‘Yes, he was. I knew him longer than you. He was always on about something or somebody. He even had the nerve to argue with the old man. They were always arguing the toss. This’ll be a terrible shock for the old man. He liked him, you know. Och, to hell, I liked the fella too, even though he made a bloody nuisance of himself.’
‘Jimmy’s not dead. You said he was only upset.’
Melvin’s face darkened with annoyance.
‘I told you he’d been to the prison and got himself all worked up and I was right. How was I to know he’d gone too far and was going to die on my doorstep? I wouldn’t have known yet, but Mata Hari across the landing was spying through her keyhole. She saw him drop and came hirpling straight in to tell me.’
‘Jimmy’s dead?’
‘That’ll be another night and day the place will be shut,’ Melvin said. ‘And he’ll have a big funeral. Here, I bet the old man’ll shut the shop on the day of the funeral as well. Jumpin’ Jesus, that’ll be three days.’
The veil of romantic fiction, the fairy-tales, all the comforting imaginings she had always hopefully clung to ripped away. Through death, she saw life.
‘Oh, well!’ Melvin scratched his moustache. ‘As long as I get my wages!’
No fairy godmother. No Sir Galahad. No ship coming in. No last minute happy ending. Nothing round the corner.
‘I’ll need all the money I can lay my hands on now that you’re pregnant.’
‘Pregnant!’
Life went on. People went on, generation after generation, countless millions. Poseurs behind masks, duping themselves with self-importance, busy with minutiae.
‘I don’t suppose you even know what the word pregnant means. You don’t know nothing, darlin’!’ Melvin got up, stretching his muscles and laughing.
Life was the survival of the fittest.
Life was Glasgow, tough, harsh, complex, warm with humanity, with generous helping hands, with caring in abundance.
It was the caring that mattered.
‘I’m learning,’ she said.
A BABY MIGHT BE CRYING
To my sons Kenneth Baillie Davis and
Calvin Royce Davis with much love.
Chapter 1
Excitement crowded the Glasgow air like fast-bouncing footballs. Flags rippled and crackled. Everywhere the Scottish lion cocked up on its haunches, paws sparring. Headlines boasted:
EMPIRE EXHIBITION—1938
Alec Jackson felt on top of the world. Head and shoulders above everyone else he swaggered along Springburn Road, whistling through mobile lips well practised in exploring women as well as sound.
He winked in passing at a huge fat wife with a wispy black moustache and a head spiky with curlers.
‘Hello there, gorgeous!’
The woman squealed with laughter then bawled after him:
‘Wait till I get my hands on you!’
He twisted round without slowing his pace and bulged his eyes in mock shock.
‘Sex maniac!’
Then, still without bothering to look where he was going, he swung into the dark close at the corner of Springburn Road and Wellfield Street.
‘Oops!’ The pram he had bumped into creaked with the weight of three children and was pushed by a grey ghost. ‘You don’t need to use force, gorgeous. I’m all yours!’
‘Alec!’ The ghost changed with a smile, tightened, brightened, became a self-conscious, coy young girl. ‘What a fright you gave me. You shot in the close like a bullet. Do you never take your time?’
He pinched her bottom as he passed to go clattering up the stone stairs.
‘I would with you, love.’
He stopped on the first landing, his fist raised to rat-tat-tat at the middle door, when he remembered that the Hunters had moved from their single-end to a room and kitchen on the top flat.
He took the other two flights three steps at a time and reaching the top attacked the door with a good loud thumping.
It opened in a couple of minutes and he followed Ruth Hunter to the left of the shoe-box hall and into the kitchen, his eyes never leaving the undulating flesh beneath her pink sweater and red skirt.
‘Two shillings, is it?’ she appealed, lifting her handbag from a chair and easing a softly rounded hand inside it.
‘You can have it for nothing from me any day, gorgeous!’
One eyebrow arched up as she slid a look that cut him down with sarcastic disapproval, yet the sexual awareness still remained.
