I haven’t felt like using the digital recorder for a few days. I know I promised myself to detail everything I did but I can’t decide if the Drumchapel job is a worthwhile exercise.
I spent the night at Martin’s and woke up the next morning less sure of my actions than I had been since I left prison. The last week has been a haze. My cell mates go on the batter nightly and I have avoided it like the plague. It would be too easy to slide into the alcohol wagon and tell everyone else to take a flying fuck.
On the night after my visit with Martin I was in a different place. I sat next to the Necropolis and stared down at Glasgow. Did I need this shit anymore? Would life be easier if I just dropped to first gear and wandered through the rest of my natural existence with little more horizon than the next bottle of booze? How hard could it be? How bad could it be?
I sat with my back against the grave of Hugh Tennent and looked at his brewery sprawled out at my feet and made a call. An hour later I was trying straight meths for the first time in my life. One taste and I threw up. I told the assembled body to sit tight and took off in the direction of Alexandra Parade. On the way I picked up a chunk of metal from a building site and entered the corner store with a face that said don’t fuck with me.
I left with six bottles of malt — the store’s entire inventory of good whisky. I made it clear to the shopkeeper that calling the police was not an option. I put on the look of a man that had been here a million times before and the owner let me go quietly. When I returned to my drinking mates they were gobsmacked but they asked few questions as they tucked into the booty.
I fell asleep next to Hugh’s grave. I think he might have understood.
For the next five nights I played the Tesco delivery van to my drinking companions’ needs. I did in five stores and left each one in no doubt to the future should they call foul. Last night I drew a line in the sand and stepped back.
It wasn’t hard to see why. My mates — now up to fifteen in number — were waiting on me behind the car impound on High St. Six of them were from the hostel but the others had joined our merry throng as my supply of drink had grown in notoriety. In the circles I was now mixing in, notoriety spreads fast.
I had eight bottles of varying sprits on me but after an hour it wasn’t enough. My friends looked to me for more and, even in my inebriated state, I knew this was no way to a good place.
I pissed off and went up to the Necropolis to throw up. As I lay looking at the red tinged clouds above the city I knew I was on a bad slope and either I changed or I’d end up at the back end of a bottle for the rest of my life. The next day I went back to Martin’s. This time I wanted his help and he had no choice over whether he gave it to me or not.
He opened the door and looked at me the way my mum used to look at me when I had been in a fight. The Highland Park was still on tap and I should have said no but I didn’t. I needed something to kill the hangover.
We chatted and chewed the cud well into the night and the second bottle of malt was cracked open before I told Martin what I wanted. He looked at me and stood up. I was waiting for an exit stage left or a ‘yes we are in this together’. Instead I got a blank and he headed for the toilet. I felt like a patient in a doctor’s surgery waiting for results of a test. Martin came back in and looked at me.
‘What’s in it for me?’
Less than six months earlier I would have told him that keeping his life was a fair bargaining chip but the world moves on and I was in need of his help. What was in it for him? Why should he help me? After all if Dupree was such a bastard then a peaceful life in a mock farmhouse was no bad thing.
I was hardly in a position to offer a deal. What could I say? I’ll breathe on you if you don’t help? To be fair that was no idle threat given the state of my dental hygiene at the moment. I could stun at ten feet. Then I dug deep and went for the nuts.
‘We shake and go home?’
It was a low blow. Not that low blows meant much now. It was a phrase I had used more than once in London.
When I had asked him to come down at first it was more than a request and he knew it. He had a good life in Glasgow and I was asking him to chuck it on the fire and head for my voice. To his credit he had done so, but not without a hundred regrets. I had shat on him from a high place and even though he had done well in London he was never happy.
Every time we had to put on the fight mitts I would tell him that it would soon be over and we could shake and go home. We never did. And now I was calling in a favour that didn’t exist and he knew it. I stared at the whisky and was lost for words. My fall from grace was complete.
Martin walked behind me and reached down, grabbing my shoulders.
He could have taken me by the throat and who would have cared. Me? Not then. Not right at that moment. I waited on his fingers around my throat but of course they never came.
‘You can’t offer me home. I’m home but if I help you, we call it all quits.’
I looked up at him. The thinnest of smiles on my face.
‘Deal.’
We turned to the options for Drumchapel in the same way we had planned a thousand jobs. As usual the first ideas were of the bog standard type — they always are.
I went on a creativity training course once — it was the old man’s idea down in London. He had been on it and thought his direct reports should go. I thought he was kidding but it was a three-line whip and, as it turned out, a real eye opener.
I’m a cynical bastard about such things but it was better than I feared and a few things stuck in my head. One of them was what they call the ‘First Burst’ — the first ideas you come up with. The same old same old.
The course had told me that this was the norm and to get fresh thinking you needed to push by these ideas and, as none of the stuff we came up with answered the brief, we ploughed on. Then Martin threw in a wild idea and we were home free with added sugar. It always works that way.
We are going for it tomorrow.
Chapter 35
Friday February 1st 2008
So now I know what Spencer left for me. Getting it was a stroke of genius on Martin’s part and so blindingly obvious that I am currently thinking about submitting myself for the thick as a plank award.
Martin phoned the Credit Union and asked what the procedure was for retrieving the contents of a box for someone who was deceased. The requirements were straight forward enough — a copy of the death certificate and proof that you were now the legal heir to the deceased’s property.
The former was easy. A trip to the Martha St births, deaths and marriages office and we were away. Spencer Cline, deceased 14 ^th March 1996, cause of death — automobile accident.
The next step was trickier. Martin phoned directory enquiries and asked for a Cline living in Inveraray. There was one match and he phoned the number. Mrs Cline answered the phone and things got awkward.
Martin had only met her once before at Glasgow Central Station when she had turned up with Spencer in tow after he had enjoyed a long weekend away from the troubles of London.
Martin explained who he was and apologised for not attending Spencer’s funeral. He told her he had been out of the country for the last fifteen years and had just come back to find a letter from Spencer that had been held by a mutual friend. The letter said that Spencer had tried to return some old photographs that Martin had loaned him but, by then, he had gone abroad. For whatever reason Spencer had placed them in a safety deposit box under his own name and he needed her permission to open the box.
Mrs Cline wasn’t stupid and the story sounded weak and probably sounded even weaker from her end of the phone. Martin tap danced for a few minutes and said he would be happy to send her the key and, next time she was in Glasgow, she could open the box and send the photos onto him. This tipped the balance. Mrs Cline was in her late eighties and a trip to Glasgow to open the box of her long dead son was not one she wanted to take.