Jim Colquhoun, THE GOREY-BELLS

THE GOREY-BELLS

or

“How Childe Roland (…) came to the Dark Tower.”
Huntingtower. John Buchan

“19th February 1994: Suns out. Blue sky grades down to mucky smog. The Kingston Bridge collapses silently into The Clyde. A flight of pigeons rises up.”

Some days I would leave my flat in the Gorbals and it was as if the freaks had decided take some air all at the same time, bashed in faces, wasted flesh, toothless gums. The alkies were early risers, up and out around eight to catch the offy, licking their lips in anticipation of that first can of special. The junkies appear around ten, either strung out or gabbling before the nod. Sometimes it seemed like the fabled Gorbals leper colony (situated on what is now Hospital Street) had never gone away, still on their way to ring the ‘gorey-bells’ for their supper, still causing a shiver of horror as they pass you in the street more dead than alive. The junkies and alkies were a constant. You couldn’t escape the punishment of their faces. These were the pitiable emblems of our crass materialist culture, their metronomic lifestyles a febrile negative to the work, eat, sleep, consume treadmill. One evening around 9.30 my doorbell rang, immediately I was on guard as this had happened before–some alky looking to have a party with the former tenant. I crept to the top of the stairs to see three long pale fingers slipping through the letterbox. It was a moment of almost comical horror. I shouted (squeaked) ‘who is it’ and heard in reply the unmistakable tones of the junky, a kind of nasal whine. It was my neighbour from up the corridor, she claimed to be looking for cigarette papers, but I suspect hers was a mission to check my status – was I a fellow traveller? Could I be used in some way? Occasionally I would meet her and her daughter at the lift, the small girl squirming with embarrassment as her mum attempted a ‘normal’ conversation. Later that week I stopped some kids throwing stones at a nesting swan, they came back soon after and finished the job, smashing all of the eggs except one. After a few days the mother reluctantly abandoned the nest, leaving the one intact egg, which I retrieved and kept on my balcony for years until it began oozing slime and had to be thrown away.
It’s really not all that bad in the Gorbals, there were only a couple of instances of threatening behaviour and people were cautiously friendly, my main problem was the daily dose of poverty-stricken, low-expectation culture. You can smell it–its unwashed clothes and cheap fags, the morning vodka breath (Haddow’s own brand), the pound shop mentality.
I’d ended up in the Gorbals and got stuck. For eight years. Back to what I’d come from, a solidly working-class area and a multi-story building, but it was very close to town and therefore easy to escape. I spent hours, day in year out, sitting at my desk pushed up against the big picture window in my living room, watching the birds, the cloud formations and the banks of rain rushing in constantly from the west. Often I was stoned, dreaming, writing reams of shite in my notebooks and keeping a regular diary for the one and only time in my life, pining for girls I wanted, brooding neurotically about my lack of ambition.
Whether it was warm or not I’d often stand on one or other of my balconies and watch the comings and goings of Gorbals folk. They had their rituals too. Plenty of people were on the sick or unemployed, like me they had turned their faces away from the world of work, to inhabit a free-floating timeless zone bounded by the TV schedules and the fortnightly trauma of signing on. It was a frugal and exacting existence, zen-lite. I lived on rice, lentils and vegetables, coffee and bread and as much red wine as I could afford.

“18th October 1994: It’s blowing up a storm out there in Gorbals land. This building has a bit of a dubious shake about it. Too many things move and squeak when the wind hits. Still, the seagulls seem to get some enjoyment. Or maybe it’s safer way up there? Sometimes the window goes concave. One morning we will wake up to an endless grey lake, scummy, shitty and full of corpses, with a bit of luck the Christians will have been raptured out of the picture. Vicious wind, shredded concrete. The man in the newsagents resembles some strange species of fish, naked and flapping on the quayside, out of its natural element. Dying. 4.29: The sky is an incredible shade of nicotine yellow, almost biblical. Finely-etched cloud mass.”

