Читать книгу A Glasgow Trilogy - George Friel - Страница 13

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr Daunders called in Noddy’s mother right away. She was a cleaner in the school, so he had no trouble getting in touch with her. He waited on after four o’clock till she came in for her evening’s chores. But it didn’t get him anywhere. She stood in his little room, a timid foot and no more inside the door, with her working-overall on and scarf round her head in royal fashion, a big-bosomed, enormous-hipped, thick-ankled woman. That this hulk of womanhood should be the old block of a skelf like Noddy made Mr Daunders think of the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, and as he remembered the phrase he sighed at the destiny that had condemned him to be a headmaster in a small primary school in one of Glasgow’s wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandalism, a pool of iniquity. He had a painful stab of longing to have done with backward and delinquent children and be a retired headmaster living his own life, following his own interests. He had an elegant eighteenth century edition of Horace with the mad Christopher Smart’s prose translation facing the Latin. He always took it with him when he went on holiday, but somehow he never found time to open it. Now he couldn’t even remember where it was that Horace had spoken of the mountain in labour giving birth to a mouse. ‘I must read Horace again when I retire,’ he thought, even as he was talking severely to Mrs Mann.

Mrs Mann had her own distracting thoughts. According to the book of words only widows were supposed to be employed as cleaners in Corporation schools, and she wasn’t technically a widow though she passed for one in so far as she didn’t have the support of a husband. A husband in jail for robbery with violence wasn’t a resident head of the house. She felt entitled to her job, but she was afraid Mr Daunders was going to tell her she was sacked. When she understood he was talking about her son she felt quite happy and smiled encouragingly to the headmaster. Mr Daunders frowned at her. He knew quite well she was no widow, he knew where her husband was. He had hoped his knowledge might be used as a lever to extract information from her. But she had no information for him. Yet she was the only person who gained from the interview.

She challenged Noddy that night.

‘I was hearing you was found wi’ more money than you’re supposed to have,’ she said, slapping his face to begin the discussion on the proper terms. ‘Two ten-shilling notes, eh? Now where the hell did you get two ten- shilling notes?’

Noddy said he had found them in a midgie in Ossian Street. There was a bank at the close. The bank must have thrown them out by mistake. They were in an envelope.

‘Ha-ha, a likely story!’ said Mrs Mann her fingers splayed on her hips. She didn’t think of asking for the envelope as Mr Daunders would certainly have done. ‘And what did you never think of telling me you found them for if that was how you got them?’

‘Ah never goat a chance,’ Noddy mumbled, crouched in a corner of the kitchen near the sink, his right hand over his ear. Mrs Mann darted swiftly and smacked his left ear and Noddy changed guard.

‘Ye hid nae intentions o’ tellin’ me, ye little bugger!’ she screamed, and then smacked his right ear. Noddy put both hands up.

‘Ah hud,’ he said. ‘Ah’ve never saw you since Ah fun them. Ah only fun them this moarning.’

‘And whit wur ye gaun tae dae wi’ them?’ said Mrs Mann, pursuing her beloved seventh son as he edged round the kitchen past the dresser and the coal-bunker, along the valance of the recess-bed, up to the fireplace, and behind the ruptured armchair that flanked it.

‘Ah wis gaun tae gie ye hauf,’ said Noddy, willing to give up one of the bits of paper for the sake of peace.

‘Oh, ye wis, wis ye?’ said Mrs Mann sceptically. ‘Well, come on then! Let’s see ye hauf it!’

‘Ah canny, he’s goat them both,’ Noddy wept in vexation.

‘Oh, the bastard! So he hus!’ cried Mrs Mann, and shook her fists at the whitewashed ceiling above the pulley where her shift and a pair of bloomers were drying, her head thrown back and her bleary eyes staring wildly.

And just as Mr Daunders had waited for her at four o’clock she waited for him at nine o’clock the next morning after she had finished her morning chores. She was humble, garrulous, apologetic, over-explanatory and nervous, but quite firm. Noddy had taken the money from her purse. It was a terrible thing to have a son that would steal from his own mother who had always done the best she could for him, but he was only a boy and he wasn’t very bright, he just liked to play with bits of coloured paper, so if she could have her money back, she paused and leered in expectant servility.

Mr Daunders knew when he was beaten. He gave her the two ten-shilling notes, and since she was an honest woman and a good mother she didn’t keep them both. She gave one to Noddy.

