And if not that, then what of this whisper for his soul?
My Name Is Barney
'My name's Barney, and I'm a murderer.'
It was a busy reception desk; two officers behind the counter going about their business; fourteen or fifteen various members of the public, from concerned parents to assorted criminal element, on the other side, awaiting their turn. The man in the green jumper and purple Teflon C&A slacks had finally reached the front of the queue after an hour and a half. But this was a man who was used to waiting. Time meant very little to him, and so he had sat and listened to the problems of others while watching the occasional drama unfold. He was unsure if he was doing the right thing, but if it would rid him of his nightmares, then it had to be done.
The desk sergeant continued to write slowly, the laggard movements of the pen betraying a slight trembling of the fingers. After a while he lifted his head and looked at the middle-aged man, two yards across the counter. There was a discernible twitch in the sergeant's eye; his lips drifted between a sneer and a smile; a vein throbbed in his forehead, another in his neck. Needed a cigarette. He deliberately put down the pen, then leant forward, the palms of his hands flattened on the desktop. His head twitched.
'Barney?' he said.
'Aye,' said the man in green. 'Barney.'
'You don't mean Barney Thomson?' said the sergeant.
A glimmer of a smile came to the man's lips, but it died quickly, as had all his smiles this past year or so.
'Aye, aye,' he said. 'Barney Thomson. I suppose you'll have heard all about me.'
The desk sergeant nodded.
'Oh aye, Wee Man, everyone knows all about you. It'll be you who killed your two work colleagues in the barber's shop, disposed of the bodies of your mother's victims and may, or may not, depending on your point of view, have had something to do with the murder of thirty-three monks in the monastery in Sutherland about a year ago. Am I right?'
'Aye, aye,' said the man in purple Teflon breeks, 'that's me. Mind you, I definitely didn't kill any of they eejits in the monastery. I was there right enough, but it wasn't me that did it. Apart from the real murderer, of course.'
'Aye, of course,' said the sergeant. He went silent, fixing the man with a disconcerting stare. Didn't move a muscle, his eyes burrowing into the man. Like a jackhammer into cheese.
The silence continued.
'What?' said the man eventually. Beginning to feel unnerved. The strength of his conviction disarmed.
The sergeant raised himself up to his full height – some seven or eight feet – then continued his stare from on high. Finally he pointed a finger back into the depths of reception at another, younger man sitting on a bench; a man with Elvis sideboards and hair that required cutting by an experienced barber.
'See that wee guy sitting over there?' he said, and the man in green nodded. He had noticed him earlier; Sideboards Elvis had been sitting there since he'd arrived.
'Funny thing is,' continued the desk sergeant, 'that he's Barney Thomson 'n' all. And strangely enough, if it isn't just the kind of coincidence to make you want to slash your wrists in astonishment, but there's another Barney Thomson back here getting interviewed as we speak.'
He finished, raising his eyebrows as he did so.
'What d'you mean?'
'What do you think I mean, heid-the-ba'? Are you that stupid, Wee Man? You're the fifth Barney Thomson we've had in here today. Yesterday we had a couple and the day before that we had seven – two of them were Nigerians.' The desk sergeant continued to stare across the divide; the man in Teflon wilted. 'You getting the picture yet, Wee Man? In the past year we've had nearly a thousand Barney Thomsons giving themselves up. There isn't a stupid bastard out there who doesn't want to be Barney Thomson. There are sheep who think they're Barney Thomson. My mother thinks she's Barney Thomson. And now it's just over a week before Christmas, so even more of you sad bastards are crawling out of the woodwork.'
'But ... but I am Barney Thomson. I really am.'
'Fine. You want to be Barney Thomson, that's fine by me. You going to show us some ID?'
The man in Teflon patted his empty pockets. The shoulders slowly shrugged at the even more contemptuous look winging its way across the counter in his direction.
'Don't have any,' he said eventually. Very, very small voice.
