This Road is Red Page 3

  Her brother dragged a piece of wood and stamped on it, telling the girls he was breaking it into pieces for his crossbow. A girl they’d never seen before took two balls from her coat pocket and began to throw them against the wall. The others stopped to watch her as she chanted her rhyme and slapped at the balls and when there was nothing new to see they went back to their beds.

  Jennifer’s mother at the very top of Ten Red Road with a basket of wet sheets, the wind swaying the washing lines and flicking the sheets into her face when she hangs them up. The sheets shifting and flapping. She’s holding pegs in her teeth and clipping a bedspread to the line. Her hair in her face, her dress with the swirls on it flat against her legs. Thick clouds and a white sky. Seagulls sit on the ledge that goes round the building. The ledge is as high as Jennifer’s mother’s shoulders. The very top of the flats. It’s exhilarating.

  And Jennifer’s mother is proud of her family; her husband who she walks with every day to the gasworks in Provanmill where she cooks and he labours; her children who are well- mannered and doing great at school. The rent is a leap from the house in Possil, yes, ten pounds a month, and more than they paid for a quarter year in their old house. But they won’t want to move to Cumbernauld like their neighbours from across the landing. No thank you. They’re happy at Red Road.

  They’re still building the flats. The work goes on and on. She’s at the centre of a new era. New housing. New Glasgow. She looks at the half-finished cladding on Ninety-three Petershill Drive. Semi-clothed. A trouser halfway up a leg. To the left of the building a boy crosses the wasteland. He scampers; leaping and veering and running. He wears shorts and a T-shirt with a collar. He carries a bag that hangs from his fist like a cartoon burglar’s sack. Strong legs. Windblown hair. She watches him run out of her view, behind the half-built tower. A scan of where he came from – the open ground and the railway – and then she picks up her washing basket and peg bag and goes back down the stair.

  The boy ran straight at them, his sandshoes slapping on the concrete. Jennifer and the girls stopped their beds and waited for him to go away. James looked up from where he sat on the ground, nailing his pieces of wood into a cross shape. He stared at the older boy. The older boy stopped and panted, a lick of fringe falling below one eyebrow, his bag hanging from one hand.

  ‘Are you making a crossbow?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘For hunting rats?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  One of the girls threw her stone and hopped over her beds.

  ‘What’s in your bag?’ James said.

  Something in the bag jerked and scrabbled. The boy held the bag out in front of him, his fist gripped tightly around it.

  ‘Guess,’ the boy said. James stared.

  ‘A ferret,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I seen another boy with a ferret in a bag.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kenneth Campbell.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Well he had a ferret too. What’s your name?’

  ‘Davie. Did you see the ferret?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to see this?’

  ‘Aye.’

  The girls held their stones, James stood up and the girl with the balls stopped playing. Davie smiled. He had the beginnings of an Adam’s apple in his throat and hair that hung loose around his ears and neck. He held the bag in the crook of one elbow and slipped a hand in. His wrist came out first and then he lifted out the ferret. Davie dropped the bag and put his other hand on the ferret, bringing it close to his body. The children stepped in to look and the ferret twitched and struggled, its back and sides moving as it breathed.

  ‘Ah it’s so cute!’ one of the girls said.

  ‘Does it bite?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl with the balls ran away.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ James asked.

  ‘By the railway.’

  ‘How did you catch it?’

  ‘Jumped it.’

  Eyes raised from the ferret to Davie’s face to the ferret again.

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘Play with it, then let it go.’

  The children took a turn at stroking the ferret’s fur. Its eyes didn’t stop moving.

  Davie said, ‘I’m going to let it go now.’

  ‘You didn’t keep it for long,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘I can catch another one, easy. Pass me that bag.’

  James picked up the bag and held it out to Davie who took it and released the ferret. Then he turned and walked away. James stared after him. The girls stared too.

  ‘He’s my big brother’s pal,’ one of them said.

