There’s something in the rhythm that reminds me of sex, of Henry’s steady, dogged pace and the laughter starts bubbling up. I’m doing my lippy and I can’t keep it straight, I have to stop and lean on the hallstand.
The clanging stops. ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’ he calls through.
I can’t speak for laughing.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Don’t stop now. You’re doing great!’
I blot my lippy and leave the square of tissue with my Peach Frost kiss on the hallstand, a square of tissue that Henry will keep in a cigarette case in the top drawer of his bedside table.
I take the haggis off the boil and set it on the oval dish. It sits there, tight in its skin, fit to burst, a compact wee bomb. I shout the boy through from the front room where he’s playing with the dominoes, setting them up in a snaky line along the tiled hearth.
Henry has carried the plates to the table, each with its orange splodge of neep and its white splodge of tattie.
‘Will we have the poem?’ Henry asks, though he always recites it. It’s his favourite part, when we’re having haggis.
‘Go on, then.’
Calum grinds his wee backside into the chair, grinning, he loves it when Dad does the poem.
I take my seat and Henry stands at the head of the table, arms spread wide. The big knife is on the table in front of him, a checkered dishcloth beside it.
When he gets to the bit about ‘His knife see Rustic-labour dight’, he snatches up the breadknife and wipes it with the dishcloth – ‘An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight’ – and plunges it into the haggis, drawing a line down the middle of the skin.
The insides seethe up, spilling out over the cut – ‘warm, reekin, rich’ – like freshly ploughed soil. It’s a good haggis, spicy and moist, with the pinhead oatmeal through it.
I’m hungrier than I thought, watching Henry scoop the haggis out and dollop it on to the plates beside the dollops of mashed tattie and bashed neep.
The boy attacks it, packing it away in urgent forkfuls, till Henry tells him to take his time.
The windows rattle as we eat. The wind whoo-whoos in the chimney. When Calum’s fork is clacking on the china Henry clears the plates. He comes back through with two mugs of tea, an empire biscuit for the boy.
Calum picks the jelly tot from the top of his biscuit and sets it to the side for later. Then he takes a bite from the biscuit and sets it down on his plate. You can see the wee teeth marks in the white fondant icing.
‘Can you do the ring, Dad?’ he says, his mouth full of biscuit. ‘Dad, do the ring.’
‘Ah, Jeez,’ Henry says. ‘I’d need to soap it to get it off, son. I’m no as slim as I used to be.’
But he tugs the wedding band off and sets it on the table, balanced on its end. He’s been doing this for years, his little trick, ever since Calum was a baby in his high chair. He grips the ring between the forefinger of his left hand and the thumb of his right and springs them sharply apart.
Suddenly the ring is a gold translucent ball, spinning in the centre of the table with a kind of wet rasping hum. Calum is mesmerized, as he always was, and he watches as the tiny potter’s hole at the very top of the ball gets wider and the noise gets raspier and the ring starts to materialize in the golden globe, wobbling through its drunken figures-of-eight until it clatters to a stop with a kind of snappish trill.
‘When you were wee,’ Henry says.
‘I know. You used to do it on my high chair and you’d have to watch that I didn’t snatch it up and put it in my mouth.’
Henry picks up the ring and works it back on to his finger. The panes rattle fiercely as he does this and he looks up sharply, catches my eye.
‘You sure this is a good idea? It’s getting worse out there.’
He’s not jealous, there isn’t a jealous bone in his body. He’s not trying to stop me going to the dancing. He’s away a lot, he knows I like to go dancing with Nancy. I shouldn’t drop Nancy just because he’s home. Where’s the harm in a night at the jiggin?
‘She’ll be disappointed,’ I say. ‘You know what she’s like.’
Nancy goes dancing three nights a week. She’d go seven nights if she could.
‘OK, but here …’ Henry’s digging into his pocket, holds up a note. ‘Take a taxi. There and back. Don’t mess around with buses. And stick together. Be careful.’
He doesn’t say it, but we both know what he means: The Quaker.
‘OK.’ I lean over to pluck the note from his hand and he grabs me round the waist, topples me on to his lap.
