A Glasgow Trilogy Page 6

  He made them make the sign of the El at every meeting and rang the bell three times before they filed forward for their weekly allowance. Inspired by his position as their guide, philosopher and friend he made up a hymn for them to the tune of The Ash Grove, careful to work in his own name as an essential item in what he called the ‘relevation’ of El.

  Down, down in our cellar, where rubbish concealed him,

  When daylight is fading, we bow unto El,

  And promise to follow the one who revealed him.

  So sing Percy’s praises and ring out the bell.

  After that they chanted with gusto to the tune of ‘Boney Was a Warrior’, ‘El is our salva-ti-on, rah, rah, rah!’ They particularly enjoyed the ‘rah, rah, rah’ bit, and Percy was thrilled to have a choir of his own even if it wasn’t just as good as the Vienna Boys’.

  For nearly a month he lived more delighted with the success of converting the gang into a reverent congregation than with his lordship over the money. He was proving himself a poet at last. He was a sacred bard whose job it was to create and maintain the religious secrets of his tribe. All he bought for himself was a plush-covered copy of Shelley’s poems, and a portable typewriter to type his own poems for publication once he got them written down. Later on he could get whatever else he wanted, there was always tomorrow. Meanwhile he kept the Brotherhood in order, he accepted only reasonable demands for money, and he advised them how to spend what they asked for. Still excited with the miracle performed for them, the boys didn’t think of asking for much. Like Percy they found their satisfaction in dreaming of the future, when they could have whatever they wanted. Like him, they enjoyed the secrecy and the mystery of it, they loved the hymn-singing and the bell-ringing in candlelight, the sense of belonging to a chosen people when they made the sign of the El. It was better than going to church. They could understand it. They could see what they were asked to adore and they felt it concerned them and the real world they lived in. The Clavigers stopped murmuring and bided their time.

  ‘Ach he’s out of this world altogether,’ Specky said pityingly. ‘He’s round the bend. He’s carrying on like a real Holy Willie.’

  ‘Aye, he’s round the bend all right,’ Skinny agreed sadly. ‘Do you know I don’t think he’s touched a penny of it for himself.’

  ‘No, just a few fivers,’ said Savage. ‘There are nae pennies in it. Nothing so common. I bet he’s been shifting it in wads every night in the week when we’re no’ there.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe that,’ Specky said reproachfully.

  ‘How would we know if he wasn’t?’ Savage demanded. ‘Tell me that and tell me no more. Don’t forget it was never counted. To this day it hasna been counted. He could dae what he likes wi’ it. He could tell us in another month it was all done, and we couldn’t argue. Ye know, he had a bloody cheek making us give him back our keys. Clavigers! He likes big words. I bet ye he likes big money too.’

  ‘Well, after all it was him that gave them to us,’ Skinny said. ‘They were his to start with. It was him got them cut from the key his old man had.’

  ‘You know, I could apply my boot to my posterior,’ said Specky. ‘I should have got one cut before I gave him mine back. I should have anticipated some such manoeuvre on his behalf.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t expect him to do that?’ Savage asked, and grinned, his animal teeth on a victory parade.

  Unable to resist showing off he thrust his hand into the back pocket of his tight studded jeans and showed them a new key.

  ‘I thought of it all right,’ he boasted. ‘I used the loaf. It’s time you brushed up your IQ, Specky.’

  ‘You can’t brush up an IQ,’ Specky tutted at him. ‘An IQ is the result of the primitive formation of your inherited characteristics from your paw and your maw. You can’t do a thing about it.’

  ‘Well, you could dust your brains then, couldn’t you?’ Savage retorted, shoving the key away in his back pocket again. He was content to wait. He had a key. He had the whip hand.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The silver was done. There wasn’t a half-crown or a florin left. They had all been squandered on sweeties, cigarettes, lemonade, playing cards, slot-machines, comics and the pictures. Percy burned the pokes and faced at last the problem of what to do about the folding money. He thought of changing handfuls of notes into silver and keeping the gang going a little longer on a diet of half-crowns, but he was nervous about going into a bank with the notes in case he was asked questions, and to go round the local shops, changing singles and fivers here and there, would only cause talk. Anyway, he saw he couldn’t keep them much longer from real spending. They were all getting peevish with him. He made up his mind to start them off on pound notes. He thought he could trust them, but he warned them just the same.

