Moving to Kilmarnock by Mistake

In my younger days as a waif and straif in London, venturing nowhere other than public houses, I decided to move back to Scotland to spend some time with my folks. For reasons of their own they’d decided to re-locate to the East Ayshire town of Kilmarnock, though they were both Glasgow folk (it may have been because my father’s younger brother, William, lived in nearby Ayr, merely a bus-ride away).

I therefore arrived to live in a town I hadn’t even visited. Stepping off the train I felt immediately home-sick, not for any particular place just anywhere except Kilmarnock. Mind you, it was raining heavily (‘peltin’ doon’ is the town motto) and wind whipped around your trousers like angry rattle- snakes.

Later, while having a walk around my new, though hopefully temporary home, I entered The Burns Mall, a tatty wee plastic construction in honour of the classy bard. Burns gets used for every tourist/commodity angle around these parts, from underpants (rightly so considering he rarely kept them on) to hotel names (he slept around we all know but not in as many wee B&Bs as is claimed, surely).

The one word to describe Burns Mall and its seeming resident inhabitants was ‘jaded’. Sitting around the plastic seating smoking titchy wee roll-ups  and drinking from some giant communal bottle of industrial booze which had the words ‘White Lightning’ flashed across it. Why give it a name? Who was kidding who? I can imagine a marketing team discussing demographics of poverty so that they can hit their target markets accurately and consistently. There’s a lot of money to be made from people in this state. You feel the White Lightning people know all their giro days. “Klaus” (you suspect they’re all German) “Jimmy McMenemy has had his JSA sanctioned again, ten less bottles at Scotmid’s, Kilmarnock and target other drinkers in the area to compensate. Have them approached if you have to”

There is a Quicksave’s with milk spilt in the foyer and a Lambert and Butler poster on the window proclaiming ‘the very best smoke for you’. ‘Lookin’ Trendy’ is a little clothes shops showing the latest tatty fashions, whatever Jason and Kylie are wearing at the moment even though west of Scotland weather is just a tad less sun-kissed than wherever Ramsey Street is on the other side of the world. Ubiquitous bookies – two in fact, A Corrals and a William Hill – in case, presumably, one burns down suddenly and there’s nowhere to back a dog at Powederhall.

There’s a pub The Guardsman populated by the odd be-bunetted auld yin, barman rubbing at a glass or reading The Record. Two young mullets play a tedious game of pool: nothing worse than watching pool players that can’t pot a ball (well, perhaps having to have your hand nailed to a table, or being forced tom watch repeated Rangers/Heart games).

Even then, in those days, it was becoming clear that poorer folk could no longer afford to drink in pubs. The prices were just getting too high and one could get equally blootered far cheaper on the streets or at home with your cheap ciders and beer in 2 and 3 litre containers. Like many other cultural pursuits, pubs would become more and more a middle class option (or well-earning working class) and be seen more as where you went for a good meal rather than a right good bucket with a rammy afterwards.

One day, after I’d been living there a few weeks, there was a curious buzz around the town; the excitement was palpable. It transpired that a branch of the record store Our Price would be opening on the High Street the following Saturday. There was Mardi Gras fever in town. Nothing of this magnitude had happened in anyone’s living memory, not even when Johnny Beattie had brought his Christmas show to the local Pavilion and had been forced to cancel to everyone’s delight, even Johnny Beattie’s.

The day of the opening saw parades and marching bands. Crowds were cheering as local football club captain, Crunchie McCracken cut the ribbon and folk piled in to gasp at the records and posters for sale. Free broth was ladled out along with a well-fired roll. The birth-rate was to increase in the town roughly nine months later.

At the back of my parents wee bungalow at the top of Brighousehill Rd in the Shortlees area of the town was a disused quarry. My Father, frustrated at his mistake of leaving Bohemian London behind to life in this parochial little town where it was hard to purchase a copy The Guardian (this was considered a strange request in a town where The Daily Record and The Sun informed people).

Some nights, toward dusk with only the moon as witness he would trudge over the scrub-hill to the quarry. If my mother turned the volume on the telly off and we listened carefully we could faintly hear his roared oaths and yelps of frustration. This would last for a while and then ten minutes later he would return home with a blissful look on his face as if he had been ridden of demons. No words were ever shared about this.

