Red Shoes

A boy-child is waiting at a bus stop with his mother. The wind-blown rain makes the horizon blurry, traffic fizzes spray and pedestrians, the few bedraggled souls there are, watch out for gushes splashed up by passing cars or, heaven forbid, buses. Waiting here on Dalmarnock Road for twenty-five minutes, the red SMT bus is notoriously late. It’s the week before Christmas and cheap baubles illuminate fake trees in dark tenement windows.

The weekly visit to Granny is over; boy-child is chuffed with his shilling. There was laughter but there were also niggles; family niggles, unique and unexplainable to any but those involved (not even those, if we’re honest). The mother with her boy standing in the rain is chary of niggles. She is, without doubt, the family scapegoat, the one most hurt and devastated by her kin. This ‘fact’ has been tacitly understood among them for longer than any can remember. If they were a pride of lions, she’d have been left behind for the jackals long ago. 

They pick her clean, the raw pulse of her kind, well-meaning heart left exposed to the icy Glasgow winds of ill-judgement, No love for the meek in this slate-grey metropolis. They should ‘take to the drink’ to hide their angst and appear more sociable. The city’s motto should be ‘Take a drink and keep quiet’.

The boy-child is wearing red shoes the same colour as the bus which eventually arrives. Chances were they’d be off the bus by the Cathkin Braes due to his troublesome ‘bus-sickness’. Mother only shows gentle irritation at this common occurrence but it means double bus fares, an expenditure she can ill-afford with black-listed father forced on to the dole for his militant activities.

No other child that he knew wore red shoes.

Rain spackled, anoraked and rain-mated, the two wait for yet another bus out in the airy, misty braes. You can see nearly all of Glasgow from here, ominous and high-rised below old-man-grey clouds. In the gathering gloom you can see the fevered lights of the new high-rises and the general luminescence of sodium street lighting covering the metropolis like a lime-orange umbrella.

Heavenly Visit

I had a visit to heaven to see my Dad. It wasn’t what I expected as it somehow resembled the station café at Paisley Central, the bit I was in any way.

He looked just like he had done when I was a wee boy in East Kilbride when he’d have been in his early thirties, a-glowing with health and vitality like he was all ready to take me into town for pie and chips at RS McColl’s and then off to Parkhead to see the Celts pummel the latest opposition.

“Great to see you, son”

“Great to see you too Da. I’ve missed you. We all have”

“I know that, son, and it’s appreciated”

I stare at him like I can’t believe this is happening.

“You don’t believe this is happening, dae ye son?”

“Aye, aye, I dae” Because I want it to be so badly.

I start to tell him what’s been going on in his absence but he says he knows and anyway, he’s not been wholly absent.

“I’ve become omnipotent, like I always wanted”

He smiles his wry, kind smile at this and I ask him what has been going on with him, and specifically, why this place looks like the tea-bar on old Paisley station?

“Me and your Uncle Billy share this place as it’s the site where we were most happy on the terrestrial plane. A tiny bit blootered after a Celtic/St Mirren game. We laughed a lot that day, like two fond brothers should. You should treasure the times you spend with your own brother”

He doesn’t say this in an admonishing way, more wise and knowing, like he always was.

“So what else happens in heaven?”

“I got to meet Miles last week and sing with his band”

“Miles Davis?”

“The very same. Lovely man now. Wasn’t always”

I’m blown away by this, then am blown away by the fact that I’m blown away by this as I’m sitting here talking with my Dad who’s been dead eleven years. Surely, now, anything is possible…

“Will you always be around for us Da? I mean you won’t have to leave us at some point?”

“I’ll always be here, son. And we’ll spend more time when you’re up here yourself, but that’s not for some time yet…”

I smile and he smiles back. A bond that has never been broken.

“What did you sing with Miles?”

“My Funny Valentine. I sung it for yer maw. She heard it but she thinks she was dreaming”

After a heavenly visit, by the way, you don’t come down some heavenly stairs to celestial music or anything like that. You get the train back from Paisley to Glasgow where it’s pishing down and a man with a big white beard begs a pound off you on Renfield Street and then disappears in the blink of an eye.

Glasgow Central

 I don’t know why I have such fond regard for all things Glasgow, it certainly never liked me. I like it best without its people; a deserted grey monolith, just streets and train stations, and preferably raining. Glaswegians are playing the part of being perpetual Glaswegians – smart, funny, quick-witted, it can get really tiring. 

