Laidlaw

9

Bud Lawson stood at the window, looking out on Duke Street. How often had Jennifer come towards this window from Fraoli’s café? She had always liked visiting Bud’s sister Maggie Grierson and her husband Wullie. In moving back and forward across this street she had grown up, lost the fairness of her hair and become dark, abandoned what Wullie called her ‘schoolboard specs’, changed her mind about what was her favourite pop-group (‘Mair often than Ah chinge ma semmet,’ Wullie said), developed breasts and secrecy. She had always said that this was where she would like to stay. ‘This is the real Glesca,’ Maggie had told her. Her absence from it now was not believable.

In the room behind, Maggie Grierson sat looking at her brother through her tears. She knew exactly what he was seeing. Duke Street’s drab width had been her home for nearly forty years, and there was nowhere else she wanted to go. For her it had kept the quality of the old Glasgow, a sense of the street, a realisation that streets were places for living in, not just passing through. She knew a lot of the people in its three-up tenements. She knew who was never out the bookie’s, who drank in the Ballochmyle Bar, who ran up a lot of tick in Mulholland’s Dairy. The places in the street had become as familiar to her as her own furniture.

But now it was all memories. It seemed to her it would always be closed, as it was today. From now on it would always be Sunday.

She saw Bud looking down towards Gateside Street. Behind those tenements was the swing-park where Jennifer had often played. One summer evening she had come from there herself and knocked at the door of the Bristol Bar, where Wullie was having a pint. ‘It’s time to go home, Uncle Wullie,’ she had told him. Nine she would be at that time. The men had kept it up on Wullie for weeks.

This house had been full of her. Their weeks revolved around her coming, and she always came. Growing up hadn’t distanced her from them at all. Remembering her worth and the hopes they had had for who she would be, Maggie found nothing outside herself that measured her feeling. Outside, there were only the shuttered fronts of the fruit shop where she had waited in the queue and the bakehouse opposite, where she liked to go for hot rolls on the mornings when she had stayed. There was only the walk up Cumbernauld Road to Alexandra Parade and the park where they’d often walked. There were only the few things of hers that Maggie had kept, like the smelling-salts she’d bought as a present for Maggie when she was seven, thinking it was perfume.

Beyond that, there was only Maggie’s faith in Jennifer. Her inability to make anybody else but Wullie and herself see how much had been lost was a fiercesome bitterness. She cried again. Not even Jennifer’s own father had appreciated her. Looking at her younger brother, Maggie found no forgiveness for him. Bud was a mean-spirited man. He wouldn’t give you the kiss of life without counting the breaths you owed him. He had never fully accepted Wullie as a person because he had been baptised a Catholic, although Wullie hadn’t been in a church since he left school. When Bud had come looking for Jennifer this morning, he had been like the Gestapo checking a suspect. Ever since he had found out about that Catholic boy called Tommy, he hadn’t allowed her to stay the night with them, in case they were shielding her. They would have done, too. Telling them this afternoon, he had acted as if Jennifer had affronted him in getting murdered. He still looked more angry than sad.

Wullie came in. Bud turned from the window. Maggie saw how Wullie didn’t look at her because he didn’t want to add to his pain by sharing hers. She thought what a decent man he had been all his life and how little was left for him. She regretted again that she had never given him children.

‘Did ye see Alec then?’ she asked.

‘Aye. He’s a nice man, Alec. Ah mean, he disny know you fae Adam, Bud. But says he’ll run ye hame an’ pick up ither people on the road. Ah said we would get the bus. He’s waitin’ for ye.’

Bud went out without saying a word. It took Maggie and Wullie more than half-an-hour to get ready. They hung about helplessly in an irrevocably empty room.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘We better get the bus.’

They walked along to George Square. While Wullie was paying the driver, she noticed that the only empty seats were at the back. But a man near the front got up and said, ‘Here, missus. You an’ yer man sit there.’ He went to the back. He must have noticed that she had been crying. It was his way of showing sympathy.

The house absorbed them into its gloom with a murmuring of hellos in the hall and a soft shutting of doors. Others were there already. Since they could find no form for what they were feeling, things that happened accidentally had become rituals. Because Bud Lawson had been in the kitchen when the first man arrived, that was where Wullie found himself, among the men.

Maggie was shown into the living-room where Sadie sat among the women. Around her their sighs and headshakes were gentle, subversive, a comfort they must give in spite of her inability to receive it. Their clichés went on tiptoe. ‘Oh my Goad, is this no’ a terrible thing.’ ‘Ye canny believe it.’ ‘Ah don’t know whit the world’s comin’ tae.’ ‘Ah’ll make a cuppa tea.’ Sadie sat motionless, leaking tears, and whenever anyone crossed her vision she offered a placative smile. It was a strange event in the ruins of her face, that smile, given without discrimination, like someone in a road accident apologising to the traffic that has hit her. Maggie saw it as partly a condemnation of her brother.

In the kitchen, interrupted only occasionally by the passing back and forth of a woman, the men were different. While the women were hunkered down with a fact, learning to live with it, the men were chafing against it. Their room was restless. One of them would always be looking out of the window or tightening one of the taps on the sink or footering with his cup. Wullie felt uncomfortable. He felt that this had nothing to do with Jennifer. It had only to do with Bud, and beside him Airchie Stanley, sitting and feeding off Bud’s silence.

Someone had produced a bottle of whisky. Wullie thought it might have seemed inappropriate except that nothing was appropriate. Only a couple of glasses had been found. The rest used cups. Slowly the whisky had played upon their grouped moods until their anger found expression. It happened at first in isolated moments.

Somebody said, ‘Folk like that shouldny be allowed tae live.’

There were noddings. The silence was a fearsome unanimity.

‘Whit harm did that wee lassie ever dae anybody?’

No harm at all, the silence said.

‘Even if they get ’im, some doactor’ll likely see tae it he jist gets jiled.’

Their righteousness was total. These were rough men. Several of them lived with violence as part of their way of life. One of them might like to talk of the time he’d met a safe-blower or had a drink with a well-known criminal. But there were crimes and crimes. And if you committed certain of them — like interfering with a child or raping a girl — they emasculated you in their minds. They made you a thing.

The kitchen became a place sterile of pity. Gradually they talked themselves out of being men. They were all vigilantes.

‘Ah only ask fur wan thing,’ Bud Lawson said. It was the first time he had spoken for over an hour. His eyes had no tears near them. They were clear and blank. ‘Jist let me hiv ’im fur five minutes.’ The cup he turned in his hands looked like a thimble. ‘Ah jist want tae hiv ’im in ma haunds. That’s all Ah want. An’ Ah’ll never ask fur anythin’ again.’

All of them deeply wanted to grant his wish. Airchie Stanley thought to himself there might be a way.

In the living-room the women still sat protectively round Sadie. For her there was nothing to do.