The Ephemera (22 page)

"Gordo, gonna see if Malky wants some of this?" someone says. "There's masses."

"He's not in," comes the reply. "He's out crimming again."

"Leave it out, ya knob."

"C'mon man, you've got to admit he knows some dodgy people. You wouldn't want to mess with the likes of them."

There's a pause that pointedly isn't a refutation, then the first speaker says: "Aye, but he
lives
with the likes of us, doesn't he?"

The breeze bullies Malky back against the brick again and when the phone in his pocket goes off he answers it in some confusion.

"What?"

But the line is even worse than before. He can't make out what Haddow is saying at all now. His voice is chopped up into unintelligible squawks and squabbles. It sounds like the chatter of crows.

"What?" Malky repeats and then disconnects the call. 

The wind waits until he is shoving the phone back in his pocket and then pulls at him from two directions at once. He sways alarmingly before somehow finally regaining his balance. He can't even contemplate turning around now. The bird is right, there is no down, but going higher is surely only going to make his predicament worse. Perhaps he can stay where he is until the wind drops, or until it gets light and he can see properly where to put his feet.

"All right, monkey-boy?"

He should have known there would be a third crow. In stories, they always came in threes, didn't they? This one is the most outlandish of the lot. Its plumage is a motley of black and grey. The beak is chipped and discoloured like the razor shells on the beach. It watches him with one cloudy eye. Where the other should be is a gummy hole. It gives the crow the appearance of a pantomime villain.

"I want to get down from here," Malky tells it.

The crow works its broken beak silently, a parody of laughter. "No you don't."

"I fucking do."

"Is that right?" The crow shrugs its wings like it's squaring up. "You want to go back down there and spend the rest of your days risking the jail doing shitey jobs for that arsehole?"

Malky feels the colour rising in his face. He's not easy to anger—which has always been a useful preservation trait—but he can feel it coming on now. "I don't do it for me, do I?" And his anger grows because he shouldn't have to explain himself to a
bird
.

"Oh, that's right, I forgot." The crow's head waggles from side to side in time with its mocking words. "
You're doing it for her
."

"Fuck
right
off." Malky is shouting now, but he doesn't care. "That wee lassie needs help —"

"Aye, maybe so. But she needs help getting off the smack, not paying for it. And I don't think you've got that kind of help in you buddy. Let's face it, your record's not great."

"What are you on about?" Malky scrutinizes the crow, but it stares him out again with its one eye. "She doesnae do smack. Just a bit of blow and some pills."

The motley crow watches him, unblinking. Then it says: "Monkey, son. That lassie, she'll take every penny you can give her all day long, but she doesn't
need
you. Why don't you think about yourself instead. Fly away, leave all of them behind."

"What?"

"Come on, man. You're nearly at the top. Just a couple more steps and you can fly —"

"Stop saying that. I can't fly."

"Course you can. Like Icarus."

"Icarus died."

"Like Gavin then."

Malky doesn't know what to say because he doesn't understand how this scabby bird knows about Icarus, or Gavin.

"Just two more steps," the bird wheedles. "Come on, Monkey. Put that needy mammalian shite behind you. Be like the birds. Think of yourself for once." It flaps its wings, once, twice. "
Grow a pair
."

An unbidden image in Malky's mind. Himself with strong white wings. Like Icarus, but growing out of his back not strapped to his arms. Strong wings with purpose that can beat hard and take him soaring in any direction that he chooses. He feels heat between his shoulder blades, like an itch.

"No..."

The crow shakes its head, then nods directly downwards from its step. "Then you'll find what you came for down there."

Malky looks and sees, set into a slope of mossy red tiles, a square of window. The metal frame is rusted, the glass cracked into three uneven pieces. Malky's perception of how far away the roof is shuttles dizzyingly between the height he expects to have climbed and a matter of mere feet. And then he stops worrying about how far away the glass is, because he can see something through it. At first it's like a shiver of reflected starlight across the largest of the pieces then, as if the angle of illumination has shifted, he can see Natalie. At least he can see some of her. The white-blonde extensions splayed across a burgundy pillow. The eye, furred with false lashes like a velvet moth. The white tips of French manicured nails on the hand curled round the neck of the man whose broad shoulders and heaving, pimply back obscure the rest of her. Malky can't see the man's face but by the shape and size, and by the hairline, he knows it is Declan Haddow.

Malky stares, aware that his mouth has gone dry. This is clearly a hallucination of some sort because Natalie wouldn't do that to him. She tells him often that she loves him, and he believes her.

