The Fly and I

There’s a fly in this room, and it and I seem to share the same cup-a-soup addiction (although he, I’ll call it he, doesn’t seem too keen on the dregs of this Beef and Tomato I’ve left for him. Obviously a choosy wee fly, though he gets all restless when I’m slow with my Minestrone).

I’ve opened the window open wide for him several times but he seems reluctant to leave and, with it being late autumn now I can’t afford to be letting the precious heat from my wee fan-heater belch out of an open window too often.

There’s a hoar frost on the ground and my little seaside town has gone into its yearly hibernation. Ice-cream parlours do meagre business and the steam from the chip shops rises to meet the cold air. Street lamps barely create enough light for drunks to navigate their way homeward and the smoker’s outside the boozers shiver and hunch and stamp their feet to encourage blood circulation. Just shows the tenacity of that addiction that folk will resolutely stand on the streets in blizzard conditions to cop a lungful of nicotine. Not only are they risking all sorts of cancers and heart disease but they’ll maybe have double-pneumonia as well, just to complicate things.

I stand with my latest cup-a-soup (Chicken, my fifth of the day, although the third of those was Golden Vegetable) and look out of my window onto the back of the tenements opposite. Lots of lives being lived over there is what I think. I see a middle-aged woman standing at her sink. Maybe she was once a prostitute, for all I know. Or perhaps she’d once considered becoming a nun. Was there a man sitting watching TV in the front room after she’d made him his tea?

The curtains are drawn in the flat next door. Maybe a death? Or just on holiday

The fly was buzzing at the window. It was scaling the face of it. I wasn’t fooled, though. Before, I’d have taken this as a sign that it wanted out and away, but experience had disavowed this notion, so I won’t be opening the window to encourage escape because this helpfulness will be ignored by the fly.

He wants to stay here where the cup-a-soup dregs are easy pickings.

The Exactitude of Craft

I love tenements so much I even live in one. They have a grandeur and style lacking in more modern structures.

Take the ones in Marchmont to the south of the Old Town of Edinburgh (where Rebus lives). Street upon street, terrace upon terrace, row upon row of four-storey Victorian pink and Edwardian blonde sandstone tenements. These were built deliberately for the better off of Auld Reekie, and very possessive of them they are too (they recently attempted to lessen the numbers of 'itinerant' residents ie students so annoyed are they by their cheeky, temporary presence).

Hippolyte Blanc designed some of them. I only mention this because I like to see his name in print.

Soot-stained and blackish-grey, the tenements of pre-70s Gorbals in central Glasgow housed poor immigrants from Ireland and a community of Jews, many escaping pogroms in Russia, Lithuania or Latvia. These tenements were vastly over-populated though the decision to pull them down in the 1960s and 70s to be replaced by vast, dark tombstone monoliths was not a universally popular one. That both character and community were lost is undeniable; a population cut from 90,000 to just 10,000, many cast to the outer darkness of new-built estates like Easterhouse and Drumchapel.

Battlefield and Langside are still little ‘tenement towns’: the large rooms and high ceilings are popular and the prices tempting for first-time buyers and young families. Again, these areas housed a strong Jewish community who have subsequently moved out to places like Giffnock and Newton Mearns. Row upon row of red and blonde three-storeyed sandstone constructions; like platoons of stone soldiers on parade, standing straight to attention in faultless symmetry; clean and glistening in the ubiquitous rain. These buildings were made for wind and wet, fair weather and foul.

Tenements are not exclusively a Scottish phenomenon. They’re known as ‘walk-ups’ in New York – the lower-east side of Manhattan to be more specific. (think of the cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ album). There’s even a Lower East Side Tenement Museum which tries to replicate living conditions of the late C19th.

Berlin has mietskaserene, Buenos Aires conventillos.

In Mumbai they’re called chawls.

The exactitude of craft is exemplified in the lines and angles of tenements. Exact and true, there is beauty and function in the design. They’re all around us but we rarely notice them in their ageing Victorian and Edwardian splendour.

They’re pretty dandy….when you think about it!

Tenements

As a young lad I remember having to share a stairwell toilet with neighbours. How many neighbours I’m not quite sure: maybe one toilet between four households. Just a wee skinny room with a toilet bowl and a chain-pull, one had to provide one’s own toilet paper and was one’s hands in one’s own kitchen sink.

Our neighbours consisted of parents, children, elderly widows and the odd widower. Auld Tam, who lived downstairs until he died a few years ago, certainly used our toilet. One could tell this by the sweet, almost acrid, smell of his expelled effluence. It hung in the air for ages and one would avoid using said facility for a good while after him if you could. God knows what his diet consisted of.

This was 1970s Glasgow when you ate what was put in front of you. An old man on his own would have nothing approaching sophistication at meal times. It would be a tin of spam and maybe a boiled tottie or two. From the smell of his shite he’d been eating mouldy seaweed and some form of animal vomit. 

(My own Grandfather I’m told, for I never knew him, would make a pot of mince and chop hot dog sausages into it. Similarly, tinned soup would be bulked out with a tin of butter beans which, now that I’ve thought of it, I may try the latter myself).