‘There y’are, ma son,’ she said tenderly, and threw him across the kitchen in the excess of her affection. ‘There’s your share like you promised me. And the next time you find anything jist you let me know and don’t go causing a lot of bother keeping things tae yersel. Ye’ve goat tae let yer mammy know. Yer mammy’s yer best friend.’

Noddy took the note silently. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with it, but it was good to have it in his pocket again.

‘Ah ye’re a guid wee boy,’ his mother grinned, and she rumpled his long uncombed hair. Noddy jerked his head away and scowled. Any show of affection distressed him.

He was even more upset to find he was in the bad books of the Brotherhood. The news of his interrogation had spread with the speed of foot and mouth disease, and he was brought on his knees before Percy at the next Friday Night Service. Percy was frightened. First the stranger and now Noddy’s two ten-shilling notes. He saw them as two straws that suggested there was a wind rising somewhere, but he didn’t know where to look for it.

‘I gave you a pound note,’ he said severely to Noddy. ‘How did you come to be caught with a couple of ten-bob notes? Tell me that.’

‘I changed the note you gave me,’ Noddy declared, primed in advance by Savage. He tried to rub one of his knees as he was forced to remain on them by Specky and Skinny while the Regent Supreme examined him. It was a most uncomfortable position. He wasn’t used to it. Looking at the squalid urchin Percy had an idea. He must get them all to kneel during the Friday Night Service.

‘What did you go and get it changed for?’ he demanded with the soul-searching stare in his mournful eyes again.

‘Because,’ said Noddy. ‘Let me go, let me up! Ah never told nuthin. Ah swear it, Ah kept the oath. You ask old Daundy. He’ll tell you Ah never told him nuthin.’

‘What did you change it for if you’re saving up?’ Percy persisted. ‘You’re sure nobody else has been giving you grace?’

‘Course Ah’m sure,’ Noddy complained, rubbing the other knee ostentatiously. ‘Let me up! Ah’ve got a sore knee. Sure you’re the only one with a key. Who else could it be?’

‘If I find any of yous fellows coming in here behind my back,’ Percy addressed the congregation threateningly, ‘I’ll burn the whole lot, so I will. Have you no respect for nothing? I made you make a gentlemen’s agreement, I taught you about El and how powerful he is if you keep him secret, and now you go flashing ten-bob notes in the school. I don’t like it. If there’s the least danger of strangers getting a lead into the sanctuary of El we’d be much better to burn the chests and all that’s in them. I’m warning yous.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Savage, squatting at the right foot of the Regent. ‘You’re the only wan wi’ a key. Whit are ye worrying aboot?’

‘All right,’ Percy said grudgingly. ‘I’ll let it go but I’m telling yous I don’t like it, I don’t like it one little bit, so I don’t but.’

Savage smiled, and Percy passed sentence. Noddy was condemned to forfeit payment for four weeks for being caught in possession of the money they had all sworn never to be found with. Noddy wasn’t bothered. It was enough for him that he could get up off his knees. He relied on Savage for the month that followed. Savage had promised to give him double his ration if he didn’t let Percy find out where the ten-shilling notes had come from.

His mother wasn’t bothered either when the other cleaners talked about her son being up before the headmaster for stealing money.

‘He never stole it, he found it,’ she said, choosing to concede at last that she had heard them talking behind her back and under her nose. She shook out a duster as if she were a toreador at a bullfight, her torso swivelling on her enormous hips. ‘And I may say for your information if you’re interested that my Nicky is a good son to me. Anything he does steal he brings straight home to his maw. He’s always been a good boy, I don’t care what yous say about him.’

‘There’s nobody saying anything about him,’ said Mrs Phinn, gaunt and chilling.

‘Not bloody much,’ said Mrs Mann. ‘Dae yous think I don’t hear ye? Dae yous think I’m bloody-well deaf?’

‘I was only saying I wish my Percy could find a couple of ten-shilling notes and give me one of them,’ said Mrs Phinn from about three storeys above her.

‘Him,’ snorted Mrs Mann. ‘Your Percy couldna find his way frae here tae there withoot tripping ower his big feet. Him! He couldna gie ye a kind look, he’s that bloody sour. Ma wee fella’s aye cheery anyway, I’ll say that for him. He doesna go aboot wi’ a face that wid turn milk.’

‘He was never a midgie-raker anyway, my Percy,’ said Mrs Phinn proudly. ‘He was never a lobby dosser like some weans that never see their faither.’

