The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘Same old stuff, Davey,’ I answered with a smile. Davey Wallace was a dreamer. A good kid, but a dreamer. For many within its boundaries, Glasgow was as much a prison as a home. The bars that confined them were the class system and, in almost every case, the lack of any viable alternative to a life of manual labour. The shipyards and the steelworks devoured the city’s young: I’d often wondered if Rotten Row, Glasgow’s appropriately named maternity hospital, simply put ‘apprentice’ instead of ‘boy’ on birth certificates.

Davey was an apprentice – an apprentice welder – working the morning shift in the shipyard. Started at fifteen and would most likely work there until he was sixty-five, by which time he would have given up his passion for Rock’n’Roll, probably because he’d be deaf from the constant riveting before he hit forty. But now, Davey Wallace, seventeen years old, parentless at seven, in an orphanage until fifteen, unmarried and with no kids yet to bind him further to an ineluctable industrial fate, escaped into the cinema every afternoon and Saturday night, where he would meet up with a different gang: Bogart, Cagney, Mitchum, Robinson, Mature.

When Davey had found out that I was a real-life enquiry agent, he had approached me in the bar like a Greek shepherd approaching Zeus. Since then, he had taken every opportunity to remind me that if I was ever looking for help …

‘Thanks for the pint, Mr Lennox.’

‘You’re welcome, Davey. Shouldn’t you be in bed? What about your early shift?’

‘I sleep in the afternoons, mostly.’ Then, as if correcting himself: ‘But I’m always available … you know, if you needed any help on one of your cases, Mr Lennox. I’m always here.’

I exchanged a look with Big Bob, who grinned.

‘Listen, Davey,’ I said. ‘It’s not like you think it is. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing glamorous about what I do for a living.’

His expression dulled. ‘You should try working down at the shipyards. Anything’s glamorous compared to that.’

‘Really,’ I grinned. ‘I would have thought it was riveting …’

Davey either didn’t get or didn’t appreciate the gag and stared at his pint glumly. It was, I had noticed, a Scottish tradition. I sighed.

‘Listen, Davey, I can’t offer you a job because I don’t have a job to offer. I struggle to pay my own way at times. But here’s the deal … if anything comes up where I need an extra pair of eyes, or need any kind of help, I’ll give you a shout. Okay?’

He looked up from his beer and beamed at me. ‘Anything, Mr Lennox. You can rely on me.’

‘Okay, Davey. Why don’t you finish your beer and get off home. Like I say, I’ll get in touch if I need anything.’

I let him hang on my elbow till he finished his drink. After he was gone, Big Bob came back and poured me another Canadian Club.

‘You realize I only keep this pish in here for you,’ he said. ‘Why can’t you drink Scotch like everybody else?’

I cast my gaze around the bar, trying to penetrate the bluegrey cigarette haze. A knot of older men in flat caps sat huddled around a table in the corner playing dominoes and smoking scrappy roll-up cigarettes. Swirled in cloud-like tobacco smoke, they paused from their game only to sip their whisky and laid their dominoes on the beer-ringed table top with the joyfulness of grim Titans toppling graveyard headstones. Glasgow at its most Goyaesque.

‘I don’t know, Bob,’ I said wistfully. ‘Maybe it’s a delight I’m saving myself for …’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake …’ Bob said, suddenly distracted and looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that four young men had come in through the side door of the public bar.

‘Tommy … Jimmy …’ Bob called to the two other barmen and the three of them stepped out from behind the bar with a squared-up purposefulness and crossed to the young men. I noticed that the newcomers were dressed in rough work clothes; one wore a heavy leather armless tabard over his jacket and all four were wearing rubber boots. I noticed that their hair was longer than the usual and the guy with the tabard had thick, black, curling locks. They had the sunburned look of men who spent more time outdoors than in.

‘Fucking pikeys …’ Bob muttered under his breath as he passed me. ‘Okay you lot … fuck off out of it. I’ve told your mob before you’re not welcome here.’

‘All we want is a drink,’ said Curly, with a dull expression and a hint of Irish in his accent. It was clear he was accustomed to welcomes like the one Big Bob was offering. ‘Just a drink. Quiet like. No trouble.’

‘You’ll get no drink here. You lot don’t know how to have a quiet drink. I’ve had the place wrecked before by your kind. Now fuck off.’

One of the others stared hard at Bob. He had the ready stance of someone thinking about kicking off. Curly put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him I couldn’t understand. The tension went from his frame and the three walked out silently, but not hurriedly.

‘Fucking pikeys …’ Bob repeated after they were gone.

‘Gypsies?’ I asked.