Imagine the cold weight of your body, dead. Awkward to shift, like a loosely filled sack.
Look at it from outside. See it. Touch it. The flesh like rubber. Can you even smell it?
Have you ever had a dead arm? Maybe you’ve woken up fazed with it lying there like a stranger in the bed. You can move it around with your other hand; it’s an alien, vegetable mass. Then maybe in a fey mood you’ve imagined what death is like, your body too heavy to move. But it’s not just your body that is heavy, it’s the world, and your body becomes only the bottom sack in the universal heap of heavy matter. Your body is no longer ‘you’, it’s function now is merely to establish the focus: it’s the atom, the very point of the great pin, pressing down to your inner being with the weight of the whole dense, dense universe piling above it to squeeze the aberration of your wee life from existence.
I’d say Lyn’s death affected me badly.
New Farm Loch was a young, sprawling council estate in Kilmarnock. We moved there when I was three and it was a wonderful place to grow up, full of trees and building sites and thousands of kids from all the young families. You could play football with a full complement on each side, or kick the can with about thirty bods. It was dangerous and wild and great fun; and there was always something new and someone new coming along.
I’d just turned fourteen when she died; and so had she. A part of me retreated inside and became expressionless, a ghost behind the mask of me. Thus was my puberty, my awakening, the great sprouting of fecundity, frostbitten in a cold snap. Just starting to appreciate the sweet rewards life has to offer, I was stopped short by the awful bitter truth of time! As you may see, I became ‘somewhat maudlin’, a strange brew. My fifteenth year was on the surface unremarkable, but in my heart, turbulent.
She was in my class at school but we only really got to know each other in the second year when we were both slaves to a rogue of a tattie seller. We worked alongside each other for about six months for this man, tramping bags round the doors, trying to convince housewives that these potatoes straight from the farm were better than anything available in the shops. Tastier, fresher, cheaper, all round better value. Sometimes, Lyn, for a laugh, would just tell people that the tatties were frosted and bad. More often than not she’d still get the sale. She was good fun. We became great pals and I felt a bond with her that the other tattie boys didn’t have, but we were only just friends.
The van owner, Jack, was a real chancer, banally, if accurately, called ‘Fat Jack’ behind his back on account of the large round paunch. He would drive us to the farm in this filthy old deathtrap of a white Transit, where he’d bargain for hundredweights with the farmer. Then, when the deal was struck and the farmer took him to the office to pay, we slaves would be tasked with loading-up, passing the big paper bags in a human chain. From the top of the great pile that reached the very roof of the barn, tossing them one to the other and into the deep recesses of the van. Only we’d stick in another five or ten bags and hide them in the front or behind something so the farmer couldn’t see. And we were even more sneaky. On prior instruction we’d leave a few of the extra bags in clear view so the farmer could insist on their removal, thus satisfying his business pride. Fat Jack was a successful chancer.
Of course even at that age we understood we were being abused; but the stronger imperative was the tribe mentality and we tried hard to steal as many as possible, despite this theft meaning we would have to bag a whole extra lot of the mucky bastards en-route to the first housing estate. As soon as the doors closed and the engine coughed up it’s black smoke we would get to work, weighing the tatties out on scales with a big scoop-shaped basin, tipping our short measures into the 5lb, 7lb and 14lb bags. These were for us slaves to carry, graduating with age to carrying the bigger bags as a badge of honour and experience. Once you could carry 14lb the next step was two bags at a time, or you might even be trusted to deliver full paper hundredweight to a regular order. An apprenticeship of sacks. Despite our soft, growing bones being moulded abnormally by the weight of root vegetables en-masse, there was an honour and kinship engendered by the hardship we endured to earn our three pounds sterling for a 19 hour week. From 4:30 on Friday nights for three hours, then all day Saturday and Sunday. We’d work on till every bag was sold. Lunch was not included.
Lyn said, even back in those days, it would have been considered a scandal to work us so long and so hard, had the authorities been informed. And the pittance of a wage would no doubt have horrified the douce middle class ladies of the private housing estates had they been interviewed on the subject for a tv news exposé. But Jack had the whole thing worked out. Not only the theft of tatties, but the regime, the brainwashing. We voluntarily hid the truth of the extent and nature of our work from our families. We didn’t even tell our friends who were outside the club. No-one broke the rules. Honour among thieves like us, was all.