My flat was high on the top corner, with two large balconies, one at the front and one at the back. It was beautiful, a dream of functional, contained, modernist living. The front door opened onto stairs that went up to a relatively vast hallway. There was something ridiculously optimistic about that hallway. It took up practically the whole flat, essentially functionless, apart from (critically) adding a sense of spaciousness. Another set of stairs took you up to the bedroom and the bathroom, there seemed to be no practical way to reach the light fitting on that far away ceiling, nowhere to prop a ladder. The bathroom was large and the bedroom adequate, with plenty of cupboard space. My living room was separated from the tiny kitchen by a sliding wooden door, which I thought neat. Stuck to the wall was a four bar electric fire that was totally inadequate for the job of heating a very draughty space, there was no other heating. On one wall I could just make out the palimpsest of a sprayed gang name–Cumbie.
Everyone in working class areas have power cards now, they are foisted on to those who cannot pay their bills. These have what’s called the ‘emergency’ function, allowing an extra £15 of heat and light before shutting down altogether. This is charged at a higher rate and after it runs out, a full £20 has to be found to start the process all over again. That can be a lot of money out of a giro. So, perforce, people cut themselves off, letting the power companies off the moral hook. Everyone lives on emergency now and thinks nothing of it, but it ends up being a default tax on poor people, same as the lottery. I exercised my right to have the device removed as soon as possible.
The views and the river save the Gorbals from being just another blighted inner city shithole. Nature is right at hand and amongst the despondent-looking trees and bushes lining the riverbank a pair of Mute swans attempted to nest every year. The huge nest was constructed from a bathetic stew of reeds and rubbish. The locals fed the birds their leftover pan loaves then chucked the plastic bags, which the swan would diligently add to the nest. Once I watched a white Cockatoo fleeing between my building and another, hotly pursued by two Lesser Black-backed gulls. It was doomed and by its terrified screams I think it knew it. The local Crow family spent hours performing aerobatic display’s for each other, only stopping to harass a passing Heron. Early one morning, coming home from town I surprised an otter strolling along the river walkway, it spotted me and leapt through the fence. I heard it crash into the bushes six feet below, obviously a stranger to the neighbourhood. Another time, again in the early morning, I drunkenly watched a man standing on the very edge of the tidal weir, looking intently at something at his feet. He ignored my worried questions, just stared. I thought he was a suicide, but found out later he was counting elvers as they crawled painfully up the weir.

“9th January 1995: With concentration camps/hospitals all over the civilised world filling up with the victims of Spongiform Encephalitis or Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease it seemed inevitable that a ‘soft-brain’ cult would raise it’s ugly, malformed and drooling head. House parties and raves are filled with young people doing ‘The Stagger’, this being a stylised version of the symptoms of this horrifying disease. Dying animals are often introduced onto the dance floor, with the result that getting crushed by a ‘mad cow’ is now a commonplace weekend injury.”

I thought, when I first went to live in the Gorbals that I would play a full role in the local community. This was my chance to engage in some kind of meaningful way with my neighbours, my locale. What an arsehole. What did I know? I didn’t have the stomach or the inclination for local politics. So I became what I should have known I would–a permanent tourist, a dilettante prole. None of my neighbours could make me out. I wasn’t a junky or an alky. I spoke different. I was friendly but standoffish at the same time. I suppose I was lucky I didn’t get my head kicked in, but living in high rises is curiously impersonal, especially if you are unemployed as I and many of my neighbours were. Most people spend the day indoors watching TV. There is nothing else to do. After a year of this lifestyle (I was actually starting to admire Judy Finnegan, mainly for putting up with Richard.) I placed my television in the hall by the lift. It was gone within twenty minutes. I felt heroic and nervous. What the fuck was I going to do now?
The days and weeks and months were spent with friends experiencing a similar stasis or fencing with the D.S.S. as they tried to send me on yet another useless ‘Restart’ course, or wandering the city in search of fuck knows what. I’d stripped the embossed white wallpaper from my walls to find a kind of shabby chic, putrid yellowness. It was ugly, yet appropriate, complementing my state of ongoing psychic distress.

“5th April 1995: Greasy Glaswegian weather sits on the city like failed cloud, the monkey on the back of the Scottish psyche. (Or is that our pathetic whining nationalism?)

The view does something to your head. The River. The Green. From my east-facing balcony I could see all the way to Tinto Hill and north to the Campsie and Kilsyth Hills. Closer in I had a panorama of the scrofulous east end. From here I’d watched the men from the Orange Lodges battering each other for want of anyone else to hit (nobody was stupid enough to venture onto Glasgow Green on that day), it was working-class culture devouring itself. There always seemed to be a column of thick black smoke churning up from somewhere, a pyre of burning tyres or another chip pan fire (an east end speciality). From here I watched what I thought was the head of a drowning man dip below the surface of the river. After calling the police and watching a helicopter and George Parsonage from the Humane Society search and find nothing, I realised it was probably a seal mooching around for fish, they would come up with the tide looking like swimming dogs.
My other balcony looked to the west, the city centre and the south side. If not for the Queen Elizabeth flats the view would have been marvellous. But they sat there like some vast malevolent temple dedicated to a particularly loathsome deity. It was hard to imagine anyone living there, even harder to know where the inhabitants disappeared to once the flats were gone? Perhaps they had decided to retreat underground like the Morlocks in Well’s The Time Machine?
I had a party on the day in 1993 when the flats were summarily wiped from the skyline. As it went down it became obvious the spectators had been allowed to venture too close. People began to run from the rapidly approaching dust storm and Mrs Helen Tinney took a mortal blow from a piece of the building, leading to a fatal heart attack. As a result the authorities never publicise the latest erasure of yet another embarrassing bit of modernist junk, the spectacle having been deemed no longer appropriate, Helen Tinney’s unlooked for epitaph.
But Basil Spence’s giant folly was not always so reviled, people embraced the notion of concrete decking and sci-fi perspectives as all part of the dream of progress, a dream almost instantly compromised but seductive and powerful all the same. Soon electricity would be cheap or free and vast space colonies would ring the earth. Even the working classes would get a taste, no hint yet of an underclass (those Morlocks again), or the triple whammy of mass unemployment, heroin and daytime TV. We were silkily informed that leisure time would expand exponentially due to the automation of manufacturing processes. A life as contented hobbyists beckoned, everyone working their allotments and becoming part-time astronomers or pigeon-fanciers or whatever. Meanwhile those casting a weather eye around them began to notice little things like military-industrial complexes and mutually-assured destruction.

