by Alan Spence
‘C’mon, c’mon, we canny huv this rubbish clutterin up the pavement.’
‘Right enough,’ said Aleck. ‘We better get the Sanitary.’
‘Oh helluva funny,’ said Shuggie. ‘Helluva fuckin funny!’ and he struggled to his feet, pleased to see them but trying to act surly. He said there might be a game of football going on in the school playground.
‘Might get a gemm, if we’re lucky!’
‘OK.’
So they sauntered off towards the school. They’d seen each other the night before, so they had nothing much to talk about and they walked along in silence.
Despite their occasional fights, they were really very close. They’d once decided to become blood brothers, and there in the hallowed secrecy of a rickety homemade back court hut, they’d pricked their thumbs with the pin of Joe’s ABC Minor’s badge, squeezed out a drop of blood, and clasped their hands together, each to each, Shuggie to Joe, Joe to Aleck, Aleck to Shuggie. That night they’d christened themselves the Tribe and solemnly pledged allegiance.
There still weren’t very many people about; a podgy woman waddling along, balanced by two bulging messagebags, one in each hand; a man in his slippers, his pyjama jacket showing under his ex-army pullover, milk and rolls and the Sunday papers clutched in his arms. There were occasional family groups, consciously on their way to church or chapel, clean and polished; and there was a noisy shuffling knot of wineys, grubby and unshaven, some of them still drunk from the night before, purple faces laughing as they passed around a bottle of wine.
A very small girl, telltale soggy knickers hanging weighted below her dress, ran across the road in front of a bike. The bike skidded to avoid her, and her mother, who’d been standing at the close, charged across and battered her with relief.
‘Ye might uv’ THUMP ‘got fuckin’ THUMP ‘KILLT’ THUMP THUMP.
When they reached the school, the playground was empty, but they clambered over the railings anyway and just wandered about. Aleck and Shuggie saw enough of the school during the week, but there was always something in the adventure of being there when they weren’t supposed to. And for Joe, who went to the Catholic school down the road, the expedition held even more of this sense of intrusion. They crossed into what was the girls’ playground and were just about to climb up on to the toilets when the janitor came out of the boiler-room opposite and bawled at them, brandishing a shovel in the air. They ran back the way they’d come, and realising he wasn’t chasing them they paused at the railings to get their breath back before climbing out.
‘That janny’s a wee bastard!’ said Shuggie angrily. ‘If he tells the heedie we’ll cop it themorra.’ Shuggie knew there was no real danger of this happening, but he was trying to impress Joe with the unknown, unimaginable horrors of a Protestant school.
‘Naw,’ said Aleck, ‘e’ll no bother is arse.’
Outside the school, they were once more at a loss for what to do, and they started to drift back towards the corner where they’d met up earlier. All the way down towards Govan Road were half-demolished tenements, façades exposed like dolls’ houses. The whole area had been scheduled for redevelopment for years and only now had a start been made. Aleck’s parents had had a visit from the Sanitary Inspector the week before, and he’d assured them they would be in a new house within the year. That probably meant a shift to one of the big housing schemes like Easterhouse. At least in Govan there were shops and cinemas, and Ibrox Stadium was just up the road. But the schemes were so bleak. No pictures. No football. It would be terrible. And what then would become of Aleck’s Tribe? His Uncle Peter lived in Drumchapel, and he called it the Reservation and made jokes about catching the last wagon-train from George Square, and for Aleck that was exactly how it seemed.
But that was in the future. For the moment they were together, with nothing particular to do.
‘Mon wu’ll go roon mah back,’ said Shuggie, and they trooped through the close and into his back court. It was also the back court of all the other families whose houses backed on to it. But to Shuggie it was ‘Mah Back’. Joe picked up a long stick of wood and looked at it thoughtfully.
‘We could make a cuppla hatchets,’ he said at last.
‘Good idea,’ said Aleck, and he wandered off with Shuggie to look for another stick and three tin cans while Joe set about breaking his long stick in half by leaning it against the wall and stamping it till it splintered under his boot. Gathering up the pieces, he followed Aleck and Shuggie. They were lucky. In the first midden they rummaged through they found the cans they needed and another short stick. They also unearthed, among the ashes and the debris that overflowed from the bins, a bundle of old comics, mainly Beanos and Dandys, and Aleck found a tattered copy of a Billy Bunter book with a library label half scraped away. He leafed through it, reading random sentences. ‘O cripes! O crikey! Yaroo! Leggo! Gerroff! The fat owl of the Remove was being bumped again.’