Anyway, it was a Saturday in July, 8:20 am and we were at the farm. The tatties had been picked and sacked earlier that morning and were damp. The scent of the disturbed earth was still on them, the wetness staining the paper sacks. We had just about finished loading-up when Jack and the farmer came back from their business earlier than expected. We heard the voices first as they exited the office. I could hear Fat Jack waffling, trying to delay their progress back to the van but the farmer was for none. His Wellingtons flopped steadily closer. They rounded the corner of the pyramid. We stopped where we were. The farmer began his count. He found four extra sacks.
Jack confronted us, “Aww, for fu… Boays! Ah’ve tell’t ye a hunner times, count, count, count as ye go alang! Don’t worry, Charles, Ah’ll keep them right…Tam, Barmy – get thae bags oot o there…well, whit ye waitin fur, bloody Christmas!”
Tam and Barmy shuffled into action, undoing the good work they had done moments before. I was waiting round the front, sweating, a big buff sack still in my arms. When I heard them begin to move the illicit bags I timed it to coincide. As they counted “one, two, three…heave,” and dumped two bags back on the pile I dumped mine in the footwell in front of the passenger seat. A hot shiver of panic passed up my spine, my arms. Had I been too loud when I dropped it?…Charlie would be able to tell….no it was alright. He didn’t come round. Jack was mumbling to the farmer, complaining about boys these days. I knew that Charlie would be completely ignoring all this, still watching them, beady eyed. I spread the blanket over the passenger seat, over the tatties, climbed on top and stayed there, pulling the door to, as quietly as possible. As soon as everyone piled in and the van had dragged itself out of the barn across the farmyard and onto the potholed road I crawled through the inside hatch into the back. There was no congratulation.
“Ah hope you managed tae get that other bag in. If ye didnae, it’ll come oot your pey, no mine,” said Neilly.
“Aye, Ah goat it,” I replied and it was left at that.
Lyn caught my eye. My heart gave a jolt, or maybe it was just a pothole. She smiled, a wee surreptitious look. She took the Stanley knife and slit open a paper sack. The tatties rumbled onto the van floor among our feet. Some of them tumbled to the back of the van, to the double doors which were latched together loosely from inside with a hook and a frayed piece of string, the lock being busted. There was a space between the doors and the van floor. The space waxed and waned from one to six inches as the suspension took a battering from the rough terrain. The tatties vanished down the chasm and were lost to the road.
“Hiy. Gie’s that knife!” roared Neilly, “It’s ma joab tae cut the bags. Ye see what happens!”
“How come only you get tae yase the knife?” wee Boab countered, “Ah want a shoat.”
“It’s the law – it’s health and safety ya sully bam. You’re too young,” said Neilly, jumping to kick the remaining tatties away from the yawning, rattling doors.
We had a ranking in the tattie business. There were always five or six workers in the van. Neilly, being the eldest and longest-serving was ‘top’ tattie boy and could sit in front with Jack while the other grades were asserted according to some childish, unfair ranking. I was tall and old enough to hold my own place according to my length of service. I knew though that I wasn’t able to advance beyond this position and so kept to myself mostly. The smaller, the younger and the less able had to put up with the constant emotional and physical bruising that accompanied the lowest ranks, having to sit on the hard bumpy floor of the van towards the back, getting ordered around, insulted and blamed. And all of us getting lead pumped into our developing brains from the diesel fumes that came up through wee holes in the rotted floor where we would watch the road pass by as we bagged up. Now I wonder if this mixture of chemical poisoning and overwork contributed to Lyn’s illness. Sometimes she looked so tired.
Of course there was a return. We got tips which we kept to ourselves, learning after bitter argument that it was best to hide any handouts or Neilly would demand his cut. But he knew which houses gave the best tips and kept these to himself. Neilly was an inch or two bigger than me and a year or two older. If not born bad he had obviously learnt to be, and at all times projected the requisite image of boorish bravado. The rest of us felt uncomfortable with the thieving and conning, we felt pressured to it against our will, but Neilly seemed to like it. This was his world and he revelled in the smartness of it, no second thoughts at all. He would feel no sense of justification, for it never entered his mind to doubt his actions. He’d moan when the farmer complained we’d taken too many bags (though we had actually taken far more), “Torn faced aul’ basturt”. He took what he wanted and gave no thought to the consequences for anyone. Fat Jack was our Fagan and Neilly was the Dodger, but not cute, like in the musical version. This Dodger was a real robber’s protégé: orchestrating the theft of tatties from the farm; enforcing the rules and privileges of rank; overseeing the short measures as we filled the bags; smarming housewives on the merits of our crop like it really mattered; conning doited old women out of mere pennies; gloating over it; and pocketing the biggest tips.
