by David Keenan
Lucas always had big feet, big feet and big hands. His nickname was The Man from Atlantis or sometimes Luciano. Plus he had a large, regal forehead, you could almost imagine a coat of arms on it or a jewelled turban. It made him look very exotic. I would say to him, these people don’t have half your intelligence. You’re a highly educated person. You’re a special boy. You shouldn’t let them get to you. Sometimes I would picture him getting up from his chair and floating through the window, swimming up through the night sky like we were stranded on the bottom of the ocean and breaking through the bright clouds and waving his hands in the air, his big massive hands, like a distress signal or a beacon, and bringing back a group of angels with masks on and breathing apparatus that would take us to heaven or happiness or whatever it was that eluded us.
Things got worse from there, unfortunately. While Dad and I continued our great romance, Lucas went downhill. He became involved in a cult that owned some property in the Borders. I never fully understood what they were all about. But there was a leader, someone with a name like Sri Abergavenny, I think that’s correct, a religious name, and they practised total renunciation, brain death, they called it. They whittled away at compassion, empathy, love, concern, common decency … They saw them as things that got in the way, like bugs on the windscreen that mean you have to slow down and can’t go forward. Lucas shaved his head, which was a tragedy as he had locks to die for when he was young. They believed in sheltering their followers from the world so no one was allowed to leave the compound. Lucas wanted to leave, I know that. Later he talked about beatings, sexual impropriety. But he was stuck there. I think they did things like meditate, garden, eat lentils, walk around naked, stuff like that. They had a thing where they repeated clichés or commonplace sayings, the sort of thing that his dad and I might have said to him, until they became nonsense. They called it whirlpooling. That was hurtful. Occasionally we would receive a letter from him, though it was always typed and never signed so who knows who was really writing, and it would say things like, I am speaking to you from a dream or I am sat on a lonely balcony facing the sea, which was nonsense, as they were landlocked, but obviously it had something to do with the teachings, like they had risen above the sea, something like that, which made me think of Lucas smoking at his lonely window. And then suddenly he was back home. He had been gone for about eight months. The story goes that he was at a lecture, there were these mass lectures every day, The Precepts, they were known as, and there would be hundreds of people in this great hall come to see Sri Abergavenny sat on a cushion, and at one point this fellow, this complete stranger, just collapses in front of him, complaining about a terrible pain in his chest. Lucas picks him up and carries him to the stage. This man is dying, he says. I need to take him to the hospital. The whole room goes silent. Isn’t this exactly what they were programming themselves not to react to? But the permission is given and Lucas walks out of the room, carrying this stranger in his arms, and delivers him to hospital. He never goes back.
But then his behaviour alters. He wasn’t depressed, he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm. Rather, it was misdirected. He started talking to himself, running commentaries, describing everything he was doing, you know, like, I peeled an apple and now I am eating it. I am making a tea for my father. For my breakfast I am sucking the juice out of an orange. His name, his address, his date of birth. It was like someone who was slipping in and out of a coma and who was holding on to facts for dear life.
Round about this time his dad had been offered a partnership in a lucrative business venture, though we later found out to our cost and, it must be admitted, to our profit, that it was actually a criminal network masquerading as a charity. We upped and moved to Nigeria. A salt sea cure is the term, I believe, a holiday in the sun. We moved to Jos, north-east of Abuja. It was like a speedway and a shanty town and a slum and a casino in the desert. We lived in a small adobe building with a rooftop terrace. At first Lucas seemed to take to it. He made friends and played dice on the street in the baking sun and worked for a while as a driver, moving farming equipment and sheets of wood, and sometimes whole families sat on the back of his truck to here and there and back again. By this point Dad was up and running with his charity work, which I’m ashamed to say involved photocopying banners and fabricating licences so that back home we could collect funds from hapless passers-by on Sauchiehall Street that were supposed to go towards a phantom genocidal conflict in Africa. Not that there wasn’t trouble. His dad got burns on his thighs and on both of his feet after an altercation at a village meeting somewhere on the plains, but we were there as figureheads or links in the chain, this terrible economic chain that fed on suffering, I’m afraid, rather than missionaries. Then the winter came down and finished his dad off. Can you imagine that?
