Bryant In the Morning

Bryant had woken to a new morning once again and his first thought was that his day was now spoiled and the same old puzzle now confronted him: how on earth should he spend the ensuing hours which now spread before him like some endless desert? Hour after hour of creaking, aching boredom, a tedium he had defeated by the simple act of nightly sleep was once more his task to endure. He felt bored already and he hadn’t even got out of bed. He imagined a ‘boredom Olympics’ where contestants tried to out-do each other in ennui. Bryant felt he would be carrying the gold medals back in a suitcase. He braced himself against the coming inertia and the crucifying cold of the out-of-bed environment and rushed to his ice-box of a bathroom to empty his squeezing bladder.

No employer had deemed it necessary to offer Tam Bryant a job for going on five years now and, at his present age of forty-five his prospects were not improving with the passage of time. Ex-welfare advice worker, ex-polytechnic lecturer, ex-bookies clerk, ex-busker; Bryant had more exes than Elizabeth Taylor (who he couldn’t help thinking of without images of a large bosom tormenting his thoughts because he was many times the ex-lover too though not, unfortunately, of Ms Taylor).

What he wished he was more than anything other than ex-poor was an ex-depressive. It seemed to him that he could be brought low by the very merest vicissitudes of life: his intercom buzzer wrongly pressed in the small hours would have his amygdala in overdrive with panic and speculation, his ‘threat system’ – he was now fully aware of the pyscho-terminology – screeching in his gut like a hungry crow: sleep no longer a possible sanctuary. Was it a malevolent neighbour or maybe even the police? The notion that it was merely some drunken student attempting to gain access was now lost to his anxious brain and he’d fret and worry until the dawn light eased its way through his curtains.

Bryant’s credo was ‘expect the worst, because that’s what will probably transpire’.

Of course, anxiety wasn’t a wholly irrational response to the world. There was a lot to be anxious about. Western economies on the verge of collapse, life on the very planet itself was under threat and successive Tory governments seemed intent on culling the poor, yet Bryant was just as worried that he’d once upset a friend twenty years ago or that the slight twinge in his groin may turn out to be pancreatitis or the onset of some form of syphilis that one contracted without recourse to any form of recent sexual congress (did he really gaze at that dogs arse admiringly the other day? This too, worried him.)

He also worried he was going bald and had somewhat foolishly  ordered a hair-piece affair from a mail-order company and, due to its expense, he felt compelled to wear it and, if one is seeking to establish the reality of such an item among one’s circle of friends and acquaintances and among the populace at large, it is wise to wear it consistently. So far he had detected no half-hidden sniggers or expressions of shock on the faces of those he’d  encountered and this encouraged him to proceed with his hirsute adventure. Standing at six foot two and thin as a rake, he believed the near-russet hued toupee lent him a distinguished, elegant mien which could only appear captivating to the opposite sex, although no sign of this had as yet been evident.

He was smitten by the female who worked behind the counter in McColl’s on the high street though it worried him that she reminded him facially of his old boozing buddy Jack and worried also how this would pan out should he ever actually come face-to-face with her in an intimate setting. Surely he wouldn’t mutter his friend's name in his ecstasy?

Everyone needed something to live for: some dream or ambition or maybe just a hope. Bryant’s gamut of fantasy had lessened year-upon-year for some time now. Dreams of pop superstardom had now diminished to perhaps a single ‘like’ on his Facebook page for some dirge he’d written twenty years ago about a love lost and the possibility of suicide (the theme of all of his songs for a period of some years after the most pathetically tragic of all his love affairs when she’d left him to pursue the life of a nun).

Bryant’s breakfasts were always bizarre mostly because they depended on which ‘reduced for sale’ products he’d been able to collect. This also meant that virtually all the food he ate was a little past its sell-by-date. Of an evening at certain times (and there was no exact science to this) he’d make a tour of all the supermarkets locally (except ASDA as he loathed how they treated their essentially non-unionised work-force) and procure whichever cheap goodies were available at the designated little areas they all had for the selling of such products which was often surrounded by a group of the like-minded many of whom Bryant recognised as regular rivals.

There could be maliciousness at these places and Bryant feared that there would one day be an incident sufficiently violent to make at least the local papers. ‘Reduced Sticker Wars in Morrison’s – Man Strikes Rival over Quiche!’ It really was only a matter of time.

This morning he was having blue cheese with vegetarian haggis, coleslaw and tiramisu. He was going to add a slice of stolen to this but decided to have that for his lunch with a tin of beans and pork sausages.

We all need something to look forward to, he thought, while boiling a kettle for his third mug of tea (teabag left in!).

With the thrill of breakfast a thing of bygone times, Bryant decides to go for a walk to pass the time before the library opens. He either shuffles or schleps along the prom before deciding that schlepping is the best word to describe his self-perambulatory style, the very opposite of ‘striding’ which is a far more robust form of walking. He was by no means striding. He gazed upon the sea with something far less than wonder (he’d seen it before, it was no novelty). The day was blustery and a rain mist had completely obliterated Fife and East Lothian. 

Dogs and their owners occupied the beach, they would stop and talk to one another and Bryant had noticed this. If I get a dog, he thought, then random people may talk to me and this may form a route to houghmagandie type frolics. Their respective dogs (meaning his future partner’s and his own) could just look on or snooze on the floor (was this an inversion of the ‘dogging’ activity, somehow? Possibly not, as this activity did not have as its central feature a group of humans standing outside a car looking at dogs screwing on the seats within.).

No-one else was thinking these thoughts in the whole of this town on this bleak November morning.

Bryant appreciated his uniqueness.

The Spangle House

Often, during the long summer holidays, I and some friends would take a long trek through the countryside to the ‘Auld Hoose’, though we never actually reached this destination. The journey was a quest that was never realised. As a consequence none of us was actually sure such a place existed. 

