by David Keenan
I can’t even remember how me and Patty hooked up. Naw. I think I might have met him again at a record fair where he was with this beautiful little blonde that I had seen at gigs and who was one of the hottest things on the scene, I couldn’t believe it, but later on I slept with her and it was a big disappointment, she didn’t even take her tampon out before we got into bed, but it was enough to pique my interest, you know, what the fuck was this guy Patty’s story? Okay so we start hanging out, we were kids, into the usual shit, comics, porno, music, drugs, booze. Booze was a big problem. We couldn’t get enough of it. We had this one connection, this guy called Assif, who was the son of the guy who owned an off-licence in Clarkston. We were underage but when his dad wasn’t around he would slip us the merchandise and we would slip him the readies next time we saw him and then go drink in the park or at whoever had an empty. At the time Patty was living in this big sprawling haunted bungalow in Forrest Street that was hidden from the road by twenty-foot trees and that was perpetually gloomy and dark and where in the back garden there was the remains of a mine and an old chimney and these great dilapidated greenhouses which is where we would often drink in the hot summers and it was where he kept his stash, his porn stash, he was so paranoid about getting caught he would bury the mags in the soil or secrete them in the grow bags for the tomatoes, which was crazy as they were often soaked beyond use or at best soiled and covered in dirt but try telling him that, that was just his style. Still, to this day I like me a soiled porn mag. He would buy them from a vendor who had a stall outside Queen Street station in Glasgow. No one bought porn in Airdrie, okay, it would be like pissing on your own doorstep, plus this guy knew the drill and so made it less embarrassing, immediately folding the magazine in two, wrapping it in brown paper and sliding it beneath your arm. Patty marvelled at his technique. What a pro, he would say. Okay so there’s a day when your cock is hard for things like that and there’s a day when your cock isn’t, what can I say.
The other thing we used to do was we got into petty thievery, just stealing shit for the hell of it, that kinda style, breaking into back gardens in the neighbourhood and once even creepy-crawling a house up on Grahamshill Avenue and stealing some books and burying them in the ground, pointless shit. Then there was the night of our big escapade, our teenage retribution. Okay. We had a falling out with Assif. I can’t sell you any more, he said, my dad found out, he’s going to kill me. We’re going to kill you, Patty told him, don’t worry about your dad. We are a much bigger problem. The whole thing blew up, the way things do when you’re a teenager, and soon we had a vendetta out for Assif and a score to settle, even though we were obviously the ones in the wrong. Alright so one night we go to this gig in Airdrie, some depressing washed-up punk show but with live-action painting by this naked guy and his wife who were eventually dragged out by the promoter which was good stuff actually. Afterwards we’re half-cut and looking for a fix. Fuck it. I come up with the idea of burgling Assif’s shop. Yeah. I know.
We arrive about 2 a.m. The place is all shut up. Okay so I give Patty a lift and he manages to get onto the roof. I climb up after him. There was a single skylight right above the cash desk. The shop was completely dark. Patty puts his foot through the glass and the whole window just falls in, wow, alright, smashing all over the desk. Holy shit, I’m thinking, we’re done for now. But we climb down through the window regardless. There were no alarms or CCTV or shit like that back then; everything was more honest. We were too scared to switch a light on and bring attention to ourselves so we walked around with our lighters held up in the air before us. We got some booze, some good booze, a bottle of single malt that was as expensive as fuck and we sat down on the floor in front of the fridges and started passing it back and forth. I filled my pockets with cigarettes and batteries, I don’t know why, pure greed, and then we sat there, smoking and drinking and reading porno mags. There was a microwave oven in there so we started heating up snacks – ravioli, shit like that; fucking instant hamburgers, remember those? They always came out like damp. Yeah.
