All the Colours of the Town (6 page)

Then the sixties came and they tore the district down. Whole streets reduced to rubble overnight. It was worse than the Blitz, the old ones said. Folk moved out, to the new schemes at Drumchapel and Easterhouse, or away altogether to a New Town maisonette. The Orchardtons moved to the coast, to a pebble-dash semi in Irvine New Town. A postage-stamp lawn and an indoor toilet. Salty air and the peaks of Arran. Gordon was eighteen at the time.

Everything changed when they moved to the coast. Gordon’s da got a job in a local hotel, where he worked as porter and receptionist and odd-job man. Every
morning
he left for work in a shirt and tie instead of his
carpet-factory
overalls. He was a different man. He seemed
precipitately
old, a diminished figure, spruce and obliging, with his pullovers and his neatly shed grey hair. He swore less. He joined a bowling club and fell away from the Lodge. Their neighbours, in the council semi on a split new estate, were a Catholic family, a retired couple with grown-up daughters. Jimmy Farren was a former train driver. He’d fought at Monte Cassino. He and Gordon’s da went bowling together. They walked their dogs on the moor on Sunday mornings, traded shorts and light ale chasers in the Spinning Wheel in the afternoons. Suddenly, the old animosities had lifted. The heavy weather of bigotry had cleared. It seemed something they had left behind in Glasgow, something mixed up with football crowds and blackened stonework and the
rattling
of trams, something that had no place amid the hopeful geometry of the new estate. When the new Trinitron brought images of the latest Ulster mayhem, Gordon’s da changed channels, reached under his
armchair
for another tinnie.

Everyone was thriving: his ma and da, his wee sister; everyone adjusting to the new life. Gordon wasn’t. He hated Irvine. He felt like an alien in the coastal town, walking its narrow streets. He never got used to it, the racket of the gulls, the fresh dirty whiff of the sea. The naff accents, the slow speech of the locals. They said ‘ken’ instead of ‘know’, like something out of
Doctor Finlay
. He stood on the walkway of the bright glass shopping precinct, staring at the river, at the spire of the old
sandstone
kirk, out of place amid all that newness. As often as he could, he caught the bus back to the city. He still had friends in Brigton, uncles and cousins, in streets waiting demolition. He kipped on their floors, in their old
box-beds
. On match days they’d travel out to Ibrox and then hit some of the old pubs – the Grey Mare, the King George – before Gordon caught his bus back to the coast. There was an Uncle Ian, who took Gordon to the pub after every home game. He was a foreman at Arrol’s
steel-works
and sometimes, when they met up, he’d tap a
folded
fiver into Gordon’s top pocket. He knew all about whisky, single malts, the features of the various regions, how a Lowland differed from a Speyside, the protocol of tasting, how a tulip-shaped glass was best, and a little splash of water released the nose. Islays were his favourites: Ardbeg, Laphraoig, Lagavulin. The reek of peat and iodine. ‘Hospital bandages,’ he’d gasp, a wash of ecstasy on his face, as he lifted his nose from a tumbler of malt.

Then one day Gordon came home to a different house. A queer tightness in the air as he closed the door behind him. No answer to his shouted greeting, though both his parents were home. He found them in the kitchen, a paper on the table between them. Uncle Ian: his strange familiar face on the cover of the
Evening Times
. Headshots of five other guys. According to the story, Ian was OC of the Brigton UVF cell that bombed the Clelland Bar. They hit another bar on the same night – the Old Barns in the Calton. Celtic pubs. No one was killed but they might well have been. The buildings were gutted. The getaway driver shopped them and the whole cell went down. The trial at the Sherriff Court lasted barely two weeks. Nobody walked. Two of the gang got sixteen years: the rest – Uncle Ian among them – landed eighteen.