Maybe he’d get himself an ashet pie supper from the local chippy. There was no shortage of chippies in Glasgow at that time (or, indeed, now). There were two at the bottom of Whitehill Street and many more on Duke Street itself. Suppers were wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers through which the vinegar and grease oozed and if you weren’t careful you’d stain your Harrington jacket or Ben Sherman shirt. If you were posh you’d transfer the food directly onto a plate, if not you’d plonk the supper still in the paper onto a plate on your lap before wolfing it joyously. Pickled onions were an extra particularly to be enjoyed.

Then, I guess, all that was consumed ended up being flushed down the communal toilet.

Ours was a ‘tiled’ close: emerald green with pink rose motif. Quite posh I guess! Certainly not like the tenements where the poorest of the poor lived in The Gorbals: they were pulling these down to be replaced with eerie tombstones that cast a fevered light on the Clyde. These were the days before tenements had security doors, meaning anyone who was able was free to enter and chap at your door. For some reason this entitlement was rarely abused. Certainly, no-one would come in to use the communal ablution facilities: such an act would be an unthinkable violation on a par with pissing through your letter box. Such subtle social sensibilities.

My Da tried to burn down the wee Masonic Hall on the other side of our back dyke. The sound of their songs and drunken banter got on his nerves so much that he felt impelled to this act of arson as he set alight the scraggy grass around the base of this building used for sectarian purposes. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the divide you stand) this merely had the effect of charring the lower brickwork before the services managed to extinguish the, ironically, orange blaze. Derry’s Walls were maintained once more.

Mr Griffen who lived on the ground floor was a keen Mason and I’m sure he suspected my old man to be the fire-lighter. It was around this time that he’d taken up playing the flute, probably to further taunt my father. Luckily, he was a heavy smoker and unable to generate sufficient puff to even get half way through The Sash before spluttering and retching to a quite un-Protestant halt. The funny thing was my Da wasn’t even a Catholic. He was a Celtic-supporting hun which, to many, made it even worse.

Mr Griffin’s neighbour was an old Jewess named Rosie Cohen (“Jews and tims aw up ma close” was how Mr G would complain about it at the bar of the local bowls club which was, as every local knew, an unofficial Orange Lodge where the snooker table didn’t accommodate a green ball). Auld Rosie, as she was not always affectionately known, was a bit of a lush and over-fond of the ‘Coatbridge table wine’ or Buckfast to you and I. To procure this sainted liquor she would attempt to borrow money when she was skint from her more soft-hearted neighbours (Mr G was never one of these). 

My Ma was a popular target, and as well as always being paid back, Rosie’s gratitude was expressed by the pan of soup left outside our door along with Matzoh bread wrapped in tin-foil and sometimes a plate of potato fritters.

There were rumours that Auld Rosie had lost family in the holocaust but details of this were never enquired about or offered.

Mrs Petrie lived on the middle floor alone. Her lift had known tragedy too. Her twin boys had drowned simultaneously, the one trying desperately to save the other, while on a family holiday on the Ayrshire coast. The poor woman had never recovered from the death of her only children and her husband perished miserably two years later a broken, alcoholic man.

She lived her days in solitary silence, attending church on Sunday and shopping once a week at the local Galbraith’s. She offered a polite ‘I’m fine thank you’ when the till-girl asked after her welfare. In this way she very nobly and with great dignity prevented the tremendous grief in her heart from infecting those around her. We in the close were aware of its existence but were allowed not to have to dwell on it.

The McGoldrick’s shared a landing with Mrs Petrie in the house where Auld Tam had died, not utterly surprisingly, from stomach cancer. Maw, Paw and two weans just like us, wee Fraser and his younger sister, Dottie, seven and four and scatty as kittens. Mr McGoldrick worked at the local Tennant’s brewery as a mechanic. Every Friday night he’d bring a big ‘carry-out’ of stolen Super lager and proceed to get pished as a Glesga Green hoor and, often as not, start slapping his wife about. 

Nowadays, action would likely be taken by concerned neighbours. There would be a hot-line to phone and report this sort of thing anonymously. In 70s Glasgow, the term ‘a discreet veil’ was code for ‘mind ye rain fuckin’ business’. It was ‘a domestic’ and not for nosey-parkers. Mrs McGoldrick would be seen maybe a couple of days later hanging out her washing in the back green sporting a bruised lip and a black eye, trying desperately to hide her angry, lonely tears from her tearaway children who’d be climbing the dyke or playing chasies in the midden.

The neighbours from my floor? Well, they were the Thompson family. He, Ted Thompson, was well known as a local gangster and hard-man, believed to be a cousin of the more notorious, Arthur Thompson, a much feared ‘Godfather’ of the Glasgow criminal world. The wife, Agnes, was a right hard-ticket too. Fur coat and she had the knickers too, painted fingernails and coiffured bee-hive, she’d scratch your eyes out if you looked even half-squinty at her. To me, she was the sexiest thing on earth. 