He snapped open his brief-case, tossed his book on to the table and thumbed through the pages.
Sammy Hunter was a lucky man. He could imagine Ruth pestering him for it, pleading with him every night.
With one hand Ruth slid a two-shilling piece across the table, with the other she guided her insurance book towards him. He marked up the book with a flourish.
‘I like your new place.’ Alec gazed around the kitchen as he tucked his pen into his pocket, and gave himself a pat. ‘You and Sammy certainly have good taste.’
She forgot her sexy performance for a minute. Enthusiasm and childish eagerness rushed to take its place.
‘You really think so?’
‘Of course I do, love. Real high class, this place is. The pair of you have worked a miracle in here.’
‘Sammy did all the electrical work. He studied a book on how to do it. We did the painting and decorating between us.’
‘Good for you!’
‘We had to get a plumber to shift the sink, though.’
He looked over to the kitchen window where all the houses had their sinks, with pot cupboards underneath. In place of a sink, a sewing-machine stood in front of the window. Gold curtains were drawn back on either side and, on top of the machine, a vase of marigolds reflected the sun like glistening oranges.
‘Shift the jaw-box?’
‘Into the cupboard! Isn’t it marvellous?’
Ruth knocked into a chair in her hurry to reach the cupboard door and two or three long strides took Alec over beside her to peer inside.
‘What a bloody good idea!’
She flashed him a look and he apologised for the ‘bloody’, but she wasn’t really annoyed. Sheer joyous pride swamped every other emotion.
‘It’s even got a light!’
The light clicked on, displaying Sammy’s patient and conscientious workmanship of shelves and drawers fitted to the walls and under the sink. Alec could just see Sammy with a book in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. If he had managed a window that would have been something. Still, it was a bloody good idea.
‘I like the colours.’ He grinned and nudged Ruth, immediately electrifying himself with the heat and the bouncy resilience of her flesh. ‘None of the old cream and green, eh?’
She shrank away but it was a graceful feminine movement. She had remembered sex again.
‘I love pink and red. It’s so nice and warm.’
‘Yeah!’ Alec’s groan of enthusiasm aimed straight for the bulging sweater and skirt. Pressing back against the sewing-machine, wriggling quickly then slowly as if she were squashed up against him, she shrank further away.
‘Do you like it here?’ He gathered a kiss in his fingertips and flipped it to her. Ruth brushed past him, the invitation in her eyes hooking him and pulling him along.
‘The room’s the best,’ she said and a pulse skittered through him.
The kitchen bed-recess had been made into a dining-area. That meant that the bed must be in the room. ‘The room’s the best all right,’ thought Alec. Hallelujah! Unexpectedly Ruth stopped and indicated a cabinet made of the same polished oak as the sewing-machine.
‘That’s the bed. The mattress folds up inside during the day.’
Alec did not give up hope. He grinned cheekily down at her.
‘I’ve heard of it happening in many a place but a cabinet’s a new one on me, love.’
The sarcastic look returned, sarcastic, yet sexy.
‘You want to see the room?’
Across the small hallway she picked her way, high heels clicking on the linoleum, buttocks bunching and quivering. He could imagine her as a sultan’s favourite concubine, or a king’s mistress at a French court, or a hot-blooded temptress of a belly dancer. A belly dancer — couldn’t he just imagine that!
In the front room, she swivelled towards him, her breasts jiggling like jellies.
‘Of course, it’s not nearly finished yet. Still the bare boards, but look at the paper! It’s the latest thing. We got it in town. And see the hole-in-the-wall bed?’
He lit a cigarette to help keep his hands off her.
‘Eh? Where?’
Delighted again, a child-woman, she giggled and wiggled, and pointed to the wall where the bed-recess ought to have been.
‘Behind there. We’re using it as a store place. Sammy made the wall, imagine! It’s wood, papered over. Listen!’
She tripped over to press herself against the wall and knock on it.
She looked good enough to eat.
‘Fascinating!’
‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘I was thinking you look good enough to eat.’
