Espedair Street

THREE

They don't seem to have telegrams any more; they have something called telemessages instead; fake telegrams that come with the ordinary mail. One dropped onto the pile of mail behind the small back door of St Jute's vestry six days ago, on a Wednesday. The pile of mail is three years deep; probably enough to fill a couple of postal sacks. It's junk mail mostly, so I ignore it, just go down there every now and again and kick it around a bit, looking for anything remotely interesting. Important mail gets sent to my lawyers; the people who matter to me know that trying to get in touch directly is usually futile.

Rick Tumber ought to know that, but he must have forgotten. The telemessage skidded across the tiled floor when I kicked the pile of mail and I picked it up, wondering whether I should open it or not. This was unexpected, and unexpected things tend to turn out badly, in my experience. What the hell; I opened it.

ARRIVING YOUR PLACE LUNCHTIME SUNDAY 21st.

IMPORTANT. BE IN. PLEASE. THIS IS GOOD NEWS.

KINDEST REGARDS. RICK T.

Good news. I was instantly wary. Rick Tumber was head of ARC, our record company. When he talked of good news he meant there was lots of money to be made somewhere, somehow. I started making plans to be out of town there and then, though I suspected something would happen to stop me; I wouldn't get round to it.

I put the message back in its envelope and replaced it on the pile, as though pretending I hadn't read it, it hadn't come, nothing was going to change, then I went back up the spiral of stone steps to the choir. I hadn't had any breakfast yet, and what passed for my kitchen and dining room lay in the south transept.

St Jute's, also known as Wykes' Folly, looks exactly like a church, but it isn't. It has what looks just like a graveyard, but it has no graves.

Ambrose Wykes, 1819-1898, was the only son of a successful Dundee jute merchant; he built up the business, turned a small fortune into a large one, and moved to Glasgow to oversee the establishment of another commercial empire in the early 1850s, shipping tobacco from America. He had always been mildly eccentric, dressing his servants as ship's crew — the head butler was the captain, the maids were cabin boys — and equipping his villa in Bearsden with a small lighthouse which attracted the wrath of his neighbours and considerable numbers of migratory birds, but by Victorian standards his oddities were not extreme, and he was a devout Catholic, a responsible husband and a loving father.

At least, he was these things until May l864, when his wife Mary and their only child were killed in a train crash. The boy was only two weeks old, and unbaptised. Ambrose's grief was deepened by the knowledge that the infant's soul was forever denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven; he began to drink too much, and couldn't sleep; his doctor prescribed laudanum.

Ambrose's mourning went beyond the bounds of good taste; he had the whole of the Bearsden house, and his villa at Hunter's Quay on the Holy Loch, draped in black canvas. The furniture was reupholstered in black, the carpets replaced with black felt, black canvas was placed over all the pictures and portraits, and the servants were suddenly required to dress as undertakers. Most of them left.

Ambrose paid frequent visits to his priest, accompanied by an embarrassed but well paid lawyer, apparently trying to find some loophole in the divine legal code which would let his dead son's soul gain everlasting peace. The priest, his bishop, and several Jesuits all tried to reason with him, but Ambrose refused their comfort. He stopped going to church, he refused to confess.

His business affairs began to deteriorate as he spent increasing amounts of time writing letters to priests, bishops, cardinals, and even the Vatican itself, urging that some sort of special dispensation be found which would allow the soul of his son to rest in peace; he published pamphlets advocating the reinterpretation of certain Biblical verses. Then he began to picket his local chapel; sitting outside the church in an undertaker's carriage he'd purchased, while some of his warehouse workers paraded round with placards urging reform.

These workers, themselves Catholics, were persuaded by their own priests that taking part in such unseemly demonstrations, even at triple time, was bad for their souls, and would do no good for the dead child. So Ambrose hired drunks from the Glasgow slums instead; they swore at the churchgoers, pissed against the church and fought with the police.

