don’t go to all that trouble for nothing. Where would ye get a good inside forward anyway? They’ve spent good money before this and it’s been money wasted. They’re better sticking tae what they’ve got.’
‘Trouble, aye it’s trouble all right,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Eight or nine years they get, every time. But you’re right enough I suppose, some of their best servants was players they got for nothing.’
‘Well, so what?’ O’Neill asked. ‘Would you no’ do eight or nine year to come out tae thirty or forty thousand?’
‘Aye, if I was coming out tae it,’ said O’Donnell. ‘But that’s what I’m arguing, they’ll no’ come out tae it. The minute they touch it they’ll be lifted.’
‘But they’ve served their time, haven’t they?’ said O’Neill. ‘They canny put them in jail twice for the wan offence.’
‘That’s murder you’re thinking of,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Robbery’s different. Sure they’d take the money from them, wouldn’t they? They’d never let them get away wi’ it. That would make it too easy. I’d do it myself for eight or nine year.’
‘But suppose somebody else has been keeping it to feed it back to them when they come out, ye know, in regular payments, quiet like.’
‘Who could they trust to keep thirty or forty thousand for them?’ O’Donnell asked derisively. ‘Would you trust anybody wi’ that amount o’ money if you were inside for eight or nine year?’
‘I don’t know,’ said O’Neill thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never had that amount o’ money. Maybe ye could if ye made it worth their while. What’ll ye have?’
‘Just as a matter of interest, how many is that now?’ O’Donnell asked.
‘It’s only yer second,’ said O’Neill. ‘You put the first wan up when we came in and that’s all we’ve had. Do ye want the same again?’
‘Naw, no’ the drinks, the bank robberies I mean ye’re talking about,’ said O’Donnell. ‘Anderston, Ibrox, Maryhill, Whiteinch, that’s four at least.’
‘Oh, there’s been a lot mair nor that,’ said O’Neill. ‘And tae think it’s a’ lying somewhere! They’re a’ inside and the money’s outside. Thirty thousand here and forty thousand there and the same again and mair. It would break yer heart just thinking about it.’
‘Aye, it would be a bit of all right finding even wan o’ they stacks. Will ye be up seeing the Bhoys on Saturday?’
‘Aye, ye could find it but would ye have the nerve tae spend it?’ said O’Neill. ‘Och aye, I’ll be there all right.’
‘I’ll see ye here at two o’clock then,’ said O’Donnell. ‘I like seeing the Bhoys when they’re doing well.’
‘But I’ll see ye before then,’ said O’Neill. ‘Ye’ll be in here the night aboot eight, will ye no’?’
‘Och aye, sure,’ said O’Donnell. ‘The Bhoys is drawing big money the now all right.’
‘Forty-five thousand there last Saturday,’ said O’Neill.
They took no more after O’Neill had returned O’Donnell’s hospitality. They were two steady working-men, and they went straight home for their tea after their second drink. They knew they would be back in the same pub in a couple of hours. And besides Glasgow’s plague of bank robberies there was the state of the Yards on the Clyde to discuss, and there was the Celtic football team to talk about. For two Glasgow Irishmen that was a topic as inexhaustible as the weather to two Englishmen.
CHAPTER TWO
That same evening, in the Bute Hall, the Glasgow University Choral Society and the University Orchestra gave a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. It was damned with faint praise by the music critic of the local paper, a sour Scotsman who complained of the acoustics and found the choir’s hundred and eight voices too light for the place and purpose. O’Neill and O’Donnell, like most people in the city, didn’t know the Mass was being sung by the University Choral Society, so they weren’t present. They were back in the Tappit Hen before the Sanctus. But among those who did attend the Bute Hall was the unwitting hero of this true narrative, a culture-hungry teenager who had failed in his eleven-plus examination and come to life at sixteen, just after he left school. He was working as a packer in the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society in Nelson Street, but he knew he deserved something a lot better. He went about his daily chores with a dagger of bitterness against a system that had refused him a higher education just because he didn’t happen to pass an examination when he was only twelve. He tried to educate himself. He went to the public library every night and brought home books on philosophy, psychology, economics, and the history of art from the cave-paintings to Picasso. He found his pleasure in the very act of borrowing them. When the girl stamped the date-label and filed the title-slips with his tickets he was sure she admired and respected him. Nobody else in his unjust position would have had the courage and intelligence to borrow such books. He had always to take them back before he had time to read them, but he felt that even having them in the house was something. To see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the kitchen dresser alongside the first volume of Marx’s Capital was a great consolation to him. You never knew who might come in and see them. It only annoyed his mother. She had no patience with him.
‘It’s high time you took them books back,’ she scolded him every time she dusted the dresser where she displayed her grandmother’s two brass candlesticks, the four large seashells she had brought home from her holiday at Millport the year she was married, a photo of her mother in a white-metal frame, a snap of her brother when he was a sergeant with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Singapore, an enamelled tray showing two pastoral lovers beside a rustic bridge, and her bottle of cough mixture. ‘How can I keep this corner tidy if you clutter it up with books? And they’re all overdue and I never see you open them anyway.’
‘You don’t see all I do,’ he answered, looking down on her from a great height.
‘There’s sevenpence to pay on each of them,’ she complained the night he was getting ready to go to the Bute Hall. ‘You might as well buy the damn things, the money you spend in fines. Do you think I’ve nothing to do with my money but give it to you to pay for all the books you keep past their time?’
‘Money, money, money! All you can think of is money!’
He was peevish with her. She was always nagging him since his father died a month ago.
‘Somebody’s got to think about it,’ she said, her head high, acting the calm lady to his bad temper. ‘Of course, you’re Lord Muck of Glabber Castle, you’re too high and mighty to bother about money. I’d have thought now your poor father’s dead at least you’d try and help your mother. You’ve only one mother in this world, you know, my boy.’
She wiped her eyes with a dirty hankie, and went ruthlessly on.
‘Your poor father’s no’ here any longer to look after us now, ye know. Him dying the way he did. Puffed out like a candle. Wan minute he was there, the next he wasna. It’s something I’ll never get over. The day after his brother was killed. No’ that he was any good. But your poor father was a good man. Do anything for anybody. Worked hard all his days. Then just to die like that, down in the cellar all by himself. And then they tried to tell me it was his heart. Funny he never complained about his heart before. Of course him and Sammy was twins. They was born together and I suppose they had to go together. Well, near enough. Sammy was killed on the Friday and your poor father was found dead the next day, couldny ha’ been more than a couple of hours after he heard about it. Makes you think. You ought to be helping me, no’ annoying me the way you do.’
She sniffed wetly, and his nerves jangled at the sound of air through mucus.
‘I’m helping all I can,’ he said dourly. ‘But I never get a bloody word of thanks for it. Don’t forget it’s