Nanny Bludgeon's Teeth.

The discovery of gold in the Klondike, Yukon was no great thing, for it was already there, just waiting to be picked up and carted off. That precious metal turning up in Dalbeattie Street had Jake and Rab hooting, jabbing and dancing arm in arm in circles, like heathen monkeys without a home. They forgot everything, but the lust for that precious metal, even where to put their feet on the way back from the snug heat of Connelly’s Bar. It was always seemed longer to them coming back than going there. The world just wasn’t a fair place for man or beast.

That was the problem Jake and Rab frequently encountered, they were too kind hearted and liable to be taken a loan of. They’d been in Connelly’s earlier to see George the Gypsy about some tins of Spam and corned beef that were going cheap. While his ship was in dock he was prone to roll off it in the morning like Long John Silver with enough meat down each leg to feed a family of ten. It was understood that this was an honourable thing he was doing, providing a service, but only because those bastardin’ boat owners didn’t pay him enough. It was no more than any docker worth his salt would do. There was no disagreement from Rab or Jake. A ten-bob note was slipped and dapped into his pocket and enough tins put in an old Hessian sack for them to feel compassionate as Samaritans. George the Gypsy buying a beer, for his new found friends, of course, sealed the deal with nods of the head, smiles, rolled smokes and handshakes all round.

Rab had no trouble selling a couple of tins to buy George a drink back. George, of course, bought them another, for that would never do and flung in a glass of whiskey, for beer loses its taste after the first few. Soon the sack was empty and they were full. Jake wouldn’t take any hint of a loan at first, but when he saw his brother Rab swilling and laughing away his share of the ten-bob note it was too much for any poor man to take. When that was done, George the Gypsy talked of repayment, not in terms of right away, but in terms of what kind of things they could sell, for he had contacts all over the town. He’d mentioned bits of metal, lead and copper, growing on tree top roofs, or sitting lying unused in metal buckets in Scotstoun docks, that could be had for men like themselves willing to take a bit of a risk. Jake didn’t like the sound of it. Neither did Rab. There were risks and risks and after bartering pounds and ounces of dead weight and a few whiskeys it hardly seemed worth their while. They needed something more. It was Jake who, after a Woodbine too many coughed it up. He countered the asking price of metal with insider knowledge of the price of gold, as if he’d been planning all along. And it was that more than anything else that caught George the Gypsy’s interest. A ring or jewellery was worth a fair bit, even split three ways, between the two of them.

‘What if somebody else gets to the gold first?’ Jake, being the younger brother, fair fizzed ahead with questions and calculus; his mouth, however, was quicker working than his feet as he slouched behind his brother on the way home.

‘Just you leave that to me, yah daft bastard’ slurred Rab, for age brought not just experience, but great responsibility. He stopped for a piss in McGrorty’s close, and to think about things, while his brain was still fuzzy and warmed up.

‘Ya dirty bastard-away with yeh,’ screamed old Mrs Brown at Number 2. ‘The kids could be coming in at any time and I’ve just cleaned the dirty close with clean water.’

‘It wasnae me,’ cried Rab, buttoning his buttons up all higgledy-piggedly and shooting down the three steps into Swan Street, his innocence fair falling out of him. He wasn’t one to argue with a woman. That just wasn’t right.

‘Have you any ideas?’ he asked Jake, because that was his big idea, to ask his younger brother if he’d any ideas. And he had to admit it was a beaut. There was a word for that kind of thing, but he didn’t want to tax his brain too much, overheat it, with febrile taxonomy.

Jake tucked himself in behind a lamppost, almost mounting it, like a dog on heat; invisible to everyone, but those that were looking. A trickle of water ran down onto his shoes, but he didn’t want to spring back in case anybody noticed him. ‘Aye,’ said Jake, ‘we could get her drunk…’

They bounced on from pavement to road, for a straight line was anathema to them, never raising their heads above the shop windows, as if they were grazing the wide and long pavements of Dumbarton Road. The tenement block pressed in on them and stopped them from straying too far.

‘The thing is,’ said Jake drawing himself up to his full height, without his bunnet, of five foot four, ‘for I’ve got a fair dreuth and water’s no good for a man. My tongues like a Dead Sea scroll and my mouth a salt-pit of Hades. I’m surprised you cannae hear my lungs banging together like dried out bagpipes filled with over-green peas. If I emptied my veins I’m sure all you would see is granules of sand running out. Can you no’ hear my belly rumbling like a tram? If I’d a mouthful of whisky I don’t think I’d be for the sharing. In fact I think the best thing we can do is go back and beg that young fellow, what’s his name, to give us a little credit, or even a glass of beer’. Jake set his feet like a compass back to the way they had come.

