Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (29 page)

‘Daddy!’ she shrieked into his face. ‘I’ve got shells in my bag for you!
Special
shells that whisper!’

Sean was so happy to see us. He hugged Ashley so hard she pushed him away.

‘Daddy, you are squeezing me too hard!’

‘Sorry, babes, go strap yourself into the car; I want to chat to Mummy.’ He held the car door open for her and threw our bags into the boot. I could see something frightening in his eyes. My mouth went dry.

‘What is it, Sean?’ I panicked: ‘Is it Mij or my Dad?’

Sean leaned against the boot of the car and held my face gently between the palms of his hands. ‘Janey, Donna from up the road died two nights ago: it was heroin.’

She had been such a lovely young woman and her wee daughter Kara was just getting ready to start school that year – she was almost the same age as Ashley.
Is everyone going to die from it?
I thought.

As soon as I got to the Calton, I went up the road to Donna’s home. She had lived on a very nice council estate where the houses had verandas. Her open coffin was lying on a trestle table in a candlelit bedroom cloaked in semi-darkness, with flowery curtains pulled tight. She lay there like a wee angel looking about ten years old in that wooden box. Her blonde hair was spread out all over the beautiful soft white silk lining. I stood there for long minutes and prayed. I had never really prayed before, because I didn’t have a religion. I suppose I just stood there and whispered hopes and fears to a God I didn’t believe in, thinking:
Such a waste of a life!
The tears started to squeeze through my tightly closed eyelids. I heard low voices and looked over to
the
shadowy corner of the gloomy, candle-lit room. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Donna’s sister and older brother Kieron both sitting there heating up a small spoonful of heroin over a Holy Candle that had been lit for her Mass.

‘Janey, shut the door, eh?’ Kieron said quietly. ‘This is the stuff she overdosed on. She left it an’ it’s good an’ I’m sure she wid want us to huv it.’ He had his trousers pulled down to his knees; Donna’s sister had the left leg of her jeans rolled up. The two of them turned away from me and started to split the gear into two syringes. I watched as Donna’s sister sat quietly injecting brown fluid into the back of her left leg while Kieron pushed the needle slowly into a vein at the top of his right leg where it joined his groin.

It was the same week the fair came to town.

GLASGOW FAIR IS
a traditional celebration left over from when all the shipyard and factory workers got two weeks off work; during ‘Fair Fortnight’, they used to take their whole big scabby families to other parts of Scotland, usually ‘doon the watter’ to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde. That year, Glasgow Fair was a community project to celebrate the City of Culture year. A big-top tent was set up on Glasgow Green near the Templeton Carpet Factory, just opposite the Weavers. There were big swinging boats, loads of activity tents, a mirrored German Spiegeltent where musicians played, stilt walkers and loads of entertainment to cheer up local people.

The Weavers entered a float in the fair parade, which followed a circular five-mile route starting and finishing at Glasgow Green. We borrowed the float from Sean’s relatives who were Gadgies. Our float was amazing. It was a long, flat-floored lorry with a big kiddie ride filled with lots of fibreglass Disney cartoon characters – Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and big glittery Goofys – on which our customers sat wearing fancy dress; but the moulded children’s characters were all too small for adults, so everyone had to contort their bodies to sit on them. Our regular Country and Western crowd were there, including ‘Wild Bill Hickok’ and ‘Sioux’ wearing full Western outfits, which made me smile because they weren’t in fancy dress at all – this was their everyday garb. They shopped at Safeway supermarkets, went to the cinema and got on the bus wearing their cowboy and Indian outfits. They hadn’t known we were going to be wearing fancy dress that day; they had just turned up dressed as normal.

There was an extraordinary assortment of outfits. My face was painted as Minnie Mouse; one middle-aged guy was dressed as a baby; a few of the female customers dressed as Hawaiian Hoola girls with grass skirts, bare midriffs and garlands on their heads; Gay Gordon – of course – was dressed as a woman with fake breasts, fishnet tights, high heels, a blonde wig, blue eye shadow and lipstick that went up round his nose. He had turned into a particularly grumpy version of Bette Midler: he was hanging off the back of our lorry, carrying a handbag, swigging gin, spitting it at passing children and shouting out, ‘Feck off! Don’t! I’m a lady! Don’t speak to me like that!’