As I sprawled wearily in the back of that rust rotten prison I wondered about things, how all this came to be, how Fat Jack first established the system, with what kids, how long ago, how was it possible to be so tired, to be so in thrall yet technically free, what the police would do if they found out…would we kids be held accountable? That was a real fear. Most of the time I wondered about other more important things – specifically if Lyn felt the same for me as I did for her. I was too scared of rejection to make my feelings explicit, so I worked in a dwam, secretly longing like only adolescent boys can, while keeping some semblance of normal behaviour.
She was an anomaly. A lassie in a boys world. It’s unclear how she had ever convinced Jack to take her on… I think he only gave her a job so she would give him peace and stop hanging round outside his house which was beginning to look very suspicious. Yet she fitted in perfectly and could hold her head up as an equal in our team. We felt proud of her. And her presence spurred us on to work harder. If her skinny frame could thole the howking and carrying, how much more could we? She fought above her weight, put in a good shift and could even merit a seat on the wheel arch! But I had other reasons to admire Lyn.
She would slump casually down on the van floor between housing estates just like the rest of us; she’d do the same work, if with the lighter bags; she’d be just as dirty and her jeans and t-shirt would be just like the rest; but my eyes lingered on her increasingly as time went on, picking out the budding curves below her shapeless boyish clothes, her hair that hung over her face in bits, the smudge left when she brushed strands back with a dirty hand, the smile on those lips, redder and smoother and softer than the boys’. I fell in love.
On this particular day Lyn had been pushing the boundaries with Neilly. First with the knife, then with mocking, and then she overstepped the mark.
“It’s ma money and ye’re no’ gettin’ it!”
Her spirited defence had me enthralled.
“Naw, its ma hoose, Ah always go there, the tip’s are mine,” said Neilly, not yet losing his temper, his hand stuck out demanding his payment – and his place.
“Well, ye’re no getting it, she gave it to me, she even said it was ‘cause Ah wis a lassie!”
“That’s pish! She ayeways gi’es me a big tip.”
“Aye, well that’s ‘cause you’re a big lassie anywey!”
I knew and everyone else knew she’d gone too far. A direct insult, a direct challenge to his authority. I could see the slight dulling in Lyn’s eyes, the previously righteous shine had a flicker of doubt and, like the rest of us monitoring the dispute, she was waiting to see what Neilly would do. Could he use physical force against a lassie?
My mind raced just as his must have. What would I do if he struck her? He couldn’t let her off with this insult, could he? There was a long silence during which we all waited for a response, me, Lyn, wee Boab, Tam the Man, and Barmy. We were all standing round the back of the open van. The diesel of the engine mixed with the smell of the wet tatties and took on a strangely not unpleasant tang. Far off I could hear a bell ring, a school maybe, the bell for playtime on automatic, ringing needlessly on a Saturday afternoon. The street was quiet and sunny.
After a whole long three seconds of eye contact with Lyn, Neilly said quietly and calmly, with no emotion,
“How much was it?”
“Twenty pence,” she answered, truthfully, unconsciously pulling the two two-bob bits from her pocket.
Neilly was holding out his hand. She placed the coins on his palm. He didn’t even look down at first, but held her gaze, then in one swift movement looked at the coins, wrapped one in his fingers and shoved the other back into Lyn’s hand which he’d grabbed with his free hand. “Fair ‘nough then. This time,” and he turned away, “Hiy, Barmy, ya poof! Whit have I told ye aboot staun’in like that? It’s juist tatties we’re sellin, ya nancy boay’” And he laughed louder than the joke allowed. Barmy, who had the unfortunate habit of standing with one hand on a shoved-out hip, responded with a tut, “Piss aff!” And the mood had changed. Everyone moved to get on with things, taking up new bags, dividing up the blocks of houses, allocating them by rank and the prospect of tips.
Lyn looked thoughtful and stuck the ten pence into her pocket. She hadn’t had a chance to object to taking the coin back – and why should she? But it still seemed wrong that, despite the inexplicably magnanimous gesture, Neilly had taken some of the money that she had been given and was her’s by right. I felt I should have done something. But what? It was over so fast. There was a nuance I didn’t like about this outcome but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it disturbed me – almost more than if he’d just hit her. At least if he’d done that I would have been forced to act and my way was clear. This way, I was left a mere spectator like the others.
