I eagerly anticipated those Friday nights, even if they had a strange edge to them. Grandad Jock would be nursing a beer, which he rarely finished, and sipping at a whisky. One only. He’d look at his two sons: drunk, sprawling, flatulent and loud-mouthed, and even as a kid, I could feel him seethe with disappointment. I suppose it was something that we shared.
My ma hated him and his trio of mates. Gangsters, she called them. Back then, in the late seventies, they were among the last men on the dwindling docks. All of them, bar Johnnie, had been there since the war and were nearing retirement. The older three, through being in a reserved occupation, had missed all the fighting. I always thought it ironic that cunts thought of as hard had used their job status to shite out from swedging the Nazis. But personal gain was their real motive. — They took everything that was meant for the working people, I mind my mother once saying to me. — Stole fae their ain. The war stuff, it was meant for everybody, no just they thieving ratbags.
That was a wee bit disingenuous. I’d look around at all the stuff in our house compared to the scruffs’ hooses. We had everything, until the old man pished it away. And you knew where it all came from. I never heard any talk from my ma of sending it back.
But she tried to keep me away from Grandad Jock and his mates. I was thirteen and in first year at school when they started to take an interest in me. That they didnae give a fuck about my brother Joe, fourteen months my elder, was good. It made me feel important.
Not a lot did back then.
I struggled with reading throughout primary school, and was put in dumbo classes in secondary. Letters and words on a page meant nothing, they were just a smudged code I couldn’t crack. I would, many years later, be diagnosed as dyslexic. But back then the teachers and snobby kids laughed at me for being slow and stupid. I raged inside, with such force that I nearly made myself sick. Sitting there, at my desk, my breathing tight, almost passing out with fury. Then I learned that letting that rage out was the way to stop the laughter: to stop it by turning it into blood and tears.
So it felt good to be valued, by Grandad Jock and his pals; those bold, sly men, whom people seemed to fear and respect. Johnnie Tweed, though, I could never figure out. He was more ages with my dad, and I always thought he should have been his mate, rather than my grandad’s. As his nickname suggested, ‘Handsome’ Johnnie was a good-looking guy with big white teeth and a shock of dark bath-brush hair, cut in a short crew. He smelt of strong aftershave, cigarettes and alcohol, like all the men did when you were a kid, but there was always something a bit more fragrant about Johnnie.
I hated school, and worked part-time as a delivery boy at R & T Gibson, a grocer’s in Canonmills. I’d ride the big, black metal-framed bike, with boxes of groceries stuck in the huge basket at the front of it. I’d pedal this heavy monstrosity along busy streets, my skinny wee legs pumping hard just to keep it upright. I also stacked the shelves in the shop. The owner of the store was not called Gibson, but Malcolmson: a high-voiced, excitable cunt. Malcolmson was always bossing me around, along with Gary Galbraith, the other schoolkid who worked there.
One Saturday morning Grandad Jock came into the shop with Carmie. Willie Carmichael was a colossal, silent man with hands like shovels, and was forever by Grandad Jock’s side. Jock wore this trademark lopsided smile, which I now associate with the word snide. He stared deeply at Malcolmson, who shuffled around uncomfortably as they talked, his voice growing higher. — The Leeeeth dockers, aw aye, Jock, we’ve got tae keep the Leeeeth dockers happy!
My grandad’s cuntish smile never left his pus. He and Carmie took Malcolmson aside and whispered something to him. I kept out the way, stacking tins of pineapple chunks onto the shelves, but I could see Malcolmson’s eyes get bigger and wider and Jock’s and Carmie’s get all narrow and slitty. After, Jock said to me, — Make sure you work hard and behave yirsel for Mr Malcolmson here, boy, right?
— Aye.
Then they left the shop. Malcolmson said fuck all for a while, but later looked at me in a strange kind of awe and fear. Then he told us that Gary Galbraith would be doing most of the deliveries and I would be stacking shelves, inside, in the warm. This was good news for me, but not for Gary. It was fuckin Baltic outside on that bike. But there would be just one delivery that I would have to make three times a week: a box of fruit and veg to the Leith dockers. I had never seen my grandad or any of his friends ever eat a single piece of fruit, or a vegetable that wasn’t a tattie.
A nutter called John Strang, thick glasses, slicked-back hair, was the boy on the gate. He was known as a violent psycho, who had done time in Carstairs, a facility for the criminally insane. The stanes were cobbled, which didn’t matter too much going in, but when I came out, after visiting their howf, the box was full of heavy bottles of spirits, which you could hear rattling and clanking together. Of course Strang said fuck all; he was obviously being looked after by Jock and the others, but just going past that magnified gape was unsettling enough. Then I would cycle back to the shop and dump the bottles into the skip at the rear of the building. Johnnie would later come by in a van to pick them up. I knew this was their way of operating, as I waited behind the bushes one night, down by the Water of Leith walkway, and saw him appear.
But I liked going down to the dockyards to meet my grandad Jock and his mates. You could tell they were a group apart and that the other dockers had no time for them. They hung out at this brick outbuilding by an old dry wharf, which they had commandeered as their HQ. It was right at the eastern side of the docks, bordered by a big wire fence and a set of industrial units, well away from the other dockers. I think this arrangement suited all parties. The ‘howf’, as they called it, was obviously meant to be an old storeroom; it had a wooden table and chairs, and a rack containing some cleaning materials. There was a light, no windows, the place ventilated only by air bricks at the top and bottom, and sealed off by a big wooden door, which was left slightly ajar when we were inside.
I’d sit with them, drinking tea from a mug, keeping warm by a Calor gas stove they always had on in the winter, listening to them chat. They sounded weird to my young ears, often talking in riddles, using words and ways of expressing themselves I couldn’t decipher. It was as if it was a different language, some kind of a code. They were like relics from another era.
They might have known fuck all about the Jam being top of the charts, but they knew about people, and their frailties. — See yir brother Joe, he’s scared ay you, Grandad Jock said to me once down the howf. — He kens he’s weaker than you.
I was floored by this revelation. Joe constantly bullied me: battering me, making my life hell. But I recognised a strange credibility in my grandad’s statement. There was a panic in Joe’s eyes when he beat me, like he was almost anticipating a retaliation that never came. But, armed with this insight, I resolved that it would now arrive. And he wouldn’t be expecting it. This old bastard Jock, who could smell a man’s vulnerability like a shark does blood in the water, he saw everything. He understood it all.