Uncle Stephen
by Jack O'Donnell
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: When Uncle Stephen returns from Australia, it's perhaps not the best of news for the family.
_____________________________________________________________________
Da’ drank the dregs of the tea and muttered it was unnatural that his son Alex couldn’t sleep. Mum shrugged. She’d be up when he opened his eyes, banking the fire, or tending to one of the wee ones, and still up when Alex closed his eyes.
Alex meant to say it was the noise of his Da’ banging about all night that kept him awake, but he knew there were no easy answers only aggravations. And he liked the quiet spaces of nighttimes. Before he finally dropped off, when time seemed to hang in the air like fog, and all he could hear were his mum’s sighs, ticking like a clock, he’d sat up and asked her if insomnia ran like rickets in the family.
In the morning she whispered and coughed and coughed and choked out, ‘Alex, Alex, it’s time’.
The shrieks of cold Northern wind outside competed with the farts and groans whistled by the open mouths of dreamers inside. Darkness filled Alex’s mouth and he licked his lips as if to answer, but clutched onto sleep as long as he could, like the spittle grey edge of his childhood comfort blanket.
Alex cried out in sleep babble, some unknown Esperanto-like tongue, when mum nudged him awake again and again with the tip of her toes.
‘Alex, Alex, it’s time.’
Alex tried to rise from sleep; to make light of it. But the dead weight of bodies head-to-toe angled towards him like rank organ pipes on the floor around, produced a tar like heat that called him back to the charnel house of euphonic sleep. His mum waited at the top of his bed, with the half- light of the coal fire behind her, a spectre against the grain of the day. She gave him time to disentangle the white roots of his limbs from the knot of his brother Gerry’s. She also stood in as a referee and to make sure Alex didn’t accidentally-on-purpose kick Gerry much as the latter spread himself out on a full mattress, with tugged blankets as blinkers, pulled over his head, an emperor taking possession of a warm virgin spot. Even when Alex swung his legs out and mum had stirred the light in the fire she carefully watched him take half a minute to sit and take possession of his body. His head seemed top- heavy on his shoulders, ready to topple like a king and fall sideways and backwards onto the lumpy softness of the mattress. Yawning reminded them both he was still awake.
There wasn’t much for his feet to avoid, just a pine wardrobe, a walnut table and two pock marked chairs that at some point in their sad history had been painted green. Mum tugged the blankets up and over the babies contentedly sucking each other’s faces lying snug as chestnuts, in two grey drawers that were used as cots
Alex sleepwalked the last part of getting up from memory. He pulled his torn nightshirt down to cover himself better, because despite the muggy heat of unwashed bodies it was cold at the sink and grit from the tiled floor got in between his toes, which made him feel even colder. Mum had already run a little water into the basin for him to wash in and left a slither of soap and a cloth to rub down with and make himself respectable. He shivered and splashed at his face and ran the cloth around the back of his neck, respectable enough for anyone that cared to look. Alex’s work clothes were brushed down and hung on a nail, beside Da’s, but there was no work, only the dole queue, for him.
Outside, the horses were up stomping in their stables, sticking their heads out as Alex chanted their names, in a nimbus cloud of affection that hung in the air and merged with the horse’s own breath. He patted one, but not the other, looking for a bit of sugar or a biscuit. Fat chance. Alex was lucky, but not that lucky. He got an extra three pence a week for taking a gallon of milk from the Co-op at Hume Street and carrying its clanging weight all the way down to the kitchens at John Browns and breaking the empties back before the horses were harnessed.
The boss-woman in the kitchen, Isa, was good to Alex.
‘Alex, Alex when you goin’ to grow big enough to marry me,’ and she’d bat her eyes like Betty Boop and roll her hips like a theatre going dame and make a grab for him and he’d hear the other women cackling with laughter inside. But she’d slip him a sandwich in a brown paper bag. ‘Sshh’ she’d signal with a finger to her lips; our little secret.