  ‘Yous don’t want to look too affluential,’ he addressed them from the chair in the candlelight. ‘And you shouldn’t buy anything conspicious. You have got to be very careful from now on.’

  ‘A fine thing if we’ve got the money and canny spend it,’ Savage commented at the foot of the throne.

  ‘Of course you can spend it,’ Percy scolded him, resenting the comment. ‘There’s nothing to prevent you from spending it if you want to spend it. All I’m saying is you’ve got to be careful and don’t spend it on things that would get you asked awkward questions. Yous want to detract attention from yourselves.’

  ‘And just buy sweeties like?’ Specky asked. ‘Boy-oh- boy! Twenty shillings’ worth of lollipops! Nobody would ever dream of asking what you were doing with all those lollipops, not much.’

  It was beginning to dawn on him, as on some of the others, that there wasn’t much they could do with so much money. They would be better off with less. It would be easier to spend.

  ‘Don’t be funny,’ Percy snapped at him. ‘It takes brains to be funny. And you fellows should be helping me, you’re the Clavigers, not niggling and nattering and trying to be sarky. I don’t like folk that are sarky, and I don’t like folk that nag.’

  He gave out the pound notes grudgingly and hoped for the best. In a little while he found they weren’t spending them, they were accumulating them and little groups were pooling their resources for purposes they kept secret from him. They began to demand a twice-weekly ration, and he gave in to them for the sake of peace. He was in the cellar every night to satisfy himself everything was all right. Then various members of the Brotherhood began to turn up every night too and tap at the side-door till he had to let them in. Once they were in he had to let them have something before they would go away. He felt he had lost the place somewhere, but he didn’t see what he could do about it.

  He gave up his job without telling his mother and spent his days at the Mitchell Library pursuing an elusive something he thought of as his studies. He looked particularly for books in one volume that would tell him what he wanted to know. He read Wells’ Outline of History in a hop, skip, and jump, and from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy he wrote out the names of the philosophers. He made notes on what he tried to read, haphazard notes, not always coherent or legible, but still notes. It made him feel more like a real student when he sat in the Mitchell Library and took notes. Odd items of information stuck to him, items as dead and separate as flies on flypaper, but for all that he was learning. Sometimes his eyes ached and he wondered if glasses would make him look more like a student or if he wouldn’t suit them.

  It was a great pleasure to him to sit amongst the undergraduates and look at the legs of the girls from Queen Margaret College when they sat across from him with their knees crossed. It made him feel he was a student too. He went home every day at the usual time after a cheap lunch in a small back-room restaurant near Charing Cross, and every week he took the amount of his wages from one of the tea-chests and handed it over to his mother. Sometimes he thought of buying her a present or making her a gift of a hundred pounds or so, but he always decided not to bother. In the first place, she didn’t deserv
e it, the way she was always finding fault with him, and in the second place she would only ask questions, not scientific ones, but the wrong ones, like where did you get all that money. He admired himself for not having given up his job at once. It proved his consideration for others. He had been so busy getting the Brotherhood organized under the protection of El that he hadn’t had time to think of himself.

  ‘I suppose some folk would say I should get my head examined,’ he said to himself proudly, scratching it. ‘But worldly matters are beneath we poets.’

  The thought reminded him he had meant to write poetry if ever he had time. He bought a beautiful big book, half- bound in leather, like a ledger except that it wasn’t ruled off for cash entries, and he meant to start writing poetry in it. But he had to hide it from his mother, and that made it hard for him to get a chance to write in it. He didn’t seem to have any time at all to himself, even though he wasn’t working. The Brotherhood found employment for him. They made him their errand-boy: because of his age it was he who had to go into town and buy what they wanted. They were quite changed from the weeks when a pocketful of silver was enough for them. They outflanked him: they didn’t want the money as money, they wanted things. And he had to go and get them.