Ambrose had ignored the increasingly stern warnings and frosty advice of his few friends, and soon found himself without any at all. By this time his neglected business empire was on the verge of collapse, so he sold out. Injunctions eventually prevented him from picketing effectively, and he withdrew, broken and bitter but still obsessed, a rich but almost powerless man.

His frustration turned to hatred. The pamphlets began to vilify the church on every possible ground, until they too became unsupportably scandalous, and the printers refused to print them. Ambrose bought his own printing company and kept going for a while, until that too was buried under a blizzard of injunctions and prosecutions. He was excommunicated in 1869.

Ambrose remained determined to get back at the church somehow. His solution, after much thought and more brandy, was to make use of one of the few pieces of property he still owned; an empty site on St Vincent Street, between Elmbank Street and Holland Street. He sold almost everything else he owned, paid a great deal of money to an architect who has remained anonymous to this day, and — the rumour goes — an even larger sum to at least one member of the City Council to make sure there were no problems over building permission.

He built his own church. A Gothic design one architectural guidebook calls 'a bastardised blend of truncated Pearsonesque Normandy Gothic and facetious, ill-proportioned Lombardy'. The church was correct in almost every detail: nave, transepts, choir, vestry, crypt, pews, altar; even bells in the tower (Ambrose had them cast cracked so they sounded awful, but another injunction prevented them being rung).

The spare ground at the rear of the plot he turned into a mock graveyard, hiring Protestant stonemasons to turn out gravestones for each of the many enemies he'd made during the previous decade. Each stone gave the correct date of birth, but the following date recorded the death of Ambrose's friendship with whoever the stone purported to commemorate; the time when Ambrose had decided this person wasn't fit to live. His priest, a bishop, two cardinals and a variety of Jesuits seemingly lay beside a collection of lawyers, businessmen, judges, newspaper journalists, city councillors and building contractors, all apparently wiped out in some terrible, class-conscious plague which swept the city from 1865 almost to the end of the century.

The place was known as Wykes' Folly, or — in memory of Ambrose's original business — St Jute's. It became famous, a Glasgow landmark. Guidebooks mentioned it, people wrote to newspapers demanding it be torn down, a small group of free thinkers formed a Friends of St Jute's Society, and various bits of stonework were chipped off — and various insulting words scrawled onto — those parts of the church accessible from the pavement.

Ambrose retaliated by having a madonna and child statue made which showed his own Mary as the Blessed Virgin, and his unchristened son as the baby Jesus.

Ambrose was later to claim — in a pamphlet published privately, long after his death — that his son had indeed been the result of a virgin birth; in attempting to consummate his marriage on his wedding night, Ambrose had suffered a premature ejaculation while just inches from his goal; he retired in confusion, and claimed that he was afterwards too embarrassed to try again. His seed, however, had proved to be made of sterner stuff; it survived its short airborne journey and found what must have been a rather tenuous hold within the flower of Mary's womanhood; just a dewdrop within the heart of the rose, but sufficient to provide one sperm which must have wriggled past Mrs Wykes' maidenhead and connected with an egg. Ambrose thought this little short of a miracle, and it had been one of the reasons he had wanted his child given special treatment in the afterlife... but it was also a detail of such an exquisitely personal nature that he had felt unable to mention to the relevant theological authorities.

Ambrose died after his collection of papers, pamphlets and tracts went up in flames on Good Friday l898, seriously damaging the north transept. Ambrose suffered extensive burns, and despite holding on — and even seemingly improving — in the Royal Infirmary, finally died a few weeks later, on Ascension Day.

Ambrose had left enough money in his will for the folly to be maintained; this money proved sufficient to repair the fabric of the building, though slowly. The ownership of the place was turned over to the still surviving Friends of St Jute's, who used it as a storehouse for atheist publications. They abandoned it in the early 'twenties but couldn't sell it; a term of Ambrose's will had been that the place was not to be demolished or significantly changed from its original plan. I bought St Jute's in 1982, when I decided to make my own retreat from the world at large, and have felt thoroughly at home in it ever since.