At Christmas she’d even slipped in an orange. He took it home, like an unopened wage-packet to show his mum, which was a mistake. His mum had made him sit in a chair, like Santa, and share it out segment by segment with the wee ones. One after the other they’d taken turns in spitting it out in his lap because it tasted funny and fought each other, with the gusto of veterans of the baby wars, with ear splitting howls, to eat the skin.
The first time Alex had tried to lift the gallon urn in the Co-op yard he thought that his wrists would fall off. His legs also went into spasm as if he’d been played football in the street for hours and days on end and was never going to win. The worst bit was his hands. They were that cold that he couldn’t feel them and when he put them under my armpits to heat them up they felt as if Mr McAulay had given him the belt at school. He felt salt tears creeping into his eyes, because mum had been so proud that he’d got a job and promised that on a Saturday he’d be able to keep some of his wages to himself. But he wouldn’t, because that wouldn’t be right.
Gradually, Alex worked out a system. He moved the gallon milk jug about six paces and put it down and moved it four paces and put his hands under his arms to heat them up. But then he’d managed only two paces and nearly got knocked down by the tram going the other way towards the Gorbals.
Alex shivered because he’d never have lived that down. He could hear the voices at his funeral, they’d have muttered in derision, how could a tram have knocked him down? A snot nosed wain of three could get out of the way of a tram, and he was nearly twelve, ripe for leaving the school and going to work. That got him moving, rolling the urn, like a hoop and praying that the top wouldn’t come unstuck and spill milk all over the cobbled side street and then he’d need to throw himself in the Clyde.
‘Is there any tea Ma?’
‘Sshh.’
Mum was sitting in the other chair. She had the rosary beads in her hand and her eyes closed, whether she was praying or sleeping, he wasn’t quite sure and whether there was any difference between the two he wasn’t quite sure either.
Mum soon roused herself. She was up peering into the fire and had a half mug of tea stewing and handed it to him.
‘Sorry son, there’s no much heat in it and the leaves have seen better days, but there’s nae point in banking up the fire when there’s only you’.
The tea looked like engine oil and he was half ready for work and just idling in the chair. He took a sip and then another and smacking his lips pronounced judgement. ‘That’s ok Ma.’
All he had to do was find a jumper and put his shoes on and that would be that. He crouched down onto his haunches trying to draw the shallow heat of the fire into his bones, a remembrance to use against the cold later. And winding down he checked his pockets to see if he’d put the two bits of rag in, a bulwark against the metal containers sticking to his hands with the cold.
‘I’ll no be long Ma,’ he said, running the remains of the tea around his mouth to clean his teeth and spark the day.
He always said that, a kind of charm that would make it happen, even though they both knew that he’d be lucky to be back before the shipyards had sounded the first horn. He looked over, Mum was dozing in the chair, but her eyes opened quickly as if she’d been caught out.
‘Beat it. I’m asleep.’ Da’ grunted and curled himself up into a ball and shut his eyes and opened them again to see if Alex was gone.
‘Wheesht!’ said Mum, as if Da’ were one of the wains.
‘Uncle Stephen’s coming to see you,’ Alex tongued a hole in his teeth, trying to guess its circumference and how much it would hurt to wriggle and waggle it out of his gums.
Mum’s green eyes opened wide and she stared into the curl of fire and then at him so that it was as if her eyes were alight. ‘Away with yeh,’ she whispered, ‘your Uncle Stephen’s on the other side of the world, in Australia.’
‘Aye,’ Alex put the mug carefully down on the grate beside the poker, ‘but he’s comin.’
Mum pushed back into her chair, her face cloaked in shadows. ‘Just think a minute,’ she said, ‘you don’t even know what he looks like.’
‘Am away Ma.’ Alex leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, in the way he usually did. ‘A’ve seen a photo of him with you when you were younger.’ He smiled in triumph at his trickery.
‘That might be true,’ said Mum, ‘but how do you know he’s coming?’
‘Dunno.’ Alex was in a hurry now, turning away, moving his toes about in his hobnail boots, and preparing for flight. He’d taken an extra pair of socks to put them over his other extra pair, so that the heat would build up in his feet and blast him around the streets, his feet moving so fast that the cold would be left behind.
