Glasgow (47 page)

The barman sighed heavily and got me a pint. A minute later, I realised that what they were saying to me was that this was the worst pub in the world in which to order lager since all I would get is a glass of warm soap suds, dispensed from a gasping, reluctant tap, and that really I should flee with my life while I could. I drank two sips of this interesting concoction, and, making as if I were going to the Gents, slipped out a side door.

‘WILLIE LYNCH IS NO' A GRASS', 1996
Nick Danziger

Few writers spend as much time getting to know a place as Nick Danziger. Fewer still are prepared to venture into those bleak backwaters that are well off the tourist trail. Glasgow's East End has long had an unenviable reputation but as Danziger reveals, there are within its insalubrious precincts individuals, many of whom are women, who are doing what they can to get by and make of life what they can. The streets described here are of the meanest, where drugs, violence and theft are endemic. Few Glaswegians, let alone foreigners, ever visit them. They are Glasgow's equivalent of what in Paris are called ‘banlieus', vast high-rise housing estates with few amenities, and even fewer reasons to linger
.

I left the far north of Scotland in July, having discovered that social intimacy comes at the price of privacy: everybody knows your business. The day I arrived in Glasgow the rotting body of a pensioner was found in his flat eight months after he died. Neighbours hadn't seen the quiet eighty-two-year-old for months, but no one had reported him missing. Council officials only took an interest in Malkie when his rent fell into arrears and they moved to evict him. When police battered down his door the Christmas cards were still on the mantelpiece.

It is difficult to speak of Glasgow. In 1990 it found new prestige as the cultural centre of Europe, but at first sight it is not a pleasant place, this sprawling metropolis with its grim tenements and claustrophobic closes. For many Glaswegians it is not cheerful, or easy, or safe, or reasonable; it is, however, a passionate place, where both young and old, the hopeful and the disillusioned, find a life constantly on the edge. The city breathes with a vitality like no other city in Britain. In this Glasgow has much in common with New York.

I drove into Christine's close at a snail's pace, through toddlers playing in the street oblivious to the traffic. As I pulled my bag out of the car a young man called up to a third-floor window, ‘Do you want any rugby balls?' In Newcastle they were known as jellies or wobbly eggs because of their soft centre; here the prescription sleeping pill Temazepam is also nicknamed after its shape. I was soon to discover that this drug was almost as popular as oxygen.

Appearances can be deceptive. Christine's sandstone tenement in the East End is framed by a thin border of pleasant shrubs, but a steady stream of young drug addicts, both men and women, use the pavement for making their deals. They are rarely older than their late twenties, and often as young as fifteen and sixteen. In Christine's presence they
were not malicious, and they often asked her, as a former local community activist, for advice on rehabilitation centres.

When I telephoned Christine ahead of my arrival she asked me, ‘Wherr ur gawn tae stop?' I wasn't sure. Less than two miles out of Glasgow city centre, there were no boarding houses or hotels. When I said I would find something in town she told me off. ‘Ach don't annoy me! You're gawn tae stay with me.'

‘What about your son?' She lived in a compact two-bedroom flat.

‘Duncan is in Tenerife and is no home till Saturday week and Alistair lives with Patricia and the wean.'

So I pitched up with a bottle of malt whisky, knowing that with this pillar of strength in the community, who had enough energy and bounce to make an active person dizzy, there wouldn't be a dull moment. I was not to be disappointed.

Christine is one of those larger-than-life figures like so many women I was to meet in Glasgow. Like many of them, too, she had discovered the nation is too big to look after the little things and too small to take care of the big things. Like more and more people living in small communities, Christine was one of those who recognised and dealt with problems at a local level without recourse to the state. Politics had, in her words, become like the supermarkets, ‘More for less'. She took her battles to the male-dominated local councils, which she saw as impenetrably bureaucratic and chauvinist as well as hopelessly irrelevant and out of touch with the day-to-day reality of local people. She had won battles to help set up a creche, a drugs advice centre and a family flat for young children and their parents. The women were the driving force, but success also bred resentment, petty jealousies and envy, particularly from men who were out of work. When the women had fought successfully for funds to set up support groups, the men wanted a piece of the action; they wanted to be given the job of running them.

Having helped set up the community's self-help groups, Christine had moved on to working with street women. At the end of the week, after four two o'clock to midnight days, she was ready to try and obliterate her clients' harrowing lives from her mind; but, as I was to discover, everyone knew Christine and wherever she went they brought their troubles to her. She had, however, learnt to set the problems to one side and allow herself to have a good time.

‘Tonight we're rockin',' she said soon after I arrived at her place. ‘It's Patricia my daughter-in-law's twenty-fifth birthday and we're goin' to the pub to meet Catherine, Jenny, Olive and Little Frances. I hope you dain't mind.'

‘Why should I mind?'

‘They're only women, no men.'

As we prepared to go to the pub, her son Alistair came banging at the door. ‘Where's my fookin' giro?'

‘Sorry, Alistair?'

‘Where's my fookin' giro?' he screamed. He stormed into the flat, took one look at me. ‘Meet Nick, Alistair,' said Catherine.

‘Fook you.'

‘Leave me alone.'

Alistair left the flat cursing his mother. ‘Bitch! Cunt! Fucking cow! Liar!'

His wiry bicycle-frame of a body was spry and wan, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. For years he had been abusing his body with sachets of smack and capsules of jellies.

