All the Colours of the Town (5 page)

What could I say? I shrugged. A waiter was waiting to get past; he stood before me with three desserts balanced on his arm; a tiramisu and two elaborate ice-cream
structures
. I sat down.

‘That’s all I’m saying then.’ He folded the banknotes, lodged them in the pocket of my shirt. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

The waiter squeezed between the tables, twisting his hips like a matador.

We ordered coffee and talked about nothing; Party
gossip
; Celtic-and-Rangers. At one point the lights went out and a fizzing, orange ball wavered into view, and a man’s reddened features, savage in the ruddy glow. Then the music started and everyone joined in, craning round to see. Lyons was beaming. The voices thinned when it came to the name – Timmy, it might have been, or Cammy or Terry – and then we all rallied round on the final line. The kid’s round mouth raked the conflagration – there were sparklers in there, and four or five candles – and everyone clapped as the lights came back on.

‘How’s your own two?’ he asked. ‘Ricky and James?’

‘Roddy. They’re great. I’m taking them up the coast next week. Carradale.’

‘Nice.’

Lyons’s phone rang again.

‘Do you mind?’ The phone perched on his outstretched palm, open, like a black plastic bird. ‘I sort of need to take this.’

‘On you go.’ I needed a piss in any case.

When I got back Lyons was signing a napkin for the toothy woman.

I called for the check.

At the birthday table the kid was sulking, his chin deep down between the wings of his polo shirt. As his dad leaned in close, the boy flinched, hunching his shoulders as if he was cold, as if his clothes were suddenly wet. I could hear the dad’s tone, coaxing and low – a tone that the kid himself would come to master, the tone of a man letting somebody down.

The waiter arrived with the check and presented it to Lyons.

*

The street was cooler now – a breeze had come up off the river – and as we strolled towards George Square the
tension
between us passed, as if the restaurant were to blame, its enervating cramped formality, and here in the open air we were easy as ever.

Lyons stopped to light a torpedo; the flame flapped whitely, twice, like a butterfly’s wings, as he sucked and puffed and got it to draw. A great white cloud plumed skywards.

‘Oh yes.’ He shook his head. ‘Smoking ban. Fucking politicians. Listen, Gerry.’

‘What?’

We paused at a junction.

‘About the wine. Back there. It was stupid; I should have thought.’

‘What?’

‘It never occurred to me. I’m sorry.’

We stood at the kerb. A bus rolled through the
junction
, its fumes blue in the afternoon sun. I’d been in rehab, briefly, a year or so back – there were alcohol issues after the split – but I didn’t see how Lyons could know this. I was about to ask him what he meant when the signal changed and the crowd pressed forward. On the far pavement a man in a red wooden booth called ‘
Evening Times
’ in a stylised bark. Lyons strode ahead, his free hand rooting for change. A backdraught of smoke gusted into my face and the two things – the smoke and the bright hot sun – pitched me back a
quarter-century
. Sunlit water on wooden planks. I’m in the Howard Park, half in and half out of the gloom beneath the footbridge, reclining on the earthen bank. I’m eleven years old, smoking a Regal King Size and the petty, tea-dark river is majestic with light; its reflection sways on the planks of the bridge, crossing and twisting like ropes of shadow-glass. I watch the pattern through half-shut eyes, through smoke and sunlight, sleepy and alert.

‘Here.’

I opened my eyes. Lyons was poking me in the belly with a rolled-up
Times
.

‘Phone Bryce. And Gerry? See it gets a good show.’

He was off down Argyle Street, heading for Queen Street Station. He walked on, slapping his leg with the
Times
, then turned to wave, his hand cresting a sun-shot fug of blue cigar smoke.

I turned back towards the East End. At the Cross, I turned down the Saltmarket, keeping to the shady side. I could feel the notebook in my pocket as I walked, its
discrete
weight, as if the MacLaren story was rippling its pages, the kinetic gravity of news. It felt good to have a story again – not a sloppy wodge of comment but a hard bright newsy nugget. A scoop. I could see their faces already – Rix and Moir and Fiona Maguire; the
spreading
smiles as I broke the news.

I passed the High Court with its sinister columns. Banker Bill MacLaren was jacking it in: that in itself was a splash. But the real news, the big, billowing indistinct story, was just edging into view. Lyons as First Minister: I had backed the right horse there. But then Lyons as Loyalist conspirator. The First Minister-in-Waiting and a nest of paramilitaries. Who were the New Covenanters? A complete run of
Rathlin
had told me precious little. I knew who old ones were, the martyrs and saints of the Covenant: hardline Presbyterians who fought the British state. They wouldn’t have bishops. They worshipped in the open air, on rough bits of moorland, with armed
sentries
guarding the faithful. The redcoats chased them through barren glens, coursed them like deer in the late sixteen-hundreds. They were shot and hanged in the ‘Killing Time’. But who were their namesakes, the New Covenanters? I would have to turn redcoat myself – Trooper Conway – and run them to earth.

