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?”