The Plettie (Part One)

Instead of consigning the old postcard to the bin, where it should have went, Larry Henderson brooded over it from the moment it fell from the pages of a book he had randomly acquired.  It was a heavy sepia card, crenulated around the edges, and bore a heavy diagonal crease which suggested that someone had thought about ripping it up and then changed their mind.

   The picture showed an old fashioned boy with long flannel shorts, hob nail boots, scabby knees and a rough collarless shirt.  His freckled face, smiling beneath the pudding bowl haircut, was the very definition of a street urchin.  The boy was frozen in midair, attempting to click his heels together in that carefree gesture peculiar to old comedy films.  Despite the immutable grin, his staged joviality looked desperate.  Maybe the photographer had bribed him with a few scattered coppers strewn on the tenement landing, Larry thought.  It was hard to decipher the setting clearly.  Larry could discern an iron railing perilously close on one side, and beyond this a background jumble of white washing on lines, then a jagged mountain range of jumbled roofs.  Directly behind the boy the shadows yielded a doorway and a stairwell.  Further scrutiny seemed to reveal several surprising but indefinite figures lurking back there, still timid after all these many decades.

    It made for an odd sort of picture postcard.  Although there was no printer’s information on the back of the card, there was a copperplate scrawl written in violet ink (which brought the trade name ‘Quink’ to his mind) which said, ‘Fond greetings from the pletties.’  The anonymous message seemed ominously targeted at Larry, for who else but him, or a fellow Dundonian, would have known what that last word meant.

   He had to explain to his wife that in Dundee, pletties had been long external landing that ran behind tenement buildings, connecting four or five flats perhaps on each floor.  The stairway would be tacked onto the middle or end of the landing.  The pictorial scene might have been anywhere in Dundee, for this plettie land was ubiquitous in the vanished dark age days.  When he grew up in the fifties and sixties the tenements lingered like a back street disease, before the apocalyptic horseman of redevelopment rampaged through the town, cutting epidemic swathes through every district.  The scene in the photo could even plausibly have been the street where he was born.  He thought the boy possessed a nagging familiarity, a specific genetic stamp of locality he remembered, even though the snap must have been taken twenty years before he was born.  He even imagined that the handwriting looked sinisterly recognizable, though he could not link it to a name.

    ‘This is a calling,’ his wife Louisa said superstitiously. ‘It means you are going back for some purpose.’

    ‘I’m effing well not,’ Larry swore vehemently.  But in his head he did fly back.  His early years were interspersed with a number of what he termed Hansel and Gretel incidents, which he could not reconcile with his other memories.  These small strokes of falsely reconstructed fantasy did come from his very early childhood, when imagination might be expected to run riot, but later, when he should have known better.  And the episodes seemed to be connected to specific ruptures in his life.  For reasons he never fully discovered, his parents had subjected him to upheaval more than was normal. He moved houses a strange number of times before he was ten, and the turmoil made dark furrows in his consciousness.

    Once he asked his dad why they kept on ‘flitting’ as they called it, and dad told him, ‘If you keep on moving, those things of darkness canna get a haud of ye, son.’

    What was it in the numinous dark that seemed determined to terrorise his family in particular?  There was a mania among his relations that he could not fully explain, that seemed partially inspired by the place they came from:  The Dark Suburb.  That’s what they called Lochee, the seedbed of his strange kindred.  The name arose because the area grew more quickly than municipal amenities like gas lights in the nineteenth century, shivering out west in the Victorian night, its jute mill machinery pounding, with some older bleak obscurity in the Sidlaw Hills frowning down at the encroachment of the streets.  Lichtless Lochee was another variation.  But characteristically, Larry chose to believe that the darkness referred to something more figurative.

    Larry turned over the postcard for the fiftieth time.  Increased handling had increased his illusion of kinship to the photographed boy.  The postcard now felt wrinkled with age and his clumsy handling.  Each time he put it down carefully and wondered what had happened to himself.  One of the wellsprings of his confusion was that his mother and father seemed to break up and reconcile multiple times each year.  It was bamboozling to the boy who would one day be luxuriating in a lovely semi-detached house with mummy, then next week whisked away to a rat ridden tenement flat with no wallpaper, a bare bulb dangling overhead, and a near deranged dad.