Sometimes, to take the sting out of his despair and frustration I’d say;

“Da?”

“Aye son” I sometimes thought he knew what was next.

“Fancy a walk to the gonk shop?” The gonk shop was actually a Scottish outfitters shop up by the kirk in the centre of town. It just happened to have a wee tartan bag-piping gonk in the window.

A smirk would appear on his lips, no doubt he was considering the ludicrousness of my request, and he’d say…

“Aye son, why not”

The Magic Midden

Long ago, when Crunchies were a more substantial chocolate bar and you paid for them with copper coins, there was a young lad named Charlie Cochrane who lived in the Bridgeton area of Glasgow.

Charlie was a normal wee Glasgow boy who got into scrapes and played football; climbed trees and stole bird’s eggs for fun (although he’d stopped this after his dad had told him he was stealing the bird’s children). Being only nine, Charlie thought of girls only as people who generally didn’t play football, although there was one wee lassie in his class named Donna McClelland that he had warm feelings for, although he wasn’t quite sure why.

Charlie liked his own company and would spend hours by himself just exploring. He loved the woods even though he was terrified of stories of the giant who was reputed to live there. He also spent a lot of time in the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. He loved the atmosphere of the place and was fascinated by the history of his city. The big glass and brick building also held a palm house and Charlie loved the warmth in there and the smell of the tropical plants. It smelled like loamy earth and he liked to hear the rain pattering on the glass. He felt all safe and secure like he was back in his mother’s womb.

He wondered what to do with the latest ten pound note nestling in his trouser pocket.

This is how it happened.

Every week his mum, a lovely woman, would ask him to take the rubbish out to the midden, and this he duly did. Three weeks ago he was emptying the rubbish into the bin when he spied something unmistakable just behind the bins. It was a crisp, new ten pound note. Charlie couldn’t believe his luck. He picked it up and put the note in his pocket and spent the rest of the day imbued with a little cheer of excitement in his stomach. He knew he should hand the money over to his parents but there was a strong reluctance to do this. They were honest people and would only ask around the close to enquire if someone had lost it. He suspected one of them would lie and acquire the money and maybe just go out and drink with it, or go to the bingo or bookies and lose it. He felt strongly that this money was meant for better purposes.

Summer holidays for a boy-child and for all Charlie knew for girls too, are a magical journey ruined only by its ending, but Charlie was only two weeks in with a glorious four to go. He played ‘kick the can’ with his friends, he played ‘heidy-two-touch’ with his father, he went to the pictures and the shows but always he was aware of the crisp ten-pound-note he’d folded neatly in his pocket.

You’d think that a nine-year old would be buying sweeties, crisps and comics by now but. Somehow, Charlie knew that he shouldn’t waste the money this way. It had a special purpose which he either had to find or should be prepared for when it came along.

It wasn’t long before it did.

Down by the River Clyde there’s a boatman. His job is to save lives when possible and pick up remains when he can’t. Charlie would talk to the boatman a lot and help him with small chores like sweeping out the boathouse, but the boatman wouldn’t take him out upon the waters. You never knew when a bloated corpse would appear and he didn’t want the little lad exposed to such sights. Mr Warner took his job extremely seriously and had been doing it a long time like his father before him. He had saved a lot of lives and retrieved a lot of dead folk and he found his work worthy and believed his God had put him on the earth for precisely this purpose.

He was honest with Charlie when he said that most of his casualties – alive or sadly dead – were suicides; folk that had come to the end of their tether for one reason or another and had jumped into the dark, swirling waters usually at night in the hope of finding an end to their plight. Charlie thought about this long and hard. He enjoyed life so much that he couldn’t imagine people who didn’t. Who couldn’t be entranced by the wind in the trees or the sun on their faces; by a favourite football team and a game of marbles; by pie beans and chips and the taste of ice cream on a sunny day. 

Through Mr Warner he began to understand that people’s lives could go wrong in a variety of ways and he began to recognise the truth of this by looking around at the people in his community. There were folk sleeping in shop doorways, folk drunk and belligerent, separated from their wives or husbands and families. There were teenagers in gangs with little prospect of lucrative advancement. 

Charlie began to look at life in a different way. It didn’t depress him but it sometimes made him a little sad and he spoke to his mum and dad about it.