Every community group in the area had decorated lorries, small cars and even ice-cream vans to enter the parade. Music blared, dancers boogied the length of several streets, kiddies for miles around had brightly painted faces, the atmosphere was great. The parade took three hours to make it out of the Green and a mile up to the Gallowgate. As the parade passed along Duke Street, only a few blocks from the Weavers, Wild Bill Hickok and Sioux started yelling and whooping and pulled out their Wild West revolvers, firing them wildly into the air.

Bang! Bang!

Bang!

Bang bang!

They couldn’t have chosen a worse place. It was right outside Mills’ Bar which was a known haunt of nutters, a
place
where real bullets had been flying recently. At the sound of gunfire, local kids started screaming and ducking in fear as their parents tried to shove them down onto the pavement; dogs started barking, babies were picked up out of prams and policemen desperately started running over, yelling through their megaphones, ‘Stop the parade! Stop the parade!’

Then two police horses bolted and ran amok into the crowds. Policemen tried to calm their whinnying beasts. Miraculously, there were no injuries, but the parade was halted and Wild Bill Hickok and Sioux were removed from the float by pissed-off police.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ a white-shirted officer shouted at my Minnie Mouse face. ‘Are you in charge of this fucking float?’

‘Fucking hell!’ Minnie Mouse screamed back at the man in the flat police cap. ‘How wiz I to know he had a fucking gun wi’ blanks in it? I never knew he wiz gonna fire his pistols. He thinks he’s a real fucking cowboy!’

The copper stood and looked in disbelief as Wild Bill Hickok took his revolver back and simply put it into his holster saying, ‘Sorry,’ rather sheepishly. Sioux took her gun back, put it under her squaw costume and smiled sweetly while telling the policeman, ‘He’s a
real
cowboy, ye know.’

The man just looked at her in stunned silence, turned to look at me and raised a single eyebrow. I stepped back up on the lorry then turned and shouted down: ‘He’s hardly fucking Arthur Thompson! He’s wearing a cowboy hat and she’s dressed as a squaw!’

The float moved on and the rest of the parade went without a hitch: Wild Bill Hickok and Sioux clapped their hands instead of firing their guns. They looked a little disappointed. Later that day, the Weavers won second prize for best float; we lost out to a West Indian Calypso theme lorry from the Gorbals Community Centre. Sammy accepted the trophy for us but was too embarrassed to say anything. He was often very shy, though he always seemed to hit it off spectacularly with women.

* * *

Later that summer, Sammy had visits from some of the many children he had had by various women, particularly one woman called Betty. He was very affectionate with his kids, but none of us was sure exactly how many he had; he was very private about his various relationships. We guessed he had about seven kids by three different mothers but none of the women had ever stayed very long with him though obviously long enough to procreate. He, of course, paid no financial support to the mothers, though if he had some spare money, he would buy them bits and pieces. Betty seemed resigned to the fact Sammy was not up to committing to their relationship or to any of the wee kids he fathered.

‘The weans annoy him when they cry,’ she tried to explain to me. ‘He’s no’ very good at changing nappies and stuff– an’ to be honest, Janey, I like it this way. He can be a real bastard to live with.’

All this baffled me: Sammy was great with Ashley. He was placid, happy, easy-going and never seemed to throw a temper. Sarah, his then-current girlfriend, accepted that he had other women and kids outside their relationship; it never seemed to faze her. They never had any kids together because she was too busy making money as a prostitute and he was too busy smoking dope or working in the bar. He did tell me once that he wished he had made more of an effort to be with his own kids because he seemed to have more of a bond with Ashley than with any of them. He was just innately very secretive and shortly after my conversation with Betty I discovered another of his secrets.

