Extracts from Graham's novels

 

 

Five Oranges

 

“WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN? THAT IS the question, eh?” Stella said, as she stared sadly at the prostrate bird, it’s breast bloodied by the arrow piercing its pitiful heart. As a child she had spent hours examining the exhibits at this small museum in the park near where she grew up in Carntyne. It had been a haven of green among the coal-dusted tenements, and it still was, although the black dust that had afflicted the place had been replaced by white powder injected up the arms of the local inhabitants, the scourge of the times. Her mother still lived in the same house and after her weekly visit, Stella revisited her childhood with a wander around the park. She was always amazed that it never seemed to change. Perhaps it looked smaller, but that was all. Certainly the museum was the same. The same displays, the same stuffed stag by the doorway (a former park resident that had been somewhat harshly evicted from his stamping ground in older, less ecotouristic times, the same exhibits of old coins and spinning wheels, the brown bones of long-gone animals, the same poor Cock Robin, still innocent, still bloody, still dead. When she was wee and at the school not far from Shettleston Road, she’d go up the hill to the park after school, sometimes with a friend, sometimes with just a packet of crisps to keep her company. You could do that then, but not now. These days, an eight year-old girl would be a target for some crazed junkie desperate for cash, even it was just a few pennies, or some pervert who had chosen not to take his medication that day. She’d eat her crisps and roll around on the grass for a while, then hurry to the museum before it shut. The woman at the desk knew her and would let her off the penny admission. She’d wander around, pretending to be interested in everything in the solemn room with its diffused light and echoing floorboards, but it was just a preamble to her true fascination, the story of Cock Robin, recreated in exact and gory detail in a large rectangular glass display cabinet that rested on a wooden table that allowed you to peer into it from every direction. If she stood on her tiptoes, placing her fingers on the edge of the case, she could even get an aerial view. She was fascinated because she couldn’t understand death, couldn’t understand why the life of such a sweet creature should be snuffed out like a matchstick flame. Once, while her older brother Jackie was walking her to school, he told her that they used to have another sister, but that he didn’t know what happened to her. Maybe she died, he said. He said he’d heard their mammy talking about it to their granny. They were whispering together in the front room about some wean or another, and how they wondered what happened to her and where she might be now, that poor wee unsought for. Her mammy was crying. Stella remembered the night. They were all staying over at their granny’s. She didn’t know where her da was, only that her mammy had packed up all the weans and they got the bus to her granny’s house. Funny, it was the soft massage of their voices in the night that had lulled her to sleep in the first place, and then the stab of her mother’s tears that had woken her up.
“What’s a poor wee unsought for?” she’d asked Jackie in the morning, but he didn’t know. Years later, when her friend from the school, Denise Burniston, went away to her aunties’ in Anstruther for a while, then came back with a pram with a baby in it, she’d heard that expression again, a wee unsought for, and this time she knew what it meant. Families, they all had their secrets, they all had their shame.
“That fuckin’ sparrow has a lot to answer for,” Stella continued, her expression telling Eileen that the sight of the small dead bird still evoked in her feelings that disturbed and unsettled her, that Eileen suspected were bound up with other events in her childhood. Eileen wanted to say that it was just a nursery rhyme, but thought better of it.
She and Stella had just been visiting Stella’s mother, who lived nearby with her cat in a house that was cleaned to hospital standards, complete with a discomfiting odour of cheap pine antiseptic that her mother sprinkled around freely like she was Zsa Zsa Gabor with a new bottle of Chanel Number Five. And because Jimmy was also called upon, by decree, to wallpaper his mother-in-law’s house once a year in embossed maroon flock, this further contributed to the funereal air of the place, a mausoleum with a fridge and facilities for making tea, coffee and chips. Whenever Stella took her children to call on her mother they were required to forfeit motion, speech and mastication. On no account were their mouths to be opened or were they to touch anything, an impossibility for Estelle who blethered away like a fishwife, irrespective of whether there was anybody