Prized Possessions (34 page)

‘Aye, all set, Tommy.'

‘Got the gin bottles on ice?'

‘We'll no' be needin' ice in this weather, I'm thinkin'.'

‘You're right. It'll be hot toddy for t' toast the Auld Year awa'?'

‘Maybe just a drop,' Janet conceded. In fact two bottles of Standfast were already reposing in the pot cupboard where her mother couldn't reach them and two lemons were hidden in the pocket of her overcoat in the back shop. ‘We're not much for celebratin' in our house, though.'

‘Much like m'self,' Tommy said, with a wry smile. ‘A quiet Hogmanay at home'll suit me just fine this year.'

Janet handed over the envelope and watched it vanish into Tommy's breast pocket. She said, sceptically, ‘That'll be right.'

‘True, but,' Tommy said. ‘Been a bad year for me. Nothin' seemed t' go right at all. I doubt if next year'll be much better. In fact, it'll probably be a damned sight worse.' He gave a cough, a sigh. ‘Anyway, I'll be wishin' you an' yours a good New Year, Jinty.'

‘An' to yourself, Tommy, an' to yourself,' said Janet.

Then he'd pushed himself away from the counter and, shoulders sagging under his stained trench coat, battered little hat pulled down on his brow, the last half-inch of a cigarette hanging from his lip, he had slouched out into the street to face his final destiny.

*   *   *

Bells rang, factory hooters sounded, ships on the river whooped their whistles and the gang of Goodtime Charleys, girls as well as boys, that had gathered at Gorbals Cross let out an uproarious cheer to greet the New Year, their ardour undampened by the thin drizzle that tumbled down out of the sky.

Beer bottles, whisky bottles and glasses of various shapes and sizes went the rounds. There was much back-slapping and hand-shaking and a bit of passionate kissing around the Parisian-style monument. Impromptu choruses of ‘Auld Lang Syne' led to a conga line that went round and round and in and out for a while. Then one serious young man leaped on to the monument and, hands clasped at his breast, sang ‘A Guid New Year to One and All' in a rich tenor voice that brought tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat and might even have mellowed the rougher element in the crowd if the songbird hadn't then slipped into ‘The Old Rugged Cross', a liberty that brought glassware smashing about him and, for some if not others, robbed the celebration of much of its fun.

In No. 10 Lavender Court, Lizzie Conway's girls leaned from the front-room window. They were excited, though for no particular reason since none of them planned on going out on the tiles; stimulated by the promise of the untarnished year ahead, a year in which they might continue to make their marks on life and receive in return – as Lizzie could have told them – such marks as life might chose to lay upon them.

Lizzie did not join her girls in the front room or share their eagerness to lay another year to rest. As always at this time she was possessed of strange wistful longings and a feeling that time, like a Highland river, had begun its tumbling plunge down off the heights. She did not toll off the years, though, did not make nostalgic tally of losses and gains, did not seek to separate good times from bad. She just preferred to be alone, all alone during the two or three unmagical minutes when the clock on the mantelpiece ticked up to midnight.

This year, though, it wasn't so bad, not so bad at all.

When the clock chimed and the racket outside started and the first bloodcurdling yells came from the tenements and some idiot blared away on a bugle as if 1931 was thundering in upon them like a cavalry charge, Lizzie turned her head and glanced towards the kitchen door. Any second now her daughters would rush from the bedroom into the lobby and fling open the front door and the Gowers, the surly, sullen brother and sister who lived across the landing, would make the supreme sacrifice and actually exchange a few words of greeting without, of course, setting foot across the step, an act that would have been considered not just bad luck but almost treasonable to any true-born Scot.

Although she knew it would not happen, that it was asking too much of him, too soon, Lizzie toyed with the notion that Bernard might come leaping up the stairs with a bottle in one hand and a ring in the other and, throwing himself down upon his knees, demand that she become his bride.

In the two or three seconds that it took the clock to count to twelve, the thought, the wish became so strong that it seemed like its own fulfilment and left her not disappointed but rueful when instead of Bernard her girls, her three darling daughters, flung themselves upon her, crying and laughing, and demanding that she pour them a drink.

