Alone in the locker room at the end of my day-shift, I changed from my supermarket clothes into my gangster ones.
Off came the burgundy fleece with the square orange name-tag, the purple shirt, the elasticated trousers and the clunky warehouse boots with the steel toecaps. On came the black Membrana TC jacket, the red cotton sweatshirt, the Kurabo denim slim-fits and the white Chukka boots. Before I stuffed the supermarket clothes into my locker, I took from a trouser-pocket a tool I thought would be handy tonight. This was a cutter with a blade embedded inside a crescent of plastic, which I used for opening boxes and plastic packaging. I’d broken off the top end of the crescent, so that the blade’s corner jutted free.
While we held down George Macintyre, this would be ideal for slitting his arm from his wrist to the inside of his elbow.
Danny had informed us: “Was drinking once in a pub by Pattaya Beach with some big New Zealander. He got into an altercation with three guys who’d served in the Israeli military and they carved him up like that.”
Hector whistled. “Did they kill the guy?”
“Naw. The Kiwi was a hell of a size. Six-five, six-six. Played rugby, second-row forward. He’d enough blood in him to survive losing the amount he did. Though after the Thai doctors stitched him together, they told him he wasn’t going to play rugby again.”
Hector, Mikey and I understood Danny’s thinking. George was big too and though he’d never played rugby as far as we knew, he boxed. Danny intended cutting up George so badly he didn’t box again – not at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, not at Meadowbank, not at Bellahouston, not anywhere. Though many people would joke that George had never boxed in his career anyway. He’d seldom won a fight. In fact, the only time George seemed to win fights was when punters had bet a pile of money on him to lose them.
Outside the supermarket, two red flecks hovered in the darkness above the wall of the car park. I went across to where Hector and Mikey sat smoking and asked, “So, where’s George?”
Mikey sprang down from the wall. “A pub, probably. But we don’t know which one.”
That wasn’t helpful. “What do we do, then? Just check out a couple of hundred pubs across Edinburgh?”
Hector sprang down too. “Danny’s given us names and addresses of four where George hangs out Saturday nights. Reckons he’ll be in one of them.”
All four pubs were within a mile of the city centre. The first one we entered seemed the size of a cupboard and packed with red-faced guys with beards. Hand-pumps for traditional ales lined its counter and its shelves contained nothing but whisky bottles. I got a blank look when I asked for a bottle of Beck’s. Meanwhile, along one of its walls, the seats were full of reprobates clutching flutes, fiddles and accordions. Just as we found a space to stand, they started playing. The crowd rose off the floor like a sea-swell and together they started hollering, in out-of-tune voices, a song about mountains, lassies, trees blooming and bonnie heather.
A glob of ale and spittle landed on the shoulder of my Membrana TC jacket. I swung round towards the beardy punter hollering behind me and snarled, “Och, for fuck’s sake…”
Hector grabbed me. “Focus, Dougie. Focus! We’re only interested in George tonight.”
After spending a half-hour there without seeing George, we went to the next pub on the list. It was bigger and had old-fashioned wooden panelling and furniture, which made it popular with tourists. However, eight or nine musicians with flutes, fiddles and accordions were huddled in a corner, producing a dirge similar to the one we’d just escaped from. The tourists listened and nodded their heads rhythmically while holding half-pints of beer. By now the evening had developed a theme.
I asked Hector, “This is George’s idea of a Saturday night out?”
“Sure,” he said. “George is dead into this stuff. Mind that fucking song he had them play every time he got into the ring? It wasn’t exactly Eye of the Tiger.”
To remind me, Mikey started crooning George’s theme song: “…a soldier… a Scottish soool-dier…!”
A tourist turned towards us and went: “Shh!” I gave him a look and hurriedly he turned away again.
I was already familiar with George’s song. As a kid, after my father had pissed off and my mother’s life had become a procession of crap-paying and unsociably-timed jobs, I often ended up at my grandmother’s flat. While she looked after me, my wrinkly wee granny liked to play vinyl records on an old record player that resided inside a wooden cabinet, and the one she played most featured a guy called Andy Stewart singing a song called A Scottish Soldier.
When I was little, I liked the song because: (a) I was Scottish; and (b) I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. But later the song grated on me. Andy Stewart’s warbly singing voice was one reason why, but another reason was that, when I properly understood the lyrics, I realised how grim it was. That soldier had survived many battles but now his luck had run out and he was mortally wounded. Worse, he wasn’t dying in Scotland but in some foreign country, surrounded by hills that weren’t his beloved hills in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. His one comfort was that a friend of his was playing the bagpipes for him as he died. Aye, the last thing he ever heard… Fucking bagpipes.
Life seemed bleak enough without having to listen to songs like this.