When Uncle Ian went to jail, that’s when it started for Gordon. That’s when he gave up on home, more or less, on his ma and da and sister and the house by the sea. At home, Uncle Ian was never mentioned. It was as if he
didn’t
exist. Gordon’s da wouldn’t hear the man’s name in his house. He wouldn’t let his wife visit her brother in jail. Only Gordon went, once a month at first and then every week, sitting across a table in Barlinnie. Uncle Ian in his pinstriped prison shirt, footering with a box of matches, asking about streets that no longer existed. They talked about Brigton. Gordon asked about Belfast on the Twelfth. Uncle Ian told him the stories, going over on the ferry, the things you could stash in a Lambeg drum – sticks of gelly, detonators, TA pistols. Over the months Gordon got close to his uncle. He moved back to the city. He found a bedsit on Alexandra Parade, and hung around Bridgeton, the UVF pubs, holding court at the bar, trading on his uncle’s name. One Saturday he queued in Terry’s Tattoo Parlour, had a red hand done on his shoulder, ‘For God and Ulster’ in a scroll underneath.

It was in one of these bars that the idea struck him. A kind of secret society. A coven of Scots Loyalists,
dedicated
to the cause of Ulster. Something needed to be done. Anyone could see it. Since the Hunger Strikes, the city had been changing. The Taigs were organising. Flute bands had sprung up in Coatbridge and Dumbarton, with names like the Crossmaglen Patriots and the James Connolly Memorial. Every few weeks there was a rally in the city centre: Troops Out; Time to Go. His own streets were falling to the enemy.

So he fought back. He invented the New Covenanters. It started small and stayed that way; never more than a score of members. Guys from the Criterion. Guys from the Lodge. Just guys he thought might be interested. They were flattered to be asked. They took it seriously, the
military
structure, the weekly roll-calls in Orchardton’s flat, before adjourning to the pub. One of the guys had been a sergeant in the Royal Scots, and he led monthly classes in weapon handling and fieldcraft. Manoeuvres on the Fenwick Moors. There was ‘intelligence’. They collected information on RCs in sensitive jobs. RCs in politics and the media. They compiled lists of names and addresses.

I smiled. ‘I’d have been one of your targets.’

He looked round from the window. He didn’t smile.

‘You’d never have got the job.’ He stubbed his fag out in the saucer. ‘Not in they days.’

Sometimes they printed the names and addresses in their newsletter. They hawked the paper in the match-day streets, in the pubs round Ibrox. Some nights they took a collection; they jiggled tins with ‘Loyalist Prisoners Welfare’ on the sides. The money poured in: loose change, folded fivers and ten-spots. Everyone eager to give to the cause. The landlords would weigh in with something, a couple of fifties from the till. It felt good to be doing something.

He leaned forward, flicked his ash into a saucer.

‘It was different then, it was all different. There was no peace process or any of that. It was murder, pure and
simple
: naked bloody murder. Our side as well, but we’d been getting it for years. You saw it on the news, every other night; our people getting slaughtered right and left. Bloody Friday? I was
there
son, the week before, for the Twelfth; I was barely home a week and I turn on the box. The polis scraping the bodies affy walls. Filling bin-bags wi skittery bits of people. Our people. And who’s helping them?’

Some ash had spilled onto the table and he swept it into a cupped hand and shook it into the saucer.

‘Maggie Thatcher? She’s talking to the Provies. Haughey, a fucking gun-runner. A Provie gun-runner,
sipping
sherry in Downing Street.’

He sat back, peering out to the blue hills. ‘The Taigs had it all, son, no offence.’ He turned to face me, thumb and fingers flicking up as he counted it off: ‘The South. The Yanks. Ted Fucking Kennedy. Guns from Libya, Semtex from the Czechs. Who did our boys have?’ He opened his arms, as if he might embrace me. ‘Us. And if we didnae step up? Pwhh.’

He turned back to the window. The wee boy next door had gone back in.

‘Did Peter Lyons step up?’

He looked round.

‘Peter Lyons?’

‘Aye. Peter Lyons. Did he step up?’

Orchardton leaned back in his chair. For the first time that day he really looked at me, his chin tipping jauntily back, the tight brown jowls almost creased in a smile. Over his shoulder a jet climbed the sky, its fuselage
glinting
pinkly in the failing light. Chimes sounded thinly in the distance, the perfunctory tones of an ice-cream van.

‘You want to know about Peter Lyons?’ he said. He leaned over to the Dictaphone, pressed the off button.

‘I’ll tell you about Peter Lyons.’