She had purchased a bottle of sweet fizzy wine to go with the bottle of whisky that tradition demanded she have on hand. She had put out plates of sausage rolls, sultana cake and crusty black bun and, with the fire blazing bright in the range, the kitchen shining like a new pin and her daughters romping about her, she was content to let the dream of becoming Bernard Peabody's wife remain a dream, a little mirage that bobbed and floated hazily along the horizon, and to be that which she had always been, Lizzie McKerlie Conway, no wife but a widow, and mother to three growing girls. Except that they were growing girls no longer. They were women, young women. Their need of her and her influence over them would inevitably dwindle and this year or next year she would surely waken up to discover that she had lost them – even Rosie – that they had gone out to face the world on their own which was, she realised, just as it should be.

‘Mammy, are you crying?' Rosie asked.

‘Nah, nah.'

‘She always cries at the New Year,' said Babs. ‘Everybody her age does.'

‘Well…' Lizzie said, helplessly. ‘Well…'

She felt Polly's arms around her waist, Polly's brow rubbing against her shoulder and, glancing down, saw that her oldest had a little rim of tears, clear and shimmery, in her eyes too.

‘I know, Mammy. I know,' Polly said, very quietly.

And Babs, expertly plying a corkscrew, said, ‘Right. Who wants what?'

*   *   *

The Conways barely had time to drink one anothers' health, to beseech the two-faced god to bestow wealth and happiness upon the family and bring abundance in the shape of full employment back to Clydeside, before a cry went up on the landing and a booming fist beat upon the landing door.

Polly and Babs glanced at each other nervously but Rosie, picking up the vibrations, grinned and said, ‘First-foots, I do believe. Will I open the door?'

‘No,' said Polly, hastily. ‘That's Mammy's job.'

She looked at her mother, frowning. She had no need to put into words what was on her mind: that this was no cheerful guest bearing traditional symbols of plenty but some merchant of violence who had come to spill blood not bounty all over the kitchen floor.

‘Ahap – ahap – ahapp-ppy New Year,'
a voice yelled.

And Babs said, sighing, ‘It's only Jackie Hallop.'

‘I'll let him in,' said Lizzie. ‘If you want me to, that is.'

‘I thought you couldn't stand him?' Polly said.

‘I can't,' said Lizzie. ‘But it isn't up to me. Babs, will I let him in?'

‘Sure,' Babs said, more pleased than not. ‘It's New Year's, after all.'

Jackie did not come alone. He brought his brother Dennis with him and one of the sisters, Louise, who was just about old enough to tag along. They rushed into Lizzie's house on a wave of jubilation as if all the problems that had accumulated in the closing weeks of 1930 had vanished at the stroke of midnight and forgiveness as well as forgetfulness had descended upon all and sundry.

There was indiscriminate kissing and hugging, a sharing of drink, a mildly manic quality in Jackie that manifested itself in a need to prance about. He wasn't drunk, not even tipsy, just filled with relief that Mrs Conway had seen fit to open the door to him and that Babs had apparently decided to forgive him his past transgressions and had even let him kiss her without protest. For Jackie this was a good start, the best sort of start to the year and his high spirits soon infected the Conway girls and even swept away some of solemn Polly's reserve.

Rosie brought in the gramophone, wound it up, and coaxed it to play a scratchy old record of ‘Everybody's Doin' It', to which Jackie and Babs danced in the space between the table and the sink and Louise, who'd been at the whisky as well as the sweet white wine, sang a version of the chorus that would have brought a blush to Lizzie's cheek on any other occasion.

It was about a quarter to one when Jackie merrily suggested that they all go out and Babs shouted, merrily, ‘Yeah, yeah.
Everybody's
doin' it,' and Lizzie said, ‘Where? Who?' and Jackie said, ‘Down the Cross, Mrs Conway, just down the Cross for half an hour.'

And, after a pause, Lizzie said, ‘All right then. Polly, go too.'

And they went, all of them except Rosie who in that fickle way of hers elected to stay at home and keep Mammy company, mainly because crowds made her uncomfortable and she, of them all, retained a fear that Alex O'Hara might be out there, lurking, and that it would be better not to run the risk of meeting up with him again, face to face, no matter what Polly said about Mr Manone being on their side now.