'You don't have any?' said the sergeant. 'That's not much bloody good, is it, Wee Man? You could've made a bit more of an effort. Even the saddest bastards who come in here make at least a token attempt. Last week we had a wee seventy-five-year-old woman saying she was Barney Thomson, but at least she'd made the effort to score the name out on her Blockbuster video card and write Barney bloody Thomson in crayon across the top. Initiative, you see,' he added, prodding his head with his forefinger.
'But ... but I am Barney Thomson. I've just been away, you know. Where am I going to get any ID?'
The desk sergeant folded his arms across the Wyomingesque expanses of his chest. Delved back into his hard stare for a second or two, then shook his head.
'Very well, Mr Thomson,' he said, 'have it your way. If you'd just like to take a seat I'll try to get around to seeing you some time before I die. But I'm promising nothing.'
'Oh, right,' said the man. 'Right.'
And so, as the desk sergeant turned his attention to another man who had been waiting some amount of time, a man with a duffel bag full of light armour over his shoulder, Barney Thomson, the genuine Barney Thomson among a thousand impostors, turned and walked out of Maryhill police station and back onto the streets of Glasgow.
***
It had been a strange year for Barney Thomson. Not quite as strange as the year that had preceded it – from now on any year that did not see him involved, indirectly involved, implicated in or downright completely innocent of at least forty murders would seem tame – but strange nevertheless.
Set free to walk the Earth and get in adventures with the good wishes of two officers of the Strathclyde constabulary, he had discovered that it was very difficult to settle somewhere far from home. It took a peculiar kind of man to walk into a new town, penniless and without an identity, and create a life for himself; and Barney Thomson was not that man.
The previous year had seen some sort of epiphany for him, no question of that. It had been his year of awakening. It had threatened to turn him into some sort of vegetable, but he had emerged a stronger man, with an excellent sense of perspective and a firm grasp of the vagaries of the human mind. This year's model was almost a well-rounded individual, but still he was not comfortable with strangers; still he was a Glasgow man.
And so, though his year of wandering the Earth had taken him around Scotland, and even briefly into enemy territory south of the border, he had constantly felt the pull to return to Glasgow. The city of his fathers, a world of opportunity, a town where a boy could become a man, a man could be king, a king a god, and a god the very begetter of the Armageddon of disillusion, the eviscerator of failure and the gatekeeper to the crucible of realpolitik. (You thought some amount of shite while walking the Earth and getting in adventures.)
He had contemplated all sorts of ways of going home. New identities, beards, any number of facial or sartorial gimmicks to fool the forces of the law. But there remained shreds of decency and honesty in the man, there remained a feeling that he ought to have faced punishment for his crimes; punishment beyond his own mental torture and physical hardship. And then there were the dreams. Night after night, waking in a cold sweat. A talk-show host abusing him, a minister, his back turned, murmuring softly for Barney's soul, while all the time Death crept up at his shoulder. The very thought made him shiver.
And so he had returned to the very police station from which the forces of the law had emerged to interview and hound him over the accidental deaths of his two work colleagues, and the serial-killing hobby of his mother. He had walked into this demon's lair, he had proclaimed his identity; he had at last done the decent, honest,
deed.
And what did he do now that he had been spurned? Give it another go perhaps, at some other station, just to test the water. Presumably he would get the same reaction. And if they were not interested, then so be it.
Fuck 'em.
That's what he thought as he headed down the street. Nervousness suddenly evaporated, a new insight into life in Glasgow given to him. Everyone said they were Barney Thomson, so no one was particularly going to believe he was who he said. There were more lines on his face than there had been, a lot more grey hair. He could walk among the masses and no one need ever know. He might look a bit like the bloke in the photos, but then everyone's got a double. That's what they said. It could just be, he thought, that he was a free man.
But there are different types of freedom, and it would take more than waiting in a police station for an hour and a half to free him from his nightmares.
Might as well go and visit the wife, he thought, walking with a little more purpose than of late, up the street. Would take about twenty minutes. Didn't feel nervous. Or interested or bothered for that matter, but he thought he might as well check out how she was doing. It was not as if she was going to have any friends to whom she could report his homecoming.
