TWO
Frozen Gold: I hated that name right from the start, but I was so damn sure of myself I was perfectly confident I'd persuade them to change it.
Wrong.
A wet Tuesday in November, in Paisley, in 1973. I was seventeen; I'd left school a year earlier and started work at Dinwoodie and Sons, a light engineering works carrying out component work for the big Chrysler car plant at Linwood (the Chrysler factory had been a Rootes factory, would later become a Talbot factory, and finally end up a Closed factory; a car plant that withered).
I spent most of my time collecting swarf from around the lathes, making up songs in my head and going to the toilet. In the toilet I smoked, read the papers and wanked. I was bursting with youth then; seething with semen and pus and ideas; bursting spots, pulling myself off, scribbling down tunes and words anq bad poetry, trying every form of dandruff control known to Man save cutting all my hair off, and wondering what it was like to get laid.
And feeling guilty. Never forget the feeling guilty; the constant bass line to my life. It was one of the first things I was ever aware of (I don't know what I'd done; peed on the carpet, thrown up over my da, hit one of my sisters, sworn ... doesn't matter. The crime, the misdeed, is the least important part of it; what counts is the guilt). 'You bad, bad boy!' 'You wicked child!' 'Ye wee bugger ye!' (skelp) ... Jesus, I took it all in, it was my most formative experience; it was part of the fabric of reality; it was the most natural thing in the world, the principal example of cause and effect; you did something, you felt guilty. Simple as that. To live was to feel, 'Oh, God! What have I done?' ...
Guilt. The big G, the Catholic faith's greatest gift to humankind and its subspecies, psychiatrists... well, I guess that's putting it a little too harshly; I've met a lot of Jews and they seem to have just as hard a time of it as we do, and they've been around longer, so maybe it wasn't the Church's invention... but I maintain it developed the concept more fully than anybody else; it was the Japan of guilt, taking somebody else's crude, unsophisticated, unreliable product and mass-producing it, refining it, finetuning it, optimising its performance and giving it a life-time guarantee.
Some people get away from it; they honestly seem to just shuck guilt off like a backpack as soon as they leave home; I couldn't. I took it all too seriously, from the start. I believed. I knew they were right; my ma, the priest, my teachers; I was a sinner, I was dirty and soiled and horrible and it was going to be a full time job saving me from the fires and the torment; real professional work was going to be needed to rescue me from the eternal damnation I felt forced to agree I so thoroughly deserved.
Original sin was a revelation to me, once I understood it properly. At last, I realised, it wasn't necessary to have actually done something to feel guilty; this dreadful, constant, nagging sensation of wracked responsibility could be accounted for just by being alive. There was a logical explanation! Hot damn. It was a relief, I can tell you.
So I felt guilty, even after I'd left school, even after I'd stopped going to church (oh, Jesus, especially just after stopping going to church), and even after I'd left home and started sharing a flat with three atheist prod students. I felt guilty about having left school and not going to university or college, guilty about not going to church, guilty about leaving home and leaving my ma to cope with the others alone, guilty about smoking, guilty about wanking, guilty about skidging off to the bog all the time and reading my newspaper. I felt guilty about not believing in guilt any more.
That Tuesday evening I'd called in to see my ma and whatever brothers and sisters happened to be in the house. Our flat was on Tennant Road, in the Paisley suburb of Ferguslie Park, the roughest area in Paisley at the time, a wasteland of bad architecture and 'problem' families. It was a toss-up which were the most broken; the families or the houses.
Ferguslie Park lay in a triangle of land formed by three railway lines, so no matter what direction you approached it from, it was always on the wrong side of the tracks. The streets were full of glass and the ground-floor windows were full of hardboard panelling. The only thing holding up the walls was the graffiti.
Spray paint was something of a status symbol amongst the local gangs then, like owning a Parker pen; a sign you'd arrived as a menace to society and could afford to devote some of your valuable time to the theory and practice of artistic despoliation as well as the more strategically effective but less aesthetically satisfying forms such as smashing holes in walls, wrecking cars, and carrying out al fresco, enthusiastic, but usually non-improving amateur plastic surgery on the faces and bodies of rival gang members.
The closes in the squat, ugly, buildings silted up overnight with empty bottles of fortified wine and drained cans of strong lager; it was as though people put out wine bottles instead of milk bottles, waiting for a morning delivery that never came.
I didn't stay long at my ma's; the place depressed me. That made me feel guilty too, because I felt I ought to love her so much it would outweigh the bad memories the place held for me. Our flat always smelled of cheap cooking; that's the only way I can describe it. It was the smell of old chip fat, reheated cans of cheap Irish Stew, too many cans of baked beans and burned slices of white sliced bread, and the greasily solidified remains of fish suppers, take-away Chinese meals and curries; all overlaid by the smell of cigarette smoke. At least my youngest brothers and sisters were past the age of regular vomiting.
My ma, as usual, started trying to persuade me to go to church; at least to go to confession. I wanted to talk about how she was, how the kids were, whether she'd heard anything from da ... anything but the one thing she wanted to talk about. So we didn't talk together; we talked apart.
It washed over me, I felt guilty and inadequate and hopeless and nervously out of place. I just sat nodding or shrugging or very occasionally shaking my head, and concentrated on trying to put one of wee Andrew's toy cars back together for him (he was crying). It was cold in the flat, and damp, but I was sweating. My ma was smoking her usual number of fags and I had always promised not to smoke so I couldn't take out my own packet. I sat there, scanting for a cigarette and trying clumsily to mend my wee brother's toy car and wanting to get away...
I got away. Left a fiver on the ledge beside the little container of holy water by the front door, and got out, but not without promising that I'd come back after the pubs were shut with some fish suppers, also not without promising to think about going to chapel again or at least to go and see Father McNaught to have a talk, and to be good generally and work hard... the faint smell of urine in the close was almost a relief; it was like I'd just started breathing again.
It was raining; I turned my collar up and tramped across the street, feet crunching on the broken glass that was Ferguslie's equivalent of a gravel drive, then marched over the muddy grass, past half-burned sheets of hardboard and sodden chip pokes and half-crumpled aluminium take-away containers holding little greasy puddles of rainwater, until I was out of sight of the flat. I ducked into a close on Bankfoot Drive, and lit up, sucking at the smoke like life itself. The close stank, there was illiterate graffiti carved into the tiled wall opposite, and I could hear a man shouting in one of the upstairs flats. The flat nearest to me turned their telly up, presumably to drown out the noise from upstairs. I smoked my sawn-off Embassy and looked out at the damp dreariness of Ferguslie Park, shivering a little as some water ran down my neck.