Espedair Street
Page 4
'See you there,' I said. He got into the car as the roadies slammed the door on the Transit. I could see a couple of pale faces inside, staring out.
I started walking down the slope of Hunter Street, heading for a chip shop and then ma's. The Transit coughed and bounced past me, then the Hillman. It stopped, and Christine Brice stuck her head out.
'Want a lift?'
'Ferguslie Park for me,' I laughed, shaking my head. 'Yer t-ttyres would never get out alive.' She turned back to Dave Balfour and they talked. I got the impression stopping had not been Dave's idea.
'We'll drop you nearby.'
'Ah...' I shrugged. 'Ah've got tae p-pick up some chips first, like; you'd...'
'Aw, get in.' She opened the rear door. 'I'll have some chips too.'
We stopped at a chip shop off Gilmour Street; she gave me the money for their chips. Nobody talked much, and they dropped me on King Street.
Dave Balfour only livened up at one point, when we were waiting at the traffic lights on Old Sneddon Street; a car drew up alongside us, and Balfour did a double-take when he looked over at it. He nudged Christine, and reached down to take something small and black from a door-pocket; something clicked, and he looked anxiously at the back of the small device, glancing up at the traffic lights a couple of times. I thought I could hear a high, whining noise. Christine shook her head and looked away. A little orange light shone on the back of the machine; Balfour held it up against his side window, tapped it against the glass, and sounded his horn. The driver of the car alongside ours looked round.
Balfour waved with his free hand, and was immediately surrounded by a blinding flash of light. I sat trying to blink the harsh reflections away, trying to work out what had happened, as Balfour laughed and sent the car powering away from the lights. 'God, you're so childish sometimes,' Christine breathed. Balfour was still giggling, looking into his rear-view mirror as he drove. 'Give me that flash gun,' Christine said, holding out one hand.
'Sammy Walker,' Balfour said, ignoring her. 'Did you see him? That's the second time I've got him this week!' He shook his head and kept chuckling. Christine looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I smiled uncertainly.
I walked through the drizzle with the slowly cooling brown packages leaking grease and vinegar onto my jacket, wishing I hadn't agreed to go back to my ma's after closing time. Just what I needed, to go wandering about Paisley all night.
On the way back to the flat I did remember Christine Brice, from my schooldays. She had been fairly good looking even then; one of the well dressed older girls, self-assured, collected, and properly uniformed; very much not a product of Ferguslie Park itself. She'd been in the year above me all right, and I recalled that three years ago, when I still thought my looks could pass for dramatic rather than just horrific, I'd invited her onto the floor at the school's Christmas dance; of course she was older than me and so it was hardly the done thing, but I thought being tall might give me the edge...
She'd blushed and shaken her head; her friends had giggled.
I'd crumbled with shame and left the hall and the school. I'd wandered through Paisley — wretched, cold, humiliated — in my tight new shoes and my thin old jacket, waiting until the dance was due to finish, so I wouldn't arrive home before my ma expected me; she'd only have asked embarrassing questions.
When I had got back, I'd told her I'd had a great time.
THREE
They don't seem to have telegrams any more; they have something called telemessages instead; fake telegrams that come with the ordinary mail. One dropped onto the pile of mail behind the small back door of St Jute's vestry six days ago, on a Wednesday. The pile of mail is three years deep; probably enough to fill a couple of postal sacks. It's junk mail mostly, so I ignore it, just go down there every now and again and kick it around a bit, looking for anything remotely interesting. Important mail gets sent to my lawyers; the people who matter to me know that trying to get in touch directly is usually futile.
Rick Tumber ought to know that, but he must have forgotten. The telemessage skidded across the tiled floor when I kicked the pile of mail and I picked it up, wondering whether I should open it or not. This was unexpected, and unexpected things tend to turn out badly, in my experience. What the hell; I opened it.
ARRIVING YOUR PLACE LUNCHTIME SUNDAY 21st.
IMPORTANT. BE IN. PLEASE. THIS IS GOOD NEWS.
KINDEST REGARDS. RICK T.