  James picked up his crossbow, left his sister and her pals, and went after Davie.

  Davie and some big boys kicked stones as they walked, in no particular hurry and in no particular direction. They grabbed at things they found on the ground, hurling them in the air. One picked up an empty ginger bottle and swung it from a finger. Another pulled his arms out of his jumper, stretched it over his head and tied it around his waist. James watched Davie drag a piece of wood along the side of a wall, then step on the wood and snap it, the bag with the ferret gone. The boy’s jumper slipped off his waist and fell on the mud. James was about to shout after them but they ran, suddenly, and James had to run too. He stopped at the jumper, picked it up and followed the boys into the foyer of his own building, Ten Red Road. They got in the lift.

  ‘That’s my jumper,’ one of the boys said.

  ‘I came to give it to you.’ James held out the jumper and the boy took it.

  ‘Cheers wee man.’ The boy sniffed like a grown up.

  James looked up at the big boys. They chewed sweets with wet lips and leaned against the walls of the lift.

  ‘What will we do?’ one of them said. ‘Play in the lift or chap door run away?’

  There was the sound of the foyer door opening.

  ‘Quick!’ Davie pressed a button and the doors closed. ‘You choose, wee man,’ he said.

  James didn’t like being stuck in the lift. It had happened once before with his sister so he said, ‘Chap door run away.’

  The lift went up and one of the boys said they’d start at the top and work down. Oh mammy daddy, he had heard about the boys and girls who played chap door run away. He wanted to go home. He didn’t want to go home. He looked up at Davie who patted his shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right, pal. Stick with me. Best to plank your crossbow somewhere.’

  So James leaned the piece of wood against the side of the lift and waited. One of the boys took a length of wool from his pocket and wound it round his fingers.

  The lift stopped at floor thirty and the boys got out. The boy with the wool tiptoed to one of the doors and tied one end of the length of wool to the door handle. All the boys began to giggle, bending over and holding their hands over their mouths, big eyes looking around, a trickle of snorts and squeaks and inhalation. Tiptoes and bent backs.

  ‘Hurry up,’ one said. His voice was a whisper.

  Davie took hold of the other end of the wool and began to stretch it across the landing but footsteps sounded from behind one of the doors and the boys ran into each other, wild and feverish. A key unlocking a lock. About to get caught. They fled out of the landing door, the boy yanking the wool free from the door handle, onto the stairs, running down them fast, each boy running a few steps then putting a hand on the banisters and jumping the rest. Three floors down they stood in the stairwell with the door to the twenty-seventh floor ajar. James stood with his head down, breathing fast, and smiling.

  ‘Okay, this one,’ the boy with the wool said.

  James knew his downstairs neighbours but he didn’t say anything.

  They were better organised this time; swifter, less gangly about their work. Doors one and four were opposite each other. The boy with the wool stood outside door one and tied the wool
around the door handle. Then, with Davie standing by him, he stretched the wool across the landing to door four and tied the wool to door four’s handle. He checked the wool which was taut and checked the knots which were strong. A boy stood by one door and Davie stood by the other. James watched their hand signals; one, two, three. He knew it was going to happen but he wasn’t prepared for the noise of the knocking and the charge towards him as the boys ran for the door. James was first down the stairs, hooting and sucking in his lips; he even jumped the last three steps, but when he looked back, the boys weren’t following. They were bunched by the door, motionless. One turned to James and scowled. Davie put his finger to his lips and beckoned for James to come back up.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. Footsteps.

  ‘Hold on please,’ said a woman’s voice. It was Mrs Cameron, his mother’s friend.

  Scuffling and scratching. ‘Hello?’

  The first tug on the wool and all the boys nearly collapsed, holding their stomachs, bunching fists into their mouths. James giggled. The wool tightened as the woman pulled her door but couldn’t open it.

  ‘My door’s jammed,’ she said. ‘Who’s out there?’