At fourteen, I’d just begun what was to become a prolific masturbatory career and it didn’t take much to get my fist in pumping mode. (Suzie Quatro should be made aware of the literally gallons of fluid spurted on her account. Every time she was on Top of The Pops, and Can the Can was number one for some weeks, I’d be trotting off to the communal toilet where screams of ecstasy and ‘O Suzie’s’ were surely disturbing to the neighbours, particularly the McGoldrick kids). 

Mrs Thompson had a cleavage like the Campsie Hills which reduced me to stuttering paroxysms every time I confronted it. Her scent was overpowering like she’d bathed in the stuff. But, you couldn’t mess with Ted Thompson’s wife. You’d as well just fling yourself on the tracks at Belgrove Station; that’s probably where you’d end up anyway.

The Thompson’s were childless. My Da reckoned, strictly within the confines of his own four walls, that Ted Thompson was too mean to have children. Despite his obvious affluence -Jaguar parked at the front of the close, expensive suits and all the other gangster trimmings –his front door wouldn’t even be approached for a treat at Halloween by the local kids and he was well known for ‘collecting his copper’ and cashing it in for notes at the local Clydesdale’s.

Every tenement was full of stories and Glasgow – Scotland – was cram packed with tenements.

Mad Tam

Mr Jowl may once have been a perfectly good Maths teacher, but his dedication to his craft had eroded over time like chalk cliffs facing an incessant tide. In his case, the tide was succeeding generations of the children of Castlehouse, a vast housing estate on the fringes of the city of Danderbunkie, vice-Capital of the dark country of Mausoloneum.

The rain lashed at the classroom windows as he gazed forlornly at his charges. Algebra, trigonometry, geometry – what was the use? These kids were off at the first opportunity to work in either of the three local industries; the brewery, the cigarette factory or the abattoir. Mathematically, all they’d be doing is counting cans, fags or coos.

He spent the forty minute class having fun with them, making them laugh. He’d pick on one of the tougher, trendier-dressed ones – maybe young Ged McQuillan – grab him pretend-aggressively by the hair, make him guess an answer…

“What is x boy?”

The class would be screaming with laughter, hysterical that they might be next. Mr Jowl only picked on the tough ones, though. Bring them down a peg or two.

Crow Road Comprehensive was from the educational ark, even in Danderbunkie terms. Ink wells, desks with lids, Slade Prison gothic it had everything but the suicide nets. Late Victorian Gradgrindian, one expected the gymnasium to be attired with torture fixtures – knee-splitters and the odd Judas chair. The students looked like space aliens, with their feathered mullets and long leathers, giant flairs and six-inch platform shoes sat behind desks designed for nineteenth century waifs. Like thirty David Essex’s and Suzi Quatro’s sat behind toy furniture. No wonder they didn’t take any of it seriously. Yet, still they had to go through with the charade ‘Todays class is elementary equations which you won’t be taking a blind bit of notice of and I can’t say I blame you’.

This was no longer so much an academic establishment more a finishing school for thugs and hard men. Only a few months ago the then head master, a Mr Thompson brought in to ‘sort the place out’, walked down to the playground hands-in-air  peace-maker style to stop a gang fight and was promptly kicked in the nuts by one of the fourth years. Mayhem ensued of course and the police brought in again. Jowl knew fine well that if he were to check the lining of Ged McQuiilan’s coat he’d find a knife – or even a sword – and he wouldn’t be the only one carrying hardware.

“Fuckin hauns up ya cunt” Mr Masson, the Arts teacher demonstrated how a teacher down at Black Moat Comp, a Mr McSloan, had been subjected to a hostage taking and given six of the belt by one of his pupils, a rather ‘gemmie’ individual named ‘Mad’ Tam McGurk. McGurk and his cohorts had then locked the unfortunate tutor in his equipment cupboard only to be discovered by the school caretaker, Mr Halitos, quite a while after the end of the school day.

The staff room was what you’d expect at an inner city comprehensive in mid-seventies Danderbunkie. The air was foetid with cigarette smoke and grubby text books lay in piles amid a rabble of chairs and tables laden with educational supplements and old copies of the Daily Herald.

Mr Cream, the Modern Studies teacher always made sure there were a few copies of Socialist Worker strewn about and would deliberately read out loud about car strikes and the obvious perfidy of governments and bosses generally. The teachers occupying the chairs and standing about ‘the kettle area’ were a care-worn bunch in the main. All had the look of folk who had run an arduous race but still had more than half the course to go.

Mr Masson was a large, dark, gangly man with hands like spades. He held them out now in mock-supplication to indicate the plight of poor Mr McSloan, who was in reality a vicious bastard who always aimed for the wrists with his tawse. For an art teacher, Mr Masson, displayed few of the sensibilities one might expect of the artistic nature. Boorish and seemingly dull of imagination one wondered if he was in fact an art teacher at all. Maybe one day he’d covered for an absentee art teacher who’d never returned and been left there ever since.

