night.
Shug sat smoking in the dreich and listened to the crackle of the CB radio. The lady dispatcher announced fares up in Possil and runs to be had down in the Trongate. Joanie Micklewhite was the only voice on the radio, and every night he listened to her hold this repetitive circular monologue asking for help, waiting for answers, giving orders, and bluffing any backchat. Always only half a conversation, like she was talking to herself or talking, it seemed, only to him. He liked the peaceful sound of her voice. He took a comfort from it.
He finished his cigarette and watched young couples huddle together as they left the late picture. The drivers in front slowly started to pull fares and rattle off into the night. Alone at the head of the rank, he watched a group of young lassies dribble chips on to the street as they had a fight over how they should get home. It looked like they’d get in the taxi, but no, the fat practical one wanted to wait for the night bus. Leave her, he thought, let her get wet. The prettiest, most guttered one was still stumbling towards him. Shug practised his smile in the half-light.
He was dragged from his dirty thoughts as a set of bony knuckles rapped on the window. “Ye fur hire, pal?” said a man’s voice.
“No!” shouted Shug, pointing in the direction of the wrecked girls.
“Right, then,” said the old man, not paying any heed. He opened the door before Shug could hit the automatic lock and pulled his small frame and voluminous coats inside. “Dae ye ken the Rangers bar on Duke Street?”
Shug sighed, “Aye, pal,” as the pretty girl slid along the queue to the taxi behind his. He gave her a half-smile, but she paid him no mind.
Ignoring the black leather seat that ran the width of the taxi, the old man pulled down a folding seat and sat directly behind Shug. This was the sign of a talker. Here we fuckin’ go, thought Shug.
It was wet outside but humid inside the cab. The hackney filled with the smell of old milk. The old man sat in a yellowed shirt and a crumpled grey suit, over which he had piled a thin wool coat and on top of this had added an oversize topcoat. It gave him the look of a refugee, his tiny frame drowning in yards of Shetland wool and gabardine. On his head he wore a Harris bunnet, from the shadows of which only his red round nose protruded. The patter started almost immediately. “Did ye see the game the day, son?” asked the milky passenger.
“No,” answered Shug, already knowing where this was headed.
“Aw, ye missed a great game, a bloody great game.” The man was tutting to himself. “Who do ye support then?”
“Celtic,” he lied. He was no Catholic, but it was the shortcut to ending the conversation.
The auld man’s face crumpled like a dropped towel. “Oh, fur fuck’s sake, might’ve known ah’d get in a Pape’s taxi.” Shug watched him in the mirror and snorted under his moustache. He didn’t support Celtic; he didn’t support the Rangers either, but he was proud to be a Protestant. He would have turned his Masonic ring around, but the old man was paying no heed and moving like he was underwater.
Bemused, Shug watched as the man worked himself up into a state of distracted despair, swinging from lachrymose to belligerent. He held his hands in front of him like he was pleading with God. Then he laid his arm across the back of the partition and brought his face inches from the glass separating him from Shug’s ear. Wet-lipped with the drink, he was spitting out random streams of patter, making faces like a toddler learning to talk. Big globs of wet spit misted the partition. Shug deliberately tapped the brakes, and the man’s forehead made a thunk sound as it skelped off the glass. Bunnetless but undeterred, he kept on with his rambling. Shug frowned. He’d have to give that a good wipe later.
The auld Glasgow jakey was a dying breed—a traditionally benign soul that was devolving into something younger and far more sinister with the spread of drugs across the city. Shug looked in the mirror and watched the man continue his drunken solo, the conversation so low and incoherent that he could pick out only certain words like Thatcher and union and bastard. With no feelings of sympathy, he watched as the man laughed and then sobbed at intervals.
The Louden Tavern sat dark and windowless, the door well recessed into the brick face of the low building. It was by design rock-proof, bottle-proof, and bomb-proof. The facade, painted with the red, white, and blue of the Glasgow Rangers, was gloriously defiant in the shadow of Parkhead, the home of Glasgow Celtic, the sporting Mecca of all Catholics.
Shug told the man the fare was a pound seventy and watched him ferret in one pocket after another. All the Glasgow jakeys did this. Their Friday wages were splintered by every bar they passed till they rolled around in pockets as five and ten pence in change, the cumulative weight of the heavy small coins giving them a waddling walk and a hump. They would live on the coins for the rest of the week, taking their chances with their random findings. Even in sleep they were never to be separated from their trousers and large coats for fear their wives or children would tip them out first and buy bread and milk with the shrapnel.
The man was an age looking in every pocket. Shug listened to the soft voice on the CB and tried to stay calm. By the time the jakey had paid and sailed into the dark mouth of the pub Shug was thundering back along Duke Street, trying not to miss the dancing letting out. Outside the Scala an auld dear stuck her hand out, waving it like a small bird. Shug had to stop short or run her over.
He watched her climb into the back of the taxi and felt relieved when she sat square in the centre of the wide black seat. “The Parade, please.” She sniffed, wrinkled her nose, and looked scornfully at Shug. It must have smelled like someone pissed in a pot of old porridge back there.
The taxi started climbing the tenemented hills of Dennistoun. Shug looked in the mirror and watched the woman, who was watching him. The Glasgow housewives always sat square in the middle, never to the side looking out of the window or on one of the fold-down seats like the lonely old men who were hungry for company. She sat as they all did, upright and rigid, like a Presbyterian queen, knees together, back straight, with her hands clasped on her lap. Her coat was pulled close around herself, her hair was set and brushed, even in the back, and her face was set tight like a mask.
“It’s a wild terrible night, right enough,” she said finally.
“Aye, the radio said it would piss all week.” There was something about the woman that reminded him of his own mother, dead and gone. The raw hands and tiny frame belied the strength and power that surely ran through her. He thought of the nights his father would raise his fist on his mother. The more she took it the more he rained down on her, turning her red then blue then black. Shug thought about her at the mirror, pulling her hair over her face, pushing her make-up wider around her eyes to cover the bruises.
“Ah wis just saying I don’t usually get a taxi.” She was searching for his eyes in the mirror.
“Oh, aye?” said Shug, glad to have his thoughts interrupted.
“Aye, but I’ve had a wee win the night, you see. Just a wee one, mind, but it’s nice all the same.” She was rubbing her thumbnail raw. “It’ll come in right handy, you see, now that my George is out of work,” she sighed. “Twenty. Five. Years. Out at the Dalmarnock Iron Works, and all he got was three weeks’ wages. Three weeks! I went up there maself, chapped on the big red gaffer’s door, and I telt him what he could dae with three weeks’ wages.” She opened the clasp on her small hard bag and looked inside. “Do you know what that big bastard telt me? ‘Mrs Brodie, your husband was lucky to get three weeks. I have some young boys wi’ their whole lives ahead o’ them and they only got paid till the end of their shift.’ Made my blood absolutely boil so’in, it did. I said to him, ‘Well,
