‘So what do we do?’ she asked.
‘We try to help Tony. But Ah’ve got tae phone this Mickey Ballater the night. Ah give him a nonsense, right? Ah mean, Ah’ll tell him where tae find auld Danny McLeod. That keeps ’im busy a wee while. But he’s gonny phone back. An’ he’ll not be a pleased man. So then we have tae move intae the real game. Ah have to start doin’ real tricks. Ah need your help. You’ve got to find out where Tony Veitch is. It’s as simple as that.’
‘I’m sure Alma knows.’
‘Then you go and see Alma. The morra mornin’. Fair enough?’
‘I suppose I could. Milton will be at the golf. He always plays golf on Sunday morning. Sometimes has lunch at the club and plays again in the afternoon. I’m sure I can get her alone. Are you going to give Mickey Ballater my number?’
‘Ah’ll have to. Ah’m goin’ to let him phone me back. Ah give him that, he’ll give me back some trust. It’ll steal a few hours. We’re gonny need them. See. You want to help Tony, what we’ve got to do here is play for time. Ah can get the right people to find him. An’ still kid Ballater on. Ye understand?’
She wasn’t sure that she did but she didn’t know anything else to do but let Dave handle it.
‘You going to phone?’ she asked.
‘Ah’ll phone right now. Ah said before the day’s out. The day’s not out.’
He got up and walked across a red carpet that nobody else could see. But she believed it was there. And certainly nobody encroached on his progress.
Reaching the phone, he dialled the number he had dialled earlier today. The same woman’s voice answered, saying the same thing, ‘Gina?’ Did she not know who she was? He didn’t bother confirming. He asked for Mickey Ballater. The voice that was as gravelly as a cement-mixer came on at once. ‘Aye?’ He must be in bed with her, Dave thought. She must be kinky for no-users. He gave his message and waited.
‘Who’s he?’
‘He wis a friend of Eck Adamson’s. He must know somethin’ about Tony. Ah told ye about Eck, right? Ah’m tryin’ all Ah know. You have a word wi’ him. No joy, you phone this number.’ He gave him Lynsey’s number. ‘That all right?’
‘It better be. Ah’ll tell ye how all right it is the morra.’
Ballater put the phone down. Dave gave the dead tone the fingers. Go and frighten Birmingham, he thought. He walked back into the dance-area, hoping somebody would try to intercept him. But he had a clear path to Lynsey. She looked up. He nodded and sat down.
‘There’s a man at the bar,’ she said, ‘trying to have a fight.’
He looked across. He saw a man who wasn’t as drunk as he was trying to be. He was gesticulating in that ambiguous way that was both a threat and a plea. ‘I’m warning you but don’t take me too seriously.’ Dave didn’t. He sipped at his vodka and orange.
Tam stopped gesturing at one of the men behind the bar and subsided into his whisky. Surrounded by imagined enemies, he was muttering to himself. ‘Ah could sort this whole place out.’ He looked over his shoulder and saw Pat sitting suave at a table. The girl he was with was almost all eyes. He wondered what they could be talking about that was so interesting.
‘After that,’ Pat was saying, ‘I played at inside left.’
21
‘Blankets? Pull this over the head, ye’ve got a fallout shelter. Hand-knitted from Polar berrs. Ah’m tellin’ ye. Wake up in the mornin’, ye see the frost on the windae in the shape o’ two hands up. It’s surrendered. At a fiver a whack, Ah’ve got to sell them quick. Polis see me, Ah’ll get arrested for insanity.’
Mickey Ballater moved on. He wasn’t in the market for blankets. Paddy’s Market in Shipbank Lane was a nostalgic experience for him, a walk into the past that momentarily blurred his present purpose. There must be streets like this in any city, he supposed, but this one was different for him. It was where he came from, a re-enactment of the way he used to live. He felt as if they were flogging his own past.
What struck him wasn’t the blanket-seller’s spiel. That was untypical of this street, more like an echo of the Barras, the city’s official market where the brashness of commercial success came out at you like a lasso. This was a quieter place, mute with resignation. It was a street of dead eyes and indifferent glances.
Down one side there was a series of holes in the wall, lock-ups where a conglomerate of scruffy goods were howked out of the dimness to be sold. The catch-as-catch-can quality of the articles was indicated by the fact that few sellers specialised in anything but most sold whatever they could get their hands on. Down the other side were those whose premises were no more than a patch of ground on which they laid what looked like the remnants of their private possessions. The market still lived up to a name that implied a place where mendicant Irish immigrants could buy.
Mickey became angry at the thought of those who, sitting in plush places, said there were no longer any real poor. If this stuff was being sold, who else would buy it but the poor?
He remembered the house in Crown Street and an old bitterness came back. These were people he had once been part of. He thought of his father using the booze as blinkers, of his mother not able to live one day in which a penny wasn’t important. He thought of his sister, broken-hearted because the joiner she was going with packed her up, his mother keening in the background that Prince Charming had ridden away.
He was different. His wife lived in a private house. Where a second-hand bike at thirty bob had been something he waited two years for, his three daughters took a personal stereo for granted. He was going to keep it that way.
‘Excuse me, aul’ yin,’ he said.
She looked up as if a glance was a boulder she was tired of lifting. Her face was a derelict cul-de-sac. The junk behind her was like a load she was yoked to, ensuring that she would never move anywhere else.
‘Ah’m lookin’ for Danny McLeod.’
She nodded along the street.
‘Auld Danny’s up there. The wan at the very end. Silly auld bugger.’
As he got nearer he saw what she meant. Danny McLeod had a piece of felt spread on the cobbles. On it lay a few boxes of matches inside metal holders, two second-hand paperbacks, a pair of spectacles in an open case and a tin ashtray. The man himself had a face blotched with drink, a map of bad places he had been.
Mickey bent down and lifted one of the metal holders. The holder was cheap metal, three-sided. The idea was you fitted the matchbox into the metal with the striking-surface facing out. One side of the metal box had what looked like a snake on it. Mickey put it back and picked up another. The design was a sun.
‘These is fae Peru,’ Danny McLeod said. ‘Lima in Peru. That’s the capital, but. Ye get these in Lima.’
‘Peru?’
‘Correct. They’re a right rarity. 50p.’
‘How d’ye get these fae Peru? Ye got a branch there?’
‘World Cup, right? Scotland playin’ in the World Cup. Right? Ah know some people goin’ over to support the boys in Argentina. So they’re goin’ overland. Down through Peru. They got me these in Lima. Cost them a bomb. But they know Ah like precious metal. Ah’m losin’ like. But Ah’m selling off the stock. Very few left. Ye get the matches free wi’ the holder.’
Mickey put down the sun, picked up a lion.
‘That’s a beauty. That’s ma favourite, like. That wan there. Looks real enough tae bite ye. Chow holes in yer pocket, that yin.’
‘50p?’
‘Special offer, big yin.’
Mickey put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a pound.
‘Know what? Gave away the last o’ ma change there.’
Mickey smiled at the expectancy in the old man’s eyes and replaced the pound in his pocket. He started to count the change in his hand and stopped. He replaced the coins and, for a reason he didn’t understand, gave him the pound.