Patty told me about his dad, which I never knew about, how he had drowned at sea after falling off the deck of the ship he had worked on, somewhere on the approach to Jeddah, or so they said; he was a chef on an ocean liner and during a storm he had been swept right off the deck, that’s how they reported it, though no one knew for sure. There were rumours, he said, that it might have been a suicide. Even then Patty was a big reader, into poetry and shit like that and he said he thought of his dad like Hart Crane, just getting up and climbing the railings and taking this calm step off into the waters of oblivion, deliberately, matter-of-factly. Where’s the poems? I asked him. Yet to come, he said. I want to be like my dad, he said. Like Hart Crane. Okay by this point he was steaming drunk. I want to disappear, he said. Then he started crying and his nose was running and it was disgusting, big yellow snots all over his face. Wipe your nose, I said to him. Unpuff your eyes and pull yourself together. We’re living the high life, I said to him, the low life, you’re a criminal poet right now, come on. I was humouring him for sure but I needed to get that snot out of my sight. The drinking continued, the tears subsided, the food went cold. I drank until I puked then I passed out. I was woken in the morning by Assif’s father shaking me awake. You bloody arseholes, he kept saying, you bloody arseholes, in this mad accent and pacing up and down. Okay it was funny, actually, in a surreal way. Of course he called the police. At first we couldn’t wake Patty and we thought he might be dead or in a coma but eventually he came round and when he realised what had happened he started crying again. I’m not saying this to make him look bad but he did, he was a real softie. Anyway, Assif’s dad decided not to press charges, luckily enough, but Patty’s mother was furious. My parents couldn’t care less. They were both serious alcoholics and pretty much hands-off aside from the occasional pathetic beating but it was decided that we weren’t allowed to see each other, that I was a bad influence. Fuck it, I thought, and I remembered his snotty nose and his cry-baby bullshit and I was glad to be out of it. Then my parents died, one after the other, just like that, and it was as if they had taken that same step out into the air and into the water. Into this great big ocean that we all sink to the bottom of as easily as going on holiday or taking a day off. Their deaths were very light, is what I mean. It was like they floated away or drowned on thin air. Does that make them poets? Afterwards I travelled for a while, just around the UK, I wanted to see what this place was like where I lived, and I inherited a fair amount of money as well as the family home, which I immediately sold and never went back to; handed over the fittings, the furniture, the photographs, the lot. Occasionally I would call up Teddy and ask him what the fuck was kicking, you know, what was hot, and one day he tells me Memorial Device are kicking, groover, Memorial Device are hot, and I’m like, who are Memorial Device, and he says, remember Patty, your partner in crime? I couldn’t believe it. I felt it should have been me somehow. I was into this shit when he was still squeezing plukes in front of the mirror. What the fuck was that about? Okay so I bought the record, I always listened to Teddy’s recommendations, but I didn’t hear anything new in it. I saw them play live a few times but I stayed at the back and didn’t introduce myself. I was a bad influence, remember?
19. A Minor Cog a Small Life a Little Bird: an anonymous mother writes about bringing up Lucas Black and love at first sight (the kind that only happens in the past) and the etiquette of the tête-à-tête and dreams of being swept away like in a science-fiction novel or a fantasy while always coming back to the snow the unimaginable snow again and again.
I don’t want you to print my new name. Things have changed and I live a different life now. Not that it matters but anyway, I don’t want you to print it, if that’s alright with you. I’m a minor cog, a small life, a little bird. Even if I did give you my name it would mean nothing, less than nothing, even, it would just be another name without a face, another Carol or Philippa or Elizabeth. What would that te
ll you? But still, I prefer to withhold it. As I’m writing this I’m looking out the window, on the third floor, at Paris in the snow. Can you imagine that? Of course you can. I mean, Paris in the snow: it leaves little to the imagination. Imagine if I had said Budapest in the spring, or even better, Arran in the autumn, or let’s push the boat out, Nigeria in the winter, which will figure later in my story, so start imagining it now, if you can, and let’s see where we end up.
