Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘You working for the New Brunswick tourist office too?’ I asked, he frowned. ‘I’ve been busy, Bob. Anyone been asking for me?’

‘Naw… just Little Bollocks over there.’ He nodded in the direction of a youth at the end of the bar. I beckoned for him to come over.

‘I take it he’s been nursing that half all night?’ I asked Bob, who gave a knowing look and nodded. ‘Give him a fresh pint.’

‘How’s it going, Mr Lennox?’ Davey Wallace beamed at me as he came round to my end of the bar and Big Bob handed him his beer. Davey was about five feet-seven, as fresh-faced as the Glasgow atmosphere would allow, and dressed in a too-big second-hand suit that had been expensive once. A war and a generation ago.

‘Hi, Davey,’ I said.

‘Business good?’ he bubbled with enthusiasm. ‘Any new cases?’

‘Same old stuff, Davey,’ I answered with a smile. Davey Wallace was a dreamer. A good kid, but a dreamer. For many within its boundaries, Glasgow was as much a prison as a home. The bars that confined them were the class system and, in almost every case, the lack of any viable alternative to a life of manual labour. The shipyards and the steelworks devoured the city’s young: I’d often wondered if Rotten Row, Glasgow’s appropriately named maternity hospital, simply put ‘apprentice’ instead of ‘boy’ on birth certificates.

Davey was an apprentice — an apprentice welder — working the morning shift in the shipyard. Started at fifteen and would most likely work there until he was sixty-five, by which time he would have given up his passion for Rock’n’Roll, probably because he’d be deaf from the constant riveting before he hit forty. But now, Davey Wallace, seventeen years old, parentless at seven, in an orphanage until fifteen, unmarried and with no kids yet to bind him further to an ineluctable industrial fate, escaped into the cinema every afternoon and Saturday night, where he would meet up with a different gang: Bogart, Cagney, Mitchum, Robinson, Mature.

When Davey had found out that I was a real-life enquiry agent, he had approached me in the bar like a Greek shepherd approaching Zeus. Since then, he had taken every opportunity to remind me that if I was ever looking for help…

‘Thanks for the pint, Mr Lennox.’

‘You’re welcome, Davey. Shouldn’t you be in bed? What about your early shift?’

‘I sleep in the afternoons, mostly.’ Then, as if correcting himself: ‘But I’m always available… you know, if you needed any help on one of your cases, Mr Lennox. I’m always here.’

I exchanged a look with Big Bob, who grinned.

‘Listen, Davey,’ I said. ‘It’s not like you think it is. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing glamorous about what I do for a living.’

His expression dulled. ‘You should try working down at the shipyards. Anything’s glamorous compared to that.’

‘Really,’ I grinned. ‘I would have thought it was riveting…’

Davey either didn’t get or didn’t appreciate the gag and stared at his pint glumly. It was, I had noticed, a Scottish tradition. I sighed.

‘Listen, Davey, I can’t offer you a job because I don’t have a job to offer. I struggle to pay my own way at times. But here’s the deal… if anything comes up where I need an extra pair of eyes, or need any kind of help, I’ll give you a shout. Okay?’

He looked up from his beer and beamed at me. ‘Anything, Mr Lennox. You can rely on me.’

‘Okay, Davey. Why don’t you finish your beer and get off home. Like I say, I’ll get in touch if I need anything.’

I let him hang on my elbow till he finished his drink. After he was gone, Big Bob came back and poured me another Canadian Club.

‘You realize I only keep this pish in here for you,’ he said. ‘Why can’t you drink Scotch like everybody else?’

I cast my gaze around the bar, trying to penetrate the bluegrey cigarette haze. A knot of older men in flat caps sat huddled around a table in the corner playing dominoes and smoking scrappy roll-up cigarettes. Swirled in cloud-like tobacco smoke, they paused from their game only to sip their whisky and laid their dominoes on the beer-ringed table top with the joyfulness of grim Titans toppling graveyard headstones. Glasgow at its most Goyaesque.

‘I don’t know, Bob,’ I said wistfully. ‘Maybe it’s a delight I’m saving myself for…’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake…’ Bob said, suddenly distracted and looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that four young men had come in through the side door of the public bar.

‘Tommy… Jimmy…’ Bob called to the two other barmen and the three of them stepped out from behind the bar with a squared-up purposefulness and crossed to the young men. I noticed that the newcomers were dressed in rough work clothes; one wore a heavy leather armless tabard over his jacket and all four were wearing rubber boots. I noticed that their hair was longer than the usual and the guy with the tabard had thick, black, curling locks. They had the sunburned look of men who spent more time outdoors than in.

‘Fucking pikeys…’ Bob muttered under his breath as he passed me. ‘Okay you lot… fuck off out of it. I’ve told your mob before you’re not welcome here.’

‘All we want is a drink,’ said Curly, with a dull expression and a hint of Irish in his accent. It was clear he was accustomed to welcomes like the one Big Bob was offering. ‘Just a drink. Quiet like. No trouble.’

‘You’ll get no drink here. You lot don’t know how to have a quiet drink. I’ve had the place wrecked before by your kind. Now fuck off.’

One of the others stared hard at Bob. He had the ready stance of someone thinking about kicking off. Curly put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him I couldn’t understand. The tension went from his frame and the three walked out silently, but not hurriedly.

‘Fucking pikeys…’ Bob repeated after they were gone.

‘Gypsies?’ I asked.

‘Irish tinkers. They’re over here for the Vinegarhill Fair in the Gallowgate. They’ve pitched up camp by the old vinegar works.’

‘They seemed reasonable enough to me,’ I said.

Big Bob crossed his Popeye forearms across his massive chest. ‘Aye, they seem that way now, but a few drinks in them and they go fucking mental. By the end of the night I’d be picking the furniture up for firewood if I start letting knackers drink in here. Drink and fight, that’s all these bastards know.’

‘Yeah… drink and fight,’ I repeated, trying to work out how this fact distinguished them from the usual Glaswegian customer. ‘It’s funny, I was at a pikey fight the other night.’

‘Aye? I bet there was blood and snotters all over the place. Fucking mental.’ Bob shook his head in a way that reminded me of the awe Sneddon had displayed when talking about his tinker fighters.

I got back to my digs about ten. As I passed her door, I heard Fiona White switch the television off. I had bought a set six months before, when my cash flow had been going through one of its sporadically positive periods. I had come up with the pretence that the television would be better in their lounge. More room. Some crap like that. The truth was that I had no great interest in television: I still couldn’t see it replacing radio. One of my greatest disappointments had been to see the actor Valentine Dyall for the first time on television. The face behind the voice behind the ‘Man in Black’ on radio’s Appointment with Fear turned out to look like a dyspeptic bank manager.

I had told Mrs White that I could watch it at any time, if that was okay with her, but she was to feel free for her and the kids to watch it whenever they felt like it. I knew they did, but she had a habit of switching it off when I was in my flat. She had told me, when I had assured her that it was really okay with me for them to watch as much TV as they wanted, that she was worried that she would ‘wear the tube out’. The truth, I knew, was that she didn’t want to feel she owed me anything. She didn’t want to owe anyone anything. It was a drawbridge that had been drawn up a long time before I had first encountered her. Fiona White was an attractive woman, still young, but I really couldn’t recall ever having seen her smile.