A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  ‘I’m sick of this place,’ said the janitor.

  He was an old-fashioned man, impatient of children, much given to whining about the hard life he had. He spent his days moaning in the huts and his nights drinking in the Black Bull. He was there one night when his lonely wife heard glass breaking. She hurried out just in time to see three lads scampering. She was angry, and in her anger she spoke foolishly.

  ‘I know you,’ she called out in the twilight. ‘I know you, McCulloch! I saw you, Baxter! Yes, and you with the red hair, I know you too!’

  She told her husband. He challenged McCulloch and Baxter in the morning. He thought he would get the third boy’s name by threatening them. All he got was abuse. When it was dark that night somebody threw a brick through his living-room window. At the end of the month he handed in his resignation.

  ‘I’m not putting up with this any longer,’ he told Mr Alfred. ‘I’m getting a job with the Parks Department.’

  He wasn’t there a week before he was moaning again. Mr Alfred met him on one of his lunchtime walks.

  ‘I’ve just lost eight young trees,’ said the ex-janitor. ‘They must have come prepared to do damage. It would have took a good axe to fell they trees. It would break your heart, so it would.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  To avoid having to listen to the ex-janitor’s grumbling he stopped going to the park. He went further out to have a look at the cemetery he had long meant to visit. It was a restful plot, away from the world and divorced from time, but before he was very far in he saw two tombstones lying flat. A wizened labourer was bent on putting them up again. He straightened when he heard Mr Alfred come along. He had to tell somebody.

  ‘But how did they manage it?’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘They broke into my toolshed,’ said the old man. ‘It took a crowbar to get these stones down. I give up. Folk that’ll do that, they’ve no respect for nothing.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  He was in low spirits at that time in any case, because Granny Lyons was in hospital. She was to have a mam- mectomy. He went out at midday to phone the hospital and ask about her. He didn’t like to use the phone in the school in case he was overheard. He preferred to keep his private life private. He walked round and round Winchgate for an hour and got nowhere. Every phone-box he tried was out of order.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I’ll never understand it.’

  Still searching peace and quiet he went next day to the local library. He liked going to the corporation’s public libraries, he liked showing his spare ticket to get in, and then browsing through the catalogues and the card-index of recent additions. The librarian on duty that day was a sedate little spinster with grey hair and a cameo brooch on her blouse. When she saw Mr Alfred come in she knew at once he was a booklover. She watched him go to where the catalogues should be, watched him squint for the card- index boxes. She sighed, padded over in flatheeled sympathy. She explained the library had no catalogues. There had been a break-in through the skylight. All the index- cards and the printed catalogues had been stolen. Some of the cards had been found scattered across the old railway line, but she couldn’t say yet how many were missing. The printed catalogues, bound in volumes, had still to be found.

  ‘We’ll have to recatalogue the whole library,’ she said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘What a shame.’

  She blinked and sniffed, acknowledging his share in her sorrow.

  ‘Fourteen thousand volumes,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how long it will take us. We’re short of staff as it is.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘I don’t understand. Why do they do it?’

  He was glad he wasn’t a cinema-goer when he saw from the bus one morning that the Dalriada was only the hollow shell of a burned-out building. But he wasn’t surprised. He knew he was in a bad area. He seemed to have spent his life in bad areas. And he supposed the annexe where he taught was the prey of vandals because it was a neglected backwater lacking the amenities of the main building. It bred resentment, and resentment was expressed in de¬ struction. That’s how he explained it to Mr Lindsay.

  Mr Lindsay smiled. He knew the main building was having trouble too. The climax came when a single-storeyed wing was gutted by fire. A passing motorist saw the flames at two in the morning. The wing included a dining- room, kitchen, gymnasium, and medical room. The papers said it cost more than £100,000 when it was opened. The police said entry had been gained through a pantry-window too small to admit anyone but a schoolchild. Mr Chambers had to make emergency arrangements to feed the children who used the dining-room their schoolmates had destroyed.

