‘Ah’ll swing for you, lady!’ Aggie screeched, rising menacingly from her chair beside the fire.
‘Aye, well, make sure ye wear a wee sparkly costume when ye dae, Aggie. The effect is everything when it comes tae pleasin’ the public. Just ask your Jessica.’
‘As God is my witness, may you be struck deid for whit comes oota that mootha yours!’ Aggie screamed, spittle flying in all directions, and her hands performing a blessing across her body to seal her granddaughter’s fate.
‘Christ, Aggie,’ Kathy responded conversationally, ‘if ye don’t go a bit easier wi’ yer sign o’ the cross ye’ll dislocate yer shoulders wanna these days. An’ anyway, if yer God hasnae struck Jessie deid for what he’s witnessed hur daein’, Ah don’t think he’ll bother too much wi’ me, Aggie. Dae you, really?’
Jessie and her children moved from Broad Street after the demise of the unfortunate Sammy. With business booming she, Harry and Claire moved to Newton Mearns, on the affluent southern fringes of the city, the natural home of Fifties yuppies, where she bought a 1920s bungalow with double bay windows. Family visits to Jessie were not frequent, so Kathy only saw her house once, and was struck by how respectable it looked, with its net curtains and neat garden. Jessie didn’t exactly ban the family from her home, she just didn’t issue invitations, and in a strange, but civil, way there was a feeling of polite discouragement. Kathy’s great friend, apart from Jamie, had always been her cousin Harry. Jamie was her soulmate, but she knew he had no interest in the things that interested her; they were so close because their personalities complemented each other. Jamie’s dreams for the future were simple and commendable, if dull. He would serve his time as an engineer then settle into married life and have two children. He wanted a better life for his children than he had had himself, a better house in a better area, better clothes, better schools, in fact in the future he envisaged life would be much the same, only every aspect would be better. She had always known that his horizons didn’t stretch as far as her own. He had no interest in books for instance, and books were her great solace. They would go to the library together, he to study for his City and Guilds, she to read poetry, though she never told him that; he had assumed she was doing homework and she didn’t deny it, that was all. But it was different with Harry, because Harry had been educated, and out of the entire family he was the only one on her wavelength. He was a cheerful, good-natured boy, always with a welcoming smile, happy to talk books with her, the only one she could ever divulge her deepest ambitions to. Harry didn’t laugh because she wanted to be a writer, though the dream was so far away that she knew it was indeed laughable, and from her very earliest days she felt an unspoken understanding between them. She was proud of Harry, he was clever, he was pleasant, and one day he would, she was convinced, be somebody, he would succeed. And when that day came, she could imagine him being the same open, pleasant chap, unlike her brother Peter, who wanted nothing to do with his background or the people he came from, who was ashamed of them, regardless of the adoration they all felt for him, well, almost all. Peter too would make it big, of that she had no doubt, he would have it all one day and he’d keep it, whereas their cousin Harry’s success wouldn’t stop him being one of the family. Peter was a phoney, she thought, but Harry was the real thing.
When she asked Harry about his mother it was as if he knew why she was asking but wasn’t offended, in fact he was so easy about it that she often wondered if he really knew what Jessie did for a living. Until the later days of her germ phobia, Jessie always presented an immaculate figure to the world. Kathy would see her at Aggie’s house, the only place she ever did see her, and she never tired of examining the vision that was Jessie. Everything was a little overdone. The black of the eyebrows was too strong, the face powder too heavy, and too pink. Her rouge was just a hint too rosy red, and applied as a precisely defined circle of colour on each cheek. Her habitual scarlet lipstick was too red and too thick, so that it overran her lips, bleeding into the tiny lines leading from her mouth. She looked to Kathy like one of those women you saw in the big stores being taught how to apply make-up, but over time she had remembered the impression while becoming hazy about the detail, so that the result became increasingly imprecise, and her face more like a mask. Then there was the mink coat, of course, and an ever-present, black velvet concoction of a hat, like a little saucer with a saucy bow on top, sitting on her head. Two open triangles of velvet-covered wire held it tightly in place at both sides, and a delicate black veil with little dots, like a spider’s web full of dead flies, fell from her forehead, ending at the