At the ‘fuckin hauns up ya cunt’ Miss Chappel, the Religious Studies teacher, blanched. It was bad enough teaching the Gospels to groups of teenagers suddenly devoted to sex, violence and the acquisition of garish footwear without her fellow teachers resorting to such industrial language. Miss Chappel was ‘old school’, quite literally, she’d been teaching here since the war years when the school was a ‘senior secondary’ and such as Masson would have been lucky to be among the cleaning staff. In those days, a certain calibre of pupil was the expectation. Some were now famous in their various fields of endeavour, and Miss Chappel held on to this fact when she felt she was going under with the general educational trend. To Miss Chappel, the ideal of ‘comprehensivism’ threw the baby out with the bath water. It dragged the cream down and raised the hoi polio to a false level.

“‘Hauns up ya cunt!’ I mean, what’s it coming to eh? Poor auld McSloan. Nae chance now wi’ kids like that. Well, they’re not even kids eh? Just thugs. What say you Boab?”

“Aye, it’s a worry right enough. Let’s hope it doesn’t catch on here” Robert ‘Boab’ McCluskey was Head of Physics and due for retirement in five months’ time. He’d made the mistake of befriending Masson one drunken night out and now Masson presumed upon their relationship with unwanted familiarity. McCluskey had a strange look of Rupert the Bear about him. A wee teddy bear of a man, all whiskery and big bellied. He was one of those old blokes who wore trousers with massive zips that seemed to stretch from groin to chest. He wore the clothes of the elderly bowling club member – checked shirt, brown leather shoes and beige blouson. This elderly genteelness was belied by his over-affection for the children in his charge. Savile-like, this was widely suspected but no-one had ever bothered to pursue the truth of it, and since he was near-retirement, it was assumed that this was the carpet under which his sordid career of abuse would be swept.

“Ye widnae stand for that wid ye Boab? Nae chance. Try that with me and they’ll be in for a shock” 

Masson took on a Bogart-like stance as if he was some sort of hard man from The Bronx. The whole staff-room knew he shit his pants the time wee Malky Forsyth had pulled a Stanley on him. The whole school had laughed about it.

“Don’t tell me ye’ve got a gun in your drawer, Tam?” Linda Squelch, the blonde bombshell of a gym teacher, knew Masson hated being referred to as ‘Tam’. He knew the ‘kids’ called him ‘Mad Tam’ in a derisory sort of a way, and as he had feverish fantasies of a very erotic nature over Ms Squelch he was crestfallen at the implied contempt.

“Got a gun in ma poakit Linda, can ye no’ tell?” Masson seemingly couldn’t help but say the coarsest things at every opportunity. Pre-Tourette’s awareness perhaps but Thomas Masson, Senior Art Teacher at Crow Road Comprehensive seemed to have an involuntary instinct for saying the wrong thing.

Linda Squelch was the goddess of Crow Road Comprehensive. Pubescent males were forced into masturbatory paroxysms every night thinking of her blonde locks and soft cleavage. It’s not known if she was anywhere near aware of the liquid tons of bodily fluid spurted on her account but she certainly must have been aware of the lecherous stares of pupils and staff alike.

A woman, certainly one as outrageously erogenous as Linda Squelch, knows when she is making an impact. Fourteen year olds had their eyes on stalks Looney Tunes style as ‘Miss Squelch’ bent over to pick up a basketball in her tight gym shorts. Their love-lives were ruined forever as no female outside the realm of high-class porn would ever come up to scratch for them.

What they didn’t know was that Miss Squelch was a fervent lesbian with a serious and baffling crush on one of the dinner ladies, the redoubtably butch Edina McGubbligan, a mother of six who owned a face like a bag of chisels and a pelvic floor akin to a sailors hammock.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the beholder in this case was long overdue for a visit to Specsavers. Edina, as yet unaware of the ardour that existed for her within the plentiful bosom of Miss Squelch, had recently wondered why she kept bumping into her. She seemed to be duty teacher at every sitting these days and seemed to make a point of trying to engage Edina in conversation, even to the point of ignoring the other dinner ladies offer of assistance until Mrs McGubbligan was free.

Edina had barely thought of Lesbianism and if she ever did, it was something for posh folk to be involved with, not women from the Castlehouse Estate. Women from here married men with drink problems and had sex solely to have children. If there ever had been a sensual side of Edina McGubbligan it had long disappeared amid the shitey nappies and the raging marital battles. She’d seen lesbians on the telly and they always looked angry and unhappy.

Squelch the lesbian wasn’t exactly unhappy though she was deeply frustrated. Usually, men or women that she’d given even the merest signal of interest to fell at her feet in an instant. She wasn’t even sure if Edina McGubbligan had noticed her at all, and this was more than upsetting, it was almost insulting. The big hulking housewife had no right to ignore such glamour and sexuality. She’d worn her most revealing blouses and shortest skirts. She’d worn high heels and pouted her lips.

There were boys and teachers alike who had been fainting and panting in her wake as she had made her way to the dinner hall. Her perfume held in their nostrils as they rushed away home or to the school toilets to relieve their sexual tension. Plumbers were called in to fix blockages but refused when the cause was discovered. Outraged by the mass sinfulness, local priests held demonstrations outside the school gates, but, suspected of pederasty, they were chased off by worried parents.