‘I wish he were dead. I don't want him to die. I love him because I'm his ma, but I don't like him. Can you understand that? I'm so tired, he must be so tired.' Christine had lived through a marriage to a violent husband and had two sons who were like chalk and cheese. One had inherited the violence of her deceased husband, fuelled by an addiction that had driven him to steal her wedding ring; the other son, Duncan, was as polite, supportive and helpful as could be dreamed. ‘Alistair has his father's insane jealousy. If I'd had an argument with his da or a fight he'd go out and hit someone out of spite. I had a girlfriend to stay last month and Alistair accused her of being a lesbian. He smashed her car window and slashed her tyres.' I cringed at the thought of my borrowed car parked right outside her tenement and I had reason to be worried: the neighbour found his new car's tyres slashed the following morning.

When Patricia came to collect us, she was agitated. She knew Alistair as well as her mother-in-law did, and yet she continued to show unstinting devotion to her husband. As Christine readied herself, Patricia confessed that, ‘The best birthday present from Alistair would be if he went away for eight weeks. I hardly ever get a shag, he's so wasted. And I'm afraid to be out at the pub because I'm worried about leaving the wean in his care.' The two women joked about his behaviour: Christine laughed off the threats Alistair made whenever he saw her drinking in a pub with a male friend, and Patricia did an imitation of Alistair promising to give up his habit. She called to Christine in the bathroom. ‘Are you using that new mouthwash I bought you?'

‘It's not mouthwash I need, it's sheep dip.'

We left the tenement and passed the teenagers in scrums on street corners hustling their deals. We passed the railings to the factor's office hung with bunches of flowers in memory of Willie Lyle, victim of a gangland execution two days before in broad daylight in the middle of
the street. An official sign on the factor's door read, ‘A look on the bright side of town.' Daubed on a wall close by were the words: ‘Willie Lyle is a grass' and ‘Willie Lyle is a police snout'. I read some of the cards on the bouquets: ‘Proud to be your pal', ‘All the lads from the Apple' (local wine alley), and ‘You were many things, but never a grass'.

Glasgow is a tale of two cities, ‘Cathlicks and Proddies', Celtic and Rangers, Green and Blue. Christine looked at several of the bouquets. ‘It's terrible,' she said. ‘Even in death they won't leave it alone', pointing to the orange lilies tied with red, white and blue ribbon. ‘Willie would have liked that and laughed.' Everyone knew Willie Lyle and in the pubs they were still talking about his death, but the dozens of witnesses weren't talking to the police.

‘He'd gie his last penny,' said Catherine over a pint.

‘It wasn't his money, he'd robbed it,' said Christine.

‘I was staring down the barrel of a gun. Two men in masks – I thought it was a joke. I thought they were raising money for charity. I put my hand in my purse for a couple of quid. Realised they were for real. Jenny started shouting at one of them. I realised one of them was Willie. Afterwards I told him, don't you ever point a gun at me. He said, “You know I would never have pulled the trigger.” You never know, and his partner who had the gun at Jenny is a fucking psycho. He's in Barlinnie for murder.'

I went to the bar to buy a round of drinks. The barman wouldn't take my English £10 note. ‘We don't take £10 and £20 English notes, there are too many sniders floating around.'

‘But I don't have any Scottish money,' I pleaded.

‘Are you from New York, the city that never sleeps? Ha, try changing Scottish money in the Big Apple.'

As we talked, the pub filled. Like all the pubs I was to visit with Christine, the windows were bricked up and no natural light penetrated inside other than from the entrance. Men played snooker, others hung around the electronic gaming machines or watched the races on the television set while a steady stream of shoplifters hawked their merchandise. A man found no buyers for a pair of size eight brown suede shoes. An extremely attractive woman Christine worked with, who was facing five years for the possession of 932 jellies, offered several blouses and woollen skirts still on their hangers. Another had pairs of designer sunglasses: she crouched in a corner next to Christine in a foetal position, her young, pretty face ravaged by her addiction, with deeply drawn lines and hollow eyes. Christine tried to comfort her in the only way she knew, but the lure of the next fix was greater than Christine's powers of persuasion, and she disappeared into the
ladies to keep her appointment with the needle. After the clothes and the accessories came other merchandise, including a joint of meat and bottles of perfume.

Catherine was one of the many who had witnessed Willie's murder. She had been shopping with her four- and six-year-old nieces.

‘Willie left the factor's and was walking across the road, five guys started running after him. Willie started to run, he nearly got away, one of them got hold of his jacket. The first one slashed him across the stomach, the second into his neck, the third into his side, four of them kept stabbing, they screamed, “Willie Lyle grassing b—!” Sorry, I don't like swearing. The women in the street started shouting “Cowards!” They screamed, “Lyle, you're going to die, bastard!” God forgive me for swearing. It was all over in a second, so quick that when they ran off they knocked into my sister's two weans. I don't know what they saw. The lassie next to me said she knew first aid, but she was too scared to go over. I said, “hold my hand”. He was lying in so much blood, his face was so white. I think he was still alive when the ambulance arrived, but I knew he was going to die. We took the weans home – one had blood on her dress. I recognised one of the murderers, he hangs around here, but I couldn't tell the polis, they'd get one of my family, George or someone else.' Catherine had witnessed four murders in sixteen years, including a mistake when the man they were aiming for jumped out of the way of the car that was to have run him down and it killed his girlfriend instead.

She had been a bus conductress, a wages clerk, a telephonist and a shop assistant. ‘When I was a kid you could change jobs like changing your socks. Now I can't find work. I could have got redundancy if I hadn't left my last job to look after my dying husband. The supermarket closed when I wasn't working. I had worked there fifteen years. They want young women now, but I'm thinking of getting educated on computers.' We were interrupted by a young man who pulled a handful of vacuum-packs of smoked salmon out of his coat pocket. ‘Half price for youse,' he touted and for the first time that afternoon there were takers.