‘I’ll come back with you,’ said Rab, ‘because I’m the same as you only worse.’

They staggered valiantly along; Connelly’s green and gold bunting signalling like a etheric lighthouse with two elbows out, until they stood washed up outside. They searched their coat pockets for hidden holes in the lining and trousers pockets and even back pockets, but couldn’t find so much as a match for a cigarette, so that they leaned against each other as people surged in and out in great waves and waited for inspiration to strike, but to their shock and fury heard the last bell tolling a non alcoholic death and the shouts for last orders. It was too much to take. Rab banged through the door and Jake caught it on the swing and banged through it some more. The smoke and the smell of ale filled their lungs like frankincense and myrrh and the cracked voice of chatter and drunken sot song was like the voice of angels.

‘That’s your last orders,’ shouted the voice of doom, more carthorse than man, because of his size. ‘And you two,’ he said, ‘beat it. I thought I told you not to be coming back and annoying the paying customers.’ His arms swept over the heaving multitudes all supping away and throwing back glasses of whisky and beer as if the fire of hell was burning in their throats that nothing but good drink could quench.

That was when they spied George the gypsy still holding court in the corner. They knew he was no stranger to hospitality smiling and handing out drink as if he was Croesus and not just a cook on the merchant ships. The strangest thing was he smelt more of the sea every day he was away from it, as if he’d been dipped in brine, tipped onto the dock pointed towards the nearest pub and set in motion like a clockwork toy. Drowning his body in a bath, or stripping the clothes for washing made little impression on him. Or so he said. He’d wheel it out now and again to remind people he wasn’t for going under with the drink or the sea; he’d merely float to the surface like a stink- witch. The only way of getting rid of the smell was dragging him to some tramp steamer were sea and distance would dilute the marrow of a seafaring man. That story stuck to him like Jack-Tar, for he had a tendency to repeat himself: drunk or sober or sober or drunk.

Rab and Jake edged closer to him, because he was widely popular and there was no way of telling his day of deliverance. There was no scorn in his face. He was at that stages of the day were such emotions had been burnt off by booze and everyone was his friend and seeing them reminded him that they were his best friends-ever-a man could have. They’d have cried themselves, but their eyes were as arid as prayer book left lying in the Gobi. It was a delight to have such a friend as he, that held off putting a drink to his own bearded lips, to hold out a whisky glass of fellowship to his pals. Jake’s hand was a horny- nail away from cementing eternal friendship, when that buzzard breathed Connelly swooped down and placing the glass on a tray, carried it away, bellowing ‘last orders and you two are barred.’

Sometimes Rab wished he’d a googly eye like Jake that looked one way and not the other, while looking perfectly normal. He had necked down the last of a quart of beer that someone had left unattended and hadn’t even given him a drop for his blistered lips. There was a lump in his throat at his brother’s betrayal.

‘Don’t worry,’ said George the Gypsy, seeing Rab’s sore plight, ‘we can nip down to the Hole in the Wall and get a few bottles. I can get you a fair price for that piece of gold from Jan the Jew when we’re there.’

‘Aye,’ said Rab, the leader of the two, out of the side of his mouth, ‘we’ve no’ got it yet, but we’ll get it for you.’

‘Nanny Bludgeon’s no’ daft you know; and worth her weight in gold,’ said Jake, as if he was reading his mind.

‘Whose Nanny Bludgeon?’ asked George the Gypsy.

There was no answer just a shake of their heads and a pull at his arm for him to follow them outside. Warm pub chatter was left manfully behind. The rain came down outside Connelly’s like a butcher’s bucket that reduced them all to dark Gypsy skin, bare bone and the smell of the sea. They clung close to the tenement walls, flitting in and out like shadows. As soon as they’d left the shelter of Dumbarton Road, resentment about whom had the most waterproof clothing brought them together and made a misery of their newfound friendship, so they started bickering as if they’d just been newly married.

‘We should have went up Kelso Street,’ said Rab, ‘it’s quicker.’

‘One of you is trailing their feet,’ countered Jake, ‘and I don’t know which one it is, but when I find out…’

‘What’s the point of saving time if you’re going to waste it arguing,’ said George the Gypsy, still warm inside from the whiskey of life.

‘Shut it ya Tink,’ volleyed Jake, pulling his coat up further around his ears, and looking dog ruff.

Rab didn’t want to get involved because just as blood was thicker than water, whiskey was thicker than blood and only God knew where it would all end and he wasn’t saying much. As the elder brother, however, he thought it best to say something neutral.