   This seam of strangeness seeped through the layers from his childhood like tenement darkness.  He remembered being the youngest of a gang of lads, aged about five, playing on a building site, falling down into some foundations and being unable to get out.  Sudden helping hands lifted him out of the darkness where he firmly believed he was trapped forever.  There was, in another memory, an improbable shoogly cottage where he and some unknown relatives ran amok inside.  It was inside a magnificently dense woodland attached to the walls of a tumble down factory, somehow in the middle of the city.  Larry had a delicious, pernicious recollection of enjoying the contents of a box of Mars Bars some of his unknown Lord of the Flies cronies had liberated from somewhere, gorging themselves daft in that miniature forest.

    Beyond these uncertain recollections, and more normal and dull life in more salubrious suburbs, there were also frequent stays with Granny One.  Granny Two was never visited and only talked about except in a whisper when he was young.  Granny One lived in what seemed to Larry the oldest building in the world.  The walls were crooked and uneven, as if carelessly carved out of arthritic old bones.  She hung great gusset bursting unmentionables shamelessly from a clothes pulley in a kitchen that she called the scullery, where there was a cold press instead of a fridge.  Another odd piece of furniture was the inscrutable uncle who sat obliviously at the kitchen table all day reading the paper, and who seemed incapable of speech.  It was said that he had carelessly punctured his eardrum with a bit of invasive paper and was deprived of the urge to communicate with anyone after that day.

    Inside the granny house you had to be quiet most of the time, for Granny One shared that abstruse dread of the unseen that dad possessed.  At certain times, according to dates crisscrossed on her crazy calendar, Larry had to succumb to a terrified enforced silence. She would pull down the blind that let bad light in from the plettie, cowering back from an imagined intruding horror that would imminently burst into the flat at any second.  Even when the invisible threat had passed it was evident that the great menace still lurked somewhere within the extended tenement building. The warren of flats, taken as a whole, was large as a mansion, which only made the many possible lurking locations of that nameless entity all the worse.

    But sometimes, at night, it took definite shape, Larry learnt later.  For years he rarely stayed at gran’s overnight, until there came a time when it was particularly bad between mum and dad.  When they grew exhausted of torturing each other and playing tug of war with him, granny stepped in and took him away.  She had been a charge hand in a jute mill in her young days and would not let any ‘kettle biler’ of a man (which meant weakling), or besom of a lassie (strumpet, that is) destroy the spirit of a puir wee laddie like Larry.

    Uncle what’s-his-name was sent to stay at a cousin’s in Arbroath, and Larry was royally installed at granny’s for six weeks.  He discovered that Plettie world was inhabited by a cast more exotic than he had suspected.  He already knew many of the small boys and girls who infested the building, but becoming a permanent resident allowed him to be immediately immersed in their constant games, zigzagging in and out of common doorways and actual dwellings.  Apart from play, there was the semi-slavery of going on parental errands or, much better, going to the shops for old wifies for penny rewards.  Older kids fetched carried beer, baccy and bets for housebound or bone idle adults.  Anyone from outside the building was set upon and hounded out, as if they were a predator being repelled by native termites.

    At night they huddled on the landings, because nobody made them come in during the summer holidays until the night was absolutely black.  The whole building seemed to vibrate with child noise, the teeming life force of the neighbourhood. There was an arcane form of communication there which always struck him as magical, and he could never figure out how it worked.  It operated when, for instance, a gang of enemies approached the building and the boys who inhabited the tenement would pour out within minutes to meet the invaders.  Or when a roaring drunken father came rampaging home at closing time and the landings and stairwells would instantly clear in advance of the approaching hurricane.

    There was another thing that disturbed their society at night, making them react in a different way to other threats.  He became aware of it one evening when it must have been very late because the shadows in the building were long and the sky was stark with sunset scarlet and purple.  Larry had lapsed into a dreamy state because he had been co-opted into participating in a girl’s game of tea parties or the like.  The older boys would not have surrendered themselves to this fate, but he was still young and amenable and besides too tired that particular evening to object.  As far as he could remember, his participation did not involve active engagement in the girls’ game.  He was propped up against the wall, wrapped in a tartan rug; to his left was a similarly passive teddy bear (one eyed) the same size as himself.  There was a rag doll on his right and various girls dispensing tea, which was outrageously only water, from a plastic tea set.

