10
Death, heroin and hookers
I LOVED MY new chambermaid job at the city-centre hotel, although it was really hard work and not very well paid; at nights, to make extra money, I had to go and help the Storries behind the bar at the Nationalist or at the Palaceum. I quickly became exhausted and was seeing less of Sean, but the flat was taking shape and our wedding plans were sailing along.
All was going well until one night when I went back to Mammy’s flat after a late shift in the Palaceum. She told me a policeman had come to her door and broken the news that Uncle James had been killed as he crossed a railway line near us, coming back from Crazy Katie Wallace’s; they were on one of their frequent separations. I was upset and cried for hours. Uncle James was a lovely gentle man who had been nothing but kind to me and I missed him sorely. Mammy was hysterical with grief and was convinced he had killed himself because he and Crazy Katie had separated. She vented her fury on Crazy Katie and told anyone who would listen that Katie had driven him to his death. Poor Sammy and Jackie were left fatherless at the ages of 13 and ten.
The week of Uncle James’s funeral was difficult for me. Sean spent the days arguing with me and being very unsupportive. I left him at home one evening while I went back to Shettleston alone to see Mammy. I managed to get a late-night bus back to the Calton and, on my return, found our whole flat in total darkness. I assumed Sean had gone up to Toad Hall. But, when I opened our bedroom door and switched on the light, I saw him lying in bed. He sat up and started mumbling:
‘There’s a worm in my beans,’ he muttered. He was hallucinating. As I tried to speak to him, he started crying and held me tight as he blurted out: ‘I’ve taken so many painkillers, Janey. I want to die.’
I jumped off the bed in a panic and picked up all the tablets that I could now see were lying on the floor, then I grabbed Sean and dragged him downstairs and into the street. We managed to get a taxi to the Royal Infirmary, where they took him into a side ward and stuck a thick brown rubber tube down his throat which made him vomit. His choking screams were horrible. I ran out of the room. Afterwards, I had to phone his dad. Old George just listened and then said, ‘OK,’ very matter-of-factly. He sent his son Stephen to the hospital and, when he arrived, I had to sit outside while the doctors spoke to the two brothers. Stephen came out and asked me:
‘Why did he dae this? What did you dae tae him?’
‘I was up at my Mammy’s,’ I pleaded. ‘I was trying to help with my Uncle James’s funeral. We hadn’t even argued—’
‘You fucking must huv upset him!’ Stephen shouted at me.
I went into the ward and Sean looked at me then broke down in tears again: ‘I’m sorry, Janey, I was really fed up and sad and I just wanted tae die.’
When he left the hospital it was decided that he should go home to Toad Hall to stay for an indefinite period. This lasted for two nights; he couldn’t stand it; and then we were back together again. The suicide bid was never talked about. His depression continued. Just a few weeks afterwards, I lost my job at the hotel. The trade union told me not to do overtime. So I refused to do overtime. The management sacked me and five other girls for being insolent. Around the same time, Philip Storrie was in a car crash and could not manage the Nationalist Bar, so Old George came up with a plan to sort out both problems: he suggested Sean and I take over running the Nationalist Bar from Philip and his wife Mary, Patsy Paton’s sister. As we already lived above the premises, it was ideal and we jumped at the chance – it meant we could get away from the Palaceum, make our own mark in the bar and work together again in our own building.
The rooftop had a fantastic monumental balustrade with round sculptured red stone pillars which supported a huge ornate balcony plinth all the way round the perimeter of the roof and housed a private garden; the views were awesome. On a clear day, you could see north all the way up to the Campsie hills over 20 miles away; they were the back-drop for 1960s council-estate housing schemes which took your eye straight up to the furthest snow-capped hill, like a pretty wee Scottish postcard with broken windows to spoil it for the Americans. Looking east, you could see Celtic football ground’s floodlights peep above the trees that littered the view. To the west, you could see all the way to the city centre and beyond to the massive cranes of the main Clyde docks at least ten miles away. And, looking south, you could see the top of the Nelson’s Column obelisk on Glasgow Green and the beautiful church spire of St Francis that marked Cumberland Street; but the monstrous high flats of the Gorbals blocked most of the view beyond.