At first there’s not much to tell, at least not much that would interest an outsider. I grew up happy. I did well at school. I couldn’t get a job. I moved around a lot. I took menial jobs, minimum wage. Then one day a man came into the shop – I was working at a shoe shop, an average shoe shop on Dumbarton Road in Glasgow. He guessed my shoe size; I was a size 3. I’m the one that’s supposed to have the expertise, I told him. It’s not expertise, he said, it’s intuition. Do you like music? he asked me. I had always dreamed of liking music, of being carried away, which is what music can do to you or so they say. Am I going to be swept away like in a novel or in an old-fashioned film? I wondered. My tastes were old-fashioned, even then. I read books, I liked crossword puzzles, in a way I was a spinster before my time. And here was my suitor, ready to rescue me from a future that I might have found in a word search or a board game. I was naive, too. I kept up the discussion of shoe sizes long past the point where it should have turned into the first awkward manoeuvrings of a romance. You like music, he said to me, this stranger who was dressed so well, but you don’t like to dance. I took this as a personal affront, although deep down I knew it was true. I can dance as well as any of them, I said, and I intend to prove it. I was surprised at myself. This was an outburst, there was no other word for it, something that I had never experienced except when I was alone, walking in the park near the university, where I would often accost myself with sudden outbursts that would alarm me and point to some kind of inherited madness, perhaps.
The scene of our challenge was set. We agreed to meet at the Barrowland Ballroom, at five past eight, on the following Friday. In the meantime I attempted to brush up on my moves. I remember I attended the Mitchell Library and enquired as to whether they might have a volume that would alert me to the latest footwork, the correct amount of give and take appropriate to a man and a woman engaged in a tête-à-tête, which I believed to mean a secret assignation with a particular choreography but of which I was immediately disabused by a brusque young man at the enquiry desk who informed me that a tête-à-tête had nothing to do with dancing, though he was forced to concede that it did imply some kind of discretion. In my lunch break I studied diagrams, attempted to decode movements that were indicated by curved arrows and solid footprints. I combed through the back stock of the shop until I settled on some elegant kitten heels that allowed for maximum mobility while providing an appropriate pedestal for my legs, which were lovely and comely and much commented on in my youth.
On the evening it was love at first sight. He swept me from my taxi cab and my feet barely touched the floor all evening. So much for my dancing lessons! It was a time of great romance, the kind that only happens in the past. He was knightly, courteous; for instance one night he missed the bus back to Glasgow from Calderbank, where he had paid a visit on me in an attempt to win the favour of my parents, and instead of accepting their heartfelt offer to stay the night he had insisted on walking back to Glasgow himself, a journey through the nocturnal city that took him all of five hours but that impressed my parents no end. Here was a real gentleman with an athletic sense of values, my mother exclaimed. I sat in front of the fire and rubbed my hands together and thought abracadabra, here comes the future in top and tails.
I left my job at the shoe shop for a course at Glasgow University. I was the first member of my family ever to take advantage of higher education. I would meet my suitor on the campus and leave him to play pool with the boys in the Union while I attended lectures. Some nights I would study so late that I would hear my father rising in the morning and leaving for work before I had even finished taking notes.
My suitor, it turned out, didn’t have much money. That was the first disappointment. He was living in a bedsit in Kirklee Circus near the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow that consisted of a simple mattress on the floor, a cupboard where he hung his beautiful suits and a few candles scattered here and there for when he ran out of money for the electricity meter. He had recently arrived from Northern Ireland, he informed me, but he wasn’t giving much away. What are your intentions? I asked him. I intend to unwrap you like a present, he said, and threw me roughly onto the bed and proceeded to devour me. I was quite the tasty little thing back then.