  ‘We could buy a ball and strips and start a team,’ said Cuddy. ‘The Brotherhood Rangers. The Bethel Thistle, eh? A dark blue jersey with an orange lily.’

  ‘Is that all you can think of?’ Percy cried, despairing of his chosen people. ‘Football! Can you no’ think of anything else but football? Do you never think of culture? You could buy Shakespeare’s plays or a season ticket for the SNO. And who would you play? Tell me that! There’s no league for a street team for lads of your age, and folk would ask where you got the money for a strip.’

  ‘That’s all you can say,’ Noddy complained. ‘Whatever we want to buy you say folk’ll ask questions, that’s what you keep saying. Have we no’ to buy anything?’

  In the end Percy went into town and bought them a strip. He bought them two strips, and three balls, and two dozen pair of football boots. But they never wore the strips or the boots except at night in the cellar, when they played a brawling game of five-a-side. Percy kept the jerseys, pants and stockings in his own house every day, telling his mother they were the strip of the school football team (the school hadn’t a team), and he was their trainer.

  In a big shop in Renfield Street he bought a ukelele one week and a guitar the next because Noddy insisted money ought to be spent on his musical education. He took a bus to Shawlands one afternoon and bought a tape-recorder because somebody thought it would be fun to have one, and another afternoon he went across the river to Maryhill for a transistor set, and while he was there he bought himself an electric razor. It was high time he was shaving every day. He told his mother the foreman had got it as a Christmas present, didn’t like it and gave it to him for nothing. He had to tell her something. He couldn’t go into hiding every time he wanted to shave. Another day he went over to Govan and bought a record-player. Much of the stuff he was sent to buy wasn’t meant to be anyone’s particular property. The tape-recorder, the record-player, the transistor, the television were everybody’s and nobody’s. They were bought because of a general will for them, and they furnished the cellar as a club for the Brotherhood. They were kept in the cellar and used there and nowhere else. The electricity required was got by using an adapter plug in one of the light-sockets. These items were not only kept in the cellar, they had to be hidden in case the janitor came across them, and Percy lost sleep worrying they would be found in spite of all his precautions. He worried too when he saw every member of the Brotherhood wearing a wristlet watch. Some of them had a pocket-watch as well, and he was sure they would attract attention. They had cameras too, Leicas and Voigtländers and Zeiss Ikons, but they didn’t dare use them.

  Friday nights were a great comfort to him. He had been beaten in his attempt to limit the spending of the money but he was determined not to yield on the Friday night service. He was grateful nobody opposed him. It was quite the opposite. In their orgy of spending they seemed to enjoy the Friday night with more zest and reverence than they had shown when he had sent them away with five bob each. They weren’t just obeying him from force of habit, or doing casually what they knew he wanted done. They were doing it because they wanted to. They had taken over his creed and ritual and made them their own.

  By their very submission to him they corrupted him, like a country that by accepting a dictator gives him a legal authority and wider scope for fanaticism. He had set out to be their leader, and he had become their slave, and he followed the code of his masters. He wakened to wants he had never known when he was only a packer in the Coop in Nelson Street. If his boys could find things to buy, then so should he to keep up with them. He bought a leather pocket-book so as to have something to carry pound notes and fivers in, for although he rationed the Brotherhood he never went out without twenty pounds in his pocket. He bought binoculars that cost him forty pounds, two expensive fountain pens to write his poems with and a dictionary of quotations to give him a short cut to a knowledge of English poetry. Lying in bed one night he had foreboding he might have to leave in a hurry and travel far in search of peace and quiet, so he bought a big briefcase, in genuine pigskin, and hid it in the cellar against the rats’ wall. It had three compartments and he kept a suit of pyjamas and his shaving tackle, carefully wrapped, in one compartment. The other two would hold thousands, he was sure. He bought a pair of skates and went to the ice-skating at Cross my loof, more to see the pretty girls there, and try to pick up one of them, than because he was keen on skating. He bought a fishing-rod and basket, and boots and waders and a jacket and hat to match, though he knew nothing about fishing and didn’t know where to go fishing anyway. But he had read that fishing was a solitary and peaceful sport, fit for thoughtful men, and he hoped he would find time to be solitary and peaceful some day.