The door bell rang about lunchtime, as I was making some ideologically sound Nicaraguan coffee; I don't just have jars of coffee, I have crates of the stuff.

I'd spent the time since breakfast working in the studio in the crypt, just fiddling about with the synthesiser and reading the manual on my new sequencer. I still write tunes; jingles, TV themes, the occasional film score, just to keep my hand in. I don't need the money but it passes the time. The jingles and the themes are two of the reasons I hate watching television or listening to the radio. Haven't been able to stand my own stuff since the band broke up, not once it's out there, public, no longer mine.

I thought it might be Blythswood Betty at the door. Betty is a whore who visits me every couple of days or so, just to keep me from getting too attached to my hand I guess. Nice woman; no nonsense type. I didn't think she was due today, but I lose track easily. I went to see who it was.

Ambrose had had hefty doors and barred windows fitted to his folly, but I have gone one better; closed circuit TV guarding all the entrances. The Holland Street door monitor, heaped in with most of St Jute's other non-musical electronic gear behind the pulpit, showed it was McCann, swaying in the small porch, holding his head and grimacing up at the camera and jabbing a finger at the door. His mouth was working.

I turned on the mike. '... pen the fuckin door, eh?'

I pressed the appropriate button and went to meet him.

'Jesus,' I said when I saw the blood, 'McCann, what... ?'

'Ah, ma heid,' McCann said, stumbling up the steps to the choir, holding a reddened hanky to his forehead. I led him to the bathroom in the bottom of the tower.

'What happened to you?' I put the hanky in the sink and got antiseptic and plasters.

'Wee argument,' he said, sitting heavily on the side of the bath and looking at his hand. He put his head back while I dabbed gingerly at a cut just under his hairline. I've reached that stage where I don't so much have friends as accomplices, and McCann is one of my two closest. He's about fifty, a one-time docker and several times unemployed person; greying now, short but fit, with beetling brows and a collection of lines between those brows which give him the look of one who is perpetually finding much to be unimpressed about, as though the world owes him not so much a living as an apology. This is indeed exactly how McCann feels, so no false signals there.

'You stick the nut on some punter?' I jiggled the TCP bottle a bit too much and some of it ran into one of his eyes.

'Ah! Ya basturt!' He ran to the sink and sloshed water into his eye.

'Sorry,' I said, lamely. I handed him a towel. This is me; Mr Clumsy. I always hurt people. All my life I've been knocking things on top of people, bumping into them, turning round too quickly and bashing them in the eye, treading on their toes; you name it. I'm used to it by now, but then I'm not on the receiving end (apart from the big G, of course).

'Sawright, nevir mind Jimmy.' McCann isn't calling me Jimmy the way he'd call any man Jimmy; he thinks that's my name. I've told him I'm called James Hay. This is actually a joke I've never had the nerve to explain to him; it's Jimmy Hay as in 'Hey, Jimmy!'. Hay is my mother's maiden name. McCann doesn't know who I am; he thinks I'm just the caretaker here.

I tried to unpeel a plaster but it stuck to my fingers; I handed him the packet while I picked the plaster off my hands. He sat down on the bath again.

'What happened?' I repeated.

'Ach, Ah goat intae a wee argument wi some stupit bugger in Brodie's.'

He dried his face, got up and looked in the mirror to put the plaster on. 'What about?' I asked.

'Oh, the usual; poalitics. Some balloon talkin aboot how we needed tae keep nuclear weapons. Ah tolt him he wiz a dupe of the imperialist propaganda machine an the so-called independent nuclear deterrent wiz a farce; we were paying for the Americans' war machine, an that wiz only there to threaten the gains of the workers' states an force the Soviet Union tae devote so much aw their Gross National Proaduct on defence the workers wid question the priorities of the leadership.'

