Our Ladies, page 7
MALE AMERICAN VOICE #1
(Off screen)
Well hi there, we’re real sorry to disturb you ladies but Herb here …
We PAN LEFT, an OLD AMERICAN CAUCASIAN breaks for it, clearly in great DISTRESS and clutching his CROTCH he pushes past the SCHOOLGIRLS and EXITS through the door marked GENTS.
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
Sorry Mister, we were doing a bit extra swotting for our exams in there.
MALE AMERICAN VOICE #2
(Off Camera)
Heh, heh, heh, heh. You ladies from these parts? You’re very fortunate young ladies, living amongst all this splendour.
MALE AMERICAN VOICE #3
Now what kinda tartan is that your kilts are made from?
SMALLER BLONDE THIN SCHOOLGIRL
That’s Protestant tartan.
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
Aye, only Protestants like us can wear it.
MALE AMERICAN VOICE #1
Now you ladies wouldn’t be trying to hoodwink us in any way, would you now?
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
Aye we were.
The other SCHOOLGIRLS turn to stare at her.
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
Exams are really over.
GENERAL HILARITY among the group of girls.
SMALLER BLONDE THIN SCHOOLGIRL
They were great tho I was excused them on health grounds.
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
Mental health grounds!
GENERAL LAUGHTER
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
It was brilliant right, this girl Kay that’s at school with us … what exam was it … ? Geography? SHE turns aside to the others.
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
It wasn’t Geography, time with Kay it was English.
SHORTER BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL WITH THE EYES
The time with the kilt thread, that was English …
SMALLER BLONDE THIN SCHOOLGIRL
Protestant kilt thread …
GENERAL LAUGHTER
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
Look, we’ve got this girl in the class a real … ah don’t know what yous call it in America but she’s a real swot …
AMERICAN VOICE #2
A damned pencil pusher …
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
We were all in early and sat down, the pencil pusher’s outside, swotting out some last poetry rubbish, so’s she (POINTS to TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL) … tugs this thread out her own kilt seam and manages to tie Kay’s seat to her desk … when she comes in the exam hall Kay was clattering and banging to get the chair away …
SMALLER BLONDE THIN SCHOOLGIRL
Aye … all the teachers were shushing her …
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
Yon was a disgrace, and the Geography, eh? Ah mean yon actual questions!
FOCUS PULLS OUT, PAN LEFT AND CLOSE UP ON
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
Aye. This satellite photo of some town: like a satellite from up in outer space and this town was meant to be in Scotland and we should know it, right!? Well all you could make out is the coastline and that was the question: ‘What can you tell us about this settlement?’ Eh, I mean what’s that all about?
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
So that’s all what we wrote down … ‘It’s on the Coast.’
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
‘… It’s in Scotland …’
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
Ah guess we weren’t paying much attention up the back, but a satellite photo … ah mean to say!
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
What was the other exam cracker?
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
We all left the exam hall after the forty minute minimum was up. There’s only so many ways to say, ‘It’s on the Scottish coast.’
BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL WITH RESERVED SIGN
What was yon Geography question, the other one?
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
Seagulls.
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL
Aye. ‘Nineteen-whatever was a record year for seagull hatchings on the west coast, how many seagull eggs were laid?’ Ah mean what’s that all about?
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
Y’know. Impossible!?
SHORTER BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL WITH THE EYES
That was judged such an impossible exam, automatic-like, they started everyone off at D.
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
We all got Ds.
SMALLER BLONDE THIN SCHOOLGIRL What about you when you did Maths!
TALL BLONDE SCHOOLGIRL
Aye, Fionnula, tell him …
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL (FIONNULA)
Aye … right. (COUGHS AND FACES CAMERA) Ah had the maths formulas wrote inside the sanny bin in the girls toilets, so’s a bit into the exam I asked to go to the toilet but ma piece of formulas paper was all soaked in blood cause someone had used the dispenser. Dirty Hoor.
SHORTER BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL WITH THE EYES
Ah, dinna scum us out!