  He bought himself a new suit after he stopped working because he believed a gentleman of leisure should be well dressed, and when his mother made a scene about it he said he had been saving up for it for a year. She snorted sceptically and said no more, so he bought another couple of suits and shirts and ties to go with them. If he was smart and well dressed he might have a better chance of getting a girl, and a poet whose life was dedicated to the pursuit of beauty shouldn’t be wearing shabby clothes.

  Seeing Jasper’s motor-bike parked in the blind-alley aroused him to a new want. Why shouldn’t he have one too? He bought one. After all, Shelley had a boat. A poet must move with the times, and Shelley would certainly have had a motor-bike or a racing-car if he was alive today. What’s more, he would probably have written an ode to Speed. He began one himself, just to do what Shelley would have done, and wrote the first three lines in his leather-bound log-book.

  O wild Speed, be thou me, impetuous one,

  Driving my thoughts around the universe,

  And let the engine of my spirit run …

  He didn’t know where or how he wanted his spirit to run, so he left it till he could get peace and quiet to finish it.

  Meanwhile he was busy learning to ride the bike. He had a skidlid and L-plates and a manual, and Frank Garson’s father gave him a few tips. He parked it in the blind-alley every night, at the same spot as Jasper’s bike was parked during the day from nine to four.

  ‘How do you come to be having a motor-bike?’ his mother asked.

  ‘I won it in a raffle,’ he said, very short with her.

  She looked at him with her mouth hanging open. She was used to his being insolent and sarcastic to her, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of arguing when he gave silly answers to serious questions. But this one sounded so casual it might well be the truth. But it couldn’t be true, for it was clearly absurd. She was baffled to silence.

  He was parking the bike in Tulip Place one Thursday night at half past ten, before it was quite dark, after a thrilling practice run
to Balloch and the banks of Loch Lomond, when a man came out of the close across the street and jabbed a finger in the small of his back. Percy jumped. In a moment’s searing intuition he saw the hoard discovered, the owner identified, and himself in jail. The early summer evening seemed no longer beautiful, but ominous, and the sun he had seen setting behind the Campsies was a signal of the doom he had come back to meet.

  ‘D’ye know Mr Phinn?’ the stranger whispered, his scrubby face close against Percy’s smooth chin. The electric razor was doing a very efficient job.

  ‘Mr Phinn?’ Percy asked hoarsely.

  ‘Mr Phinn,’ the stranger said, nodding his head like a hand-puppet.

  Percy was frightened. He didn’t see a square man in a belted raincoat, stained and shabby, with a curly-brimmed felt hat down over his eyes and a scar from the wing of his nose to the bend of his right jawbone. This was no Glasgow bauchle. What he saw was a looming supernatural figure that he identified with a deity he thought of as Nimeesis.

  ‘Well, I’m Phinn,’ he said cautiously. ‘Percy Phinn. You see, I’m named after Percy Shelley the poet. You don’t mean me, do you?’

  He didn’t think anyone would ever think of him as Mr Phinn, any more than you would think of Shelley as Mr Shelley, and he was puzzled. But with him that was the same thing as being frightened. The stranger shook his head, the horizontal movement as puppet-like as the vertical one had been.

  ‘No,’ he breathed vigorously into Percy’s face, and Percy recognized the smell of whisky. His father used to drink that stuff. With the speed of lightning, for thought is swift even in the slowest, he wondered if it would be worthwhile buying a bottle of whisky to find out what it was like, decided a bottle of wine would be a more appropriate drink for a poet, regretted he had never thought of buying a bottle of wine for communal wine-drinking at the Friday Night Service, feared his buying days were over, and simultaneously found an answer to the stranger.