Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (31 page)

‘Thank you, Mummy and Daddy,’ she said as she hugged us both.

The New Year started well. Our business was doing well financially – we didn’t separate the Weavers from the flats above – and on Saturdays the karaoke nights really boosted takings. I loved karaoke: I was not a good singer and got bored singing normal songs, but I sang rude alternative lyrics to songs like ‘My Way’, ‘Harper Valley PTA’ and Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey I Miss You’, and I would exchange banter with the customers. I loved the attention; they particularly liked my rendition of ‘Pearl’s A Minger’ and my totally straight version of ‘Mack The Knife’.

The First Gulf War started in February. We called Sammy and Paul down to our flat to watch the air attacks start live on TV, but it was just lots of green fuzzy pictures with white flashes; we’d been hoping for more. And Ashley got it into her head that ‘The Gulf’ was the Gorbals. She used to point across the Clyde to the Gorbals and ask, ‘Mummy – is that where the war is?’

We also had an old face come back into the Weavers that year: Jonah McKenzie was someone I had known many years before, just briefly through my brother Mij. I liked Jonah – he was funny and very easy-going. He was the man whose left eye had been knocked out by the heavy glass ashtray in a freak accident at the Palaceum.

Jonah re-entered my life when he and his girlfriend Jackie and their baby girl Cheryl moved into a neat Barratt flat in Weavers Court across the London Road. Every other day, he would come over and sit in the Weavers bar for a chat. I knew he had been involved in heavy stuff – he had dealt hard drugs and was connected to some of the local gangsters. Whenever the phrase ‘Glasgow Gang Wars’ was mentioned in newspapers it seemed that his name appeared. I never asked why. I also never asked him about the strange marks on the palms of his hands; in Glasgow you just don’t ask. It was only much later I heard the rumour that he had been crucified.

But I liked Jonah’s choice of music, his conversation and the way he could laugh at himself.

* * *

One late night after we had shut the Weavers, we were in our flat on the first floor and heard loud police sirens through the windows and saw flashing blue lights flicker across our ceiling. I jumped to my feet and leaned on the window ledge to look down and see police, ambulancemen and medics standing around a body covered in a dark sheet, just lying there on the pavement across the road outside Jonah’s door.

I grabbed my coat and shoes and ran downstairs, pulling them on as I went. The main road was still busy with big trucks pounding along the London Road, making their way south. It took a couple of minutes to dodge the traffic and make it to the pavement opposite. A uniformed policeman was by now dragging the covered body along by its ankles across the pavement and road, leaving a bloody black trail under the orange streetlights. I was horrified. Surely he didn’t have to treat a dead body like that?

The policeman noticed me standing, watching. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he asked.

I ignored him.

Three plain-clothes detectives were standing around, their cold breath drifting up and turning white and blue in the flashing lights of the ambulance. It all looked so surreal.

‘Who is dead?’ I asked, shuffling around in the cold.

‘Fuck! … Help!’

The words came from the body.

‘He isnae dead!’ I said out loud in total shock. I stepped into a pool of blood, bent over and ripped the cover off the body, before the police could stop me. They were just standing around like they were having a casual chit-chat about whether they wanted eggs in their bread rolls.

The body was Jonah’s.

Belatedly, a policeman grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away. Curtains were twitching in the surrounding flats; lights were being switched on; windows began to creep open as the inhabitants awoke to the noise and lights at their doors.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ one plain-clothes officer snapped at me.

‘You are hurting him, for fuck’s sake!’ I replied. ‘Look! He’s bleeding badly.’ The blood was sticking to the soles of my shoes and the smell of it was everywhere. Jonah was silent again, his face ashen. I ran to his open front door. ‘Take him to hospital – please!’ I shouted over my shoulder. I ran up the stairway with one policeman behind me, my bloodied shoes sticking to the wooden steps as I went. I could hear Jackie’s voice shouting something indistinct in the living room. I opened the door and, when I entered, there she was holding her baby girl Cheryl in one arm, trying to pull on her dressing gown with the other and arguing loudly with a policeman. Cheryl looked startled and bewildered at having been woken up.

‘Janey!’ Jackie screamed through tears. ‘Jonah’s been stabbed and these bastards are letting him bleed tae death oot there!’

I turned and ran back down the bloodstained wooden stairs, brushing past the policeman who’d been behind me, slipping on the sticky red fluid I had left behind on the way up. Policemen and medics were now bundling Jonah’s body into the ambulance. They threw him roughly onto a bed in the back as if he were dead. Then medics pulled covers down to look at his arms.