  ‘I can just see old Chamber-pot,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘Chasing his tail in ever decreasing circles till he disap- pears up his own arse.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘What a school!’

  ‘Ah now, wait a minute!’ said Mr Lindsay, aggressively loyal. ‘It’s not just here. It happens everywhere.’

  ‘The child-dominated school,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘That’s not a fair thing to say,’ said Miss Seymour.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mr Alfred liked the weekend. He could forget school and Miss Seymour then. On a Saturday afternoon he went strolling along Sauchiehall Street. He meant to go to Boots and buy shaving-soap and razor-blades. But he was on the wrong side of the road, and when he came out of a daydream he saw he couldn’t get across. Where there should have been four lanes of one-way traffic racing from west to east, with a break at Hope Street or Renfield Street on the Cross signal, there was only a crowd of pedestrians from east and west who kept going on a collision course. He thought it rather strange so many people should be walking right in the middle of a busy road. It took him a moment or two to make out that what he was seeing was two gangs, about fifty in each, armed with axes and hammers, throwing bottles and yelling as they advanced.

  He was frightened by the noise and the flourish of weapons. When the rearguards flowed from the road on to the pavement, routing neutrals there, he ran into a shop doorway. He wasn’t the only one. All the shopping housewives flocked for cover, and their hysterical screams made bedlam of a battlefield already bellowing and rebellowing. He saw a scampering matron trip herself in her hurry and fall on her face just as an empty bottle crashed beside her. He was terrified, but he thought he had to be at least a gentleman if not a hero. He dashed from his shelter and tried to helpher to her feet. She was fat and heavy. He couldn’t lift her. He felt the sag of big flabby breasts as he grasped her round the middle and he blushed. Some women, gabbling in dignantly, gave him a hand and raised their fallen sister. She got off her knees slowly, white and shaking.

  When he had calmed her a little and taken her to the doorway Mr Alfred turned to watch what was going on in the street. He was still frightened, but he was interested too. He couldn’t believe that two gangs had the cheek to pick Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday afternoon as the venue for a challenge match, Sauchiehall Street above all places, the city’s most famous thoroughfare, its answer to Edinburgh’s Princes Street, to London’s Regent Street.

  He looked and listened. The medley of chanting and barracking made it hard to distinguish the words, but he recognised the same warcry coming from both sides.

  ‘Ya bass!’

  ‘Ya bass!’

  ‘What’s it all about?’ he asked in the doorway.

  Nobody seemed to know. Nobody even looked at him, far less answered him. All eyes front, all mouths open.

  Before the gangs were fully engaged six patrol cars and a Q car came speeding along. They barged through them and swerved to a stop in the middle of the road. A score of policemen jumped out. Mr Alfred wanted to cheer. He saw the crowd break like shattered glass, he saw youths throw away bottles and bayonets as they fled. He saw a butcher’s cleaver tossed in the air and heard it clatter in the gutter. A discarded hammer landed at his feet
. He gaped at it.

  In the Sunday paper he read there were twenty-nine arrests. The printed story pleased him. He had to cut it out. He had to show it to Mr Lindsay in the staffroom on Monday morning.

  ‘I saw that,’ he had to say. ‘I was there.’

  The cutting seemed to give more reality to what he had seen, and what he had seen made the cutting more credible.

  He saw another fight in the street before he was much older. Mr Lindsay, a judicious beer drinker, told him of a bar on the south side that served good draught beer. Mr Alfred said he would give it a trial. A pub-crawl in that area might be interesting. He took a bus across the river on a Wednesday night. He thought Wednesday would be a suitably quiet night for a voyage of exploration and he got off the bus with the pleasant feeling of a day’s work behind him and adventure in front of him.