tip of her nose. She wore plain, black suede shoes with pointed toes and high stiletto heels, the most oddly sophisticated yet questionable shoes Kathy had ever seen. Around the edges, where each shoe met the foot, a thin, white leather lining was just tantalisingly visible against the sheer black of her stockings. In ancient Greece prostitutes wore shoes with ‘Follow me’ imprinted in the soles, leaving an invitation to potential male customers with every step. Jessie’s shoes, Kathy always thought, were the modern Glasgow version, they were twentieth-century ‘fuck me’ shoes. They were decadent and slightly kinky, in their oddly sophisticated way, a way you instinctively understood without knowing how or why, whore’s shoes without a doubt. With her decadent shoes, Jessie wore fully-fashioned stockings with a design of little graduated steps climbing upwards and getting smaller from the heel, fading to a black line up her calf so straight and precise that it looked painted on her leg. Even when fashions changed and women everywhere gave thanks for the invention of tights, Jessie wore her fully-fashioned stockings, but then it was understood that men hated tights and loved suspender belts and stockings, because they didn’t have to wear them, so maybe it was less to do with choice than Jessie’s ability to look after business. Her clothes under the mink were always black and simple, no frills or flounces, and over her left arm she carried a plain black handbag that fastened with a gold clasp. On the third finger of her left hand she wore a slim gold band under a black leather glove, in which she carried the right hand glove, so that she could smoke a cigarette. The cigarette was held in an elegant pose between two fingers, the other two fingers gently curved towards her palm, the pose set off by scarlet painted nails like talons. It was, Kathy knew, the way Rita Hayworth held a cigarette, because she’d seen it in a film. Yet Kathy never actually saw Jessie put the cigarette to her lips, the cigarette just sat in position, the smoke curling high into the air until the glowing tip finally burned so low that it was in danger of scorching her fingers, then it was stubbed out. Apart from her wedding band, the only jewellery she wore was a gold watch, and on her ear-lobes, single pearl studs, white and virginal, the traditional choice of white brides everywhere. Instead of having her ears pierced, Jessie wore earrings with a loop of gold running from the pearl and under the lobes, where it was held in position by a tiny screw arrangement. The whole picture was one of determined sophistication, which, apart from the shoes, never really rang true as far as Kathy was concerned. Despite the expense of this carefully cultivated image she still looked like Jessie Bryson trying to look sophisticated, and Kathy often wondered if she lived her life in that mode. She couldn’t, for instance, imagine her aunt in a wraparound pinny, ankle socks and slippers, her hair in curlers and pins and a fag hanging from her lips, as she did the dusting in Newton Mearns, listening to ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’ on the wireless. And Harry confirmed this. A woman came in twice a week to do the cleaning, he said, and a man appeared every fortnight to tidy the garden. And did Jessie do the shopping? No, Jessie did not; the same woman who did the housework also did the shopping. So what exactly did Jessie do with her time then? Well, she worked in the hospital, didn’t she, said her son. Kathy never did work out if Harry was saying this tongue in cheek, or if he believed it. For a start, didn’t he ever wonder how she could type with those nails? But in case he did believe it, she left it alone and said no more.
‘Does she ever just laze aboot the hoose, though
?’ she asked instead.
Harry looked perplexed. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, sometimes, when ma Mammy has a bath, she puts on her pyjamas an’ lies on the couch wi’ her hair in curlers, readin’ a magazine. Does Auntie Jessie dae that kinda thing?’
Harry looked lost. ‘I’ve never seen her like that,’ he said with a smile. ‘She gets her hair and her nails done every week.’
‘Her nails?’ Kathy asked, raising her voice. ‘Ye mean somebody does her nails for her?’
Harry nodded. ‘She goes to a beauty parlour and has a manicure, her hair, the lot, all done at once every week.’
Kathy was amazed. It was all done with mirrors after all then; Jessie regularly got herself professionally refurbished, inside and out.
‘Whit else does she dae, when ye’re at school, or when ye go hame?’
‘Well, she has her work during the day, hasn’t she?’ Harry asked. ‘Then someone comes in and sits with me and Claire most evenings, so that my mother can go out.’
Ah ha! ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘Clubs or somewhere, I suppose. Or to her dressmaker, because she’s too busy working at the hospital during the day to see her then, isn’t she?’