Lyn walked off and picked up another bag of spuds to trudge round the doors. As she passed me I knew I had to say something, “At least you got half,” I said, and I immediately regretted it. What a weasely remark. I blushed. She didn’t look at me but walked off, quiet and serious. I had six months the advantage of Lyn, but now she had outgrown me in a way I couldn’t fathom and I felt so young beside her.
She started going out with Neilly, but without any explanation left the tatties just after they’d started ‘gaun oot’ so they never really worked together during the relationship. For which I’m thankful, as it would have been an unbearable situation for me. It wasn’t that I was so desperately in love with her, not since it turned out she was more interested in ‘guys like Neilly’. It was just that I had respect for her as a person. That’s what I thought to myself on those hot, laboured nights that summer, but the truth was I just couldn’t have stood seeing her with that big ignorant bastard. She deserved someone better. Ok, maybe not me, I didn’t want her now, of course, but at least someone decent.
As it was, they went together in the evenings and hung around somewhere not local to ‘my bit’ so I didn’t have to see them. Then it seemed it was all over, after less than a month if my memory is right. He’d found a new girl. To be fair to Neilly he didn’t talk about her much directly during their relationship – although there was an increase in the “Hey, I’m so sexually experienced and you’re no’” type of banter: “Hey, Barmy, you ever had a haun’ joab? Oaf a lassie I mean! Haw haw haw.” The image was more than I could take. I kept even more out of his way.
Cancer can work quick on kids. I heard only a month later that she was ill. I visited her at first in the hospital and then when she came out of the hospital and took to her bed, at home. After being very ill initially, she rallied a bit and could accept visitors. We had three months of closer friendship. We got more pally, our shared affection for the off-beat and off-chart music on the radio providing a focus. We worshipped the alternative scene with a religious zeal, John Peel our high priest. We played a lot of records. I would buy them for her in town and I used to feel so excited as I brought them in. I was surprised how she seemed to welcome my visits and I was encouraged to come more often. I wanted to spend more and more time with her, but I didn’t know exactly what she wanted from me, although, if truth be told, I harboured hopes.
Then it dawned on me there could be another reason she’d want to see me other than just our new found friendship. Sure, she did like me, we got on well and she must have been getting lonely as she never mentioned any other friends visiting – none of her girl friends came any more – but gradually I detected an undercurrent. It was nothing like romance, not on her part. Instead I was a messenger from the world outside. I brought news of scandals and scrapes and screams and school, and more importantly, sometimes, news of ‘the tatties’. Neilly didn’t visit and I didn’t mention him much. Neither did she, but she did ask about him on occasion when the subject of the tattie boys happened to come up in the natural flow of conversation – “Is he still that glaikit?” – and other mildly disparaging queries.
And she did ask about the tattie boys most days. Well, it was our common scene, I rationalised.
That’s when we became closest, those three months. It was her illness that gave me that time with her. We talked about everything and anything and nothing, but there was always a fence round that one subject. I never directly asked and she never really spoke about him.
It was a short three months. The last time I saw her she got too tired to have me stay very long – I was only there about five minutes and then she asked me to go. She promised she’d see me the next day and we could continue our usual debate on the best of the new releases over cocoa and toast while listening to the radio. I had noticed an alarmingly rapid change in her demeanour over the past two weeks. She was eating and drinking less. I would have all mine finished and she would leave the toast almost untouched, one solitary bite from a slice. She would try to get me to eat hers to hide it from her mum, who she complained was fussing, but I felt guilty as if I was denying her the sustenance she needed. She was very thin. She complained about the weight of the blankets. She felt cold in the warm room.
We made plans to visit the record shops in the town and to go to the pictures as soon as she was up again. As I left, I remember, I wanted to kiss her, just a peck, on the cheek. But I didn’t.
That night her mum called mine. When my mum came off the phone, she explained that Lyn was too ill to see me any more, or anyone for that matter. Maybe in a week or two she would feel more up to it. Then eight days later when I came home from school I heard it was over.
So fast.