It started with the flutes. Thin, high, silvery – a sound that seemed too high for human ears, as if you’d acquired the hearing of a dog. The flutes were what carried furthest, not the drums, whose distant footfall kicked in shortly after. Up close, the drums were all you could hear, and the flute-players – eyes flashing irritably between visor and busy lips – might just as well have been miming. But in those first seconds the flutes held their own, and their wispy, weightless whispering was the loudest thing of all.

You heard it fitfully, at first, in gusts and snatches. There was a moment of uncertainty, a spell of anxious head-twisting when the music seemed to ring from all directions. Then some internal radar pointed down a canyon of vacant street and you ran, at a breathless
gallop
, to the oncoming clatter.

When the Walk turned the corner it pulled you up; you stopped short, winded by this glorious irruption. Youths in scarlet tunics and feathered caps swung onto Crosskirk High Street six abreast. Their buttons flashed. Their trouser-legs had stripes up the sides. Burnished flutes were pressed to their lips. They had the shallow
perfection
of figurines. Behind them came the walkers, in dark suits and clean shirt-collars, tasselled sashes, the women in churchy hats, some of them clutching Bibles and umbrellas. Above them the banners pitched and swayed: dark likenesses of martyrs and reformers, the white smudge of King Billy’s charger.

The onlookers whooped and clapped as the band approached, the air already pulsing with the drum. Out in front, drawing the roars of the crowd, came Jack the Lad, Cock of the Walk, the boy who swung the stick. He was talisman and witchdoctor. All the fervour of the crowd, all their sense of favour and entitlement was focused on his mobile frame. His specialness was there in all he did: in his rolling monkey-walk; how he crouched and sprang and strutted and twirled. You saw the beauty of it, his wayward figures-of-eight setting off the marchers’ ordered tread, how their gait looked all the straighter for his flourishing arabesques. Grimacing, lolling, acting the goat: he might have been the town drunk were it not for the precision of his hands, the quick wrists busy with the stick. He stretched to send it
spinning
into the air and then stooped to let it roll across his shoulders or twirl in florid cartwheels round his back. I could watch for ever the sluggish tinkle of his fingers as the baton rode the knuckles of one hand.

A girls’ accordion band came next, teenagers in pleated kilts and crisp white fitted shirts, and the roaring was
different
now, lower and more throaty, and the girls lips twitched, as if with incipient laughter, their eyes sliding to take in the crowd.

I had an urge to cross, to step right out between the bands, make a break for opposite pavement. You couldn’t cross a Walk. You couldn’t pass in front of it. We’d had this hammered into us as kids. The marshals would lift their truncheons in white-gloved hands and the polis would watch them strike you down.

I didn’t cross. I watched the rest of the parade, the bands from Ayrshire and Ulster, the Toronto band with its maple-leaf flag, marching down the low-roofed street, and when the last drummer banged past the Hall and the crowds moved off behind him, I followed too, down the hill to the Green.

*

Two days before this I was in Rix’s office. Jenna, his PA, set a coffee down in front of me. On his desk, where the smirking offspring ought to have been, was the snap of Vinnie Jones reaching behind him to squeeze Paul Gascoigne’s testicles. It was autographed in the bottom corner. Rix’s windows faced west. He left me time to admire the downriver vista – the Armadillo, the Finnieston Crane – before emerging from his inner office.

Rix didn’t rate me. I knew without him telling me that he thought my stuff was useless. Ponderous, he no doubt deemed it. Wordy, worthy, deficient in – let us say, bite? Malice? The note of personal enmity? Rix’s own
editorials
had an unruffled viciousness that I enjoyed without wishing to emulate. Someone had told him I’d studied at Oxford and he was eager to let me know that he wasn’t impressed. Why should he be? But I liked to wind him up. As the weeks passed, my copy grew pompously Latinate, I quoted from Bentham and Mill. I dug out my college tie when I knew we’d be meeting.

I was wearing it now as I told him the story. The story was Peter Lyons. I had a source who could connect him to loyalist paramilitaries in the early 1980s. I knew Rix would jump at this, so instead of talking it up, I found myself demurring: the details were sketchy; the source an unknown, most likely nursing a grievance. Probably it was horseshit.

