A Scots Quair (75 page)

Meg said
Don't blether, you haven't the guts; you're jealous
he's brains and you haven't, that's all
. Alick snorted
Brains?
Him? He's only got swank. And me and the chaps in the Furnaces
are planning a little bit of a surprise for Mr Bloody Ewan
Tavendale
.

—
WHO
?

Alick said
Wash out your lugs. Ewan Tavendale's the name if
you want to know. Here, get out of my way till I get on my boots,
the hooter'll be howling in a minute or so
.

So that was where her son worked, was it then? What had She to be stuck-up about? A lassie could bear with old Ma Cleghorn, an orra old bitch but not a bad heart. But the way that that Mrs Colquohoun took on, and looked at you cool, put a body off. And who was she to put on her airs that kept a lodging-house for a living and had her son only an apprentice like Alick?

Meg grabbed her hat and set out for Windmill, the Cowgate slowly unwreathing its fug, up in Royal Mile the lorries were lolloping over the calsays, Paldy Parish littering its doors with weans, snuffy and ragged, kids off to school, scrawling dirty things on the pavements, some throwing filth and cheeking a lassie…. She'd get out of this place, get a lodging somewhere in Tangleha' or the Ecclesgriegs.

But who should she meet where the Cowgate lane climbed up to the stour and whirr of the Mile than Big Jim Trease the Communionist, red-cheeked and sappy, everybody kenned him and called him
Jim
when bobbies weren't looking. But
Meg had no use for those coarse brutes the Reds that would do away with the gents and her job, and when Big Jim smiled all over his face twinkling his wee pig eyes at her she made to go by with her nose in the air. He'd a creature with him she didn't know, thin, brown, ragged, with an ill-shaved face; and Jim cried
Meg, I've been looking for you. Has your Ma still
got that spare bed to let?

Meg snapped
Supposing you gang and speir at her?
Big Jim smiled at her sappy and kind, she felt half-shamed though the beast was a Red:
Right, and we will. Many thanks, Meg
.

Would you credit that?—trying to land a Red in the house, maybe rape you and gut you in the middle of the night, as the coarse tinks did with hardly a break, night on night, in that awful Russia. If Ma wasn't soft she would keep the door snibbed….
Oh to hell, there's the Windmill tram!

She caught the thing by the skin of the teeth and got out under the Windmill Brae, ran up the Steps and met face to face young Ewan Tavendale coming down them—three at a time, no hat, in overalls, hands in his pouches, two books alow his oxter, his eyes went over her, why need he be proud? The like of him made you think the Reds right, he needed to be jammed by a wall and shot.

Morning, Meg
, he said,
Didn't notice you
, and smiled as sweet as a kid at you. Oh, losh, and the things you'd been thinking about him!

And the things Alick said they were doing today—

Gowans and Gloag made metal containers, bolts and girders and metal trestles, fine castings for sections of engine casings, a thousand men working in great rattling sheds built to hold the labour of three times the number in a rattle and roar of prosperity. Ewan Tavendale would think of that now and then, Gowans had flourished just after the War, high wages and bonuses dished out to all, pap for the proletariats. Wonder what they did with the high money then?—Spent it on the usual keelie things, dogs and horse-racing and sleeping with whores, poor devils—it had nothing to do with him.

Hardly anything to do with the others at all, stoking his shot in the Furnaces, stripped to the waist, he stripped brown, mother's skin, and tightened his belt over shovel and barrow, cleared out the clinkers and wheeled up a load and flung it deep in the whoom of the flame, the Works kittling up as the morning woke, bells snarling hell if the heat now and then went low in one fire or another. In an hour or so Ewan'd be dripping with sweat, and drink and drink from the tap in the rear, water that gushed out again from him, a sponge-like life and tremendous fun. The other apprentices, keelies the lot, didn't seem anxious to chum up at all, thank goodness, it gave him time to tackle the books of the trade, metallurgy twice as exciting as flints. He stacked the books with his coat in the sheds, till dinner, and went up and scrubbed himself, put on his coat and went down to the Docks with books and a sandwich and swotted up Castings. But the other apprentices stayed behind and laughed and joked in the lavatories, insanitary devils, no business of his.

