Two wee boys were watching all this from behind a dyke. They would have stones, were about to hurl said stones. The ragman had not seen them. Neither had his dog. This dog was mean. I hoped it would bark at them and chase them.
Nearby the empty space, where part of the dyke was demolished such a very long time ago. A section had collapsed and crushed a child. Why not say it. Killed the child. The child was beneath the dyke. Bigger children had climbed onto the dyke. I got the story from Lindsey who heard it from Mrs McAuley. The bigger children had run away after the ‘accident’. In case they got blamed.
Accident! The word had to be challenged. It did not do justice to the fact.
None ever was adjudged culpable. Not anyone. A freak of fucking nature. Council business. People had demanded the dyke’s demolition. Oh naughty dyke. What did they put it on Trial! Naughty naughty dyke. Then did the Council act.
I had a wee child. If such a thing ever happened, if it ever happened.
I had sketched this dyke on numerous occasions. What was there about that dyke? Nothing. Bricks and mortar a soul doth not own. Obviously not. Nevertheless, I sketched it.
Dead weans and old dykes, a traditional Glasgow story
The ragman approached the close entrance to the derelict tenement. Aha.
Just to see what was what.
The place was reeking! I could have told him. I had been inside it a fortnight ago. The concrete floor was rutted and wet, urine and shite, animal and human. The walls running damp, initials and dates knifed into the plaster, gang slogans on the ceiling. Empty buckie bottles and bricks and mortar, bricks and mortar, gen-yoo-oine bricks and mortar. I laid down the sketch pad and crayons, massaged the small of my back. The baby’s nappy needed changing. I should have done it an hour and a half ago. Then I could have gone for a walk, pushed the pram. I quite enjoyed that. I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it a lot!
Now Lindsey was due home.
In the background the drone of the radio. It came from through the wall. This was the radio programme, every lunchtime the broadcast. Who could believe people listened to such nonsense? But they did, in their hundreds of thousands. This person or persons through the wall from us; one’s neighbours, they listened to it on a daily basis. Probably I had seen them on the street. Ordinary people, no irregular habits, except this compulsion to listen to extraordinary crap. Was this not the most extraordinarily crap programme in the radio universe!
The door the door the door. The front door was being unlocked. I went quickly to the cot and lifted out the baby, sniffed the nappy and knelt to the floor, dragging across the waterproof changing mat, laying the baby aboard, still sleeping my God, amazing. The room door opened.
Hiya Lindsey! I said, surprised as fuck.
She peered at the wee one: Sleeping?
Yeh.
She smiled, taking care not to glance at what I had been doing. That was enough. To not glance. I attempted a smile but really, people doing that, very difficult, very very difficult. What is it about life, life can be so affected, and how it affects us.
Want a cup of tea? Lindsey said.
I nodded, because out the corner of my eye, what I was working on, it was just obvious, just getting closer, I just had to get closer. How could I get closer! Always the damn problem!
Black soot ingrained sandstone tenements formed a rectangle. For every two closes there was a midden containing three square metal containers which should have been emptied weekly.
Can soot be other than black? Yes, this had been answered. Soot is anything. I no longer had difficulty with that. Or did I! Of course not.
Yes sir I might have known the baby was awake. Lindsey was here and the nappy, just a new nappy, the baby was looking at me, big fucking eyes. I was aware that my stomach was something or other, that it was me, me to blame.
Death is not
I was losing consciousness. I felt like I was, if I wasnt. On this chair, awaking, I was waking and there were words but the words made no sense.
She was beside me, thank God, thank God.
But the whirring! And a rapidity about everything.
That was my life. It pretended to progress but didnt. Unless all was progress. The stuff that took one back was another way forward. Progress or not progress? It was a problem for some. Movement, its possibility. All these wise and questing individuals who existed decades prior to Plato, to Socrates, to old Zeno himself.
But it was not my head it was hers. I could barely distinguish it in the dark. I sensed it more. But to sense something is to distinguish it by other senses.
What went on inside her head? Frequently I thought I knew but I didnt at all. Even to think I knew was arrogance of the intellectual order. The intellectual order of males. There was no other kind.
But I was arrogant. Nothing new there. To know what went on in another’s head one firstly had to know what went on in one’s own. That made sense but not for long. My own head appeared straightforward. I never had the need to think. My body moved and my brain followed. ’Twas ever thus.
I paid close attention to her fingertips, the lines there. Those lines on the human body, on the skin of a human being, these were unique and an identifying feature.
Her body brought a smile to my face. It seemed as per a norm. What does that mean, as per a norm? It sounds insulting yet rang true. It connected to the human norm, she was as per the human norm. She was a normal human being, unlike myself. But I was a God. How else to describe myself? It was no egotistical feature, just the reality of my existence. It is said that each of us is God [a God]. This has become clear, it has been so since the birth of my children. I watched them grow and in their early months, these first couple of years, it was never more clear. And yet, and yet now, now at the present time in my life I see something amiss, is amiss, amiss with the argument.
I made a gulping sound; she was reaching her hands out to me, and picking up things, giving me other things.
Her throat also.
And my throat. I saw it when I shaved. The adam’s apple. What use had my own throat been lately. And why think of myself? I returned always to myself. It was at the nub of the failure. But what was the failure? I knew. If I could not answer such a question, and only such a question, if I could not answer it then I must somehow answer the questioner who will want to know the effect the problem has brought about, given that it is the questioner who sets the question, and the question is the problem. Or so I thought, but it has become apparent that the question only becomes a problem in relation to me, that in one most acute manner I am the problem.
Her pinkie reached out from the safety of her fist which had been clenched, but not so tightly, otherwise how could this movement of her pinkie have occurred.
It must have been a summer’s morning. I was shivering. This should have been a source of amusement. For myself, irony had been so very important, a means to survival. My blood was so very thin. Yet I was frightened to swallow a late-night brandy. I chuckled.
Here, she said.
What for me?
Yes.
It was her after all. No wonder I smiled. I asked was it another sweater. No, she said, it is a cup of tea.
I heard her chuckle then her hand was to my forehead, smoothing; and to my temple.
She brought me presents. She laid them next to me. One had been a sweater. I remembered it clearly. I had not requested the sweater but had wanted one. Then she was laying it beside me.
I said to her that I had not known I wanted the sweater. But you knew. You knew. I didnt even know I wanted it.