1st couple of chapters of my 'tartan noir' novel Glasgow, Like A Stranger, now available on kindle,here:
1./ And there it was, suddenly, swelling out
of the blackness below the plane, a phosphorescent octopus unfurling its
tentacles in an oil-dark ocean, reaching
Ted’s way for a multiple handshake – or a dragging down, a drowning, a slow
devouring in depths darker yet.
“The Big G, sweetheart,” said
Pamela, leaning from her own seat for a better peek through the window at his
side. “You’re home… almost.”
And big it was, Glasgow, shifting
its outline instant by instant, expanding until its million, billion, pocks of
light filled the space beneath the plane in every direction in which his head
could angle, streetlamp amber glowings punctuated with silvers, yellows, the
occasional neon pink or blue: a field of fire with a little ice stirred in.
Home indeed, he supposed, even after all these years away.
Soon the sprawl sorted itself into
geometries: the rectangles and semi-circles of housing estates; the little
squares of factories and warehouses; straight lines and circlings of road and
motorway, speckled with soldier ant cars. A dark curl of river snaking among
the bright lights like a cobra scaling a Christmas tree.
Tower blocks, tennis courts,
sandstone tenements, office blocks, a graveyard on a hill, a scrapyard, a
sewage farm, a broader uncoiling of blackest water, shipyard cranes skeletal
against the glare of life elsewhere, quaysides converted to ritzy housing
developments or reduced to puddled wastelands; then a blur of grass and dark
runway, stabs of light marking out the space.
The undercarriage bumped to earth.
The plane rattled and reversed its thrust. Ted Gillman, a frequent flyer, was
always convinced at such moments the plane was going to hurtle into the
terminal building, killing him and doing all manner of damage to everyone else.
As usual, it did not. Not even on
this landing.
*
The belt on the baggage carousel
was composed of metal plates, curved at their outer ends and layered atop one
another. Ted thought, as they clanked into motion, of some torture device from
the days of the Scottish witch-finders: something for slicing confessions from
peasant women or papists. Then suitcases, holdalls, rucksacks, a set of golf
clubs, a battered-looking box marked 'Fragile', came trundling along the belt
from behind the curtain of grey strips, cutting aside the fancy.
"I hope Magda herself comes," Pamela was
saying. "If it’s anyone else, I won’t have the faintest idea who to look
for."
"They’ll hold up one of those signs." said
Ted. "You’ll feel like Barbra Streisand. Or Lulu, at the very least. -
There..."
He picked a large black suitcase off the carousel.
"Is it over there we go?" asked Pamela.
"Ted? You remember?
"Last time I was here," replied Ted,
"they were still flying in on hot air balloons. - Damnit. Bet you the
other bag’s still at Gatwick."
Pamela resisted the obvious, loving, dig at a man who
had fought his way clear of a Glasgow tenement
to wind up one of London
"There she is!" Pamela cried.
Ted glanced in the direction in which Pamela had begun
waving. At the other side of the baggage hall, by the entrance to the main
concourse, a tall guarded smile of a woman dressed in elegant blacks was waving
back.
"Have you got the other....?" began Pamela.
"Just about to fly back and get it now,
darling," Ted answered.
"What?"
"There it is..." muttered Ted.
"You don’t mind if I -..."
"Not at all," he assured Pamela. "You’re
the big news here."
"Okay, come right over. Magda’s more fond of you
than you think."
"Shame on me for ever doubting the fact.”
Pamela hurried away. Ted dragged their large holdall
off the belt. He started after Pamela, lumbering case and holdall at either
side of him.
Ahead, Pamela and Magda had locked in an embrace. Ted
admired in his wife that ease of hugging and cheek-kissing. Her parents had
been Ladbroke Grove hippies and he supposed that an ideal grounding for
membership of the London
"HEYYYYYY!!!!" called someone behind him and
the case and holdall seemed abruptly filled with rocks heavy as those they
sowed in the belly of the big bad wolf. A presence sped across the space at his
back; he awaited an arresting hand on his shoulder.
