The early-morning streets are dusted with a thin frost that melts underfoot, leaving black smears on the pavement. The re-sidual heat of the city, held in the ground, defies the season.
Watt and Manuel park and get out of the car. They walk round the back, exchanging excited glances. Their eyes are wide, they nod to each other over and over, exaggerating their sexual engagement to the brink of pantomime. Peter Manuel is impotent. He can ejaculate when a woman is frightened enough but he can’t have normal relations. When the police examine his clothes they will find all of his trousers have ejaculatory stains inside. It has been like this since he was in Hollesley Bay Borstal. Brendan Behan was in Hollesley Bay around the same time. He said of it that inmates engaged in sexual practices ‘the lowest ruffian in Ireland could be born, live and die and never even guess at’. Manuel was sent there when he was twelve. William Watt doesn’t like sexy shows or stripping, he wouldn’t go on his own. But they are prisoners of this macho convention and there is no room for either of them to express anything but increasingly intense interest. Still, both quite like the idea of being in a room where their satisfaction is the main focus. They suspect, as do many people, that there is some sexual practice that they don’t yet know about, something new that will pique their interest.
The cellar is round the back, by the bins and behind a high wall. It was once a coal cellar so the stairs down are narrow and plain, sliced out of the yard floor. When a man is standing on the bottom step he looks as if he has sunk into the ground up to his waist.
Manuel and Watt step carefully down into the well. There is hardly enough room for both sets of feet. Watt knocks on the steel door.
The eye slot slides opens and a puffy-eyed man looks at them critically. They try to see past him but his face blocks the view.
‘Wait,’ he says, and shuts it.
They wait, their annoyance tempered by sexual interest.
The slot opens again and the bouncer examines them as if he is looking for something. Watt holds up a five-pound note and smiles pleasantly.
‘We’re no buzzies!’ Manuel says, but the slit scrapes shut.
There is nothing to do but wait.
‘Did you give me a pound?’ asks Manuel, a smirk on his face.
‘You’ve sung that song already, Chief,’ says Watt, but he’s smiling too.
A huge engine rumbles in the street beyond the wall, wheels crunch on the cobbles. The engine cuts. Doors slam. The stairwell is too narrow for them to turn around. They hear feet tramp towards them.
‘Right, boys?’
Twisting awkwardly around they find Scout and Shifty Thomson looking down at them.
Scout has a plaster on the bridge of his burst nose and has changed his jacket. His eyes are purple-puffed. He half smiles. ‘Mon, fellas. Time to go.’
They are trapped. They both know the jig is up.
Shifty and Scout escort them to the car, an Alvis Grey Lady, two-tone, in burgundy and black. The bonnet is longer than the cabin. The wheel hoods are fat and round and the chrome trim perfectly polished.
Watt is too drunk to put his case eloquently but he doesn’t think he should really be here. They want Manuel. They don’t want him. He’s not the problem.
They are put in the back of the car with Scout sitting in the middle.
Before they set off Scout warns them with a grin, ‘Anybody tries anything funny and they’ll be getting their fucking lights put out. Clear?’
Manuel and Watt agree that Scout has made himself clear. Shifty pulls out onto the road and Watt thinks ‘I need a drink’. He doesn’t. He has drunk so much tonight that he is having mini blackouts. He suddenly comes to in odd situations: listening in John’s kitchen, walking down the close, ordering drinks in the Gleniffer, changing up to fifth gear. The one thing he doesn’t need is more drink.
Shifty is driving. The Grey Lady is a thing of beauty. The seats are soft grey leather. The dashboard is a solid slab of high-varnished walnut with a matching steering wheel. Both front seats are pushed back as far as they can go, which is not so much of a problem for Manuel at five foot six, but Watt is concertinaed, his knees against his chin.
Wheels purr against cobbles as Shifty turns down the sweep of Cathedral Street. It is still dark but the workers’ dawn is breaking. Grey civilians walk purposefully, sandwiches and flasks in their hands, faces raw from sleep, making their way to their own small part of the great machine of Empire.
Manuel grabs the back of the front seat, yanking himself forward. This seems to count as ‘anything funny’ and Scout takes hold of Manuel’s middle finger, levering it the way fingers don’t want to go. Manuel raises a pissed-off eyebrow at Scout.
Shifty tells the windscreen, ‘Yees wur telt.’
Watt and Manuel know that they have no defence. They wur telt.
They turn down Buchanan Street. Shifty swings gently around piles of horseshit. There are a lot of pubs down here and brewers still deliver with drays and carts. Halfway down Buchanan Street he takes the turn for Gordon Street and parks right outside number 25.
The door to the Gordon Club has a Georgian formality. It is glossy, black and ten foot tall, set into the building, four steps up from the mucky street. The Gordon Club is on the second floor, above the Girl Guides’ headquarters.
Everyone is wary as they get out of the car. This is not going to be nice.
The Gordon Club is in the middle of everything. At the end of the block Glasgow Herald vans are lined up along the street, waiting to pick up the second edition. Within a half-mile radius of this place are the courts, the Corporation, the Trades Hall and the Merchants’ Guild, three national newspapers and the police headquarters.
Both Watt and Manuel have been to the club before. That’s not surprising. Every man of interest in Glasgow has been in the Gordon Club at one time or another. This is a time of clubs. Men with common interests meet in closed rooms and make deals, lend money, decide outcomes before formal negotiations are even timetabled. Still, though, the Gordon is special. It is a social portal through which the bottom and the top can meet and drink and talk, in the absence of women and church and moralising judgement.
The Gordon Club is a thrumming valve in Glasgow’s mercantile heart. But mostly it isn’t about deals. Mostly it is about bonhomie and men acknowledging their common interests across the chasm of class distinction. But it’s no place for the faint-hearted, it takes audacity to be part of this. It hazards disgrace.
Scout and Shifty flank the two men who wur telt to the door, up the steps to get out of a sudden bluster of sleet. Shifty has a key to the front door and uses it. This is quite impressive. Most people have to ring, wait and give the boy who comes to the door their membership number. Shifty opens the door and waves them up the stairwell.