It was a tough area in which to run a pub. A narrow footpath directly opposite the Nationalist Bar led straight across the Glasgow Green then, by St Andrews Suspension Bridge over the River Clyde, into the Gorbals which, by this time, had mostly been vacated by ‘normal’ people. Benny Lynch the boxer, Jimmy Boyle the murderer and a lot of major organised crime figures had been raised in the slums there. In the 1960s, the Cumbie gang from Cumberland Street in the Gorbals had eternally fought the Tongs gang from the Calton. The Tongs had been in decline for the last five or six years but, in Barrowfield, an area just east of the Calton where Celtic football ground stood, there were still terrible problems with open warfare between two deadly rival gangs called the Torch and the Spur. They divided up local streets into their territories. Young men regularly went to prison for knife attacks and murders; stabbings and razor slashings were a Glasgow tradition and it had long seemed nothing could break the feud between the two gangs in this small area. Young girls who were found dating boys from the other side had always been beaten for their ‘treachery’ and this warfare carried on into local bars. If a Torch or a Spur came in for a beer and saw a member of the opposing gang, you had to be careful as a fight could break out without warning over nothing.
However, as heroin took rapid and firmer control of the area, it ended the long-standing gang wars: Torch and Spur soon consolidated into one friendly needle-swapping commune. The flats above the Nationalist Bar quickly started to become drug dens as tenants became hooked on heroin. The rivalry between Torch and Spur was replaced by a bitter and violent rivalry between drug barons with addicts as their prey. ‘The Railings’ was where many addicts bought their drugs – a set of pedestrian railings by a road crossing right outside the main Gorbals Police Office. Big John, my favourite self-confident shoplifter and family friend, was by now desperately trying to sell anything from used jewellery to his old clothes just to get one fix. Within a few months, at least three young teenagers in the area had died and people started to wake up to what being a junkie really entailed.
* * *
For me, the good thing about living above the Nationalist Bar rather than at Grandpa Davy Percy’s place was that I lived closer to my Dad. He started visiting me in the bar. I would also occasionally go up to Shettleston to see Mammy. Things were quieter for her now as my brother Mij, Cathy and the baby had moved out, my brother Vid was working away from home and, for the first time in her life, she had the whole place to herself. Peter even seemed to have calmed down a bit and there were no traumas or bruises visible. Perhaps I was just too wrapped up in my new life and my wedding plans to notice. Our wedding date was set for 27 September 1980. We were to get married in the new Catholic chapel of St Mark’s and the reception would be held in the Palaceum bar where we first met.
Old George had trained Sean well at being what I called tight-fisted and what he called being economical. When we moved into our new flat above the Nationalist Bar, he controlled both our money and exactly where it went. I was given £20 a week to feed and clothe both of us.
‘It’s not enough,’ I argued.
‘But you don’t need to buy me any clothes,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got three shirts, three pairs of trousers and one pair of shoes. Why would I need more? And no woman needs more than one dress and one pair of shoes.’
He was serious. I got my nylon wedding dress in a sale for £58 – plus a pair of white plastic shoes. It was no
t really what I wanted, but Sean could be pushed no further on the cash front. He borrowed a formal suit for the day from one of his brothers. My flowers were bought on the cheap from a local florist and Sean refused to buy a ring for himself as he said, ‘I don’t wear rings.’ Mine was the cheapest plain gold band in the shop. I was hurt, but kept it hidden behind a smile. On the morning of my wedding, I was very nervous and getting more stressed by the minute. At one point, I needed white Kirby grips to hold in place a wee diamante tiara in my hair.
‘Mammy, can’t you just run to the shop for me?’ I asked.
‘I don’t huv no money, Janey,’ she replied, with a hurt tone in her voice.
‘Oh, fucksake, Mammy!’ I screamed at her. ‘You would huv money if it wisnae fur the booze!’