Was Harry having her on? Didn’t he know that Jessie’s ‘work’ took place at night? Kathy never found the answer to that one, because, being fond of her cousin, she didn’t have the nerve to say, ‘Look, Harry. Your mother’s on the game, she always has been. Everybody knows she’s a slapper.’ Neither did she feel comfortable hinting at what he should know, that not many hospital secretaries could fund the lifestyle Mrs Nicholson and her children enjoyed, and damn few could afford weekly trips to beauty parlours and dressmakers. But Harry was a clever lad, she thought, surely he must’ve thought of all this himself and wondered? And if he had done, he had obviously decided to keep such musings to himself, so just like the confused topic of Harry and Claire’s true parentage, Kathy stopped asking her cousin questions, though she never did stop wondering just what he did know, and how much he had decided not to know.
3
Her first taste of life outside the East End had been on a school trip when she was thirteen. Somehow Lily had scraped together a few shillings and, even more amazingly, had successfully kept them hidden from Con, so that Kathy could go on a coach trip to Fort William with her class. She remembered Lily seeing her off that morning, her stomach in knots of anticipation and fear, because however excited she was at the prospect of the trip, the Highlands were another world away. She had never been that far from her mother before, there hadn’t been a second of their lives when they hadn’t known exactly where the other was, and though she felt embarrassed about it, there was a very childish fear deep inside that she might vanish off the edge of the earth and never see her again. As she boarded the coach Lily had pressed more money into her hand, all of it in pennies and silver sixpences, telling her ‘Mind, noo, ye’ve no’ tae bring back presents. That’s for you tae spend.’ She’d felt guilty, though, knowing that Lily would have done without herself to finance the trip, and she made up her mind there and then that of course she would buy Lily a present. It was a cheap enamel brooch of a bunch of heather held together with a tartan ribbon, and Lily had worn it from that day on; it was still pinned to the scrap of charred cloth that had been her coat, recovered from the fire a couple of years later.
The trip seemed to last for days, though it could only have taken two or three hours to get there, but as far as Kathy had been concerned it didn’t last long enough. As they left the built-up centre of Glasgow the buildings gradually thinned out, and there was a feeling of light and space that she had never experienced before. Everyone else was singing, or eating too much and being sick, or chattering to each other in high excited voices, but Kathy Kelly sat with her face pressed against the window, soaking up the scenery in silence. Glencoe completely overawed her. In the background a teacher’s voice tried to penetrate the garble of the girls, and even when she knew she had lost the battle, she kept trying valiantly; this trip would be educational, whether or not it was also enjoyable. To many of the girls it was neither. Born and bred in the city, they had no liking for this vastly different landscape, finding it alien and almost threatening. Anxious voices kept asking ‘When will we be there, Miss?’, desperate to reach Fort William, where there would be streets and pavements and people once again. ‘Many people,’ the teacher screeched over the noise, ‘find Glencoe a brooding, dark place,’ but Kathy didn’t. She turned her head from side to side, desperate not to miss the mountains rising high on both sides of the narrow, winding road, and thought of them standing here for millions of years, not brooding or dark, but magnificent. It probably hadn’t changed in trillions of years, and if you blotted the road out of your mind, you could imagine that the ancient people of Glencoe were still alive, just over that hill, round the next bend in the road. ‘Many of the Redcoat soldiers,’ preached the teacher, ‘searching for the remnants of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, had never seen scenery like this before, and they suffered badly from vertigo as they hunted through these mountains.’ But you didn’t have to be English to be affected, many of the Glasgow girls on the bus, coming from just as flat a landscape, clearly felt exactly the same as the Redcoats. Kathy didn’t find it frightening or disorientating, though, it was a fascinating place, a magical, glorious place, and with each new ridge that appeared her imagination soared. She spent that day in silence, so full of the place that she couldn’t have described it or given an opinion, her throat tight, transfixed by the grandeur.
