Steelie 6

He leaned forward, the ink from the Racing news and rough wood of the table digging into his forearms. A nimbus of light seemed to drift and spread. Floaters.

His face was pale in the dim light. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his gaze darting around the pub. He smelled faintly of damp earth in the lair of a newly opened grave and something acrid and metallic.

The hairs on the back of gang’s neck stood and stomachs lurched. Their eyes darted behind them to find flesh melted away and nothing but a sense of rising panic and a sense of claustrophobia.  

Agnes, the old landlady, who smelled of lavender and decades of fags and pub lock-ins, stepped behind the bar with Sharon.

‘Not in my fucking pub,’ she crowed. The smell of fried food from the back kitchen where she pushed Sharon into suddenly seemed overwhelming ‘And o’er my deid body.’

‘That can be arranged,’ cried the guy with the ponytail, before his teeth were rearranged by Connor smashing the pool ball into his face.

The jukebox kicked in with a whirling ‘Step Me Gaily,’ Highland dance number, played at the wrong speed.

DJ danced on tiptoe towards and swung the butt end of the cue and smashed Spider on the nape of his neck. He buckled and dropped his blade but didn’t go down. Cockeyed Bill snatched it up and swinging it cleared a path between pool table and bar. He stood at the hatch, the blade in his calloused hand and cockeyes aglow.

Agnes pushed into his back. ‘I’m no scared of them,’ she muttered, trying to get past him and scowling with a wooden club in her hand. ‘They’re nothing.’

Brodie was used to the ugly snarl of life. He came out of the toilet ready to straighten things his way with hands and feet. He’d hidden the gun, in the tank of the cistern, which was unoriginal and unprofessional. His boss would be pissed. But needs must. He could feel his anger simmering. A hot, prickly feeling that threatened to boil over. It was him the gang had come for, but something felt wrong.

A skinny kid with a shaved head was taking a kicking from an old guy with a paunch and bald head. He noticed a glint of metal flash near the flickering lights of the pool table. Fists meeting flesh echoed through the room. Grunts of men used to manual labour and the sharp crash of overturned chairs used as makeshift weapons of necessity and make-do.  The smell of sweat mingled with the bitter tang of spilt beer. A chaotic symphony.

His perceptions dimmed and shifted. He glimpsed the world through a dark tunnel made of calico. It revealed a cold, dark room in a snow-muffled world. Jews were prescribed from lighting a fire. An everyday problem had been solved by the Fuherer because we had no kindling or coal, he thought. Mole mourned most not being able to enter and play in public parks, which was simply verboten. He clamped his fingers over his mouth. His throat was on fire and he no longer felt the cold creeping up his legs and settling over his body. But his constant coughing angered the Block commander and their neighbours. They did not want to bring Brownshirts to their door and be taken to the work camps from which no one came back.   

 The warmest glow in their room came from the dulled and chaffed roses on wallpaper near the door. Yellow neatly stars sewn into their overcoats they wore inside the Mietskasernen rental barracks. Outside offered too few respites from the cold. It was his job to empty the stinking and overflowing piss pots near their dank straw beds into the communal toilets in the downstairs landing. But he had to wait until he could no longer hear on the stairs or landing other tenants leaving for work. He rubbed at his tired eyes.

In an oval mirror, one of the remaining possessions that could not be traded or burnt, his mother moved. Her abundant dark hair brushed up high and pinned. The wrinkles tattooed onto her high overly pale forehead. She had much to be worried about. Nothing to eat but the odd potato. Shared between five. Her steely eyes and blotched complexion mirror her anger. She developed the spider of a flush in the region of her wobbling chin, tucked in beside her well-covered breasts. She cooed and sang a familiar refrain in Yiddish to the baby, my little brother that would die, anyway.

Three buttons on her dark dress snapped to attention as she warily lowered herself onto a three-legged stool to nurse him. Not knowing his fate, my brother squirmed and squealed like a little bird with its raucous cry for his mother’s milk. To him she always smelt the same. Tasted the same. She was life.

She needed to expose her shame and the towering slabs of her white breasts, when she uncovered his raven haired and mewing head.

‘Look away,’ she warned us. ‘Look away.’

Daddy, a quiet bearded man with a stoop was an unemployed master tailor. Since the new regulations, he was stuck in a limitless gloom. With a shake of his head and the point of his chin, he indicated where we should look. Towards the long window.

The curtains mum had made guarding the light. Snow falling burying and remaking the world in a living, moving geometry of crystallised white and the glare, lighting a candle in our room.

Every now and then mum glanced to check we were not looking. Not even cat-like, from the corner of our eyes. But in that cold-spun place, spellbound, it was impossible for us children not to defy her, not to answer her sighs, with swivelled heads and matching dark glancing eyes.

My brother that died yet cried, in squalling fits, with little fists raised. She turned her back to us. The stool cried out as she covered herself and raised herself like an ocean liner that had broken the chains. She converged on us.  

The trick wasn’t to expect cossetting or to avoid the danger. Sometimes she took a long breath. The hand raised to strike turned featherlike and her fingers stroked our warm cheeks. And we nuzzled into her side and her warmth.

‘Little Mole,’ she whispered, stroking my head. Stroking my heart. ‘My darlling, Little Mole.’

The pub doors creaked and banged. Swung open and then shut. Open and shut. Letting in the cold Clydeside air and in the scent of expensive cologne out. Gang members tore into each other, their initial purpose forgotten in the confusion and haze of fear of something clinging to them. Brodie tasted the raw, animal scent of aggression, the pinprick tang of adrenaline. It was a mess, a stupid, senseless mess. And as the first sirens wailed in the distance, he was getting out of there too before men in uniforms arrived.