As I sit here in Paris, on the third floor, in the bleak midwinter, it’s hard to picture. I see my husband, Lucas’s dad, asleep beside me. I see the Sunday papers, English editions, weeks old, hand-delivered by a mulatto boy named Kenji, spread across the bed. The only sound is of the fan, spinning, and of the hissing of the earth outside in the distance. From next door, through the wall-length wardrobe at the foot of the bed, I can hear voices, a running commentary. I am, I was, I always will be, he would say, though not in so many words. I was brought up in a quiet household, with a sense of calm. I had no experience of this. I had never heard my father raise his voice. My mother had died at a young age from a problem with her kidneys. My baby sister passed away at three years old. I had looked forward to the same, a quiet life, then death, but with culture. Now here I was in a monastery for the insane, in the winter, in a country where snow was a memory or a dream.
20. I Thought They Had Cut the Top of His Head Off and Were Spooning Out His Brains: The Clarkston Parks had a time of it in Airdrie.
We had a group called The Clarkston Parks, me, Alan, Dougie and Goosey. Good, innit? Mod, innit? My old man was a lorry driver; my mam worked at a baked potato place in Airdrie. I was a mod. I became a mod. Me and my pals were the mod squad. We lived in one of them shoeboxes in Mull, in Petersburn, which of course now seems really romantic, innit, now that I don’t live there any more and my mam and my old man are gone. I remember lying awake in my bunk bed, I remember it to this day, the wee one asleep beneath me, listening to cassettes all night long and staring at the street light outside, sometimes hearing footsteps in the lane or drunken conversations or even one night live sex, which was a thrill, believe me. And dreaming of smoking cigarettes and drinking and imagining my future wife being out there somewhere and what she was doing and all that kinda stuff. Oh baby, I’m dreamin’ of Monday, oh baby, when I see you again. That was me: portrait of a young mod. I would listen to things like The Pistols, The Stranglers, The Jam. I remember walking all the way to Coatbridge one summer afternoon, cutting across these empty parks, looking sharp as hell, that was me, right then, what a moment, you only live once, there wasn’t a soul around and all the time the sun was beating down and it was like a mission or an initiation, just to buy a cassette of The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette. From there I got into sixties stuff, like mod and psychedelia and freakbeat. There was this club night in Glasgow, Joy of a Toy, it was called, where they played classic sixties soul and garage and British psych. We were all over it like a rash. I started sending away for fanzines that had things like pictures of Mr Spock or Twiggy or Brian Jones on the front or you know like Roger McGuinn looking cool with a bowl cut. I got into the whole thing of clean living under poor circumstances.
My old man would drive us into Glasgow in the evening and pick us up afterwards, no matter what the time. He was great like that, my old man. I would borrow his suits, he was a sharp dresser in the sixties, and I would say I bought them myself or even better that I had my own tailor, innit? I had this girlfriend at the time, Mary Bell, not the child-killer but of course everyone said that so they started calling her Mad Mary Bell. Mad Mary Bell the modette. She was pretty crazy, actually. Once she picked up
some pills that were just lying in the street covered in dirt and ate them. We were walking down the street and before I could stop her she had snatched them up and swallowed them. Happy days! They could have been anything but in the end nothing happened. Once she drank a bottle of plant food just for the hell of it. I was impressed. She was mental. She didn’t like to have sex, that was one thing, well, not penetrative sex, she just liked you to rub your leg or your penis over the front of her panties, that was all, and she would moan and lick her lips like crazy. It was a real turn-on but obviously frustrating at the same time. She had a great look, though, long white coats, tiny handbags, blonde hair curled around her face like Mary Quant. We looked the part, me and Mad Mary Bell, absolute beginners, classic.
The Clarkston Parks became kind of big on the scene. We had a residency at a place in Calderbank, a working men’s club that burned down long ago. We built up quite a scene out there, in this weird depressed mining village that was actually a hotbed for mods back in the day. Who knew? And they would run buses from Coatbridge and Airdrie and Shotts and Greengairs and sometimes even Glasgow and they’d all be singing on the way there and being Calderbank you would get a mix of people turning up alongside the hard-core followers, a right bunch of loons. Sometimes you’d get rockers and metallers looking for a fight; sometimes locals looking for a fight; sometimes even locals that weren’t looking for a fight. We had this whole thing where we were working-class hardmen with style, innit, so we could handle ourselves, even if it meant getting our shoes scuffed or spoiling the cut of our suits.
