A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  As she crossed the landing Wee Annie opened her door in the middle without a warning or a fumble and caught her in transit, caught Donald too at the Stockwells’ open door staring at Bobo’s retreating bottom as it swayed under that absurdly tight skirt.

  ‘Be not deceived!’ she announced to the stairhead, looking at neither, yet they both knew she had seen them both and they both guessed she had spied through the keyhole and seen them go in. ‘Neither fornicators nor adulterers shall enter the Kingdom of God.’

  Bobo darted in and home like a lightning-flash, the check key always in the door of her parents’ house to save them answering a knock or ring from one of their own, and Donald rocked on the doorstep a moment. Then he too slammed inside to his corner, appalled at Wee Annie’s words.

  ‘D’you know,’ Bobo said to Main the day of the funeral, ‘I had one hell of a time with him that night, I can tell you that. But I never thought he’d be away out the minute I left him. He didn’t even try to seduce me. I had to keep talking to get a word out of him. I felt such a fool, talking a lot of old tripe. But what could I do? I bet you’ve often been kissed, says he, but he’d never kissed a girl, oh no, not him! I could see damn fine where he was trying to get to, just a detail to me and glory hallelujah to him, but just because I went and said you’re a right betting man, you are, he got on to betting’s a bad thing. He had the chance to come it all laid on for him on a silver saliva and the poor man looked the other way. And now! Oh my, I feel such a bitch, honest I do! But it wasn’t my fault, was it? I wasn’t trying to send him. I wasn’t even teasing him. And even supposing I’d been in the mood, supposing I’d known, supposing I’d taken pity on him? But you can’t do much for pity, can you? It’s not the same. It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it? I mean, it’s not my fault. That skirt and jumper I was wearing that night. You don’t think that, do you?’

  She was crying again, but not for Dross this time. After all, she was the last of the neighbours to see Donald alive. She had never got to know him well, but he was always there, she was used to him across the landing, and she was always sorry for him because he was so gawky and gormless in everything that came as easily to her as running downstairs. But for once Main didn’t comfort her. He was past talking about it, silent in his own guilty sorrow.

  Yet Bobo may have been to blame, just for being Bobo and letting Donald get her alone in a top back room for half an hour. He was a frustrated trembling accident of humanity when she went away, and Wee Annie’s intervention didn’t sober him. It made him angry. Worse, it made him want to deserve the insinuation of the words she had spoken. Then they wouldn’t be so unjust. He couldn’t abide their injustice. It threw coal on his fire, and he flamed. That the opportunity was lost and gone for ever only made it worse. He burned. Retrospective longing, vain regrets and imagined achievements choked him. He banged the round table in his rage, damning and helling aloud at his failure to be bold. It was like failing to pass an exam he had studied hard for. He was humiliated. If he had only tried to kiss her she wouldn’t have minded, not Bobo, oh no! and he could have gone on from there. He knew only what he had heard from the bawdy talk of medicals round a coffee-table between lectures, speculative young men who pretended to know all about women. They said you could get a woman so worked up by making love the right way she was helpless and couldn’t stop you. It was all a matter of technique. He had overheard the technique, and now he had gone and missed the chance to try it. He hadn’t sat down close beside her, he hadn’t put his arm round her, he hadn’t looked into her eyes, he hadn’t breathed deep and caressed her patiently, he hadn’t kissed her hard till she melted, he had done nothing. He kicked the chair she had sat in, just to think there she had been and there she wasn’t. He raised in his mind again the short skirt showing off her thighs, he tried to repress the memory of her breasts too big for her jumper, and he gnawed his knuckles at the hunger she had left within him and the frustration she had left around him. He couldn’t sit at peace, he couldn’t open a book, he had no heart for studying. But he had to do something. The Stockwells wouldn’t be back for an hour or more, and he had a few pounds in his pocket. For the first time in his life and the last he went out on the prowl.