Good news. I was instantly wary. Rick Tumber was head of ARC, our record company. When he talked of good news he meant there was lots of money to be made somewhere, somehow. I started making plans to be out of town there and then, though I suspected something would happen to stop me; I wouldn't get round to it.
I put the message back in its envelope and replaced it on the pile, as though pretending I hadn't read it, it hadn't come, nothing was going to change, then I went back up the spiral of stone steps to the choir. I hadn't had any breakfast yet, and what passed for my kitchen and dining room lay in the south transept.
St Jute's, also known as Wykes' Folly, looks exactly like a church, but it isn't. It has what looks just like a graveyard, but it has no graves.
Ambrose Wykes, 1819-1898, was the only son of a successful Dundee jute merchant; he built up the business, turned a small fortune into a large one, and moved to Glasgow to oversee the establishment of another commercial empire in the early 1850s, shipping tobacco from America. He had always been mildly eccentric, dressing his servants as ship's crew — the head butler was the captain, the maids were cabin boys — and equipping his villa in Bearsden with a small lighthouse which attracted the wrath of his neighbours and considerable numbers of migratory birds, but by Victorian standards his oddities were not extreme, and he was a devout Catholic, a responsible husband and a loving father.
At least, he was these things until May l864, when his wife Mary and their only child were killed in a train crash. The boy was only two weeks old, and unbaptised. Ambrose's grief was deepened by the knowledge that the infant's soul was forever denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven; he began to drink too much, and couldn't sleep; his doctor prescribed laudanum.
Ambrose's mourning went beyond the bounds of good taste; he had the whole of the Bearsden house, and his villa at Hunter's Quay on the Holy Loch, draped in black canvas. The furniture was reupholstered in black, the carpets replaced with black felt, black canvas was placed over all the pictures and portraits, and the servants were suddenly required to dress as undertakers. Most of them left.
Ambrose paid frequent visits to his priest, accompanied by an embarrassed but well paid lawyer, apparently trying to find some loophole in the divine legal code which would let his dead son's soul gain everlasting peace. The priest, his bishop, and several Jesuits all tried to reason with him, but Ambrose refused their comfort. He stopped going to church, he refused to confess.
His business affairs began to deteriorate as he spent increasing amounts of time writing letters to priests, bishops, cardinals, and even the Vatican itself, urging that some sort of special dispensation be found which would allow the soul of his son to rest in peace; he published pamphlets advocating the reinterpretation of certain Biblical verses. Then he began to picket his local chapel; sitting outside the church in an undertaker's carriage he'd purchased, while some of his warehouse workers paraded round with placards urging reform.
These workers, themselves Catholics, were persuaded by their own priests that taking part in such unseemly demonstrations, even at triple time, was bad for their souls, and would do no good for the dead child. So Ambrose hired drunks from the Glasgow slums instead; they swore at the churchgoers, pissed against the church and fought with the police.
Ambrose had ignored the increasingly stern warnings and frosty advice of his few friends, and soon found himself without any at all. By this time his neglected business empire was on the verge of collapse, so he sold out. Injunctions eventually prevented him from picketing effectively, and he withdrew, broken and bitter but still
obsessed, a rich but almost powerless man.
His frustration turned to hatred. The pamphlets began to vilify the church on every possible ground, until they too became unsupportably scandalous, and the printers refused to print them. Ambrose bought his own printing company and kept going for a while, until that too was buried under a blizzard of injunctions and prosecutions. He was excommunicated in 1869.
Ambrose remained determined to get back at the church somehow. His solution, after much thought and more brandy, was to make use of one of the few pieces of property he still owned; an empty site on St Vincent Street, between Elmbank Street and Holland Street. He sold almost everything else he owned, paid a great deal of money to an architect who has remained anonymous to this day, and — the rumour goes — an even larger sum to at least one member of the City Council to make sure there were no problems over building permission.
He built his own church. A Gothic design one architectural guidebook calls 'a bastardised blend of truncated Pearsonesque Normandy Gothic and facetious, ill-proportioned Lombardy'. The church was correct in almost every detail: nave, transepts, choir, vestry, crypt, pews, altar; even bells in the tower (Ambrose had them cast cracked so they sounded awful, but another injunction prevented them being rung).