I finally destroyed the record. One day I smashed it into black jagged pieces and told my granny I’d dropped it accidentally. My granny, who got damp-eyed whenever A Scottish Soldier played, burst into tears. It didn’t occur to her that she could go out and buy another copy of it, though maybe by then they’d stopped making vinyl records. Anyway, for the first time in my life, I felt guilty about doing something bad.
Come to think of it, it was also one of the last times I felt guilty about doing something bad.
George didn’t appear in the second pub either, so we moved to the third one. It was on a street behind the railway station and as decrepit as the first pub we’d been in, though larger. The counter was on the left as you entered and around the counter’s far corner was a space where a man stood singing and playing a guitar behind a mic-stand. He was an old guy who had long white tresses of hair draped about his shoulders. But he was big too and, below his rolled-up shirt sleeves and under a slathering of faded tattoos, his arms still showed muscle.
The crowd seemed a mixture of the two previous crowds, containing both red-faced beardies and tourists. Again, George wasn’t there.
We ordered drinks. Meanwhile, the old guy finished singing a ballad, which earned him loud applause. “Thank you,” he said in a deep voice. “A number written by my friend, the great Dick Gaughan. Don’t tell Dick I’ve played it cos he’ll be hammering at my door tomorrow demanding a performance fee.” The crowd laughed. “Now this next song is…”
Mikey’s phone rang. For the fifteen seconds it took Mikey to remove it from his pocket, its ring-tone, which was Coolio’s Gangster’s Paradise, filled the pub. Every face turned our way. I gave those faces another of my looks, but this time it didn’t work. There were just too many of them.
Mikey started talking into the phone in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Aye? Oh hello, Danny… Just now? We’re in that shite-hole pub behind the station… Naw, no sign of him yet. It’s just wall-to-wall sheep-shaggers listening to some teuchter musician… Sure… I’ll phone you when we find him… Speak to you later, right?”
Mikey stuck the phone in his pocket and only then became aware that he had an audience. The old folkie rumbled into his microphone: “You finished now?”
“Aye,” Mikey said across the silent bar. “I’m finished.”
“Son,” replied the folkie, “you were finished the day you were born. I can imagine the shock your mother received. Just after she’d got off the toilet and looked down at it. Wondering why one of the jobbies floating there had a wee face and was staring back up at her.”
Mikey froze. The silence in the bar gave way to a ripple, then a roar of laughter from the folkie’s audience. It wasn’t until the laughter had died down that Mikey reacted. He turned to Hector and croaked, “Did you hear what that auld motherfucker just said?”
“Motherfucker?” mused the folkie. “Well, I would have fucked your mother if my cousin hadn’t beaten me to it. She didn’t have any change, you see, and he had the right money on him. A fifty-pence coin.”
“Fuck you!” Mikey shouted back, though his voice had to compete against another roar of laughter. Deciding that as a team we should present a united front, Hector and I shouted too: “Aye, go fuck yourself, you auld cunt!”
“Listen, I’m just doing my job here,” said the folkie. “That doesn’t give you three the right to disturb me. I mean, I don’t stick my head into the alley where you work and shout abuse while you’re giving blowjobs to sailors. Do I?”
We shouted more insults but our words were drowned out while people cackled and hooted around us and while he spoke, amplified by the mic. “Still, I welcome everybody to my gigs. And it was nice of you three to come. Just a pity that your fathers came, twenty years ago. Though when I say ‘fathers’, I use that word very generally. I realise they could also have been your grandfathers, uncles, brothers…”
After the laughter had subsided and the pub was quiet again, five words wheezed out of Hector: “You… are… going… to… die.”
The folkie put down his guitar and told the crowd, “Right folks. I’m nipping out into the alley for a cigarette break. The show will resume in ten minutes.”
He looked towards us. But then, instead of coming along the bar, past us and out of the front door, he turned and disappeared into a passageway whose entrance was in the wall behind him. Hector promptly bundled Mikey and me through the front door onto the street.
I wasn’t convinced this was a good idea. “What about George? Shouldn’t we be focusing on him?”
“Fuck George,” said Hector. “This auld wanker’s got something coming to him.”
We found the alley at the other end of the pub’s façade. The rays from a streetlight at the corner scoured along it and showed a wheelie-bin at its rear. The folkie had emerged through a door in the wall beside the bin and stood holding a cigarette packet and lighter. When he saw us enter the alley, he lifted back the wheelie-bin’s lid and placed the packet and lighter on top of its rim.
“I believe,” he said, “you lads need to better appreciate your country’s traditional music.”
“Bastard!” roared Hector, ran at him and threw a punch. But the folkie dodged Hector’s fist and simultaneously whipped something up out of the wheelie-bin. The streetlight’s rays briefly gleamed on an empty whisky bottle. Then the folkie thrust the bottle forward, its thick round base crunched into Hector’s head and Hector keeled back onto the alley’s floor.