O the old yins in the toon would garble on about how easy it was to get there in their day and the youth of today and all that but none of them would or could convincingly describe it. They’d say it was a ‘big, rambly place’ or ‘like a Lord’s Manor’ but no more than this.

Still, every summer we would head with our packed lunches and bottles of juice in the direction that myth told us it lay. This took us through fields where farmers would sometimes chase us, past reservoir’s where we’d sometimes stop and swim – the whole gang of us jumping in naked or some in underpants which would remain sodden then damp until home time. It took us through wee towns whose natives eyed us warily, though shopkeepers hoped we’d stop and buy sweets and drinks which we surely would (Archie’s big brother mind, he was more likely to pochle them).

One particular summer we decided to build a fire in a wood beside a burn. We’d stolen some potatoes from an allotment and here would be a good place to bake them.

While the spuds were baking a few of us wandered off deeper into the woods and it was then that we came across the strangest sight any of us had ever seen. Through a clearing in the trees there emerged the most magnificent structure – Ghormengastian in its aspect it was a giant palace of a place; all turrets and towers, domes and huge walls which stretched for many miles around the impressive settlement. From the crest of this most unexpected valley we gazed down upon a vast, shining cathedral in the middle of the woods.

We all stood aghast for several minutes until one of us, possibly me, said ‘does it look as if it’s made of spangles to any of you?’ Geordie, staring in wonder at this giant orange structure turned to me and exclaimed ‘It fucking is you know!’

We all looked at one another laughing, wide-eyed and freaked out..

‘It’s a giant fucking spangle house’ ‘What the fuck..!’ ‘Eh!’

The acid had truly started to take a grip.

The Goodness in Tommy Bryant

Tommy Bryant was having a bad day. For all the will in the world everything he touched seemed to turn to ruin before his eyes. The phrase ‘a good deed never goes unpunished’ had been rattling around his head and he wondered if everything in life eventually became a cliché or an aphorism so at the very end, at the final death-bed scene, some bland stranger would sidle up as you’re gasping for your final breath and whisper “life is what you make it, son, you should have listened”.

At primary school, they should have an ‘introduction to cliches’ class to prepare you.

Tommy was a do-gooder. He liked to do good for people and, in these mendacious times, this was not the sort of approach that was likely to get you the big house and the roller. His friends and family would say that’s all very well, Tommy, but it’s yourself you have to look out for and, today, he was tending to see the wisdom of that advice. A nightmare was unfolding of labyrinthine proportions.

Never had the words ‘I’ll help you’ been so regretted and these three innocuous words had led him into a world that only Frankie Kafka, that dark comedian of the surreal, would appreciate.

At the centre of this drama was a singularly improbable item – a Grandfather Clock!

Dan McCafferty was a lanky shambles of a man, his ineptitude being little assisted by an unknowable plethora of street and subscription drugs taken in God-knows-what quantities. Beneath this psychotropic miasma he possessed a street-cunning that was innate and local. In Craigbath, you didn’t survive without street-smarts so acute you could spot a soft touch at a thousand paces.

Such an animal was the bold Bryant.

“You’re Grandfather clock, you say?”

“Aye, boss, wiz only away 3 months and they’d evicted ma flat man: aw the gear you goat me, stereo and the couch and that, but the clock as well. Need to get it back man”

You never knew when McCafferty’s tears were genuine or when they were just another of an array of manipulative tools which included going completely spare and potentially violent and seeming to offer one of his many female relatives in an apparent erotic trade for your helpful services.

When the DWP had top-level meetings about policy objectives they projected an image of McCafferty on the wall to keep them focussed on their right-wing agenda. Iain Duncan Smith in his time as that department’s supremo had an effigy made of Dan and would point at it frequently muttering “That’s the reason why” to anyone who would listen….

“The world’s number one scrimshanker”

Mr Duncan Smith, who’d married into vast wealth, wasn’t far above scrimshanker status himself, although he would never quite see it that way.

For what had McCafferty contributed to the great scheme of things? His human being? That he existed in whatever oblique and half-formed shape was not in question, but what was this existence worth?

This is hard to measure in any qualitative way as theologians and existentialists will disagree profoundly on the matter; much easier to asses quantitatively as, indeed, members of Mr Duncan Smith’s party are wont to do. Suffice to say that, as a burden on the state, Dan McCafferty was English Premiership grade. He could barely tell you what day of the week it was or who and who was not actually related to him but he could pinpoint exactly how many points were required for Higher Rate disability benefits and the exact criteria for access to the Scottish Welfare Fund. In this fiduciary expertise he would have been a natural choice as Chancellor of the Exchequer or CEO of the IMF, except, of course, you would never be sure if he’d turn up for meetings and he’d probably be blitzed out of his skull if he did.

Dan was lumpen proletarian without ever being aware of the fact. In fact, if you’d told him he’d assume it was an ailment and ask if it merited an increase in benefits.  In Craigbath, having C.O.P.D. was like having letters after your name.

And now there was the matter of the clock.

“So you’ve lost your flat on the Links?”

“They changed the locks”

“And all your furniture?”

“It was in storage but then they said they selt it in an auction. Ma 3-piece-suite, boss”

He begins to whimper again.

“But, it’s the clock you're bothered about?”

“Aye, man, fucking tragic, boss”

And where was he for the three months? Saughton, most likely. He liked a wee holiday there once in a while. Once, quite recently, he was found on top of the police station roof, his addled though agile mind deducing this as the best tactic for a wee trek to the pokey. Or perhaps not! His roots were in the travelling community for which Craigbath was a favoured locale. He could have been in Arbroath or somewhere on a wee inter-tribal visit.

Aaaah! The penny dropped. Travellers. Grandfather clocks. Travellers liked grandfather clocks, they were somehow symbolic. To own one was a marker. A totem. An indicator that you were of the fold: like a handshake to a Freemason.

