My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  When I was a child, my father, Tommy Glass, drove things for a living. A long-distance lorry driver for a while, he gave that up so he could be home more. It’s funny the way things work out. He got a job on the docks, and when the war came that meant he was in a reserved occupation. This night I’m thinking of, he came home with an armful of books. As he set them down on the kitchen table, he must have asked where my mother was. Stupid question: she didn’t share her plans with me any more than she did with him. I’m talking now of years ago and so I can’t remember exactly how I pointed that out – ‘I don’t know where she is,’ said with a scowl, I’d guess; not knowing yet how lucky I was to have him there – but I remember his answer. ‘Who’s “she”?’ he asked. Not that he didn’t know, but he thought it was disrespectful of me at eleven to say ‘she’ instead of ‘Mummy’.

  He liked to cook, so there was one way I was lucky with him. He didn’t have a big range: fish and chips, toasted cheese with a poached egg on top, scrambled eggs, mince and tatties. As for what he made that night, that’s gone; not that it could possibly matter, though I’ve tried to remember. Probably not the mince and tatties: cooked up in a pot with turnip and carrots, that took time, and his detour up Maryhill Road to the library had made him late. Whatever it was, it would have been good; everything he made tasted good. But I shoved my plate away, maybe took a mouthful or two, maybe stirred my fork round in it, for sure shoved the plate away. I remember the way he looked at me when I did that. I should have been hungry. I’d been alone in the house since four o’clock. Chances are there would have been bread and jam; probably I’d stuffed myself on bread and jam.

  He ate one-handed while he read. I stayed at the table even though I wasn’t eating. When I caught him glancing up at me, he nodded at the pile of books and said, ‘Anything there you fancy?’

  And he meant anything, though every one of them was out of the adult library. I could look through whatever was there, no rhyme or reason to what he chose, not that I could see, all kinds of books caught his eye. Often, impatient, he’d pick up and lay down book after book, so that all of them went back unfinished. I used to wonder what he could be searching for that was so hard to find.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t looked.’

  ‘I don’t need to. It’ll be rubbish.’

  ‘Where have I heard that before?’ It was a word my mother used a lot. Shaking his head, he went on before I could open my mouth. ‘Found another one about King Arthur.’

  ‘We’ve finished with him.’

  ‘So what’s your teacher got you on now? I’ll look next time I’m in the library.’

  ‘Nothing.’ Why was I angry? Maybe I was tired of coming into an empty house.

  He pulled out a book from the pile and turned it so I could see the cover.

  ‘I was on my way out when I spotted it on the returns shelf. Don’t know what it’s like, but they’re all in there, Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, sitting around in their tin underwear waiting for a knock at the door to go off on an adventure.’ He pushed it over to me. ‘Have a look, Harry.’

  I pushed it back without a glance and got up to put on the wireless, too loud, I expect; that was a bad habit of mine. I’m pretty sure he sat on, reading at the table. What I remember is waking up during the night with the noise of the outside door slamming shut. Lying in the dark in the recess bed in the kitchen, I heard my father’s voice in the lobby and then my mother answering him. The voices weren’t angry or loud, and listening to them I fell asleep again. As usual, by the time I was up in the morning he’d gone to work.

  When I got back from school, I looked in the bedroom, half expecting to see my mother hitched up on the pillow with a cup of tea, and a fag in her mouth, but there was only a tangle of blankets on the empty bed. In the kitchen, I made myself a piece and jam, took my father’s seat at the table and picked up the book he’d left there for me. Because of the crown on his head, you could tell which one was supposed to be Arthur in the picture on the cover. He looked older than the others, and as if he had a lot on his mind. Lancelot was easy, too, long blond hair surrounded by light as if someone had left a door open to the sun. The book was too old for me, not a book of stories at all. Like a penance, I persisted with it, until I was left with a handful of words: medieval, chivalry, and in a footnote The Romance of the Rose. The main thing was that I’d looked at it. I wanted to be able to tell my father when he came home that I’d looked at it; but he didn’t come home, not that night or any other. Later we heard that he’d given up working on the docks, and then that he’d been called up. For a while, every time I walked past Maryhill Barracks I wondered if he was somewhere on the other side of the high wall with its ugly shards of broken glass.

