My Life as a Man (3 page)

‘What’s the fucking joke?’ he asked. ‘Your head’s never out of a book or stuck up your arse. You’re useless. From now on, boy, you’re in the real world
and I’ll tell you what chance you’ve got. No chance, you’ve got no chance.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ve got, I’ve got a job,’ I said. He didn’t break into applause, just sneered and shook his head. ‘Mr Simpson put me on to it,
the one that did careers when I was at North Kelvinside. I met him in the street, and he asked me what I was doing.’ You could have made more of yourself, he’d told me.

‘Schoolteacher arsehole.’ He had a gift for that kind of repartee.

‘He was all right.’

‘You wee poof!’ he said and pointed at the wall without waiting for an answer. ‘That goes with you, by the way!’

I never had gone in for posters, so the only thing on the wall was a picture I’d torn out of a magazine. Don’t ask me why I’d put it there with a strip of Scotch tape top and
bottom. Not because of his long blond hair, that was for sure, or because, Christ, I fancied him. A picture of a knight on horseback. Why not? There were worse things you could stick on a wall.

‘I won’t get paid till Friday. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave then.’

‘Today – I’ve a friend coming.’

‘Who?’ He didn’t have any friends as far as I knew, just people he drank with until sooner or later they got sick of one another. A nasty thought struck me. ‘You talking
about a woman?’

‘That’s my business.’ But he couldn’t stop himself from giving a wee smirk.

‘You tell her about Nettie?’

He sneered at me. ‘Nettie, is it? You mean your mammy?’

‘Did you?’

‘What would I do that for? Your fucking head’s wasted.’

‘Is whoever-she-is moving in?’

‘Before she steps in that door, I want you on the other side of it. And that’s it. Out, finished, on your own. No more charity.’

‘I’ve more right here than you have. If my mother was here, she wouldn’t let you get away with it. You only walked in here five minutes ago.’ Wrong on all counts, as a
matter of fact. In reverse order: he’d been here for years, and who could ever tell what Nettie would do? Third, and the one that mattered, my bloody mother had signed papers that made him
the tenant. Love’s young dream.

‘I’m a fool to myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve been good to you.’

On the other side of the road I put the rucksack down. I’d pocketed the spare key on my way out; God knows why; a souvenir of good times? I took a last look: end of a terrace of
pebble-dashers, a cold box with four rooms. Built after the war, lines and miles of them dumped on the edges of the city, no pubs, no pictures, crap wee shops. Metal frames showed in straps along
the edges of the wall in every room, like the skeleton on an insect. The competition to get one of them was terrific. Everyone wanted out of the old tenements, so there was a points system. Points
for how long you’d been on the waiting list and points for how many children you had. My mother just had me, but the two of us got a house. Rumour had it that she’d slept with a
councillor. That’s the kind of rumour somebody always wants to share with you. Since then, the garden had gone to hell in long tangles of sick-looking grass, a colour of its own as if the
earth had taken a scunner at us. Under the window of my bedroom upstairs the pebble-dash had flaked off like patches of acne. Funny thing is, that hadn’t happened to any of the other houses.
We were always an embarrassment to the neighbours.

Home. That was one way of describing a place I’d never liked, but walking down the road I couldn’t think of another one.

The way it turned out, I lasted five days.

That very first morning I saw her sitting in the car, but I was too busy worrying about being late to pay attention. I’d got off the bus on a side road with shitty wasteland behind me and
in front a building behind a high link metal fence. I walked along by the fence, looking for a way in, and started to panic when I couldn’t find one. When I got to the corner, the fence
stretched away along the side street but I still couldn’t see any sign of a gate. I started down that street, changed my mind and hurried all the way back to where I’d started. Through
the link fence, the place seemed empty of life. Even when I went round the far corner and found there was a gate, I couldn’t see anyone. Where were they all? How late was I? Had I got the
start time wrong? Why couldn’t I see anyone going into work? It was like one of those nightmares that don’t make any sense, and all the time the clock was ticking. Inside, I half ran
into the first opening and found myself in a little courtyard with a car parked by the wall. I didn’t know much about cars, but it was a big one – you didn’t need to be an expert
to see that – and it had been polished until it shone. The windows were steamed up.

In the wing mirror, I could see my hair standing on end and the sweat on my face. Don’t ask me what I thought I was doing when I went to the window. Looking for directions? Bending down, I
got so close that I could see a girl’s face turned to look at me. Not clearly – she didn’t wipe the glass or roll down the window – and I stared in until it occurred to me I
might be frightening her.

Straightening up, I saw a door in the wall with the firm’s name on a sign so discreet it was no wonder I hadn’t noticed it.

As I went in, a racket like machine-gun fire stopped abruptly. Behind a long counter, a woman was sitting with her back to me. Alerted by something, maybe a colder movement of the air, she
whipped her head round from the typewriter and stared at me. ‘Staff don’t come in this door,’ she said. I hadn’t even opened my mouth. It was as if she knew at first glance
I was a mistake; but then I suppose that’s what she was paid for.

Turning, I saw a door at the back marked
STAFF ONLY
.

‘Not that way. Go back outside,’ she said, ‘through the swing doors. You’re not supposed to go in from here.’

‘Sounds like a joke.’ She looked down her nose at me, and I made the mistake of trying to explain. It was a joke my father had been fond of, an old joke. ‘You know,
“If you want to go to Dublin you shouldn’t start from here.” ’

A man in shirtsleeves came round a partition at the back and stared at me.