But this forenoon was the worst he'd faced in the Furnaces, hours clogged with heat, lungs going like bellows, once the foreman Dallas came swearing down, about fires, not Ewan's, it was drawing fine. He looked at Ewan and gave him a nod
Take it a bit easier, Mr Tavendale. Yours is fine. It's
the fires of those other muckers
. He'd hardly gone up the steps to Machines when the pimply keelie Alick Watson called out to another of them, Ewan didn't know his name:
D'you know
any poetry this morning, Norman?

—
Oh, ay, a fine bit. You other lads heard it?
—

…. Oh ay, the toff bastard heard it fine, but he didn't let on, just went on with his work, all the lads laughed, you'd known he'd no guts. Syne Norman Cruickshank sang out another bit, you laughed till you split, a funny sod Norman, about the toff mucker's mucking mother. He threw down the
shovel as he said that, Norman, getting ready for the toff when he louped to bash him, as any body would do when he heard that about his mother. And he heard it all right and gave Norman a look, fair damn well maddening, as though Norman were dirt and not very interesting dirt at that: and went on with raking the clinkers, calm. But Alick you could see was warming up to him, you all warmed up, led him hell's delight, serve him right with his bloody show-off. Wee Geordie Bruce couped his barrow when he wasn't looking, and Norman nipped back for the urine pan and slung it right slap in the toff Bulgar's fire, it sent up a guff that near killed you all and the toff had to stoke it up afresh.

He'd only just finished when the hooter went, Alick Watson had nipped up a minute afore bent on some deviltry you could be bound. When the rest of you got up the stairs he was just coming out of the washing-sheds where all the lads left their jackets and pieces. He winked and you knew he'd been up to something, and grinned and waited for Tavendale.

Ewan went in and washed and took down his jacket, and put it on, and put his hand in his pocket…. For a minute, certain, he knew he'd be sick, damned sick, and then swallowed his throat and didn't think as he washed his hand and wrenched off his jacket. Nuisance—miss most of that section on phosphor bronze now.

The five keelies were waiting for him to come out, they held their noses and capered and laughed, Ewan thought
The
pimply keelie, I suppose
, and walked quietly over to where the five stood. The keelie's eyes in his thin, dour face didn't change, scornful of gentry, hands in his pouches,
Damn
shame, he's no chance
, said Ewan's mind as he hit him and felt his arm go numb.

Alick shot like a stone from a catapult half across the yard crash in a bowie of lime, Ewan knew he'd be back in less than a minute, the only other dangerous one in the gang the one called Norman, an unscrubbed little swine—
about three
inches higher than yourself—still, little
. And he swung up his left, keelie on the point, he whirled about and went flump in
the stour; and it seemed to Ewan suddenly all the day cleared, Duncairn clear, bright and sharp to his finger-tips' touch, he'd never felt so well or so keen for life, he laughed: and Alick Watson came at him head down.

The foreman and another man heard the fighting back by the sheds and came round to see. The childe with the foreman grunted
That's him: another of those gentry apprentice
sods
, but the foreman Dallas of course had his favourite, he called out
Steady a bit, Tavendale!
Ewan dripped blood like a half-killed pig, but he didn't know that, infighting, they were both thick-streaked with blood and snot, holding and fighting, Alick tried to kick, Ewan felt a stab of pain like a knife, and loosened his hold and Alick broke away—looked, swung, and struck, it caught Ewan's neck, he gave a queer grunt and twist, the fight finished, queer that silence to Alick and the way the sheds shook.

When Chris woke next morning the first thought that came in her mind was of Ewan. She didn't lie in bed and stretch as usual, got out and dressed and went down to the kitchen. Outside the early dawn of Duncairn lay pallid on the rigs and rinds of grey granite stretching away to the feet of the morning, east wan-tinted, no birds crying, the toun turning to yawn awake below. Jock came and purred and circled her legs, sniffed and sneezed, but she hardly noticed, taking up Ma's tea, syne Miss Murgatroyd's, and so at last gained Ewan's room.

