“If you gied um salad he’d fucken fry it”
The arse was hanging out of the couch they were sitting on. It had seen better days; probably back in the last century. A pallid light almost emanated from an ancient standard lamp, maybe pre-Argos, it’s shade tilted roguishly like the hat on some WW2 spiv. The carpet on the floor was so matted that only a membrane of the original pattern was visible under the decades of cigarette ash and accumulated vomit and alcohol which had often been applied all at the same time.
“That cunt would fry sugar”
This was council house living Gorgie style. Big block of concrete divided into flats then left to fuck to its own devices. The lift rarely worked, the plaster came away in chunks. They framed the damp patches as works of conceptual art; maybe the Turner Prize one of these years, Urban Decay no.301.
The whole area had seen better days but no-one could quite remember them.
A hundred years ago, John MacLean had urged the working folk of Scotland to rise up and seize the day but they hadn’t bothered and now tories from all the big political parties were shitting all over them for their negligence. Folk were actually having to be ill, or at least offer convincing verisimilitude of such, to qualify for disability benefits. Sanctions were being handed out like nippy sweeties at job centres throughout the land by crabbit auld civil servants who thought themselves guardians of the public purse. They were being offered immigrants as convenient scapegoats for all of this even though it was the immigrants who were working like Trojans with never a day on the sick.
The world wasn’t fair if you didn’t collectively make it so. Otherwise you just sat and moaned and dreamed of being on Jeremy Kyle.
Short-term escape came in many forms. One could drink, smoke, pill-pop, snort and inject oneself into oblivion, but that other longer-term oblivion was always there waiting when you came back.
Sometimes nothing works, and these two jokers certainly weren’t doing anything like that. The last time Tam Mullan had put in a shift the Bay City Rollers were only on their second comeback and as for Arthur ‘Zebedee’ Finlay, he’d tried it once the day after he left school delivering milk with United Dairies before he’d decided that dealing in and partaking of recreational drugs was a far pleasanter pursuit. They cried him Zebedee due to his powers of recovery - ‘bouncing back’ – and the fact that he’d been in and out of prison more times than some of the warders.
The compulsive fryer they were talking about was William ‘Bambo’ Taggart. ‘Bambo’ because he was a bam and also a mad Jambo. Rumour had it that he had a Heart of Midlothian tattooed on his cock and preferred women who supported Hibs so he could truly say he loved to fuck the Hibees.
Two o’clock on an Edinburgh November afternoon and the world outside Polwart Towers held all the magic and mystery of a dirty shovel. The air looked as if it was contaminated by iron ore, like a sepia photograph of a bygone age. This impression was helped by a film of stoor on the inside of the living room window. You have to peer pretty determinedly to make out the Lowry-like stick figures shuffling along the road either to the massive space-age Asda’s to buy Krispy Kreme’s and cheap cider or to one of the local pubs or bookies to while away the time. Forgormiks. Poor souls struggling through lives blighted by the ‘fuck-it’ mentality and a notorious lack of personal discipline.
One of these unfortunates was Malky McCulloch, a man blessed with the best taste in music in Scotland but cursed with a seemingly insatiable desire for Auld Blammo Tonic Wine (or ‘Gorgie table wine’ as it was locally known). He drank it like it was juice. How he managed to fund this precarious habit was somewhat of a curious affair and something which had been baffling local shop-keepers for some months. The lava seas of the moon were of lesser quantity than the amount of Auld Blammo Malky McCulloch had swallowed.
Malky McCulloch was a waste of a man in many ways, though that depended on what you valued of a human existence. True, he wasn’t a self-employed car mechanic, or a estate agent or even a lowly civil servant, but if you wanted to know the name of the guitar player in Simple Minds or sing you a selection from the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, he was your man. He would also willingly talk the ear off you about Soren Kierkegaard or the life and times of Willie Bauld while constructing the neatest spliff you’ve ever seen or smoked.
As I say; it depended what you valued about folk. He knew fuck all about house prices but could tell you all you needed to know about the break-up of the Ward Hunt ice-shelf. Which is more important? I’ll leave you to decide.