He looked at Dan afresh and saw his anguish was real. Behind those pallid, muddied eyes was a pride that had its origins in the mists of country time: a lineage like a regiment might have: a Romany past which coursed through this mock-shambolic figure to his very blood and now it called out to the goodness in Tommy Bryant. For all he knew his own ancestors had travelled the roads and byways and he’d always possessed what he’d described to himself as ‘the call of the wilds’. He thought of the gypsy curse.

“About this clock, Dan?”

Ray and Rube and Me

We watched in awe, Rube and I, as our friend Ray walked stoically toward a dusky horizon along the road from Calais to Boulogne: his destination, ultimately, like our own, the city of Paris where we hoped to make our fortune as buskers. We were an odd trio to say the least.

I, a callow and often drunken youth of merely seventeen and several years younger than the other two had somehow – or through having booked the hovercraft tickets – been designated ‘team leader’. This did not bode well for our trip, though in such capacity I advised we split up the better to secure motor perambulation to the capital.

Ray, in his twenties and with six years army experience was the obvious choice to hitch on alone, and leave me to look after Rube who only six weeks before had been a resident of Goodmayes Mental Hospital as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who’d taken somewhat of a funny turn.

Speaking of which, Rube’s mad parents – his mother Phyliss was more deserving of psychiatric attention than her only son ever was –and his father, Monty who pretended to be deaf to save his sanity had asked Ray and I to accompany them to Southend as a day out for Rube away from his institutional confinement. In the car on the way down Rube, gibbering and generally out of it on whatever psychotropics had been administered, would only be comforted by my singing his favourite Irish tunes (he was mad keen on Planxty and The Bothy Band). This though maddened Phyliss who started shrieking her disapproval, ironically like a banshee. Monty hummed to himself and eh? and what-ed his way out of confrontation. Ray sat beside me on the back seat chuckling as I belted out Spancil Hill and The Wild Rover.

By the time we reached Southend there were more people in that car in need of strong medication than just Rube.

And now we're in France and Rube is shaking and muttering and fidgeting and fretting. He’s like a wind-up toy with faulty wiring, gulping and sweating and spouting some insane mantra that could have sounded like ‘what the fuck am I doing here?’ but it was incoherent to all but himself.  We’d spent the night before attempting to sleep under the stars in the ruins of an old Calais Castle. By the end of this second evening, he’d be praying for such luxury.

The sky had been black as the Earl of Hell’s arse crevice but now the God’s had entered battle and the whole thing was lit up by lightning flashes and thunder roared like Zeus himself breaking rumbling wind. The rains suddenly poured, lashed, pounded and thudded from the ground. Rube and I had finally got a lift from a local social worker in one of those wee Citroen cars that look as if you build them from a kit. Rube wanted to beg him to add him to his case-load but couldn’t find the words. The only French he knew and kept repeating was voulez-vous manges mon pantalon? Which may not even have grammatically correct but seemed to make the driver laugh. He dropped us off at a camp-site somewhere outside Boulogne little knowing that we didn’t even possess even the most basic equipment like even a tent.

We were in the middle of a weather cataclysm with only sleeping bags for protection.

There was, though, a camp toilet.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sleep on the floor of a campsite toilet but my advice would always be – don’t! Assuming you ever achieve slumber you will wake up soaked in urine and have the smell of human defecation in your nostrils for days. Folk will have kicked you whether by accident or design and will have sworn at you in a multitude of languages. I lay there all night slurping at my bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker and singing Irish songs to Rube with the intention of cheering him up. It seemed to have the opposite effect.

We left this toilet hell at first light. The skies were clear and birds chirped in the trees. On reaching Paris we met Ray under the Eiffel Tower as arranged. He slumbered fitfully on a bench in the Parc du Champs de Mars, a man soaked and bedraggled after hitching 200 miles through the night in a violent storm. We hadn’t the heart to tell him we’d taken the train.

How To Enjoy Yourself

For far too many years I interpreted the phrase ‘enjoying yourself’ as ‘drinking yourself steadily into oblivion’. In this misinterpretation I was not alone as half of Glasgow believed the same thing.

I think what happened was, sometime early on in this liquid career, I experienced a ‘great night out’, a night when the laughter and conversation flowed and the bevvy was endless and tasted like honey from heaven, and I then spent the next thirty years attempting unsuccessfully to replicate this.

“Remember that night?”

“Aye, it wis rerr”

“How much have we spent trying to recreate it”

“Many, many thoosands o’ pounds”

And all of this folly had led me here hunched over a well-sooked roll-up outside a community centre which held AA meetings at the same time as across the hall, the Weightwatchers class was taking place, Not so much Alcoholics Anonymous as Alcoholics Apparently as you can bet all the weightwatchers would be reporting back to the local community.

“You’ll never guess…”

“I always knew he was a piss-head..”

Now the fatties of the little town by the sea knew who the alkies were.

Earlier he’d been touched by a story a wee, small woman had related to the group. She was a wee forgormik all hunched in on herself and nervous. It was one benefit of such groups that folk not used to or ever invited to talk in front of others found themselves doing so, maybe voicing their innermost secrets and emotions with other humans for the very first times in their lives. Soon they got used to it and you couldn’t get them to stop.

Elsie her name was (not really. This was Alcoholics Anonymous, after all!). She had a mouth like a small beak like a wee-pea hen and her eyes met only the ceiling and the walls as she told her tale. She’d reached such a desperate low, she said, little money and now alone in a cheap bed-sit, everything in her life now rent asunder by her desperate devotion to oblivion, that she’d asked the kindly local off-licence man not to sell her any more booze under any circumstances. It was a cold, wet night when she’d entered his premises begging for ‘a wee hauf bottle of vodka’, pleading with him, but he wouldn’t give in.

She said she had to walk two miles in the storm to a more obliging shop of booze.

Such is it to be controlled by something external to yourself; when the only relief you can seem to find comes out of a bottle.