‘Who’s good to you?’
‘You are.’
‘You behave yourself.’
‘Always.’
He kisses my neck. Calum eats his biscuit.
At half-past nine we’re in the Trader’s Tavern. Nancy’s in full flight, accepting drinks from a gaggle of suits at the bar, flirting like a champion. The storm’s getting wilder, which only makes the pub brighter and warmer, the lights and the smoke and the flickering fire, the thick weave of voices, glasses clinking.
Nancy’s more outgoing than me. She always knows what to say, always has a smart bit of backchat for the fly men, the chancers. It comes from her job. She spent nine years on the buses before she got the secretary job in Harland and Wolff’s.
It’s getting close to ten o’clock, and the men at the bar are throwing back whiskies. They’re not interested in us now – only in getting as much booze down their necks as they can before chucking-out time – and we gather our things and hurry over to the dance hall, coats wrapped tight, heels clacking smartly on the pavement, through the swirling rain to the big bright neon sign.
The queue isn’t long and we’re soon climbing the stairs arm in arm towards the muffled beat and suddenly we’re in, we’re part of it, the whirling lights and the crowds, the chest-thumping bass and the slashing guitar, we’re on the dance floor, light bouncing off the thighs and shoulders of the sharkskin suits, the lassies in their short frocks, spoor of sweat and smoke and perfume, the sprung floor bouncing under three or four hundred feet. In front of us a lassie in a Paisley-pattern minidress is thrusting and pumping, all blond hair and legs, little triangle of white flashing up beneath her hem. Nancy elbows me and points and we’re clutching each other’s arms and pushing through the crowds to the bar.
Within five minutes Nancy’s got a click, a tall, sharp-featured bloke, black hair, blue suit. Good dancer. I’m watching them on the floor when I hear the low voice in my ear – ‘May I have the pleasure of this pleasure?’ – and I smile and turn. William’s wearing this beautiful brown three-button suit with the thinnest scarlet pinstripe. Tan brogues. Slim regimental tie. Glint of gold in his smile.
We move out on to the floor. I haven’t told Nancy about William. We’re pretending we’ve just met, though in fact I’ve known him for three or four weeks. As the dancers move I catch sight of Nancy. Over her partner’s shoulder she hoists her eyebrows and pouts, as much as to say, Not bad!, and I laugh and do the same. It’s a slow number and I hook my hands round William’s shoulders and close my eyes. He smells excitingly of eau de cologne – something piney and green-smelling – and the noise of all the conversations around us, all the shouted remarks beneath the snap of the snare, is like the buzz of friendly bees.
Nancy’s click is called John (no doubt his surname would turn out to be ‘Smith’). He’s the quiet type, just sips his drinks between dances, smiles, doesn’t say much. I whisper to Nancy that he might be the Quaker and she grins into her drink. We’ve got a table for four behind one of the pillars near the bar but we spend most of the night on the dance floor.
At one point we’re dancing right at the centre of the hexagon. William makes a funny remark and I throw my head back to laugh and there’s the glitterball overhead, throwing off light, and I think of Henry’s wedding ring, spinning on the kitchen table, spinning on the high-chair, spinning back through the years to when Calum was a baby.
‘Wha
t’s the matter?’ William’s standing over me now, frowning, touching my elbow.
‘Nothing. I feel a bit iffy. Let’s get a seat.’
He lights my cigarette and watches my face. It might never happen, he tells me. I force a smile. I tell myself I’m doing it for us. For Henry and Calum and me. William can help us. You can’t get ahead on your own in this city. You need to know someone. Someone who knows someone. And now I do.
Nancy and her click come back to the table. William stands up until Nancy takes her seat. Nancy finds this hilarious. ‘Where did you find him?’ she asks. William just stands stoically until she settles herself and then sits himself down, smoothing his tie with the flat of his hand.