One of the drawbacks of being ‘in recovery’ as the jargon had it is that you kept bumping into people who most definitely weren’t. You’d blether on ineffectually about attending ‘groups’ and being ‘two weeks clean’ but such people essentially ignored you or dismissed your words with a derisive “ach, a quick pint willnae herm ye” or “I’ve got some top gear, pure fucken good stuff” and invite you to some hovel to partake of the very thing that has made your adult life apart from the last two weeks a living miasma of hell and damnation.
Such people are the devil disguised as friends. You may have known them from primary school, your mother will know their mother, but they are hell bent on dragging you back down to the very faeces and murky margins of existence that you are tremblingly trying to escape from.
“Haw Malky, you deef ya cunt? Been shoutin efter ye fur ages, man”
This time the Devil came in the exiguous shape of James ‘Jaffa’ McKinnon, a man-boy of indeterminate age who may well have been born in a hoodie. To call him shifty would be an insult to World War Two spivs. When asked his address he generally gave it as HM Saughton as it was a safe bet any correspondence would catch up with him there.
Malky responds in kind.
“Awright Jaffa? Aye, ah phoned that Deaf Awareness folk aboot it but there was nae answer. How’s it gaun ma man?”
“Champion Malks, jist champion. I’ve goat some really nice gear. Ye liftin’?”
The pressure never stops. It takes 24/7 not to return to bad habits; it takes less than a second to succumb. And there was zero-tolerance among his friends for his policy of abstinence. It made them feel bad.
A chill wind made Malky turn his shoulders into his chest and he did his wee nervous dance as he prepared to resist. All of these confrontations took far more energy than they merited, after all, a simple ‘no thanks, buddy’ should suffice.
“Nah Jaffa, ahm aff that stuff” They’d drummed it into him at the group to be assertive, not to say I’m trying but to say I have.
“Away tae fuck Malks, this stuff’s barry. Fucken space cadet stuff”
Folk with drug habits lived in two unreal worlds. The unreality of being on drugs and the unreality of pretending it was ‘fucken barry’. This was denial on a very fundamental level. Had no one seen the human carnage? Deaths, rehab, detox, prison, premature decrepitude, the pain and misery of wives, boyfriends, husbands, girlfriends, mothers, fathers and all the rest. Unplanned, unwanted offspring, care orders, violence, harassment orders. These were all ‘barry’? The fun had stopped some time ago if it was ever really there at all, why was this still the best idea in town?
It’s surprising how quickly complacency sets in. Literally weeks after the latest wreckage and the word ‘boredom’ raises its ugly head. The promises and vows amid the hours of trying to heave up bile and poison accumulated over a two-week long binge, all seemingly forgotten now as the hours turn into days and the days seem like weeks.
This is what left you vulnerable: at least it was ‘something to do’. All the other convictions -to do the cookery class, to volunteer at the Grassmarket Project, maybe start a band – had somehow dissipated into some rhetorical void: very little effort had been spent bringing them to fruition. Malky still attended his ‘recovery meetings’ but wilful enthusiasm had degenerated into whining and moaning about ‘folk tempting him’ and how long the days seemed and how he couldn’t sleep.
Long ago in the mists of time there had been an event, perhaps the only event of its kind. This was the ‘barry time’. All who were there would remember it as the ‘barry time’ until it was now part of local folk-lore. The drugs, the pills, the alcohol, the sex, the music, the vibe, the groove had all coalesced with the arrangement of the stars and it had been the memorable ‘barry time’. From that day all concerned and more besides had spent time, money, health and whatever else it took to recreate that ‘barry time’.
And they never, ever had. Yet, the search for blissful oblivion went on still.
Malky got out of this one by promising to ‘pop in later’. Hardly the assertive recovering user, but it was easier than the wrangling’s that would ensue if he stuck to his guns. These would usually end with ‘fuck sake Malky, you’re getting’ to be a right borin’ cunt’ or words to that effect. Sometime’s he thought he might go on live in the woods of Corstorphine Hill: live wild and eat berries like the Bear Ghryl chap, away from the constant drug temptations.