Back in the day, it was a regular occurrence to see some bloke (sometimes a woman, though nowhere near as often) staggering tragi-comically down a street, almost weaving into traffic and falling into gutters. It was the stuff of humour.

“Some state the other night, Tam. Christ ye were birlin’”

“Aye, ha ha. It’s that Red Biddy. I think they put something in it”

The fact that you went home and punched the wife and terrorised your kids is never mentioned.

Strange how folk joke and make light of something that is so devastating to themselves and those around them.

“You should have been there. I ended up in A&E, Big Sammy was arrested and we think Wee Tam fell under a train. Some night!”

Theresa

She is likely dead now, poor Theresa. Last I heard, she had cancer and was living down the Chingford Hall Estate, surely the last refuge for social class X in Waltham Forest. When I knew her she was living with my wee mate Eddie in a tiny bedsit in Leyton. Eddie was loving towards her but wasn’t above giving her a crack on the nose if he deemed it necessary. In a funny way, she was almost pleased for him to do this; I’d witnessed her goading him into such an action.

She was what I’d call ‘feral’. Her family origins were vague but I imagined them perhaps travellers based in rural Essex. She was cunning in her small way and, if she liked you, she would smile as she was trying to con you out of a few bob. She was certainly no ‘looker’ but this didn’t stop her lustfulness.  When Eddie and I were first drinking buddies she didn’t mind at all Eddie having sex with her while I lay half-asleep next to them in their bed. She looked like you may imagine a cockney flower-seller as cast in Mary Poppins: chubby and rosy-cheeked with a duplicitous grin as she sold you several stalks short.

I know that she couldn’t read as I had to read Eddie’s rather personal prison letters to her when he was away in Pentonville, and I’m pretty certain she couldn’t write either. Such as Theresa live on their wits one day at a time but with the notion of a long-game where they tie you up with babies and a plea to your conscience.

I didn’t even know her second name.

The Economics of a Cup on a Street

The dismal science, right enough, this wee economy of mine! Incessant, piddling rain falling out of a dull sky (I can see fifty per cent of the entire sky at any one time, apparently. Some joker came up to tell me this a few days ago. Tall, skinny radge. Left all of twenty pence in my cup).

It’s a Costa coffee cup I found in a bin in the Kirkgate. Medium-sized, I reckon. Would take me a wee while to beg enough for a coffee from Costa’s, even if they did decide to serve me.

I was thinking that some university should employ me on some sort of ‘market research’ basis. A homeless street-dwelling chap like me could provide valuable data for some study of human kindness. How many folk out of a hundred? sort of thing. How many passers-by offer me money, food or even just a kind word? It varies but it’s not that many. Maybe just the one or two out of a ton.

I have to be aware of ‘good cup management’ in this game. Finance receptacle strategy. If I’m having a good day, it’s prudent to stove away any high-value coins (and on the odd occasion, a note) so that it doesn’t look as if I’m rolling in it. Cup runneth over sort of thing. Enough to afford a prozzie and a five-star hotel. Got to maintain the impression of dire need. Can’t be sitting on the pavement sporting designer labels with a taxi with its engine running nearby.

Some folk make out that this is a lifestyle choice. That this actually the life I’ve chosen. Like I could have been a tax lawyer but I chose this instead. They come up and tell me this. You must want to do this, they say. Life offers plenty of options, they pontificate. As if they’d like to sit on their arse on a rain-soaked pavement for eight hours a day.

They don’t realise that once you’re down this far; once you have resorted to this, it is so, so hard to get back up again. Life becomes day-to-day survival, hand-to-mouth. Microeconomics. Just me and the tool of my trade. A medium-size Costa coffee cup.

Glasgow Skelped My Arse

Glasgow told me I wisnae up to scratch. Couldnae fight. Dear green place. Dear as in expensive on your spirit. I’ve had Glasgow Syndrome ever since. I still love my torturer but from afar. Edinburgh is close enough. Play on my Weeginess here. Wee bit gallus aboot it. “Come fae the west”. As if that statement stands on its own, no further explanation needed.

Glasgow is not-so-secretly proud of its wild rep (the wild west?). It likes the world to think we’re aw heid-the-ba’s. Edinburgh plays possum knowing that it too has its square-go masters, scheme’s where you’d be brave to live. A rep is hard to shift and masks a truer story. City of poverty and personal pain and too much drink and Presbyterians intent on repatriating Catholics at least to the scabby outlands. City of artists and poets and kindness and hippies.

“Whit aboot the swingin’ sixties, Da?”

“Didnae happen in East Kilbride, son!”

Hard, aye, but flawed like everyone else. Jimmy Boyle – a sculptor of faces.  Who would have known that underneath he was a sculptor….of faces?

It’s little wonder that in a city where it can be June in January and January in June that there a few mental anomalies. The wind skitters and squalls in Glasgow like thoughts in an errant mind. The rain drenches the colour out of your clothes leaving you free to fully understand the meaning of words like drab and dreich. When the sun eventually shines for that one week in August the city’s denizens barely have time to realise it and shed layers before it’s gone again and the world is once more monochrome.

Glasgow knows well over 152 different types of rain: as a boy I counted them, and not only that but each little district of Glasgow has rain that is synonymous with it. Toryglen has lashing, slanting rain that slashes horizontally up Prospecthill Road until you can escape it past Mount Florida. Carnwadric has a creeping misty drizzle which soaks you to your bones. The rain in the Gorbals is incessant and cold as if it has the flu and Springburn has April showers all year round in keeping with its name. In Shettleston, the grim trees droop with heavy precipitation until the wind scatters raindrops straight into the faces of passers-by. The word drizzle was invented in Dennistoun.

Glasgow is the city of rain. Even when it isn’t raining you have the feeling that it is in the post, it’s only having a breather to let the sewers empty. There’s been a black cloud hanging over Busby for the past seventy-five years, one day the sun peeked through and the Busbyites panicked, banging on church doors for untimely entry.