The sun hammered down on the High Court steps. On Glasgow Green the grass was thick with bodies, couples reclining on jackets, clerks and junior counsels with their Marks and Spencer sandwiches. Two boys with squeezy bottles were chasing in and out of the bushes. Their laughter issued in fluent spurts. As they passed me, the boy in front turned and planted his feet, squaring off to his onrushing foe. But his bottle was empty; it wheezed hoarsely as he pumped it with both thumbs. His laughter scaled up to a choking joyful shriek as the other kid drenched him, waving his bottle from side to side, the water fizzing on the laughing boy’s chest. Then the victor turned his bottle skywards, and sent a thick jet skooshing high in the air, a glistering arch that hung a moment in the sun. 

Two days later I was on the train to Irvine. The carriage was almost empty. Then, two minutes before departure, in they pushed, seven flushed roustabouts, heading home from Aberdeen, wedging holdalls into the luggage racks and squeezing round adjacent tables, bursting the
cellophane
on a slab of lager, seven ring-pulls hissing in gaseous syncopation. I closed my paperback, slipped it in the seat pocket.

You had to wonder how much Lyons knew. Should I have sprung it on him, I wondered, back in Ferrante’s? Pulled the photo from my briefcase and slapped it on the table? That had been the plan. But every moment, as we talked, I was sure he was about to spill. He
had
to know; that was why he called me, that was why he was acting how he was; that strange excitement, a kind of girlish tizz. But then he mentioned MacLaren and I knew he wasn’t spooked at all, he was high, exultant at the top job suddenly swinging into reach. By then, of course, the moment had passed. And anyway, the MacLaren angle altered things. Lyons as First Minister? This was a whole new scale of story now. I would have to think it through, decide how to play it. So the briefcase stayed shut.

A station flashed past, too fast for me to read the sign. The oilmen were quieter now, their cropped heads
swaying
above the sports reports. A kid had started babbling at the far end of the carriage, a forthright,
oriental-sounding
harangue that sang out with startling purity in the mid-journey lull. The sounds were raw and unformed, but the tone was comically definite and swung abruptly from the plaintive to the bitterly indignant and then on to a sunny sing-song equanimity.

One of the oilmen turned a page and then nudged his mate across the aisle.

‘That wean’s making more sense than you were on Friday night.’

His pal looked up from his paper, cocked his head.

‘Hi, the state I was in on Friday night, I’d’ve
under
stood
that wean. Me and him would have hit it right off.’

They bent to their match reports. I thought of a
morning
, a year or two back, when James was still a toddler. He’d been in his room and had heard me climbing the stairs. It was a sunny morning, the upstairs landing a
buttery
haze. He stood in his doorway and roared, gently, like a secretive lion when I came into view at the top of the stairs. I roared back. He roared again, louder, an extended version, the original roar with a little curlicue, and he laughed aloud when I did it right back. We stood there for the next few minutes, tossing this roar back and forth, shaping and twisting it, putting in growls and little crescendos. Sometimes Jamie would introduce the new element, and sometimes I would. In the end I could
hardly
roar for laughing, not at the humour of the thing but out of sheer ecstatic joy, this spell of blissful concord with my son. Enjoy it, I remember thinking; this is as good as it gets. I knew then that no conversation, no mere exchange of words, would top this festival of roaring on the upstairs landing.

At Irvine I took a cab from the rank outside the station. From the driver’s narrowed eyes in the rear-view I guessed that Orchardton’s wasn’t the best of addresses. But the driver said nothing, just lodged his
Sun
behind the sun-visor, found first and pulled out into the sparse, pre-rush-hour traffic.

I’d phoned Orchardton the night before. There were nine Orchardtons in the Glasgow directory. None of them was him but the seventh – a spry-sounding biddy on Maryhill Road – turned out to be his second cousin. She put me through the wringer a bit but finally she gave me the number. I went online and found the address. I thought of turning up blind but I didn’t fancy a wasted trip. When I explained who I was, Gordon Orchardton was polite but chary. I told him I was researching a
feature
article on Ulster–Scottish connections. Our talk would be confidential, and real names wouldn’t be used. He gave me directions from Irvine Station, told me he’d expect me at four.