  My mother said he must have been planning to leave. ‘He wouldn’t have the guts to say anything to me about meeting another woman. I should never have agreed to marry him. When I told him I was pregnant, “Marry me, Nettie,” he said, and like a fool I did.’

  She went on like that for years afterwards, whenever she thought of it. I learned not to argue about it, but no one else ever said anything about him being with another woman, and if he’d been planning to leave us what kind of sense did it make that he’d brought home all those books that night, and among them one for me? Why would he have done that?

  BOOK TWO

  The Age of Chivalry

  CHAPTER THREE

  Monday morning the new job made a reason to get up. I almost didn’t, though, which as things turned out would have been a pity. Most mornings I lay until the bang of the front door signalled I would have the house to myself. That would be somewhere around half eight and I’d get up and scrounge for breakfast, bread and something to put on it, a cup of tea.

  When I went barefoot into the kitchen, he was in his underpants at the sink filling the kettle. His name was Alec Turner, though I thought of him as the Hairy Bastard, and we’d shared the house since my mother walked out on him a year earlier, when I was seventeen.

  ‘What happened to you? You fall out of bed?’

  ‘You might have given me a shout,’ I complained. ‘I’m starting work this morning.’

  He gave me a look that would have soured milk and went out without saying anything. I was on my second cup of tea when he came back, opened the cupboard under the sink and started to scratch around in the rubbish pail.

  ‘What do you call that?’ Down on his hunkers, holding it up at the stretch of his arm to stick it under my nose.

  ‘What would you call it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d call it empty. That was for my supper last night.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ There didn’t seem anything to say to that. I put the kettle on the ring and lit the gas.

  ‘You listening to me, Harry?’ He smelled of bed sweat and sweet aftershave in the morning. It was a smell I’d hated since at fourteen I’d seen him for the first time and realised my mother must have brought him back with her from the dancing the night before.

  ‘Are you listening to me, you wee shit?’

  When I turned round, I was looking down on his bald patch. Hair everywhere else, not only on his chest, but a pelt of it on his back and little tufts on the back of his fingers. Plus smell. Not that he wasn’t clean enough; no aroma of piss, nothing like that. Jungly smell. Maybe it went with being such a hairy bastard. Me Tarzan, you Nettie.

  ‘I want you out of here, boy.’

  ‘Where am I supposed to go?’

  ‘You should have thought of that.’

  ‘Before I ate your bloody corned beef?’ That came out wrong, with a wee touch of panic, not tough at all. He’d given me crap before about throwing me out, but this time was different. It’s odd how I knew that right away.

  He’d been palming a key for the front door and now he slid it into sight with his thumb, tricky as a conjuror. Mine had been on top of my jacket on a chair beside the bed, ready to pick up on my way out. When I went to check, it wasn’t there. And he’d dumped everyt
hing out of the drawers all over the bed.

  ‘You’ve ten minutes to pack,’ he said, following me in.

  When I’d finished, I looked at the shelf of books. You can’t carry a shelf of books on your back. One, though? Maybe two? There were some it would hurt me to leave. And what about the library books? Something to remember me by. Getting postcards about fines would drive him crazy.

  ‘What’s the fucking joke?’ he asked. ‘Your head’s never out of a book or stuck up your arse. You’re useless. From now on, boy, you’re in the real world and I’ll tell you what chance you’ve got. No chance, you’ve got no chance.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ve got, I’ve got a job,’ I said. He didn’t break into applause, just sneered and shook his head. ‘Mr Simpson put me on to it, the one that did careers when I was at North Kelvinside. I met him in the street, and he asked me what I was doing.’ You could have made more of yourself, he’d told me.