Mikey came at him too. The folkie smashed the bottle against the wall and its bottom suddenly became a maw of glass teeth. That troubled me – how had he managed to do that? Whenever I’d tried breaking a bottle to turn it into a weapon, the thing had snapped away at the neck and left me holding a nozzle of glass an inch or two long. He slashed the bottle at Mikey, who stalled just in time, though the glass teeth tore across the front of his sweatshirt. The folkie also swung one of his feet – encased, I saw, in a big steel-capped boot like the ones I wore in the supermarket – into Mikey’s crotch. Mikey doubled over. The folkie drove his knee up against Mikey’s face while hammering his fist down on the back of his head, and suddenly Mikey was on the deck too.
Hector tried to lift himself off the ground. The folkie barely glanced at him. He kicked sideways and the tread on one of his boot-soles struck Hector’s face. I heard a crack of breaking cartilage.
It was my turn. I had the cutter in my hand and I ran and lunged at him, but with his bottle-holding arm he batted the cutter aside. His free hand, meanwhile, clamped itself around my throat. Immediately I felt pain. He wasn’t just choking me – he was crushing me. I tried hacking at him with the cutter again but already my arm was weak and uncoordinated. He discarded the bottle and prised the cutter out of my fingers.
I heard a snort of amused contempt. “Well, well. Looks like I’ve found me a shelf-stacker. Son, you need to get a life.”
By now it felt like flames were kindling inside my chest and trying to climb up my throat, but were unable to get past the blocked part of it he was gripping. My vision blurred. No longer could I see his face, though a few inches in front of me I made out a knife…
No, I thought, he’s going to chib me!
“Though try,’ he continued, “to get a life better than the one I ended up getting.”
Then the folkie let go of me and I slumped forward. The next thing I knew, he’d seized me again, this time by the scruff of my neck, and he propelled me into the nearest wall. A drainpipe ran down it and my forehead struck that rather than the brickwork behind it, which possibly saved my head from splitting open and ejecting my forebrain in a spray. The drainpipe caved in. My head bounced back, my legs stopped functioning and I dropped.
I woke sometime later. Pain pulsed outwards from the middle of my forehead and enclosed my face like a hideous mask. The pain was so bad that I was unsurprised to hear sobbing noises, though after a time I realised the noises weren’t my own but came from further back in the alley. I managed to clamber onto my feet, then had to hunch over beside a wall and vomit. Afterwards, I stumbled across a form that lay huddled on the ground and emerged onto a street.
Along from the alley’s corner was a large window brimming with soft, warm light and then a door. My head still throbbing, I felt an urge to be inside amid the warmth and light. I tottered to the door, went through and found myself in a crowded pub, although the crowd were turned away from the door and watching something at the pub’s other end. Unnoticed, I shambled to the counter and found a free stool. I propped my elbows on the countertop and clutched my seething head between my hands.
Eventually, I heard the folkie singing, remembered what’d happened and realised where I was now.
When his song finished, a voice came from the stool beside me. “Why, hullo Dougie!”
I raised my head from my hands. George Macintyre was sitting beside me at the counter, smiling – though a moment later his face became concerned. “Jesus,” he said. “You’ve a hell of a lump on your forehead. What happened? Did something fall on you in the supermarket?”
Because of my pain, all I could do in reply was grunt. George interpreted that as a ‘yes’ and marvelled, “Wow, your employers aren’t great on Health and Safety, are they?”
Then the folkie spoke and I looked along the bar. He’d been joined at the mic by a girl with a tartan miniskirt and a Celtic pattern spiralling down one of her long legs. He lifted a set of bagpipes, jammed the bag under his left arm and arranged the drones over his left shoulder. “For this next song,” said the folkie, “Fenella’s going to provide the vocals while I screech away on these pipes. It’s dedicated to a pal of mine who’s just come in. Mr George Macintyre, whom you may know as a boxer of some repute.”
As people cheered and clapped, the girl started singing A Scottish Soldier.
Her voice had a tenderness and sadness I’d never heard when my granny played her vinyl copy of the song. Meanwhile, looking at the folkie, whose right hand now clutched the bagpipes’ chanter, it occurred to me that the knife I’d glimpsed in the alley hadn’t been in his hand. It was a few inches below the hand, on his forearm. The knife depicted in that old tattoo had wings, which made me think of the insignia for some British Army regiment… An elite regiment… But I couldn’t follow this train of thought because of the pain in my head.
The girl paused in her singing and the folkie’s bagpipes released a heart-breaking wail. And as I noticed the damp smears in his eyes while he blew down the blow-stick, I understood that the folkie had been a Scottish soldier once. Not the Scottish soldier the girl had sung about, for surely that’d been a friend of his.
I wondered where the faraway hills had been, in which faraway land, when he’d played the pipes for his friend one last time.
[Image Credit : Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash ]
by 
Steve Cashel
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That was an entertaining read. Good job, Steve!