It was five to four now. I braced my arm on the door as the cab leaned into the curve. We were skirting a housing scheme, long grey lines of corporation semis. That
morning’s
rain had left dark shapes on the gable ends, like urine stains on grey school trousers. I looked out for the acronyms, the spray-gunned logos, since this was an
arterial
route, a boundary line. A posse would be
headquartered
here, a Young Team with this street in its name.

The cab swung right and then left, nosing deeper into the scheme. The streets were neater here, well-tended crescents with close-cropped hedges, the houses finished in white instead of grey. It looked like the street where my gran used to live, in a ‘good’ council scheme with a long waiting list. As a kid I spent most Sundays there. One of the neighbours had a boy my age, and we’d play for hours, stroking a football back and forth beneath the ‘No Ball Games’ sign on the crescent’s central disc of turf. It seemed a safe place to me then, happy – the pensioners walking their terriers, the houses with their wedding-cake walls. A world of local newspapers and corner shops, where all the front doors were exactly the same. Then Thatcher got in and everything changed. Suddenly the doors were different – they were bright-blue or scarlet instead of dark-green, or they were fancy panelled affairs from the home-improvement centres. This was what you did when you bought your council house: you changed the front door, because now you could.

And who could blame them? Not me, who lived in a ‘bought’ house – still, in eighties Mureton, a sign of
poshness
. Why shouldn’t my granny’s neighbours own their homes? But it depressed me, on my Sunday walk to Gran’s, the sad brashness of these lacquered doors, the hanging baskets and carriage lamps. The doors were too big for the houses. They altered the scale. They made all the houses look like Wendy houses.

The cab had slowed to walking pace, the driving
craning
out at the numbers.

‘Thirty-seven? Here we go.’

I paid up and got out.

I was halfway up the path when a head poked out of the door.

‘Gerry Conway?’

‘That’s right.’

The door closed and then opened and a white dog
landed
on the top step, skittered down onto the path, barking.

‘He’s due his walk.’

The door clapped shut and the man came down the path, zipping his jerkin. I swithered about shaking hands but his hands were already jammed in his pockets so I lifted my chin to his own curt nod. He walked at a
ferocious
clip, his heels in their glossy derbies striking the pavement, and, short as he was, I’d a job to keep up. A couple of times I tried to bring up the subject of
Rathlin
, the New Covenanters, but he turned aside, or yanked the dog’s lead, and cut me short. At one point the dog hunched on a grass verge and squeezed out a long thin caramel-coloured shit, which we simply left, nestling in the uncut grass.

At the top of the brae was a line of shops. A chippy, a Spar, an off-licence, a bookie’s. Outside the Spar, Orchardton handed me the leash.

‘Two minutes.’

I went for a walk while he shopped. I lit a Bolivar no. 3 – the first of the day – and strolled down the wee parade of shops. At the far end was a patch of gravel and a bus stop. Some kids were hanging around, teens in lurid white sportswear and some smaller boys. Sandy stopped at the bus shelter, cocked his leg. The shelter was fairly new, with scuffed Perspex panels, magic-markered in a cursive female hand: ‘Jody B f’s Ryan M.’ A wee boy of five or six was poking the ground with a coloured stick.

One of the youths broke off from the group.

‘Get us a carry-out, mister?’

His tone was perfunctory, bored, like this was a formal exchange with ordered responses.

‘I don’t think so, son.’

It was ten past four in the afternoon.

He kept coming, leading with his shoulders, arms hanging loose before his torso in a manner familiar from rap videos.

I could smell his breath – fiery, rank – when he stopped in front of me.

‘Gie’s a light then.’

I tapped my pockets for the plastic lighter, handed it over.

‘Cheers.’

He lit his cigarette and then tossed the lighter towards his mates. One of them stooped to pick it up, stowed it in his tracksuit pocket.

‘Later, big man.’

He turned and swung back to the group.

The wee boy was crouched down beside me, petting Sandy. I noticed his stick: it was a miniature baton, a
half-sized
mace, its shaft patterned with tiny Union flags.

Gordon Orchardton came out of the minimarket
holding
a carrier bag. He raised his arm in an awkward, oddly poignant salute. I tugged on the leash.

Back at the house, he unclipped the dog and it
scrambled
up on the armchair, standing on the headrest with its front paws on the windowsill.

‘Hey!’

He swept the dog to the floor and motioned for me to sit.

‘Wait there a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

He came back grinning, holding it out on his open palms.

‘What’s this?’

It was a toy gun, a rifle, full-sized, carved from a
light-coloured
wood. I turned it over in the light from the
window
. The workmanship was basic, the edges blunt; it was home-made, something a dexterous uncle might knock up for a boy.

