The Cutting Room (8 page)

He looked pleased with himself.

`And that’s your master plan? You create a diversion while

I leg it with the incriminating material.’

`Simplest is best. We’ll meet up at yours, I’ll get the gear to Gerry and give you the info. Christ, I’ll even chum you to the meet. We can go for a pint after.’

`They’ll have seen me coming in.’

`Rilke, there’s nine flats in this building, six of them

multiple occupancy. This area of Glasgow suffers from a

preponderance of single, middle-aged men with a drink

problem. They’ll not have noticed you.’

`Still no way, Les.’

`I’ll put you in touch with the person you need to talk to. This boy covers his tracks - you’ll never find him without me.’

Four cans and three joints later Leslie was handing me his

keys.

`Double-mortise the front door and make sure you lock the

back entrance to the close. I don’t want any junkies sneaking in for a smoke.’

He swaddled the cheap china ornament in two newspapers,

hunted through the detritus on the floor for tape, then gave up in disgust.

`I hate this, fucking hate it, there’s no need for this mess. They could look and put things back as they go along. You know why they do it, don’t you? There was no pause. Les, like Rose, was the master of the rhetorical question. `Psychological torture.

Bloody Nazis. What kind of sick fuck becomes a polisman??

‘James Anderson.’

`You know how I feel about that. A good man gone bad.’

`I saw him yesterday.’

`Oh yes? Leslie had found the cardboard box his stereo had

come in and was cutting it down to size. `Did he take down

your particulars??

‘Aye, he did.’

He stopped, knife poised mid slice.

`Christ, he never. I thought he was straight in every sense. I thought it was just one of those boyish things, you know,

quick Willy-rub behind the bike sheds.’

`We didn’t have bike sheds at our school.’

`Come on. I’m filled with girlish curiosity.’

`Is that what you call it? No, it was nothing like that. I got nicked in the park last night. Anderson called me in from the front desk and let me off with a talking-to.’

`Oh that’s great. Fanbloodytastic. You can’t even sniff

around the park without getting nicked. That fills me with

confidence.’

He was wrapping the box in a series of carrier bags,

smoothing out creases, splitting the handles and tying them

together.

`Maybe you should get somebody else.’

`Look, I’m just a bit rattled. Of course I’ve got confidence in you. You’re a smooth operator, I know that. Just try and

not screw up, eh? He slipped the package into the final bag, patting it affectionately. `There, that should take a while to unwrap.’ He pulled down a swing coat from the back of the

door and zipped on a pair of calf-length black boots. He

wasn’t going to win any beauty contests. He turned and gave

me a grin. `Ready to go??

‘Are you sure you want to go out like that in daylight??

‘Ach I do it all the time. Nobody looks at me and if they do they just think I’m a hacket woman. Anyway, some of us

poofy bastards are good fighters. All set??

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?

He paiftsed, swore, `Christ Almighty!’ broke into laughter

and lowered the pulley.

`There’s no way, Leslie. No way.’

`Come on. It’s lucky. It was right above that polisman’s head last night and he didn’t even notice. It was a fucking miracle. As soon as I get back I’m going to phone the Pope and ask him to consecrate the pulley.’

`It’s too conspicuous. It’s just not the kind of bag I would carry.

`For me, Rilke.’

I stepped out of the back door and looked around. Leslie’s

back court was fourth in a row. To get to the street I had to cross three back yards, scaling four six-foot walls on the way.

Jeremy Bentham invented the panopticon as a means for

warders to keep constant surveillance on prisoners. He

proposed a circular prison with cells built round a central well from which the watcher could see the watched at any angle. Quite where this fits into his greatest happiness system I’m not sure, but it became popular among designers of

schools. Les’s back court wasn’t circular and it wasn’t a true example of a panopticon, but I estimated my journey could be observed from about seventy flats. I managed the first two

walls fine, walking as nonchalantly as I could in between, the tartan shopper banging against my leg. In the third, a young boy on a tricycle was cycling circles beneath a line of bilious washing. He eyed my advance.