Miss Squelch would have to resort to more desperate measures to lure the apple of her eye.

Hitch Hiker

I’m a hitch-hiker in the nineteen-eighties, the very zenith of hitch-hiking in the western world. In these times it’s actually ‘cool’ to hitch-hike. Drivers pick up hitch-hikers just to boost their credibility.

The film The Hitcher starring Rutger Hauer hasn’t been made yet and no-one expects to be shot in the head or stalked by a psychopathic one.

Born-again Christians are prolific lift-givers. Captive audience for their gospellings, I guess. One chap took me fifty miles past his own destination because ‘Jesus told him to’. Thank you Jesus! Then he sang me some Christian songs before I got out. I hadn’t noticed the guitar on the back seat.

Another driver drove me across the border to England while extolling the pious virtues of evangelist Billy Graham, claiming to have met the man himself. I’ll always remember him as the spit of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry (the driver, not Billy Graham, although….).

I fell in love while hitch-hiking. She was waiting for a lift just like me. Eleven at night, Charnock Richard services, both aiming for Glasgow (actually, I was going on to Kilmarnock but I didn’t tell her this. Something to do with camaraderie and cosy chumminess). She was wearing a very toasty looking Arran jumper under an open Parka. She had curly blonde hair like Marilyn Monroe. I thought her the loveliest vision I had ever seen. Her name was Lorna.

She knew within seconds that I was smitten: I suppose girls that look like that are used to being fallen in love with. I, usually so loquacious, stumbled over words like a new-born fawn trying to stand for the first time. I said I was sure she would get a lift soon but hoped with all my heart that she wouldn’t. I hated the creepy male driver who hadn’t stopped to pick her up yet. He’d have to take both of us and mind his manners.

Lovely Lorna. Never saw her again. She got a lift from some elderly gent in a Rover. Dirty old bugger.

People would give you lifts so they could tell you their life stories. Again, captive audience. Ex-army usually, telling you their service tales and how they miss ‘the camaraderie’.

Once got a two hundred mile lift from London to my destination, Liverpool from a bloke who drove at ninety in the fast lane and asked me to keep rolling spliffs for us both. By the time I got to my girlfriends I was both zonked and traumatised, having spent most of the journey convinced we were going to crash and die.

Not as scary as a lift in a lorry from Carlisle to Carmyle given me by a driver who took the concept of drink-driving a little too literally seeing as how he was determined to do both at once. With a half bottle of bells in one hand and the steering wheel in the other he rattled us down the A74 like the hammers of hell. He’d already told me to get out once on the hard shoulder for ‘being a Tim’ (he being a true blue-nose) but he relented saying it was his ‘good deed for the Queen’.

Hitch-hiking is not so prevalent now. Drivers are too aware and worried about the possibility of picking up a pyscho or a mobile mugger . This is a shame. It means me missing out on so many stories.

Invisible Mending

The strangest thing about this particular ESA medical Assessment was that the claimant appeared to be invisible. I say appeared because in a visual sense Davie Bryant didn’t appear at all. O the assessor, one Maggie Finlay a senior nurse, knew he was there but she couldn’t actually see him. She could see everything else in the room; the gurney, the scales, the door the window, even the carpet, her computer screen and the implements on her desk. She just couldn’t see Davie Bryant.

“But, I um here though..!”

He’d had terrible difficulty signing in present at reception, in fact, the receptionist had taken so poorly at the non-sight of him that she’d had to lie down in the sick room and was sent home for the day.

“Mr Bryant. You haven’t mentioned anything on your claim form about being invisible”, Maggie Finlay could hear herself speaking words but was disconcerted by the fact that she didn’t know what they collectively meant. She’d apparently acknowledged, almost accusatively, that another human being was invisible and sitting before her.

“Naw, well it’s happened since. Ah wis awright when I filled the form in”, he stopped, realising what he’d just said and to whom “Well, y’know, obviously ah wisnae awright ah jist wisnae invisible, ken?”

She could see and hear the leather seating on the chair creasing under the pressure of Bryant’s agitation.

“Erm, Mr Bryant, I’m not sure how to proceed. The rules mean that I have to view your condition at the time of you filling your form in, when you stated you were suffering from stress and depression. I can’t really take your subsequent……invisibility into account…”

“You don’t think it’s significant…?” She could sense Bryant had lent forward in his annoyance as the sound of his voice seemed to edge closer.

“You think it’s mibbe cured my anxiety and stress to have woken up last Thursday tae find that I couldnae see masel in the mirror…that I was invisible? You think that’s mibbe calmed me doon”

Maggie was used to claimants getting upset. This was after all a government sponsored project to get those they saw as shirkers and malingerers off state benefits wherever possible. Over her three years as an assessor she’d found that it was often the undeserving that got shafted. The street-wise ‘at it’ merchants had the vitality and the cojones to find a way through, the truly vulnerable hadn’t the energy or compulsion and were easy targets for the….well….targets.