‘Keep oot of this, ya nosy cow,’ a plain-clothes officer snapped at me. ‘D’ye know who he is?’

‘Aye,’ I answered. ‘He’s a fuckin’ human being, ya fuckin’ bastard!’

‘He’s a fuckin’ drug-dealing bastard that deserves to die!’ the policeman shouted at me. ‘He sells smack to the wee weans round here!’

‘Is that right?’ I screamed into his face. ‘Well, he’ll be no different from all the other cunts that sell drugs round here, then, except some of them get away with it more than others coz you fuckers take a cut! Whit’s up? Did he no’ pay ye enough, eh?’

‘You watch yer step, Storrie,’ he sneered at me.

‘Fucking hell.’ I stood my ground. ‘You must be really important in the Polis round here, coz ye know people’s names. You’ll be the chief Masonic Master soon wi’ all those brains, but ye still cannae threaten me or fucking treat people like that. I’ll be a witness!’

The ambulance reversed and drove away into the London Road towards the Royal Infirmary. The officer turned his back on me and started talking to his associates. I pushed through them and ran back up to see Jackie. I had no idea what was going on. I knew Jonah had been involved in drugs, but I thought there was no way he sold it to kids round here … We already had plenty of locals who did that. Jackie was sitting on her clean cream sofa crying; it must have been around 3.00 a.m. by now. Her eyes were puffy and baby Cheryl was crying in her arms.

‘Whit the fuck happened?’ I asked, sitting beside them.

‘I wiz in bed,’ Jackie sobbed, ‘an’ I heard him put the key in the lock, then I heard shouting. I tried to open the door but Jonah held it shut. He was screaming to me to keep it shut, Janey. He was being stabbed by people oot there on the other side of the door and he didnae want them to get to us. Then it went quiet an’ even before I could pick up Cheryl and get ready to go oot to him, the Polis was here and an ambulance. I huv’nae even seen him: is he OK? The bastards widnae even let me oot o’ here to see to him!’

Her voice was becoming hysterical. ‘Is he deed? … Is he deed, Janey?’ She ran around the wee flat holding her mouth. It sounds over-dramatic, but that’s exactly what she did. Every time she said the word ‘deed’ she put her hand on her mouth as if she didn’t want to hear those words coming out. She came from nice people; she was only a wee middle-class lassie who got dragged into a relationship with Jonah, so she had never faced anything like this in her life; she could only react the way she’d seen other people react – in films or on television – and throwing her hand up to her mouth when she was saying ‘Is he deed? Is he deed?’ was what she did without thinking. Her wooden floors were smeared with the blood that I had brought in on the soles of my shoes.

‘Janey, is he deed?’ she kept asking me. ‘Is he deed?’ She sat down and cuddled Cheryl in her arms.

‘No, Jackie, he looked alive but those bastards treated him like meat. Look, I will watch Cheryl – you go and get ready to go up the infirmary…’ I lifted the baby from her arms. As she stood up to get ready…

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

‘Police! Open up!’ they shouted through the letterbox.

I went downstairs, let them in and carried Cheryl back upstairs with the detectives following.

‘He is OK,’ stated one detective uncaringly. ‘They have taken him to the Royal Infirmary. Do you know who did this?’ His attitude was that he didn’t give a flying fuck.

‘Why?’ she snapped, as she pulled her hair into a pony-tail. ‘Wiz it no’ you lot?’

‘No.’ He spoke quietly to her. ‘I think we know who this was.’

‘Well, ye will need to talk to him aboot it. Leave me alone, OK?’ She grabbed her bag and gave me her keys.

‘Janey, can I pick the wee one up at yours later?’

‘Sure,’ I reassured her. ‘You go. I will see you later. Just go, Jackie.’

She walked out with the detectives and shut the door of the living room behind her. I lay Cheryl down on the sofa. By this time, she was crying her head off, shocked and frightened; she didn’t really know me. I walked into the kitchen, wiped the wet blood off my shoes, then mopped the wooden floors to get rid of the stains. The blood was all through the house. I grabbed the baby’s nappy bag and some bottles and made my way with her down through the policemen, pools of blood and flashing police-car lights. Jonah was admitted to hospital and Jackie sat with him through the night. Next morning she arrived at my door to collect Cheryl.

‘Janey, he is gonnae be OK. He had 16 stab wounds in his back and legs, but they’re all just flesh wounds – nothing too bad.’