The presence hurried by. Some
young guy with his frizzy blonde hair in a pony tail was sprinting from the
carousel to the arms of a girlfriend in a short tie-dyed dress, purple fishnets
and Doc Martens. She shrieked as he caught her in his arms, whirling her off
the ground, her long straight hair swinging, Scottish in its red hue as a
breeze across a loch.
Got away with it yet again, you lucky bastard, Ted
mused, heaving the baggage on to where Pamela was beckoning him.
2./ Magda's car sped up the ramp ascending
from the airport to the motorway. Ted, in the back seat, glanced out at dark,
nondescript buildings that meant nothing to his memory.
"Anyway, Ted, you are wicked," said Magda, the mix of
Eastern Europe and Glaswegian in her accent an
appropriate soundtrack for his disorientation.
"Am I?" frowned Ted.
"Yes! A son of Glasgow and you’ve never once
brought Pamela up to see what a true cultural hotbed looks like."
"Mm," he said, "never got round to it
somehow."
"You’ve been away - what? - twenty years?"
"Oh, I’ve driven up a few times since then. Just
briefly. Discreetly."
"You don't miss the old place?"
"Oh, I...." Tower blocks lined the top of a
hill in the distance. Another set of blocks, closer to the road, had strips of
green neon descending their faces, making them look like Martian war machines.
A sign on the side of the Bell
"You'll have a chance to renew the
acquaintance."
"Not really."
"No?" asked Magda.
"I’m not really here at all," said Ted.
Magda turned uncertainly towards Pamela, in the passenger
seat. Pamela flinched a shadowy smile, no more confident of smoothing her
husband's rougher social edges than at any other point in the fifteen years of
their marriage.
"Just providing my celebrated wife with a little
arm candy," Ted went on. "You know, like some blonde at the
Oscars."
"This a serious conference, Ted," said Magda.
"On very serious issues. And Pamela is going to make a very serious
impression."
"Oh shucks," grinned Pamela, "I’ll maybe
throw in a joke or two."
Magda looked round at her, unamused. Pamela's smile
receded. What for Pamela was a matter of intellectual concepts of liberty and
justice - and with which one could be a little capricious occasionally, as with
any set of ideas - was to Magda a weight of scarrings scarcely healed or
healable.
"Well, I’m sure you're going to make a
difference," said Magda. "There on the back seat, Ted.... I have
today’s Herald. Check page nine."
Ted lifted the folded broadsheet, opened it out,
leafing through the pages.
"They wrote a good article," Magda said.
"And put the spotlight on tomorrow's big speaker."
"Oh God," said Pamela, "I hope it’s not
that usual photograph."
Ted reached page nine, scanning to a headline halfway
down: " ‘CONFRONTING YESTERDAY’S CRIMES’ HEADS AGENDA AT HUMAN RIGHTS
CONFERENCE". At the bottom corner of the article, a small official-looking
photograph of Pamela boxed in her dark-haired, thoughtful beauty, a politic mix
of seriousness and approachability fixed on those features Ted had so often
seen reckless with laughter. It was the usual photograph.
His thumb-tip settled on the
caption below, pinning down the words in the flickering light from the
motorway's central reservation: “A VOICE FOR THE DEAD: International human
rights lawyer and author PAMELA FRANKLAND-GILLMAN will deliver speech.”
A voice for the dead... - Christ,
he thought, the gothic sanctimony of newspapermen. He looked out the window
again, all his dead Glasgow
*
They left the motorway at the Kinning Park
Red sandstone stretched every which
way, the tenements sandblasted into looking younger than in his days among
them, when the city still wore the sooty rags of its slow industrial death.
Lights glowed behind the windows, figures flitting in and out of sight, life
seeming to have got along quite normally without him all these years.
