grimms19

Dermot picks up Angela and carries her into his wee boy’s room. His son, a step ahead in the lobby, slips into the room picks up his book of fairy stories and peels back the blankets. Dermot tucks her into the bed, near the wall and leaves them to it. Already late, he flicks the light off on his way out.

Undressing isn’t easy for him, with one hand, clothes piled higgledy-piggledy on the unmatched wooden chair.  Bed is more a destination in the gloom than sitting up.  Slumber and sleep mix the hours in a portion of night pains. Fog outside, drifting, cotton wools the window and colours his dreams and carries the drifting sound of hammering on the Clyde. Not a light shows when he rises. In  the silence of the close the creaking groan of bare feet on floorboards as he tiptoes is like a haunting. He rummages in the back of the  kitchen cupboard where his wife had kept the medicines, the calamine lotions and potions and strips of bandages that would see out childhood sunburn, but not death. His hand knocks against a striped, heavy brown bottle crusted at the top. He has trouble opening it, sniffs it and takes a slug. Cough mixture. About a third of a bottle. He downs it in one go, figuring it might not help the pain, but it might help him sleep and if it doesn’t he’ll not have a cough to contend with for a while.

He sits with a blanket round him by a fire that is grey embers. He stokes it and builds the flames gradually with coal, with the eye of a stonemason building a dry-stone dyke. He warms his feet and nurses his hand, the night empty. His eyes are shutting when he hears what is more a scratching than chapping on the front door.  He picks the poker up and pushes it deep into the coal embers, waiting until the tip is hot enough to sizzle in his hand before pulling it out. Cocking his head and listening, the letterbox lightly raps and he swiftly makes his way to the door. With his bad hand he can’t hold the poker and pull the door open, so opts to lean it upright against the facing. The smell of burning linoleum hurries him even more. He turns the key and pulls the door open, reaching for the poker.  

Karen stands gawping at him, her eyes thicker with black eyeliner than Cleopatra. She’s bathed not in the milk of asses, but gallon drums of perfume. Nightgown and slippers are her night attire, her voice low and husky, ‘Is my wee lassie there?’

She makes no mention of the poker in his hand and he’s not quite sure what to do with it or where to put it. He settles for sticking it where he left it, regardless of the linoleum. ‘Aye,’ he says.

‘Well, can I speak to her?’

‘No, you cannae. She’s sleepin’ and after whit you done to her I wouldnae let you keep a dog.’

‘Angela,’ she shouts in the door. ‘It’s your Mum, are you in there, hen?’

‘Hi,’ he shouts, ‘I’ve already told you.’ He leans forward, breathing her in. ‘I’ve seen the marks on her wee body, yah, cruel, fuckin’ cow, yeh.’   

Her head drops and she looks up at him through straggles of blonde hair. ‘Look sometimes things get out of hand. She can be helluva cheeky and I admit I sometimes do go overboard. But I cannae get to sleep in that big bed myself.’

‘Well, you should have thought of that before.’

‘Nae need for that, getting all high-and-mighty on me. They’re thin walls you know. Don’t think I didnae hear you blowin’ up with your wife. And I heard every blow and her screaming for you to stop.’

Angela stands beside Dermot, her bush of golden hair making her seem taller, almost up to his hip. She looks up at her mum her eyes full of sleep.

‘C’mon hen,’ Karen says in a soft voice. ‘I’ll take you away from the bad man.’ And she holds her arms out and Angela pushes past Dermot and is lifted up, clutched tight against her mother’s breast.

He watches them going next door, clicking the door shut behind them and locking out the world. He picks up the poker and drifts down the stairs, keeping an eye out and listening. Satisfied that the dog is no longer hanging from the bars he goes back upstairs and shuts the door. There’s little point going to bed, he sits on the chair waiting until it’s time to go to work.

Falling asleep he wakes with a start. His hand feels as if he’s pushed it into the coal fire. Getting on his clothes takes him twenty minutes and he has to leave his shoes untied. Pulling his coat from the door he finds he cannot punch his right hand through the sleeve and leaves it drooping over his shoulder.

The mist and fog outside claims him and makes what he looks like as irrelevant as curtains on a brick wall. There’s motion in the haze and he knows from noise and looming lights it is traffic. Smudges of people pass him on the pavement and drift away. But his feet know the way and filling his lungs with misty air is a salve to his fingers.

The yard filled with coal is a black hole, darker than the rest. Beneath the fog is trucks rumbling and voices. He hears two men coming towards him and percolating fog gives voice to a tall man in a reefer jacket wearing rimless specs. ‘You took your time,’ his gaffer Billy says.

The other man is Archie the truck driver. He is small and square of stature, reeks of booze, and grunt and spits to show what he thinks of the weather. ‘I didnae see you there,’ he says to Dermott in a joking tone.

‘I’ve no’ been that well,’ says Dermot.

‘Too much of the booze,’ says Archie. ‘You got a match?’

When Dermot looks at him again a Woodbine dangles on his bottom lip. ‘You’re a stingy cunt,’ he says. ‘You never buy a box of matches.’ He needs to humph his back and use his good hand to get the box of Swan Vestas out of his pocket, his coat falling to the ground. He tosses the matches to Archie before picking up his coat.

‘Whit’s the matter with your hand?’ Billy asks.

Dermot holds it up under Billy's nose so that he can get a good look. Archie crowds in as his shoulder to get a decent gander and he whistles.

‘No more wanking for you,’ Archie says.

‘Jesus,’ says Billy, ‘a man down and with the weather being so bad, and it being so good for us. His voice rises up like an accusation. ‘We’ll be awful busy.’ Then his voice drops. ‘You’ll need to go on the panel,' he informs him. 'Get back to me when you’re better.’ Already he’s drifting away, preoccupied and dismissing him.

An Alsatian dog, Sabre, rubs against Dermot's leg as he’s picking up his coat and flinging it over his shoulder. The world’s worst guard dog. The joke among the men in the yard was that it should have been a whippet at Shawland’s track the speed it ran away from any loud noise. And that anybody that came to steal coal would just as likely get licked to death. It’s nose is cold and Dermot gives it a playful pat on the head as it follows him out the gate before panting and disappearing back into the mist.