‘Fucking hell!’ I said. ‘Sixteen stab wounds disnae sound OK, Jackie. Who did it?’

‘He won’t say.’ She picked up the baby and thanked us both before leaving.

A few months later, Jonah was back in hospital. His other eye had been gouged out in a further attack.

After that, Ashley often used to sit up at the bar and chat to Jonah. She became very fond of him and he took time to play games with her. Ashley’s favourite was for her to scour the Weavers, hold an object up to the poor blind man and he had to figure out what it was by touching it. Ashley held up everything from a juice bottle to a domino box; I would get embarrassed and tell her to stop, but Jonah would insist.

‘It’s OK, Janey, this is better than the exercises the hospital give me. She’s fine – leave her be,’ then he would reach down, touch her head and shout out, ‘Is this Ashley or a wee dog?’ She would giggle and run around barking at him.

‘It’s a wee dog!’ he would yell.

Jonah often sat with his fingers drifting over fag boxes and whisky glasses, his blind eyes working out by touch what was on the table. In time, he got used to negotiating the hazardous trip to the toilet on his own but in the early, difficult days, we would shout out the obstacles to him.

‘Jukebox to your left …’

‘Customer approaching to your right …’

‘Smelly drunk man sitting at the fag machine … Avoid him!’

‘Woman with blonde hair on your left! Don’t approach! We don’t know her …’

‘If I touch a woman’s tits,’ he would shout back, ‘it’s coz I’m blind, OK? So don’t shout at me!’ He stretched out his arms at chest height and cupped his hands. Or he’d shout out to women: ‘Can I feel your fanny? If I felt your face I wouldn’t know it …’

Another time, Jonah told me he wanted to go on an African safari. I laughed and replied, ‘You’re blind. It would be a waste of cash.’ So I set a big electric fan up in the Weavers bar and turned the heaters on him and he made animal noises, and I did a commentary about wildebeest roaming the Serengeti. I had customers making strange elephant sounds and we laughed for ages.

* * *

Later that same year, Arthur Thompson Junior was shot dead in the street while on weekend leave from prison where he was serving a drug-dealing sentence and this set off a wave of bloodshed throughout Glasgow. The newspapers called it ‘The Summer of Violence’. A lot of people were arrested for a lot of crimes but, inevitably, it was rarely the right people as the police were notoriously corrupt. The Storries were not involved in any of the violence and abhorred anything which would give them publicity. Old George had a man to cover all eventualities. As well as the dubious benefits of having The Gow as a family carpenter, he had a whole network of tradesmen and professionals throughout the city who would fix things for him without asking any questions.

On the day of Arthur Thompson Junior’s funeral, two young men called Bobby Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon were found shot dead in a car outside the Cottage Bar in Darleith Street, next to Kenmore Street in Shettleston. The newspapers hailed it as an ‘execution’. There were accusations, court cases and conspiracy theories. In the Calton, there were journalists and photographers crawling all over the Weavers and loitering outside Jonah’s home. Old George came into the Weavers and asked me: ‘Whit the fuck’s happenin’ across the road?’

‘It’s all to do with Thompson,’ I told him, then nodded across to two men in the bar. ‘They’re journalists. Don’t speak.’

Old George spat out, ‘They’re fuckin’ worse than the Polis!’ then, speaking louder: ‘Get those cunts oot o’ my pub!’

When blind Jonah and I were alone later that day, I asked him, ‘Who killed them boys in Shettleston, Jonah?’ as I stirred his tea and held the cup straight to his hand to let him feel the handle. He had thick, jet-black hair and wore dark glasses quite a lot, but this day he didn’t wear specs; he was actually quite handsome and had an infectious smile.

‘Killed who, Janey?’

‘Fucking Cock Robin,’ I told him. ‘Glover and Bananas, ya mad fucker. Ye know who!’ I sat close to his face, sticking up two fingers at his eyes. I still thought maybe he could really see and kept trying to catch him out.

‘How the fuck would I know?’ he replied evasively. ‘I wisnae there, wiz I? Anyway, are ye gonnae open ma letters an’ read them fur me?’

‘Where’s Jackie?’ I asked, ripping open the first brown envelope.

‘She fell oot with me again – haha!’ he laughed. That was how he typically spoke. He acted like he thought it was all a big game – he was a man, after all, so he wasn’t going to admit that anything had hurt him; he just sat there with his head cocked, looking up straight at me with his blind eyes.