Lonie day 1

Lonie was on the Glasownian shit-sick shift, 5am until forever. The assistant night shift editor, Davy Brown, had left him parked at a typewriter two- fingered pecking at the backlog of copy. The carbon copy, four sheets separated by the coarse blue- grey of carbons, were called dupes, or dopes, dependent on what dope, editors or typesetters, got it. In the upper-right corner of the page Lonie typed the slug for each department. SPO was sport, which went to Archie in the sport’s department. The only SPO that was of any interest to the Glasownian was football, and the only teams that mattered were Celtic, Rangers and to a lesser extent Partick Thistle and Clyde, in that order. The SPO page at the back page could become a SCA, or scandal story, on the front page, if any Old Firm player was involved, looked like being involved, or was a mile from the incident. After the nightclubs closed Lonie got reports phoned into his desk from all over the city. He could track in a few seconds from a map on the plasterboard wall in front of his nose, the lane Jimmy Johnstone had stopped for a pee and what black Hackney taxi took Jim Baxter, and his ‘unknown ladyfriend’, to which destination. These were the type of non-stories that were written up and simply filed; rough notes, which could be used to feed the fire of a bigger story if a scandal broke. Political stories, or POLS, revolved around Glasgow District Council. They mostly involved some councillor sleeping with another councillor, the better sort of stories involved hash and one councillor taking another councillor literally up the ass. Then there were the usual medley of nepotism, some scam involving the awarding of contracts, to relatives, or in ‘the green finger case', a councillor’s wife and the planting of four million daffodils on the cities’ motorway’s links, central reservations, verges and hard shoulders. The filler, or FIL cases, usually involved the infiltration of the city council by Trotskyite elements. Lonie wasn’t sure what a Trotskyite element was. Usually, it involved trying to keep a school, public baths, or daycentre from closing, but he just tried to think of them as daleks, and wrote the Trotskyite quotes in dalek speak, and the councillor’s responses in Daily Pravda speak. But his head was thumping and the print in front of his eyes was squeezing his eyeballs so he couldn’t focus. What he really needed was rape in Ashton lane, a murder in Caledonia Street, or another gang fight, with plenty of stabbings and slashing in Edgefauld Road to keep him awake and his fingers tap dancing on his Olivetti. But there was nothing but muggings and petty theft.

Lonie looked over at the card board sign he’d Scotch-taped to his desk: ‘Don’t fuck up’. Beyond the high open window it was near dawn and the sky seemed to hover between dreich grey and the syrup of banana rum. He reached over and tapped a fag out of his packet of Woodbine. He was down to his last one and would need to go to the newsagents on the corner of Shakespeare Road. There was a lull as editors trekked upstairs, wandered in smoking and wisecracking with the passing girls in sales then, hanging around their booths, licking their lip, nudging each other and discussing what they’d like to do with them, before turning away to their business of making up reality and what they’d do with the material currently in type.

Lonie didn’t hurry back when he went out for a packet of fags. He stood in one of the bricked up doorways of the Broomilaw that smelled of piss and contented himself with filling his lungs, his headache blown away. He watched pedestrians making up their own separate breed of human. Some scooting by, bent and hiding under brolley heads. Others were wearing designer plastic bags for hats. One young dude in Wrangler, and yellow open-necked shirt, with red coloured sea-horses printed on it, head up, patrolling, refusing to believe in the downpour, water running off his long hair and dyeing the shoulders of his jacket an ocean blue. The shutters were up on the ground floor and lorries ran in and out of Glasownian , their wheels ten times the size of a life-jacket, hitting the metal ramps, splashing through the puddles of the road and beating out the news that deliveries would be made on time. He could hear the shouts and low growls, the guys on forklifts, making it happen, dashing and darting into rectangular space, pirouetting kings’ of their subterranean world.