“16th February 1996: A roosting pigeon watches me warily. Dishes rattle next door. The kid cries every ten minutes. Warm jet stream skies. Dreamt about nose hairs? Syringes? My junkie neighbour seems to have been spewed back into society again. Wasted grey flesh, they exude shiftyness, junk miasma. It’s only a matter of time before a corpse is carried out. Poisoned blue bodies, twisted limbs amongst greasy blood n’ sperm sheets. (That’s enough of the Bill Burroughs parody thank you very much.)”

A pattern quickly formed: I’d get up and go on a usually futile hunt for The Guardian. Drink my coffee, have my toast and head into town. Or South-side. Or anywhere but where I was. Did I mention that the flat quickly became oppressive, especially the constant ‘friendly’ surveillance by the concierge service, who’s presence (through no fault of their own) more and more resembled that of jailers. I spent many long days exploring the badlands to the east. The dereliction left by dead heavy industry sometimes seemed to spread as far as the eye could see. Somehow the east end had become terra incognita, to be walked and mapped. Discovered. Vast disused railway yards swarmed with Buddleia, Himalayan Balsam and other horticultural escapees. There were huge metal sheds, like the remnants of some aborted Scottish space programme. Not even kids seemed to come to these rotting places anymore, except that the traces of people were everywhere. Old fires, makeshift shelters and camps, abandoned clothing, the remnants of the sort of desperate parties that always ended in wild kicks and punches. Once I watched a man struggling to remove his trousers while all the time baying like a wolf (oddly I’d watched identical behaviour years earlier on the south side). He was doing ‘the evostick shuffle’. Another time I came across a deep stone well filled with dead fox cubs and fat toads. Then there was my Herring Gull. For years it came every day to be fed, long after I’d stopped giving it food (because of the awful mess). It had a screeching, piratical, but somehow engaging personality. For hours it simply sat and stared with one mad eye and then the other. A similar thing was happening on my side of the glass I suppose.

“September 12th 1996: Nice day. Null creativity. Everything is horribly familiar. At the entrance to G’s building a girl was shouting rape. ‘You fuckin’ beast’, she kept screaming. Not pleasant. Horrible thought – they probably made up, or at least I watched them arguing earnestly by the riverbank. I imagine fearful scenes in some teenager’s room. Jellies passed around. Boys smirking as she slumps. Out of it. They fuck her quiescent body. Laughing amongst themselves, pretending to feel good about it. Then she comes to, her clothing disarranged, the pain. Slow realisation. Dawning horror.
Neighbours are squalling again. Dishing out the verbal beatings. Drink-fuelled.”

I’d spent my childhood and teenage years climbing around in multi-story buildings. Hiding in the stairwells and concrete drying greens, jamming the lifts between floors to smoke joints or have sex, or just sit. But I can remember as a kid the feeling of new horizons opening up, that brief honeymoon period before everybody realised the promises of modernity were essentially empty, the dream faltering and stuttering on a raft of bad planning, shady deals and naked profiteering. But more than that, the buildings just did not work as communities. These were the seedbeds of anomie and spiritual dislocation. They worked as long as they did because the communities inhabiting them were relatively strong and cohesive, the Thatcher years put paid to all of that. It always struck me as odd how smack made an appearance (in quantity) around about this time? I think my friends and I escaped that fate by the skin of our teeth. I can remember arranging with the local dealer to buy some and watching with a friend from my bedroom window on the twelfth floor as they cruised around in their car waiting for us. We had chickened out at the last second, a defining moment for us.
Yet for all the low-level dread, there is something wonderful about being able to see the world roll out before you every morning. From my balcony I would plot my routes into the east. I found a lost loop of land cut off by industrial units, dirt embankments and a traveller’s encampment. A wilderness of spoil heaps, pits and Giant Hogweed infestation. On my first visit I noticed that someone had been hacking a path through the Hogweed, a dangerous pastime as the ‘juice’ from this particular interloper is extremely toxic, allegedly causing ‘nerve damage’. Then I came across a sunken bath filled with tadpoles and newts, then bird feeders, finally after a chance stumble through a bramble bush, I found a beautifully constructed shed, carefully hidden, its roof camouflaged by vegetation, someone did not want to be found. I left a note for these latter day levellers and months later received a mysterious phone call describing a secretive alliance, which had laid claim to the loop without bothering to inform the relevant authorities. A kind of quasi-utopian community was flourishing under my nose, careful to disguise itself from the encroaching hordes of suits and vandals. Now it’s a mooted site for a new Glasgow zoo, having only just escaped becoming a section of the new M74 extension.