I kept my cool and took it as if it had been expected – which it was, but I hadn’t – and later in my room I cried secretly, desperately, and didn’t sleep till very late. The next night I played records loudly and pretended I had got over it already. No-one spoke to me about it, except my mum to tell me when the funeral was, and I didn’t talk about it to anyone. At school they made a bit of a speech and some of the lassies gret. One of the boys even made a casual joke. I stayed silent throughout. It was strange how a few months off school could make someone seem so far away, so absent as to be practically forgotten. No-one really cared but just went on as usual. I thought of poor Lyn. I thought of her pain, how she had withered and been smudged out like a flower under a heel on concrete. How could that happen? How could that crushing agony be possible? Hopeless. And I thought, why hadn’t I kissed her, that last visit?
At the mid-morning break on that day of the announcement I saw Neilly and completely despised him. He was mooching around with a couple of mates and laughing like nothing had happened. It’s possible he didn’t know. It seems very silly to say this but I swear my hackles rose and my teeth bared. I could feel the muscles in my shoulders bunch and my fingers tighten to fists and a low growl rose in my throat. Luckily I was alone and no-one saw. It was a struggle to control myself and I think I only managed it because of the shock this animal emotion caused me. I found myself standing back in my mind, observing my autonomous reaction and then I could see my rational self step in and take control. I turned and walked away, shaky with adrenalin.
I can’t remember too much about the funeral. I sat with the school party. We had all been given the option to come but it was just the lassies from our class that took it up. There were two other boys. One was just a cousin who lived in England, another the son of her mother’s friend, probably both there under protest. There was no Neilly. In fact no one from the tatties. I was out of place and awkward and tried to keep my self-control, but I remember I was shaking like I was cold and tears did roll down my cheeks a few times. I wiped them with a hanky and sniffed and gently blew my nose. I hated the lassies and their hypocritical weeping. Had they been to see her as much as me, and had they gone alone or in a pack? How many times? Once, maybe, or twice? I kept my dignity as much as I could. I felt that I should be with the family and family friends, closer to the front of the church. I wanted to tell them how much I was sorry and how I felt so bad, too, but us kids weren’t allowed to queue up for the receiving outside. We were ushered away by the teachers, who had also been tearful, also hypocrites, and we weren’t allowed to attend at the grave or the tea.
A bus dropped us back by the school and that was that. No-one mentioned Lyn any more. She wasn’t important because she could no longer take part in anything. I made an effort to just get on and tried to think of her less, and was remarkably successful. For a while some songs and the radio programmes reminded me of her, but gradually I learned to forget on purpose, consciously at first, then automatically.
Now all these years later I can even hear the songs we listened to and I hardly let her into my head. When her image does creep up I have become good at sweeping it away again. But there are some things that make me think of her so that I cannot help but dwell on the memories. There are smells – diesel, and earth, and the smell of soft, sweet, rotting tatties – that bring her back to me every time. It’s not exactly a romantic perfume, but it does it for me. A garage forecourt, or walking past a ploughed field, new tatties in a mock-rustic-style bag in the supermarket in late spring, or digging in the garden. These things make me think of the tattie days and Lyn as she was. And I feel now just like I did then. I still feel like a young boy, admiring her figure and her eyes and that ruby-lipped smile as she sprawls on the floor of a rusty old Transit, careless of her ability to entrance.
That’s something you should be told when you’re young. These silly young feelings don’t go away – you just have to handle them. You don’t feel older and wiser, you just have to behave that way. When you get older, you feel pretty much like you did when you were young; scared and embarrassed and unsure of how to behave; and when you think of the things you did or should have done you relive it not in scenes like watching a film, but you relive all these feelings, stronger than any mere memory. You still cringe. You still yearn and pine. And still even love those you did once. It’s there in the memory, unchanged, just swept expediently under the years.
But there is an extra twinge – what you do feel that is different, is the regret. Don’t believe those who say ‘No regrets!’. Your life will be full of lost opportunities, never to return. I should have said or did something that day. I shouldn’t have simpered like a fool after he’d given her the ten pence back. I should have stood up to Neilly on Lyn’s behalf and made sure she kept the whole tip. Maybe if I’d been brave, if I’d been brash and rough and loud. If I’d been prepared to fight that day, then maybe I’d have been the gentle one, to really be there for her instead of abandoning her to the clutches of a thief.
It could have been me she was yearning for in her last weeks instead of him….because I know that despite our deepened friendship, despite how I came round more than anyone else and despite how she took comfort from my visits…despite all this that should make me feel glad or proud or even comforted, too, I know she would have traded me in a moment for a little time with him. Her first love. Her only love. The undeserving oaf!
In that respect, like me.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