Perhaps what I like best is the way out of it: Glasgow Central train station. A baroque palace of possibilities and other destinations preferably past Motherwell.

Like Ayr. Ayr train station is airy and redolent of the sea. Kiddies laugh and scream with joy on its platforms and cry and moan at the end of the long day in the sun, candy floss sticky on cheeks and bellies full of chips and limeade.

St. Enoch’s was the best: dark and gothic, it stood on a hill and looked like you could catch a train to Transylvania to meet Dracula for a late supper. But they tore it down to make way for a plexi-glass mall that you could find replicated in a hundred cities.

O’Connell Street station, Dublin was where she waved goodbye.

Liverpool Lime Street where we maybe said hello again.

The best thing about Birkenhead Central is that it affords the welcome opportunity to flee Birkenhead.

Southport station was my favourite because it meant being with her; my unlikely femme fatale. After Birkenhead, Southport is Las Vegas. Its Floral Hall a Caesar’s Palace and Lord Street is The Strip.

But, Glasgow Central is iconic; the heartbeat of the city. I mind the day, I mind the day. I mind the day, said Shuggie Gallagher, the ghost of Glasgow Central. I mind the day when everyone wore a flat bunnet, even the women.

Folk that ‘commuted’ through Glasgow Central on a weekday worked in the shops and the offices. They were dressed in suits and ties and polished shoes, white blouses and high heels (women were a lot sexier in those days, precisely because they didn’t mean to be, though they had lines up the back of their stockings as if leading you to the promised land that no-one ever talked about. It was a wonder to everyone how procreation took place at all).

At the weekends it was a free-for-all of excitable juveniles aiming for Lewis’s toy department and women off to Arnott Simpson’s to try on perfume while their men-folk headed east for Parkhead or South-west to Ibrox (maybe, too, the odd mental case bound for Firhill or Shawfield but folk that followed Queen’s Park travelled in Vauxhall vehicles or not at all).

The ghost of Glasgow Central saw them all and often had cause to laugh at their antics. Drunk. Moroculus. Pished. Blootered. Glasgow had names for inebriation like no other place. Howling. Hammered. Reekin’. Steamboats.

“We were aw hammered man, it wis great. Hammy fell under a train”

Only poor folk use buses. You notice when its posh folk not used to this mode of transport. They think it’s ok to ask the driver all sorts of questions or to not know the correct fare and how to pay. Anything that holds the bus up will do for them; smug bastards with their strident voices; whole bus can hear about their self-importance. But, mainly it’s just ordinary Joe’s.

There’s a guy arguing with the driver up at the front. Slight American tinge to his accent with wee Scottish words thrown in. Foreigners do that, they pick up words and phrases and end up talking in pidgin dialects. He says the fare is only £11.40 and the driver’s saying it’s £11.60. I, myself, along with several others have after a few minutes of this offered the guy twenty pence to put an end to this charade but he’s having none of it. It seems to be a point of principle but pretty soon it’s apparent that the bloke is not quite the full shilling.

This is another phenomenon on long-haul bus trips, folk that maybe need a check-up from the neck-up.

Eventually, the police are called and a few passengers are getting into arguments with the guy, but he’s sticking to his guns and is now sitting on a seat behind the driver. I envisage that he may be a hi-jacker just gearing up to clobbering the driver with a hammer he has hidden up his jook then driving us all off to Troon to be held for ransom. In many ways, this would be more exciting than just toodling along to Glasgow which is what we eventually do when the troublesome chap gives up before the police finally arrive. He trundles toward Haymarket train station no doubt intent in repeating his mayhem there. Maybe he has some grudge against people attempting to travel to Glasgow.

Or maybe he once lived there and is getting his own back...

Julie - Queen of Leytonstone

I guess what was remarkable and startling was seeing the name of your friend on the roster for that days cremation services.

‘Julie Stephenson – 3pm’

Rather blunt and to the point for an event so poignant but there you have it: your old friend was having her dead remains burned to ashes at three o’clock and there was very little one could do about it.