The vernacular struck home and Mrs Mann could only grunt contemptuously. The janitor was coming along anyway to break it up. She couldn’t deny Noddy had been a lobby dosser more than once in his short life. A lobby was the word for the long stairhead landing found in older tenements, and a dosser was a person who slept there. So a lobby dosser was a waif, stray or vagrant who took shelter at night in the common stairway of a tenement and went to sleep in the lobby. Noddy had done it often, playing truant and staying away from home for nights on end. But he was always discovered by some man leaving at five or six in the morning to go on the early shift in Singer’s or Beardmore’s. Yet he never learnt. He would do it a week after he had promised never to do it again. There wasn’t all that much difference between sleeping on the stairhead in a strange close and sleeping under the old coats on top of the boards in the recess-bed in his mother’s kitchen.

‘Come on, my darlings,’ Mr Green bustled them jovially. ‘You’re not paid for standing there arguing the toss. It’s time you did some work. I bet you I’ve got the biggest blethers in Glasgow for cleaners. So she says to me so I says to her. Yap-yap, morning and night. Come on, get cracking.’

They shuffled off, but he came after them with a hand up, remembering.

‘Here, wait a minute! Who’s got my key for the cellar? I had it hanging up on its nail in my room, and it’s not there now. Do any of you know who took it?’

‘We’ve no occasion to go near the cellar,’ said Mrs Phinn, her pail with a shovel in it in one hand and her brush in the other. She was the self-appointed spokeswoman for the cleaners because she was the late janitor’s widow, but she was far from being the oldest cleaner, and her assumption of seniority didn’t increase her popularity with the other widows. ‘Nobody here touched your key.’

‘Well, somebody’s took it,’ Mr Green insisted. ‘A key doesn’t just go for a walk all by itself.’

‘Why should we touch your key?’ Mrs Phinn asked him straight, putting down her pail and brush and folding her arms across her flat bosom in a position of rebellion. ‘We never need to go down there.’

‘Maybe no,’ Mr Green granted. ‘But I’ve got to get down there, and soon. I’ve been trying to get down since I came here. I’ll need to get a weekend there and clean that place up. I opened the door once and shut it again quick. I’m keeping that place locked now. I don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry wandering in there. I’m fair ashamed of it. It would scunner you. It’s a real Paddy’s market, I’m no’ kidding.’

Mrs Phinn glared at him through her NHS spectacles.

‘Aye, it’s all very well for you,’ Mr Green said jovially to avert a quarrel, ‘but your man left that place in some bloody mess, so he did. Christ, it’s even got a piano in it! How the hell he ever got a piano down those stairs beats me. And what a stupid place to put a piano anyway!’

‘Where else was he to put it?’ Mrs Phinn asked indignantly. ‘That’s where he put everything there was no room for. That’s where he was told to put things when Mr Gainsborough was headmaster. That was years before your time, of course.’

‘Aye, and before Noah’s time too by the look of the place,’ Mr Green muttered, rather less jovial. ‘Did you ever take a look at it? I bet you you’d find St Mungo’s report card down there.’

‘St Mungo would never have been at this school,’ said Mrs Mann, only half-joking. ‘He’d have went to a Catholic school.’

‘If you think my husband’s to blame for the state of that cellar, I’m quite willing to work on Saturday and tidy it up,’ Mrs Phinn declared, standing straight and noble between her pail and her brush that leaned against the door of a classroom.

‘Oh, so you’re after some overtime, are you,’ Mr Green clapped hands, rubbed them, and smiled. ‘I couldn’t put you through for overtime. The Office would never wear it.’

‘Not for overtime, for my husband’s sake,’ Mrs Phinn answered, and drew surplus mucus up her nose in the way that always annoyed Percy. ‘If you think you can run him down. He was a janitor before you were born.’

‘I’m not running anybody down,’ Mr Green soothed her. ‘I’m only passing the remark that the cellar’s in a bloody mess. Many thanks for your kind offer of course. Nevertheless, notwithstanding, I’d better see to it myself. The trouble is the key’s lost.’

‘I know all about that piano,’ Mrs Phinn said aggrievedly. ‘My man told me all about it. He filled in a white requisition to have it uplifted and he was still waiting for them to come when he went and died.’

‘Oh, well, ye canna blame him for that,’ Mr Green said kindly.

‘Maybe wan o’ the boys has took it,’ Mrs Mann suggested. ‘Ye know whit boys is like.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Mr Green, nodding his head and tutting. ‘They found a kid here the other day with forty- seven keys in his pocket. They pick them up and steal them and borrow them and get another one cut and then they try them on the shop doors and up closes where they think there’s nobody in. Oh, ye canna be up to them!’