At the end of the night we’ve collected our coats from the cloakroom when Nancy decides that she needs cigarettes. She feeds her money into the machine in the foyer but the drawer sticks. She can’t get her fags and now the money’s stuck too. Nancy just shrugs – it’s late and we all want to hit the road – but William won’t leave it. He’s like a man possessed, summoning the manager, demanding satisfaction. When the manager arrives he’s a rough-looking ticket in a rumpled tux. William looks like a schoolteacher in his belted raincoat, scarf tucked neatly into the collar. All he needs is a rolled umbrella. He starts berating this man, what an outrage it is, stealing patrons’ hard-earned money, running defective machines. You can see the manager doesn’t know whether to placate William or chuck him down the stairs. Finally he stumps up the missing money and we march off in triumph, William muttering loudly about ‘dens of iniquity’.
It’s nearly midnight when we leave the dance hall. Nancy’s click goes off for the night bus at George Square and will never be seen again; despite repeated pleas from the police, he will never come forward to assist the investigation. The three of us walk down the Gallowgate. I’ve got my arm linked through William’s. On the way to Glasgow Cross we pass a group of wee neds. One of them’s pointing at William’s boots. He says something to the others and they erupt in nasty laughter. William just looks through them, strides on as if they don’t exist.
In the taxi I sit between William and Nancy. Nancy is drunk. She’s still laughing at William and she thinks he doesn’t notice. When he offers me a cigarette, Nancy demands one too, and plucks three or four when he offers the packet. William’s off on a rant about something or other. Real bible-thumping stuff. Odd phrases stick out over Nancy’s drunken giggles. Wages of Sin. Taken in adultery. Nancy finds it hysterical.
Nancy lives out in Yoker, but William insists that we drop her first. There’s an air of gallantry to this manoeuvre, but of course he wants me to himself. Three’s a crowd.
Nancy gets out at the foot of Kelso Street. The last I see of her, she is standing at the kerb, still doubled up with laughter and then suddenly the laughter stops and she straightens up. She raises her hand as we pull away. It’s an odd gesture, as if she’s hailing the cab she’s just gotten out of.
I stop the cab in Earl Street, a block before my own. And everything from this point onward seems like it’s a rerun, even the first time round. William seems to know that we can’t go to my place. As if we’ve agreed it in advance we walk up the path of another tenement and walk through to the back close. William is whistling quite loudly, a kind of folksy tune that I know but can’t place. It seems important that I find out the name of the tune but instead I shush him. In the back close he starts to kiss me, roughly but without urgency, as if he’s just passing the time.
I hear a noise. There’s something stirring further back in the close and this, I realize, with a rush of belated insight, a backwash of regret: this is a mistake. Henry’s words come back to me: You sure this is a good idea?
William is pressing into me, his hands braced on the wall beside my head, and he takes his mouth off mine for a moment and cocks his head, as if he’s heard something or maybe he expects to hear something, and I take my chance. I rake my shoe down his shin and duck under his arm and set off at a run. Nervous laughter bubbles up as I charge through the close but it dies out when I see my mistake. Instead of running up the stairwell, shouting and banging on doors I’m running out into the backcourt, into the darkness and emptiness with nobody there.
There’s a grass banking on the far side and I set off for that, stumbling across the broken ground.
I’ve lost a shoe. I kick the other one off and set off up the banking but my stockings are slippy on the grass and I land on one knee and scramble back up and fall again and this time there’s no scrambling back up because a hand has grasped one ankle and yanked hard and I’m clawing at the banking but there’s nothing to grip and my fingers are gouging down into the mud and I’m sliding right down and he flips me over now and he’s blocking the light and the scream that pours out of my throat is cut short by the punch that explodes behind my eyes and my head is bumping and bumping on the low retaining wall at the foot of the banking and I want to scream but the blood from my broken nose is slipping thick down my throat and it’s all I can do just to lie there and breathe.
The man who finds me next morning in the bluish first light is the proverbial dog-walker. I’ve been strangled with my own tights, like Victim Number One and Victim Number Two. A sanitary towel tucked under my armpit. The city rousing itself for another day, like nothing has changed.
From now on my name will be yoked with those of two strangers in a sequence that will never be broken, three names forever linked, like the Ronettes or the crew of Apollo 11. Jacquilyn Keevins. Ann Ogilvie. Marion Mercer.