‘Don’t get upset, Janey – no’ today – don’t fight with me,’ she pleaded with soft, sad eyes and I apologised.
At that point, Dad came into the room in his best suit and smiled at me.
‘You look lovely, Janey. Are you ready to go?’
‘Yes, Dad.’ I smiled back.
As we were walking down the stairs of my old family home in Kenmore Street, I suddenly stopped stock still. I looked at the window and the walls. I could see the wee Janey Currie I used to be, playing ball on the landing, I could hear all the childhood voices of my pals singing on the steps. I turned to Dad and said, ‘I can’t do it, Dad. I don’t want to get married.’
I sat down on the dirty concrete stairs in my white nylon dress. Dad had a frantic look in his eyes as if to say What’s going on? then he lifted me up and said in a totally calm, resigned voice, ‘OK, Janey, let’s go downstairs and tell his brother to let Sean know. I don’t want you doing something you don’t want to do.’
I stood for long seconds, took a breath, then put on a fake smile, held my bouquet of flowers tightly in my right hand and said, ‘No, it’s OK, Dad. I’m ready now. It was just a wee last-minute scary thing.’
He smiled and the colour went back into his cheeks. We climbed into Stephen Storrie’s black Audi car with white wedding bands on the front and he drove us to the chapel. The service went well and, at 9.30 a.m. I became Mrs Janey Storrie. Afterwards, we posed for photos. The photographer kept saying, ‘Give us a smile … Give us a smile!’
But Sean remained stony-faced and gave him a Fuck Off! look. He hated being told what to do; he was like a petulant schoolboy. As I entered the Palaceum for the wedding reception, Young George spat on me and Sean’s family never actually spoke to mine at all. Sean and I ate dinner and left the place by midday. We were driven in Stephen’s Audi to a cheap bed and breakfast in Saltcoats on the Firth of Clyde, which was being lashed by freezing late-September wind and rain. By teatime, we were both bored and went to the local cinema to watch Dustin Hoffman in Kramer Versus Kramer, the Oscar-winning film about divorce.
Being married didn’t change our relationship much. We just went back to the Nationalist Bar and carried on as normal. Sean took his role as pub manager seriously, although it didn’t really need a manager – it needed customers who actually drank enough to pay the bills. But I liked the down-at-heel regulars, in particular the prostitutes – middle-aged women dressed in bri-nylon dresses with brightly painted red lips and a determination to face one more blow job before teatime. The hookers amazed me and ignited my imagination: they would often bring me gifts from the nearby Brigaitt flea market. These included a small glass vinegar bottle, ornaments and books. I may have left school at 16 but I loved reading and Dolly brought me a great selection including classics like Moonfleet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – I liked Stevenson’s vivid descriptions. Madame Bovary also held a particular resonance for me: proof that bad marriages don’t end happily – instead, you just die. Doris gave me stapled, A4 scripts of plays sold off by impoverished actors – including The Threepenny Opera. The world of the Calton was small and inward-looking but, in these books and plays, I could be part of a wider world out there. My horizons were widened by prostitutes. I had always assumed hookers were tall, blonde, young Hollywood babes – not short, dark, middle-aged women who smelled of cheap talcum powder and stale whisky.
‘Men are all bastards, hen,’ Doris would tell me as she stripped in the bar’s toilet to change into a fresh flowery blouse. ‘You gotta take whit ye can and then fuck off from them the first chance ye get!’ The whiff of urine and wet armpits would hit me and Doris’s black dyed hair and aspiring moustache made me wonder why men would pay her for sex.
‘They want something that makes them feel naughty,’ she would explain. ‘I mean, I could look the spittin’ image o’ their own mammy but that widnae stop ‘em!’ She never seemed to mind me constantly quizzing her. Why did men go to prostitutes? Why did men need sex so much they would go to such lengths? I could never comprehend it.