Glasgow is not twinned with other cities as contemporaries are; it is twinned with a rain forest in the Amazon Basin.

There’s something special about Glasgow but not as special as before when it seemed to feed on hardship often self-inflicted. Now it’s an old and new city ringed by motorways and carriageways to facilitate escape. Decisions have been made to make it look worse not better. Character has been replaced by the Gerry-built and temporary. Permanence replaced by fly-by-night. There’s more art and poetry in an auld Gorbals tenement than there is in the already-rusting new-builds that appear overnight like cankers. Once proud streets made non-descript by economics. Take a walk down Garscube Road a once bustling thoroughfare of bookies, gangsters, pubs and rain-mated wifies, now reduced to a strip of car dealerships and car wash outlets.

Something has been lost yet no-one seems to care. Progress they call it. I have a funny feeling that their idea of progress will lead to several different forms of cataclysm unless it is somehow stopped.

But Glasgow is just a place: just bricks and mortar, it disnae have a soul or a mind or a heart. The way we go on about it ye’d think it was alive, a living entity with thoughts and words and a script. It’s just a place we made up, a reflection of ourselves. Its churches were built by and for religious folk and Hillhead for the well-heeled. There were that many pubs cos we like a swally. We knocked down St Enoch’s cos we wanted a fancy mall and we chose First Bus cos it was cheap and maist of the Glesga folk were sick of all thae Irish tri-colours skitin’ about the toon.  And that river’s just a river that we dredged deep enough for the trading boats. The tobacco. The slaves. If you fell in it you’d get wet.

Glesga’s good and Glesga’s bad and everything else in between. It just happens to my toon and I have an inexplicable and abiding affection for it. Every time I smell chips and vinegar I think of it.

Glasgow is dialectic; a living document; a work in progress.

“In thee, O city! I discern

Another beauty, sad and stern”

The Summer of '76

It was the summer of 1976 and the sky was filled with sun. Every bird on the planet sang a song and water became the precious commodity it always was. A blazing sky beamed on Epping Forest and the hollow ponds were dry as the grass in Africa.

He wore a post-Bay City Rollers t-shirt and a pair of purple baseball boots his mother had found in a dress-your-son-like-a-nob outfitters on Leytonstone High Road. There was the insidious stench of fresh cow shit in the air and stag beetles mated furiously on the steaming pavements.

The Wurzels topped the charts.

Crispy Pancakes were still plump and winsome. The laws of the market had not yet thinned their sauce to the consistency of Pipistrelle vomit.  Capitalism, in essence, is miserly. Shave another centimetre off a Bounty Bar every three years and charge twice the price. Make the kids pay more for less.

1976 was the end of innocence...!

Tam Bryant was sixteen years of age and this was his first year living in England, let alone London. His mind was in a fug. Since moving from Glasgow he’d become increasingly Glaswegian though this approach didn’t help when seeking to purchase things in shops or when buying tube tickets. The amount of times he’d heard ‘sorry, mate?’ and ‘could you repeat that?’ One time when he’d asked for a Daily Mirror he’d been handed a Toffee Crisp by the shop-keeper. His natural Scottish paranoia and sense of inferiority had kicked in and he wondered if they were taking the piss.

He wore his Celtic scarf at all times. He wore his cultural identity like a badge and had begun drinking accordingly.

His guardian angel, if such a thing had existed, would have questioned exactly why he was so sorry to leave his native city for it had never been very kind to him. A gentle giant with sticky out ears and an aversion to hand-to-hand combat of any and all types, he’d been bullied for years in and out of his various schools. Even some of his teachers had bullied him. They seemed to despise his cleverness and had stepped back and watched as he’d slid from the top class down to the very bottom where the pupils had played three-card-brag and picked at each other’s plooks.

The trucks rolled by on busy Whipp’s Cross Road and the eponymous old hospital peeped grandly through the branches of the Forest Glade. Further east, a drunk man in Walthamstow was being thrown off a bus for urinating in the aisle. London was a metropolis of little towns each with their own history and character. If Leytonstone was a Dickens character it would be Mr Fezziwig with a hint of the Havisham’s. A kindly place where some of the residents had a screw loose. A modest Bohemia on the edge of a dense forest.

Someone always knew someone who’d once toured with the guy who used to be in so-and-so. Leytonstone attracted social workers and schoolteachers. It housed retired dockers and psychiatric nurses who worked at Claybury Mental Hospital. Or they may have been employed at Leytonstone House, itself an institution for the mentally bewildered. You would often see denizens and staff wandering around its proximity pointing at traffic or mouthing oaths the meaning of which even they did not understand.

Tam Bryant would watch them and wonder if the inability to think and feel clearly and rationality and have folk look after you would in any way be a good thing. It seemed to him that life was too complex and full of hurt and humiliation. Incarceration may at least save you from the bulk of it.

The bees buzzed on the cotoneasters and high above a jumbo jet was whisking folk to perhaps cooler climes. The British clamoured for summer heat but when it came it often overwhelmed them. Old biddies at bus stops would moan ‘oh this heat, I can’t be doing with this’ while dressed in roughly the same apparel as they would be in October save the rain-mates.

Around the corner from the Bryant household (a three-bedroomed terraced council house on a leafy road) was a Hindu temple. In the autumn, the summer colours would be resurrected by the hundreds dressed in yellows and greens and reds gathering on the flat fringes of the forest where a giant tent would be erected for the Diwali festival. The grazing cows there would be especially safe among such a community.

If Tam Bryant was ever teased out of his emotionally cauterised state it would be to wonder at this bovine presence which often crossed the main road and down into the road where he lived. No-one ever seemed to question this event. Whose cows were they? And who came to take them back? Sometimes, and almost like mules, they stubbornly held their ground in the face of traffic and Bryant laughed at this inconvenience to motorists. Another of his father’s influences: he disliked cars and their drivers.