`Forgotten my keys, son.’ I hauled myself over the wall and

into his yard trying to look paternal. `Should you not be at school?’

The child lifted his face and gave me a suspicious look. His baby teeth were tiny tombstone stumps.

`No. I’m no big enough yet. You need to be five to go to

school. Kyle goes to school. He’s a big boy.’ He shifted his gaze from me towards a second floor window and in a voice

like a fog horn shouted, `Mammy! There’s a man just climbed

over the fence.’

The window slammed open and it became clear where

junior had got his voice.

`Right you. Stay where you are while I phone the police.’ I

could see her grappling with a telephone, dialling 999,

shouting at me at the same time. `I’m onto you. Keep away

from that child. Pervert. Knicker-stealing plamph. I know

your face now. You’ds best steal your pants elsewhere,

bloody weirdo.’

Around the back courts other windows were sliding open. I

shielded my face with Leslie’s lucky tartan bag, pulled myself over the final fence, and ran from view.

There were things I should be doing, things that would

make me money and wouldn’t get me arrested. I slowed my

pace, trying to look like a guy who habitually carries a tartan shopping bag, a thin man in a black suit covered in orange

brick dust. An ordinary guy on the way back from the Coop

with the week’s butcher meat. Out on the street nobody paid

me any attention.

Les was waiting. `You took your time. I was beginning to get the wind up. No probs?’

I let us in. `No, none at all.’ I felt weary. `You?’

`Easy peasy.’ He had a buzz on him. Adrenalin or speed? I

didn’t care. `I took a ride on the subway to make sure I wasn’t being followed, got off a stop too early and walked the rest of the way. Better not hang about, though. Sooner this is off my hands the better. Cheers, man. That’s one I owe you.’

He put his arms round me in a bear hug, relieving me of the

bag at the same time.

`I’ll collect now.’

Les’s face became a question mark, one eyebrow raised,

mouth turned down. He moved his feet in a boxer’s fast-toed

shuffle, still charged with the electricity of the adventure.

`What?;

‘The contact.’

`Oh yeah. Sure you want this?’

`I wasn’t helping you out of the goodness of my heart,

Leslie.’

`Yeah, well, a deal’s a deal.’

He took a mobile phone from his bag and started to dial.

…though no city has ever been changed

into such a stinking ulcer on the face of green Nature,

The poet says unto thee, `Splendid is thy Beauty!’ Arthur Rimbaud, `L’Orgie parisienne’

THE VOICE ON THE telephone had been flat and accentless.

The precision of someone speaking a foreign language perfectly.

`Yes,

Leslie said you would call. How does five thirty suit

you? He’d given me the address and hung up with, `Fine, see

you then.’

Simple. A date with a pornographer. A man who knew

about the snuff setup.

Pornography is a versatile industry, it moves with the

times. When the first caveman discovered he could paint on

walls, using dyes fashioned from earth and ash, another dirty

little Homo erectus saw the chance to draw a bare naked lady. In the days before photography, paintings, etchings, drawings of every imaginable vice existed and, of course, as soon as the camera came on the scene the industry expanded with delight.

The advent of cinema inspired undulations viewed in porno

picture palaces across the globe. Video closed most of those cinemas, but who cared? There was money to be made. In

every high street there is a video store where, for a couple of pounds, you can rent your own show. Of course, there are

always some whose tastes are difficult to satisfy and for them there are quiet little shops away from the main drag, hidden palaces of strange delights. It’s as if the everyday shopper doesn’t see the dreary storefront, the unwashed window that

displays nothing, nothing at all. But if you are sympathetic, if you have the motivation, you can be in any town, any city, in the world, a stranger on your first day, and it will sing to you.

Some people run from Grandma’s house, they long for the

bite of the wolf.