One evening a local biker gang turned up, looking for trouble. They called themselves The Fenric Wolves or The Wolves Of Fenric, something like that. They were all ugly, a real rogues’ gallery, with beards and long hair and sweat stains on their stupid T-shirts and with their sneakers on. I can’t stand leisurewear to this day, it really distresses me. They made a big deal about pulling up on their bikes and skidding around the car park with their lights on before we played. Of course there were a lot of mopeds parked outside and later we heard that one guy, this notorious biker called Teddy Ohm, had picked up a bunch of scooters – and these were classic scooters, authentic 1960s Vespas – and taken them and thrown them over the bridge into the River Calder. Years later, when I was walking the length of the Monkland Canal from Coatbridge for a cancer charity, I passed beneath the bridge and you could still see a rusty moped sticking up from out of the water.
Our bass player, Goosey, had greasy curly hair. It’s an affliction, innit? The rest of us had classic bowl cuts, sharp as you like, whereas he looked like a darts player or something. He was a cool guy and a great musician and he died from some kind of lung problem when he was only thirty-two years old, long after we had lost touch, although I would still see his brother from time to time, who was a nutcase. On the night the bikers all filed in and stood at the front of the stage. It was like Altamont or something. They were breathing really hard, I remember that, there were a lot of flared nostrils. They were like bulls getting ready to attack. I went up to the microphone. We did that song by Tinkerbells Fairydust, classic British psych, innit, ‘In My Magic Garden’, and so I just said, this is a song by Tinkerbells Fairydust, and it was like a rag to a bull. I saw one guy bite through one of the cans of beer he was drinking in a rage. This massive fight broke out. I kicked a guy right in the face – the stage was perfectly at eye level. People were throwing tables around like in a Western brawl. The bikers had chains and hammers and Stanley knives and chibs. Goosey leaped off the stage. He took about three guys down with him. I took off my guitar and fucked somebody right around the head with it. There were bottles flying everywhere. I saw them going at Goosey and then this crazy thing happened. I will never forget it. They scalped him. One of them knelt on his chest while another held his head back and a third guy took a blade to his scalp. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. There was blood everywhere and for a second I thought they had cut the top of his head off and were spooning out his brains. But then one of them held up this mop of grey curly hair attached to a thin layer of flesh and it was like they had beheaded a Gorgon in a snooker club. It was grotesque and I just completely lost the plot and went haywire. There was a screwdriver lying on top of my amp and I grabbed it and launched myself at his assailants. I stabbed one of them in the back of the neck and he began jerking around like a puppet or a broken-down robot, like when they stick one of them electrodes in your brain and you start acting crazy. His friends backed off, though one of them still had Goosey’s scalp in his hand like some kind of Greek myth. I waved the screwdriver around, like I was going to do anything, and they made for the door, but not before one of them grabbed hold of Mary and dragged her kicking and screaming out into the night. It was a total nightmare. No one called the police, I couldn’t believe it, not even the owner, who was more worried about vengeance and getting closed down than he was about justice, lucky for all of us, in a way. We had someone drive the guy that I stabbed to an industrial estate outside Holytown where we dumped his body on the pavement. I had no idea whether he was alive or dead. We had to take Goosey to hospital but we said he had fallen down a brae next to the River Calder and somehow scalped himself on the cliffs, which they believed, amazingly. Where’s his hair? they asked us. We lost it, we said, it must have fallen into the river.