“I know what you’re saying, it’s just that I have to view your condition from what you’ve written on your claim form and also, of course, your GPs report which doesn’t mention you’re invisible either. Granted it was written before….was it last Thursday you said?”

“Aye, last Thursday. Been invisible ever since”

“Have you seen your doctor about it, just as a matter of interest?”

“He said he couldn’t see me”

A heavy pall of silence fell upon the ropey little assessment room with its Monet print on the wall, put there for its calming effect. As if any notions of claimants becoming distraught as your system of questioning consistently denied them the opportunity to explain their condition satisfactorily would be instantly extinguished by the presence of this painting in its tatty frame. Once, they’d used plants strategically placed in open plan job centres for this same effect until they realised they could just as easily be used as weapons to hit impertinent staff with.

All at once the sardonic humour of his remark hit the part of her frontal lobe that recognises these things and she smiled in recognition.

“Have you found no advantages to being invisible?” If one human adult couldn’t take a healthy interest in anothers sudden invisibility then what had the world come to? She just hoped he wasn’t going to pipe up with some clichés about being able to watch women undress or go to the toilet.

“The obvious wans like watchin the burd acroass the street get ur kit aff, bit mainly ahv jist been goin aboot playin wee tricks oan people and stealin weans sweeties an that”

She looked long and hard at Davie Bryant and decided that his benefit was humped.

The Book they Couldn't Lend

I’m a book entitled ‘The Social History of Margarine’ and no-one ever checks me out of this blasted library. I’m four-hundred and thirty-seven pages of pure educational gold and no-one wants me.

My title, though, attracts attention. Browsers pick me up with a wry look on their faces. They call their friends over ‘Look at this; they say ‘A Social History of Margarine’. What a boring book!’ And off they go seeking a John Grisham.

Well, how would they know that? Have they read me? Do they know that the very idea of me came from an Emperor of France?

It gets boring just resting here on this shelf. I’m stuck between ‘Bread Making: An Idiot’s Guide’ and ‘Eating for Victory: Original Second World War Ration Recipes’ and even they get borrowed from time to time. At least then I get a new neighbour or two. Last week it was ‘Fifty Shades of Chicken: A History of Erotic Food’. That was quite a thrill, but now old ‘Idiot’s Bread making’ is back so things are back to frump-mode.

I look across to the Science Fiction section from time to time to see if there’s any action. Plenty of Asimov, Philip K Dick, Iain M Banks and the rest. We had a reader in last week who’d written a book called ‘Do Glaswegians Dream of Enamelled Teeth?’

Right now we have one of the library staff doing the ‘entertain the kiddie’s bit’: ‘The Wheel’s On the Bus’ and all that shite. Four mornings a week I have to put up with this. At least if someone would borrow me I’d get a change of environs: maybe a nice wee bungalow down in Joppa, a nice polished coffee table to elegantly rest on. Never once have I been out of this library in the eleven years since I was brought here.

Portobello Public Library! Hardly the Bodleian is it?

So much knowledge to give that no-one wants.

Did you know that in the United States they call me ‘oleo’?  I’m not going to even explain why; you’ll have to read me to find out.

Ghosties

The wind was birlin aw roon the head-staines in Piershill Cemetery. Aw roon aboot us the wind wis swirlin up the autumn leaves like some mad spin-dryer.

It wis late at night an me an ma pals were walkin hame efter a barry night oot at Mojo’s, the new nightclub up the Cowgate. The bus stoap wis at wan side o the cemetery, oor hooses in Mountcastle were at the ither. Quickest way wis also the spookiest. Past the big heid-stain dedicated tae The Great Lafayette and his wee dug Beauty. The famous magician was killed in a theatre fire in 1911. Thoosands lined the streets for his funeral procession and when ehs wee dug died they buried it with um cos he wis so devoted to it. Bitter-sweet eh?

There’s five ey us aw staggerin through this dark graveyard an we’re aw chitterin’ wi the cauld. Aw we’ve goat oan is wee skimpy dresses an’ high heels and wearin these mad face-masks – no a jaicket or coat atween us. Ma big pal, Lorraine, is singin some auld Peter Andre shite she must huv dredged fae some recess in her memry..

“Oh, no doubt you look so fine
Oh, girl I want to make you mine”

She’s aff her heid on vodka-cokes!

We’re hauf-wiy through when it aw begins tae kick-aff. Dawn sais ‘ye know it’s Halloween?’ which wis stupit cos of course we did, we’d jist been tae a Halloween Pairty, an then this terrifying scream sorta rises up in front o us. I say ‘rising up’ as it seemed to rise oot of the ground in front of us. It wis like the worst scream ye ever heard, like someone was being tortured horribly. I huv tae admit ah hauf pished masel and ah wis giggling which is whit a awiys dae when ahm scared oot ma wits.

Aw ae a sudden the air turns even caulder thin ye could even imagine an’ this figure appears afore us, huge it wis, about eight feet tall and clothed in shrouds. Like a giant oot the Michael Jackson vidjo. 