AMERICAN VOICE #1
(Off Camera)
Hell, I can’t play this kinda stuff to my nieces.
AMERICAN VOICE #2
Heh, heh, heh, heh.
HERB, smiling now, comes out of door marked GENTS.
TALLEST BRUNETTE SCHOOLGIRL (FIONNULA)
Hoi, aye, since we’ve helped you out with your holiday video how’s bout yous doing us a wee favour?
Where have you been, Sister Condron grit her teeth.
These Yank tourists got Coca-Cola for us, Sister, obviously we didn’t want to go into a public bar ourselves, Fionnula held up the two 1.5 litre bottles, filled too near the top for perfect realism.
Don’t say ‘Yank’ Fionnula, they’re American.
New Orleans in fact, The Pagan nodded seriously.
The Sopranos shrugged. We know, Manda says.
Jerry nodded his clean-shaven chin once and closed the door behind them.
Post-Seventh-Hooch-Syndrome
Up back everything was moving into post-seventh-Hooch-syndrome. The two bottles, that were really a half bottle Southern Comfort lightly diluted with the Coke that hadn’t gone down the toilet, were passed back and forth in an alliance of giggles and silence.
The bus was slithering and swaying into the Low Lands – instead of the impossible places, the ground now became creamy pastures; high walls, the mosses killed by city-nearness, came up close to the window – beyond the racing top-bricks, the rhododendron estates of great, mysterious wealth.
Chell McDougall was whisked onwards, manoeuvring the heavy Coke bottle of liquid to her mouth, feeling the alcohol swing inside the tank of plastic between her two palms.
Chell’s auntie is also her sister!
Chell’s Daddy Patrick is gone, gone and drowned: his never-found bones all broke apart on scattered places, down in Davy Jones’s locker, nestled cross the rust-coloured rocks, jammed in among the slimy, thick-waving strips of weed.
Lost, lost offof the Eilean Shona. No funeral ever or nothing. Just gone; his shaving things still above the sink for in hopes he’d swum ashore … His shaving things in the cabinet … Say he was stranded on an islet or that? Then just nothing. Daddy Patrick isn’t Chell’s actual Daddy tho.
Chell and her big sister/aunt’s Actual Daddy isn’t round anymore. Actual Daddy was another sailor, and he was over that horizon where all the old moons and suns are cluttered up, like Buzz’s scrapyard, before you could say Jack Robinson. Chell’s Mum married Daddy Patrick McDougall soon after, First Mate on the Eilean Shona who became just bones at sea.
Chell’s big sister Shirley got pregnant last summer. Guess who she got pregnant off? The youngest of dead Daddy Patrick’s brothers, crazy Buzz McDougall the bee keeper, Chell’s Uncle Buzz. So Chell’s sister is also her auntie.
Not that Buzz is any spring chicken. Time was when both little sisters would spend a lot time out at Buzz’s place near Tulloch Ferry, with his honey jars and parked old lorries and the Zebra pick-up.
Time too the sisters got took in the Zebra pick-up to get full hives off of old Cloon up near the Fort. Buzz drinking in pubs all the way up, bringing out lemonades with real lemon slices to the carparks. Driving in tears, ‘Poor wee Fatherless lassies,’ going on a roundabout the wrong way then mounting a grass one straight over the middle and the hives wrapped in wire driving home but Buzz still stopping at so many pubs it got night and cold in the Zebra pick-up (salvaged from the Bear Park) and as it was freezing and freezinger, the bees in the back got all silent out there in that cold, rushing night air.
They get to Buzz’s place, lorries everywhere (so’s when he wants one at the back out, he has to park them all the way down the single track road and tourists have been queued up for an hour). There’s a telly in the garden and Buzz’s old pal Snorkel is sat, watching Panorama with a big coat on.
The bees are silent. Buzz don’t seem worried tho’. They all just gone dozy with the cold, says Buzz to Snorkel and the wee girls.
Buzz carries the full hives into his front room and sucks all the bumble bees out with the vacuum cleaner, filling all those vacuum cleaner bags, even emptying the full one of its ousels out the back door so’s some dust motes adhere to the telly screen in the garden.