‘It makes me scared to hear you talk like that.’
Mum’s lone voice in the big room sounded sad and Alex hadn’t meant to make her sad.
‘Don’t be daft Ma.’
‘But how can you know?’ Mum looked into the fireplace, stirring the embers into life and coaxing them with the poker to give just a little more heat.
‘Dunno.’
‘You mustn’t think about these things.’ Mum coughed and in the flickering yellow light her face was pinched and screwed up with worry.
‘When’s he coming?’
‘Dunno. This week. Today or tomorrow.’
There was another bout of coughing and Alex wished he hadn’t spoken.
‘Och, away with you,’ said Ma, shaking her head in consternation, ‘you’ve got some imagination. I’ll give you that. But you talk such rubbish.’
He cushioned the click of the front door so as not to wake anybody. The clang of the hammers from across the Clyde beat out the new day.
Uncle Stephen had turned up unexpectedly, carrying a green canvas sausage bag that smelled like he was carrying a dead dog’s carcass. Gerry thought that his uncle Stephen was mair his uncle than he was Alex’s, because he’d been given two strands of penny liquorice and Alex only got a bit and a half. Family relations were a tangled web. The smaller kids: Tracy, Ann, Sean and Catronia had scurried behind their ma, like a set of brood chicks waiting to see if it was safe to come out. The unfamiliar feel and taste of wormy liquorice finally won them round.
Alex had been more impressed with the way that he smoked fag after fag and stabbed them out. He smelt of oil and the sea and all things exotic, but his dialect was of the streets around their tenement block.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said to his sister, ‘Australia is great if you’re a convict, or willing to work for nothing. And even if you do want to work for nothing there’s no work.
‘It took me six months to get back here working back and forth on tramp steamers all the way to Chile and back, for even less money than I got before working for nothing.’ He stabbed out another fag.
‘Have you got any fags hen?’ he asked, running his fingers through his thinning hair for inspiration, showing the tide coming in on the hard Sunday collar, patting at the pockets in his woollen coat and matching grubby waistcoat and then his best dress trousers, with a crease like a razor, for clues to where the other cigarettes might have gone.
She pulled a packet of fags out of her square apron pocket, which held everything from hankies for snot noses, to childhood nothings, and handed him one. Stephen snapped the tip off before flipping it into his mouth like a cowboy and lighting it. He sucked in life-giving smoke and continued on, flicking the ash into the grate. Somehow he’d found his way into Da’s chair by the fire. ‘That soup looks great,’ he said.
He needed a shave, but supped the soup down, mopping up the plate with the last of the bread as if the was in an American film. ‘That bastard,’ he said, banging the spoon down and, like a showman, with all eyes upon him, licked the plate clean. ‘That bastard,’ he growled again, ‘and I apologise for calling him a bastard, especially in front of the kids, but he is a bastard, owed me three months wages. And he was short. I signed on as an engineer. All Glasgow men are natural engineers, but the ship’s engines weren’t up to much. I’d counted it all out as I peeled potato after potato. I don’t ever want to see another potato.’
Stephen looked at his sister’s face and from her big face to the small framed look of her children. He carried the same hurt look of incredulity from one to the other, so that even the baby Eva could understand. She stopped jumping up and down for a second.
‘So I told him where to go. Didn’t I?’
‘And you know what?’ he said. The exasperation was in the sneering shape of his mouth, the way that he held his head. A high wire act of words ready for the next words to fall from his lips and end it all.
‘He said that was all I was getting. So I punched him clean out. And you know what they did?’ He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe the injustice of it all. ‘They put me in the brig.’ He looked from one child to another and then to his sister for confirmation that it had really happened. ‘You know what the brig is?’ he brayed and then answered his own question with a raised voice that would have struck open heaven with the injustice of it all. ‘The brig is where they put people after they’ve robbed them. I’d have probably have been better if I’d just swum home.’
‘And that is why,’ he said, sitting back settling himself into Da’s chair, ‘I’ve came back without a penny. But don’t you worry,’ he nodded at his sister, ‘I’m willing to work for practically nothing. All I need is a bite to eat and place to put my head at night.’