Malky McCulloch’s friends and drug acquaintances seemed to him like ghosts of people who hadn’t quite died yet, although there were many who were genuine ghosts - Cammy Simpson, Deek Hammond, Bobo Gillespie – all gone, funerals attended, bodies burnt, ashes spilt around the walls of Tynecastle (or Easter Road in Deek Hammonds case – irreverent rumours prevailed that Bambo Taggart had pissed them to a sodden mulch beforehand, his hatred of all things Hibs knowing no bounds of friendly etiquette). All of them were somehow chimerical and disappearing from life day by day. Look at Jaffa McKinnon. If there was a ‘dead pool’ he’d be odds-on favourite. Skin drawn and almost translucent, he was like a skeleton encased in a cheap poly bag, all angles and angst, a simulacrum of the happy boy of his long-distant past. The boy who made them all laugh at school was now a strange chemical-driven desperado who’d walk over his own mum for a bag of kit.
Though, there’s none of us quite who we were. Life has played upon us like the sea upon the rocks on the shore.
We become barely visible to ourselves concealed behind masks for all occasions.
Taking drugs is a cause of and a symptom of ‘arrested development’ and the more cauterised one’s emotions become the more drugs one is more likely to take, partly through emotional immaturity and a hidden desire to reveal oneself to oneself. It was like living two lives at once: the one your internal life full of hopes and softer feelings than you could dare express in your other life, the one you lived with friends and family and anyone else that happened to encroach. Maybe you took drugs to try and marry-up the two existences. Or maybe it was all merely a quest for oblivion.
All is life one may suppose, but one life is real and several are imagined. Malky wondered sometimes why things hadn’t been different. Why was he not a long-distance runner? Or, a long-distance lorry-driver for that matter? Why was he not a doctor or a missionary or world-renowned horticulturist?
Why the fuck was he not a church minister or some sort of porn star in films that featured dwarf women?
Why was he, Malky McCulloch fae Dalry, unemployed and with a troublesome proclivity towards hard narcotics and other substances harmful to body and soul?
Mullan and Finlay had been sharing a spliff while watching ‘Who’s Feet?’ on Sky. The idea of the show was that a panel of celebrity podiatrists were shown pictures of famous feet, the owners of which they had to guess having been given hilarious clues by the show’s host, Simon Bastard.
“She’s not known for being on her feet all of the time”
These feet would turn out to belong to big-breasted model Jordan who was known to be keen on a bit of the old hows-yer-father.
Darkness had fallen outside and the landscape had changed dramatically. What before had looked grim and bleak now held possibilities like a crime novel or a Christmas fairy tale. Little orange and white lights illuminated the pitch black and the sound of cars in the wet reminded Tam Mullen of his childhood staying at his Granny’s place in Fountainbridge. All tucked in after his Ovaltine and toast, cars were rarer than they are today and sounded like American movies to wee Tam head-full of Batman and Man from U.N.C.L.E. he’d be staying at his auld Granny’s because his folks had been fighting again or his father, again out of prison, had taken to the booze and wrecked the house and bits of his mother.
“Best off the bairn disnae witness this”
So he spent a lot of his childhood in an auld woman’s company. His Granda had died due to the effects of liberating Belsen. Whether was somehow from the psychological effects of seeing such horrors or he was gassed or what it was no-one was ever clear about. Shrouded in mystery. Mullen guessed he’d drank himself into an early grave trying to obliterate the thought of it. That was certainly the Scottish way. ‘Wash away yer feelings. Drink yersel deid’
Arthur Findlay let out a resounding, rasping fart.
“That’s gonnie stink that. Yon curry comin’ through”
“D’ye mind eh Minnie Gilchrist?” Mullen made a wafting motion with his hand as he moved swiftly away from the likely area of stench.
“Wee Minnie? Course ah mind her. How? She deid?”