To Aleck, the world of these stories was just as distant, just as strange, as the worlds of the other books he read – about the gladiators, about Arthur’s knights, all the Children’s Classics.
The bundle of comics proved uninteresting. They’d read them all before, so they dumped them back in the midden. But Aleck kept the book, shoving it down inside his jeans. He would read it later. For the moment it could wait; there were hatchets to be made. The idea was to place the end of the stick inside the can and hammer the can with a brick till it was flattened into an axe-head which could then be secured with a nail. They kneeled down by the side of a big stagnant puddle, which covered about half of the back, and started hammering away.
It was a scarletfever puddle. Aleck’s mother said so. He’d had scarlet fever once and his mother said it was because he’d been playing in a green puddle and said he’d get hammered if he did it again. The puddle was actually a very nice colour, if you looked at it, though to some of Aleck’s relations it would be heresy to say such a thing, for green was the Catholic colour, the colour of Celtic. His Uncle Billy went so far as to refuse to have anything green in the house. But his Auntie Lottie was forever saying ‘It takes a green stem tae haud up an orange lily’, and to Aleck this had seemed like the highest wisdom, very profound and enlightened. His Auntie Lottie must have thought so too, she repeated it so often, sometimes alternating it with ‘Even Rangers play on green grass’, and looking very reasonable and smug.
Aleck stirred the puddle with his foot and it smelled a bit foul. It was the colour of the grass in the park, of the tufts of grass along the guttering above Aleck’s window.
It was funny how you said green as grass but not green as puddles. Or how about green as snotters? Aleck laughed.
‘Heh Shuggie! Imagine ye wur oan the telly, oan Come Dancin or somethin, an this perr dance past an ye say “Naow heah we hev Cynthia in a beautiful snottah-green dress”.’
‘Daft cunt!’ Shuggie threw a stone into the puddle just beside Aleck and the water splashed up but Aleck had jumped clear. And Joe had gone into convulsions, snorting and giggling. Aleck was doing a stumbling parody of a Come Dancing woman and whining Victor Sylvester music through his nose.
‘Yes, snottah-green is definitely this year’s fashion colour.’
Joe jumped over and joined in and the two of them were doing a wild birling lunatic waltz, and by this time Shuggie was laughing as well. Then Joe slipped and Aleck just managed to stop him tumbling bodily into the green slime. Then they both went down in a tangle and Joe’s hand slapped into the puddle. He crossed over and swirled his hand in another puddle that was mucky but not green.
‘Yizzur aff yer heids the perry yiz,’ said Shuggie, and the three of them were still laughing as they carried on hammering. Soon their tomahawks were battered into shape. All that was needed was a nail for each one to hold the head in place. Shuggie said he’d go up and see if there were any nails in his brother’s toolbag.
‘Be back in a cuppla minnits.’
Aleck and Joe watched him go and waited
where they were, aimless, kicking stones, scraping their initials in the dirt. To pass the time, they stood a bleach bottle up on top of a midden and tried to knock it down with stones. They were still trying when Shuggie came back and smashed the bottle to the ground with his stick.
‘D’ye get any nails?’ asked Joe eagerly.
Shuggie held forth his hand and, grinning, opened the clutched fingers to reveal three shiny brand-new two-inch nails.
‘D’ye know that Easter joke?’ asked Aleck as he and Joe took their nails. He made hammering motions, knocking in two imaginary nails about five feet apart, then stopped and looked down at the nail, held between his thumb and forefinger, his lower lip protruding in an expression of exaggerated stupidity and puzzlement.
‘Heh Jimmy, d’ye mind croassin yer legs, wu’ve only goat three nails.’
‘That’s sick!’ said Joe, trying to look disgusted, but smiling nevertheless.
Aleck didn’t see what he meant, until Joe added, ‘Typical proddie shite!’