She struggled to cool her giggles, to flap superciliously at him with thick lashes on a tip-tilted face.
‘It’s really too early to show it to anybody yet.’
‘Never mind.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll be back.’
She ignored his innuendoes.
‘Have you got tickets for the Exhibition, by the way?’
‘Sure. I’ve got a season. I’ll be there at the opening ceremony with the King and Queen in Ibrox Stadium tomorrow. Will you and Sammy be there?’
‘No, we’re going straight to Bellahouston Park. Sammy hasn’t much time for royalty or the military or the powers that be. Sammy’s very independent-minded.’
‘Me too, but it’s the wife.’ He shook his head. ‘Anything for a peaceful life.’
‘There’s going to be a march-past of all the services, isn’t there? It’s Sammy’s father. You know what he’s like, don’t you?’
‘Who doesn’t?’ He grinned. ‘If it wasn’t for his gammy leg I bet he’d be marching along beside them, bawling the odds.’ He coarsened his voice to a snarl. ‘Left, right, left, right, left, left.’
She shook her head and sighed as she opened the outside door but her eyes were smiling and her red mouth full and soft.
‘Cheerio, Alec.’
‘Cheerio, love.’
He savoured her all the way down the stairs and when he crossed the road outside he looked up at her front room window in the hope that she might be there to give him a wave. The double window in the old tenement building sparkled with cleanliness and was edged with royal blue curtains. It looked like a precious jewel in a crumbling stone setting.
Ruth had been on his book nearly three years now, almost from the time she married Sammy and moved into the single-end at Springburn Road. She had been sweet sixteen then but every bit as lush as she was now. He reckoned that she must always have been sexy. Even as a two-year-old those eyes of hers would have had a coquettish twinkle.
He had missed out on those years because, apart from being quite a bit younger than Alec, Ruth was a Springburn girl and he had been born and brought up at Townhead. He had always been secretly proud of his origins, although he would tell people that Glasgow could sink in the Clyde for all he cared; and that he would rather have been from wealthy blue-blooded stock, with the emphasis on wealthy. The truth was that he was proud to be a true Glaswegian, with his roots in the oldest part of town. Glasgow had not originated down at the Saltmarket on the edge of the River Clyde as a lot of people imagined.
Years ago, as a wee laddie sheltering from the rain in the public library, Alec had discovered that St Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow, had set up his monastery across the road, only a stone’s throw from his own tenement building. St Mungo had chosen the very ground where Glasgow Cathedral now stood, grey and aloof yet not too far back from the crush and buzz of the Castle Street pavements, only separated by the small Cathedral Square, with its statue of King Billy on a horse with a broken tail that would wag in the wind.
From the Saltmarket at the river’s edge to High Street and Castle Street then on to Springburn Road was practically a straight line on the map, right through Springburn to Bishopbriggs, once the bishop’s riggs or fields.
Graduating from an infancy of tottering about his own back-court and close, Alec had first explored the area immediately surrounding it. Against the skyline of the Necropolis across the road, all crowding together, stood the cathedral, the towering Royal Infirmary, Duke Street Prison and the Drygait where, according to the book, such great lords as the Dukes of Montrose had their town houses long before the prison dominated the place, a giant black castle of doom.
He had chuckled at the thought of lords living there because he knew the Drygait only as a slum.
Then on his own side of the street was Provand’s Lordship, the oldest house in Glasgow, now a museum. King James II and King James IV of Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots were all supposed to have slept there.
As he got older Alec had wandered further afield down High Street to the Gallowgate and along to the Barrows, or right down by the Saltmarket to Glasgow Green and the river.
He didn’t very often travel up the other end towards Springburn because at that time there never seemed to be anything of much interest there. Springburn Park was the only exception. It meant a really wild game of football, plenty of swings, a pond with paddle boats, and if you took a jar you could catch minnows.
Alec had seen Sammy there long before Ruth had met him. The irony of it! Instead of bumping into Ruth, it had to be young Sammy. It would have been hard to miss him, of course, a red-haired, dour-faced unwilling conscript into his father’s army.