  The door rattled on the other side now. Big tough tugs that made Mrs Cameron’s door click shut.

  A man’s voice. ‘What’s going on here?’

  The boys looked towards the door with the big voice behind it. The wool stretched across the landing. Mrs Cameron’s voice again, ‘Harry, is that you?’ Her letterbox open and her voice coming out of it.

  ‘I can’t stop laughing.’

  ‘Maggie, are you stuck too?’

  ‘I’m dying with laughter.’

  ‘I can’t open my door,’ she said.

  ‘She’s talking through her letter box!’

  ‘Neither can I.’

  ‘Something’s jammed. Can you give yours a tug, Harry?’

  ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘Tug it harder.’

  ‘I’m going to die laughing.’

  ‘Some wee bastards have tied our doors together.’

  ‘Oh my God, he’s going to break the wool.’

  When the boys saw the man’s door lurch violently inwards and crash shut then lurch violently inwards again they ran down the stairs, floor after floor, silently, slowing up when they felt safe, until they walked nonchalantly onto a freshly cleaned landing where a pair of lift doors were opening, letting out a woman, James’s mother.

  The older boys put their hands in their pockets and stepped aside to let James’s mother pass. Silence. Casual stances. Not a word was spoken except by James’s mother. ‘James, up the stair with me, please, after I give these messages to Alice.’

  The boys put their heads down and stepped into the lift, Davie looking up once to wink at James, before getting in the lift himself.

  ‘Hey, wee man, do you want your crossbow?’ Davie shouted and held the crossbow between the doors.

  ‘No he does not,’ James’s mother said.

  In the house she ran a bath then called down from the veranda for Jennifer. She dropped a sponge into the bathwater and tested the temperature with her fingers. James climbed in.

  ‘What were you doing with those older boys?’

  James looked at her and thought before he spoke. His mother waited.

  ‘I don’t want to find out you’ve been terrorising our neigh- bours. These are good people we live among.’

  ‘One of the boys, Davie, he caught a ferret.’

  ‘Really? A live ferret?’

  ‘Aye. I stroked it.’

  They talked about the ferret and his mother said, ‘As long as you don’t bring one in the house.’

  When he thought it was safe, he bent his head and splashed water on his arms and chest and changed the subject.

  ‘Are you pleased with your wallpaper?’

  ‘Oh aye.’ She looked around the bathroom walls. ‘We’ll do in here next.’

  James heard his sister come in.

  ‘I found your crossbow in the lift,’ she said and his mother shook her head and left the two of them in the bathroom, Jennifer sitting down to pee and laughing as James told her all about his time with the big boys.

  Jennifer 1968

  Jennifer watched the carpet. The wind got under it and made it billow like a sheet. She couldn’t tell how the wind got there because the carpet was fitted from wall to wall. She chased the ripple and slammed the heel of her hand onto the carpet as if she was catching a rat. The building swayed and the tassels on the lampshade shook. The sound of crashing pots and cutlery came from the kitchen.

  ‘Good God, some hurricane,’ Jennifer’s mother said. She stood by the window. ‘I hope they knew what they were doing when they built up this high.’

  Her father stood up and joined her at the window. Jennifer stood up too and rested her chin and hands on the window sill.

  ‘They were built to sway a bit,’ he said.

  ‘A bit!’

  Jennifer thought they could be at sea; her eleven-year-old hands holding onto the railing of some bulky ship, while the turbulent air heaved them one way and then the other. She looked down into the dark and saw shapes she thought might be sheets of plastic or sheets of newspaper or kit from the building sites thrown into the air or blown, twisting, onto Red Road.

  ‘And James is sleeping through this,’ her mother said. They were quiet. Jennifer saw a patch of condensation form

  at the bottom of the window from where her breath stopped on the cold pane. She looked up at the reflection of her parents’ faces. Gentle.