'So he hit you.'

'Naw; he called me a commie an Ah said Ah certainly wiz, an proud ofit too.'

'So then he hit you.'

'Naw, he said well then Ah'd want the Russians over here then, wouldn't ah? An Ah said it wiz up to each an every working class to make its own revolution, an the idea that the Soviet Union wantit to invade Western Europe was a load a mince; the last thing they wantit wiz a whole load of Polands and Czechoslovakias oan their hauns, no that they'd get the chance anyway cos if they didnae bomb oot aw the major manufacturing centres in the process, the Yanks wid, an as fur sneak nuclear attacks on anithir country, there was only wan state in history had ever done that, an it wiznae the fuckin Soviet Union.'

'So then he hit you.'

'Naw, then he said it wiz people like me that had wantit to appease Hitler and started the Second World War, so Ah told him it was the communists that had fought against the fascists in Germany, an, far frae helpin them, the Stalinists had cut them adrift just like they cut the Spanish Republicans adrift, an the people who'd done the appeasin were the right wing basturts that thought they an the fascists should be fightin the Soviet Union together, the same ones that had supported the White Russian army an the Imperialist invasion of Russia after the First World War, an their successors were the ones that still wantit to roll back the revolution noo, usin the threat aw Star Wars or anyhin else they could lay their hauns on, an anybody who couldnae see that wiz a fuckin eedjit.'

I hesitated. 'That was when he hit you?'

'Naw; he said ye couldnae trust a commie an he'd be votin fur the Alliance at the next election. Next thing Ah knew ma heid wiz in his face.'

'You hit him?' I said. McCann nodded wearily and rubbed his forehead.

'Ach, Ah didnae really mean tae; it wiz instinct, like. Ah didnae know whit Ah wiz daein. Totally involuntary.' He made a tutting noise. 'See ma heid? It's got a mind of its own sometimes.' I thought about this. 'I believe this calls for a drink.'

We sat in the nave on pillow-covered pews, drinking bottled Budweiser and shorts of Stolichnaya. 'It's not done these days, you know, McCann. Glasgow's miles better and much nicer; head-butting is out.'

'Oh, Christ, aye, European City of Culture nineteen-ninety, eh? Bloody garden festival...' He snorted and drank.

'More hotels.'

'An anuther fuckin exhibition centre. God, this place is goin tae the dogs all right.'

'Aye, but the dogs have left it.'

'Bloody right, son,' McCann said, disgusted. He was still in mourning for Shawfield Stadium, where they'd held the dog racing; its English owners had closed it in October. McCann had had to find other ways of losing money every Saturday. He shook his head. 'Ah wiz doon the docks yesterday; well, where they used tae be. Whit a mess. They're even gettin rid aw the auld fit tunnel, did ye know that?'

'Aye.' The foot tunnel under the Clyde at Finnieston Quay was being filled in.

'There's just yon one big cran left an the rest's aw that bloody exhibition centre.'

'Shug from the Griffin told me they only kept the crane there because they might need it to load tanks in a war.'

'Aye, fuckin typical, isn't it?' McCann shook his head at the general deterioration of everything. 'City of Culture... bloody garden exhibitions; just mair excuses fur the businessmen tae make a killin. Fresh paint on the double yellow lines an a bigger subsidy fur the opera.'

'Cynical bastard, so you are, McCann.'

'Ahm no a cynic, Jim; cynicism is fur the rich. Us poor punters are just cautious; cannae afford tae be any thin else. Cautious, an no so stupit.' He drank some beer.

'You banned from Brodie's then?'

'Don't think so. It aw happened in the cludgie; nobody saw.'

'Jesus, you left this guy lying in the toilet?'

'Whit wiz Ah supposed tae dae? Say sorry? Stupit wanker. Hope it knocked sense into him. Ah mean, Christ. Ah coulda been a real bastard and swiped his white stick as well.'

'What? He was...' I shouted, then saw McCann's grin. He winked.