Four of our customers – young guys from nearby Barrowfield – raped a prostitute and slashed her to shreds with the traditional Glasgow weapons of open razors; she almost bled to death, with so many gaping slits on her face it was hard to see any unslashed flesh. But she was ‘only a prostitute’, so the police made no effort to prosecute. When the full horror of the woman’s injuries emerged in the press, a lawyer privately prosecuted the four guys. Our customers in the Nationalist Bar talked about nothing else, but it was difficult and uncomfortable for me to read about the trial daily in the paper. I had laughed with one of the guys, played cards with him in the bar; I had been his friend and here he was being charged with raping and slashing a woman to pieces. The general opinion was: ‘She was a tart. She deserved it. How can ye be charged with raping a hooker?’ The four young men were given long sentences but each had grassed on the other three, so this led to the killings of various brothers and friends as bloody revenge was taken by all four families – slashings and stabbings on the streets of Barrowfield which inevitably spilled over into arguments and fights in the pubs of the East End.
Sean and I were relatively safe from serious violence in the Nationalist Bar because of Old George’s reputation. Everyone knew that, if you messed with any of the Storrie sons, you were in real trouble with George. But it wasn’t the local hard men we were scared of – it was the daft drunk who had nothing left to lose who might hit you in the face with a pool cue or the random nutter who might lob a half brick at your head coz he was hearing voices. And, though we were mostly protected from serious crime, petty crime was rampant, with every other addict coming in and trying any trick to get cash for heroin. One ginger-haired man tried, ‘Janey, Sean told me to tell you to give me £20 till he comes back. His car broke doon and he needs petrol, hen.’
‘Fuck off!’ I told him. ‘That makes no sense and he doesn’t even drive, ye dick!’
The bar had always been a one-stop shop for petty criminals and illegal goods, mostly stolen to order, but this increased as heroin took hold of the area and the amount of nicked electrical goods could have restocked Dixons anew almost every week. One benefit, though, was that I could forget about Sean’s tight-fistedness because I was now being dressed by Glasgow’s finest shoplifters. I remember snuggling up inside my first ever black leather coat, smelling the expensive hide and sliding my hand over the luxurious soft nap; the only downside was the size – it was on the large side and when I stropped around I looked like a cross between a Dalek and a member of the Gestapo. I didn’t care, though: it was still very trendy.
Heroin was taking an ever-increasing toll all over the Calton; young guys were starting to look like walking skeletons, with those tell-tale gaunt jaws and that just-too-quick jiggy walk when they came back across the bridge from the Gorbals. Young girls who used to come into our bar for crisps and cola were now doing quick tricks and blow jobs to get money for their habit, taking over from the older prostitutes on Glasgow Green. There were prostitutes everywhere. I started being hassled by guys in cars even when I walked to the shops. While the outside world disintegrated, Sean and I just spent that whole ye
ar trying to keep the bar in profit, cleaning the toilets and painting our new flat.
My brother Mij and his family had now settled in the Gorbals and he became a frequent visitor to the Nationalist Bar. He was looking forward to his little daughter starting primary school and had settled down slightly, but he was still a great fantasist. If there was someone in the news who had been bitten by a shark, then he recalled how he had fought off that monstrous shark at the beach in Largs. He lived in a wee world of his own – one that protected him – but his partner Cathy was outgrowing his fantasy dreams and by now realised Mij might never get a real job.
Mammy was still fighting with Peter and one Monday teatime she arrived at our bar with a black bin bag that contained all her clothes. We only had one bedroom, but we let her sleep in the kitchen, which was quite big and contained the TV: it already had a pull-down bed in there for when young Paul stayed over.
‘I need a break, Janey,’ Mammy explained. ‘Peter’s being a right bastard but he won’t come doon here in case you fucking tell him to beat it.’
After a few days with us, her mood brightened and she started to enjoy helping out behind the bar, meeting new people. I taught her how to pour a pint and top up the bottles; it felt weird, me showing my Mammy stuff about alcohol, but she loved it. She even managed to stay off the booze. I took her round all the local shops and introduced her to the neighbours; she in turn cooked me soup and then sat quietly and smoked, watching anything and everything on TV.
Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival Page 12