‘But we’ve no money and nowhere to put you,’ said his sister.
‘Well that’s fine,’ he said, taking a deep breath and, coughing fit to burst, barely made it out of Da’s chair. He looked around him, as if disorientated, for his canvas bag. ‘I travelled all this way to see you and your wee family and I’m no’ wanted. That’s fine. Fine. And I’d brought you a wee present too.’
‘What is it? What is it?’ clamoured the children jumping up and down and pulling at the hems of their mother’s skirt.
Stephen started emptying the green canvas sack. Shirts, socks, trousers and an old blanket appeared on the floor. They were pulled out like a magician emptying his wardrobe of tricks and showing that miraculously one balled up piece of clothing could be dirtier than the other. Just when the sack looked empty his long arms reached in and pulled out one partner- less shoe, for a left foot. Alex looked down at Stephen’s feet. The shoe looked at least three sizes too small and would probably have fitted Gerry, his younger brother. But Stephen trumped him, his long fingers found their way into the shoe and pulled out a mouth organ. He ran it through his fingers blowing into it and producing a windy rasp that only kids could colour in as music.
‘Here’s your present,’ he said to his sister, handing her the mouth organ.
Her children pulled at her arms to give them a shot of the magical musical instrument. Stephen flung the shoe back in the canvas bag and looked from one dirty package on the floor to the other, avoiding his sister’s eyes, as if deciding what to put in next.
‘He can sleep in my bed,’ said Alex, through the hurdy-gurdy of childish pushing and shoving and wet mouths applied to the worn pipes of the mouth organ.
Stephen held one balled shirt in his hand. ‘A don’t want to be any bother,’ he said.
‘A suppose you can stay for a few days until you get settled,’ said his sister.
‘If you’re sure then,’ said Stephen, strolling away from the pile of his cast-off clothing and looking out the window. ‘If you’ve got a measly three penny bit, A’ll nip out and get a packet of fags and start looking for work right away. That way when I’m working you’ll have two wages coming into the house instead of one. And you can start putting a wee bit by.’
‘Ta,’ he said, when his sister handed him the money. ‘You’ll soon be raking it in.’
Stephen pulled his cloth cap over his forehead. His head was up and he scanned the horizon sure that a man like himself, a worker, would find something. The way he was dressed it wouldn’t have surprised him in the least if he was offered a job in the offices of one of the bigger companies. Maybe, with his engineering background, a supervisor’s job in one of the shipyards. He didn’t want to rush things, be pinned down in the wrong job, with crap money, working sixteen hours a day and barely able to raise his head. The more he thought about it, the slower he walked and the more cautious he became.
He bumped into one of the guys he’d went to school with, Derek Smiley, outside Maise’s the tobacconist. They sized each other up, like two circling dogs, before either said anything.
He puffed away at one of Derek’s Capstan Full Strength and tapped at the packet, with the picture of a sailor. ‘I’ve been on the boats,’ he said, taking a deep breath and puffing out his chest, ‘an engineer, so if you hear of anything let me know and I’ll be right down there that day.’
Derek edged away, two-stepped onto the road, looked him up and down. ‘What did you dae for a bevy? I know you liked a drink.’
‘Nah, I didn’t bother. Didn’t miss it at all. You know it’s a responsible position. You don’t need to drink and you’re better not to,’ he said, flicking the fag away in response to Derek’s suggesting that they go for a pint. ‘A wouldnae thank you for one. I’m tee-total now, signed the pledge in Wodonga. Best thing I ever did.’
‘You sure? A just had a wee win at the cards. Ten pounds,’ he said, pulling out an impressive amount of coins of one pocket of his overalls, then the other, to show Stephen. ‘Just one. For old times sake.’
Stephen smacked his lips together. ‘Alright. See you in the Macintosh Bar in ten minutes. I don’t want to be a killjoy if you insist on buying me a few drams.’
Swearwords: None.
Description: When Uncle Stephen returns from Australia, it's perhaps not the best of news for the family.