  ‘Schoolteacher arsehole.’ He had a gift for that kind of repartee.

  ‘He was all right.’

  ‘You wee poof!’ he said and pointed at the wall without waiting for an answer. ‘That goes with you, by the way!’

  I never had gone in for posters, so the only thing on the wall was a picture I’d torn out of a magazine. Don’t ask me why I’d put it there with a strip of Scotch tape top and bottom. Not because of his long blond hair, that was for sure, or because, Christ, I fancied him. A picture of a knight on horseback. Why not? There were worse things you could stick on a wall.

  ‘I won’t get paid till Friday. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave then.’

  ‘Today – I’ve a friend coming.’

  ‘Who?’ He didn’t have any friends as far as I knew, just people he drank with until sooner or later they got sick of one another. A nasty thought struck me. ‘You talking about a woman?’

  ‘That’s my business.’ But he couldn’t stop himself from giving a wee smirk.

  ‘You tell her about Nettie?’

  He sneered at me. ‘Nettie, is it? You mean your mammy?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘What would I do that for? Your fucking head’s wasted.’

  ‘Is whoever-she-is moving in?’

  ‘Before she steps in that door, I want you on the other side of it. And that’s it. Out, finished, on your own. No more charity.’

  ‘I’ve more right here than you have. If my mother was here, she wouldn’t let you get away with it. You only walked in here five minutes ago.’ Wrong on all counts, as a matter of fact. In reverse order: he’d been here for years, and who could ever tell what Nettie would do? Third, and the one that mattered, my bloody mother had signed papers that made him the tenant. Love’s young dream.

  ‘I’m a fool to myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve been good to you.’

  On the other side of the road I put the rucksack down. I’d pocketed the spare key on my way out; God knows why; a souvenir of good times? I took a last look: end of a terrace of pebble-dashers, a cold box with four rooms. Built after the war, lines and miles of them dumped on the edges of the city, no pubs, no pictures, crap wee shops. Metal frames showed in straps along the edges of the wall in every room, like the skeleton on an insect. The competition to get one of them was terrific. Everyone wanted out of the old tenements, so there was a points system. Points for how long you’d been on the waiting list and points for how many children you had. My mother just had me, but the two of us got a house. Rumour had it that she’d slept with a councillor. That’s the kind of rumour somebody always wants to share with you. Since then, the garden had gone to hell in long tangles of sick-looking grass, a colour of its own as if the earth had taken a scunner at us. Under the window of my bedroom upstairs the pebble-dash had flaked off like patches of acne. Funny thing is, that hadn’t happened to any of the other houses. We were always an embarrassment to the neighbours.

  Home. That was one way of describing a place I’d never liked, but walking down the road I couldn’t think of another one.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By bus the factory was ten minutes away. The plan had been to walk it, but with all the nonsense I didn’t have time. After paying the fare, I had a handful of silver between me and pay day on Friday. Getting off the bus, I wasn’t looking for much, just a proper job where you got up in the morning, went home after a shift, got paid at the end of the week. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. If somebody had told me, see this job you’ve got, you’re going to be working there for the next thirty years, I’d have said bloody wonderful.

  The way it turned out, I lasted five days.

  That very first morning I saw her sitting in the car, but I was too busy worrying about being late to pay attention. I’d got off the bus on a side road with shitty wasteland behind me and in front a building behind a high link metal fence. I walked along by the fence, looking for a way in, and started to panic when I couldn’t find one. When I got to the corner, the fence stretched away along the side street but I still couldn’t see any sign of a gate. I started down that street, changed my mind and hurried all the way back to where I’d started. Through the link fence, the place seemed empty of life. Even when I went round the far corner and found there was a gate, I couldn’t see anyone. Where were they all? How late was I? Had I got the start time wrong? Why couldn’t I see anyone going into work? It was like one of those nightmares that don’t make any sense, and all the time the clock was ticking. Inside, I half ran into the first opening and found myself in a little courtyard with a car parked by the wall. I didn’t know much about cars, but it was a big one – you didn’t need to be an expert to see that – and it had been polished until it shone. The windows were steamed up.