  He must have walked miles. In complete sincerity he had believed his lust for Bobo would be satisfied, over and done with, after a single indulgence. But Bobo hadn’t played her part to let him prove it, and he was left with a lust that had no particular woman for its purpose and would keep on coming back, he feared, perhaps till the end of his life. The autumn chill in the night air didn’t cool him off. It quickened him. He felt alive all over, tingling from scalp to toe. His pulses galloped. He was hardly sober even though teetotal, but he was vigilant, a roaming lion seeking whom he could deflower. Every girl he passed he stared at with a plea in his eyes, and some he followed until he lost them in a grimy tangle of backstreets. One he actually spoke to, getting so close he could smell the powder on her face and feel the solid roundness of her hips, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying and glanced at him nervously as he brushed alongside, then she crossed over in little running steps, her glamorous legs twinkling in the starry night till they vanished round the corner of a black scowling tenement.

  He came at last to a dark deserted sidestreet still north of the river lit by oldfashioned gaslamps where the brackets holding the mantles were shaped like questionmarks asking him where he was going. He had no idea. Passing a pub he heard a jabber of many drunken voices and he was tempted to go in and see if there was a lonely woman there, but he knew he wouldn’t know how to buy her a drink. He knew he would only be an odd stranger in hostile territory. Two stout women came out together, not old and not young, not well-dressed and not shabby. They whisked along, barely steady. He might have followed either, but not both.

  Floundering deeper in a net of alleys he was in two minds near the river. Rather than explore the south he probed east. He had a dim feeling his prospects would be better there. He blundered on to the London Road, wandered off it again, and saw he was lost, quite lost, fed up and far from home. He was weary. He slouched out of a dead end, made three blind turns, and found he had the Green on his right. The tide of longing for a woman lapped weakly on the lonely shore of his fatigue. The tingling in his scalp, the gallop of his pulses, the fire in his loins, all faded. He wanted to go home and lie down, safe on his own bed. Sadly, defeated, his pace slackening as he slowly sobered, he heard the tired old Adam inside him complain adventure wasn’t meant for the likes of them. It was a fiction for paperbacked heroes with paperdolls. The ape in him was dying, hardly to be conjured alive by the spell of the darkened Green or the leafy excitement of all the demesnes that there adjacent lie. He was on the brink of giving up. The poison in him seemed to have worked itself out of his system. He fumbled for a route home.

  Suddenly the night was torn apart by a squeal, a girl’s squeal, not a squeal of terror or even alarm, simply a squeal of sheer abandoned female pleasure. Before it died there was another, even more shrill in delight, but a different girl to his ear. He plunged to the sound like a diver to the depths. The old Adam stood erect again, insisting adventure came to him who ventured, the dying ape stretched his hairy limbs in exultation, assured of gratified desire round the corner. He hurried on, eager to complete his noctivagation and make his guilty prowling justified after all. He forgot he was weary.

  They were waiting for him at the corner, two young things. Ruby was watching from the closemouth, one palm against the wall, her arm fully stretched, the other hand on her hip, one leg bent, the other straight, her pose silhouetted by the stairlight behind her. Pearl, her colleague, loitered a step away from the questioning streetlamp and welcomed Donald with an expectant smile. Jake and Jumbo had slipped into the backclose the moment they heard Donald’s tired feet plod on the pavement a hundred yards away. They were the guardians of these two precious stones. The guardians, not the keepers. The kept rather. If a keeper at the zoo gets a livin
g out of looking after the lions, it’s the lions are keeping him.

  Donald advanced to battle, the pleading light in his eyes again.

  ‘Hullo darling,’ Pearl greeted him brightly. ‘How’s it goin?’

  She was sure Donald was a good man to speak to. He had a hand in his pocket as if ready to bring out some money, and the whole stamp and style and carriage of him showed he was the lone wolf on the hunt. She had seen enough lone wolves in her short time to recognise them from afar. But indeed they had all recognised Donald from afar, Ruby and herself and Jake and Jumbo. They had all heard a victim thrashing through the jungle before they ever saw him, and the sexloaded squeal of the two girls was a more arresting signal than any red light, as they well knew.

