Jodie felt the floor tilt underneath her. Like a gable end slated for demolition, the front facade of her fell away and the private contents of her life rolled out. She was being torn down, and every mismatched bed sheet in her mind was to be exposed for all to see. She knew why the teacher had gone away. She knew what she had done to make Mr Gillespie disappear.
* * *
Mungo wouldn’t sit next to her on the bus. He sat on the bench opposite and flattened himself against the glass, his eyes fixed somewhere over the black fields. Jodie couldn’t remember a time when he had been this disappointed in her.
It was a long while before she could stop crying. Then she had told Mungo all about Mr Gillespie, about his holiday caravan, the frontier of the vast sea and the excitement of the screaming waltzers. For every thing she told him, there was a thing she could never tell. She didn’t tell him how Mr Gillespie had said he believed in her. How easily he had groomed a daft wee lassie into believing that she might get out of the city; that she might escape the dreich streets that held them all stuck and be free, at last, from the burden of her brothers. She had a good brain, sure, but she was nothing special, not compared to these Perth lassies with their tutors, and the Edinburgh debutantes from the Mary Erskine School. She had a good head on her shoulders but he was the one who would make sure she would go far. How could she tell Mungo that as he was fingering her that very first time, she had already started to trust him and doubt herself?
Mr Gillespie had promised to help her get into Glasgow University, and she had doubted she was bright enough to manage that on her own. To Jodie, the university was another city altogether, one whose postcode was a moat that kept East End middens like her out. It was the ancient seat of learning that respectable Englishmen came to when they wanted a sense of frontier plus a top-drawer education, not to mention four years of shenanigans with local girls who liked to get fucked off their faces on eccies and pints of snakebite and black.
Hamish said he knew all about it. When he had a supply in, Hamish sold dank hashish to the university freshers. He cut it with plain rolling tobacco and crumbled a beef Oxo cube over the top of the mixture. He could make the smallest amount stretch across a whole class.
His timing had to be perfect. He had to catch them during freshers’ week while they still had envelopes of money from their grandmothers and before they learned the hard lessons the city had in store for them. He always struggled to straighten his grin as Toby and Dom sniffed at bags of tobacco and Mo-Maw’s out-of-date Bisto and exclaimed it smelled just as good as the skunk they had “that one time in Goa.”
Hamish called this last week in September “Plum Season.” You had to con the bastards before they got too ripe and Glasgow rotted them on the vine. Soon enough the city would show them its true nature and then it would be too late. But three years running, he made enough money to pay off all of Mo-Maw’s Provvie loans; he even bought a video player and with the remainder he rented a full-body sunbed for Sammy-Jo.
The last time Hamish had come in the door buzzing and flush with freshers’ money, Jodie was already lying with Mr Gillespie and dreaming of making it to the West End. She was slack-jawed as Hamish talked in awe about the grand tenements the students lived in, the fancy ones off Byres Road, with their wide wood floors, high ceilings, and big centre lights that cast a sparkle upwards, not downwards from a garish bulb. It filled her head with daydreams.
Every Plum Season, the English arrived in their mothers’ battered Volkswagens, all the better to not flaunt their wealth – the good Mercedes was simply too much for the north. They slouched down the Great Western Road in balding corduroys and waxed Barbour jackets. Their hair was artfully unbrushed, an old Proust was dog-eared and protruding conspicuously from the flap of a canvas bag. They were dressed for shooting grouse in Aberdeenshire.
“Ah think they’ve had the Walkman too loud when their mammies were telling them about Glesga being full of peasants. Daft cunts thought she said it was full of pheasants.” Hamish told that joke to every single one of his Protestant boys, and twice to Jodie. “You can only dress like ye don’t care if ye have money. I mean serious, neverhave-to-count-it money.”
Glasgow teenagers in the very best of gear they could afford and caked with make-up and body spray watched the slouching corduroys from the top deck of the bus and felt a spur of shame. It would be a dream to afford beautiful clothes. It would be another dream entirely to be able to shun it and dress however you pleased.
Hamish took their money quickly. He sneered as they told him they planned to visit their big sisters – invariably called Tilly or Tanya or Tess – at St Andrews or Robert Gordon’s. They asked him the best season to visit Skye. “How the fuck should ah know?” he would say. “Ah’m no yer fuckin’ ghillie pal.”
These students went home for every holiday. Whenever anyone asked them where they studied, they would answer Glasgow, and the friend would nod approval; how bright and brave young Dominic Buxton was, and just the acceptable level of debauched. They always went home after graduation. They would never actually settle down here.
Yet to Hamish, the worst of them were not the English. The worst were the chinless lambswool milksops from the West End or Perth or Edinburgh. These Scots spoke the Queen’s English with a snooty clarity that would embarrass even Etonians. They knew more than one Rabbie Burns poem by heart, and actually enjoyed ceilidhs and bagpipes without taking the piss. They knew all the best walks around Loch Voil and thought the Drovers Inn did the best Sunday roast, though it was “ruined by day trippers.” To Hamish, these Scots let themselves be minstrel dollies. Middle-class Glaswegians were the worst; they had no loyalty, when it suited them they draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket, but they knew none of its chill, none of its need. These Glaswegians were acceptably foreign and endlessly entertaining to the English. Their das were not being put out of work on the Clyde or pulling slag from the coalfaces in Cardowan. Their daddies were catching the commuter flight down to London and eating smoked Scottish salmon at business lunches in Canary Wharf. They preferred to take their oatcakes with French paté and drank uisge beatha by the glass, not by the bottle.
Hamish took one look at them and knew he hated them. He was jealous in every way. Then, howling at their gullibility, he took their money and gave them a lungful of powdered beef.
He told Jodie that university life was not available to her. It was not for Glaswegians like her.
Jodie listened to the scream of seagulls and knew she couldn’t explain any of this to Mungo.
What she had told him was enough. In the tenement, with milk pouring down his chin, Jodie had told Mungo about the baby Mr Gillespie had put in her belly. This was why he had disappeared. She told Mungo how Mr Gillespie had said it wasn’t his. How he had screamed at her in a lay-by and panicked like a midden rat trapped by Staffordshire terriers. It was funny, she had thought then, for him to act so trapped when he wasn’t the one who would be stuck. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he’d listed a long list of Protestant surnames, her classmates. He’d recited them alphabetically, gruffly, like he was reading the morning attendance.