Tam had become un-moored from his family in a gradual way over many years. His beatings and humiliations at the hands of his peers was a secret he kept from them and this private shame had rendered him sullen and uncommunicative. He felt deep shame about himself and by extension those that had created him. The bullies had stolen more than simply his dignity, they’d stolen any normal relationship with those closest to him and, indeed, the rest of the world. It had made him a solitary individual with dark thoughts aimed toward himself. Friendships foundered in the wake of his self-destruction. Less hurtful that he destroyed them rather than face the inevitable rejection.

His thoughts since moving south to London were obsessively about how he could return north.

For revenge!

Somewhere on these bright streets, there was the chiming noise of bells. An ice-cream van played ‘Greensleeves’, a very tinny version. The children ran out of their doors as if from a house fire. The sun shone benevolently on young Tam Bryant. He barely noticed it.

Weeds and Nettles

The feeling was grief, pure and simple. A devastating grief that was somewhere in the post: it hadn’t had a chance to express itself. She wasn’t even sure she was supposed to express emotions. No-one in Scotland ever spoke about ‘emotions’. Emotions were for toffs.

The night was darker than anything. Black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat, as Wullie would have said. She almost might as well have been blind, just putting one foot in front of the other and trusting there was terrra firma for the next footfall. Her poor Wullie had died not an hour before in that far-off hospital. Wullie her love. Her lovely man Willie. Wullie her husband. William and Mary. Wullie Michie was finally and irrefutably no more but he’d left a wife behind to walk crying through the bleak, blacked-out night.

There had been a scorch of tears at his bedside. Complications from his long-suffered gangrene picked up in the last war. Blighted in the first while fighting, fallen in the second while at personal peace. He one-legged, she bow-legged.

“Legs like Queen Anne chairs” Wullie would exclaim.

And now these little legs had to take her the long miles home.

The home without a husband. The home without a father.

If Mary could have articulated it thus, she would have said that grief was like hunger, a hunger forced to feed upon itself. And it was an entity so much bigger than her little frame as she walked lonely in the night and growing and growing with every painful step. How could she hope to encase it? It was bigger than her whole life. This is what she would find.

The thought of her four children – and strangely, the wee one who had died – and her abiding duty to them drove her on, the dank water lapping gently beside her. Wullie had so loved their children and they him. They had thought his wooden leg was a toy when they were younger. True poverty was having your father’s wooden leg as a toy.

Erskine was fifteen miles west of Glasgow and on the south bank of the Clyde. She’d have to walk this distance then cross on the Jamaica Bridge to trudge eastward a further two miles. This would surely take her all night but at least the dawn may light her way into the big city.

Wullie had been in Erskine because it was there they specialised in military amputees and where prosthetics were designed and made. They made them from leather and willow for lightness. A basket-type casing from thigh to knee then a wooden spar down to moulded shoe-shape. It was called an ‘Erskine leg’ and was designed by the craftsmen who made the luxury fittings on the passenger ships that had been built in the yards all up the dirty, deepened river. Wullie’s leg had been designed and built by Clyde ship-builders.

He made ‘ooh arr, Jim lad’ noises like Long John Silver to delight the children and hopped around after them in the tiny room and kitchen above the chippie. Sometimes the smells from the chip shop made them salivate and their stomachs rumble. The dusky ambience of sodium street-lights. The dank chill in the air. The breath of words at tram-stops.

A person’s absence was eternal. Everywhere you were and would be would be without them. Everywhere you are they are not and everything will always remind you of them. The strange paradox was that, though they were never there, they were also always there. This was how bleak grief was. How cruel.

She walked on, her back sore, her heart anesthetised for fear that she may collapse among these weeds and nettles. She had to think only of her progress home to her diminished family.

Way, way in the distance she saw a dull light which she took to be her city.

Picture by Sisley

I thought that working at the National Gallery would be some sort of spiritual, artistic experience. I thought I’d wander nonchalantly around its august rooms offering sage pointers on early Italian frescoes and the Flemish Masters to visiting Greek philosophy professors and Judi Dench. Before long, having impressed my superiors, I’d be asked to deliver lectures to visiting Slade students on the mocking majesty of Magritte (all of this from a history of art paperback gleaned from a charity shop in Camden Town just the week before).

I thought I’d be Sister Wendy Beckett without the wimple spouting sagely and reverently about ‘The Virgin in Prayer’ instead of which by day three, I was bored absolutely shitless and wishing I’d never applied for the post of Gallery Assistant in the first place.

Not to mention the uniform.

I don’t like wearing uniforms (I would not have been a good Nazi) and once curtailed my St John’s Ambulance career before qualifying for one. Women they say love a man in uniform but you never see those calendars appearing in the local mall of hunks dressed in St. John’s Ambulance uniforms - or gallery assistants for that matter.

The National Gallery, especially in the main pre-Sainsbury building, is a labyrinth. The bowels of the place are a maze of tunnels and stairways which somehow lead back to the central staff dressing rooms and recreational area. It brings to mind what The Pentagon may be like underground: a subterranean spider-like grid where human skeletons are found in out-of-the-way runnels clutching documents never delivered. 

They told me on recruitment that it could take me several weeks to be able to get used to its wynds and corridors and they were not wrong. Venturing forth from the central pod you feared could lead you to musty rooms where Sir Anthony Blunt had met his final end a la Edward the Second, the red hot poker now bleak and cold.

Other than the beautiful image of a prayerful Virgin Mother by Sassoferrato, her robe a brilliant blue, her eyes downcast in solemn shadow, the other picture that stuck with me was Sisley’s ‘Seaside: Langland’, one of a serious of studies he’d painted off the Gower Peninsula in the 1870s. It’s just an impressionistic image of a large boulder in a choppy sea but it is a captivating work. A pointillist mix of blues and purples and greens and greys expertly contorted into the figurative by a master. I looked at it closely every time I was posted to that particular little Sisley exhibition space and was mesmerised by its magic. But, there are limits…

I left on the fourth day and never returned. A tear of shame fell from the Virgin’s eye.