Thing is tho, it husnae goat a heid, an its no haudin wan under its erm eether.

It sterts tae reach out and thirs a hideous smell comin fae it, like keech and mouldy auld meatballs.

Wee Dawn looks at me and sterts laughin’. She turns roon tae the appiration and says

“haw nae-heid. Ye want tae git yirsel tae a launderette, yer mingin’ man!”

An’ then she kicks him sqerr in the haw-maws – luvs ur kick-boxin’ wee Dawn, ah widnae mess wi ur – and we trot on past the daft hulk lyin’ oan the gravel haudin’ ehs swollen nuts.

Barry night, but dying fur ma kip, likesays….!

Making Paths and Holes in Fences

 “Good morning. HM Revenue and Customs, Receivables, Avril speaking. How can I help you?”

“Is that Avril the section leader wummin?”

“Erm….yes, yes it is. Can I help you?”

“Aye ye kin. I’m phoning up on behalf of Edward Bryant. He won’t be in today”

“O dear. Why is that?”

“He’s drunk”

Happy times in the 1970s when nothing much mattered, certainly not your job. This was before everything turned sour in the country, and government’s started making things tough for poor folk. You had less to worry about in the 70s. So long as you were able to afford the new Lynyrd Skynyrd album, that was all that mattered.

The landscapes were different. There was innocence that would soon be lost when you began to realise the Tories were cunts and despised those not doing as well as themselves and their like. Bankers, wankers and tight-buttocked golf-clubbers hell-bent on ‘getting on’ at any cost especially someone else’s.

A man-boy like Edward Bryant could afford his friend Jack to phone him in drunk because if it came to it, he’d just leave his pishy wee job as Assistant Collector of Taxes and go and work somewhere else, probably the DHSS who were always taking on staff as fast as they were constantly shedding them. You signed on there one week and were the other side of the wire mesh the next handing out the money.

These days, work is a more seriously scientific affair. Phone in drunk now and they’d have you at an Occupational Therapist answering questions.

Being Scottish in London at that time was an interesting thing. Many of us thought we were down there to show the English the proper way to get steaming drunk. Some never made it outside the confines of the Kings Cross/Euston station proximity. They just holed up in some dive near the station, got moroculous for two years then went back up the road.

“How was London, son?”

“Some place, maw, some place”

As a boy I had O.C.D. though no-one had heard of such a thing. I was so scared of my Dad dropping dead that I’d be forced to do everything three times. Not four (don’t even like writing ‘four’ even to this day), not two but three, always three. And I always had to touch every paling on the way to school. That was a lot of palings as a big metal fence ran the whole way the length of the estate (to keep weans away from the burn but, as usual, a space was made to get through by some bright spark wrenching one of the palings away to leave the gap, but I couldn’t go through this because I had to touch every paling three times)

Sometimes I even had to repeat myself twice when talking to folk. They’d look at me oddly; sometimes they’d get angry and say ‘I know I heard you the first time. Fuck you telling me again for…..TWICE!’

I wasn’t the best fighter at school or even in my class. In fact, I often got picked on. I was the tallest in the class, but I couldn’t fight. Not a good combination. Wee rufftie-tuffties could enhance their ‘rep’ by battering me. Until eventually, I was so notorious for being ‘a shitebag’ that reputations remained unenhanced by giving me a doing: everybody could do that!

Life’s shite when you’re picked on. It colours everything for a long, long time until well into your fifties you’re telling the whole sorry tale to a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist somewhere in Edinburgh.

Once I met a friend who had somewhat similar superstitions about members of his immediate family dropping dead because he didn’t perform certain repetitive tasks. Once, in a pub in Leytonstone, I cruelly suggested to him that his father would come to a sorry end if he didn’t immediately do a ‘goat dance’ in front of everyone in the pub. Of course, he had to do this.

This bloke was Davy who was Jack’s younger brother. He resembled a bare-arsed banditti, a fiery haired Jacobite down in London to claim the throne for the bonnie Prince. Davy, like me, could and would drink himself to a stand-still. I’d received a substantial debate and Davie was loth to let me out of his site for a minute. Indeed, he took me back to the bedsit where lay asleep his intellectually challenged girlfriend, Theresa. I was invited to sleep alongside them on their double bed (nothing remotely dodgy, you understand. Davy was to homosexuality and threesome shenanigans what Anders Breivik is to The Koran). On the ensuing nights I would pretend to sleep as the bed rocked to their urgent couplings. In my drunken snoozings, I’m sure I heard a conversation containing the words ‘gie Eddie a go’ but I may have been dreaming.

Theresa was a cunning, cheerful product of the nearby Essex countryside. Upon cashing a giro at the local post office she was asked for ID, upon which request she produced a photograph of herself signed at the back. For some reason never ascertained she had it in her mind that Lester Piggott, a favourite of her horse-race loving spouse, was the president of South Africa. Not bright intellectually perhaps, she knew every shop in the area that would give tick and would have a fiver off you before you even knew you had one. She was sex mad, making demands on poor Davie that even the most lustful Jacobite couldn’t aspire to.

