Ye want a death on yer conscience? Still.’ His face assumed a look of martyred generosity. ‘Tell ye what. Ah’ll take the price of it an’ have it when Ah finish. Probably no’ get a wink of sleep the night. But ye’ve got to get some pleasure.’
Frankie remembered Harry’s nickname – Harry Kari. He wasn’t sure whether the nickname was because that was what everybody felt like trying after a conversation with Harry or because that was what people thought Harry should do. No wonder Gus McPhater was quoted as saying, ‘Harry does for conversation what lumbago does for dancin’.’ Harry was the kind of barman who told you his problems.
‘Religion?’ Gus McPhater was saying. He was always saying something. ‘Don’t waste ma time. The opium of the masses. It’s done damage worse than a gross of atomic bombs. Chains for the brainbox, that’s religion. Ministers? Press agents for the rulin’ classes. Ye’ll no’ catch me in a church. If Ah could, Ah’d cancel ma christenin’ retrospectively. Take yer stained-glass windaes. Whit’s a windae for? To see through. Right? So what do they do? They cover it in pictures. So that when ye look at the light. The light, mind ye. That’s how ye see, ye know. Light refractin’ on yer pupils. When ye look for the light, it gets translated intae what they want ye tae see. How’s that for slavery? An’ whit d’ye see? A lot of holy mumbo-jumbo. People Ah don’t know from Adam. What’ve a bunch of first-century Jewish fanatics got to do wi’ me? Ah’ll tell ye what. Know when Ah’ll go intae a church? When it’s man’s house. When the stained-glass windaes are full of holy scenes of rivetters in bunnets and women goin’ the messages wi’ two weans hangin’ on to their arse an’ auld folk huddled in at one bar of an electric fire after fifty years o’ slavin’ their guts out for a society that doesny care if they live or die. Those would be windaes worth lookin’ at. That’s what art should be. Holy pictures of the people. Or a mosaic even. How about that? See when they made that daft town centre. The new precinct. The instant slum. See instead o’ that fountain. Why not a big mosaic? Showin’ the lives of the people here an’ now. How about that? The Graithnock mosaic. Why no?’
Frankie had no desire to join in. He contented himself with a mime of his superior status. Gus McPhater depressed him. People listened to him as if the noises he made with his mouth meant something. He was a balloon. A lot of stories were told about him. He was supposed to have travelled all round the world. He was supposed to be writing a novel or short stories or something. Frankie didn’t believe any of them.
Gus seemed to Frankie an appropriate patron saint for Graithnock. He was like the town itself – over the hill and sitting in dark pubs inventing the past. Frankie could remember this place when the industry was still going strong. There had been some vigour about the place then. They were all losers now – phoneys, like Gus McPhater.
Frankie couldn’t believe this place. The only kind of spirit in it was bottled. He felt like an orchid in a cabbage-patch. Where was the old style, the old working-class gallousness? Since the Tory government had come to power, it had really done a job on them, slaughtering all the major industry. They believed they were as useless as the government had told them they were. These men were the cast-offs of capitalism. They were pathetic.
Well, he was different. If the system was trying to screw him, he would screw it. He had his own heroes and they weren’t kings of industry. He thought of McQueen. He wondered how long it would be before McQueen got back out. McQueen, there was a man. He was more free in the nick than most men were outside it.
That was what you had to do: defy your circumstances. You were what you declared yourself to be. Frankie looked round the bar and made a decision. He would buy a drink for someone. He pulled his wad of money from his pocket. In the flourish of the gesture he became a successful criminal.
He decided on Gus McPhater’s group. His distaste for them somehow made the gesture grander. He felt like Robin Hood giving the poor a share of his spoils. Besides, Gus was a great talker. Buying him a drink was as good as a photograph in the paper. They would know he had been. He threw a fiver on the counter.
‘Harry,’ he said loudly. ‘Give Gus an’ the boys whatever they want.’
He noticed a boy who was drinking alone watching him interestedly. It was all the encouragement Frankie needed. He made an elaborate occasion of getting the drinks and taking them over to Gus’s table. He dismissed their thanks with a wave. He took his change and put some of the silver into the bottle where they collected for the old folks. The whole thing became a mini-epic, a Cecil B. De Mille production called ‘The Drink’.
‘Okay,’ Frankie said, saluting the room. ‘Don’t do any-thin’ Ah wouldn’t do. If ye can think of anythin’ Ah wouldn’t do.’
As he went out, he heard the boy asking, ‘Who is that?’ Stepping into the street, he felt the gulped whisky sting his stomach. It was a twinge that matched the bad feeling the pub had given him. Hopeless, he thought. But maybe he was wrong. He remembered the admiration on the boy’s face as he had asked who Frankie was. Frankie lightened his step and started to whistle.
A good actor never entirely knows the impact he is having. Perhaps in the thinnest house, unnoticed beyond the glare of the actor’s preoccupation, a deep insight is being experienced or young ambitions being formed for life.
He would try ‘The Cock and Hen’. There might be some real people in there. He side-stepped into a shop doorway and checked his wad of money. He had three fivers left and he repositioned them carefully to make sure they were concealing the packing of toilet paper inside that made them look like a hundred. He would try ‘The Cock and Hen’.
3
On the sidelines
British Summer Time had officially begun but, if you didn’t have a diary, you might not have noticed. The few people standing around in the Dean Park under a smirring rain didn’t seem to be convinced. They knew the clocks had been put forward an hour – that was what enabled these early evening football matches to take place. But the arbitrary human decision to make the nights lighter hadn’t outwitted the weather. The Scottish climate still had its stock of rain and frost and cold snaps to be used up before the summer came, assuming it did.
Two football pitches were in use. On one of them a works’ game was in progress. On the adjoining pitch two Boys’ Brigade teams were playing. Standing between touchlines, John Hannah, his coat collar up, paid most attention to the Boys’ Brigade game – he was here to see Gary – but the works’ match, so noisy and vigorous and expletive, was impossible to ignore. It impinged on the comparative decorum of the boys’ game like the future that was coming to them, no matter what precepts of behaviour the Company Leaders tried to impose on them. John had heard some of the other parents complaining ostentatiously at half-time about the inadvisability of booking a pitch beside a works’ game. ‘After all, it’s an organisation to combat evil influences, not arrange to give them a hearing,’ a woman in a blue antartex coat and jodhpurs and riding-boots had said. Presumably the horse was a white charger.
John found the contrast between the games instructive. It was like being sandwiched between two parts of his past. The works’ game was an echo of his own origins. He had himself played in games like that often enough. Standing so close to the crunch of bone on bone, the thud of bodies, the force of foot striking ball, he remembered what a physically hard game football is. Watching it from a grandstand, as he had so often lately, you saw it bowdlerised a little, refined into an aesthetic of itself. The harshness of it made him wonder if that was why he hadn’t pursued the game as determinedly as his talent might have justified. He hoped that wasn’t the reason but lately the sense of other failures had made him quest back for some root, one wrong direction taken that had led on to all the others. He had wondered if he had somehow always been a quitter, and his refusal to take football seriously as a career had come back to haunt him.
Three separate people whose opinions he respected had told him he could be a first-class professional footballer. The thought of that had sustained him secretly at different times of depression for years, like an option still open, and it was only fairly recently that he had forced