_____________________________________________________________________
Da’ drank the dregs of the tea and muttered it was unnatural that his son Alex couldn’t sleep. Mum shrugged. She’d be up when he opened his eyes, banking the fire, or tending to one of the wee ones, and still up when Alex closed his eyes.
Alex meant to say it was the noise of his Da’ banging about all night that kept him awake, but he knew there were no easy answers only aggravations. And he liked the quiet spaces of nighttimes. Before he finally dropped off, when time seemed to hang in the air like fog, and all he could hear were his mum’s sighs, ticking like a clock, he’d sat up and asked her if insomnia ran like rickets in the family.
In the morning she whispered and coughed and coughed and choked out, ‘Alex, Alex, it’s time’.
The shrieks of cold Northern wind outside competed with the farts and groans whistled by the open mouths of dreamers inside. Darkness filled Alex’s mouth and he licked his lips as if to answer, but clutched onto sleep as long as he could, like the spittle grey edge of his childhood comfort blanket.
Alex cried out in sleep babble, some unknown Esperanto-like tongue, when mum nudged him awake again and again with the tip of her toes.
‘Alex, Alex, it’s time.’
Alex tried to rise from sleep; to make light of it. But the dead weight of bodies head-to-toe angled towards him like rank organ pipes on the floor around, produced a tar like heat that called him back to the charnel house of euphonic sleep. His mum waited at the top of his bed, with the half- light of the coal fire behind her, a spectre against the grain of the day. She gave him time to disentangle the white roots of his limbs from the knot of his brother Gerry’s. She also stood in as a referee and to make sure Alex didn’t accidentally-on-purpose kick Gerry much as the latter spread himself out on a full mattress, with tugged blankets as blinkers, pulled over his head, an emperor taking possession of a warm virgin spot. Even when Alex swung his legs out and mum had stirred the light in the fire she carefully watched him take half a minute to sit and take possession of his body. His head seemed top- heavy on his shoulders, ready to topple like a king and fall sideways and backwards onto the lumpy softness of the mattress. Yawning reminded them both he was still awake.
There wasn’t much for his feet to avoid, just a pine wardrobe, a walnut table and two pock marked chairs that at some point in their sad history had been painted green. Mum tugged the blankets up and over the babies contentedly sucking each other’s faces lying snug as chestnuts, in two grey drawers that were used as cots
Alex sleepwalked the last part of getting up from memory. He pulled his torn nightshirt down to cover himself better, because despite the muggy heat of unwashed bodies it was cold at the sink and grit from the tiled floor got in between his toes, which made him feel even colder. Mum had already run a little water into the basin for him to wash in and left a slither of soap and a cloth to rub down with and make himself respectable. He shivered and splashed at his face and ran the cloth around the back of his neck, respectable enough for anyone that cared to look. Alex’s work clothes were brushed down and hung on a nail, beside Da’s, but there was no work, only the dole queue, for him.
Outside, the horses were up stomping in their stables, sticking their heads out as Alex chanted their names, in a nimbus cloud of affection that hung in the air and merged with the horse’s own breath. He patted one, but not the other, looking for a bit of sugar or a biscuit. Fat chance. Alex was lucky, but not that lucky. He got an extra three pence a week for taking a gallon of milk from the Co-op at Hume Street and carrying its clanging weight all the way down to the kitchens at John Browns and breaking the empties back before the horses were harnessed.
The boss-woman in the kitchen, Isa, was good to Alex.
‘Alex, Alex when you goin’ to grow big enough to marry me,’ and she’d bat her eyes like Betty Boop and roll her hips like a theatre going dame and make a grab for him and he’d hear the other women cackling with laughter inside. But she’d slip him a sandwich in a brown paper bag. ‘Sshh’ she’d signal with a finger to her lips; our little secret.
At Christmas she’d even slipped in an orange. He took it home, like an unopened wage-packet to show his mum, which was a mistake. His mum had made him sit in a chair, like Santa, and share it out segment by segment with the wee ones. One after the other they’d taken turns in spitting it out in his lap because it tasted funny and fought each other, with the gusto of veterans of the baby wars, with ear splitting howls, to eat the skin.