The A to Z revealed the address to be in an alleyway off the far end of West Nile Street. It was the end of the afternoon; the sky hung dark and heavy, like a lid on the world. I could feel the heat of the day stored under my feet in the sticky tar pavements. Intimations of summer, or environmental disaster.

A trickle of sweat drifted down my spine and I worried

my shirt might stain.

I set off along Argyle Street, dodging between schoolkids

and stacks of cardboard boxes littered with rotting vegetables.

Three Sikh pensioners sat, smoking and gossiping, on wooden

chairs arranged on the pavement outside a grocer’s shop. One of them said something in his own language and the group

chuckled. `Bloody Sair Heids’ muttered a harassed woman

arcing past them, catching her loaded shopping bag against my

shin. The old men’s laughter followed me. I didn’t mind;

people had done worse than laugh.

Outside the funeral directors, black-edged traffic cones

reserved a space for the dead. As I passed the aluminium doors scrolled up, revealing the loaded hearse within. Seagulls

squabbled on top of a telephone box, hovering, flapping their broad wings, cawing half-human screeches, orange beaks

dipping with dainty derision, pecking over something rank.

Their presence inland confirmed the approaching storm. A

vein on my temple started to throb.

Ahead of me an old man crept a creaking wheelbarrow

along the pavement. Derelict factories were under demolition near the quay and he’d collected low-quality scrap, the kind younger, fitter scavengers would ignore. I drew level, took in the rusted cart, his dusty suit, the stoop of his back, and felt the man with the scythe at my elbow. Maybe I wanted to

dismiss Death. I should have known better.

`D’you need a hand?

He hunched further over the barrow, quickened his pace

and hissed, `Fuck off. It’s mine. I found it, away and get your own, you fucking bastard.’

`You’re an ungrateful old git.’ I reached over and rattled a bit of distorted metal. He cringed, bravado gone, dropping his prize, glancing up at me once, covering his head reflexively with his arms, but not before I had seen the yellow spread of fading bruises across his face. `It’s all right,’ I said. `I wouldn’t hurt you. I’m not after your stuff.’

I touched his shoulder and he flinched.

`Leave me alone’ - a whisper - `just leave me alone.’

A block later, I turned to look back. He was still there,

frozen, whispering, covering his head.

A small posse of boys gathered round the streaming

window of the Finnieston Fish Emporium, eating sweets,

transfixed by the ugliness of a gaping monkfish, whiskered sea monster. Across the road a policeman took a firm grip of a

shabby suspect’s manacled wrists and huckled him from a

patrol car to the station. The prisoner, head down, stumbled as if drunk, or too tired to care. The police braced himself with expert ease and checked the descent. Safe in the long

arms of the law. Newspaper hoardings propped side by side

declared the discovery of the toddler’s drowned body and the promise of full details on the slaughtered `vice girl’.

At Charing Cross I was absorbed into the late-afternoon

tide of office workers. Here, then, was sanity. The industrial age had given way to a white-collar revolution and the sons

and daughters of shipyard toilers now tapped keyboards and

answered telephones in wipe-clean sweatshops. They shuffled

invisible paper and sped communications through electronic

magic. Dark suits tramped along Bath Street, past the stormblasted spire of Renfield St Stephen’s, home to prepare for

another day like the last and another after that. Cars crept at a sluggish pace towards curving slip roads and the motorway

miles below, where three lanes of paralysed traffic shimmered in a heat haze. Buses forced their way to obedient queues of defeated commuters, unoiled brakes screaming at every

touch. A coach, trapped in the gridlock, opened and closed

its pneumatic doors, trying to raise a breeze from the stagnant air. Elevator buildings that inspired the Chicago skyline

disgorged men and women crumpled by the day, some barely

a step from the door before they lit their first fag of freedom, sucking long and hard, deep inhalations that revealed their

cheekbones, smoke curling from their nostrils, working for a hit. And all around me mobile phones. People talk, talk,

talking to a distant party while the world marched by.

A gang of youths swooped through the crowds, flinging