Glasgow is not, in my experience, a violent city. I do a lot of walking in the city at night, just plodding through the streets, looking, listening, smelling the place, and I've never been bothered. Of course, being six and a half foot and looking like a mutant baboon might have something to do with that. And, okay, so I do carry a shooting stick cum golf umbrella, but that's not just for defence. It rains here, quite a lot sometimes, and I like to have something to sit on, wherever I am. I was stopped a couple of times in the early days by the police, wanting a look at the stick's business end, but they know they can't do me for it.

They seem to be used to seeing me wandering around now; they leave me alone.

The shooting stick has a thick metal plate at the bottom and a stubby two inch spike on the end, and it's not light; a pretty offensive weapon in the right hands (not mine though, I'd probably swing it and crack my own skull. Looks good though; I wouldn't mess with somebody carrying one. Mind you, I'm a paranoid coward).

Purely a defensive weapon in other words; a deterrent. McCann, on the other hand, had once told me that when he was younger and running with a gang, one of the little tricks they used was to sew fish hooks behind the lapels of their jackets, so that if anyone grabbed them there to head-butt them they'd get a nasty surpnse ...

Anyway, most of the violence that does take place in Glasgow is between gangs, not against strangers, and usually doesn't happen near the centre. I'd sooner waik through Glasgow alone at night than through London with a bodyguard. For New York, I think I'd want air support; and that's just during the day.

'Diet Irn Bru,' McCann said suddenly, sounding like he was about to cough something up.

'What about it?'

'The very fuckin idea of it, that's whit,' he said. 'God almighty; whit next? Low calorie fuckin whusky?'

'Aren't they working on some new colourless, tasteless whisky to compete with vodka?' I said, sipping some Stolichnaya. In fact this was a total fabrication, to pay back McCann for his blind man in the toilet, but:

'Aye, Ah heard that too,' McCann said. 'Makes ye sick, doesn't it?'

'I don't know,' I said, annoyed. 'Does it?'

'You sure your boss doesny mind us drinkin aw this booze Jim?' McCann said, ignoring or ignorant. He held up an empty Bud bottle and inspected one of Ambrose's stained-glass windows through it.

'I've told you.' I told him. And I had told him. McCann always asks that question, and I always tell him it's okay. 'It's okay; he doesn't mind.'

'Positive?'

'Certain; he's given it up. Told me to help myself.'

McCann looked around the crates of drink piled up in the nave amongst all the rest of my Comecon booty, and scratched his chin. 'He should sell aw that stuff if he doesnae want it.'

'Too complicated. Have to pay duty... all sorts of things. He can't be bothered.'

'Aye, he must be rich, right enough... awright if I... ?' McCann held up his empty bottle.

'Help yourself,' I told him. McCann went for another bottle.

'Ah've never seen this guy, Jimmy, ye know that? Does he never come round here at all?'

'Last time he was here was... must have been a year ago. More, maybe.'

'Whit's his name again?' McCann used the bottle opener tied to the end of the pew, drank from the bottle.

'Weird.'

'Funny name, that.'

'Funny guy.'

'He's no goannae knock this pile doon an build an office block, naw?'

'Can't. The building's got to stay as it is; that's why he got it so cheap.'

'Diddae get a mortgage on it, aye?'

'I don't think so,' I said, not sure whether McCann was taking the piss or not. 'He's rich. Eccentric.'

'Aye,' McCann said ruefully, 'if yer rich yer just eccentric; if yer poor yer a nutcase an they stick ye in the bin.'

'Rank has its privileges.'

'You're tellin me, pal.'

We drank our drinks. McCann looked round at the piles of booze. ' Aye, this stuff's all very well, but Ah fancy a pint of heavy. Cumin up the Griff?'