The images proliferate. While the silent shagging continues, in the adjacent segment of glass, Natalie is sitting at home with her pal Tracy. They're watching Eastenders, wreathed in a soft cloud of dope smoke and laughter. Eyes alive with girlish gossip. He can't help but wonder what, or who, they have to laugh about.

And then in the smallest of the panes, so dim it's almost all shadows. Natalie on her kitchen floor, kneeling and curled over like she's praying. Her skin is flushed dark as blood and bruises, her flesh is clenched to a hardness that it will never relax from. Her works lie scattered on the lino near her balled fists.

All of these images, Malky knows, are possible, and likely, and true.

He tears his gaze away, and he is back on the crow's steps again. The crow is gone. The breeze has dropped its interest for now. The steps feel safe.
Two more steps
, the crow had said. Malky heaves his legs into motion. The rest of the climb is easy.

When the steps come to an end he has reached the top of the roof. All around him, tiled ridges radiate from the central chimney stack. Each of them are breasted along their lengths by more chimneys, each chimney has its own decorative steps. Every available perch is occupied by crows. Giant ones, tiny ones. Patterned and plain. Every shade of black and grey; he sees the white one from earlier among them too. Without exception, they watch him in silence.

A memory from childhood. Gavin telling him about the names for groups of species: a gaggle of geese, an exaltation of larks.

A parliament of crows
.

"So, now you've seen what's always been there to be seen...what's it do be?" The motley crow hops forward. It exercises its wings, which are too small for Malky to feel the gust from, but he does. "Free bird? Or performing monkey?"

"It's not that simple..." Malky begins.

"It's perfectly simple," replies the crow. "You just have to make a decision. For yourself, for once." This time, when the crow flaps, all the other crows do too. The wind of it flows around Malky, not cajoling this time, but caressing. It makes him feel light.

"Icarus died," he says.

"Icarus wasn't the only one who tried."

The waiting crows stir, restlessness rippling through them.

"Last chance, Malcolm."

He knows the truth of it. In what Haddow says to his son. In the banter of his flatmates. In what Natalie gets up to when he isn't there. He's loyal to a fault; but his loyalty did nothing to save his mum from the drink and he understands too well why Gavin walked away. But there's one image he can't get out of his head: Natalie on the kitchen floor. How can he live if he lets that happen?

"I can't..."

One by one, the crows on the ridges and the chimney pots, and arrayed like ornaments themselves on the crow's steps turn their backs on him. All together they beat their wings and, as they each lift into the sky heading off on their individual journeys, the wind from the hundreds of assembled wings lifts Malky off his feet. His arms mill the air, and for a second he knows how it would feel.

Then he's lying on the roof tiles, looking up at the sky. It is wide and black and without limit. And forever out of reach.

~

Crow's steps—or Corbie steps—are a common feature in Scottish buildings. They're like little staircases, and I always wondered where they might lead to without ever coming up with an answer—until now.

The Gubbins

My Uncle Tam was a footerer. He spent most of his time shut away in the wee room at the back of his and Maisie's tenement flat tinkering with some contrivance or other.
His room
was his world. I realised later, of course, that it was just a workshop, but as a kid it was like a treasure trove. Those high, metal shelves neatly stowed with cardboard, wood and tupperware boxes whose seductively mechanical contents were identifiable only by glued-on squares of card, typewritten in an arcane language that only
the sorcerer
could decipher.

That was how I thought of him when I was eight years old. As a wizard. At that age it would not have surprised me to have seen potions bubbling on the work table, or even a stuffed crocodile like the one in that Disney cartoon about King Arthur dangling from the light fitting.

Uncle Tam actually did possess real powers. When we'd travel into the city to visit, Mum would always dig out some ailing appliance—the hoover perhaps, or her carmen rollers. And she'd say, "We'll just take this along for Tam to look at, eh?"

Usually when we got there, one of the neighbours would be in ahead of us, perched on the edge of the good settee, balancing a cup, a saucer and a chocolate finger, while Maisie extracted their news for later mixing with acid drops and distilling into a hundred proof gossip.

This I'd have to sit politely through, swinging my legs like the pendulum in the distantly metronomic hall clock. I wasn't granted permission to get up, not even when the discreet knock came, and the neighbour gulped down the last of her tea to hurry through and pick up her Breville sandwich maker from the usual spot by the front door. Good as new, cleaner than it had ever been, with its cable precision-coiled and stuck to the lid with insulting tape.

I, of course, would refuse the tea and the biscuits. The broken transistor radio clutched on my lap, was my ticket to the sorcerer's den and I wasn't giving it up for anything. Eventually there'd be a break in the sleep-inducing chatter long enough for my nervous excitement to be noticed, and Aunt Maisie would say, "Don't just sit there like a numpty, Michael. Away and take that in to your Uncle Tam."