  ‘Coming up?’ Pearl asked kindly.

  Donald tried to answer, but his mouth was parched and no word came. It might have been yes, it might have been no. For the first time since he left the Stockwells’ front room he was frightened. It was all so new to him, he was so far from home, the street was so dark, the autumn night was so exciting. He was nervous. This was no paperdoll of a printed invention. This was a woman at last, a real woman all to himself, a woman who would let him learn. His fear was he wouldn’t be clever enough. He was only a poor sheltered student, seeing every situation in terms of the vacant life he led. He feared Pearl the way he feared an examination he hadn’t prepared for. With Bobo he hadn’t done his best, but Bobo hadn’t set him a fair paper. This was a bird of a different colour. This was an unseen. He trembled, and even while he stood there shaking Pearl cleeked him and he went with her. The touch of her hand, the light in her eyes, the smile of her lips, the smell of her body, the nudge of her hip, enticed and repulsed him. His timid mind took one step backward as his sheep’s feet took two steps forward, so forward he went in the net with the forward girl.

  She led him on past Ruby’s close and up the next one further east. Ruby swivelled and gave the lads their cue.

  ‘Come on up and see my granny,’ said Pearl. ‘She’s making candy.’

  But Donald was dumb.

  There was a coarseness in her voice, a looseness in her manner, unpleasing to his unacquired taste, and the scabby close, so different from the wally close where the Stockwells put him up, made him limp and miserable. The dirty stairs shocked him. The peeling brown paint disgusted him. The cracked and battered doors on the first floor depressed him. His eyes were unhappy at the dimness of the gaslight on the landing and his nose was displeased by the guff of hoarded garbage. He was stifled by the squalor and depravity pressing hard against him as he went up another flight to Pearl’s harbour.

  She slipped a key from her coat and opened the door. This was going to be a silent customer, maybe even an awkward one. She elbowed him over the doorstep and before she followed him inside she turned to the stairs and whistled the start of ‘Scotland the Brave’. Jake and Jumbo came slowly up, without a care in the world. They knew they knew their job.

  Inside, faltering, the first thing Donald saw was a kitchen table with a couple of beer cans on the naked board and the scraps of two fish suppers in a sodden newspaper. The stale smells of vinegar and beer made him squeamish. He had too strong a nose for a stomach that was weak. In a recess to his left was an untidy bed that didn’t even look clean. Two plain chairs in front of a poor fire had a pair of knickers and stockings, a bra and a girdle, slung over them, and the whole room was so disorderly he was sorry he had come. He was resigned to being only the shadow of a man if he could just get out. From cowardice he made the great refusal. He turned back to the door, blinking to clear the tears in his eyes. He tried to run away.

  Pearl sat on the bed with her skirt off and laughed. She didn’t bother rising to stop him. She knew it was all taken care of.

  Jake and Jumbo met him on the stairs. Donald panted an excuse me, for he was always polite to strangers, and he thought he could go right ahead after that. But Jake and Jumbo didn’t know good manners. They pounced. Jake grabbed Donald’s right arm and twisted it so far behind his back Donald was almost on his knees, his thighs quivering in terror, his breast heaving. Jumbo got behind him and thudded him callously on the neck with the edge of his big coarse palm.

  ‘Oh my goodness me!’ Donald sobbed, and Pearl gleamed at the door in her jumper and panties and giggled at his feeble ejaculation.

  Her handers bullied Donald alternately and together.

  ‘Is she no guid fur ye like?’

  ‘Hell dae ye think ye’re playin at Mac?’

  ‘Whit’s the gemme insultin oor dame?’

  ‘Whit dae ye come here lookin fur it and then renege?’

  ‘Hivye no the pricefit ye mug?’

  ‘Whit ur ye in a hurry fur?’

  ‘King soon see.’

  ‘Open up Jimmy.’

  They searched him between them, exploring him, found his oldfashioned pocketbook, a clumsy thing of real leather inside his jacket, took his few pounds away and shoved the pocketbook back where it was. They were agreeable to let it go at that. But not Donald. Oh no, he wanted his money back. His Highland blood was up. The rest no longer mattered, but money always mattered. He snatched for it, grappled, wrestled, pleaded. Jake took him from the front and Jumbo took him from the rear.