And as he dodged the cars and felt more at one with his fellow pedestrians than for some time, he wondered if the lousy soap operas his wife always watched, such as Anal Accident Ward B and Only the Bald, would be as bad as they always had been.
An Instance In The Life Of Blue Hawaii
He was happy enough, Stevie Grogan, happy enough. Loved his two boys, his wife, God and the White Album, approximately in that order. Job was all right, though he couldn't afford satellite TV – which was just as well from the marriage fulfilment point of view, given the amount of sport he would have watched – and he had to take the family to that Monaco on the Clyde, Millport, for their holiday every year. Jean Grogan hated it, spending all her time cleaning, but the boys would be all right for another couple of years, until puberty kicked in and they wanted to have sex, smoke drugs and beat up old people, rather than look for crabs in rock pools and cycle endlessly around the island.
Not concentrating as he drove that night, which was nothing unusual. With some unexpected serendipity, which had been absent for most of the rest of his life, he was listening to Wreck on the Highway, that Springsteen paean to gloom, heartache, loneliness and desperation. Talking in his head to Jean, trying to explain how he'd almost slept with one of the plutonium tarts at work, but that he hadn't, so that was the main thing; not the fact that he'd only been thwarted by Plutonium Tart's indifference, rather than his own conscience. Sounded good in his head.
Used his hands to talk sometimes. Which was what he was doing when the cat ran out in front of him. A cat called Blue Hawaii. One hand loosely held at the bottom of the wheel, one hand nowhere near. Grogan's body tensed in shock, his loose hand tugged desperately at the wheel, the other flew aimlessly between gear-stick and nowhere. The open section of road in front careered away from him and suddenly he was heading towards a field; black as black.
Blue Hawaii the cat watched.
Difficult to say if Grogan would have survived if he'd braked hard and early. But something happened. His life flashed before him, and he had his defining moment of clarity, his epiphany, and at once it all seemed obvious. The insurance policy, the endowment, it was all set up. He was better off to his family dead than alive.
He would not go quietly; he would not go slope-shouldered to his grave. He would die like a man ...
And so, not knowing what lay out there beyond the limited horizon of his headlights, he floored the accelerator. Better to go flat out than to die in some desperate rearguard action. And with that extra acceleration, as the car left the road it partially lifted off, clearing the low wall it would otherwise have smacked into; and consequently hit a tree, some twenty yards away, more than ten feet off the ground.
The car bent and buckled and fell broken to the ground, where it landed directly on the top of the corpse of Wee Corky Nae Nuts, whose body had lain undetected for over nine weeks.
The car exploded in a stupendous ball of flame, the tree burned, the bodies burned, the night came alive with fire.
And although the police would eventually be able to identify the corpses of Stevie Grogan and Corky Nae Nuts, and they would know that Wee Corky had been dead for over two months, the cause of his death would remain in ashes, and they would not know to add him to the list of victims of that year's serial killer. A list which was about to begin to grow.
And as the flames tasted the cold night air, off ran Blue Hawaii the cat, in search of another victim.
My Name Is Socrates
'Good afternoon, everyone.'
The 'hellos' and 'good afternoons' were returned to him from around the room. He steadied himself, tried not to think too hard of what he was about to do. He had been coming to the group for more than a year and had yet to talk. At every meeting Katie Dillinger had asked quietly, with no hint of coercion, if he was ready to speak. At every meeting he had balked and hidden behind the jokes and the forced good humour.
Finally, though, he was ready. If any of them had asked him to explain what was so different about that afternoon, he wouldn't have been able to answer; but none of them would, for they had all been there in that blighted place, where truth would out and the past would be faced. Perhaps it was the proximity of Christmas, that great embellisher of every negative emotion, that multiplier of sadnesses. But for whatever reason, it was the turn of Socrates, and so urgent was the need to talk, now that it had come, that he could not wait for the next meeting and Dillinger had called a surprise session of the group. Not all of them had been able to attend, but there were enough to hear his cry.