The spare ground at the rear of the plot he turned into a mock graveyard, hiring Protestant stonemasons to turn out gravestones for each of the many enemies he'd made during the previous decade. Each stone gave the correct date of birth, but the following date recorded the death of Ambrose's friendship with whoever the stone purported to commemorate; the time when Ambrose had decided this person wasn't fit to live. His priest, a bishop, two cardinals and a variety of Jesuits seemingly lay beside a collection of lawyers, businessmen, judges, newspaper journalists, city councillors and building contractors, all apparently wiped out in some terrible, class-conscious plague which swept the city from 1865 almost to the end of the century.
The place was known as Wykes' Folly, or — in memory of Ambrose's original business — St Jute's. It became famous, a Glasgow landmark. Guidebooks mentioned it, people wrote to newspapers demanding it be torn down, a small group of free thinkers formed a Friends of St Jute's Society, and various bits of stonework were chipped off — and various insulting words scrawled onto — those parts of the church accessible from the pavement.
Ambrose retaliated by having a madonna and child statue made which showed his own Mary as the Blessed Virgin, and his unchristened son as the baby Jesus.
Ambrose was later to claim — in a pamphlet published privately, long after his death — that his son had indeed been the result of a virgin birth; in attempting to consummate his marriage on his wedding night, Ambrose had suffered a premature ejaculation while just inches from his goal; he retired in confusion, and claimed that he was afterwards too embarrassed to try again. His seed, however, had proved to be made of sterner stuff; it survived its short airborne journey and found what must have been a rather tenuous hold within the flower of Mary's womanhood; just a dewdrop within the heart of the rose, but sufficient to provide one sperm which must have wriggled past Mrs Wykes' maidenhead and connected with an egg. Ambrose thought this little short of a miracle, and it had been one of the reasons he had wanted his child given special treatment in the afterlife... but it was also a detail of such an exquisitely personal nature that he had felt unable to mention to the relevant theological authorities.
Ambrose died after his collection of papers, pamphlets and tracts went up in flames on Good Friday l898, seriously damaging the north transept. Ambrose suffered extensive burns, and despite holding on — and even seemingly improving — in the Royal Infirmary, finally died a few weeks later, on Ascension Day.
Ambrose had left enough money in his will for the folly to be maintained; this money proved sufficient to repair the fabric of the building, though slowly. The ownership of the place was turned over to the still surviving Friends of St Jute's, who used it as a storehouse for atheist publications. They abandoned it in the early 'twenties but couldn't sell it; a term of Ambrose's will had been that the place was not to be demolished or significantly changed from its original plan. I bought St Jute's in 1982, when I decided to make my own retreat from the world at large, and have felt thoroughly at home in it ever since.
The door bell rang about lunchtime, as I was making some ideologically sound Nicaraguan coffee; I don't just have jars of coffee, I have crates of the stuff.
I'd spent the time since breakfast working in the studio in the crypt, just fiddling about with the synthesiser and reading the manual on my new sequencer. I still write tunes; jingles, TV themes, the occasional film score, just to keep my hand in. I don't need the money but it passes the time. The jingles and the themes are two of the reasons I hate watching television or listening to the radio. Haven't been able to stand my own stuff since the band broke up, not once it's out there, public, no longer mine.
I thought it might be Blythswood Betty at the door. Betty is a whore who visits me every couple of days or so, just to keep me from getting too attached to my hand I guess. Nice woman; no nonsense type. I didn't think she was due today, but I lose track easily. I went to see who it was.
Ambrose had had hefty doors and barred windows fitted to his folly, but I have gone one better; closed circuit TV guarding all the entrances. The Holland Street door monitor, heaped in with most of St Jute's other non-musical electronic gear behind the pulpit, showed it was McCann, swaying in the small porch, holding his head and grimacing up at the camera and jabbing a finger at the door. His mouth was working.
I turned on the mike. '... pen the fuckin door, eh?'
I pressed the appropriate button and went to meet him.
