The Devil and Archie Cairney

Archie stumbled past a rose bush. It had stuck its leg out and tried to catch him. Archie was nothing, if not resilient, practically indestructible. He bounced on into Kingdom Hall. He thought it was just the place he was looking for, because he was dying for a pish and another pint, but had instead found Jehovah. But not only did Jehovah not have a bar; He never even had a toilet. Well, it wasn’t Jehovah’s fault exactly.

But Archie did find a lot of people that fair took a shine to him and stuck to him like wood glue and knew what they were talking about. And talk they did, although some time they took time off talking, to visiting people like Archie, to talk some mair.

It got to that stage were Archie was that scared to answer the door in case he found that it was himself at the door flogging Watchtower. Jesus. It got to the stage were he even preferred going to work at Singer’s to get away from it all. He didn’t tell anybody, of course, and Jehovah already knew, so they had kinda a deal going. Jehovah wouldn’t talk about Archie and Archie wouldn’t talk about Jehovah, not during work hours anyway.

‘Hey Archie, I hear you’ve been reborn,’ said Phil McMahon his arsehole mate and a born sinner, if ever there was one.

‘Fuck off,’ said Archie, taking the Lord’s name in vain, or something like that.He took off his goggles and turned off his lathe for that day.

Archie didn’t usually wear goggles. You were meant to wear them to stop particles of rounded molten metal breaking off and hitting your eye at 56 000 revs per minute, but only poofs wore them, or people hoping to get promotion, which was much the same thing. Archie had started wearing them as a kinda disguise. It obviously hadn’t worked.

Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. He had to go to the stores to get them. Asking for anything out of the stores, even an innocuous item, like a sweeping brush, was made to seem like you were asking for a revolver and live ammo.

‘What did you do with your last pair?’ said the store man, John Ferguson.

Archie had went to school with John Ferguson. They used to call him Eagle Beak, because of his hooked nose. But he had the last laugh now. He had the job for life, or until Singer’s shut. And everybody knew that would never happen. Even though they made sewing machines, Singer’s stores were legendary. They had every kind of part imaginable and for every contingency, from before the war, although which war was not clear. And Singer's stores never flung anything away. They had the same kind of bolt first used to hitch a horse to a cart, and the cross-sheath bolt used by the pioneers crossing the Prairies to open up America. Everything. And John Ferguson, the store man knew it. He now wore the white dust jacket that showed he was no longer just a simple machinist. He was a store man, more like a medic that kept Singers ticking. John Ferguson was no longer eagle beak. He was the man looking down on Archie now.

‘I don’t know what I did with the last pair,’ said Archie, ‘I don’t think I ever had a pair of goggles’.

John Ferguson shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘goggles are mandatory and unless you return your last pair I can’t issue you with another pair’. He went to shut the hatch on his window and shut Archie out of his life.

‘For fuck sake, JOHN,’ said Archie, ‘we went to school together, Our Holy Reedeemers, help me out!’

The hatch reopened enough to give Archie some hope of getting the goggles he needed.

‘Just give me a minute,’ said John Feguson.

John Ferguson always felt that he was fair. The out of breath apprentice who rushed up expectantly to his eyrie and asked for a long wait, was treated in the same way as the woman asking for a short ladder, to put a light bulb in the work’s canteen. Stock taking. It could take a life time, or longer.

John Feguson plonked down a welder’s helmet on the workbench. But he’d given Archie a choice. He’d also put down a pair of Spiderman swimming goggles. ‘That’s all we’ve got,’ he said shutting the hatch as abruptly as he’d opened it.

Archie looked at them and shook his head. That was just plain daft. The things that they did nowadays. Spiderman never went near the water. It should be Skippy the butch Sea Lion goggles, or something like that, not Spiderman.

Phil McMahon put his arm around Archie’s shoulder.

‘Friday. Payday,’ he said, ‘you’ll be goin for a few pints?’ The excitement was fair fizzing out of his mouth, so that he was almost panting.