‘I’m not going to argue and I’m not going to take sides, but I would say that it’s the Tink that’s dragging his feet and it’s all your fault…’ He pushed the Tinks back so that he stumbled, ‘because you have gone and wasted all your money on the no-users in the…’ he shoved him again, ‘…no-users.’ The last part was separated out in his mind because a Tink, was a Tink was a Tink and there were no high horses in Clydebank, just low stools. That’s what he wanted to say. But it was too late. They were already at No 14 Dalbeattie Street.

It was a natural thing to be Old Nanny Bludgeon to be living in the top tenement in the close, with no other family above, but pigeons and cawing seagulls, that would keep a body awake with their endless mooching and crying about the sea, for that was where the aristocracy of Dalbeattie Street found themselves. She was a floor above the low lying broody clans in the bottom flats, like the Murphy’s, that life could not separate apart, with their smaning and sneering and vulgar ways. All the children looked the same, with their red hair, thin noses and watery blue eyes. Only the mix- matched clothing; the patches on the patches, like those bubbling on an inner tubing, expanding, taking up more of the surface area and passed down from one match head to the smaller red heads helped tell them apart.

‘I’m supposing you’ll have a plan how to get the gold,’ whispered Jake outside Nanny Bludgeon’s door.

The Tink, for that was what Gypsy George was now that they had left the levelling influence of Connellys, stopped dead as an overworked donkey and brayed just as loudly, as likely to wake everyone in the close and give them a bad name:

‘I thought it was just a matter of picking up a daub of gold and taking it to Jan the Jew!’

‘It is. It is.’ crooned Rab, for patting him on the back like an old friend he’d been playing a poor joke on, for The Tink, had moved back up the social scale with his outburst and necessity. ‘We’ll just go in and get it.’ One turn of the handle on the door and they were inside Nanny Bludgeons’ hallway. Rab took his bunnet off, his head downcast and placed it in mourning at his midrift, with two hands crossed over like Jake’s eyes.

‘It’s us Ma,’ he shouted through force of habit to the big room.

Nanny Bludgeon glowed wax framed and bewigged lying in her casket. Gypsy George wasn’t sure what to say. Usually it would be something about the deceased looking peaceful, but Nanny Bludgeon looked like some kind of cruel puppet. His hands were folded and as if in prayer he mumbled ‘I’m very sorry about your cruel loss. When you lose your Ma-your world ends.’

‘That’s no my Ma.’ Rab’s voice could have cut through the glaur on the windows, but was respectful enough because they had visitors and because of the solemnity of the occasion. ‘ That’s Nanny Bludgeon. My Ma ran away with him down the stairs and left us with her. She was fair man mad was my mother. She was always doing things like that. Have you got anything to toast her with?’

‘No,’ groaned Gypsy George, 'I've got to be going,' because there was nothing worse than somebody dying on you to unnecessarily sober you up.

‘We’ll get the gold and come with you,’ said Jake, respectfully making the sign of the cross, before looking into the casket. ‘She was an old woman and she had a good life and will be sorely missed.’ He pulled a pair of pliers out of his pocket and balanced them on Nanny Bludgeon’s forehead like a fringe. ‘You hold her mouth open and I’ll get the gold teeth,’ he said to Rab.

Rab clamped his long fingers on her jaw and pulled her mouth open.

‘You cannae do that!’ cried Gypsy George.

‘You cannae steal from a dead person,’ replied Jake, positioning his feet and wielding the pliers as if he’d been doing that sort of thing all his life.

‘For God sake stop. Stop.’ Gypsy George’s voice halted their progress. ‘Can you not see that that’s not real gold she’s got in her mouth. It’s Fool’s Gold.’

Jake downed tools as fast as a man hearing the factory whistle. ‘I always knew it. That dentist. He’s nothing, but a robbing bastard.’

Rab’s hand’s fell to his side. ‘Nanny Bludgeon deserved better,’ he said, ‘she was always as good as gold to us.’

Gypsy George tiptoed to the front door to leave them to their mourning.

‘Thank you for coming.’ Rab nodded and with a few steps crossed the room and was shaking Gypsy George’s hand; his eyes welling up, as if he was going to start being unmanly.

‘No you’ve done enough,’ said Jake, slapping him on the back. ‘You’re like one of the family now.’

Gypsy George shook each of the brother’s, he never knew he had, hands warmly. ‘I might not of known Nanny Bludgeon, but if there is ever anything I can do.’

Rab had a bit of bother catching Jake’s eye. Even with a lifetime of practice it was never easy. ‘Well, if we could just get a little drink to toast her with. That would be awful civil. I’m sure Ma would appreciate it and I’m sure little Maggie Murphy from down the stairs would nip out and get it for us if you slipped her a few miserable shillings.’