’s mine, she says of her old house when she passes, because she passes frequently for her work. They cook on the braai in their garden. Food tastes so much better on the braai.

  Andrea gets her new build with her three bathrooms and neat back lawn. Birnie Court’s still standing and she sees it when she hangs her washing out. It reminds her of her twenty-five years in Red Road, up in those structures, far away from the ground she stands on so casually now.

  Khadra works as a secretary to support herself through univer- sity and thinks constantly about the big questions. She doesn’t see her friend any more. Doesn’t know if the twins are growing up well. She likes her walk through the city rain to her classes or her office.

  Mariam stands on her balcony and watches a man on a mower drive in circles around the field below. She sees her brother playing football with Mustapha and thinks about later, when she will meet up with her friends from school and take the bus into town. She’s old enough for that now and sure enough of Glasgow. It’s all right here.

  Farah is still there too, with her books and her ambition. She watches the dismantling of the far slab block. Men and women taking apart the buildings that she and her parents cling to. Her parents’ health still worries her. She didn’t get funding for university. Her guidance teacher prepared her for this. So she works as a volunteer instead.

  Kamil gives Michael a lift home from a birthday party in Springburn. Snow has fallen on top of old snow and they drive slowly on the empty streets. Let’s go by Red Road Michael says because his daughter’s birthday is coming up which always reminds him of the time they brought her home from the hospital. Snow on pavements, snow on the ledges around the bottom of the flats. The tyres roll softly over snow. They drive in past Ten Red Road and turn the car where the burger van stands. Barely a light on. A concierge walking with a torch. He sweeps the torch over the windscreen and Kamil and Michael shield their eyes. They drive left onto Red Road and left again down Petershill Drive where the thin blocks stand silently.

  ‘What’s that?’ Michael says.

  There’s a heap in the snow. A bundle of clothes. And a dog circling. The dog stares at the car.

  Kamil stops the car and puts on the handbrake. ‘Is it a body?’ he says. ‘Should we get out?’

  ‘He could be dead.’

  All the sounds are muffled because of the snow; the click of the doors opening and shutting, the crunch of their footsteps.

  ‘Mind the dog,’ Kamil says, because the dog is circling and agitating.

  They walk to the bundle in the snow and a man sits up and smiles at them.

  ‘Are you all right, pal?’ Michael says.

  ‘Aye, I’m seeing what it’s like to lie down in the snow,’ the man says.

  ‘So you’re not hurt.’

  ‘Hurt? No. I just passed by all this snow and thought I’d lie down for a while.’

  His dog licks his face and he puts out a hand and claps it.

  ‘On you go, big fella,’ Kamil says and they get back in the car. The man lies down on his back with his arms wide and his head facing the loaded sky. Kamil and Michael drive away

  leaving him and his dog peaceful in the snow.

  The concierges are still there too. John stamps the snow off his shoes when he returns to the office. He offers George a cup of tea but George already has one that’s cold enough for him to drink now. The two men sit in silence watching the CCTV monitors. The night goes on, Red Road sleeping, occasionally twitching awake or tossing and turning – a light on, a car parking, a lone man touching his key fob to the door and coming in from the snow – but mostly sleeping. George and John stay awake and keep watch over the last of its tenants.

  Afterword

  THE STORIES in this book are largely true. They were told to me by people who lived or worked in the Red Road Flats (some of whom still live and work there). In some instances I’ve amalgamated characters and invented new ones or altered stories for the sake of the narrative. I wanted to be as truthful as I could to the stories I was told, but I was aware too that I was writing fiction.

  I hope that that the stories here chime with the experiences of those who know Red Road and give an insight into Red Road life for those who don’t. That was my initial brief when I began working with Glasgow Life: to document the experiences of tenants of the Red Road Flats from the 1960s to the present day. If I’d interviewed a completely different set of people I’m sure I would have had a different book as these are only some of the stories to come out of Red Road. There are plenty more.