Denounced as a heretic, Aleck said it wasn’t a Protestant joke at all. ‘Ah mean, proddies believe in Jesus as well, ye know.’
‘Never you mind um Aleck,’ said Shuggie. ‘Aw thae Papes ur the same. Jist too fuckin touchy.’
There was something needling in the way he said it. He was poking at Joe. But Joe just turned away and didn’t take him on. Aleck gave up trying to be the Defender of the Faith, and they all carried on with their hammering.
By the time the axes were ready, Shuggie had to go away. Every Sunday he had to take a bundle of laundry to his granny’s, collect her washing for his mother to take to the steamie.
‘Ah’ll plank ma hatchet here,’ he said, hiding it at the back of the midden in the hope that nobody would find it. Joe decided he’d go and watch the Sunday afternoon film on television, and Aleck thought he might as well go home and read his book, so they hid their axes beside Shuggie’s.
‘See yis efter tea then,’ said Shuggie.
‘Right yar,’ said Joe. ‘Come doontae mah hoose furst.’
‘Right yar, see yis.’
‘OK.’
‘See yis.’
‘Cheerio.’
After tea, Aleck again found himself in Joe’s close, and he was feeling miserable. The book hadn’t been very good and his father had bawled at him for being cheeky to Mrs Gallacher earlier on. As he rapped at the door, he noticed the score on the wall had been changed again and now read CELTIC 70000 RANGERS 10000.
It was Joe who opened the door, and he took Aleck into the small bedroom he shared with his two young brothers, where Shuggie was already waiting. The rest of the family were in the other bedroom watching TV. Joe went out of the room to get his jacket and Aleck looked around him. He was fascinated by the Catholic things in the room; the Crucifix, the Sacred Heart, the framed certificate issued at first communion. He often felt envious of all the trappings and rites of the Catholic church. They seemed much more interesting than their own drab ceremonies.
He picked up a small bottle of Lourdes water from the mantelpiece. It was made from clear plastic and shaped like the Virgin Mary. It had a blue screw-on cap which formed the Virgin’s crown and the name LOURDES was printed on the base in raised letters. Joe would sometimes sip some of the water and top up the level from the kitchen tap. Aleck was examining the bottle when Joe came back in.
‘D’ye fancy a slug?’ he asked. Aleck hesitated. He thought perhaps it would be a terrible sin for a Protestant to drink Holy Water. But Joe persisted. ‘Ach goan! Jist a wee sip’ll dae ye good. We kin aw take some.’
Aleck unscrewed the cap and sipped some. It just tasted like ordinary water (which by this time it probably was). He passed it to Shuggie who gulped some down, looked pleased with himself and passed it on to Joe, who took some himself and sneaked into the kitchen to fill the bottle up with tap-water. Once he’d replaced it, they all trooped out, and Aleck felt like a conspirator in some monstrous crime. It was just starting to get dark as they went and collected their axes, which were just where they’d left them. Then they decided to try and get some wood to build a hut in the back court. The best place to try was the woodwork. It should just be a matter of avoiding being caught by the watchman, so they set out across the wasteground behind Shuggie’s back court.
When they reached the woodwork they decided that Aleck should keep watch while Shuggie and Joe climbed over the wall to see what was to be found. ‘Ah’ll gie ye a pucky up,’ said Shuggie, making a step for Joe by clasping his hands together, palms upward. Joe put his foot on this and Shuggie hoisted him up so that he could scramble on to the top of the wall.
‘It looks awright,’ he said. ‘Ah’ll dreepy doon.’ He let himself down on the other side and Shuggie jumped up, gripped the top of the wall and pulled himself up. Before dropping down on to the other side he shouted down to Aleck, who was holding the tomahawks.
‘Mind the Hangman disnae get ye!’
Aleck laughed but felt very uneasy. The Hangman was right next to where he was standing, up against the woodwork wall. During the day it was just a lamp-post and its gallows shape held no terrors. But by night the lamp cast a vague shadow against the wall behind, and if you once admitted it looked like a hanging corpse, it became very difficult to see it as anything else. So it had become the Hangman. (Aleck had once thought maybe it ought to be ‘Hanged Man’, but then Hangman was easier to say.)