They were gone in minutes, coated, hatted and chattering, storming off down the dank stairs out into the noisy streets while Rosie, not at all depressed at being left behind, wound up the gramophone and put her good ear to the metal sound box and listened, smiling, to the other side of the scratchy black record, and Lizzie loitered all alone on the landing, smoking a cigarette, listening to another song entirely, one that nobody else could hear.

*   *   *

For some reason best known to himself Tommy Bonnar did indeed return to the top-floor flat in Lilyburn Street at the back end of the Calcutta Road to bring in the New Year in the bosom of his family.

The fact that he was half seas over and barely able to find the close let alone the stairs might have had something to do with his decision not to loiter in the streets, but there may have been other reasons too. He was certainly in a bad way when he reached the fourth-floor landing and it was all his little nephews and nieces could do to guide him into the single-end and steer him to a chair by the fire where, still clad in trench coat and hat, still with a cigarette hanging from his lip, Tommy flopped down and instantly fell asleep.

It was then about twenty minutes to midnight and the size of Tommy's family had been considerably reduced by Maggie's defection several hours beforehand and by the departure of three of her offspring, led by nine-year-old Colin, on a begging spree. After all it was Hogmanay, a time when the generosity of Glaswegian drunks knew no bounds where kiddies and small animals were concerned, a fact of which Maggie's brood were very well aware.

For this reason the little tearaways – two boys and a six-year-old girl – picked up a stray dog, a ragged mongrel too weak to escape pursuit. They carried it turn about in their arms and trailed from public house to public house, asking for pennies with a pathos that was all the more poignant for being calculated. Even after the pubs closed at ten, fish-and-chip shops and coffee stalls stayed open and there were plenty of folk about. Tommy's nephews and niece, to be polite about it, bought chips and hot pies and ginger beer with the pennies they had wrung from passers-by. They fed the dog and stored some chips in greasy paper to take back to Lilyburn Street for the babies, the three- and four-and five-year-olds who had rescued Uncle Tommy from a night on the stairs.

Wet through, big-eyed and shaky with the need for sleep, they might even have trailed home before midnight if the lure of the gathering at Gorbals Cross had not proved too strong. Hidden in the midst of the crowd, they counted out the minutes to midnight, cheered in the New Year, listened to the singing, watched the fights and petted the dog they carried in their weary arms, turn and turn about.

Meanwhile, Maggie was sprawled on the bed of a man she had met in the back bar of Brady's, an amiable and persuasive stranger who lodged not with a family but in a room of his own in a boarding-house near Eglinton Toll. Maggie had no idea who the chap was and by the time she staggered back to the boarding-house with him she was so topped up with gin and brandy that she might have been going off with the Man in the Moon for all she cared.

Whether the stranger had intercourse with her or whether he did not Maggie Bonnar had no clue.

Shortly before midnight she passed into a state of insensibility that was her idea of bliss, a sleep so deep and sound that nothing could waken her from it, not bells or whistles or hooters or, about ten minutes past the hour of one, the clang-clang-clang of the Southern Division fire brigade hastening to answer its first call-out of the year, a summons to a tenement fire in Lilyburn Street in the backlands of the Calcutta Road.

Chapter Sixteen

The silence in the streets was uncanny. It was already after eleven o'clock in the morning but there was hardly a soul about and all the shops, even wee corner dairies and newsagents, were shuttered and barred. Along the length of the Calcutta Road not a bus or tramcar was visible. Even at the road's end the thoroughfares lay empty as far as the eye could see.

Night rain had washed the smoke away and over Glasgow as well as the Gorbals the sky was a clear liquid blue. But the gutters still ran with mud, back courts contained great dark spreading lakes and the eaves of old buildings dripped and dribbled, their sandstone walls puckered with moisture.

At the top of the tenement in Lilyburn Street there were no signs of the fire that had claimed three lives.

Polly had to push herself to enter the close and walk through to the backs to detect evidence of it. Even that was little enough, hardly more than another stain on the stained building, a sooty thumbprint high on the wall close to the roof. The kitchen window was not broken, merely cracked, and beneath the ledge, above the common lines of wash, was a salty sort of splash-mark left, perhaps, by the firemen's hose.