A perfect day for bill posting. Stark winter sunlight, not too much wind, no thunder or lightning, no miasma of the plague. While I pour another cup of water into the bucket of paste to stretch it the extra mile, miraculous sunshine blazes through the dirt on my windows. If I wasn’t a gnat’s breath short of clinical depression I’d be whooping.
By the time I set off down the street the sun’s already beginning to fall behind the Cathedral, burning out the contours of the bell tower. Along the top of the cemetery glimmering rays flash through the wrought-iron railings in bars of gold and darkness. My eyes are half closed, Hope Street a quiet grey stream beside me, the fine moon-ash branches of the trees a spider’s web spun across the roof of the sunken gardens. By the time I reach the end of the street I’ll be in a trance.
Fireworks crackle and scream. Bonfire night’s getting close now and there’s rockets zapping back there over the Avenue. I’m just passing by the Earl of Wessex when Dozy lurches out into the street in a coat nine sizes to big for him and an old floppy hat falling down over his face.
‘See you, Skin...’ He hiccoughs convulsively and a fine thread of saliva bungy- jumps from his mouth to less than an inch away from the street then half way back again. His eyes are glazed now, semi-dead floaters, but there’s still a ghost-flicker of that old combustion of sympathy and rage.
‘You mind an’... mind y’ look after yourself, y’get me?. That’s all, son…all you’s got t’do...’
I knew him in a past life. A one night stand working the kitchen of a Tex-Mex eatery down the business end of town.
I was on dishes, punishing a bad back in the steam rising of an aluminium sink built for midgets. Dozey’d been there a while. He’d been promoted to the food counters, and he spent all night singing tunelessly to himself, happily chopping up meat and vegetables with a variety of meticulously sharpened knives. So. Busy night, the whole kitchen’s edgy. Then round twelvish, Ramon the head chef shows insufficient respect when asking him to splice some legumes and Dozey opens his left cheek with a graceful arc of the bread knife.
‘Yeah, you too, Dozey. Look after yourself.’ I say, briefly touching his arm and passing on up the street. His voice follows me like a take-away wrapper in a breeze ‘Nah, I’m fooked, me, kid. Fooked. Space vampires! They got their knives in me gut, son. Don’t let ‘em get at ya, kid!’
The sunshine’s getting sketchy, grey clouds buffeted over the river and the distant bronze of the Liver birds. I’m picking up speed, trying to get warm as I swing down towards the Chinese arch. The ripped and stained plastic bag I’m trying to hide the glue bucket in keeps brushing a cold smear of paste across the leg of my jeans.
It’s busy in town, which is all to the good. I’ve already seen two panda cars and a brace of bizzies on horseback, so by the law of averages I should be safe for at least forty minutes. (Not that the law of averages has ever held much jurisdiction round here.)
Students laughing, bullshitting in their street gear that can’t camouflage their accents. All togged-up so like the scallies it’s hard to tell the difference. From fifty paces these days you can’t tell if you’re about to get slashed by a flick-knife or the paper cut of a loan check.
Then there’s all the beggars and the Big Issue sellers. My people. Fools for God, dogs for dope with their broken teeth and diseased legs, their lies and their gaping flies. Some other kind of beautiful. It’s easy to pick out the ones that’re dying even faster than I am, not so easy to imagine where the fuck they go then. Their own abandoned city maybe - hobbling through eternity, doing their skaghead shuffle, halfway between a moonwalk and a lurch. Trying to cadge off each other because there’s no one else there to give them a thing. Either that or they get sanctified by poverty and manage yell their way to Heaven through the eye of a silver needle. All the Hep Cats with Hep C antibodies careening through their dirty blood. I can’t help myself - I love them all. All those who’ve fallen in love with the patterns of their mistakes, those no longer welcome at the asylum, all the loons that keep on shouting even when no one’s there.
In the back street behind the Krazy House I bend down to slosh some more of the gunk onto my brush and catch a pungent blast of urine. All these arse-end doorways that serve as unlicensed pissoirs to the lurching hoydens and drunken revellers battering around the night, marking out damp, smelly stations of the cross. These steaming doorways, man, they’ve all seen more dick than the great whore of Babylon. But its me that gets to bend over and inhale the acrid marrow of their bones, their spent pennies, their gushing libations offered off a cocked leg to the dog-watches of the night. I’m an expert. I can tell what they’ve been drinking from the crabbed reek of the half-dried pools of piss: brandy, gut-rot, tequila, tabasco, lager, lighter fluid, petrol, nail varnish remover; acid rain.
The streets are so elemental even the night can’t help pissing itself.
‘Ay mate, what you think you’re doin’ there, then?’
I don’t turn round. I carry on pasting, slowly. It could be a cop, could be an irate shop owner. It could be the raw faced deadheads that do all the hi-profile postering for the big clubs and the record companies; the reason I always keep an eight inch screwdriver in my inside pocket. But I don’t care. I really don’t care. Let them knee me in the groin, let them pour glue over my hair and face, let them break me down till I’m nothing but a bloody froth of mesentery on the street. Today you can’t touch me. Today I’m incandescent with a fire beyond grief, well beyond the piss-taking of the living or the dead.