Jack came later. We met him off the tube at Leytonstone tube station and were drunk within the hour. This is how Glaswegians greeted each other in London (in Glasgow too, actually).

As is traditional, Jack sneered at me and eyed me with violent derision every time I opened my mouth. I was friend to his younger brother and therefore an interloper. He couldn’t resist my charming humour, however, and we quickly became friends too.

Jack was a Jekyll and Hyde drunk. Jekyll was a nice man; generous, smiling and pleasant to be around. Hyde was an abject pain in the arse and barred from most of the pubs in the area that we all drank in.

As I say, it is the Scots duty while residing in London to uphold every stereotype attributed to them and, in this endeavour, Jack Wildman was magnificent. When drunk, he could have wound up Mother Theresa of Calcutta in an instant. If he were present in ‘The Life of the Saints’ their devotions would have been ruined. God himself would have bolted his celestial doors to escape the earthly attentions of a well-oiled Jack.

Jack was one of those drunks who never slept, no matter how much everyone prayed he would. He’d cavort, sing, rile, annoy, insult, injure, poke, laugh, deride, shout, provoke and prod all night and all day as if whisky were a barbiturate. Every gulp energised him to new heights of pestiferousness, and woe-betide the man, woman or child who attempted to take it away from him.

Jack was no great fighter, but he could annoy you into submission. One time he pestered Black Jerry so much for a line of his speed that Jerry gave in and gave him the wrap to take to the gents. Jack sniffed the lot and sat all night bending the ear of the man now bereft of his sulphate with all sorts of shite about rabbits, times of trains and a lifetime’s memories of supporting Partick Thistle.

Dark and long-haired and forever wearing a long leather coat, indoors and out, on a blustery, windy night, coat billowing, he could easily be mistaken for a drunken, cacophonous warlock from some nightmare poem of Burns. Tam o’Shanter mad on speed and cheap wine.

Jack was once exiled from England and sent back up the road. During the riots of eighty-one he looted a toy shop in Walthamstow and stole a Bugs Bunny Baby Buggy for his young kid in Glasgow. It was brought on as exhibit 1 in court much to the amusement of all concerned (except, it seems, the judge).

Jack was a bit of a ladies man on the quiet and was particularly sought after by fat lassies. Why this was I couldn’t say for sure but, as I say, when sober he had a quiet gentleness to him that maybe they responded to. They maybe felt safe with him and not as self-conscious about their weight. Whatever, it was always big lassies with Jack and he’d disappear into his room for days with his lucky lady, she only re-appearing for tea and food but never alcohol. Jack would stay sober for these little trysts, for give him even the briefest sniff of it and the whole thing would end in high farce and harsh words and Jack likely singing Dylan’s ‘Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat’ at the top of his strangulated voice.

Amazing that he was to become Minister of Sport in the ill-fated Callaghan government. He was the one that implemented guaranteed promotion for Partick Thistle and the club bar to be open to three pm.

I'll Follow the Sun

My old colleague wants to reminisce. He seems to think this is a good idea.

Sitting here in one of those shopping mall corporate coffee shops I feel distinctly uncomfortable as I always do in these global chains. Faux-friendly and pricey-as-fuck, you just know someone’s getting shafted somewhere down the line. I haven’t been the same since I read Fast Food Nation and my trade union hackles rise every time I walk into one of these soul-less café’s. I’m old school, more at home in a greasy spoon – a working man’s café to quote the great Ray Davies song.

Humanity is deeply selfish, at least here in the west. It’s cliché now, but how can we live like this when folk are starving two thousand miles away? How dare we? Another piece of over-expensive frankly mediocre chocolate-fudge cake? Yes, why not you complacent, greedy, thoughtless bastard.

I’m not great in these places.

And this old friend…?

Can’t stand the cunt! Never could.

It was his idea to come in here. Not a great deal of choice in this giant witless barn of a ‘mall’ – another American import, not unless you want to go even more upmarket and play a fucking fortune in some slice-of-pizza place or a Trattoria where you’ll be fleeced for some bland calamari or gnocci..

“The bill, sir? Four-hundred and forty pounds plus VAT and, of course, a generous ‘service charge’”

People are generally thick and lap all this shite up. It’s their kids that do it: holding their mulish parents to ransom and blackmail “but Daddy, Echinacea and Josh have got these new two hundred pound trainers, you can’t buy these cheaper sturdier one’s, it’ll look terrible, and I don’t even know what sturdier means”.

Me? All I’ve got are some dodgy memories when things seemed to have more substance somehow. In reality, everyone’s armpits smelled, women got their arses patted, and racial prejudice was part of everyday dialogue.

And this cunt wants to reminisce in a fake coffee franchise surrounded by the guilty stink of commerce….

As if I want to remember working in the job centre. I’m due to sign and account for my very soul there in less than an hour.

The sun is shining outside this Mammonolithic Mausoleum, the sky is blue and the rain is weeks away. The heart of the matter is elsewhere and forgotten. One has to learn to follow the sun again…