- It�s nae bleed mister, its just nature, that�s aw.
I was out the backie at the end of the garden, at the incinerator. A minaret rising in outspread supplication. The brick built structures were replicated at each close as far as the eye could see. Enclosed by the galvanised piked picket fencing that defined each feu.
The little boy eyed me suspiciously as I heaved the burst black bin liners into the incinerator. The used sanitary napkins had spilled onto the concrete path.
I gathered up the dark red clotted towels in my hands and threw them into the incinerator. Simultaneously a shiver ran down my spine. The little boy was interested now. He said
- Mister let me gun it up, go on mister.
I looked down at him and smiled, I said okay then.
I took a coin from my pocket and gave it to him. I heaved shut the furnace door and locked it. I noticed my hands were smeared with blood. I quickly turned around and walked to the grass of the backie where the washing poles and lines hung sadly. Amongst the dog shite, amongst the discarded spikes and plastic/foil flotsam I cleaned my palms. I walked back up to the boy and said,
- Are you ready?
He nodded dreamily in intuitive correctness�many times�many times before he had said. - How much longer?
I lifted him up to my chest; he was as light as a bird. The definition of his rib cage etched into my palms. He slotted the coin and an orange light came on. The little boy peered through the spy hole. The pilot light was burning unemotionally. I said to the boy,
- Any time you�re ready kid. There was a red and a green button adjacent to one another. The little boy pushed in the green button and held it for a few seconds. To allow the banks of gas burners to ignite fully. He was satisfied, and I let the little boy down gently. We both stood back from the incinerator.
Suddenly the forced air pump kicked in with a hoovering pumping noise. The waste would be superheated and turned into nothing more than fine grey ash.
I held up my right palm to the kid and said,
- See you later alligator.
He eyed me suspiciously, biting the inside of his mouth; he had resumed dribbling with a large orange football by the washing poles. I looked up quickly at the sky and then back towards the incinerator. Black smoke was now belching into the air. I thought, it�s one of those bright sharp early winter days where the sun shining in your face shows how old you are getting and how ill you are feeling�it�s all in the face.
I retreated back into the darkness of the close. The flat was on the first floor. I climbed the stairs and felt in my pocket for the Abloy key.
I triple unlocked the scarred sheet metal door and closed and locked it behind me. I looked along the corridor towards my bedroom. Sun was pouring into the dusted stillness of the room. The spring and horsehair upright mattress was slightly curled concave by the many people that had slept on it. People like me: Couriers fed up of having to wait here up above somewhere. Somewhere up above the lit fanned glass and iron semicircle of Buchanan Street Station. Points of the compass seemed to be of no use here. So how the fuck does you traverse your car around the perimeter then? Steer by the stars? Whatever wherever, under those ancient outstretched iron arms and curiously specific little plastic road signs. As specific to this place as those humpy tarmac hills, green outstretched iron arms and orange sodium lights. I guess what I�m trying to say is that you have to delve in. That�s all.
I go into the room. My bottle is sitting on the windowsill. The bottle. I carry it around with its contents of some sort of indeterminable black grog. Some sort of acutely alcoholic black bottle, rum or something anyway. I forget what. I hardly ever drink from it. It slips neatly into the fashioned inside pocket of my overcoat. Like some kind of prosthetic limb the bottle merely holds me upright. Serves as a reassuring balm to my conscience. The scenario is a total clich�.
Of all those who walked before. Who swung wildly and flailed their worth preciously. Dark and curly. Thin and tall young men who were perhaps musically inclined. Who cultivated a plucking nail? Who may have bestrode this inarticulate canvas of a city imagining they were multi layered and perplexing individuals?
I roll up an Old Holborn and smoke it sitting on the windowcill. The reek of rolling tobacco. Unlike the dry acrid cyanide smell of filter cigarettes. The reminder of smelly pubs and powerless argument. Winter lighting casts some sort of Victorian ghost upon the corniced argument of Socialism versus Marxism. While Cecilia plucks on her celestial banjo. Do I stand on the correct side of the Picket? Everything but the girl for you in this place. Youre not allowed. A drunken man did not stop. Jabberwocky. I don�t belong. I am not specific to this paradigm of existence. I wanted to look at him. Jake the Snake, seen once sober at the surgery.
There was me as well engaging the changing, new civilisation up the West end and I am reduced to blind obsession by triviality; what I have not forgotten. Which as a coherent argument definitely seems to hold water here and now.
I greeted under my reeking breath.
I walk through to the kitchen. The room is stinking of paky black hash smoke. I gag and cowk seeing as I hate the totally distinctive smell of hash. A magazine is sitting on the table in her dressing gown a middle aged woman is repainting her toe nails red. Out of a bottle. Predisposed to the process of assimilation rather than starting afresh. That would involve leaving here which would break the enchantment of the spun spell that Glasgow casts down over one of its inhabitants - like glamour Mags. I sit opposite and look at her idly. I can see the triangle of her vagina. It is darkly shadowed. I think once men start to recreate women�s sexuality into something that is not entirely foreign -yes exotic and shocking to their own senses- they might as well move on to someone or something else.
-Did ye burn the garbage out Tod?
The joint is hanging out of the black woman�s mouth in complete unhealth as she concentrates on her left big toe.
- Sure did foxy lady.
I suddenly remember my ex wife in a shining moment of epiphany. Or should I say a varnished moment of mental reservation. She used to go into the pubs on her own and get jaked on Diamond White cider and thrash the Hill Billys, up North, at pool. This guy invites her home later and gives her a blowjob. Even bigger than the real thing. Put another song on the juke box Tod�
Mags offers me a toke of her joint. I decline resolutely. I have come this far now. She asks me if I am hungry. I could manage something. I offer to make us both a fried egg sandwich. Mags says,
- Make my egg slittery Tod.
We both chuckle suggestively. We are both part of the firm, on the payroll.
Born and raised in Shettleston, that is where Mags comes from. I stick on the kettle and make us some tea to go with our breakfast. I say to Mags,
- I�ll go down to the P.O. and see if our vac sack has arrived today in the post box after this. I�m pusy seek sittin around here another day and night.
- Ye ken yersel big yin, sometimes you just hae tae stand still in this life, she replied roughly. Well I could be reasonably confident with myself. I had mailed the produce forward on its final leg from Brisbane.
Mags was just back up from Liverpool. She had told me all this last night after we had both arrived and huddled over a bottle or two. The mask slips a little after a few red wet wet wets. She had been down for a private abortion. A woman�s right to terminate her own pregnancy was still a punishable offence in the wee male holy Willy book of Calvinism. I was fairly smacked by her shared intimacy though, that some sort of private code inhabited our country still. Some sense of antithesis suggested being deemed as working class was just another form of inverted male posh pish by the upper classes. At worst the most pernicious form of racism imaginable. Heaped upon Mag�s head like a bucket of fusty shite. What the fuck, on the payroll you had to be discrete, parochialism or not this was a broad inarticulate canvas and you didn�t want to be doing things on the game any more. Not when the firm were paying anyway. She had told me the guy was Norwegian. Ziggi cried like a depressing cunt when she had told him she was aborting the kids. She had told me he then was the dreichest cunt she had ever been out with. Put that in your syphilitic pipe and try smoking a muzzle on me Heinrich Himmler.
We had our eggs, and drank our tea. We both wanted to get out of the way and left before the bars girls got up and came through for their breakfast.
It was time.
BR>
BRENDAN BEHAN
RAYMOND CARVER
PRIMO LEVI
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
ANNE SEXTON