‘I used to play with that when I was a kid,’ Orchardton said. ‘I ran about the back green, kidding on I was a
commando
. All the other weans had proper guns – toys, I mean, die-cast replicas that fired caps, but I loved that thing.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘My da used to say to me, “You watch what you’re doing with that, Gordy. That stick saved Ulster.” That’s what he always said: “That stick saved Ulster.” For years I never knew what he meant. Then one day he told me the story.’

He motioned for the rifle and I handed it back. He gripped it in his fist and shook it.

‘It’s a dummy rifle,’ he said. ‘It’s not a toy, it’s a dummy. My granda used it in Carson’s UVF. Before they got the real guns, they trained with these. He took it on manoeuvres. All these men marching about the hillsides with kid-on guns.’

‘Your grandad was in the UVF?’

‘This is the original UVF I’m talking about. In 1912. Not the current lot. Not the gangsters. It was like a
people’s
army, to resist Home Rule. Then the war happened and they all joined up together. The whole UVF. One minute they were getting ready to take on the
government
; next thing they’re in France, ready to die for King and Country.

‘The army let them stay as a unit. They called it the 36th Ulster Division, but basically it was the UVF. My granda went out with the Armagh battalion. He fought at Thiepval Wood. He was with Blacker’s Boys – the Armagh lot. Six hundred of them went over the top and only sixty came back. There’s a letter in the drawer there, where he tells my granny. He says he’s the only one in his street still alive: all the boys from Scotch Street joined up together, and he was the only one left. They went over the top with their sashes on, shouting “God Save Ulster” and “Fuck the Pope”.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the story,
anyway
.’

The dog was at his feet now, sniffing his shoes, and he squatted down to pet it, gripping the gun by its stock.

‘After that, there was no way the Brits could force us into a republic. So the six counties stayed British.’

He straightened up.

‘Anyway, there it is.’ He frowned at the hunk of wood in his hands. ‘The stick that saved Ulster.’

*

We took our coffee in the conservatory. Like his fancy front door it was too big for the ex-council house, ending six yards shy of his wooden back fence. In next-door’s garden a wee boy was playing on a plastic chute,
scrambling
up the ladder, dipping down the short slide and tearing round to start again.

Orchardton didn’t touch his coffee. The biscuits he’d bought at the Spar lay neglected on a side plate. He just spoke, almost without drawing breath, looking across to the blue Garnock hills. Now that we’d started he seemed to find relief in talking. His voice was unhurried,
authoritative
, as if he’d expected such an encounter for years, and had marshalled his memories in preparation. He lit a cigarette and told me about his family, about his
childhood
in the East End, the boyhood trips to Northern Ireland, summer holidays in Bangor and Portstewart. In next-door’s garden the wee boy played on his chute, up and down, up and down. At one point I took out the Dictaphone and mimed setting it on the coffee table. Orchardton’s eyes tracked from the window to the device and he nodded, once, the flow of his talk never breaking, moving on to the next anecdote.

Later that night, at my desk in Clouston Street, I tried to piece it together, put his spooling memories into order. Orchardton’s dad had come over from Belfast in 1946 with a suitcase and a demob suit. He had friends in Glasgow so he settled there, in a model lodging-house in the Calton. A friend got him a start in Templeton’s Carpet Factory. He married a local girl and they flitted to the top-floor flat of a Brigton tenement. This is where Gordon was born, the middle kid of three, in a
two-room-and-kitchen
in Baltic Street.

He spoke fondly of Brigton, of the tight, hard life of the tenements. The smoky stone. The stink of shit from the stairhead lavvies. Aunties and uncles passing in and out all day, the front room always busy. Brigton was the known world, a place unto itself. There were old guys in the pubs who could remember when it was a separate
village
and still spoke about ‘going into Glasgow’. In Baltic Street some of the families were from home; you’d spot Orange lilies in the windows every Twelfth, little twists of colour like votive candles. Gordon’s father joined the Orange Order and the Brigton Burns Club. Gordon joined too, when he turned sixteen. He was asked to join a gang – the Baltic Fleet, a posse of housebreakers and petty extortioners from the neighbourhood – but declined. The Order was strict about this – you didn’t run in gangs. You didn’t swear. You aspired to lead an upright Christian life. Anyway, the gangs were on the way out, everyone said. It was nothing like the old days. Even the Billy Boys was just a name, a song you sang on the
subway
to Ibrox.
Up to our knees in Fenian blood, Surrender or you’ll die!
‘King’ Billy Fullerton was still around, though, working the door at a local snooker club. You saw him on the street sometimes, standing on the corner of Orr Street and London Road, a short man in a brown suit, chatting with the men beside the bandstand, leaning back to spit into the street.