Then we had to track down Mary; Mad Mary Bell. The next day went past and no one heard a peep. Luckily enough her parents lived in St Albans and couldn’t give a toss whether she lived or died so there was no pressure on that front. Alan’s address was on the back of all of our records. He lived with his mum, who got 24-hour care on the social because she was basically doolally, so he could do what he pleased. Two days later he called me. They had posted a ransom note. It looked like it had been cut out of the Daily Record, a classic newsprint threat. If yOU want THE GiRL too lIVE, it said, tHen MeEt us hEre on SaTuRDay aT 12pM. Then there were the coordinates from an Ordnance Survey map, if you can believe that. None of us had any idea how to work it out but we had a teacher at school who was interested in orienteering and the classics and all that sort of thing that we still kept in touch with. He was kind of a local legend; Mr Scotia. We called him up and he invited us over to his house for lunch. He lived in a modern flat just on the corner of Forrest Street and after soup and bread made by his wife and some coffee and a brief history of the parks of Clarkston – he was a local-history buff as well – his wife cleared away the dishes and he spread out a map on the table. There’s your location right there, he said. It was beneath a disused railway bridge in the glen behind Katherine Park. Ah, Katherine Park, he said, and he mock swooned and the monocle popped out of his eye and fell into the pocket of his oversized dogtooth suit. Katherine Park, he said, the paramour of my youth, my mistress, my pride! What are you boys up to? he asked us. Some kind of derring-do? I was eager not to break the spell, I was always impressionable that way, so I told him I had been challenged to a duel for the hand of a young woman. I’ll be your second, he announced. You’re seventy-four years old, his wife interrupted, you’re seconding no one. Do not be disabused, he whispered, as soon as she left the room. I’m handy. Don’t let the cut of my jowls fool you.
I thought about it for a minute. Alan looked at me like I was crazy and mimed slitting his own throat. But then I thought screw it, the whole thing is getting crazier by the second, let’s up the ante. Okay, I said, you’re my second, at which point Scotia’s eyes lit up, eyes with cataracts like strawberries, almost brimming over.
The next day we visited Goosey in the hospital. It’ll be wigs from here on out, lads, he told us, that’s what they’re saying, and secretly I thought at last we can have some coherence in this band but then I felt bad, his head was mangled, he looked like a skinned beetroot. We’ve located Mad Mary, I told him, we’re meeting them down the glen for vengeance and for a handover. Don’t do it, he said, don’t get involved. Let’s just call the police, we did nothing wrong. You’re forgetting something, I
said. I may have killed someone. None of us have any idea if the guy I stabbed is dead or alive.
I was scared; there was no denying it. I sat up at night on my bed and looked out the window and held my breath at the sound of every siren in the distance, coming to get me, innit, coming to take me away. What was I thinking, I asked myself. Why did I get involved in any of it? Isn’t sitting here at home, safe, at night, with all my cassettes, with the music playing low, in the first flush of youth, looking good, being one of the faces of Airdrie, isn’t that enough? Of course not, I knew that, and even then I felt an invisible hand which I knew was really my own, or God’s own, or Paul Weller’s own, whatever you want to call it, pushing me past the tipping point, urging me on.
I called Mr Scotia. It’s more complicated, I told him. Death has reared its ugly head. He told me a story about being in the army, about soldiers tossing coins to decide who gets to disembark and who gets to stay on the island. This was Crete, near the end of the war. It all comes down to the toss of a coin, he said, in the end. These people are serious, I told him. I wanted him to understand. These people are dangerous. Young man, I am retired, he said, but not from life. Then there was this long silence on the line. The entire phone call was an education.
On the day there was the four of us, Dougie, Alan, Mr Scotia and myself. Scotia had armed himself with an old Irish walking stick with pointy nodules up and down it and an iron tip that would send off sparks every time he declaimed and struck it against the ground. It was like some ancient god of thunder had our back. A god that walked at a pace of about two miles an hour; a god who insisted on stopping to smell the flowers or gesticulate wildly in the air or point out some haunted place of childhood memorial or pseudo-historical significance every few steps, innit. In the end we were twenty minutes late but they were all still there, waiting for us, all spread out underneath this bridge like it was a photo shoot and not a potential murder scene. It was a warm summer, memorably warm, and of course Scotia was decked out in a full suit and with a bunnet and a tie and I remember his face was streaming with sweat by the time we arrived and he kept mopping his face with a hanky. He was wearing a shirt and tank top and a jacket and god knows probably a vest too. An old mod at the helm, I says to myself.