“ April 17th 1997: The Voodoo Enigma of the Filthy Rich and the Dirt Poor. Sun, cloud’s, pigeons fucking brazenly on my balcony. Springtime. Green shoots. Staring at the wall, waiting to win the lottery, junk food apocalypse. Turin shroud torched. White-bread complexions. Radio 4’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ arts programme whitter’s on in its well-bred fashion. In a couple of weeks there will be a general election.

The biggest cemetery in the Gorbals is the Southern Necropolis. A vast bone- yard and al fresco drinking and drugging den. I ventured in there one day in search of some dead Colquhoun’s and on a whim decided to follow a Chaffinch that seemed to be flying purposefully from tombstone to tombstone, naturally it led me directly to a headstone dedicated to some obscure branch of my family. It was here in September of 1954 that the ‘Gorbals Vampire’ made its fleeting appearance, gnashing its scary metal teeth. As a boy I can remember leading a large group of kids into Pollok Park on the south side, to track down ‘the murderer’, a mythic figure conjured by lurid media reportage and wishful thinking. (I got myself belted by the headmistress for that one.) A similar thing happened in the Gorbals I imagine, with a huge gang forming to seek and destroy ‘the vampire’ who apparently resided within the graveyard. Nothing came of it of course, but the moral guardians of the day blamed the influence of ‘horror comics’ (the classic EC series of that era). Most likely it was a combination of youthful imagination, mischief making and boredom. I like to think that there is a bit more to it than that though. In the absence of any meaningful celebrations in our lives the urge to get together and do something (anything) will tend to take strange and unlikely forms–like the aforementioned vampire stake-out, or when local girl gang the ‘She Cumbie’ allegedly head out glammed-up and team-handed looking to contest the virginal status of the youngest members of the group.
The Gorbals Diehards were the creation of writer John Buchan. In his book Huntingtower they embodied a vision of the working classes as honest toilers with a bit of spunk who nevertheless knew their place, always kowtowing to the officer classes and ever ready and willing to go over the top if called upon. I suspect the original inhabitants of what is now the ‘New Gorbals’ are expected to ‘just get on with it’ in similar fashion, as their community is yet again the proving ground for an experiment in social engineering. As the two camps, one seemingly prosperous, the other still reeling from generations of economic realpolitik rub up against each other it’s not really surprising that there may be friction. When I was there, just as the initial stages of the redevelopment were taking place, there was an outcry from the new residents about the attendance of the local heroin addicts at ‘their’ chemist. Somehow these very visible signifiers of urban decay and squalor were just supposed to melt away. Perhaps the ‘Old Gorbals’ would shake off its blanket despair and taking its cue from its new (labour) neighbours, pull itself up by its bootstraps, get a job and stop being so bloody embarrassing? If they would just be helped–maybe by turning up at their (privatised) Working Links interviews with a smile on their faces for once? Surely this was not too much to ask? The obvious solutions to the problem never seem to be on the table i.e. a minimum wage that isn’t a slap in the face, decent benefits for those that don’t work and the (re)introduction of ritual slayings and maypole dancing. Give people a real chance to lift themselves out of the shit and they will grab it with both hands, but this doesn’t just mean the opportunity to work and earn a living wage. If the inhabitants of the Gorbals, old and new, are to get any real benefit from all that art littered about the place then they will have to be able to see beyond the next wage packet, giro or council tax demand. So–decent money then and perhaps a generously-funded arts and community centre to raise every bodies game (oh and give the heroin addicts all the free smack they can handle, anything to stop that bloody awful whining), only then will art become truly ‘instrumental’ in helping to challenge a culture limned by hopelessness and despair, but still pissed off and awkward enough to laugh in the face of the latest ‘cultural initiative’.

April 30th 1997: As someone on the radio said: Labour is determined to break all promises before the election instead of afterwards, as is traditional. Vision of an endless motorway clotted with garden centres, retail parks, entertainment complexes, boring architecture and lowest common denominator tat, as the populace attempt to hide their fear behind a furious materialism.”


Dedicated to Helen Tinney