It had been going for a few pints that had led Archie to the Jehovah’s. God worked in mysterious way.

‘Nah,’ said Archie, ‘I’ve got things to do’. It was tempting. But Saturday was a very special day for the Jehovah’s. And Friday was the day before the very special day.

‘Och, bible bashing, you can do that any day of the week’ said Phil McMahon.

All around them, the petrified remains of the other weekday machinists were reanimated, sprinting by them, fighting each other, to get to the Singer’s exits and get the first pint in.

‘Just have one,’ said Phil Mac Mahon, in a cajoling voice that Satan himself would have been proud of, ‘it’ll no dae yeh any harm’.

‘One.’ Phil MacMahon could see from Archie’s face that he was rocking and teetering and ready to give way.

Phil MacMahon, done that thing with his face, to emphasise his point, so that you’d just want to pat him on the heid, like Lassie the film star dog, and take him home and feed him.

‘A little one?’ His hands quickly shaped into the universal sign for a little one, acknowledged the world over. He pulled out the brown envelope out of the inside of his jacket pocket, with his wages still safely ensconced, ripped it open flamboyantly and said, ‘I’m buying.’

Nobody alive could argue with that.

The Atlantis Bar and Diner was heaving. They didn’t serve food, apart from crisps, but the locals joked that if you threw up, Mac, the barman’s dog, wood eat it, so that technically it was a diner.

Archie looked about him. He could see all the people he knew hammering down the drink as if there was no tomorrow.

‘Just get me half a shandy,’ said Archie. He expected a bit of a performance from Phil McMahon, a ‘am no getting that’ kind of reaction.
But there was nothing like that.

Phil McMahon simply joined the throng at the door, and rode the wave of humanity to the bar, like the expert he was.

Phil McMahon returned the same way, but on a different stream, bouncing back to back off the punters and rattling off the Formica furniture. He had a pint of heavy for himself and a half shandy for Archie. He also had two whiskeys. And they looked like doubles.

‘Here’s to the Jehovah’s,’ said Phil McMahon flinging one whiskey back and drinking it in a oner and slamming the empty glass down on top of one of the shelves that ran around the walls of the pub.

Archie, unlike Phil McMahon, had a half pint of shandy in his hand and a whisky in the other.

‘You Jehovah’s no allowed to drink?’ said Phil McMahon.

‘Aye, I think so,’ said Archie, taking a sip of his shandy.

Phil McMahon took a drink of his pint, eyeballing Archie as if he was a stranger.

‘That’s no drinking,’ said Phil McMahon, flinging back his pint. He waited.

Archie took a little nip out of his whisky the fluid filling his mouth and his stomach with a fuzzy and welcome warmness.

‘You’s Jehovah’s not allowed to buy drink; to buy a round?’

‘Fuck off!’ said Archie, flinging back the half and placing the empty glass down inside another empty glass on the shelf. He put down his shandy beside it.

‘I’ll get you one and that’s it: finished,’ Archie said determinedly.

‘You might as well get yourself one when you’re up there,’ joked Phil McMahon, ‘there’s no telling when you’ll get served next’.

‘So what’s the deal with the Jehovah’s?’ said Phil McMahon taking a double whisky from Archie and placing his pint on top of a space that had been cleared on their table and, even more miraculously than the parting of the Red Sea, they even had seats.

‘Well, they’re nice’, said Archie, putting his pint and whisky down just as carefully on the table.

‘Nice. What do you mean by nice?’ said Phil McMahon, in a way that made you think that nice was not a very good thing to be, a thing that should be spat out immediately.

‘Nice?’ Phil McMahon took a gulp out of his pint, as if reconsidering it. ‘Are the woman nice?’

‘Well, eh, aye, I suppose,’ said Archie.

‘Right, now we’re getting down to it,’ said Phil McMahon leaning in conspiratorially to whisper, ‘who’s nice?’