Rix let me talk, his smile widening. He’d only been here two years, but he knew his readers. In this part of Scotland, sectarianism sold. It was better than sex. Then I showed him the photograph: Peter Lyons – or a man who looked like a younger version of Lyons – in a row of scowling men; the two figures in the foreground, sporting full-face balaclavas and pointing Webleys at the floor; and behind them on the wall, the claret-and-amber UVF flag.

Rix appraised it like a connoisseur. He got up from his seat, closed the connecting door to Jenna’s office, and brought his chair to my side of the desk. There was a deliberation to Rix’s movements. He never hurried. He seemed to relish the simplest physical action.

I liked his composure. It reassured me. If the office rumours were right, he had six months to turn the
Trib
around, two of which had already gone. We were
bumping
along at 55,000, same as when he took over. Every Tuesday, morning conference was a stampede of
suggestions
; ruses and stratagems for adding the four or five thousand that might save the title. The mood was hysterical. We were more like a self-help group than a
conference
of editors. Only Rix stayed calm, shirtsleeved elbows on the table, setting out the week’s agenda with slow chops of his big hands, smiling all around the
anxious
circle.

He was smiling now.

‘The Boy Wonder,’ he said. ‘Paramilitary of the Year.’

Two weeks ago, Lyons had won Parliamentarian of the Year at an awards dinner in the Copthorne Hotel. Rix and I had been sitting at his table. He bought us
champagne
to celebrate. We’d run a profile of him in that Sunday’s paper.

‘Who’s the source?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, he’s an unknown. There’s no form.’

‘What do you think?’

I turned up my hands.

‘I think he’s telling the truth.’

‘OK. Let’s find out. Have you spoken to any of the
others
, the old associates?’

I mentioned Gordon Orchardton, the New Covenanters. I told him about the Walk that coming Saturday, the big parade in Lyons’s hometown.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Talk to the punters – get them oiled, sing the bloody Sash. See what turns up.’

I nodded. I ought to go to Belfast too, he said. Do some digging. He could send Martin Moir (he’d cubbed on the
News-Letter
, after all), but he’d rather I did it.

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Gerry.’ I stopped at the door. He smiled up, back on his own side of the desk now. ‘No old pals act this time, yeah?’

*

At my own desk I booted up and checked my emails. Rix thought the whole of Scotland was an old pals act, press corps and politicos deep in each other’s pockets, so that only an Englishman – maybe only Norman Rix – could claim to be independent. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but he wasn’t right either. Peter Lyons wasn’t a friend. I’d played Royal Troon with him a couple of times. His kids were the same age as the boys, and he’d brought them to our Paddy’s Day softball game one year. And he was
usually
good for off-the-records. But he wasn’t a friend, and that wasn’t why I liked him. We all liked Peter Lyons. He was a good politician. He gave good copy. In a
parliament
of cloggers, he was Georgie Best. To hear some of his acolytes talk, he had saved the new Parliament from dying of embarrassment.

Lyons was elected to Holyrood in its second term, when the note of disillusion was deafening. Nobody had a good word to say about the Parliament. All the talent had stayed at Westminster. We had gone through three First Ministers in four years, each more mediocre than the last. The building was still just a hole in the ground, a gluttonous sump of public money. The MSPs themselves were a shambles. Spooked by the cameras, awkward in their stiff three-pieces and trouser-suits, they mumbled and stuttered through slapdash debates. Even our
scandals
were second-rate – stooshies over office rents and fiddled taxi claims.

Then Peter Lyons was elected on the Glasgow list. Nobody knew him. He hadn’t been a councillor or Party researcher. He hadn’t even been a member of the Party until the year before. Within a week he was Deputy Minister for Transport; half a year later he was Justice Minister. By the following winter, the scandal had
broken
. Someone unearthed a photograph of Lyons in the regalia of an Orangeman. He’d been a member of the Order in his teens and early twenties. He threw the stick in the Orange parades. A spokesman for the Catholic hierarchy expressed his sadness and alarm. The Record ran a mock-up of Lyons as William of Orange, astride his white charger. ‘Can You Ride This Out, Peter?’ was the strapline. Remarkably, he did. He went on
Good
Morning Scotland
and spoke about his childhood. Since he’d been a kid, he said, he’d dreamed of being an Orange drum major. In other parts of the country, the wee boy’s dream was playing for Scotland; in Crosskirk it was throwing the stick on the Twelfth. Eventually he’d come to see that there were bigger ambitions, worthier dreams. He’d gone to university, his horizons had expanded. He’d come to see the Order for what it was, and he’d left. He wasn’t a bigot. He had married a Catholic; his two kids were at Catholic school. The story became one of triumph over circumstance, the bright boy rising above the meanness of his origins.

