Mannequin Mystery

 

There was a time when you could see in folk’s windows quite easily. Maybe people felt less concerned about privacy? Maybe they were more innocent times when folk were less inclined to get up to anything so private as to keep secret?

Just out walking or from the top deck of a bus or on a train passing by a row of back windows you could quite clearly see into folk’s living rooms and quite often bedrooms too. Not like some Peeping Tom, just curious about people’s lives. Mostly they’d just be sitting at their tea anyway or watching the telly but, occasionally, just very occasionally you’d catch them at something more out of the ordinary: scratching their arse or giving a kid a slap or flinging a plate at a wall, or maybe a wifie crying. Just everday life but meaningful none the less.

I used to get the 2 through Brigton Cross on my way back from school in the winter months. In the summer I’d walk if the sun happened to make an appearance or the drizzle wasn’t too bad. In Glasgow you take whatever chance you can get to donner about the place to make up for the time huddled up indoors out of the cold and glaur. Anyway, in the winter months by the time the bus got to Brigton after school it would be pitch black and the chip shops were lit up like so many Edward Hopper scenes all fluorescent and thick with steam, the air redolent of vinegar, stoor and India Pale Ale from the pubs which seemed to exist every three doorways. I sat on the top deck where folk were still allowed to smoke, and the air was acrid like a diseased lung.

“He’s bad wi’ his chist”

“Ah’m no’ surprised oan eighty o’ thae coffin sticks a day”.

“Poor conductor having to breathe aw this in on an eight-hour shift. Mind, he’s goat a gasper oan ‘imself”

This one night I was puffing away on a Regal and absent-mindedly gazing out at the streets and tenements up Main Street. Wee lassies wi’ big packages of chips for the nights tea, shilpit’ dugs shaggin’ up a dark close, the odd drunken faither stoatin’ towards home to give his wife hell for only tinned mince for his scran.

Then I saw her.

Framed in a first-floor window illuminated by a single bare light bulb and a coal fire at her back; a woman who appeared to be painting a mannequin.

I just had the briefest of glimpses as the bus accelerated through the early rush-hour traffic and headed up toward Shawfield but the image made an impression on me. She’d been painting the face of a mannequin which was dressed in what appeared in a tuxedo and stood in the centre of the room in some sort of dias maybe a fruit crate and there was yer woman with a wee thin paintbrush seeming to add features to the bare faced manqué.

Her concentration was total.

Every evening I looked out for this but never witnessed it again. I guessed she was involving herself in theatre work but I could obviously not be sure of this.

Weeks later my Granny asked me had I heard about the woman who’d jumped fae the Dalmornock Bridge into the Clyde?

I says, naw, and she says, aye, lassie went in and dinnae come back oot despite the best efforts o’ the famous Riverman.

The Riverman fishes everybody oot in the end.