'Aye; time for lunch.' The Griffin is our local; a decent, unspoiled but lively enough bar with cheap food. I've never shaken off the tastes of my childhood, and still prefer the Griffin's pie, beans and chips to the Albany's five-star steak au poivre with fennel, asparagus, courgettes and new potatoes... besides, the Albany would mean dressing up. And a bath too, probably. We got up to go. I took our empty bottles of Bud and chucked them into the shovel of the Russian bulldozer as we passed it on the way to the front doors. I had to get some cash before we went to the Griff.

'An what the fuck's he got all this plant fur?' McCann said, shaking his head at the assembled machinery. I hauled open the small door set into the big main doors — barn-sized; I could get a double decker bus in here no problem — and hauled McCann away from the Polish dump truck (full of vodka bottles).

'They're no his,' I told him. 'The builders left them.'

'Aye, affy funny,' McCann said outside, buttoning up his jacket and staring across the road at the glossy, tinted mirror-shade façade of the Britoil building opposite. When I bought the folly, all that had been there was a hole; the office complex had been completed this year. Just in time for the oil slump and redundancies to be announced. I stopped beside McCann, looking at the distorted reflection of the folly shown on its tiered walls. 'Bloody monstrosity " McCann said, tutting. ' Ah think ah preferred the hole.'

'You're a reactionary old bastard,' I told him, bounding down the steps to the street.

'Reactionary! Me? Ye big pape.' He hurried down to catch up. 'It's no the likes of me that's reactionary, I'll tell you, pal; nothing reactionary about tryin tae maintain yer heritage, even if it is a hole in the ground; reactionary is yer fuckin entrepreneurs and yer shareholders, attempting tae maintain the capitalist system against the tide of history, an it doesnae matter how ye dress up that sort of...'

McCann kept on about progress and regress, action and reaction, and capitalism and communism, all the way to the bank, where I lent him a tenner.

As we walked back to the Griffin, I kept thinking about Rick Tumber's telemessage, wondering what he wanted to talk about, and worrying about his reasons for phrasing it just the way he had.

You get to know how people put things, the way they use words, just where the stresses fall. Trying to recall Rick's rather Midatlantic phrasing style, I couldn't help thinking that if Rick said 'This is good news,' he probably meant 'This is good news,' contrasting it with something else, that wasn't. Or maybe I was just being paranoid, as usual.

Could something have happened that I didn't know about? Easily; I avoid newspapers, television and radio, for most of the year. I have my Information Binges, but they're few and far between, about every two months or so.

During an Information Binge, I rent a few televisions, buy a radio and order every paper and magazine I can get my hands on. I read everything, I have the radio on constantly and I watch TV; all of it; soaps and adverts and quiz shows and kids' programmes. A good, thorough-going Binge normally lasts about a week; after that I'm usually goggle-eyed with lack of sleep, not to mention sickened at what passes for popular culture...

The rest of the time, I still read a lot, but mostly books and magazines, and not even news magazines. So for a large part of the year I'm totally out of touch; they could start the next world war and I wouldn't know anything about it until the streets filled with people pushing carts and prams and sticking tape over their windows...

Had I missed something? Was there really that hidden emphasis in Tumber's message?

No; paranoia. Had to be. Rick wasn't consistent enough for anybody to read nuances into his phrasing. His memo style depended entirely on whether he'd just taken a hit of coke, had a heavy lunch or recently fallen in or out of love again. Still, the message worried me.

There was a song once:

Nothing startling... but I kept hearing the tune in my head, and my old songs have always been bad news, for me or for others. My curse, my jinx; should have called me Jonah at birth and have done with it... Mister Mistaken, Captain Clumsy...

The doors of the Griffin approached. 'That guy wasn't really blind, was he?' I asked McCann.

'Naw,' McCann said firmly. 'Ah never tangle with blind punters...'

'Good.'

'... they carry sticks.'

'McCann...' I turned to him, but he was grinning at me, and winked.

'Naw,' he said again, as we went through the doors. 'Ye wouldnae see me tackle a blind punter.'