“The world’s a complicated place sometimes son. You have to keep your head up and enjoy your life, then, sometimes you’ll be able to help those around you if needed”

“You look after yourself son. Like your father says, enjoy your life and stay healthy”

Even his teacher, Miss Taylor, said;

“Do the right things, Charlie. Follow a straight course to be who you want to be and your good nature will see you be good for others”

He now had three tenners in his wee back pocket (though he took them out and put them under his mattress when his mum was doing the washing). He thought about the suicides on the river at night.

One day he happened to meet his wee mate Eck Charnley’s on the Main Street looking forlornly through the window of Lennox’s sweet shop. He wondered why his little friend looked so unhappy and asked.

“I’ve been sent out to buy sausages for the night’s tea but I’ve lost the money at the prize bingo”

Many in the area, including housewives, had become addicted to the prize bingo down at the amusement arcade. It had been reported in the local paper;

“Housekeeping money lost trying to win fags and booze”

Tins of Tennants and twenty packs of No.6 to be won and the excitement of the game enticed many away from the boring drudgery of housework, weans and husbands coming home drunk. Wee Eck had been captured by the allure.

“Dinnae worry wee Eck, I’ll dig ye oot” Charlie went in to the sweet shop, bought a bag of soor plooms and a couple of Sherbet Fountains and gave Wee Eck some of the change to compensate for the loss of the sausage money. His friends face lit up with relief. Charlie watched as he hesitated on his way to the butchers. He had a quick glance back at Charlie then the amusement arcade further down the road, he smiled and proceeded to purchase the sausages for the family tea.

Charlie felt good that he’d helped his friend out and wondered what other good causes his money could be put to.

The boatman says the weekends are the worst. Folk get drunk and maudlin and decide to take the final leap. Full of booze and probably pills they teeter on the parapet of the Dalmarnock Road Bridge then plunge into the murky waters below. The boatman felt that this tragic act was occurring more frequently in recent months due to the prize bingo epidemic. He’d been dragging in the bodies of middle-aged women in pinnies more and more, though he’d saved a few who’d confirmed his theory. 

They’d fell in debt due to their money-guzzling addiction.

Charlie didn’t dare to actually play the prize bingo but he could stand in the shadows of the giant fruit machines and watch the action. All the seats seemed to be occupied by middle-aged wifies. He recognised a few of them. There was Mrs Chalmers, Big Paddy’s Maw. At the other end was Mrs Murdoch, whose son Rab was currently ‘up the road in the Bar-L’ for breaking into folks motors. They all shared the fevered, urgent concentration of addicts. They would bawl at the wee bloke shouting out the numbers..

“Rummel them up ya plooky wee bastard” and;

“Waitin’ oan wan corner and you’ll no’ shout it ya wee turd. Does yer mammie know yer oot?”

The prizes were ranged behind the caller in a huge glass cabinet. They included cigarettes, cans of beer, half bottles of whisky and cheap sherry-wine. Also; there were tins of beans and ham, corned beef and boxes of Vesta Curry and Paella, biscuits and packets of Angel Delight. Most of these women were losing the house-keeping money meant to purchase these items. It didn’t make any sense, even to a young boy like Charlie. Why didn’t they just buy these things and be done with it?

Charlie had yet to appreciate the power of gambling.

His Dad told that these women were bored and addicted to ‘the buzz of winning Fray Bentos steak pies and a bottle of Old Tawny to wash it down’. His Dad used to joke that all the horses he backed ended up as Fray Bentos pie-filling, so hopelessly they’d raced.

Charlie lay in bed at night thinking about all this. He was particularly concerned about the idea that some of these women had taken to end it all in the Clyde. He fell asleep wondering what on earth he could do about it.

This was why he found himself down by the Dalmarnock Bridge at midnight on a Saturday night. He had sneaked out of his bedroom window and dreeped down to the pavement below. Charlie was an expert dreeper. Among the male youths of Glasgow this was no small thing. He watched for anyone on the bridge but so far there had only been drunk men and the odd stray dog urinating against the masonry.