He lay fast sleep, head bandaged, neck bandaged, she thought
He's so young!
as she saw his arm, dimpled and smooth of skin, lying by his side. And then as she went nearer she saw his face, the bruises upon it, the broken skin, the swollen lips: and went soft inside in a blaze of rage. How could they—to Ewan, he was only a bairn!

She picked up one of the apples he'd want and sat down on the bed and shook him awake. He woke with the usual quick lack of blink, but half unguarded for a minute, Chris thought, as though she'd peeped down in his eyes for once to that queer boy-self that so puzzled her. Son of herself but
sometimes so un-sib she felt more kin to Meg Watson the maid!

She told him that, idly, as though it were a joke, and he put his hands under his head and considered, and said something about hormones and egg-cells, whatever they had to do with it—
I'm not so different; but I want to
know things.
And
I love you up to that phosphor-bronze hair—more than Meg
Whatname'll ever do
.

Chris said it was Watson, not Whatname, and Εwan said that was a funny coincidence, wondered if she were any relation of the keelie that had bashed him so yesterday.—
Perfect hiding he was giving me, Chris; and I struck it unlucky,
head bang on a girder. Fought like a rat and so did I
.

Chris said
What was it all about?

He lay still a minute, still in that posture.
Oh, filth. Nothing
you need worry about. They don't much like me, the keelies,
Chris
.

She'd heard him use that word before but the queerest thing happened to her now. She said sharply:
What's a keelie,
Εwan? Your father was a ploughman afore we were wed, and I
was a quean in a crofter's kitchen
.

Bandaged, undisturbed, he lay looking at her.
A plough
man's not a keelie. And anyhow, Chris
—

Her heart tightened in a funny way. There was something else. She said
Yes?

—
Oh—just that though my father was a ploughman and you
came from a kitchen—that's nothing to do with me, has it? I'm
neither you nor my father: I'm myself
.

All that day and the next Meg didn't turn up, Ma Cleghorn swore at the lazy limmer and did all the washing-up by herself, and broke two plates in the first half-hour—
all
through that lazy bitch of a quean!
Jock hardly knew where he was after that, his feet more often in the air than not, as Ma kicked him from the range to the dresser and back, he purring like a red-hot engine the while, Chris saw the last act as she brought down a tray—Jock scart his claws in Ma's sonsy leg and give a loud scraich and shoot out of the window.
And the sight was so funny Chris heard herself giggle, like a bairn, Ma rubbing her leg and swearing:

Malagaroused by a cat and forsook by a jade. Will you go to the
Cowgate and see what's come of her?

So down Chris went, not taking the tram, better acquainted with Duncairn by now, down Windmill Brae with its shelving steps, across the Meal Market where they didn't sell meal, sold nothing, old, a deserted patch, dogs and unemployed squatting in the sun, through Melvin Wynd into Little Mart where the ploughmen gathered in feeing-times in Paldy Fair in the days long syne. They didn't now, two or three shops littered here, shops everywhere that a body might look, how did they all live and manage a trade? The pavements were sweating a greasy slime as she made her way to the Cowgate's brink, steps leading down to Paldy Parish.

She'd never been so far into Paldy before, seeing the broken windows and the tattered doors and the weary faces of the women going by, basket-laden, all the place had a smell of hippens, unwashed, and old stale meat and God knew what, if even He knew, Chris thought He couldn't. And she passed a Free Kirk with a twist to her thought: if there was a God as Robert had believed couldn't He put it into the heads of those folk they'd be better served filling the wames of their weans than the stomach of some parson clown in a Manse? But then she'd never understood religion, thought it only a fairy-tale, not a good one, dark and evil rather, hurting life, hurting death, no concern of hers if others didn't force it on her, she herself had nothing to force in its stead.

Robert once had had with his Socialism. And looking around that evil place in the stew of the hottering rising June she minded that verse he'd once quoted in Segget, long ago in that other life: