Gordon Brown - 59 Minutes

Three more appeared at the other end of the street and I was caught in a classic pincer. I looked around for a way to escape but there was nowhere to go.

Twenty five years ago I would have known these boys and they would have known me. Now I was no more than a jakey ripe for a beating. I tried to talk to them but the hoody with the beat box simply racked up the volume. This wasn’t a time for a chat — it was a time to get down and dirty on the tramp.

I didn’t take the beating lying down. I can still handle myself when the need is on but sheer numbers were against me. Even so I surprised the first three by decking them and decking them hard. It caused the others to pause and reassess their strategy but numbers and booze-filled bloodstreams gave them brave pills, and they laid into me.

I curled into a ball and tried to focus on when it would be over.

The three I had laid out came to, joined in and, if it hadn’t been for the distant wail of a police siren, I suspect I might have been joining my mates in the Necropolis as a more permanent member of the area.

I lay for ten minutes after the assault squad ran off and assessed the damage. I’d had enough kickings in my time to realise that a few bones had been broken. My ribs hurt and my left hand was limp — one of the bastards had dropped from a full six feet and crushed my wrist between his knee and the ground. I staggered to my feet and headed for the Royal Infirmary. It was less than a mile away but it still took me an hour to get there. Mostly because I needed to stop to hack up blood.

They kept me in overnight, strapped my ribs and put a plaster on my wrist. I had a restless night but it was free of the smell of ‘the Stink’ and breakfast in the morning was hot and free.

The hospital wanted me to report the attack to the police but I declined. I might have been gone for a couple of decades but there will still be some police who remember me from days gone by and I want to stay out of their way until I figure the Lame Duck/Stevie thing out.

I was discharged with a supply of painkillers and an appointment to come back in a week.

The strange thing about the whole affair was not the beating. I’m more intrigued by the fact they knew my name.

Monday January 7 th 2008

Stevie is in sight. I worked my way through the black hole that is local authority bureaucracy and discovered that the licensee for The Lame Duck was one Stephen Mailer. He may or may not be the owner but there was an address for him and I scraped enough to jump a bus and pay a visit.

He lives in Bishopbriggs on the north of the City. It is a real two day camel ride by bus and when I got there he wasn’t in. His home is a terraced house that doesn’t suggest he is a pub entrepreneur of note. I hung around for an hour or so but to no avail.

I decided to try again in the early evening in case he was working — so I duly stretched a cup of coffee to breaking point in the nearby ASDA and went for a walk — in the main to take my mind off the fact that I had no money for food.

Around seven I headed back to Stevie’s house but it still showed no signs of life. I thought about leaving a note but decided against it. The beating has sparked up my warning radar.

I headed back to the hostel and got the young internet geek to find me Stevie’s phone number on the web. This was done for free — no cigarettes — just the threat of bodily violence.

Gordon Brown

59 Minutes

Thursday January 10 ^th 2008

So Stevie exists, is alive and well and running a pub in the nether regions of Easterhouse. I phoned him two days ago and he agreed to meet in town. I suggested the Mitchell Library — to avoid the embarrassment of meeting in a pub or cafe and not having the cash to buy a drink.

I’m not big on libraries. My reading tends to be The Sun and the Daily Record and if I’m in the mood for intelligent debate I dip into the Herald. I’ve probably read six books in my entire life and most of them were forced down my throat at school. As such the ‘Mitchell’ was a bit of a wonder to me.

I waited for Stevie in the old section — a grand Victorian affair that was built when libraries were almost places of worship. High vaulted ceilings, grandiose frontage and an entrance to grace a palace.

Stevie arrived bang on time. A tall slim man with hair that looked like it had gone by the time he was thirty. He wore a pair of battered jeans and a sweat top with the words Strathclyde University emblazoned across the front. It looked old. A university degree and he was a career puller of pints. That doesn’t make him a bad person but university was a whole world away from my upbringing and I always envisaged it churning out the future leaders of the free world — people who rarely say — ‘Will that be all?’ after each sentence.

We found a table and slumped into two hard back chairs. His eyes were red. Drugs or lack of sleep — take your pick?

I opened up by handing him Martin’s letter. He looked at it suspiciously. As would I given its state after all these years. He read it with care and then handed it back to me.

‘I haven’t seen Martin since Christ left Govan.’

I nodded, waiting for him to open up a little but he stayed quiet.

I asked if he knew why I’d been left a pint. It sounded dumb.

‘It’s got fuck all to do with a pint. I wanted nothing to do with it back then. But they threatened to do some damage to my mum. Can you believe that — MY MUM. So I agreed. Take this and I’m off.’

‘Who are they?’

He blanked the question and reached into his pocket, pulled out a key, dropped it on the table and was up and off before I could speak. I grabbed the key and chased him out of the building but he broke into a run, sprinted to the roadside, leapt into an old VW Beetle, locked the doors and blanked me as he pulled away.

I watched the car merge into the traffic and when I lost sight of it I opened my hand to look at the key. It was a small brass Yale type with a few serial numbers on one side. Other than that it had nothing to indicate what it was a key for.

One mystery after another but on this occasion I know someone else that might be able to help.

Friday January 11 th 2008

Back to the old haunts is the order of the day. I hardly recognised the Gorbals. New flats, leisure centre and a distinct lack of many of the pubs I had frequented. I doubted that the person I wanted would still be in the same house. I doubted they would still be alive. But they were both.

The man who answered the door was bald (where he had once had a shock of ginger hair), wrinkled (where he had once had a face so smooth he had been nicknamed ‘baby’) and a stoop (where once he had stood tall and proud — five years in Her Majesties Armed Forces would do that to a man). Recognition flickered in his eyes and he stepped back to let me in. There was no fear — once there would have been — but my story was well kent and I was no longer a threat.

The flat was minimalist and dominated by a wretched stained coffee table that had the Mount Etna of fag ash and doots as its centre-piece. The heating was all the way up to eleven and the place smelled like nothing I had ever encountered.

There was no offer of a seat. My host collapsed in the only chair in the room. It sat square in front of the TV, next to the fag mountain and, before his backside hit the fake leather, he lit up.

‘How you doing Ron?’ I asked.

‘Better than you from what I hear.’

That hurt. The house was a shit-hole and yet I was the one on my uppers. Go figure.

‘I need a favour?’

‘It will cost.’

I knew it would. I had cleaned out the geek kid for everything he had and bought forty fags. I dropped them next to the mountain.