The first time Alex had tried to lift the gallon urn in the Co-op yard he thought that his wrists would fall off. His legs also went into spasm as if he’d been played football in the street for hours and days on end and was never going to win. The worst bit was his hands. They were that cold that he couldn’t feel them and when he put them under my armpits to heat them up they felt as if Mr McAulay had given him the belt at school. He felt salt tears creeping into his eyes, because mum had been so proud that he’d got a job and promised that on a Saturday he’d be able to keep some of his wages to himself. But he wouldn’t, because that wouldn’t be right.
Gradually, Alex worked out a system. He moved the gallon milk jug about six paces and put it down and moved it four paces and put his hands under his arms to heat them up. But then he’d managed only two paces and nearly got knocked down by the tram going the other way towards the Gorbals.
Alex shivered because he’d never have lived that down. He could hear the voices at his funeral, they’d have muttered in derision, how could a tram have knocked him down? A snot nosed wain of three could get out of the way of a tram, and he was nearly twelve, ripe for leaving the school and going to work. That got him moving, rolling the urn, like a hoop and praying that the top wouldn’t come unstuck and spill milk all over the cobbled side street and then he’d need to throw himself in the Clyde.
‘Is there any tea Ma?’
‘Sshh.’
Mum was sitting in the other chair. She had the rosary beads in her hand and her eyes closed, whether she was praying or sleeping, he wasn’t quite sure and whether there was any difference between the two he wasn’t quite sure either.
Mum soon roused herself. She was up peering into the fire and had a half mug of tea stewing and handed it to him.
‘Sorry son, there’s no much heat in it and the leaves have seen better days, but there’s nae point in banking up the fire when there’s only you’.
The tea looked like engine oil and he was half ready for work and just idling in the chair. He took a sip and then another and smacking his lips pronounced judgement. ‘That’s ok Ma.’
All he had to do was find a jumper and put his shoes on and that would be that. He crouched down onto his haunches trying to draw the shallow heat of the fire into his bones, a remembrance to use against the cold later. And winding down he checked his pockets to see if he’d put the two bits of rag in, a bulwark against the metal containers sticking to his hands with the cold.
‘I’ll no be long Ma,’ he said, running the remains of the tea around his mouth to clean his teeth and spark the day.
He always said that, a kind of charm that would make it happen, even though they both knew that he’d be lucky to be back before the shipyards had sounded the first horn. He looked over, Mum was dozing in the chair, but her eyes opened quickly as if she’d been caught out.
‘Beat it. I’m asleep.’ Da’ grunted and curled himself up into a ball and shut his eyes and opened them again to see if Alex was gone.
‘Wheesht!’ said Mum, as if Da’ were one of the wains.
‘Uncle Stephen’s coming to see you,’ Alex tongued a hole in his teeth, trying to guess its circumference and how much it would hurt to wriggle and waggle it out of his gums.
Mum’s green eyes opened wide and she stared into the curl of fire and then at him so that it was as if her eyes were alight. ‘Away with yeh,’ she whispered, ‘your Uncle Stephen’s on the other side of the world, in Australia.’
‘Aye,’ Alex put the mug carefully down on the grate beside the poker, ‘but he’s comin.’
Mum pushed back into her chair, her face cloaked in shadows. ‘Just think a minute,’ she said, ‘you don’t even know what he looks like.’
‘Am away Ma.’ Alex leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, in the way he usually did. ‘A’ve seen a photo of him with you when you were younger.’ He smiled in triumph at his trickery.
‘That might be true,’ said Mum, ‘but how do you know he’s coming?’
‘Dunno.’ Alex was in a hurry now, turning away, moving his toes about in his hobnail boots, and preparing for flight. He’d taken an extra pair of socks to put them over his other extra pair, so that the heat would build up in his feet and blast him around the streets, his feet moving so fast that the cold would be left behind.
‘It makes me scared to hear you talk like that.’
Mum’s lone voice in the big room sounded sad and Alex hadn’t meant to make her sad.
‘Don’t be daft Ma.’