“Naw, she’s no’ deid. Ah saw her the other day doon the park flying a kite”
“A fucken kite be Christ? Wis she wi’ er bairns, like?”
“Naw, she wis jist daen it ersel. No even drunk or anythin’ Jist flyin’ this crappy lookin’ auld kite. But, it wiz flyin’ but, a good wiy up”
“Did ye talk tae her. Ask her whit it wis aw aboot?”
“I could see whit it wis aw aboot. She wis flyin’ a fucken kite. An’ by the way, she could fly it in here fae the wind fae your arse, ya dirty bastard, that’s fucken radge ya cunt”
Tam could tell from his friends face that he was thinking the same as he had been. What was wee Minnie Gilchrist been doing flying a kite? Was it something she did often? Had she lost the plot? Minnie’s husband, Eddie, had died of lung cancer which had spread to God knew where just a couple or so years ago. Mid-fifties. No age, really, but forty-odd years of chain-smoking will tend to damage your health as it says on the packet. That and all the pie suppers and bucketful upon bucketful of eighty shilling will not the Olympic athlete make. You never see Seb Coe or Jessica Ennis on the telly saying ‘fags, booze and high cholesterol got me to the top’. It got Eddie all the quicker in his box. And, in his honour and following his example, everyone ended up moroculous at his funeral. Start of a seven-day binge for Tam and Zebedee.
Funny how you remember such events with much fondness and humour. Arthur had ended up in detox up the Royal Ed afterwards and Tam had ended up divorced. Happy days!
He remembered watching Minnie flying her kite in Saughton Park. He was sure she was smiling and crying at the same time.
The Excrescences around Gorgie
Gorgie Road is nothing special and was famous, at least locally, only for the presence of Hearts football team’s stadium, Tynecastle. It stretches in a pretty straight route out of the south-west of the city (Edinburgh is a wee bit topsy-turvy. When you think you are heading north, you are actually going south). A bit like Penny Lane in Liverpool because of the song, a lot was expected of a place and not much other than mediocrity was offered. By far the most exotic thing about the whole Gorgie area was the Polish population, and they weren’t very exotic at all. Tenement flats and ‘everything a pound’ shops prevailed among the charity shops, bookies and pubs. Actually, I beg your pardon. What about Gorgie City Farm? What about the Water of Leith that flowed nearby? What about Saughton Rose Gardens? There’s always beauty if you look hard enough, even in Gorgie.
The breweries were what some folk around here remembered and you still got a whiff of the one that had survived. Hibs fans say that the strange, slightly unpleasant smell actually emanates from Tynecastle, but it doesn’t. It is the smell of the hops fermenting at the North British Distillery Company and not everyone likes it.
“wid gie ye the dry boak”
Folk hold their noses when they go past in buses. The aroma is so strong that it pervades the inside of cars even with windows tight shut.
“What the fuck is that smell?” exclaim the uninitiated.
It’s true though that if you live in the area even a short time you cease to notice it.
If you live in this area a long time, there’s a lot of things you stop noticing. The way the streets reek of chip shops in the evening. That the sun sets in the west. How busy with road traffic the area has become. That you don’t even notice the foreign accents anymore.
So many years had passed and a lot had happened. Even more had happened in the entire world but in this wee part of Edinburgh a million-trillion things had happened nonetheless. People had been born and people had died. There had been so much love-making in just the previous twenty years that you could have built a mountain out of it. Buildings had been constructed while others had been demolished. Industries had gone and have never came back. There had even been rapes and murders that had become notorious. And yet, a certain mediocrity had reigned. Just lives. Bills had been paid, debts had accrued. Jobs had been lost and found. So many dishes had been washed that the actual figure had become incalculable. A football team had won cups but not leagues.
And, Foggy Mullen had leapt from the Scott Monument two days after the Department of Work and Pensions had found him ‘fit for work’. For once, he’d held up the traffic as they lifted his smashed up body into an ambulance and away to the hospital morgue.