Preston Crematorium she would not have liked. “Just as well she’s dead” I mused while strolling around the little manicured gardens. Everything here was manicured, even the trees, lining as they did the long, solemn driveway into the business part of the place. Julie who craved a certain type of conformity but led a ramshackle life would have hated the seriousness of this place and occasion. She’d have wanted to ‘fun it up’ with a few mad people and maybe a juggling clown or two (and, believe me, she would have known where to find juggling clowns). She’d certainly have hated the quietude.

Her poor old body (fifty-four but took a wee bit of a pummelling on the way) was being black-motored up from London where a celebration service had taken place the previous Saturday in St John’s Church in the centre of her beloved Leytonstone. Three hundred had attended and it had even made the front page of the local rag – the Waltham Forest Guardian - “Local Good Samaritan – A Life Celebrated”. She’d have loved that: the final validation of her life in Leytonstone and outer confines. Pity indeed, that it had had to be won in death.

I miss her now more than I missed her that day of her cremation.

She’d have castigated me for not attending the London gig and the pub party afterwards. I facilitate the excuse that I live in Edinburgh and can only really be expected to bumble down to Preston for the burning, but this isn’t true. She didn’t even come from Preston; she came from the far more atmospheric Lancaster which has the spectacularly gloomy River Lune running through it.

Julie was either bi-polar or just plain crazy: I suspect some mixture of the two. When she was down she was down and when she was up…? Well, let’s just say she could have run the country better and much more colourfully than any incumbent since Lloyd George deliberately slowed down the proceedings at Versailles the more to expedite his amorous shenanigans.

My very first week as a mature student at Liverpool Polytechnic she turns up in the student bar having driven up from London in a hired car. In her giant red cardigan she looks like some Sephardic colossus striding across to the small bar. Folk stopped what they were doing as this fiery vision swept by them. Strangely, I was not surprised to see her.

Neither was I surprised when she whisked me and my new-found drinking buddy off on a bender to Lancaster where she was house-sitting for a holidaying sister-in-law and her family. She took us to the Midland Hotel in nearby Morecambe. The bay shimmered in the mid-September sun, a late lash of heat. A Lancashire, Indian summer. My friend and I laughed at the frivolity of it all. One minute drunk and happy in Liverpool, the next drunker and even happier sitting outside an Art Deco hotel looking out to sea. Mad Julie happy to see us happy (in all honesty, I think she was more than chuffed at the exotica that was my friend; a tall, gangly, dread-locked Londoner with a sly, toothsome grin), had become firm friends with roughly half of the hotel staff in not-but half an hour. Drinks and snacks were served to us like we were minor Royals just popped in unexpectedly, be-cardiganed Julie perhaps some head lady-in-waiting.

The air smelled chlorine fresh. Dogs were unleashed by their owners on the vast beach to run and scramble after balls and sticks. Humans could learn a lot from dogs; they knew how to be happy with simple things, and how to pine for love.

What did Julie chatter about? Nothing and everything. Now that I think, she would have been enamoured with Gary as he was later to be somewhat enamoured by one of her friends (he was also lured by a temptress from a religious sect at an after-hours disco they’d organised only to escape through a window and return to base at about three in the morning). Instead, she was stuck with my own drunken self, playing her brothers’ records on her brother’s super-loud sound system until all hours of the dark morning. We also drank all his booze.

Julie spoke in her native tongue when up north which was slightly distinct from the ‘ready to fit in’ accent she had become used to in London where she had trained as a social worker. Yet, she was not comfortable in her home town; it seemed to constrain her and she longed for the comparative social anarchy of the capital. The north judged her, the south not so much so.

Julie was at the same time grounded and soaring like a kite let loose on the wind. For others; grounded: for herself; hardly at all. She seemed not to care much for herself and deemed anyone that cared for her somehow more flawed than even she.

“Like the old Groucho Marx joke” she’d often say “I wouldn’t like to be a member and all that…” She never did seem to learn the rest of the quote but the gist was clear. One man who seemed to care for her rather deeply, she tended to treat abominably and then hate herself even more for doing so, though, perversely, he was the one she had the utmost respect for the rest of her life. She seemed to be attracted by men who treated her quite shabbily, like that was what she really deserved. Men who, somehow, wouldn’t stay.

She’d lived in Turkey for some time with a Muslim soldier. She liked Muslim men and would die in the arms of one at the end.