All of a sudden Charlie’s fading interest was perked by a woman walking onto the bridge and peering shiftily about her in the luminescent gloom. Seeing that she wasn’t being watched (or so she thought) she began climbing onto the parapet. Charlie couldn’t believe his eyes and instinctively shouted ‘Heh missus!!’. This outburst startled the woman and she almost fell river-bound having lost her balance. Charlie rushed onto the bridge until he was only a few feet from the person he now recognised as Mrs Duncan, the wife of the school janitor.

“Mrs Duncan, what are you doing?” It was pretty obvious what she was doing but it was the only thing he could think to ask. Even in such extreme situations a kid still felt uncomfortable around adults and knew not to be cheeky.

“

Wee Charlie, what are you doing out at this time of night?”

A question answered with a question and a jolly difficult one at that.

Mrs Duncan looked at him sternly; as if the fact of his being out so late was much more serious than the fact that she was planning to jump off a bridge to her likely death.

“Erm” he stuttered “I was talking to the boatman and he told me that women were jumping in the Clyde cos they’d lost the housekeeping at the prize bingo” he had gulped several times during that oration and was now covered in a muck sweat.

“And you’ve come to watch have you?” Mrs Duncan had begun her climb again.

Charlie could see he would have to act quick to stop the impending tragedy.

“No, I’ve come to help”

Mrs Duncan looked down pityingly at him as a mother would to a child offering to protect her against the bad men.

“Oh Charlie, son, there’s nothing you can do to help me. Ah cannae go back to that bastard of a man of mine. Ah ken what he’s like wi’ you children, but he’s ten times worse with his own wife. If I go back with no house-keeping he’ll beat me black and blue”. She was weeping now and Charlie could tell she was posturing to leap.

“What if I gave you the money you’ve lost? Then you could maybe get off Scot-free. Charklie had no idea what the term ‘Scot-free’ meant’ but he’d heard his father use it often to describe ‘the bastard Tory thieves’ and it seemed an appropriately adult thing to say to Mrs Duncan at this juncture.

Mrs Duncan almost laughed at his generous effrontery and said;

“Charlie, ah loast the full ten pounds. All of it. Why would you have ten pounds? Are you the new money-lender in town?”

At this, he pulled one of the notes out of his back pocket.

“Please don’t jump Mrs Duncan. I found this money so it’s no’ even mine, and I’ve a feeling it was meant for something like this. Please take it”

He held it up toward her hand and she hesitated before gently plucking it from his fingers.

She climbed down to hold his head in her shaking hands and stooped to kiss him tenderly on the forehead before walking away into the gloamy night.

Charlie managed to climb back in his window by dint of an empty barrel he stood on. He pulled himself up using the strength in his arms and the scurried grip of his scraping feet.

He lay in bed awhile thinking of the meaning of all this but he knew with certainty that he’d done the right thing.

He never got to know that the next Saturday there were around fifty bingo-crazed wifies waiting on the Dalmarnock Bridge waiting for him to stop them jumping with his ready cash.

The Christmas Evening of Ringo Spliff

Ringo Spliff had just been applauded all the way to his chair at the far end of the office. This sustained acclimation had been earned the previous evening at the office Christmas party and was in recognition of his thoroughly aberrant and bizarre behaviour at that particular event.

Although the party had been well stocked with booze courtesy of the management and the ‘Christmas kitty’, Ringo had insisted on bringing his own supply in the shape of two bottles of Night Train Express, an apple based sherry-wine in the Thunderbird tradition.

Ringo had, for reasons known only to himself, brought his ‘blues harp’ to the party with him and, as he got drunker and drunker, he chose to utilise his skill with this instrument in the making of ‘lonesome train’ noises. These bluesy emissions were at jangling variance to the disco music being played by the DJ employed for the occasion. At one stage, an enraged colleague threatened to ‘shove that fucking thing’ down Ringo’s throat if he didn’t stop playing it.

Ringo, by this time very drunk indeed, had discovered the ‘novelty plastic hammer’ that someone had brought along for light entertainment. The ‘novelty’ being that on making contact with another surface it made a disproportionately loud ‘popping’ sound. This was a fresh fascination for Ringo Spliff now that his harmonica had been taken from him. He thought it would be highly amusing to apply this toy to twin-setted arse of his manager, the redoubtable Mrs Marsh.