We made the decision to start a family and were married in fifty-nine. Some of his family from Belfast attended the wedding, three brothers and two sisters, but I was unable to strike up a rapport. We held the reception at The Tudor Hotel in Airdrie and for our honeymoon we drove to Italy and back in an old Morris Minor, which I would not recommend, as driving in Europe is extremely perilous and our trip was fraught with incidents. We tried repeatedly for a child but without success and so made the decision to adopt. Family was very important to my husband, it was his raison d’être, if I understand the phrase correctly. We jumped through the usual hoops, ticked the usual boxes. Our little angel was delivered to us, our little package from the stork, by a group of pasty-faced nuns who ran a refuge for unmarried mothers in the West End. There he was, staring up at us with those big blue eyes, eyes too big for his head, his dad said, and I held out my finger, it was all his tiny hand could take, and he wrapped his hand around it and held on for dear life. I thought of the part in the Bible where Jesus talks about making his disciples fishers of men. He’s the one for us, I told my husband. I’m his dad, he said, and we held each other, the three of us, and had a little cry.
An angel touched him on the head when he was born, that’s what his dad used to say, and of course it was true in more ways than any of us ever knew.
We moved into a ground-floor flat just off Woodlands Road in Glasgow. On the corner there was a large second-hand bookshop, which suited me fine as I was a big science-fiction fan and you could trade in books you had read so we were never short of entertainment. My husband wasn’t much of a reader, he had barely been to school, his dad had insisted that he go out and get a job to help support the family, so at night I would read to him and our little baby, who we named Lucas after an old uncle who had been lost to the mists of time and who we thought we might resurrect. Sometimes I wonder if those strange worlds and alien planets set it all off. We’ll never know. My husband was a very literal man, a straightforward type, and he would ask questions like, in what year is this set or what language do the aliens speak or how long did it take them to reach Mars, practical stuff like that. Whereas for me and for little baby Lucas, we were caught up in the fantasy.
He wasn’t particularly musical as a child. I think his music teacher at school might have put him off. She was rather severe and chastised him for singing out of tune in the school play, which made him feel self-conscious. He had a group at school with some chums, 7-Up I think they were called, but they never got past the planning stage.
He was fine all the way through primary school. The summer before he graduated to secondary school his dad took him shopping and bought him books on mathematics and the constellations and Egyptology and later that night he came downstairs in his pyjamas and said he couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about death, about his dad dying and me curled up like an old leaf in a coffin. That won’t happen for a long time, his dad told him, which was the wrong thing to say because that just set him off and he began crying and saying, so you admit it, it is going to happen. Looking back we should have kept up the facade. What child needs to be told about death? You might as well tell them Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
It seemed there was a morbid streak in him, one that he couldn’t have inherited from me because I was as dizzy as a chorus girl. He went through a religio
us phase, which we both encouraged. We thought it might give him some kind of solace. You had to watch what you said with Lucas, you had to be careful, he was the most endearing combination of earnestness and naivety, which meant he was ripe for brainwashing.
When he was seventeen he left home. We didn’t want him to go, couldn’t understand why he would want to leave, but all of his school friends were getting flats in town in preparation for university and by this time his dad was high up in the shoe trade and we had bought a pleasant semi-detached house in Airdrie. He seemed to settle in well, at first. He began to phone home less and less. Then there was the suicide attempt. It was all over some darling girl with circus tattoos on her arms and long red hair and who wore leather boots and could speak three languages and play the cello. When he was recovering in hospital she came to visit but he refused to see her so I took her for a sandwich in the canteen. You can’t blame yourself, I told her. You can’t fall in love with every needy puppy. My boy’s special, I told her, he’s the kind to scream and cry a lot. That seemed to make her feel better.
He came home to recuperate but he was quiet and withdrawn plus he had started smoking and at night he would sit in his bedroom with his favourite music playing and stare out at the street lights in the distance while smoking one cigarette after the other, these awful strong cigarettes that he would roll himself. Sometimes I would send his father up to check on him and later when I went to investigate his dad would be laid out asleep on his bed while Lucas still sat there, staring out into space, looking out towards Glasgow and smoking cigarettes from the side of his mouth, which is how he drank Coke or beer too, always out of the side of his mouth. It was one of his foibles.