Magda steered into a brighter,
busier street. Pollokshaws Road, of course - then up Alison Street, with its
grocers shops, laundrette and one fenced in corner of the playground of his old
primary school. From there, they turned into the once-great thoroughfare of Victoria Road
A very 'southside' thoroughfare,
this: bakers shops specialising in cheap cakes and sausage rolls, TV rental shops
whose windows were plastered with declarations of closings-down, betting shops
with windows full of agonised greyhounds, Indian restaurants, a florists or
two, a barbers and a couple of blue-rinsy hairdressers, several chemists, far
more charity shops than used to be there, a latter-day spate of cheque cashers,
mobile phone unlockers and legal aid law practices, plentiful glimpses of chip
and kebab shops in the side streets; even now, no hint of an organic
delicatessen or vegetarian cafe, no art gallery or bookshop beyond a display of
dog-eared paperbacks in the window of Oxfam: small shops, some the same as had
stood there twenty-two years ago, others that had probably popped up in the
last couple of months and would vanish as quickly.
The south-side was the city's
secretive aspect, a mystery to all other Glaswegians on the rare occasions when
it crossed their minds at all. It made no open show of its desperations, as the
east end had been known to do; it did not preen itself on its sophistication and
style as the west end unfailingly did. No, the soo’-side withdrew into its own
company and invited no guests. It buried any dreams, any bright colours in
those dreams, deep behind its stonework, hoping they would discreetly starve to
death, solving any upset they presented. It was very much Ted's corner of the
city.
Ahead, at the end of the street,
past the pink neon sign that had been reminding the street "CHRIST DIED
FOR OUR SINS" since Ted's childhood, Queen's Park loomed. By night its
slopes and trees stood transformed, beyond the towering gates, to an oily void
bordered high and low by tree-tops of a November starkness, a void that might
as easily - Ted used to be fond of thinking - have been taken for one of the
trackless densities of Transylvania .
The
car eased to a stop outside the grand terrace of Queen's Drive. This directly
faced the fence of the park, a block of tenements sculpted for the Victorian haute bourgeoisie rather than for the
sooty-faced gaggle of the surrounding streets. In Ted's days thereabouts, the
buildings had grown sooty-faced themselves, derelict and half-collapsed,
propped with wooden buttresses and maggoted with drunks and junkies. Now they
spread above him with the magnificence of an ostentatious wedding cake,
regentrified like so many of the city's previous fallings by the wayside. They
had looked like haunted houses not so long ago; now, as Ted climbed out of the
car and moved to lift the luggage from the boot, he was the one feeling like a
ghost.
"There,
you see?" said Magda. "You have the great outdoors right across the
road."
"Lovely
in the daylight, I’m sure," mused Pamela.
"We
thought it would mean something to you, Ted," smiled Magda, "being
back in your own neck of the woods."
"You
haven't gone to all this trouble just for me, I hope."
"Well,
Pamela did mention your connections with the area. And we did have this place
available."
Ted
looked towards Pamela. She smiled. He did not. Why had they gone to all this
bother when it was her visit far more than his? He felt cornered by their
goodwill.
"This
isn't quite what I’m used to hereabouts," he muttered.
Slamming
the car boot and turning from it to pick up the luggage, he stopped, having
glimpsed - or having thought he did - some flicker of movement behind the park
railings, some tiny darkness against the vaster one.
"Ted-?"
asked Pamela, she and Magda halfway up the steps to the building's front door.
He grabbed the luggage and hastened after them.
*
Behind
the fence, a hand in fingerless gloves reached into a pocket, pulled out the
photograph of Pamela torn from the Herald. An eye glinted from the depths of a
dark cotton hood, comparing the image to the figure passing through the doorway
on the street's far side.
So
this was what he had found for himself out in the big wide world. What
treasures a man could lie his way to if he could nail the right mask tight
enough about his face. What was a holier-than-thou cow like Lady Pamela going
to howl when hubby got his mask ripped off and twenty years of pus and lies
spurted out? It was funny, sort of, to think of, but only the damp November
breeze in the branches bothered to laugh.
Want to know what happens next? Get the book!
Want to know what happens next? Get the book!
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