'My name is Socrates and I'm a murderer,' he said at last, and the room was filled with applause.
Socrates McCartney smiled. Katie Dillinger clasped her hands and waved them at him, a huge smile on her face.
'Well done, Socrates,' she said. 'Well done.'
He smiled again, but then the applause died away and he was left with a silence that he himself had to fill.
'Youse have probably all been wondering for ages how I got my name. People usually do. There are two options, of course. They think it's either 'cause of the philosopher geezer or yon Brazilian fitba' player with bad hair and a fusty beard. And you know, there's a possibility about both, 'cause I have been known to spout some amount of philosophical shite in my time, and I can also blooter a ball into the net from thirty yards if I've got half a bottle of J&B down my neck. Even had a trial for Albion Rovers when I was a lad, but I couldn't be arsed. Truth be told, I was beginning to think I might be a bit of a poof in those days and I thought the communal baths might tip me over the edge. So I jacked it in and started hanging out in aerobics classes with a bunch of women.'
'Did it work?' asked Paul Galbraith. The Hammer.
'Oh aye, no bother. I think I was just confused due to some post-pubescent crush on David Cassidy in The Partridge Family. Anyway, I chucked the fitba'. If it's no' for you, it's no' for you. There you are, a philosophical thought to take home with you the night,' he said, smiling at the daftness of the last remark and being rewarded with a few smiles in return. A brief pause and he was back in the flow.
'Anyway, it's nothing to do with fitba' and it's nothing to do with philosophy. Socrates was a horse that ran in the two-fifteen at Ayr on the twenty-third of October 1981. Nothing special about the lad, just a wee horse. Fourteen to one, bit of an outsider. Now I wasn't a gambling man or anything like that, just had a wee bet every now and again. Never had a problem with it. I had a friend in the business but, and he used to sling sure things my way every now and again, you know. I never asked how he knew, I never queried his business or the horse-racing business, I wasn't interested. So I started slowly, you know. The first time he told me, I stuck a wee fiver on. Gradually, as I began to trust the guy, I upped the bets. And here's the t
hing. He was never wrong. Never. By the time it came to wee Socrates, I must've been paid out on more than twenty bets. I was never extravagant, you know, so I hadn't made millions, but I had a few thousand by then. Had spent it all, of course. Anyway, I meets this bird. Nice enough looking bit of stuff. Different class. You could tell. Didn't shag me on the first night. Took me nearly a week to get into her knickers, so I knew she was for me. Decided to get married, and you know how it is, one thing led to another, and it ended up we were going to have the biggest wedding since Elizabeth the First...'
'She was never married,' said Morty Goldman, a man of compulsive obsessive personality, and the most dangerous in the room. A quiet lad, you might have thought, however. The sort you'd take home to meet your folks. Bearsden born and bred, unlike some of these other interlopers.
'Aye, fine, whatever. Some other rich bastard, then. It was going to be huge. But, of course, my dad couldn't afford it, and she didn't even know who her dad was, so where was the money going to come from? Especially, you see, since I'd promised the lassie a nice house up in these parts, and a honeymoon in Bermuda. She was all excited, and I didn't like to tell her that I couldn't afford a tenement flat in Govan and a honeymoon in Montrose. But I loved her,'n' all that, so I had to get the money from somewhere. So, along comes my mate with this horse. Socrates. Good fucking timing, so's I thought. Fourteen to one. What a chance. He gave me three days' notice, don't put the bet on till just before the off, the usual thing. So's in that three days I borrowed and collected as much money as I could. Put myself in debt with about five different bastards. All sorts that youse just wouldn't want to mess with. The sort of eejits that make Billy's Sammy the Buddhist bloke look like, I don't know, a Buddhist. These were bad men. But I did it. Got together about ten grand. Suspicious, I know, but I just thought, sod it. This is my chance, I've got to do it.'
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