In the flat, Henry is worried. He hasn’t slept well. He looks out over the early morning street. He has given Calum his breakfast. He’s waiting until it’s late enough to phone Nancy. Maybe I got caught in the storm and stayed over with friends in town. Maybe Nancy got sick and I spent the night at hers.
Maybe I’ll come padding up the stairs with my heels in my hand any minute, and he’ll hear my key in the lock.
He’s standing at the window, dishcloth over his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ he tells me.
14
A hearse passed McCormack on Dumbarton Road and he drew the hat from his head and held it against his chest, it was useful for that if nothing else, Cochrane’s bombastic insistence on hats. The family came next, glooming out of the gorgeous black car like moping royals, like a dynasty heading into exile. An adolescent boy – the son? the sibling? – watching McCormack as he passed. Flashiest ride of his life, McCormack thought, the black Daimler. That was probably true of the principal, too, the corpse. Of his death.
He was going to meet a tout called Billy Thomson. He sometimes wondered if Billy Thomson was a pseudonym, it seemed suspiciously apt as the name of a police informer: forgettable, bland, it blended right in. Thomson was a short, fat man with a drinker’s face. Forties, balding, he worked as a painter and decorator and hung around the East End pubs. His brother-in-law owned a betting shop in Shettleston.
McCormack was meeting him on a bench in Kelvingrove Park. They figured Kelvingrove Park was far enough from the East End. But then they’d chosen a sunny day at lunchtime and the bench they’d planned to meet at was taken. An old man in shirtsleeves and broad blue braces was tilting his face to the sun, his hands folded primly in his lap, a folded Tribune on the bench beside him. At the other end of the bench a young mother with an open Tupperware box was feeding segments of apple to a rowdy-looking toddler.
He climbed a little further up the hill to a vacant bench in the shade and lit a Regal. In a while he caught sight of Thomson in his painter’s overalls, picking his way between the sunbathers. He saw Thomson pause in mid-stride as he noticed that the bench was taken, and then come on more slowly, scanning the grassy hillside. When Thomson’s face was pointed in his direction McCormack lifted his hat and set it back on his head and Thomson came on now with more purpose, his paint-spattered knees working as he laboured up the hill.
‘You in training, Billy? Looking trim.’
Billy had his hands o
n his knees, bent double, gasping for breath. He held a finger up and in due course was able to say ‘Fuck you’, twice, wheezily. He tugged a hankie from his overall pocket and dragged it across his face.
‘So what do you hear, Billy?’ McCormack offered the pack of Regals. ‘You hear any names?’
Billy Thomson shrugged, leaned in to McCormack’s lighter.
‘Gangsters stopped dancing, have they?’
‘Oh, they still dance.’ Thomson exhaled deeply, mopped the back of his neck. ‘They just don’t dance in the Barrowland, in my experience.’
‘Naw?’
‘Naw. Too much chance of getting a sore face off one of the young teams. All these mental young guys wanting to make a name for theirselves. Chibs smuggled in in their birds’ knickers. The top boys prefer the Albert. Different crowd. More upmarket.’
‘That’s valuable information, Billy. That’s a nugget. Which Glasgow dance hall’s got a classier crowd than the next one. That’s a dollar’s worth all on its own.’
‘Well, what are you looking for?’ A wounded whine had entered Billy’s voice. ‘What can I tell you? They know fuck all. You don’t think they want him caught too? They want him caught more’n you do. Then maybe we could all go back to work.’
‘“We?” Who’s “we”, Billy?’
‘They. Whatever. Have you asked Walter Maitland?’
Maitland was McGlashan’s chief enforcer, reputed once to have offed a defaulter by forcing a joiner’s rasp down his throat.
‘Glash’s muscle? Why would I ask him, Billy?’
Thomson’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maitland? Well, he only fucking works there.’
‘Where?’
‘The Barrowland, for Chrissake! He works the door.’ Thomson frowned. ‘I figured you knew.’
McCormack took a folded banknote, stabbed it into the tout’s top pocket. ‘Do us a favour, Billy. Figure fuck all. Assume I know nothing. All right? Jesus. Less than nothing. Go buy yourself some Lanny, Billy. Bottle of El D. Have yourself a party.’
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