At Fort William they had stopped to have their packed lunches, then they had gone round the shops in the small main street, but even as she bought Lily’s brooch Kathy was anxious to get back on the road again, to travel through Glencoe. These days she knew the names of all the mountains, she could tell Buachaille Etive Mor from Buachaille Etive Beag, point out the difference between the Chancellor and the Study, if you could see them for people that was. There wasn’t a lay-by on the winding road that wasn’t crammed with Volvos and Mercs, and you’d a better chance of meeting your nextdoor neighbour trying to walk up Aonach Eagach in trainers, than in the local supermarket. But the feeling of awe never lessened. Every time she went through the Pass of Glencoe, the power, the raw beauty of the place hit her again just as strongly, and tears would spring to her eyes. She would get annoyed at herself, horrified at the thought of Old Con’s sentimentality creeping up on her as she got older, so she would blink in an attempt to banish them. And though she would never have admitted it out loud, and furthermore, would have denied it ferociously had anyone suggested it, the Western Highlands had entered her soul that first day, never to leave again; there was an immediate sense of belonging to a place she hadn’t known existed till then. When she’d returned from the school trip all those years ago, exhausted emotionally rather than physically, she had tried to describe to Lily what she had seen, but all she could do was wordlessly hold her hands wide and high in the air. What words were there that could do justice to the feeling of space, to the light, to the ever-changing shadows dancing across the mountains, to how it all made you feel? It was like trying to describe colour to the blind and music to the deaf all at once, it filled your senses on so many levels and in so many directions that you couldn’t verbalise one sensation without taking off at a tangent on another, and another after that. She had tried to explain it to Jamie, knowing deep in her heart that it was outside Jamie’s understanding. His world consisted of where he lived and what he was doing, or knew for a fact he would do, he wasn’t the type to take flights of emotional or imaginative fancy. Jamie wasn’t stupid, but he was intensely practical, and one of the things she always liked about him, had relied upon in fact, was how grounded he was, because she knew she wasn’t. He was safe, sure and dependable, whereas she was prone to acting on impulse, to saying and doing what was in her mind. It was why she argued so much with Aggie and Con, she knew that, she lived on he
r emotions, terrified all the time that she was showing signs of Con’s greatest weakness, and desperately trying to rein herself in. But Jamie balanced her with his down-to-earth view of life, reflecting reality on to her fantasies and evening them out, and given their lives that was a valuable quality to have, or to have access to. Even so, she couldn’t contain herself over Glencoe, and Jamie had indulgently smiled his solid smile as she described it.
‘But there’s nothing there, is there?’ he asked kindly.
‘Whit dae ye mean?’
‘Well, there’s nae shops an’ streets, nae buses, nae people, is there?’
‘Why does there havtae be?’ she had demanded, annoyed that he was putting down her great adventure.
‘But ye canny live up a mountain, can ye?’ Jamie persisted. ‘Ah mean, it’s mibbe OK for a trip, but ye wouldnae want to live there, would ye? Ye couldnae live there, noo could ye?’
She was almost angry now. ‘Naebody says ye havtae live up a mountain,’ she scowled at him. ‘There are hooses no’ far frae the mountains, Ah saw them, an’ people dae live there.’
Jamie shook his head slightly and smiled affectionately at her. ‘But there’s no’ a lotta work in they places, is there?’ he stated, rather than asked. ‘If ye wanted tae be an engineer, ye wouldnae go tae the back o’ beyond tae dae it, would ye? An’ ye wouldnae want tae live in a place where there’s only grass, an’ sheep an’ things.’
She said nothing, but she was almost crying, and at the time she couldn’t understand exactly why. She was talking to him of beauty and feelings, of flights of fancy and dreams, of almost seeing in your mind the defeated Highlanders making their way home through the glens and mountain passes after the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden, and he was dashing it all with casual, cruel insensitivity, because he hadn’t the slightest glimmering of an understanding that such notions existed or should. But the tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, making her blink furiously to stop them escaping over her cheeks, were caused by something deeper than Jamie’s lack of imagination. All her life she had valued his outlook, it was part of what had made her feel safe, but suddenly she felt that she was talking to a stranger who didn’t understand the language. Her tears marked the first time she had felt disappointed in Jamie, let down almost, by his inability to see with her eyes, even though she knew that was unfair, because it was precisely the quality in him that she had so loved. She had felt the earth stir under her feet, that was what it had amounted to, a fissure had unexpectedly opened up on solid ground, exposing in someone she loved a weakness that she had always regarded as a strength. And that in turn made her feel disloyal to Jamie. He was who he was, who he had always been, and his qualities were the ones she had depended on all her life. If the value she now placed on them had changed, well, then, that must be her fault, not Jamie’s. Confused, she turned to her cousin Harry, and to her great joy and relief Harry understood; she could always rely on Harry. He sat listening as she described what she had seen, what she had felt, what she had imagined, nodding and smiling at her enthusiasm. There were times when she didn’t know what she would do without her cousin, he was the only one in her entire family, in her entire life, come to that, who understood her completely, the only person in the universe who treated her dreams as not only possible, but sane. Harry saw beyond the lives they were forced to lead by the circumstances of their birth, he had imagination and intelligence, and above all, unlike her brother, Peter, Harry was kind.
Chasing Angels Page 6