“She’s looking for an angel

But, she’s not looking at the sky

She’s looking for an angel in your eyes”

The Robots and Hugo Chavez

Davidson struggled to make the connections. Firstly; on a very profound ‘labour value’ level and, secondly; in his bid to connect the travel dots. In making his seven o’clock start time he had to be like Michael Palin missing and improvising with the failings of global journeyings: in his, it was the tendency of the 5.30am Fife Circular setting off at 5.35 or on disastrous occasions – not at all. This eventuality had cost him a day’s wages, a censure from his ‘employers’ and a long-trek back to Moredun too angry and frustrated to re-connect on the old zzzz’s.

What had happened to the labour movement that it had reached such a low pitch of exploitation?

Today he’d been 12 minutes late due to the ‘Works Bus’ heading off early and him having to half-half/half-jog through the immense industrial estate down to the huge Amazon Warehouse on the M9, only to be told ‘his shift had been taken’ and that he could wait with the others to see ‘if a shift became available’. Very often, it didn’t. Like today.

And so, the day was wasted. No wages, but still the travel expenditure and the long trek home. This was reminiscent of the ‘hiring pens’ at the Liverpool docks when you had to keep favour with the foreman for half a day’s work.

Davidson’s ‘foreman’ was, in fact, a ‘forewoman’, a right bitch named Theresa who came from Venezuela. Davidson was a right pain in the butt to his Latin boss because he knew a little about the Venezuelan labour struggles; about Chavez and the Fifth Republic Movement, how he’d tried to release his country and its people from the capitalist and imperialistic yoke. When she did respond, which was seldom other than a slight sneer and an order to get on with his work, she spoke words like ‘losers’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘puppet of Fidel’. In other words, she knew nothing by right-wing propaganda about the history of her own country and here she was being embarrassed by this scruffy Scot.

He didn’t hate her for it although she’d deduct from his wages for the slightest ‘misdemeanour’ on the floor, like chatting to a colleague or going for a piss outside the allotted time. He could only imagine the life she may have had in some shithole in Caracas or forced to prostitution to feed a family. He didn’t know. That didn’t make it any easier to take that she was the bitch keeping his wages and conditions at the level that he was forced to visit the local Church food bank every Saturday.

That wasn’t her fault either. She was employed for this style of supervision; to keep us whipped into place. It was the usual faceless, pragmatic bureaucrats that had fixed this all rigidly into place. The Zero-Contract model’. ‘Be there or no pay’. Only it was even more brutal than that. Sometimes Davidson had turned up, on time and fit and ready to go, but ‘We get shifts mixed up, sorry. You go home, come back tomorrow’.

“But….but?”

No point arguing. They don’t need you. Sure they need somebody, but there are a dozen thousand somebodies that are desperate enough, or are forced by the DWP enough, and can be trained in a day to load these boxes so that they have a fair to middling chance of being delivered to the right addresses. To be taught that cleanliness of uniforms is a must and that cleanliness must be paid for out of your own pocket, and that the slightest lateness most probably their fault will mean loss of wages and that half-joking about Hugo Chavez and his glorious socialist ideas will bring you ever closer to the exit door my clever ‘loser’ friend.

In fact, Amazon is a largely excellent service. You get your new toaster sharp and safe by a guy or gal who’s being paid a pittance to work awful hard and with a very-concerned-for-his-job diligence.Yes sir, no mam, just sign there please mam. Cos I’m on fucking ‘piece work’ that doesn’t pay any extra. Like your postman! No longer the languorous community asset and friend to the elderly but an unapproachable figure in red haring around the housing estates being ‘time-and-motioned in his head. 

If I earned more money the faster I delivered then, at least that would be something, but I’m not. The faster I go, the faster Theresa and her bosses think I can go. I’m certainly not doing the next guy any favours. He’ll have to be some sort of Dervish, shouting ‘beep! beep! at folks, or barging them aside, and refusing to take a lunch, and refuelling at Amazon watering-points along the way (although he’ll have to pay for the water). Every night his uniform will be so ragged and sweaty, he’ll have to pay for another one and, thus, he’ll live only for and due to the Amazon Corporation of Venezuela and Beyond in perpetuity until…..one day, his wee local Dunfermline bus service is inexplicably late (driver was on the lash the night before) and he scurries down the motorway scree tearing the arse out of his new shiny Amazon livery only to be told..

“No work today scumbag, you’re fucking late”

And Theresa will seek someone even more subservient. Probably a robot. They know nothing of Hugo Chavez unless you tell them…