‘Well, I hope you find your key,’ said Mrs Phinn, stooping to her pail of sawdust. ‘But we can’t stand talking to you all night. Some of us has got work to do.’

Mr Green found the missing key back on its nail in his cubbyhole two days later. He never found out that Savage had pinched it and had a duplicate cut in Barrowland quick.

‘I’m fly, you see,’ Savage boasted to Specky and Noddy. ‘I didn’t steal that key. I just took a lend o’ it and put it back before wee Greeny had time to miss it. You see the idea is you’ve got to make sure you’re not suspicious.’

‘So you’ve a key to get in by Tulip Place and you’ve a key to get in through the school,’ Specky nodded in admiration.

‘You’re going to cause a lot of trouble,’ Skinny muttered sadly. ‘Percy’ll find out sooner or later.’

‘It was for Percy’s sake I done it,’ Savage grinned. ‘I think he dreams mair nor he sees. But maybe he’s right about somebody watchin the door round the corner. So I can get at the money—’

‘You’re not to say money!’ Skinny cried, anguished.

‘Well, I can find the road to El through the basement then,’ Savage amended unctuously. ‘Is that better?’

‘And how do you get past the janny’s house?’ Specky asked. He was offended that an ape like Savage had managed to do more than an intellectual like himself.

‘I put my sannies on,’ said Savage. ‘I know when wee Greeny and his wife are watching the telly, and I just creep across the playground. It’s as safe as the Bank.’

‘How much have you taken?’ Specky asked bluntly.

‘Enough,’ Savage laughed at him. ‘Do ye want to come in? Percy’s daft. Ye canna leave it all to him, can ye? I’ve got enough put away for life.’

‘Well, don’t you ever boast to Frank Garson or he’ll shop you to Percy right away,’ warned Specky. ‘I think he’s suspicious already.’

Mr Green wasn’t suspicious.

‘Just one of those things,’ he said to his wife when the key turned up. He never made mysteries out of the inexplicable, he never brooded over how, why and wherefore. He simply put aside every anomaly in daily life as ‘just one of those things’, and went on living his busy life. So far as he thought about the return of the missing key at all he supposed one of the cleaners had taken it in mistake for another, forgotten about it, and put it back in its place rather than own up after he had asked questions about it.

He went down to the cellar alone on the Sunday afternoon, not meaning to do any work, just to estimate how much work would be needed to put the place in order and get rid of the lumber – once he was sure what was lumber and what wasn’t. As on his previous visits, a glance was enough to depress him. He went sadly up the narrow steps, shaking his head and far from saying a prayer for the repose of the soul of the late Mr Phinn.

‘What a janitor!’ he muttered as he locked the door. He felt he had an enormous cupboard there, with countless skeletons. ‘It must have been worrying about that place killed him.’

He was quite unwilling to tackle the job of tidying the cellar himself in spite of what he had said to Mrs Phinn. He took her at her word and got her to come in the next Saturday afternoon and work for nothing. To help her, he drafted in another cleaner, Mrs Quick, promising her a few bob out of his own pocket. Mrs Mann heard of the job and offered her services too for a mere tip. Mr Green didn’t mind. He knew Mrs Mann was just being nosey and hoping to come by pickings, but he couldn’t see what pickings there could be in a cellar full of school rubbish. He stood in at the start of what he called jocularly Operation Underground, gave the three cleaners a general idea of what he wanted done, and when they were started he stealthily slipped upstairs and went out for a pint.

The cleaners were good workers. By shifting the position of the various items, putting like with like, marshalling everything along the walls and sweeping and mopping a central area they created an illusion of tidiness. The cellar certainly looked different when they were finished, and to that extent they had made an improvement in it. Mrs Mann found the three tea-chests hidden behind a rank of broken desks along the darkest wall where the roof of the cellar descended to meet the rising floor halfway under the playground, and rummaged in the first of them. Maybe there was something would never be missed.

‘Nosey!’ cried Mrs Phinn, scowling from the centre of the cellar, and drawing the back of her rough hand across her sweating brow. She had a sudden jab of pain when she saw Mrs Mann kneeling over the chest. It reminded her of the way she had found her husband, sprawled just like that, stone cold dead over the very same chest.