else in the conversation. They were effectively required to be dead for an hour and a half every other Sunday, a bit like their great auntie Jean, who occasionally visited from Dundee to sit by the fire in a sort of suspended animation, betraying signs of life only when she snored or farted, which she did regularly and without any acknowledgment that she might be the culprit. Like the good Virgin Mary with her conception, her church-bell flatulence was no less than immaculate. So mostly Stella decided the weans should stay home with Jimmy, a child-minding responsibility that he was more than happy to assume, given the circumstances. The last time he’d visited his mother-in-law was to paint her kitchen while she was away on a bus trip to Dunoon. He’d taken his and Stella’s dog Blackie along for the company, but unfortunately she’d given birth to eight multi-coloured pups on the elderly woman’s fireside rug. Six girls and two boys. Several years later, and despite several vigorous treatments with carpet cleaning foam, steam and emulsion, the stains of new canine life remained as a haunting reminder for Stella’s mother that Jimmy Stewart was unfortunately still her son-in-law. The auld woman had never approved of the marriage in the first place and as far as she was concerned she had been proven correct. He was a good wallpaperer, she’d give him that, but sometimes being a master of the invisible seam was just not enough. She just didn’t like the look of him and that was that.
“When I’m wi’ her, I feel like I’m catching her like a disease,” Stella had said as she and Eileen paused before her mother’s door, Stella gathering her strength before being able to bring herself to knock. During the visit, and every other for that matter, it was if she was holding her breath until it was over. The air in the room lacked oxygen, love and affection. She couldn’t remember when it had been otherwise. She’d scrambled for a cigarette as soon as she was out the door.
“Ye know, Eileen, when I was wee I used to stare and stare at that poor wee bird,” Stella whispered, her eyes fixed on poor dead stuffed Cock Robin. “It used to make me that sad so it did, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It still breaks my heart. Funny that, eh? The way things affect ye.”
There were some rooks in a large tree outside and Eileen could here them cawing. Their mournful cries snapped at the winter air.
“I was always in this bloody park,” Stella continued. “It was my own wee world that I lived in. Except for that deid bird there, it wisnae that bad. I always dreamed up lots of tea and cake,” she laughed.
Eileen laughed along with her. The woman at the desk lifted her nose from a book and blinked at them.
“That’s weans for you. They’ve got great imaginations. I suppose yours are the same.” “Aye, they’re ay pretending to be this and that. Estelle likes to pretend she’s an alien from outer space, ye know. Sometimes I think that’s no that far from the truth. Lesley thinks she’s a duck, James wanders about in Lesley’s dresses and Kevin likes to play act that he’s God and performs miracles all over the place. Takes after his father, except for the miracles, but.”
“How is Jimmy, by the way?”
“Ach, I don’t know what’s goin’ on wi’ that man. He used to be so reliable. Tired in the mornin’, drunk and limp at night. Always up for a bevvy, song and a laugh, but. Now his face is trippin’ him. He wanders about the hoose mumblin’ tae himsel’. And he’s gone off the drink. These days I’m on tae my fifth voddy and orange and he’s still playing about wi’ his second wee yin. Ye know, I think he’s having wan ae yon mid-life crises. I don’t know why he’s having it now. His life has been one long crisis. If he was American and had a brain half the size it is now he’d be a prime candidate for that Oprah Winfrey Show, ye know, spilling his guts about how he cannae find his real self and a’ that. I don’t know what I’m gaunnae do wi’ that man, honest I don’t. If he disnae lift his game soon I’m gaunnae lose my rag wi’ him. He’s been sitting’ in the bath for hours singing that song, whit is it? Oh Aye. I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me.”
“Oh my God!” Eileen exclaimed, shocked. “He’s really no well, is he? Frankie and I were walking down by the Clyde once, years ago, and he had a wee transisitor radio and that song came on and ye know what he did?”
“What?”
“He threw the whole thing in the river.”
“Is that right?”
“Aye.”
“Why didn’t he just change the station or switch it off?”
“He said the radio was tainted after that song had been played on it. He said it would never be the same again.”
“A wee bit extreme, I suppose. But effective.”