‘Well there is this one woman, Mary Russell, she’s kinda nice,’ said Archie, snatching a quick drink of his pint, becoming almost garrulous and sure of himself.

‘Well, what’s she like?’ said Phil Mc Mahon settling himself down, in his chair, for what looked like the long hall.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Archie, because it was a difficult question, one that he had never really considered.

‘Well, what colours her hair?’ said Phil McMahon in exasperation.

‘It’s kinda grey,’said Archie, taking a sip of his pint and thinking about it.

‘And what way does she wear it?’ asked Phil McMahon.

‘I don’t know,’ said Archie, ‘it just kinda sits there like a poodle, or something’.

‘Jesus. I’m going to get another round,’ said Phil McMahon.

‘Right. Ok.’ said Phil Mc Mahon as if he had never been away and their had conversation had never been interrupted. He fair stacked up the next questions:‘Has she got big tits? Is she pretty?’

Archie felt disloyal for having to say no to her not having big tits and no for not being especially pretty.

‘She’s got a tattoo,’ Archie said, ‘all the way up her arm, it’s pretty good, like a Celtic cross or something’.

Phil McMahon rolled up his shirt sleeve to show Archie his tattoo on his right arm. It looked something like the word SPUD in Indian ink, but it might have been some other word. The letters, if that’s what they were, looked as if they had been done by an unskilled five year old tatooist.

‘Aye, I don’t know who done this’ said Phil McMahon. ‘It might have been me.’ He took a drink out of his pint. ‘But I’m right handed. And it was obviously a day when I didn’t know what I was trying to say.'

'Anyway, she sounds like an old hippy. What colour are her knickers?’

Archie laughed into his beer.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Phil McMahon might have found that out, but Archie felt he never would, that was for sure.

‘Oh,’ said Phil McMahon, ‘Jehovah’s don't do that kind of thing. So how do they begat each other?'

'Only kiddin' what is it specifically you like about her?’

‘Well, she likes to talk and she’s good at talking. Everything kinda makes sense when you listen to her,’ said Archie, tired out for having spoken for so long.

‘You mean she’s articulate,’ said Phil McMahon raising his pint glass into the air in acknowledgement.

Phil McMahon knew words like that. He should have went to Oxford or Cambridge or St Pat’s Secondary. That way he could have learned Latin and Greek and been able to talk God’s language and tell Him where it all went wrong. He was dux of the school, so it wasn’t clear how he ended up at St Columbus Secondary, learning useless things like woodwork and metalwork. The girls didn’t learn that kind of crap. They learned useful things like how to bake cakes from scratch so that they wouldn’t need to drop into Harrod’s for one.

‘Aye,’ that’s what I mean,’ said Archie, ‘she’s articulate’.

‘The thing is,’ said Phil McMahon, ‘it doesn’t matter how articulate she is. She’s no going to be able to talk her way into heaven. There’s only 144 000 ewes allowed into heaven. And lets put that into some kind of perspective, that’s since Adam and Eve were born or created and jumping about the virgiin earth. There’s about 6 billion on the planet just now and say another 4 billion since then. That’s 10 billion. Lets round that up to about 150 000 of the elect. We should actually be rounding down since I’m not counting the disciples and Mary, but never mind. The odds of you getting to heaven are roughly 15 million to one.

And that’s only for people that don’t know you in the way I do. You’re better sticking with what we’ve got. We’re Catholics. You just say to God on your deathbed that you’re sorry. And if that’s no enough, you’re really sorry. And if that’s no enough, a Prayer to St Anthony should swing it.’

‘You want another pint?’ Phil McMahon said.

‘I think I’ll need more than one,’ said Archie.

‘Just make sure when you’re going up the road tonight, you walk down Kilbowie Road. Don’t walk up the way, by the Kingdom Hall. We don’t want you to get mugged,’ said Phil Mahon.