‘But how can you know?’ Mum looked into the fireplace, stirring the embers into life and coaxing them with the poker to give just a little more heat.
‘Dunno.’
‘You mustn’t think about these things.’ Mum coughed and in the flickering yellow light her face was pinched and screwed up with worry.
‘When’s he coming?’
‘Dunno. This week. Today or tomorrow.’
There was another bout of coughing and Alex wished he hadn’t spoken.
‘Och, away with you,’ said Ma, shaking her head in consternation, ‘you’ve got some imagination. I’ll give you that. But you talk such rubbish.’
He cushioned the click of the front door so as not to wake anybody. The clang of the hammers from across the Clyde beat out the new day.
Uncle Stephen had turned up unexpectedly, carrying a green canvas sausage bag that smelled like he was carrying a dead dog’s carcass. Gerry thought that his uncle Stephen was mair his uncle than he was Alex’s, because he’d been given two strands of penny liquorice and Alex only got a bit and a half. Family relations were a tangled web. The smaller kids: Tracy, Ann, Sean and Catronia had scurried behind their ma, like a set of brood chicks waiting to see if it was safe to come out. The unfamiliar feel and taste of wormy liquorice finally won them round.
Alex had been more impressed with the way that he smoked fag after fag and stabbed them out. He smelt of oil and the sea and all things exotic, but his dialect was of the streets around their tenement block.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said to his sister, ‘Australia is great if you’re a convict, or willing to work for nothing. And even if you do want to work for nothing there’s no work.
‘It took me six months to get back here working back and forth on tramp steamers all the way to Chile and back, for even less money than I got before working for nothing.’ He stabbed out another fag.
‘Have you got any fags hen?’ he asked, running his fingers through his thinning hair for inspiration, showing the tide coming in on the hard Sunday collar, patting at the pockets in his woollen coat and matching grubby waistcoat and then his best dress trousers, with a crease like a razor, for clues to where the other cigarettes might have gone.
She pulled a packet of fags out of her square apron pocket, which held everything from hankies for snot noses, to childhood nothings, and handed him one. Stephen snapped the tip off before flipping it into his mouth like a cowboy and lighting it. He sucked in life-giving smoke and continued on, flicking the ash into the grate. Somehow he’d found his way into Da’s chair by the fire. ‘That soup looks great,’ he said.
He needed a shave, but supped the soup down, mopping up the plate with the last of the bread as if the was in an American film. ‘That bastard,’ he said, banging the spoon down and, like a showman, with all eyes upon him, licked the plate clean. ‘That bastard,’ he growled again, ‘and I apologise for calling him a bastard, especially in front of the kids, but he is a bastard, owed me three months wages. And he was short. I signed on as an engineer. All Glasgow men are natural engineers, but the ship’s engines weren’t up to much. I’d counted it all out as I peeled potato after potato. I don’t ever want to see another potato.’
Stephen looked at his sister’s face and from her big face to the small framed look of her children. He carried the same hurt look of incredulity from one to the other, so that even the baby Eva could understand. She stopped jumping up and down for a second.
‘So I told him where to go. Didn’t I?’
‘And you know what?’ he said. The exasperation was in the sneering shape of his mouth, the way that he held his head. A high wire act of words ready for the next words to fall from his lips and end it all.
‘He said that was all I was getting. So I punched him clean out. And you know what they did?’ He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe the injustice of it all. ‘They put me in the brig.’ He looked from one child to another and then to his sister for confirmation that it had really happened. ‘You know what the brig is?’ he brayed and then answered his own question with a raised voice that would have struck open heaven with the injustice of it all. ‘The brig is where they put people after they’ve robbed them. I’d have probably have been better if I’d just swum home.’
‘And that is why,’ he said, sitting back settling himself into Da’s chair, ‘I’ve came back without a penny. But don’t you worry,’ he nodded at his sister, ‘I’m willing to work for practically nothing. All I need is a bite to eat and place to put my head at night.’
‘But we’ve no money and nowhere to put you,’ said his sister.