  In the wing mirror, I could see my hair standing on end and the sweat on my face. Don’t ask me what I thought I was doing when I went to the window. Looking for directions? Bending down, I got so close that I could see a girl’s face turned to look at me. Not clearly – she didn’t wipe the glass or roll down the window – and I stared in until it occurred to me I might be frightening her.

  Straightening up, I saw a door in the wall with the firm’s name on a sign so discreet it was no wonder I hadn’t noticed it.

  As I went in, a racket like machine-gun fire stopped abruptly. Behind a long counter, a woman was sitting with her back to me. Alerted by something, maybe a colder movement of the air, she whipped her head round from the typewriter and stared at me. ‘Staff don’t come in this door,’ she said. I hadn’t even opened my mouth. It was as if she knew at first glance I was a mistake; but then I suppose that’s what she was paid for.

  Turning, I saw a door at the back marked STAFF ONLY.

  ‘Not that way. Go back outside,’ she said, ‘through the swing doors. You’re not supposed to go in from here.’

  ‘Sounds like a joke.’ She looked down her nose at me, and I made the mistake of trying to explain. It was a joke my father had been fond of, an old joke. ‘You know, “If you want to go to Dublin you shouldn’t start from here.” ’

  A man in shirtsleeves came round a partition at the back and stared at me.

  Like the Kerry man trying to get to Dublin, it wasn’t a good start.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The second morning, seeing the same car in the same place and steam on the windows was a surprise. Determined not to be late, I was early, so I’d gone round that way to kill time, never imagining she’d be there again. Not that I could be sure she was, since I didn’t dare go into the yard for a closer look. But, if not her, someone was in the car or why else would the windows be steamed up?

  ‘She’s there all day,’ one of the women on the line said.

  ‘The girl,’ the other one said and laughed.

  I’d asked, first chance I got, ‘Who’s the girl in the car?’

  ‘What car would that be?’

  ‘Dozens of cars out there.’

  Comedians.

  ‘I’m talking about the wee park round the side. Not the b
ig one at the front.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘There’s a girl sits in a car there in the morning.’

  ‘All day,’ she said then. ‘The girl,’ the other one said. You could tell they thought they were funny. They laughed at their own jokes. They stood on either side of a press, and my job for that part of the day was to take away the full bin of castings and slot in an empty one. Hearing them wasn’t easy. The big space echoed with the fart and whine of machines that dribbled oil to make rainbows on the pools of scummy water under where the corrugated-iron roof leaked.

  ‘All day, every day.’

  ‘Until he leaves.’

  ‘Who?’ I wanted to know.

  They ignored me, talking to each other.

  ‘He’s away before us.’

  ‘Put it that way.’

  ‘That’ll be why you might think she was just there in the morning.’

  ‘Instead of the whole bloody day.’

  ‘Morning till night.’

  ‘Right enough, you can’t see, not from here.’

  ‘But he can. Out of his window, he can see. He can see, all right.’

  All through this, they never stopped working. Their hands made the same movements over and over again. Hands and tongues, they never stopped.

  ‘Catch me putting up with it.’

  ‘Catch you getting the chance.’

  ‘Maybe it’s worth it.’

  ‘More ways than one, maybe.’ She had a dirty laugh.

  ‘Not for money, not for the other, not in a million years. It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘He likes to keep an eye on her.’

  The one who said that laughed again, but this time her face didn’t laugh.

  Something about the joke wasn’t funny. All day I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  What kind of man made a girl sit outside all day? And the question that really bothered me: a girl who would do that, what kind of girl would she be? I was so distracted, I went the wrong way when the foreman switched jobs on me, and pushed the bin through two sets of doors without giving it a thought. It was the brightness that stopped me in my tracks. The sound of the machinery in here was different, and everything was clean and new-looking. I hardly had time to take in the size of the place, when I was punched on the shoulder.