Foggy wasn’t even all that fit to live. Since leaving the army things had gone downhill fast and this had been the final straw. Keeping up a front he’d been accepted as the sam old Foggy they’d known for a lifetime, Tam Mullen’s wee brother the sodjer who’d been to Afghanistan and come back a mere shadow. Drink, pills prescribed and otherwise, harder stuff now and again. Crumbling inside for reasons he and ultimately some jumped-up ‘medical assessor’ couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. The Scott Monument was Foggy’s last stand: I’m brave but there’s a weakness inside of me that I can stand no more. Goodbye cruel world. You’ll not mess with Foggy Mullen no more.
"If you had a job in the glue works do you think you'd stick it?"
Whether Tam Mullen was making a joke or just hadn't realised what he had said, Zebedee Finlay wasn't quite sure.
"There isnae any glue works any mair, those days are away"
Used to be, though! Cox's glue works just off the Gorgie Road: employed hundred's of local folk. Used to be in Dean Village but the posh locals didn't like the smell so it relocated to the more proletarian area.
And what a smell by all accounts, both pungent and sickly sweet.
The excrescences of Old Gorgie. Glue, yeast, leather and butchered coos.
Must have been mingin'
Rainy day in Gorgie. Nothing to do with Gladys Knight and the Pips, this was no song. This was rain specially designed by Mother Nature to fall on Scotland. Cold and incessant; it wore you down to a bedraggled state where you blended in with the dark sandstone and the grey sheet of sky looming above. A large group of people have been waiting some while for a number three bus into town.
When it arrives the usual politeness ensues.
“After you”
“No, after you”
“No after you. I insist”
“Honestly, you go”
Out of the blue, a voice..
“Aw, fer fuck sake, gonnie just yin o’ ye get oan?”
All turn to stare at this impertinence. By this time, the driver has closed the door – scooooosh – and he’s off to the next stop.
A fight breaks out among the disgruntled and thwarted travellers.
“Ah telt ye you were tae go fucken first, radge”
“Well ah didnae want tae go fucken first did ah?”
Auld yins employ umbrellas and handbags, the disabled use their sticks to stoat heads and whap bodies.
“Ah hud tae sign doon at High Riggs. Noo ahm late ahll git fucken sanctioned”
The police arrive and take the ring-leaders down to the cells. It begins again at the cell doors.
“Eftir you ya cunt”
“You fucken go, tubesteak”
What they didn’t know about Tam Mullen. What no-one knew. Was that he was a secret yodeller. Now. If you think about it, yodelling is a very difficult thing to be secret about. Unless you’re gonna go to the lengths of sound-proofing your council flat, thus contravening untold regulations, or find some underground bunker somewhere, your yodelling is going to be heard. It’s a distinctive sound. Unusual. Folk can hear someone singing and, as long as it’s not too offensive or sectarian, it’ll tend to blend in with them aural landscape. You start yodelling and ears are pricked. “What the fuck is that?” “Is that some cunt yodelling?” Thus, you will be discovered and your unusual secret revealed. One thing you tried not to be around these parts was unusual. You’d end up being called Yodel Boy and folk would snigger as you entered pubs. You’d pass folk on the street and they’d audibly yodel behind your back “Yodel-ay-he-do fucking yodel boy”. Folk were merciless, you’d never get peace.
Solution? Tam would go away high and deep up into the Pentland Hills and yodel his fucking lungs out. He yodelled like Leon Thomas, the great jazz yodeller. The Jim Whitman ‘King of the Yodellers’ songbook would be given a going over. Wylie Gustafson ‘The Cowboy Yodeller’. Tam knew them all and gave them full vent up in the hills. He felt like a Swiss shepherd without sheep.
He felt fantastic and glowed in the gathering dusk. Such were the awesome acoustics of these hills and the huge echo created, he was sure that folk from Gorgie to Wester Hailes could pick up his yodel. It must have sounded to them like the baying of wolves. But, the important thing was that they wouldn’t know it was Tam Mullen doing it and they wouldn’t dare come to investigate. He was free to yodel for the rest of his days.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, Zebedee Finlay was looking for a kite shop.