Eileen took Stella by the arm and led her away from Cock Robin’s death scene. She could see it was having an effect on her friend and the owl, with his little trowel, was giving her the willies. They stood before the stuffed stag and stared into its glass eyes. If they crouched slightly they could see their own reflections in them, the living gazing at the dead and thinking they’ll be wandering the same terrain one day in the not so distant future. Dear God, deer heaven.
“Ye know, somethin’ must have happened to my mother to make her the way she is,” Stella said, distractedly running her hand across the stag’s dull and slightly moth-eaten coat. “I can’t remember her ever puttin’ her arms around me and giving me a right good cuddle, ye know. I wish I knew what happened to her. I wonder if my brother Jackie knows.” She turned her head towards Eileen. “What about your mammy?”
“Och, she’s was always slobberin’ all over us when we were wee,” she laughed, shaking her head at the memory of it. “She was always pinching you, and squeezing you and tickling you. She was like one of yon lionesses wi’ her new born cubs, always licking them and carrying them about the place to keep them safe from predators and that. She loved weans and babies. She always seemed to be expectin’, you know. She was always knitting something as well. She was a great knitter.”
“Well, you were lucky to have a mother like that.”
“My poor faither, he had to work that much overtime to keep us all in food and clothes. He was always tired. I don’t know how he managed to sire all those weans.”
“Ach, it takes less than a minute,” Stella sniffed. ‘That’s my experience anyway.”
Eileen grinned. “Away ye go. It always takes longer than that.”
Stella raised her eyebrows, said nothing for a moment, before whispering conspiratorially. “Ye mind when I borrowed that air hostesses uniform from you?”
“Aye.”
“Well, I waited till all the weans were in their bed and I put it on, ye know, wi’ the sheer stockings and the high heels. And ye know what Jimmy said?”
“No, what?”
“He said he’d have one ae yon Corona beers and a bacon and egg sandwich. And could ye ask the captain to watch the turbulence, it was spilling his whisky. I could’ve killed him.”
Eileen shrugged and placed a consoling hand on Stella’s arm. “Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.”
“I don’t know about marriage Eileen, I just don’t know about it. It’s no all it’s cracked up to be. After twenty-three years desire goes right oot the windae, so it does. All you want is a cup of cocoa and a good night’s sleep. Anyhow, I’m sure Jimmy doesn’t fancy me anymore.”
“Och away. You’re still a good-looking woman, Stella. Any man would fancy you. Do you still fancy Jimmy, then?”
“Aye. No. Ach, I don’t know, honest I don’t. Mind, when we first met, I used tae ache for him, so I did. I’d get a’ wet just thinkin’ about him. It was like the fuckin’ Niagara falls doon there, I’m no kiddin.”
“Stella!” Eileen said, sweeping her eyes across the room to see if anyone was listening. She couldn’t help but laugh at her pal. Stella always said what was on her mind, regardless of where she was or who might overhear.
“I don’t get it, I just don’t bloody get it,” Stella said, staring at a sculpture of a prehistoric man carrying a club. He had a forehead the size of a football pitch, but when she lifted his animal skin underpants she saw that he had no balls. No wonder they died out.
“What?”
“Love, desire, marriage. They’re no bloody logical. Look at Jimmy. By all rights I should throw him out. Pigeon toes, wee bandy legs, nae hair, nae teeth.” Eileen, looked embarrassed and her cheeks momentarily flushed with colour. “Well, that’s no exactly true. He’s got a couple left, the ones I missed, ye know.”
Eileen frowned.
“Aye, I know. It was a terrible thing tae do. Serves him right, but. If he wants to be bangin’ his conductress in the driver’s cabin wi’ his gear stick right up her, then he has to accept the consequences, even if they do involve a poker. Is that no right?”
Eileen raised her eyebrows, not convinced that wielding fireside implements like William Wallace with a broadsword was an appropriate method of responding to infidelity. Still, she’d never had to deal with it herself, so she was no expert.
“He wears the same socks three day in a row and he’s had that much drink over the years that it’s just about turned his wullie purple. But dae I still fancy him? Ach, I suppose I dae. Go on, explain that. Ye cannae, can ye? God fuckin’ help me. I just don’t get this life, sometimes, honest I don’t.”
“Do you love him?”
Eileen bit her lip. “I suppose. Och, I don’t know. I’m used tae him, ye know.”
Stella looked up at the clock on the wall, the same clock, she noted, that had been there for more than thirty years. She turned and saw her reflection in the glass case and for a moment she glimpsed the small girl with her uneven teeth and pigtail hair, peering, puzzled and sad, at the dead bird before her.
“I’d better be away hame, Eileen love. The weans will be wanting their dinner.”
She trailed a finger across the glass. “See ye then Cock Robin, my wee died pal.”