Buzz sellotapes shut the rubbery openings and puts the vacuum bags full of bees by the white meter storage heaters.
In the morning when Shirley and Chell go through to watch cartoons in the gardens, the vacuum cleaner bags are buzzing angrily.
Chell takes an interest in bees there on; soon all animals. She spends all her time at Buzz’s, finding the wet clay muck that glistens with fool’s gold, searching out abandoned hedgehog nests filled with blind baby rats; brushing the hedgehog fleas away from their still-closed eyes; buzzards launching off telegraph pole tops and the pony trekking was at Tulloch-Ferry. Once, Shimmy the chestnut mare bucked her so high, Chell saw the unseeable-next-village for the first time. But she doesn’t like spiders and only this morning, taking her shower before going down to Our Lady’s, she put all the plugs in the sink and bath before stripping off her pyjamas.
One summer there were three puppies born to the bitch who died up on the farm. Chell took them, their wee eyes hardly open, kept them in one of Buzz’s sheds, secret, among all the jars and the old hives, brook bodies, crown boards, smokers, hats and veils.
Chell would squeeze the wee gold tit to feed the puppies lukewarm milk from an eyedropper. She kept the puppies in a big cardboard box, lined with newspapers and an old orange jersey she’d found.
Before Buzz came up from the bees by the burn, she’d have heated a big stone from the loch, in the oven alongside the pizzas. Chell’d carry the big hot stone with the anthracite shovel, using two hands, to the shed and tie the stone up in ripped old sheets. In the morning the wee doggies would be all curled round the gone-coldness of the stone.
Chell read in one of her animal books that puppies are comforted by ticking sound: they feel its their mother’s heart beating.
Chell got the alarm clock from the spare room, made double, double sure the alarm was switched off and just in case, set the alarm hands round to quarter past fiveish, just before the time it was then. Chell wrapped that clock in rag and put it in the box with the warm stone, lifted the little peeping puppies in on top.
In the morning all the puppies were dead in a mire of blood and shite. The red hotness of the stone had shattered the glass face of the clock into shards that had sliced through and cut the puppies as they fought to try and get out, shock and bleeding did the rest.
Chell cried for just that morning, buried the cut, plump bodies thegether down by the loch, wrapped in the bloody jersey.
She’d more or less forgotten about them by tea-time that night till she stepped into the kitchen in bare feet and heard the alarm clanging, way out across the yard in that shed.
Chell got less keen on animals for a while. Barbies took over for a spell with Loretta from 12 and with English Katie, all together they had six Barbies and one Ken.
They used to pierce their Barbies’ ears and use common pins, the little flat tips on Barbies’ lobes were earrings – the depth of the pins just fitted perfectly inside the Barbies’ heads. They would play Bungee Jump Barbie with tied-together elastic bands. Sometimes it would snap from up in Loretta’s top flat, especially with Ken.
When one Chell’s Barbies got pregnant from English Katie’s Ken, she would shove the yellow capsule from a Kinder egg up the blouse or dress. Chell’d put a wee plastic baby that you got out the Lucky bags, inside the capsule. It gave them a good fat tummy.
Primary was terrible at the end of summer holidays every year. Pick and Flick couldn’t walk and she was just frightening.
Once Chell was whispering and Pick and Flick bawled out and made her go to the front. Chell stood there and Pick and Flick sat, almost face to face just shouting at her though it was only half a year since her Daddy Patrick was lost at sea.
Pick and Flick wheeled over and did that violent spin thing, both her freckly hands flat on the tyres. Here! Pick and Flick bawled.
Chell was given usual punishment. Kneeling. Kneeling facing the wall, staring right at its boredom. It was usual. Pick and Flick loved to get them kneeling out there, sometimes up to five of them, so’s it was like they had no legs either.
That time, Chell let her head drop forward a little, forehead on the cold wall. It was a yellowy, greeny wall and it had this glaze on it, like when Chell’s Mum would brush an oven minced pie with egg white: that kind of glaze. There were minute little bubbles, tiny craters you could see in the glaze.