Flicking his dout away, he made a sudden sideways dash across the road, but got caught crab-footed between traffic splashing one way and coming another. He was drenched and in a foul mood when he reached the penumbra of welcoming light thrown by The Captain’s Rest, a café on the corner of the road. Most of the Formica tables were already taken with nightshift workers in filthy overalls, and a cloud of fag smoke was curling around a few rouged faces from Blysthwood giving them a shot of Hollywood glamour. The food was cheap and filling. A full Scottish breakfast: mug of tea, sausage, egg, beans, black pudding and potato-scone, cost no more than a packet of Quavers in some of the finer eateries in the town centre. But he tended to avoid the place. It was too crowded for his liking and the smell of fried food and false camaraderie of the regulars was too much of a reminder of the children’s home where he’d spent his adolescence. There was another reason, which he didn’t like admitting. She was sitting near the window, her cat- green eyes taking him in. She back- heeled her bag beneath her chair, leaning over, holding her hand to cover her mouth, as if the café were filled with a bus load of lip readers and whispering to her friend Marj. There was a gap between them now and a chair sitting empty. She waved him over, as he knew she would. He weaved himself through the newspaper readers and the guy with the Edwardian moustache sitting side-saddle in his chair and plonked himself down.

‘Can’t stay long.’ Lonie put a smile on the spin of his words. ‘It’s just my tea-break.’ He tried to sound apologetic. ‘Not got long.’ He looked at his watch and tapped the face as if it had stopped.

Marj dragged on her fag, angled her head to not looking at him, tried to look through the condensation on the window and used up one of her repertoire of facial expressions, a moth hitting the light, in a flicker of a smile.

Marj’s best friend Mary was more attentive. She was whimpering sighs and soft hands roughly dragging at the collar of his Crombie, pulling it off his back and piling it up like a concertinaed body on the back of the chair beside her, closest to the aisle. Natalie, with notebook in her hand and pencil stub at the ready, stomped across to block his exit and take his order.

‘Just a mug of tea.’ Lonie was getting his excuses in early.

‘Anything else?’ The voice came from between one of Natalie’s three chins.

Lonie shrugged. ‘Not unless…’ He looked across at Mary and his lip curled up as he took in Marj.

‘I’ll have a full breakfast, but no black pudding. I hate black pudding.’ The words came out in a rush. Mary smiled at Lonie, her hand briefly covering and kneading his fingers on the table.

‘Ah’ll have her black pudding with full breakfast then.’ Marj shrugged. ‘Best not waste it.’

Natalie didn’t bother writing anything down on her pad. She turned and bawled: ‘two full breakfasts’ into the clanging pots and pans and steam filled space behind the counter.

As she turned shuffling past one of the tables, like a sea liner skirting dock, Lonie shouted at the back of her head: ‘Two rolls in cheese, to take away.’ She reached for her pencil, hurriedly dabbing down the new order and frowning because he hadn’t asked when she was there.

‘Got to get back to work, you see.’ Lonie bit down the smile on his lip.

Mary grabbed at his shirt, just above the cuff, picking at it, picking at him. ‘Got any fags?’

‘Nah,’ said Lonie, ‘was just goin’ to get some, before I came in here. You got any?’

‘Down to my last one.’ Mary’s hand did a different kind of talking, offering him the consolation prize of sliding across and up and down Lonie’s thigh.

Marj said nothing. Bored with the whole idea of being bored. Lonie knew she wouldn’t eat the breakfast. He’d never seen her eat anything. She’d just push it about the plate and leave it untouched, too scared to miss out on anything.

‘I could walk up with you.’ Mary was scatter-brained, looking about to see where her thin coat on the chair behind her was, and where her bag was.

Lonie, a marionette of sudden awkwardness, jerked himself up out of the chair. ‘Nah, work.’

Her eyes sparkled like that of a much younger woman, but her teeth stayed the colour of cabbage water. She was still pretty. That was the saddest part. That and the free blow-job she’d given him, catching him drunk and alone at Christmas, coming down the wrong side of thirty. It was the most expensive blow job he’d ever had. He figured at the rate it was going it would be cheaper just marrying her, divorcing her, and setting her up for life like his last wife.

‘I’ll get the breakfasts.’ He pulled at his coat for change, his feet almost knocking over the chair as if he was wearing another man’s clown boots, and the packet of fags falling out of the side pocket onto the floor. Someone in the back of the kitchen turned on the radio. In the front room of the café ‘Love me dooooh,’ warbled out of the static and stood between them. Her smile was a thing of beauty, as she picked them up and handed them to him. She patted his wrist as he left and watched him bolt away from her.

As he returned from paying for their breakfasts, Mary watched him sliding his bum along the same row of chairs.