    Several things alerted him to sudden threat.  One of the girls spilled water absent mindedly on his hand.  He followed her line of sight across to a parallel tenement, where the plettie seemed to fog over as the space was flushed by a travelling shadow which swallowed the light as it moved from left to right.  Any notion that it was an illusion was countermanded by the small group of children over there who were seen fleeing before the advancing darkness.  After a minute the whole opposite plettie was swathed in unnatural darkness; and inside that obscurity, as in the sea, something indefinite swam.

    ‘It’s coming here next,’ the girl, next to Larry, said in a whimper.

    The population on their plettie parted; the older boys and girls slunk away without any parting sound, while the younger ones remained.  The feeling of perplexed abandonment was desolate, though worse was to come.  Larry did what he usually found expedient in any crisis and screwed his eyes shut.  He was immediately enveloped in uncomfortable darkness. One of the girls, he thought, tried to pluck  him free from the collective lethargy, but her weak pull fell away and left him swaying.  Another, younger girl yelled and he distinctly heard the hiss of her bladder releasing control, then he smelled the urine seeping through her clothes, and bleakly hoped that the stream would not come near him.

   She started to cry, as did others, and it was only his isolated wonder at why no parent or other adult was coming to help them that made him stay alert.  He thought he heard heavy footsteps trudge up the close stairs and fall with emphasis on the landing, then slowly make way along the plettie towards him.  Larry had the impression that the steps, indefinite as they were, seemed to become more muffled as they progressed and it seemed they were zig zagging wildly as they came near, which seemed impossible because of the narrowness of the landing.

    The sound stopped desperately near and was replaced by another indistinct, even more troubling noise, like air exhaled through a narrow fissure.  Larry might have shouted then; he felt it welling up in his throat, despite the certainty that he would be marked as an eternal sissy if he did actually let it out.  In the event, the wind was taken out of him as he was unexpectedly lifted up and carried off.  By the time he opened his eyes and found he was back indoors he was too surprised to squeak, let alone scream.

   The uncle was there, staring at him with unpleasant intensity, but only for an instant before retreating with granny into the scullery.  He heard the uncle’s monotonous voice with disbelief, because it was the first time Larry had heard him speak. Granny and him were exchanging sharp, rapid whispers which he could not fully understand.  Alarmingly, the uncle was threatening to take Larry away if something was not done to sort out this (unnamed) situation.  But Granny was saying that ‘she’ was no worse now than she had ever been, and ‘forbye’ had never harmed any child.

    ‘Tell that to her ain bloody poor bairns,’ the uncle hissed bitterly. ‘Done them in, one two, quick as you like.’

    ‘I was living here then,’ Larry heard Granny said wearily. ‘It wisnae just like that; there were other things involved.’

    The uncle made a cry of derision and mumbled if that was truly the case, then she and the neighbours should have done something to avert the tragedy before it happened.  And granny then seemed lost in a reverie of dreadful memories.

    ‘Thirty years syne,’ she was saying disbelievingly to herself.

    Her son cut her short.  ‘Thirty years and she still walks when she shouldn’t.  The thing put the terror in me, and you and abody else in this land did nothing to end it.  But enough’s enough. Now your other laddie’s bairn is caught up in it.  You’d better think of something soon, or me and other people will be back here and tear the tenement doon, brick by brick if needs be.’

    He raced out past the astonished Larry, giving him a look of peculiar pity as he left. Larry was too scared to go and see his gran, who was left crooning to herself.

   ‘Cut her ain throat,’ she was saying quietly. ‘Straight efter the bairns were gone.  Effie and Jean was on the landing and heard them greeting, puir sowels; run in and saw her, wi the blood gushing oot.  The wee laddie and lassie twisted together at her feet.  Nae chance for any o them.  And the mother was just standing there laughing and laughing, wi thon razor in her hand.’

    The shock of the recollection jolted her back to the present day.  But there was no comfort for her there either.

    ‘What does she want wi us efter a these years?’ she asked herself.

    No answer came to her.  Larry felt too afraid to go to his own bed that night, but evicted the obliging dog from its den of cushions beneath the kitchen table.  He did not fall deeply enough into sleep to have proper dreams, but had wade through the detritus of undigested images his upper mind threw up.  But several times in the night he momentarily sank somewhere darker and was confronted with the unspeakable cut throat woman gasping hard after him along the pletties and down the stairwells.

    [To Be Continued]