SEV 2

My brother watched me playing for the Boy’s Guild on St Stephen’s gravel park. He stood under a tree with his mate Billy Quinn, both of them wearing long black trench coats and Doc Martens, and they passed back and forth a half bottle of Bell’s whisky. Torrential rain had straightened Billy’s brown curly mop of hair, but left untouched his curling lip and impish grin. He lived up the road from us near Clydebank High school. My brother used to cut about with him and Jaz Sweeney who stayed beside Billy.

Stephen, or SEV, as he liked to be called then, told me the story of how some old codger had tried to take a gat gun off them—until he pointed it at him.

Before I went to join my teammates to get a drink of diluted orange juice at half time, SEV shouted me across.

‘You did great,’ before adding in a lower tone. ‘You really did alright!’

Billy sniggered at the suggestion.  My brother thrust their whisky bottle at me, an offer to take a swig and warm myself up.

I’d tried whisky before, we all had, at house parties. Three or four records on repeat. Peters and Lee’s Welcome Home warbled to death by da and mum’s pals. They even found a way of dancing to it, but only because they were already drunk. Peters had knocked them dead on the clapmometer of  The Hughie Green show Opportunity Knocks, was blind, and could find his way to the piano and even play it with sunglasses on. I often wondered if his blindness meant that he couldn’t know that his partner with her long hair and pretty face was a complete shag. SEV floated about between chairs and stole a nip of the whisky from drunken uncles—any of my da or mum’s friends were given the honorary term uncle, or auntie— a mouthful of vodka out of glasses topped with lemonade, women’s drinks, sipped with a fag in their hand by mum and my aunties. A partly filled can of Pale Ale or McEwan’s decanted to the kitchen or hall, with a few stolen cigarettes also smuggled away under the smoke screen. Younger kids like me and my cousin John McFadden were more likely to nick the mixers, take an up-and-downer of lemonades and ginger beer and make that face that suggested it was rotten, but we’d drink it, anyway. Recognition that the only way adults could enjoy drinking was if they were already drunk.

The kind of face I put on when I sipped the nip of whisky handed me by SEV. ‘Cheers,’ I said, before jogging back to my drookit teammates huddled near the centre circle.  

Billy sniggered and, with a wave of his arm indicated the world was his kingdom, he’d seen enough and was leaving, offered advice that hung in the air longer than I did when trying to win headers against their centre-forward. ‘Try and no make another cunt of it, will yeh.’

We’d a new three seater couch and two tan chairs to contend with at home. Real leather, plastic, still to be paid up, expensive as could be. Plastic covers were kept on the stripy orange cushions.

‘Hi,’ da warned us, when we sat on it. ‘That’s no a trampoline.’

Da could splash his bum down on it. He favoured the seat beside the fire surround, where he could keep an eye on us. And God help us if we giggled.

The only proper way to sit on the seat near the window was to hover and wait for Scotty in Star Trek to beam you up out of it, which suited da fine. Children should be seen and not heard, and preferably neither seen nor heard.  

When da stomped off to his room to read his books, Scotty could beam us back down again.

Da’s pal, John McGinlay, who he’d got a job in the shipyard in Bowling, was almost a caricature. A pinstriped, big, fat, jolly guy that hoovered up all the whisky. McGinlay’s speciality was the Al Jolson numbers, ‘How he loved them, How he loved them, My dear old Mammy…He’d walk a million miles for one of their smiles’. But like everybody else he was a chain smoker and prone to crumbling sideways and missing the ashtray and leaving not one, but two full strength fag burn on arm-rest of the settee. We could finally take the plastic covers off the cushions.

   SEV was back working as an apprentice joiner. The company he’d been working for had gone bankrupt. He got paid off, and his chances of getting another job poor. Over a million unemployed and a record number in Scotland, one job for every five school leavers. But a family friend, John Connolly, got him another start with the company renovating the houses we lived in, and he could finish his apprenticeship. He used to nip back to our house at lunchtime.

I was hiding snuggly under my bed wrapped in my Parker jacket in the room until he left. We’d been burgled a few times because we left the back and front door open. I remember picking up the garter of a green and gold snake belt from our house as I jumped from stone to stone at the shortcut that took me down to Shakespeare Avenue. For a few weeks we’d be vigilant, before going back to normal. It made it easier to come and go when dogging school.

The living-room door opened and I heard the pad of his feet in the hall. My sisters’ room door being opened, and the light switch. It was darker early in short winter days, and with the slats of venetian blinds the rooms remained gloomy and cold. Wardrobe doors were banged open and shut.

I held my breath when he came into our room. He flicked the light switch. Our three beds in a row, his unmade bed nearest the window, with the ashtray underneath it, and the dark panelled, wing-mirrored chest of drawers, with his record player on top and pushed against the wall. Records and LPs, Mud, Bay City Rollers and the late fifties sound of Buddy Holly and the Cricket piled under its legs.  He got down on one knee and looked under the bed and grinned.

‘Whit you daeing under there?’

‘Nothing,’ I looked back at him and clambered out from under the bed. ‘Don’t tell mum,’ I begged him.

I followed him back through to the living room, taking off my jacket and hanging it on the cupboard door in the hall. From the kitchen window sill I heard on the tranny an old Gary Glitter record being played about being in his gang, his gang. Two bars on the electric fire heated my brother’s thick football socks on the brown rug. Discoloured work boots on the fire surround, stinking of damp, round toes pushed up, and the zig-zag soles flapping mid-air in front of the bars. He’d a mug of tea sitting on the mantelpiece beside the glazed pot of an overflowing ashtray that bookended it beside a statue of the Virgin Mary with her chalk marks showing, and her snub nose missing. His cheese sandwiches unwrapped in his lap. With a fag smouldering in his mouth, he considered which one to pick, although they were all much the same size, before he held one out.

I took it, slowly chewed the Sunblest bread, before taking the other seat near the window and facing the telly. I looked at the empty screen.  ‘How did you find me?’

He snorted, ‘the teapot was warm’.

We were tea snobs, using unfiltered Tetley to make a pot, and believed it made us morally superior to our neighbours like the Henry’s that used tea bags. Confirmation that we were better than them came when Cammy and Jim admitted sometimes instead of potatoes, their mum sometimes whipped them up Smash!

Crazy sounding, but hip, metallic robots on the telly advertised them, but was the ultimate reddy. As far as our family were concerned, if it wasn’t a potato, it wasn’t dinner.

‘You gonnae tell mum?’

He stretched and scratched at the back of his mane of  brown hair. ‘Might do.’  

I’d nothing to counter with. It was no secret he was seeing wee Emily. Even before she’d left school, they were a couple. He was almost six-foot and her platform shoes with six-inch heels took her up to the gaudy heights of almost five-foot. She was a soft little perfumed teddy bear with red lipstick and long thick dark hair that cascaded to her wee bum, dark doe eyes, long eyelashes and a hint of Mediterranean skin. In a Kiss-Me-Quick hat, cute as a button. She favoured dark colours, white blouse and skirt, but sometimes black slacks with flares so wide they came together as a split dress that covered her shoes, and pop-up white socks. Squeeze her and she’d giggle. He was the one with the sour puss and when drunk got nasty. Already she was beginning to offer up alibis, even when he battered her twin brother, Gerry. She thought he looked like the lead singer in The Bay City Rollers.