Wee Tam the Lady-Man

I’d just got on the bus – a number 4 to The Jewel – and there he was sitting there. My wee mate, Tam, dressed from head to foot as a woman; make-up, wig the lot. I was stunned and just stood there in the aisle holding everyone up. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d seen Hitler sitting there perhaps on his way to ASDA to peruse the vegetarian options.

‘Scuse me’ and ‘tut tut!’ I was getting from the auld yins behind me: the cast of ‘Cocoon’ that generally swarmed onto the buses at this time of day, probably on their way to ‘pissy-pants’ day at The Odeon. They'd get in cheap and have a free cuppa and a biscuit while everyone blethered instead of watching the film. Buggered if that’s what I’ll be doing when I’m that age, I’d rather fling myself off The Bridges and be done with it. Already because I’m past fifty I get those ads for funeral plans and Viagra. Seems like once you get old, capitalism just can’t wait to remind you about the availability of bendy slippers and incontinence nappies.

But, Wee Tam though, eh? I was sitting down by this time just a couple of seats back from him/her and I have to admit he/she looked quite glamorous, better than he ever did as his more usual male version. Wee Tam was not known for his sartorial elegance or anything like it. Trackie bottoms and the same jumper he’d been wearing for years and had never washed. Auld denim jacket and a Hibs bobble hat when it was cold. Now, as Tam-ess, he looked all primped and trim like he’d spent ages in front of a mirror before his public appearance. Nice checked woollen coat and the hint of stocking at the knee; heels not too high but enough to accentuate an unexpectedly shapely calf.

I sat there wondering how this had come about. How long had my wee mate Tam, who I’d known since we were at school and had been drunk with a hundred times, how long had he been doing this - this cross-dressing? Because that was what they cried it these days - Eddie Izzard and the Ladyboy’s of Bangkok and all that - cross-dressing! All very acceptable in these PC times, it seemed. But, in Lochend? At his age?

I knew he knew I’d seen him as he’d fixed his gaze to look out the window as if maybe that would prevent me approaching him. But, of course, the second the seat next to him became available I had my arse on it. I could feel him tense as he sensed my presence. I noticed how shiny and sheer his stockinged legs were up close and felt an alarming stirring in my loins. If I copped off with this version of Wee Tam, would that be allowed? Could I claim I didn’t know it was him? I booted these thoughts violently out of my mind and gently nudged the wee fella.

‘Heh, Tam”

He shrugged his shoulders huffily and half turned around as if the effort was just about to make him boak.

“Aye whit?”

Even though I knew fine it was him the confirmation still shocked me. Must have been some part of my mind that still hoped I’d been hallucinating or maybe dementia had kicked in early.

“What’s the score ma pal?”

“Whit dae ye mean?”

This retort had me coughing and choking in disbelief and I had to take a swig from my wee bottle of American Cream Soda to ease my throat. The audacity of his statement! I felt like saying ‘I mean why is it raining’ or ‘why is the sky blue?’

“Whit dae a mean? Kin ye no’ take a wild guess?”

“Aw aye, the claes and that”. He fixed his gaze on the world outside. They passed what used to be Meadowbank Stadium but was now a pile of rubble. Memories of Lachie Stewart in 1970 at the Commonwealth Games winning his big race. Down past Jock’s Lodge where the two friends had shared many a laugh and staggered home together to their respective drums or stopped at one or the others with a massive carry-out enough to drown a horse.

“Ye look nice by the way”

Head jerks round rapid-style as if to fight.

“You taking the piss?” The eye-shadow, the pancake, all expertly applied. The wig framed his face making him appear demure but sexy with it. Come to think of it, Wee Tam hadn’t had any sort of relations with a woman for many a year, unless, that is, you counted Mad Lizzie from the high flats but you couldn’t call that a relationship. If it was, then Mad Lizzie was in a relationship with half the men on the scheme (and some of the dugs as well if gossip was to be believed). 

His last girlfriend had been wee Annie who’d died in that bizarre lawn-mower incident. Bloody thing had blown up with her sitting on it. First female parkie in Scotland. Rumours that it may have been a male rival usurped for the position that tampered with the petrol tank. Her demise had broken Tam’s heart as they were meant to be married the following year. Was this current behaviour some sort of strange reaction?

An uncomfortable silence between them as the bus trundles through Northfield past the house that Ken Buchanan had grown up in. The great boxer had once said that it was the bullying he suffered here that led him to take up the fistic art. Tam uncrosses and re-crosses his legs. The sexy rustle is unmistakable and I imagined creamy, welcoming thighs.

“Ahem. So you jist oot for a wee jaunt?”

He grunts in affirmation.

“As weel to have these things oot in the open, dae ye no’ think?”

A further grunt.

It dawned on me then that my wee mate, Wee Tam was treating me like I was a bloke on a bus trying to chat him up. He was giving me the cold shoulder. The hip-swerve. The brush-off. The deaf-ear. Some of the auld yins had been whispering about this possibility since I’d pounced on the empty seat leaving one of their number to stand in the area designated for prams. They thought I was a stalker. A nuisance. A sex-pest. A predator.

It wouldn’t be long before one of the auld poke-noses told the driver and I’d be ejected from the bus and on some sort of register before I knew it.

They didn’t know that this was Wee Tam Findlay dressed in drag and I couldn’t tell them. Dressed as a middle-aged Judy he may be but he was still my mate and I wouldn’t embarrass him in that way.

Tam, in his new sultry, almost pouty demeanour turned to face me full on and whispered provocatively if a trifle hoarsely.

“Is this no’ your stop?”

And he was right, it was. The bus moved slowly on after I’d got off and I swear I saw one of the old coffin-dodgers replace me in the seat next to Tam who gave the auld yin a beaming smile and his full attention.