We had a few press photographers regularly drinking in the Weavers; they would sit and drink too much while their drivers tried to encourage them to get on to the next job. Sometimes they had glamorous young model girls with them who used to sit dead bored at the side of the bar with big pouting lips waiting for the guy to drink up and get his arse moving to the shoot at the Winter Gardens or the People’s Palace. I became really friendly with these photographers and one of them – Ray Beltrami, the brother of Arthur Thompson’s long-time lawyer, Joe Beltrami – used to come to the Weavers before opening hours to get a drink. I would go down from our flat and let him in, then go back upstairs to our flat to get ready for opening. When I came back down, Ray would always have listed every single drink he had taken and he paid before he set off for his first assignment. Before long, Ray and a few of the other photographers would ask me to let them use Ashley as the token child in whichever particular ‘photo opportunity’ picture they had to take that day. So she ended up in newspapers quite a lot as the wee girl who sat in the police car as the mascot for Glasgow Fair … or the child who met Desperate Dan at the launch of some new Marks & Spencer food range … or the wee girl who met Wet Wet Wet as they prepared for their free concert on Glasgow Green. Before the year was out, she was offered professional modelling jobs through an agency and appeared as a bridesmaid in live bridalwear shows and children’s clothing adverts in the newspapers. Ashley loved it, enjoyed the work and we kept her money in trust for her until she would be 14 or 15 and big enough to spend it. One day, Ray Beltrami showed me some of his latest shots.

‘They’re going to be on the front page of the
Daily Record
tomorrow!’ he told me with justified pride.

One picture showed a young woman stretching her arm into the open passenger window of a car while a man injected her with heroin. The picture was particularly evocative as it was taken at The Railings right outside the Gorbals Police Office, in full view of passers-by walking to the shops. It was a shocking photo that highlighted the problems of drug dealers operating under the police’s nose in broad daylight. But it was another of Ray’s pictures that caught my attention. The photo showed a guy called Big Danny, a well-known heroin dealer, chatting to another young man in a black puffer jacket and blue jeans, his face hidden in shadow. From the way the guy in the black jacket stood, I knew it was Sammy.

The man not only looked like Sammy and had Sammy’s hair, he also stood with his left hand in his back pocket, which was a distinctive Sammy trait. And he wore the gold sovereign ring I had given Sammy – in its very distinctive crown setting – on the recognisable skinny middle finger of his right hand, which was pointing out, making the ring clearly visible. I felt cold fear grip me.
What was Sammy doing chatting with this drug-dealing bastard?
He knew I hated Big Danny and he had never in any conversation with me mentioned he had been meeting him. Sammy never went over to the Gorbals – he had no reason to. He bought his hash from a guy in Parkhead, near Celtic Park football ground, in the opposite direction.

Ray Beltrami did not recognise Sammy because he had snatched his wide shot from the side, at a distance and the face was obscured; there were also lots of other people and details in the shot. He realised I had recognised the man in the photo but just accepted that I naturally would, as it was taken in the Gorbals and I lived in the Calton.

‘When did you take the photo?’ I asked.

‘Yesterday.’

When Sammy arrived to take me shopping in his car later that day, I sat in the front seat quietly.

‘Sammy,’ I asked nonchalantly, ‘where were you at lunchtime yesterday?’

‘Errmm … sleeping, I think,’ he replied casually. ‘Why? Was the pub busy?’

‘So you were nowhere near the fucking dealers in the Gorbals then?’ I blurted out.

‘Oh, aye!’ he said, still casually. ‘I wiz talking to Big Danny over at The Railings.’ Then he added, ‘How the fuck did you know that?’

‘My brother Mij saw you,’ I lied.

‘Well, he should huv came and spoke to me, the big bastard,’ Sammy snapped at me as he turned the car into the main road. ‘Coz it was Mij I was looking fur – he owes me £20. I asked Big Danny if he had seen him, coz he would see him before anybody wid, bein’ a dealer an’ all.’

I sat quiet for a while.

Sammy was silent, too.

Finally he spoke. ‘I lent Mij cash last week, when you told him you couldn’t.’

‘Why, Sammy?’ I asked, my mind genuinely confused. ‘Why lend him money? He is a fucking junkie, Sammy; he never pays me back, he won’t pay you back and it all goes up his arm!’

We sat next to each other in silence all the way to the supermarket, as I tried hard to believe his story. But I knew the one certainty in life is that junkies lie.

Later, I tried to talk to Sean about it, but he was not really listening.

* * *

He and I had been fine for almost a whole year but then suddenly, one night, ‘You fucking don’t listen to me!’ he screamed into my face. ‘This is not how ye fucking defrost a fridge! Look – there is still ice in there, ya daft cow! There are still little slivers of ice at the back!’