Lyons had grown up in Lanarkshire, in an ex-mining village gone to seed, a sleet-stung bunker of cold grey stone. As Catholics, we mythologised these places, spoke of them with a shiver of dread. Harthill. Larkhall. Crosskirk. Even the names had a spondaic bluntness, a fearsome Prod foursquareness. You shook your head when you spoke them, made that noise you make when you’ve swallowed something burny. Now I was heading down the M74 on the morning of the Twelfth, peering through the smirr for the Crosskirk turn-off.

I’d never been to Lyons’s home town. ‘Bitter’ was the term you’d hear. A bitter town. We had a kind of league table of bitterness, with all the shitty towns of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire graded by how much they hated Catholics.

The turn-off appeared, and I swung onto a B-road. The rain was clearing now, claustral shafts of sunlight falling on hedges and fields. Lanarkshire was shining in the rinsed air, nothing at all like the slagheap I’d envisioned. The road skirted a field, and through a break in the hedge I saw a hare skittering off down the furrows. I opened the sunroof to birdsong and branches.

I thought about Mureton. On our bitterness league table, my hometown wasn’t high. No one ever called me a Fenian bastard. I never felt menaced coming home from school. That doesn’t mean we weren’t keeping score. You knew how many Catholic bank managers there were in town, how many Catholic GPs, how many lawyers. The pub I drank in – the Star Inn (prop. J. Molloy) – was known as the Vatican. There were occasions when someone, hearing your surname, would narrow his eyes – ‘Conway?’ – and roll your name around his mouth, tasting something sour, and his silence would have the shape and weight of four unspoken words:
That’s a Fenian name
.

St Michael’s, Mureton’s Catholic Church, stood on a hill beside the train station, in what had been a slum quarter. For decades it had been hidden from view by the great black facade of the town’s Infirmary, but when the hospital was demolished and the chapel stood alone against the skyline, visible from almost everywhere in town, the town didn’t like it. People complained about the old Infirmary, what a shame it was to see it go. What really riled them was the view it left behind, the papish chapel,
brazen
there, at the crown of the brae. Let them go to the devil in their own way, if that’s what they
wanted
. Did they have to shove it down your throat?

But did I ever feel threatened or even put upon? You knew you were different, and when St Michael’s played away, and we took the field in our Milanese
red-and-black
stripes, there was an edge to some of the touchline shouts. All those urgings to get stuck in, get intae this shower; you wondered if this vehemence was matched at every fixture. But our sense of grievance was sedulously nurtured, stoked more by tribal memories of shipyard gangers and hiring fairs than by anything in our daily lives. Our ire was reserved for SPL referees and perceived acts of bias against Glasgow Celtic Football Club.

The sky had cleared. Up ahead some walkers turned to watch me approach. Three lassies – they had mounted the grass verge at the sound of the car, and now their skinny arms stuck into the road. A thin cheer rose as I slowed just beyond them. There was a bit of confabbing and then two climbed into the back as the other – the pretty one, evidently – slid in beside me.

‘You going to the Walk, mister?’

‘Yep.’

‘Can you take us right into Crosskirk?’

‘If you’ll help me find it.’

‘You’ve never been?’

They were relaxed now, proprietorial, leaning forward in their seats, pointing out the turnings. The smell of them – lemony, chemical – filled the car.

‘You’ve never been to the Walk?’

‘Not this one.’

‘It’s major, man. There’s bands from Ireland, all over. Canada. The Walk goes on for ever.’

‘Scooby,’ said the one right behind me. ‘Nice ride. Is it turbo, mister?’

‘Afraid not.’