  And then the building shuddered and her father nearly fell on her and her mother screamed and the pots in the kitchen were at it again and the books on the shelf gave up on them- selves. Jennifer gripped the window ledge. Her father said sorry hen, and her mother said right, who’s coming? She took the blanket that lay on the settee, slung it over one shoulder and tucked a couple of cushions under her arm. ‘Jennifer?’

  ‘I’ll stay and mind James,’ her father said.

  Jennifer and her mother caught the lift downstairs and stepped into the foyer where other neighbours had gathered. Mrs McCluskey, Lizzy and Harry from down the stair, Mr and

  Mrs Fine; everyone from the high-up floors. One old woman sat asleep on a chair.

  ‘Terra firma,’ her mother said and she sat Jennifer down and told her to put her head on the cushion and get under the blanket and sleep, which Jennifer did, but she couldn’t sleep. She keeked at the men in their pyjamas and the women with their curlers and knitting, and listened to the chat. Moans, jokes, remarks – they were familiar voices and they all said they wouldn’t be going back up the stair until the hurricane passed on. Each time the lift doors opened the talking stopped and the heads turned and the new refugees were greeted with catcalls and comments. Jennifer stared at the legs of everyone around her until her mother woke her in the middle of the night and heaved her up to join the others, standing and shaking themselves in their slippered feet; washed up debris on a storm-shattered beach.

  Betty 1968

  Betty put on her housecoat and got her man out the door with his piece and flask and straightened tie. When she closed the door she looked over her house with her ferocious eye, straightening the pictures in the hall and picking up the envelopes and papers that had slipped from the wee table. Her tea cups had shuddered on their saucers but the china on the sideboard was intact. Not so the Aynsley ladies who had toppled from their glass shelf in the display cabinet; the door had sprung open and a bouquet of flowers and a tiny hand were lying on the carpet. She couldn’t bear to look.

  Outside, Red Road lay bruised and swollen: flattened grass on the fields, trees down, a car on its side. Wreckage everywhere. A lump of steel stuck into the side of one of the unfinished buildings. More steel lay thrust into the ground.

  She would start with the landing floor, work from the outside in, and get her house straightened and correct. On the way to the mop and bucket and Zoflora she picked up her p
oor wee ladies and put their broken parts into a dish for Douglas to deal with when he returned from work. At least the swaying had stopped.

  Opening the door to the landing, she set the bucket down on the lino.

  ‘Douglas!’

  Her husband sat on the landing, his back against the wall, knees bent, head lolling onto his right shoulder.

  ‘Douglas, what are you doing?’ He didn’t move or answer.

  ‘Douglas?’

  She rattled the mop against the bucket and was just about to rattle his arse when he started. Thank God he wasn’t dead.

  ‘Douglas, look at you!’

  He held his hands out in front of him as if fighting off an attacker. ‘I’m waiting for the lift.’

  ‘No, you’re not, you’re asleep. Get up.’

  It had been a terrible night. Douglas had sat up in bed for most of it, facing the wall above the bedstead, his hands and forehead pressed against it, moaning at every clash and clink outside. Betty had seen the night through with a few wee halfs but Douglas didn’t touch anything because he said he’d be sick if he moved away from the wall.

  ‘Oh my wee darling,’ Betty said, softening, and helped him up. ‘Will we get you in the lift before you get the sack and we get thrown out of our new house?’

  ‘You can take on a few more cleaning jobs if I get the sack,’ Douglas said. There was nothing wrong with him.

  He stretched as he stood and picked up his briefcase and umbrella. He pressed the lift button.

  ‘I’m cleaning away over in Knightswood today, as a matter of fact,’ Betty said. ‘I’ll have the tea in the slow cooker.’

  ‘Ach, that’s why I fell asleep,’ Douglas said. ‘Look, Betty, the lifts aren’t working.’

  One of the lifts jerked itself down to their floor. Knocking and shouts. Young voices. Scuffling.

  ‘Let us out,’ they heard someone say.

  ‘We’ve been stuck between floors. Will you get the doors open for us?’