'Jesus,' I said when I saw the blood, 'McCann, what... ?'
'Ah, ma heid,' McCann said, stumbling up the steps to the choir, holding a reddened hanky to his forehead. I led him to the bathroom in the bottom of the tower.
'What happened to you?' I put the hanky in the sink and got antiseptic and plasters.
'Wee argument,' he said, sitting heavily on the side of the bath and looking at his hand. He put his head back while I dabbed gingerly at a cut just under his hairline. I've reached that stage where I don't so much have friends as accomplices, and McCann is one of my two closest. He's about fifty, a one-time docker and several times unemployed person; greying now, short but fit, with beetling brows and a collection of lines between those brows which give him the look of one who is perpetually finding much to be unimpressed about, as though the world owes him not so much a living as an apology. This is indeed exactly how McCann feels, so no false signals there.
'You stick the nut on some punter?' I jiggled the TCP bottle a bit too much and some of it ran into one of his eyes.
'Ah! Ya basturt!' He ran to the sink and sloshed water into his eye.
'Sorry,' I said, lamely. I handed him a towel. This is me; Mr Clumsy. I always hurt people. All my life I've been knocking things on top of people, bumping into them, turning round too quickly and bashing them in the eye, treading on their toes; you name it. I'm used to it by now, but then I'm not on the receiving end (apart from the big G, of course).
'Sawright, nevir mind Jimmy.' McCann isn't calling me Jimmy the way he'd call any man Jimmy; he thinks that's my name. I've told him I'm called James Hay. This is actually a joke I've never had the nerve to explain to him; it's Jimmy Hay as in 'Hey, Jimmy!'. Hay is my mother's maiden name. McCann doesn't know who I am; he thinks I'm just the caretaker here.
I tried to unpeel a plaster but it stuck to my fingers; I handed him the packet while I picked the plaster off my hands. He sat down on the bath again.
'What happened?' I repeated.
'Ach, Ah goat intae a wee argument wi some stupit bugger in Brodie's.'
He dried his face, got up and looked in the mirror to put the plaster on. 'What about?' I asked.
'Oh, the usual; poalitics. Some balloon talkin aboot how we needed tae keep nuclear weapons. Ah tolt him he wi
z a dupe of the imperialist propaganda machine an the so-called independent nuclear deterrent wiz a farce; we were paying for the Americans' war machine, an that wiz only there to threaten the gains of the workers' states an force the Soviet Union tae devote so much aw their Gross National Proaduct on defence the workers wid question the priorities of the leadership.'
'So he hit you.'
'Naw; he called me a commie an Ah said Ah certainly wiz, an proud ofit too.'
'So then he hit you.'
'Naw, he said well then Ah'd want the Russians over here then, wouldn't ah? An Ah said it wiz up to each an every working class to make its own revolution, an the idea that the Soviet Union wantit to invade Western Europe was a load a mince; the last thing they wantit wiz a whole load of Polands and Czechoslovakias oan their hauns, no that they'd get the chance anyway cos if they didnae bomb oot aw the major manufacturing centres in the process, the Yanks wid, an as fur sneak nuclear attacks on anithir country, there was only wan state in history had ever done that, an it wiznae the fuckin Soviet Union.'
'So then he hit you.'
'Naw, then he said it wiz people like me that had wantit to appease Hitler and started the Second World War, so Ah told him it was the communists that had fought against the fascists in Germany, an, far frae helpin them, the Stalinists had cut them adrift just like they cut the Spanish Republicans adrift, an the people who'd done the appeasin were the right wing basturts that thought they an the fascists should be fightin the Soviet Union together, the same ones that had supported the White Russian army an the Imperialist invasion of Russia after the First World War, an their successors were the ones that still wantit to roll back the revolution noo, usin the threat aw Star Wars or anyhin else they could lay their hauns on, an anybody who couldnae see that wiz a fuckin eedjit.'
I hesitated. 'That was when he hit you?'
'Naw; he said ye couldnae trust a commie an he'd be votin fur the Alliance at the next election. Next thing Ah knew ma heid wiz in his face.'