Away, ya chancer!

Bob Simmons is an advice worker in Craiglaw, Edinburgh.

“That’s your ten o’clock, Bob”

Denise, the volunteer receptionist, does the universal ‘supping glass’ genuflection to indicate that his ten o’clock, Tam Sullivan, might be ‘hauf-pished’.

Tam Sullivan is a wee squat fella: ‘Clyde-built’ you might say excepting that he very much hailed from the east coast. East coast/west coast still sublimated relations in lowland Scotland.

‘East is least, west is best’ as they said in Glasgow. ‘Fuck you, ken?’ was the retort from Edinburgh.

Tam had been a footballer of some note, a nippy wee winger in days long before his current shambling alcoholic persona. “Ah played fur Hong Kong Rangers, but I’m no’ a hun, I’m a tim” he’d proclaim before asking Bob to phone the Social Fund for a further loan on his behalf.

Craiglaw is a predominantly Catholic area and has a large traveller community. This is reflected in the names on the client list – McCallum, Doherty, O’Connell. In the central belt of Scotland, the poorest communities tended to be the Catholic ones like Coatbridge and Niddrie and the more prosperous, like Harthill and Uddingston, being Protestant which was evident by the number of unionist flags on show in such areas on bedroom windows and waving atop flagpoles like so many territorial markers.

Unionists hated the notion of Scottish independence, but mainly they hated the fact that it was the poor Catholic schemes that voted for it in 2014 and came scarily close to securing it. Scotland’s future decided by Irish Catholics? If you listened closely you could actually hear John Knox spinning in his tomb.

“What can I do for you, Tam?”

The waft of stale beer emanating from the wee man as he slumped down in the chair offered to him told Bob that Denise hadn’t been far off the mark. Several hairs of several dogs had been consumed even this early in the morning.

“Ach I’ve been away a few months up in Arbroath and when ahv come back the council have taken ma flat back and selt aw ma stuff in an auction”

This was not an unknown occurrence among the travelling community. They’d disappear for months on end off up to the Highlands or wherever where others of their kith and kin were gathered. They wouldn’t bother informing the council, no rent would be paid and the place would belying empty. The council by their own rules would evict then store the tenants possessions for a month before selling them off. All above board and nothing much folk like Bob or anyone else could do about it.

“Aye, well you know the score about that, Tam”

The wee man looked crest-fallen.

“Just got a new three-piece suite and a stereo anaw wi’ that money ye goat me fae the council fund, but it’s no’ that that’s pissin me aff. It’s ma Grandfather Clock!”

This last statement stopped Bob in his tracks. It was if something really quite incongruous and surreal had entered the conversation. Like Salvador Dali had begun collaborating with an amateur water-colourist painting some ducks in a pond.

“Did you say Grandfather Clock?”

“Aye, brand new tae. Always wanted one. Was wondering if there was anything you could do about it? Maybe they’ve known no’ to sell it?”

Bob had not often pondered the meaning or etymology of the word ‘flabbergasted’. It seemed an odd word when you looked at it close up. What exactly was a ‘flabber’ and how indeed was it ‘gasted’?

“So Tam, you’ve lost your flat and all your possessions; your fridge, your cooker, your carpets and, as you say, your new suite and stereo?”

“And ma wide-screen. Don’t forget that”

“And your wide-screen. But, you’re maist concerned about your Grandfather Clock?”

The man Sullivan looked at Bob warily. Was there some piss-taking going on here? Was the adviser chappie getting wide?

“Aye, that’s right” he offered cagily.

Bob could imagine the phone call he was about to make.

“Oh thank God you’ve phoned. Of course, we’ve kept Mr Sullivan's clock. We’ve kept it safe with all the rest!”

Fellow-feeling For a Dead Dad

I once read in a document ‘Poem For Dead Parents’ by my father that he had felt in his life that he was somehow ‘not real’ and I believe I have inherited the essence of this sense from him. ‘Not real’ is an unexpected surprise at other people ‘taking you seriously’. Taking notice of the words you say or even acknowledging your presence on earth as in being in some way significant.

I can see it in photographs him in which he smiles mock-boldly and shyly, self-aware and as if the photograph will turn out blank without his image. Or at the valedictory ceremony after he’d initiated the advocacy centre in Kilmarnock where he beams like a child because the audience laughs at his joke.

And yet alongside this ‘non-existence’ was ‘a good conceit of himself’ to use the Scots impression: smartly dressed in a casual way and quite elegantly groomed, clean-shaven or with clipped moustache or Trotsky-bearded (I have forever been ‘scruffy’. I think he owned more self-esteem in this area. He grew out of the smart Glegsa forties and fifties of ‘the dancin’’ and ‘lumbers’, I from the more slovenly seventies and the beginnings of personal alcohol abuse). My Da, in his incarnation as a factory worker, wore a shirt and tie to work and never ever took time off sick (his mantra as a shop stewards convener was ‘don’t let the bastards get anything on you’ although he did this very thing several times by leading his men out on wildcat strikes until they and their bosses finally said ‘fuck you, Boab Wylie’).

Every single thing in life has an equal and opposite and this is true of a person’s psychological make-up. Where there is disastrously low self-esteem there is also a preening ego hungry for praise and approbation: where one feels ‘of no consequence’ the other is adamant for glory.

So it was for my father! These two extremes fed off each other like a two-headed beast devouring itself. Even when my father appeared relaxed and smiling and gentle as a breeze in April you sensed there was a great tension underneath like a volcano about to erupt. On his deathbed, all the toes on his bare feet were at a rigid right-angle pointing towards his head. Raging, raging and tense against the dying of the light.

To feel of little or no worth yet to live so eloquently and expressively and in a more worthwhile and productive way than most (witness his abundant poetry and his ground-breaking social work) is indeed a conundrum. Though maybe not as strange as you’d think.