Hodge Hunter, an ex-sergeant-major in the military police, marched his brood round the park every Sunday and then forced them all through a variety of physical jerks. Kids came from miles around to jeer at them and risk a fractured skull from Hodge’s silver-topped stick.
If only he had hung around Springburn Road instead of the park! Alec cursed himself as he legged along the road. If only he had lounged around the cafés, or the corners, he might have met Ruth before Sammy did.
But what was the use of worrying? The old shoulder-twitching bouncy swagger returned, and he was whistling cheerily by the time he turned right into Cowlairs Road past a few closes and right turn again into Cowlairs Road where he now lived.
His whistle bounced off the dark brick tunnel entrance of the Road and reverberated back from all sides like noisy drumming, with the clanging of two feet on the cobbles making a riotous accompaniment.
Emerging at the other end in the yard, with houses squashing in all round and the row of overflowing middens in the centre, he made a rush at a tin can and dribbled it across to the outside iron-railed staircase of Number Five. One last kick at the can before it was pounced on by a horde of howling footballers in short trousers and braces some sporting shirts, some jerseys, some vests, others bare-chested.
Up the stone steps two at a time, his brief-case banging against the railings. Then into the close, a wooden-floored one that thumped hollow, past the bottom-flat doors and up creaking wood stairs to his own right-hand door on the first landing.
The door stood open and Sheena the mongrel bitch lolloped out to meet him, tail a-wag.
‘Down, girl! Get off!’ He shied her away with his brief-case, rattling along the lobby littered with clothes pegs, pot lids and empty milk bottles.
Madge called from the kitchen:
‘I’ll murder Sadie and Agnes. They were supposed to pick them up.’
She was sitting wide-legged by the kitchen range feeding Maisie. Maisie was nearly a year old and Alec’s mother said it was time she was off the breast but Madge just laughed.
‘Och, what’s the harm? If the bairn howls during the night, the breast�
��s easier than getting up for drinks or to make bottles.’
They had produced four children in their four years of marriage, the four-year-old twins, Sadie and Agnes, Hector who was three, and Maisie the youngest.
‘Sadie!’ Madge yelled in the direction of the kitchen door and the room beyond. ‘Agnes, come on, hen. Clear the place up for Daddy!’
Maisie sucked on regardless as Alec chucked her under her wet chin and fondled the heavy pendulous breast squashing against her busy pink cheeks.
‘Get off,’ Madge told him automatically, but she raised her face to be kissed, a square, shiny face with fine white skin smudged with freckles. His lips fastened warmly and wetly over hers and his tongue was just beginning to weave from side to side and push further in when she suddenly broke away, big-mouthed with laughter.
‘Sheena! My God, her nose is cold.’
‘Down, girl. Down!’ Alec cuffed the dog’s ears and its head bounced off Maisie who sucked on, ignoring it. ‘I’ll just put my case away, Madge, then I’ll run down to give MacVene my line.’
‘Hey, never mind giving the bookie your money. How about me? Remember you promised to take us to the Exhibition tomorrow. It’s no use going without any money. Especially on the first day.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the winnings, you big-breasted beauty you!’
‘Get off!’
She punched him and tucked her short straight hair behind her ears.
‘Tea’s ready. Don’t you be long.’
Already he was whistling away to the room to put his case in his roll-top desk.
Sadie and Agnes were getting the bottles and the pegs from the lobby.
‘Hello, sweethearts.’
He put his hand up Sadie’s skirt and tickled her, and on the way back he stopped to fondle Agnes, slipping his fingers inside her pants to feel the soft hot hairlessness of her, before whistling out of the house, across the yard and out of the Road.
MacVene was the bookie’s runner who hung around one of the closes further down Cowlairs Road and collected ‘lines’ or bets for O’Hara the bookie, his ferret eyes all the time watching for the police.
The Breadmakers Saga Page 19