Glasgow
FOR ALL OF the warnings drink seemed a pretty slow killer. Not like a knife in the guts or a bullet through the head. Looking at the men that lived in the pubs around the Gallowgate it appeared you could reach sixty or seventy on a diet of whisky, beer and bile.
But perhaps the drinkers I took for pensionable were raddled thirty-somethings and it wouldn’t be long before I looked the same. I stared in the mirror and whispered, 'Bring it on.'
Already my waist had thickened; there was a scaliness between my fingers that itched more at night. My skin had the porridge pallor of a prisoner after a six-month stretch. I’d abandoned vanities like deodorant, cologne and contact lenses. My specs added three years, though they were a mite flash for my current circumstances. I wondered if I should get a new pair, ones that didn’t mark me out as a man who had known better days. My hair was longer too. I could go a full fortnight without showing it the shampoo. And there was no need for mousse or gel or any other crap. I just swept it back with my fingertips and left it as nature intended — which seemed to be a dirty brown flecked through with dandruff. Add to that the new old clothes I’d bought at Paddy’s Market and, all in all, I was managing my decline pretty well.
When I was a boy my heroes were two great escape artists, Harry Houdini and Jesse James. I borrowed library books about them, read up on their exploits and stared deep into black and white photographs of two men so skilled they could only be killed by cowards. In my fantasies I was the cowboy magician, no bonds could hold me and I was swift enough to sidestep a punch in the guts or any bullet in the back.
I jammed so many yales and mortises my father decided we were under siege and called the police. But in time my picking grew smooth. I freed tethered dogs, opened padlocks to sheds, gates and lockups. I released jangles of bicycle chains and liberated telephone dials from locks designed to frustrate teenage sisters. I bought a pair of trick handcuffs and taught myself to unfasten them with a dismantled hair clasp stolen from my mother. I hung about the locksmith’s shop, begged adults for old keys. My fingers were twitching to try their skill on a safe, but round our way there was nothing that worth securing, so I kept on the alert for a gang of thieves on the lookout for a nimble-fingered boy. They wouldn’t need to promise me lemonade streams or big rock-candy mountains; all I wanted was a chance to click that dial to the right combination. I’d be their creature and if we got caught, no great matter, I’d unlock the prison and set us free. But no wily crew ever spotted my talents and once mastered there was no drama in solitary achievements. Jesse had his pursuers, Houdini his audience. So of course I decided to organise my own great escape.
Ten-year-old boys have more access to padlocks and chains than adults might think. I invited the kids in my street to collect all they could find, and leave the keys behind. We met down by the railway line in an abandoned signal box that had once been boarded shut.
They came with dog leashes, belts and skipping ropes. They came with rusty iron links that had hung round gates for years. One boy brought a pair of handcuffs he said he’d found at the bottom of his parents’ wardrobe. I gave a short speech, and then chose the prettiest girl in the group to come and tie me up. She was too shy, but the boys obliged, setting on me with cowboy whoops and primitive yells. I flexed my non-existent muscles, like I’d read Houdini had done, and kept my face straight, though the bellows and rough jabs from the boys all eager to bind me as secure as possible made me want to struggle. Eventually I was trussed. Some of the strapping was slack but at its core was a tight tangle of metal, a firm pressure through my clothes and onto my flesh. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I felt a strange excitement in my stomach. The boys stepped away, I put on a deep voice that demanded they leave me for fifteen minutes precisely; the audience hesitated and my vulnerability entered the room. I gave them a strong hard stare. Then Ewan McIvor, the tallest of the group, said, 'He’s a fucking weirdo.' Neil Blane picked up the refrain, 'Weirdy Wilson.' And it became hard to make out individual insults beneath the mêlée of abuse.
Stupid fucking poof… silly cunt… weirdy bastard… Jessie… fucking spazmo… Joey Deakon
…
Ewan pushed me to the ground and the others joined in with quick kicks and jabs, then almost as suddenly as it had started the assault was over. They turned and ran whooping out into the sunshine, slamming the door behind them.
It wasn’t completely black in the hut. Light filtered in through cracks in the untrue slats, but it was dark enough to give the old signalling equipment a sinister aspect. I bumped up onto my bottom, brought my hands round in front of me and grasped the small metal pick I’d hidden beneath my tongue. Then I got my second shock of the adventure.
Police handcuffs are not as easy to unfasten as the trick set I’d been practising on.
It was dinner-time before my mother noticed I was missing. Neighbours’ children were interrogated and my fate soon discovered. My father shook his head, borrowed a pair of bolt cutters and set off to release me. The summer nights are long in Scotland, and it was not quite yet gloaming when he found me. But the shadows inside the signal box had spread their fingers until the little space was black. The darkness had crept inside my clothes, filtered into my nose and mouth, and slunk into my ears until I was unsure whether the rustling noises and groans came from the trees and grasses outside or from some creature inside the box with me.
My father ruffled my hair, and slowly cut my bonds, scolding and comforting in turn, finally releasing me, piss stained, snot crusted and tearful, into my mother’s custody. That was the first time I learned a fact that has haunted me throughout my return to Glasgow. I can’t stand to be locked up and I was never destined to be an escape artist.
After a few of my usual consolations I decided I was finished with pubs for that morning, so I bought myself a picnic and went down to the Clyde to drink it. In Berlin the rivers and canals were part of the centre of the city, there was bathing and boating, tourist barges and river taxis. People sunned themselves and played tennis and frisbee by the banks of the Spree, and though there were rainy days I only ever went there when it was sunny, so my impression is of brightness and good times.
It was damp down by the Clyde. The concrete walkway was deserted but there were signs others had been there before me, rusting beer cans, dead bottles of Buckfast, old porno magazines splaying already splayed women in the breeze. There were a few boats moored by the riverside, but the water was lead-grey dead, if I’d had any thoughts of drowning myself I would have ditched them for the day. The water was too cold to consider it. It would swallow you with a slurp and no word of pardon afterwards.
I walked along by the edge for a while trying to keep my mind empty. I didn’t bother trying to conceal my carry-out from the early afternoon. It swung from my hand in the kind of thin plastic bag licensed grocers seem to think sufficient for transporting lager, though every drinker knows they’ll bend and snap before you’ve walked a mile.
An old man with Struwwelpeter hair lay skippered in the shadows beneath Jamaica Bridge. He’d made a nest from an army-issue sleeping bag supplemented by a bundle of rough-looking blankets and some dismantled cardboard boxes. A tattered tartan trolley stuffed with newspapers lay toppled on the ground beside him. The old man mumbled something and I leant beneath the bridge’s supports and passed him a can of lager. It was more a plea for karma than any kind of sympathy, but the old tramp tipped his hand to his forehead and whispered ‘God go with you son’ in a voice raw with phlegm and cold. I nodded and said, 'And with you.' Though I thought any god had probably given up on both of us a long while back.