‘How are we to know what’s rubbish and what’s not if we don’t look?’ Mrs Mann asked hoity-toitily over her shoulder. ‘That’s what wee Greeny’s paying us for. He wants to know what he can throw out and what he can’t. You’ve got to be nosey to do the job right.’

She plunged into the crate again and surfaced with the fairy wand. She flourished it towards Mrs Phinn and in the voice of a pantomime fairy she chanted. ‘And now I banish the wicked witch! Begone, bugger off, you ugly old bitch!’

‘Ach, that’s the school concert stuff,’ Mrs Quick cried with a wave of her broom.

Mrs Phinn’s scowl narrowed to a glare. It was the sorrow of her life that she had been the belle of the district between seventeen and nineteen, lost her good looks and her figure, and finished up, she well knew, an ugly old bitch. The worries of marriage, the strain of making ends meet and coping with a husband who kept bad company and drank too much, had ploughed her youth’s fair field with furrows of bitterness.

‘It’s an awful pity they stopped doing a concert every year,’ said Mrs Quick. ‘I used to enjoy them. They used to do some rare pantomimes and a kind of variety show. And they were good for the weans and a’. It learned them good to speak right.’

Mrs Mann put the wand across one of the broken desks and dived into another tea-chest, her broad bottom level with the edge of the chest as she delved deeper, her head and torso inside. She came up again and turned round with a top hat in her hand.

‘Oh, I remember that turn!’ Mrs Quick squealed in delight. ‘There was wan o’ the girls came on dressed like a man and she wore that tile hat. Oh, she was a rare wee dancer!’

Mrs Mann crowned herself with the top hat, picked up the fairy wand again as a walking stick and swayed to the swept centre of the stone floor singing in a broad Glasgow voice.

I’m Burrlington Berrtie,

I rrise at ten therrty,

An’ go furr a strroll in the Parrk!

She did a little jig with an ease and lightness surprising in a woman of her colossal bulk, but she was used to it. She performed those steps every year when she marched behind the flute band in the Orange Walk on the Twelfth of July.

‘You’re going back some!’ Mrs Phinn commented coldly.

‘I used to hear ma maw sing that song,’ Mrs Mann explained amiably. ‘She’d be about your age.’

‘Ach, yer granny’s mutch!’ Mrs Phinn retorted contemptuously. ‘You stand there and do a song and dance act but it’s me that’s doing all the work and getting nothing for it and you’re doing nothing and getting paid for it. It’s no’ fair.’

Encouraged by Mrs Mann’s entertainment Mrs Quick delved into the third of the chests and dragged out a brocade jacket.

‘That’s what the Baron wore the year they did Cinderella,’ she screeched, and tried it on.

‘Baron Figtree!’ Mrs Mann howled, clapped her hands, took a front-stage pose and declaimed a couplet from an old Glasgow pantomime.

Tomorrow’s my grandmother’s wedding day.

Ten thousand pounds will I give away.

‘Hooray, hooray, hooray!’ Mrs Quick took the cue, with a triple change of voice to suggest the discordant applause of the lads and lasses of the village. Mrs Mann bowed and went on.

On second thought I think it best

To stow it away in the old oak chest.

‘Boo, boo, boo!’ Mrs Quick responded as before.

‘When yous two has stopped acting the goat,’ Mrs Phinn cut in with clearly enunciated superiority.

Her two helpers leaned over the tea-chests, laughing as only fat women can. That Mrs Phinn had no joy in their turn increased theirs. Mrs Quick wiped her eyes with her duster.

‘Well, come on, Jessie,’ she wheezed. ‘We can tell him this is a’ the old concert costumes and he can burn it or date whit he likes wi’ it.’

‘Shove them up against the wa’, Maggie,’ said Mrs Mann. ‘The three o’ them. Then we can tell him they’re a’ the gither.’

Mrs Mann kept the top hat. If she couldn’t pawn it Noddy might be able to use it when he dressed up for Hallowe’en. It would maybe earn him a few extra coppers round the doors or on the street. She was always thinking about money.

‘We could tell some o’ the weans there’s a lot of good stuff down here for when it’s Hallowe’en.’

‘Aye, they could get some rare fancy clobber here,’ Mrs Quick agreed, thrusting the top layers of the chests down hard to make them look tidy.

‘I don’t suppose it matters there’s no false-faces,’ Mrs Phinn muttered. ‘Your Nicky wouldny need one.’

‘Ho, ho,’ Mrs Mann replied, pushing the third of the chests alongside its mates. ‘Very clever, I must say.’