‘Here.’ Lonie’s index finger balanced the packet of fags on the table, a cardboard castle ready to topple onto the orange place mats and tomato ketchup stains. ‘Didn’t know I had these.’

‘Thanks.’ Mary’s fingers were fluttering over his hand, but Marj had the packet out of his hand and a fag in her gob before he had time to change his mind.

Fag smoke and the smell of fried food carried on Lonie’s clothes like cocklebur memories all the way back to work. The phone on his desk was ringing. He could hear it all the way as he hurried, panting, up the third and final flight. It was a point of honour among the staff not to answer anyone else’s phone. It stopped just as he got to his desk. Instinctively, he reached for the fags in the pocket that were not there. He hung his coat over one of the radiators that didn’t need to be kicked, bled or fed, or whatever the latest damn excuse was, and clunked and clanked when it got warm, like a wrong-headed metallic fridge stuck to the wall and throwing off enough heat to cool that corner of the room. There was a note on his desk: ‘the fat man wants to see you’ Lonie recognised the handwriting. When he turned the master of the underlined memo, Paul Woods, was standing at his desk.

He was executive editor, which meant jack-shit in a kingdom in which the fat man was king and liked to chew over every word, phrase, paragraph and story several times before breakfast. Woods had a Woodbine stuck in his lower lip and his horn-rimmed glasses dangled off the bulbous edge of his nose. He wasn’t an old man, just a man living in the wrong century, tailored in the old-fashioned eighteen- sixties’ equivalent of sackcloth and ashes and shiny black shoes. His body was an appendage to his clothes. He walked like sludge trailing nowhere fast, but still going downhill. Woods was a great man for making lists. ‘The fat man wants to see you. Now!’ He tried to sound authoritarian, but even his voice was grey.

‘You got a fag?’ Lonie sounded apologetic. ‘You know what it’s about?’

Woods handed him a fag and waited as he lighted up, considering it carefully from every angle, before answering. ‘No,’ he admitted.

Lonie followed at his back. Other Glasownian men were manning their desks making copy, working the phones, some of them with their eyes shut, as they made their way up to the big office at the top of the room.

The big office wasn’t very big. It was little more than a booth with glass windows on three sides, with a gap at the top to let out the cumulative fag smoke and a door that opened and closed, but because it was the fat man’s office, it was big. He was wedged behind his desk, a HB 1 pencil in his hand, poring over the galleries, trying to decide on the flow of the paper and the headline for that day, three other editors were standing at attention in attendance. Woods without saying anything, seemed to blend in and become part of the ambience of the big-little room. Lonie stood, stuck at the door, like a hat rack in a world in which hats were no longer worn.

‘What the fuck’s this?’ The fat man picked Lonie out.

The fat man wasn’t wearing a jacket, his tie was so askew it could have been in Inverness and the first button on his shirt was undone as if he didn’t have time to dress properly. But his black hair was set out in a perfect bowl and, deep in the folds of flesh, his hoggish- blue-green eyes looked amused or amazed. It was difficult to tell.

Lonie took two steps across to the fat man’s desk. He tilted his head to look at the copy he’d made earlier. All the other editors tilted their head in the same way to see what gross mistake he’d made. One word ‘noble’ was circled by the fat man’s HB 1 pencil.

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ was noble. Mahatma Gandhi was noble. Martin Luther King was noble. I am noble. You are a fuckin’ idiot. We don’t, in this paper, call someone that tried to kill her two babies and herself noble. I don’t give a flying fuck how sick she is. Apart from dead people we don’t call anybody noble. If hanging hadn’t been abolished, we’d want her hung. In fact we still might. You got that?’

Lonie set his head to nodding and picked up his copy. As he turned to go the fatman shouted after him.

‘Did I say you could go? Did I?’

Lonie turned back to meet the fatman and the other editors glaring at him.

‘I don’t pay you to make sloppy errors,’ said the fatman.

‘You don’t pay me at all.’ Lonnie shrugged his shoulders as the fatman grinned at him.

‘Well, whatever I don’t pay you it’s still too much. Get her with the tits and bring her back to my office.’

‘You better not let her hear you saying that,’ cackled one of the editors, the others laughing on cue.

‘You mean Audrey?’ asked Lonie.

The fat man, too busy to listen, was once more bent over the early proofs and the line of editors crowded round his desk blocking his view of him.