‘Well that’s fine,’ he said, taking a deep breath and, coughing fit to burst, barely made it out of Da’s chair. He looked around him, as if disorientated, for his canvas bag. ‘I travelled all this way to see you and your wee family and I’m no’ wanted. That’s fine. Fine. And I’d brought you a wee present too.’
‘What is it? What is it?’ clamoured the children jumping up and down and pulling at the hems of their mother’s skirt.
Stephen started emptying the green canvas sack. Shirts, socks, trousers and an old blanket appeared on the floor. They were pulled out like a magician emptying his wardrobe of tricks and showing that miraculously one balled up piece of clothing could be dirtier than the other. Just when the sack looked empty his long arms reached in and pulled out one partner- less shoe, for a left foot. Alex looked down at Stephen’s feet. The shoe looked at least three sizes too small and would probably have fitted Gerry, his younger brother. But Stephen trumped him, his long fingers found their way into the shoe and pulled out a mouth organ. He ran it through his fingers blowing into it and producing a windy rasp that only kids could colour in as music.
‘Here’s your present,’ he said to his sister, handing her the mouth organ.
Her children pulled at her arms to give them a shot of the magical musical instrument. Stephen flung the shoe back in the canvas bag and looked from one dirty package on the floor to the other, avoiding his sister’s eyes, as if deciding what to put in next.
‘He can sleep in my bed,’ said Alex, through the hurdy-gurdy of childish pushing and shoving and wet mouths applied to the worn pipes of the mouth organ.
Stephen held one balled shirt in his hand. ‘A don’t want to be any bother,’ he said.
‘A suppose you can stay for a few days until you get settled,’ said his sister.
‘If you’re sure then,’ said Stephen, strolling away from the pile of his cast-off clothing and looking out the window. ‘If you’ve got a measly three penny bit, A’ll nip out and get a packet of fags and start looking for work right away. That way when I’m working you’ll have two wages coming into the house instead of one. And you can start putting a wee bit by.’
‘Ta,’ he said, when his sister handed him the money. ‘You’ll soon be raking it in.’
Stephen pulled his cloth cap over his forehead. His head was up and he scanned the horizon sure that a man like himself, a worker, would find something. The way he was dressed it wouldn’t have surprised him in the least if he was offered a job in the offices of one of the bigger companies. Maybe, with his engineering background, a supervisor’s job in one of the shipyards. He didn’t want to rush things, be pinned down in the wrong job, with crap money, working sixteen hours a day and barely able to raise his head. The more he thought about it, the slower he walked and the more cautious he became.
He bumped into one of the guys he’d went to school with, Derek Smiley, outside Maise’s the tobacconist. They sized each other up, like two circling dogs, before either said anything.
He puffed away at one of Derek’s Capstan Full Strength and tapped at the packet, with the picture of a sailor. ‘I’ve been on the boats,’ he said, taking a deep breath and puffing out his chest, ‘an engineer, so if you hear of anything let me know and I’ll be right down there that day.’
Derek edged away, two-stepped onto the road, looked him up and down. ‘What did you dae for a bevy? I know you liked a drink.’
‘Nah, I didn’t bother. Didn’t miss it at all. You know it’s a responsible position. You don’t need to drink and you’re better not to,’ he said, flicking the fag away in response to Derek’s suggesting that they go for a pint. ‘A wouldnae thank you for one. I’m tee-total now, signed the pledge in Wodonga. Best thing I ever did.’
‘You sure? A just had a wee win at the cards. Ten pounds,’ he said, pulling out an impressive amount of coins of one pocket of his overalls, then the other, to show Stephen. ‘Just one. For old times sake.’
Stephen smacked his lips together. ‘Alright. See you in the Macintosh Bar in ten minutes. I don’t want to be a killjoy if you insist on buying me a few drams.’
About the Author
Jack O'Donnell was born in Helensburgh and now lives in Clydebank with his partner, Mary. He claims to be fat, balding and middle-aged.
Jack writes for fun and has a blog at http://www.abctales.com/blog/celticman, which he also claims no-one ever reads.
Jack writes for fun and has a blog at http://www.abctales.com/blog/celticman, which he also claims no-one ever reads.