RA-Chell!
Chell snapped her head up straight.
But you soon got bored. Chell found she could keep her head straight but stick out her tongue and lick the wall, touch its coldness.
It didn’t really have a taste as she lick-licked, it seemed to cool her down, like it does doggies with their tongues hanging out.
Kay Clarke, with her hair the way it was in primary, jammed her arm up.
Miss, Cameron, Miss Cameron, Miss, Rachel McDougall is licking the wall!
Day the school kitchens caught fire the white smoke casually rolled up the corridors past the classroom doors. Chell and the class could duck out the windows onto the hopscotch squares of the playground but Pick and Flick was sprawled in her wheelchair, whizzing round rosary beads, you could see her near greeting in the fire bells and no child wanted to help the wicked old besom escape flames but it was Chell didn’t dunk out the window but horsed it back and kicked off the brake, heave-ho’d, getting lighter as yous got faster up the corridor – through the smoke that was really more like steam – Chell’s spindly legs hit-hitting the seat back making her go OOF, OOF and the slap of the little girl’s feet on the polished floor not stopping till the janitors caught the chair at the door to the Big End and Chell leaned, on her knees then just for a jiffy, straightening, to cross herself cause of the knowing that she’d done a holy thing by the saving of a bad person who should be all burned up in flame cause of her badnesses to childs.
Cause she was LITTLE RACHEL PUSHES WHEELCHAIR TEACHER FROM BURNING SCHOOL front pages in The Port Star she got Selwyn, the gay red setter puppy from Mum. Old Selwyn now, who, Saturday nights in the dark, she takes walkies up Battleship Hill slopes above the Complex, where the wood smoke from the chimney pots moves spooky through the trees. As Selwyn scrunches and snuffles round the brush, getting autumn-crisp bramble sections tangled in his long hairs, Chell hides or retrieves the tiny flags of mini-skirts, the flaps of fabric that are mid-rift-revealing tops concealed within a selection of plastic bags she has in the bushes, uphill of the boys’ swing and the skitey smear of heel-scuff earth under the rope end.
Around twenty minutes later, Selwyn in his kennel down in the back green, Chell’ll climb back up the slopes wearing the longer skirts and tops permitted by her mum; goosebumped in the darkness she strips and changes into skirts that would never get her front of the window, never mind out. Sometimes when it’s just too icicles or she thinks there’s boys up the swing, Chell’ll compromise on a long top and long skirt, she’ll walk down the bus stop where Manda and Fionnula’ll be waiting; Chell’ll whip off the skirt and she’ll be wearing a tiny skirt underneath the long one.
When Chell gets home, pissed mortal, two or three in the mornings, Mum’s always in bed so she sneaks in, wearing the forbade clothes, gets down to underwear in the hall, case of a Mum-prowl, she can pretend, that she was just on the way to the toilet (where she checks for hickies).
Mum leaves the back door key under the flower pots on their steep stairs up to the side door. Thing is, there are seventeen steps and sixteen flowerpots and it’s pitch black there. Chell ‘shites’ and ‘fucks’ between her teeth, Swear Mum left the key under a different pot last week to spite late late nights and ma long-lies; so Chell’s head’s spinning, bent right over on the steps, scraping her varnished nails under the tipped pots, where slaters and spiders might touch her fingertips and old Selwyn the dog is out his kennel, tail slashing, paws halfway up the stair behind her, the dog’s cold wet nose, sliding up Chell’s thigh, sniffing her arse under the miniskirt, right up.
‘Leave the Capitol Exit this Roman Shell.’
THE FALL
At dawn, Tuesdays and Thursdays the seagulls fly uptown into the capital from the docks, cruise along the canyons and gulleys of grey air between the tenements: homes so close together, on the hour, through open windows, varieties of clocks can be heard chime the length of a street; the bleep of the electronic till in a cornershop can be heard up in top flats; the birds settle and gnash into the binliners, caw-cawing in the quiet air before the arrival of the ashbucket men.