Before his round of applause, which though humorously meant, served only to aggravate his already aching head, he had been roundly reprimanded by Mrs Marsh in her office. She advised him that his behaviour did not reflect well either on him or his career but she’d take no further action given ‘the spirit of the time of year’.

The hammer now lay in a drawer in her desk. The whereabouts of his harmonica was never discovered. 

The Palm House

In the middle of Sefton Park which is on the south side of Liverpool there is The Palm House, a dome-shaped botanic palace of glass which glistens in the summer sun. It glistens in the other seasons too, but best when the summer sun teases the tropical fronds inside and has them reaching for the roof.

Meanwhile, miles away on Southport beach which stretches more desert-like every day as the sea recedes centimetre by centimetre back towards Ireland and the Isle of Man, a man, Bryant, walks solitary and increasingly alone with his morbid thoughts. He schlepps more than walks, for schlepping is what morbid people do, walking is for the more vigorous minded. He scuffs his feet in the little pools of sea-water left behind by the reluctant tide. He wishes his girlfriend was more trustworthy and he didn’t have to watch her all the time for signs of infidelity, impending or already committed.

Timing was everything. His falling for her so heavily seemed to freak her into all sorts of inappropriate behaviour. Inappropriate to his falling for her, at any rate. It all served to squash his spirit and turn him into a very insecure creature indeed. Still in love, but tragically disillusioned and blighted; the love was now a poison between them. At this moment she, having had to leave the decent job where many of the misdemeanours occurred, was busy cursing him while changing soiled bed-clothes in a local care home.

She smashed a mirror in their – her – flat, screaming that she might as well make the curse official. She took in two young cats and taught them to hate him and slash at his wrists at every opportunity. One of them – a Marilyn Monroe of cats, all glamour and fur – saved her noxious farts to wake him in the night; they were like mustard gas and stung his eyes. The other, a runt, waggled her arse at him teasingly as if the little moggy knew that that was his only chance of female nookie in this abode.

He was a tortured man.

He’d begun his Merseyside existence due to another woman: the most on-off relationship since the Burtons or since Samson had been smitten by Delilah. They’d started off in London where she was an art student, and then he’d slouched after her to Dublin where her mother had married a psychopath, then to Liverpool where she’d started her teacher training. He was like a pathetic Ian Beale figure, crying and pleading his way back into her life, and following her around like a beaten dog given yet another reprieve. They’d ended up in Birkenhead (surely the graveyard for any relationship) in a bought house opposite where Wilfred Owen used to live. It’s my guess that the poet chose to go and fight in the war rather than stay there.

To say that Birkenhead is a cultural desert is an insult to cultural deserts. People used to take day trips from there to Bootle in order to luxuriate in its aesthetic splendour.

Now he was in sunny Southport, a veritable Las Vegas compared to scruffy Tranmere, in the throes of another doomed relationship. Paranoid, insecure and suspicious (a firm of divorce lawyers?), he’d taken to following her around like some sort of private detective. Once, he’d adorned a disguise and sat up the other end of a train carriage from her and peeked at her over the top of his Guardian, then scouted her around Liverpool to find out if she was meeting one of the many suspects he had in his fevered mind. In the end, she hadn’t met anyone except her mum as she’d told him would be the case when he had her under questioning that morning.

“You off to Liverpool today, then?”

“Yep, off to meet my mum and take her to lunch”

See? He couldn’t be expected to believe a tale like that!

She’d gone to St. Ives for a long weekend with her friends. He wasn’t invited. He didn’t like her friends and had made up derisory names for them that were only semi-funny. He called one of the ‘Lumpy’ and another ‘Lurch’. This meant, of course, that he too went to St. Ives, again in heavy disguise. He wore a fake moustache and dark glasses. He wore a long raincoat in the sweltering heat. This had the effect of melting the shoe polish with which he’d smeared his hair. His face was streaked black like a mascaraed woman in deep mourning.

He was sure ‘Lumpy’ had pointed him out to the rest of the group and they’d left the restaurant without ordering.

One other time he’d followed her to the Palm House. There she met an old friend of his, Donald Blewitt, from university. They’d kissed as lovers do upon meeting and proceeded to hold hands and laugh, kiss and cuddle their way around the plantly substances.

This time, he went home and waited for her….