  ‘The silly bugger ast fur it,’ was all they had to say later, shrugging off the outcome.

  He was so obstinate they had to be brutal. They beat him up and they beat him down. He punched the air, weak and wild, not knowing when he was done, not seeing he was only making them lam into him worse, until Jake gave him one last kick on the right and Jumbo booted him hard again on the left. Together they sent him falling down the stairs. Eight times he bumped and rolled before he sprawled in throbbing relief on the next landing.

  He got up. He must have got up. For he wasn’t found there. He was found in the Saltmarket near the High Court, half a mile away. No doubt Jake and Jumbo helped him to his feet and put him on his way. They wouldn’t want him fouling Pearl’s lovenest. He staggered north, past the Ross Street shebeen known to sailors the world over from Glasgow to Hong Kong, weaved blindly at strange corners but still kept his aim. Like a homing pigeon he had the direction set in his wordless mind. But his spleen was ruptured by Jumbo’s farewell boot. He couldn’t go on. He just wanted to lie down. He tripped at the last gutter.

  He fell.

  He lay there.

  He bled.

  He died.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The official version was that a student out for a stroll in the fresh air after an evening studying had been set on by some irresponsible youths and so severely beaten he received fatal injuries. There were some five or six Letters to the Editor in the local papers over two or three days, complaining it was apparently unsafe to walk alone after dark in certain parts of the city, indignant epistles asking rhetorical questions about modern education. None of them asked what a student was up to down by the river, wandering alone where the prostitutes aren’t even decent enough to give their client value for his money. I suppose the police, though too discreet to say so, had it all sorted out. But there were no arrests.

  Bobo guessed all right. She knew her mother-city. She could have taken you anywhere round it. Main had no illusions either. He knew what a chaste halfhour alone with Bobo could do to Donald and the rest of that dark night was as clear as daylight to him. As for Wee Annie, she knew. She just knew. The truth was plain to her because she knew what men were like, all of them, whatever their public face.

  Donald was buried from the Stockwells, and in all the comings and goings of neighbours anxious to show their sympathy at the loss of a good lodger Wee Annie easily got into the front room where the coffin was trestled in floral dignity.

  ‘Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish,’ she declared from the back of the queue, and nobody present was prepared to turn round and deny it.

  The silence encouraged her. She had her bible with her and she read it out to them, loud and bold, having
a burial service on her own before the coffin was taken to the cemetery, her voice the voice of the preacher, slow and canting.

  ‘Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished bringeth forth death.’

  Main drifted tactfully to her elbow as soon as she started reading and led her out before she could go on, back into her single-end next door, and there she thumped the bible down on her dresser and stared up at him, defiant.

  ‘Do not err, brethren. You know and I know.’

  She spoke through him as if he was a congregation.

  ‘God knows,’ Main answered, sick and tired.

  He looked at her as bitter as she looked at him. She gave in. She sat down and wept.

  ‘O wretched man that he was! Who will deliver us from the body?’

  ‘Aye, all right! All right!’ Main patted her shoulder as she wailed, for after all he had seen she loved Donald in her own way, or at least once wanted to love him, but Donald had never even noticed her.

  Suddenly she was venomous.

  ‘That girl put bad in his mind. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it a long time ago. She’s a bad one.’

  It took him three and a half seconds to see she meant Bobo.

  ‘But Bobo’s not bad. Sure I talk to Bobo a lot, don’t I? And you’re not going to tell me I talk to bad women, are you?’

  He spoke teasingly, flippantly jostling her elbow, trying to cheer her. But though she dried her eyes with a corner of her pinny she wasn’t to be nudged into a smile.

  ‘She was bad with him because he was bad, or there was bad in him, and she’s bad with another man as well because he’s bad too. Oh, I know them! I know them all. But she’s not bad with you because there’s too much good in you.’