  Between pubs he walked into trouble. Two companies of juveniles, moving against each other at the gallop, took over the whole street and made anybody who got in their way scurry into a close for safety. Mr Alfred resented having his hard-earned right to a pub-crawl obstructed. He had a drink in him, and he wasn’t going to run into a close just because of a clash of minors. He stood against a shop-window and superciliously looked on. What he saw alarmed him and wiped the sneer off his face. The vicious way the fangs were bared at the scream of ‘Ya bass’ seemed an appalling and yet appropriate accompaniment to the thrust of the knife.

  Squad cars and a dog-van bowled along and closed in as the battle rolled along Victoria Road and into Calder Street. The dogs were taken from the van but not released in pursuit. Their barking was enough to make the rioters run.

  The next morning he saw in his paper there were fourteen arrests. He read it out to Mr Lindsay. Again he had to boast.

  ‘I saw that. I was there.’

  ‘But you found my pub all right?’ said Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘You’re quite right. It’s a good beer they have there. But you know what I’m finding now?

  It’s hard to get a good light draught beer. It’s mostly heavy ale they serve now. That’s what the young ones ask for. They just want to get drunk quick. You can see it. Two pints and they want to fight their pal.’

  The frequency of gang-fights in the main streets of their city became a staple of conversation between them. They told each other what they had seen in town the night before, they read aloud from the paper over their cup of tea at morning break.

  ‘Policeman stabbed in gang affray,’ read Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Five stabbed on way to dance,’ read Mr Alfred.

  ‘Boy of sixteen gets six years,’ read Mr Lindsay. ‘Attempted murder by stabbing.’

  ‘Boy of seventeen gets four years,’ read Mr Alfred. ‘Used razor on a girl and a youth in gang-clash.’

  Minor disorders they noted too.

  ‘Shots hit buses on terror route,’ read Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Bus rowdy jailed for thirty days,’ read Mr Alfred.

  ‘Nine arrests after dance brawl,’ read Mr Lindsay. ‘A gang of youths entered a dance-hall shouting, “We are the little people! We’ve come to rule the world.”’

  ‘I like that,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘The little people.’

  ‘Come to rule the world,’ said Mr Lindsay.

  ‘Surely the Second Coming is at hand,’ said Mr Alfred.

  ‘That’s Yeats, isn’t it?’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘The Second Coming. It’s a poem by Yeats. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘The blood- dimmed tide is loosed. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember that,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘But I know I’ve seen a poem by Yeats called the Second Coming.’

  Mr Alfred was surprised a fellow teacher in a primary school had read Yeats. He began to like Mr Lindsay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was payday again. He was glad. He kept out of debt, but he had no savings. By the time the end of the month came round he was beginning to need money. He had his cheque in his hand by ten o’clock and cashed it locally before lunch. Money was all the armour he took on his nightly tour of dark streets and dingy pubs, in search of a castle perilous and a holy grail.

  Sometimes, as he wandered, there lurked in a forgotten corridor of his mind a twin accusing him that for all his boasted love of literature he hadn’t read a book right through for a long time, that the most modern poets he had read were those in fashion thirty years ago, that he had stopped there and never read anyone younger than himself.

  At those moments he felt his cloak of booklover was as shabby as the old coat he was wearing. He wished he had a quiet corner where he could sit in some comfort at a big desk and resume the studies of his youth. He blamed his truancy on the lack of a house of his own. His lodgings were so cramped he could use them only as a den for eating and sleeping, and even at that he often ate out. But over the years he had put off from day to day the attempt to find a better place. Where he was had one advantage he valued. It allowed him a wide liberty of coming and going as he pleased. To move might limit his freedom and would certainly mean a new routine. The prospect didn’t please him. He was a creature of habit.

  ‘And this is a bad habit,’ he said to his silent face in a bar mirror. ‘This paynight binge.’

  When he had a month’s salary in his pocket he always drank more than usual. The way the world looked then was part of the colour of paynight. So leaving the last pub when the bell went he knew he had enough, if not too much. Out in the street he was aware of being hungry as well as drunk.

  ‘No, not drunk,’ he said, encouraging himself to get past people without colliding. ‘I won’t have that. Just a bit fuddled, that’s all. What I say is, anaesthetised.’