I'd not need a second telling. Off my chair like a shot, seconds later I'd be chapping the workroom door. Then I'd wait, and while I waited I'd prepare myself for a hundred kinds of disappointment. The sorcerer was too busy battling back some conjured demon, or he'd popped out into an alternate dimension for a pint of unicorn milk, or all those brooms had got loose again, or perhaps—and this was the seat of my dread—I was no longer fit, like my mum, and even Maisie, to be admitted into the inner sanctum.

But then the door would open and he'd be there. Big hands, black with oil or sometimes glittering with metal filings. Stripy shirt with the sleeves rolled up and open at the neck so you could see the top of his simmet with the white hairs on his chest peeking through.

"Whit's yer maw gone through now, Michael, son?" he'd say, appraising the device I was holding out to him like an offering. And he'd sigh, that familiar and eloquent expression of his pain at the death of any device.

"See's it here, then."

When he picked up a screwdriver and started to work his magic, I'd loiter as quietly as I could. Happy to be a mostly ignored apprentice. Sometimes he would turn on the wireless and whistle along to the sound of plain static, the volume depending on the level of penetration into his sanctum of the voices from the front room. Other times, though, he would talk, delivering something between a running commentary and a conversation with whatever he was working on. And although he was speaking to himself, not to me, I'd lap up every word like a cat at the spilled milk of secrets.

Tam had his catchphrases that to me were like exorcisms and incantations. When he found the root of a problem he'd exclaim, "Out of there you devil!" And on the rare occasions when his subject was beyond saving, he'd sigh that sigh again, and open the thing back up to perform a systematic salvage job on the remaining components.

"The gubbins," as Tam would say.

The gubbins
. You had to save the gubbins. Anything else, to someone for whom wartime thrift was a heart-learned rule (although, in Tam's case, it was
much
more than simple thrift), was a criminal waste. You didn't make
refuse
if you could
re-use
.

So you can see, can't you, how much of an influence he was on my career. I learned by watching him before he finally acknowledged my presence and permitted me to participate. He bought me my first meccanno set, and didn't tell me what everyone apparently knew about old Frank Hornby making intentional mistakes in the instructions to make kids think for themselves. Later he taught me the ancient skill of wire wrapping before he let me anywhere near a soldering iron.

And I truly became his apprentice. I learned how to connect with the machinery. To appreciate the value of every single part right down to the tiniest screw.

It's important you know this. It explains what happened afterwards.

Twenty years passed. And suddenly I was part of a committee that designed products for a company that sold something to everyone on the planet. In the intervening time consumerism had happened, and corporate greed with it, and the ideals of design had shifted from Best-of-British durability to designed-in redundancy. People didn't make-do and mend any more, they chucked away and bought new. The logical end point of this was true disposability. That's what we did. Cheap, clean, green, 100% recyclable and constantly in demand. 

Which, I guess, is the reason that me and Tam finally stopped talking.

The last time I saw him, he wouldn't let me into the workshop. At the time I thought he was ashamed of the state of the place. I don't just mean that room, but they'd let the flat go as well. And it wasn't surprising given the dilapidation around them. Their tenement row was all boarded up. The neighbours had long since fled, leaving behind metal plates over the windows that did nothing but hint at the likelihood of rats and drug dens inside.

Mum and I had been trying to persuade the pair of them to move out, but they were having none of it.

D'you want to hear the last thing  Tam ever  said to me, before the crack between the door and the jamb was closed to even me forever? It was this: "World needs its stuff, Michael, son. It needs its screws and motors and its odd batteries in the pack. World cannae work right without its gubbins."

I had no idea what he meant because I had forgotten everything he ever taught me.

When Tam died the minister told us that he had been a man who valued his privacy so much he was difficult to know. Maisie was perfectly blunt about the script she had provided and practically challenged anyone to defy it. After all, she had hardly seen hide nor hair of the man for nearly ten years. At the reception, though, she took me aside and asked me to come to the flat later that week, and to bring some tools with me.

"Nae bugger can get the door of that bloody room open, Michael."

I soon found out why.

Since Maisie had already turned the place upside down unsuccessfully looking for a key, I didn't waste time with the lock. Instead I tried drilling through the wood, but Tam had added something completely impenetrable the other side. My guess was plate steel. He'd hidden the hinges too, and bolstered the jamb. It took me an increasingly sweaty hour and a half to realise that it would have to be the lock after all. And whoever managed to open it would deserve their prize.