Like the Kerry man trying to get to Dublin, it wasn’t a good start.

‘She’s there all day,’ one of the women on the line said.

‘The girl,’ the other one said and laughed.

I’d asked, first chance I got, ‘Who’s the girl in the car?’

‘What car would that be?’

‘Dozens of cars out there.’

Comedians.

‘I’m talking about the wee park round the side. Not the big one at the front.’

‘What about it?’

‘There’s a girl sits in a car there in the morning.’

‘All day,’ she said then. ‘The girl,’ the other one said. You could tell they thought they were funny. They laughed at their own jokes. They stood on either side of a
press, and my job for that part of the day was to take away the full bin of castings and slot in an empty one. Hearing them wasn’t easy. The big space echoed with the fart and whine of
machines that dribbled oil to make rainbows on the pools of scummy water under where the corrugated-iron roof leaked.

‘All day, every day.’

‘Until
he
leaves.’

‘Who?’ I wanted to know.

They ignored me, talking to each other.

‘He’s away before us.’

‘Put it that way.’

‘That’ll be why you might think she was just there in the morning.’

‘Instead of the whole bloody day.’

‘Morning till night.’

‘Right enough, you can’t see, not from here.’

‘But he can. Out of his window, he can see. He can see, all right.’

All through this, they never stopped working. Their hands made the same movements over and over again. Hands and tongues, they never stopped.

‘Catch me putting up with it.’

‘Catch you getting the chance.’

‘Maybe it’s worth it.’

‘More ways than one, maybe.’ She had a dirty laugh.

‘Not for money, not for the other, not in a million years. It gives me the creeps.’

‘He likes to keep an eye on her.’

The one who said that laughed again, but this time her face didn’t laugh.

Something about the joke wasn’t funny. All day I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What kind of man made a girl sit outside all day? And the question that really bothered me: a girl who would do that, what kind of girl would she be? I was so distracted, I went the wrong way
when the foreman switched jobs on me, and pushed the bin through two sets of doors without giving it a thought. It was the brightness that stopped me in my tracks. The sound of the machinery in
here was different, and everything was clean and new-looking. I hardly had time to take in the size of the place, when I was punched on the shoulder.

‘What are you playing at?’

I followed the foreman along the corridor between the doors.

Without looking round, he said, ‘Keep out of there.’

‘Is that a different firm?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.

‘What are they making?’

‘A special truncheon that works as a whip one way and club the other – that one’s export only.’ He grinned. ‘It’s used on Death Row in the States.’

‘What?’

‘Forget it, I’m joking,’ and marching off he let the doors swing back on me as I followed.

The women weren’t much more helpful.

‘They make all kinds of different stuff,’ one of them assured me.

‘And the money’s good. See, if you get through there? You’re on a different rate.’

‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

‘Don’t bother your head about it, son. A job’s a job. You need a job, there’s plenty worse than this one. Anyways, most of it goes abroad. It’s no for
here.’

‘Who cares where it’s for?’ the other one said, frowning. It was the first time I’d seen parts slipping past her on the belt, like a stutter, her quick hands missing a
beat.

That night I dreamed I was riding across a bridge, in armour. In the water I saw myself mirrored, metal gloves on my hands, a plume of feathers on my helmet. I was going to rescue the girl in
the castle and if I had to kill to do it, that was all right. I had a sword.

My first thought on Wednesday morning was for the girl. I was as tired as if I hadn’t slept, but I went the long way round the building to check if her car was there.

Seeing it, I couldn’t bring myself to walk on. After a minute looking, I took a step towards it, then another. Just then, a face round and white as a plate appeared at the first-floor
window. That was all it took to spin me round and set me scurrying off with cockcrow in my ears.

I went into the factory with my mind made up. I’d keep on asking until I found out all there was to know about her. But when I came out of the lavatory (the smell of piss up my nose, if
you sat on the toilet holes poked in the partitions at eye height, brown stains in the wash basin . . . thirty years of this; did I say thirty years?) I found the foreman, Ronnie, going through my
rucksack, and that put it out of my head. I’d been leaving the rucksack under a bench where the coats were hung, and there he was down on his knees with the straps undone and the flap thrown
back.

‘You’re sleeping rough,’ he said. He pulled out a shirt, and the pair of underpants wound in it fell out on the floor. ‘What kind of day’s work you going to do if
you’re sleeping rough?’

Thursday night I was outside their flat at half eleven on the dot, which was our arrangement, waiting for Tony to open the door and slip me inside. Time passed. I’d walked around for
hours; I was starving. I could hardly wait to get inside. Tony would have made sandwiches, the way he’d done the other nights – he was a decent guy. I put my ear to the door, then got
down on my hunkers and lifted the flap of the letterbox. There were coats hung behind the door, but I could hear screaming and shouting.

When the door opened, it nearly pulled me off my feet. I tried to push it further open and Tony’s voice whispered, ‘May’s home.’

‘So what?’

‘She’s up the stick.’ A good job in London, I’d heard his father boasting, not just a pretty face. Now big sister was home and looking for somebody to hold the baby. A
bit old-fashioned, but it was a family tragedy, I’m not stupid, I could see that.

‘I only need one more night,’ I said.

‘No chance, Harry. None of us’ll—’ His head whipped round as if somebody had come into the lobby behind him. ‘The old man’s going mental. None of us’ll
get any sleep tonight,’ he said, and nearly took my nose off, he shut the door so fast.