  He passed a new cafeteria with broad uncurtained windows. He saw it was packed with young people shoving a latenight snack down their gullets. The sight of so much esuriency recalled to him a practice of the days when he was only an apprentice in drinking. After a night in a pub he used to go to a cheap restaurant and eat a big plate of fish and chips. His journeyman’s stomach seemed to have lost the capacity for that amount of food at that time of night. For years he had gone to bed without a bite after drinking. But now a youthful craving moved in his belly and he aimed at the Caballero for something to eat.

  He didn’t forget he had a month’s pay in his pocket, and he had taken care as usual never to be seen fumbling with a wad of notes when he paid for a drink. He always kept a few pounds loose for easy access, but the bulk of his money he kept stowed away in a pocket inside the waistband of his trousers. It was a pocket he told the tailor to put in whenever he had a new suit. He had never lost any money, never been dipped. He took great pride in that.

  Outside the Caballero he made sure he had two notes handy and some loose silver. Groping to count the coins by touch alone, his fingers met a thick cylinder. For a moment he didn’t know what it was. Then he remembered it was the felt-tipped pen he had taken from a boy he caught writing gate ya bass on the flyleaf of an atlas. He had put the pen in his pocket and forgotten about it. He slipped it aside and went on trying to add up the money in his pocket. He calculated he had enough silver to pay for anything the Caballero could offer, but he was pleased to feel notes there as well. Rather than put out in small change the exact sum required, especially when he wasn’t sober, he was much given to handing over a note for each new payment and ending up with a dead weight of silver every night.

  The city was full of new eating places open late, Italian, Indian, Chinese. Keen to compete, the Caballero had modernised its front and furnishings, though not its men- us, since he last ate in it. The unfamiliar entrance offended him. The strength needed to push open a heavy glass door threw him off balance and he couldn’t get in without a stumble and a stagger. His clumsiness annoyed him. In the abrupt brightness his eyes were slow to focus, and he took conspicuously long to spot a table to suit him. There was one four yards from him, at fortyfive degrees to his
angle of incidence, but he missed it.

  He loitered two steps inside the door, making a survey that was difficult for him because he was suffering from an unexpected diplopia. He blinked. Right where he was dithering a young man and his girlfriend were eating sausage, eggs and chips baptised with HP sauce. The young man was quick-eyed and kind-hearted. He wanted to show his girlfriend he was a gentleman. He put down his knife. With his right hand freed he tapped Mr Alfred’s elbow and thumbed to the vacant table. He looked up. Mr Alfred looked down. The young man smiled. His girlfriend was pleased with him. Mr Alfred bowed to both smiles.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, age respecting youth.

  He heard a thickening in his speech and began to feel self-conscious. He advanced obliquely, swimming against the current of departing customers, anxious to reach the undulating table before he drowned.

  The young man and his girlfriend weren’t the only ones who noticed him come in. A quartet in the back corner stared, watching him all the way till he sat down. Two of the four recognised him.

  ‘That’s big Alfy,’ said Gerald Provan.

  ‘Christ so it is,’ said Smudge.

  ‘Who’s big Alfy?’ said Dianne McElhimmeny.

  ‘He looks squiffed,’ said Yvonne McGudgeon.

  ‘Well away,’ said Dianne. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Yous know him?’ said Yvonne.

  Gerald told them big Alfy used to be his teacher.

  ‘See! See teachers?’ said Yvonne. ‘Can’t stand them so I can’t.’

  ‘I hated school so I did,’ said Dianne.

  ‘Imagine him coming to a place like this,’ said Smudge.

  ‘A man his age,’ said Gerald. ‘With what he gets paid.’

  ‘He looks a right tramp,’ said Yvonne.

  ‘Is he one of yon?’ said Dianne. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘A query?’ said Yvonne.

  ‘Nut hom,’ said Gerald.

  He told them about Rose Weipers.

  ‘Dirty old man,’ said Dianne.