The street leading up to the Hangman was flanked by tenements to within about a hundred yards of the lamp-post, but this last hundred yards was bounded on one side by a blank factory wall and on the other by the area of wasteground they’d just crossed. And at night this desolate stretch, without the comfort of lighted windows on either side, was a place to be scurried past or avoided or tentatively crossed for a dare or for the sake of splashing some colour into a drab toneless evening.
Their fear of the Hangman had been heightened and confirmed by the death of Shuggie’s father, for it was only a few yards away his body had been found. Round the body the police had drawn a yellow line which hadn’t washed off for days afterwards. It had just lain there like a grotesque after-image. Aleck had had a frightening, confused dream in which he was at one moment lying down on the cobbled street with a yellow line drawn round him and at the next he was simultaneously watching what was going on and hanging from the lamp-post looking down at the grinning corpse of Shuggie’s father, staring up at him, starting to move.
Aleck was beginning to feel really creepy and he felt grateful and relieved to see Shuggie scramble back over the wall, followed by a length of rope and then by Joe.
‘We couldnae get any wid,’ panted Shuggie. ‘The bastards must’ve loacked it up.’
‘Whit ur we gonnae dae noo?’ asked Aleck.
Shuggie thought for a moment.
‘We could go an raid the Winey.’
‘Awright. C’mon.’
Shuggie wound the rope round him like a bandolero, over his right shoulder and under his right arm.
Aleck took off the trenchcoat his mother had made him wear and fastened it round his neck by the top button, like a cape.
They let out a whoop, and brandishing their axes, they set off at a run, whipping imaginary horses to a gallop.
‘Tanterryanterryanterry aaaaaaan!’
‘Winey’ was short for ‘The Wine Alley’, a small pre-war housing scheme backing on to a railway line. Although the actual houses were better than where Aleck lived, the tenements much cleaner and each flat with an inside bathroom, the place itself had some reputation for thuggery and violence. It was a bit unfair on most of the people living there, but it couldn’t be denied that there were more fights, arrests and general disturbances here than in the surrounding area. When Aleck had read about Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist, he’d thought of the Wine Alley. It had its own identity, its own isolation. Aleck had grown up knowing it as the Winally, one word, and he’d thought that was its official name; it was only recently he’d realised it was
a nickname and it was two separate words.
To reach it from where they were, they had to re-cross the wasteground into Shuggie’s back, go through his close into the street, and cross the main road about a hundred yards away. They crossed this road, still at a gallop, and charged through a canyon between two gable-ends. This led them into a rectangular back court.
Their first act on entering the Wine Alley was to knock down a washing pole so that the line sagged and the washing trailed to the ground. It was that kind of evening and they were in that kind of mood. Whooping and yelling, they ran off and took refuge in the doorway of one of the wartime bomb-shelters that dominated the back. These shelters made good gang-huts and they were favourite screwing places for older boys and girls.
They stayed there till they got their breath back, Shuggie and Joe squatting in the doorway, Aleck chopping with his axe at a clump of nettles.
At Joe’s suggestion they decided to play KDRF. That meant Kick Door Run Fast (or Kick Door Run like Fuck!) and they trooped off to do just that. Steal into a close, choose a door, each boot it in turn and scurry away.
After they’d kicked a few doors, Shuggie unwound the rope which he was still wearing.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll tie a cuppla doors thegether.’
They chose one of the closes they’d been through already, and while Aleck and Joe kept watch at either closemouth, Shuggie stealthily tied the ends of the rope to the handles of two opposing doors. This was a variant of KDRF in which, with any luck, the people who tried to open the doors would be set heaving and straining in a ridiculous tug-of-war as the taut rope kept the doors closed.
But this time Shuggie was just in the act of booting the second of the doors when a huge woman from the landing above came lumbering down the stairs and chased him and Aleck into the street, bellowing after them as they ran.
‘Gan ya durty wee bastards!’
Joe, who’d been at the back of the close, had made his escape into the back court, and when Aleck and Shuggie realised the woman wasn’t after them, they stopped running and went to look for him, going through another close further up the road. When they found him he was nursing a grazed hand. In the scramble from the close he’d got his legs tangled up with his axe and he’d fallen and scraped his hand on the ground.