‘I’m talkin’ to ya, kidder.’
I turn round. Casual as.
‘Breaking the law again, Duncan?’
Only my mum calls me that. My mum and ‘Shanghai’ Jimmy Lee.
‘How much is Lucca paying y’for doin’ that, then?’
I turn to enjoy his grinning, jaundiced, scarily pretty face.
‘Thirty quid.’ I lie.
‘ ‘kin’ hell. He must’ve seen you coming, mate. I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than fifty.’
‘Times is hard, Jimmy.’
‘Lucky for you I’m an understanding kind of fella, isn’t it?’ He says.
‘I’ve always been lucky like that, yeah.’
Shanghai - Jimmy - saunters over to the wall I’ve been posting, surveys my handiwork like he’s taking in a new exhibition at the Tate on a bleak Sunday afternoon.
‘It’s a wonder you haven’t been collared by the bizzies yet the way its camera’d to fuck round here now.’
‘Must be they’re like you: understanding.’
Quick flash of a feral smile.
‘Seriously, mate, it’s genuinely lucky for you that I’ve run into you. Think of it as your lucky break, mate. I think I might just’ve found a way for you to wipe out your little debt, how’s about that? Then we can be real mates again. Like old times.’
I pick up the bucket and brush, smear off the excess paste on my kegs as we stroll off down Maryland Street.
‘You owe me, mate. I been letting it ride… but, well, business is business...’
‘Four ton? You can make ten times that in less than ten minutes. I’m near fucking starving here, mate.’
‘Mate. There’s a flaw in your logic, Duncan, a serious flaw in your logic. You’re implying that my earning capacity has a direct relationship to the degree of obligation that you should feel to honour your debt - if y’ get me. That’s very shaky thinking. Very un-business-like.’
Pause. A frozen lick of wind. The sun’s buried itself in the river.
‘So. You ready to hear how you can make everything sweet again?’
‘Hit me, Jimmy.’
Wait till I tell you about this guy.
‘All’s you got to do, its dead simple - you remember Dunoon - the Holy Loch?’
Couple of years back me and Shanghai took a load of tabs up there and flogged them to the Marines at the U.S. Naval base. Its like a little town in Texas that Lucifer licked up skunked and laid down on the firth of the Clyde. Manic as fuck.
‘Course I remember it.’
‘And you remember Fast Annie?’ He says.
Sweet F.A. A demented speed freak from East Kilbride. I do remember trying to sleep on the stinking floor while Shanghai pawed away at her juiced-up skeleton on the single bed. She was night nurse to the whole town, with a cottage full of Class-A’s and a conveyor belt between her legs.
‘All I need’s you t’go up there, mate, get the coach, whatever, lay a nine bar of ‘charlie’ on Annie, and come back. Simple. It’s business, mate. In an’ out. You don’t have to shag her.’
I look at him, his half-closed Chinese eyes.
‘Do this for us, mate, the debt’s discharged. Sorted. History.’
A fire engine screams from nowhere to somewhere else.
‘I’ll think about it. I’ve got commitments.’
Shanghai watches me struggle with the last damn poster in an icy gust of wind. ‘Don’t think about it too long, mate. Let me down on this and I’ll be waiting for you next time you sign-on. With some friends, y’get me? Friends of mine, not friends of yours.’
If I could be a lighthouse for the lost or a ferryman for the dead, I would, man, I would; I’d piss on anyone if they were on fire. But with ‘Shanghai’ I throw in the towel. He’s not one of my successes, James Patrick Lee.
He’s another one spooked by the fucking ancestors. Licked by the scarlet flames that spill from the dragon’s mouth on the new pagoda. His old man killed some fella over a gambling debt back in China, Shanghai, round about ’68, ‘69. Family smuggled Lee pere over to Liverpool and he made out alright. Laundries, restaurants, useful contacts with the Triads and K14 etc. Then he met Jimmy Lee’s mum - an Irish rose, a jade girl on a staircase of rain etc. Between them they engendered this cruel, good looking sonofabitch who’s getting to be a regular little monkey on my back. He’s a vicious little snake-eyed prick, basically, but somehow from his dad – the murderer – he’s picked up a weirdly ironic streak of Buddha dharma, Chinee stylee. All liquid quiescence and ungraspable paradox, he can back-slang whole chunks of the Lotus Sutra at you like a regular fucking Shaolin priest. But in truth the closest Shanghai gets to religion is the firmly held superstition that one day he’s destined to take up the bloody traces of his patrimony – that one day, like his dad, he’s going to kill someone.
As he disappears away down the hill with the measured, precise gait of some unbelievable Zen assassin, I pick up the stinking old bucket for the last time and the only thing I know for sure is it ain’t going to be me.