I couldn't help feeling that this was a direct challenge to me.

"Bugger," I said.

"Mind your language, Michael Cowan." Maisie had donned a pinny and marigolds. A bucket of soapy water at the ready. "C'mon. Get a move on, all that rubbish wants gutting out, so it does."

I tried to recall everything Tam had ever told me about locks, and knew even that knowledge would scarcely be enough against his undoubted special modifications.

I rummaged in my tool box for the dental implements from my dad's old surgery, and set to it.

It took another three hours of gentle probing, my fingers aching from manipulating multiple implements at a time, before there was a smooth release of pressure, and a series of soft clicks.

By this time my Mum had arrived, and my sister, and they were all arguing in the front room with a man from the Housing Association.

I thought my exclamation of self-satisfaction had been internal, but heads appeared around the door.

"Right then, now we can get some work done." Maisie bustled into action, but she dropped the bucket when she saw what lay inside.

Gone was the neatly ordered magician's den. In its place was—and despite appearances, I knew it immediately—a
machine
. The shelves had been reconfigured to form a cage that filled the room. Braced inside the cage was a gordian knot of technology.

At first, it was difficult to differentiate this pile of gleaming, interconnected scrap, but looking closer I began to recognise individual components, and realised what he had done. He'd made a machine out of the gubbins. Every single bit and bob, every single odd and end had a place inside the cage.

I saw bicycle dynamos, with their red lamps still attached. Round the perimeter of the cage, he'd constructed a ball race from a game I remembered my Mum passing on to Oxfam twenty odd years ago. Dangling from one corner was the circuit board from a Stylophone kit. I'd built one just like that on Christmas morning when I was eleven.

I squeezed between the cage and wall to see more. That was when I got my next surprise. There had been a press cupboard in the corner, a common feature in these tenements, and generally only deep enough for a few books or nick-nacks. This one had been knocked through into the flat next door, and a prodigious bundle of cables now led from the machine in the workroom through the rough doorway.

Since all of the other flats in this block had been deserted for some months, this wasn't as bad as it could have been, but I still felt awkward stepping through into someone else's home.

I needn't have worried. There was very little home left. Just more machine. In the first room was a stack of tv sets that would have rivalled a Bond villain's, more cabling connected this to what had been a kitchen that held a bank of denuded washing machines, their drums carefully weighted with gaffa-taped-in bricks, and also to a room that contained the motors of a hundred vacuum cleaners, each attached by a hose to a giant deflated bag.

It didn't stop there. The machine continued through the flat's front door to the one across the landing, and down the close stairs to the flats below. Then we discovered the rotating belt system that had been laid up into the attic space and ran the length of the entire tenement.

It took us until well into the evening to discover the extent of it, by which time we were all knackered. The Housing man had gone and got the keys for all the other flats so we didn't have to crawl through the attic, and my Mum had got sandwiches in from Marks. I chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of crayfish and rocket while I marvelled at this monument to all of the perfectly serviceable, fixable, workable pieces of technology that other people had thrown away because that was the habit these days.

"Don't do that," I said, catching her preparing to bin the blister packs the sandwiches had come in. "They could be used for something."

The look she gave me could have melted lead.

When we discovered the last room, we all had the same question in our minds. My sister voiced it: "What's it for?"

The Housing Association man thought, or perhaps hoped, it would demolish the block to rubble, and made himself scarce just in case.

My Mum, with an unusual flare of imagination, thought it was a time machine that would take us all back to 1950.

My sister guessed it was a modern art installation, and whatever
it
was, it was already
doing
it, but then she didn't know Tam as well as me.

And I hadn't a clue. I just knew it was beautiful and important.

"The old fool was off his chump," said Maisie, not without a trace of affection. She was standing next to the prominent red button we'd all been trying heroically to ignore. "There's only wan way to ken for sure."

She had pressed it before I could even try to stop her.

None of us can agree what happened next, but in a way I think everyone's expectations were met to a degree. There was nothing for a minute or so, but then there was a build up of energy. The building shook, and plaster dust pattered down from the ceiling. And then there was a lightness in the air, a musicality, a sweetness, a warmth.

It made us happy.

It was magic.

But not for long. Soon enough there was just us again, in that scummy ground floor gable-end kitchen filled with junk.

"Was that it?" someone said, and they all turned to me.

I nodded. That was it, for now.

And then I said: "Just imagine what it'll be like when it's finished."

~

Another story from the Weird Engineering phase. This one grew out of a childhood fascination with the bits and pieces, odds and ends, that you find in tool boxes and kitchen drawers. I always had the feeling that they could all be used together to make something.