Sauchiehall Street is now a straight, mile-long broadway but it used to be completely different. It was once a winding, narrow lane with villas each standing in an acre of garden. I liked that. The idea of random, winding roads turned into a direct route. The name came from two old Scots words that have since been bastardized into English, much like the entire country. Saugh is the Scots word for a willow tree and haugh means meadow. That’s why I started counting at Miss Cranston’s old place near the corner of Blythswood Street, the Willow Tea Rooms. Good a reason as any.
I’d begun walking at the Donald Dewar statue in front of the Royal Concert Hall but didn’t begin a countdown until I got to the tea rooms and the windows full of the Mockintosh stuff that would have had Charles Rennie spinning in his art nouveau grave. The tea rooms were Glasgow history though, a tourist’s favourite.
The Room De Luxe had silver furniture and leaded glass work, a genuine thing of beauty produced in a city of sweat and ugly temper. Mackintosh’s genius was to harness Glasgow’s contrasts, mixing right angles and curves, traditional and modernist, poverty and prosperous, beauty and beaten brow.
A good place to start.
The place you begin is always important. Not as vital as where you finish but important all the same. There is logic and logic. Some would have considered me crazy but I had my own reasoning.
I counted as best I could.
One. A youngish guy in a Rangers away top. Cap pushed back on his head, tracksuit trousers and trainers. Classic ned look. Crappy chain round his neck. Lovebites and at least one tattoo.
Two. His mate. Same uniform except with the addition of a scar from ear to mouth. His hands thrust in his pockets, his mouth going at a hundred miles an hour, man.
Three. A girl. Just a bit older than Sarah would have been. Perhaps nineteen or twenty. Knee-length boots and a short skirt. Way too much make-up. She looked at me. I didn’t like that. She was someone’s daughter. Some father waiting to be hurt.
Four. A jaikie bouncing from bin to bin. That special Scottish pallor on his face; white skin gone grey, red nose and battered cheeks. He was smiling all over his face and just for a second I envied him. He most probably didn’t have any more than a couple of quid in his pocket and his brain was fried with Bucky but he was happy. Remember happy?
He stopped me, cut across my path and stood there so I couldn’t pass. He started singing to me with his hand held out in front of him. This wasn’t good, not good at all. It was changing things and it would make people look at us. At me.
I could smell him. Dampness on his clothes, foul BO and rancid breath. He was murdering ‘Danny Boy’ with this stupid grin on him. I wanted away, wanted past, wanted to keep counting. People were flooding by and I wasn’t counting them.
I scrambled into my pocket and pulled out a couple of pound coins, thrusting them at him to buy freedom. I needed past him, had to get on. But instead of getting away, it made him thank me, grasping at my hands, his breath hammering at me.
Panic took a hold. I wanted to shake him off, throw him to the ground. People were passing by and everything was changing. The dirty, drunken old bastard didn’t know what he was doing. I couldn’t have this.
He treated me to another verse of ‘Danny Boy’. I was his new best friend but I wanted to be anywhere else but there.
I tore my hand out of his, breathing hard and dancing round him. He was shouting at me as I moved. I ignored him and prayed everyone else was doing the same.
I marched on, counting and walking. Ticking them off as they passed me, then and not before. Walking. Counting. Waiting.
Five and six passed in a blur. Seven, eight, nine rushed by and I felt as if a flood was going over me. Business suits and green school uniforms, ladies doing lunch and builders’ bums. I was drowning in possibilities and realities.
I was spinning, reeling out of control and had to regain it. Ten, eleven, twelve, they kept coming. I was counting, trying to slow my breathing and calm my nerves all at once.
It was eighteen before I was remotely settled. A balding businessman with a briefcase stuffed under his arm. He caught me looking at him and glared. That was OK. He’d never think anything of it.
Nineteen and twenty were a young couple hand-in-hand. I was composed now. He was tall and fair, she was short and bottle-blonde. I was fine again. They were giggling and whispering.
I slowed, I breathed out. I kept counting. Walking and counting. I had crossed Blythswood Street and had already counted past thirty.
So many people. It wouldn’t be long.
There was a rush through the mid-forties and a lull before a few more crossed my path. Not for the first time it struck me how many of the population of the dear green place came in only two colours, ash grey or sunbed orange. The browbeaten and UV beaten. Glasgow was all-sorts. All races, shapes and sizes and they kept coming past me. I tried to paint quick pen pictures of them in my mind but how could you tell the reasonably well-off from the struggling, the Protestant from the Catholic, the asylum seeker from Jock Tamson’s bairn, the Pole from the Partick boy? How did you differentiate the oppressed from the oppressor, the trodden down and those that trod on them, the deserving and those that deserved it?
I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Maybe better that I didn’t know.
Past the queue at Greggs and past Paperino’s. Three to go and I had a definite feeling of how close it was. I itched for it. I wanted to look ahead but stopped myself.
Fifty-four, near the corner of Douglas Street, was a young bearded guy with a bag over his shoulder and a look of superior stupidity on his face. A student. A member of the most feckless, pampered bunch of idiots on the planet. Time was he’d have been planning a revolution or protesting against the occupation of Iraq. At the very least he’d have been tending his cannabis harvest. This guy was probably going to see his financial adviser or going home to watch Neighbours. Oh he’d have done.
Still he was only number fifty-four.
My heart was pounding. I told myself to be calm. Fifty-six would be here and nothing could stop it any more than worrying would hasten it.
Fifty-five was an old Chinese woman. She was maybe about 120 and seemed less than five foot but then she was bent near double, forced over by time and rain. Something about her reminded me of an old neighbour. I couldn’t think of her name but then I couldn’t think of much else but the next person that would walk past me. It could be anyone at all. It excited me, sickened me, slightly scared me. My pulse galloped.
I dragged my eyes along the pavement but saw no feet. There was no one in the three or four yards of me. Then I saw a pair of shoes. Small shoes.
I raised my eyes and saw a boy of about eleven or twelve. Fuck.
He had a mop of fair hair and a squint grin, scuffing his feet along Sauchiehall Street as he gazed half-heartedly into shop windows. Oh fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He seemed in a bit of a daydream, this kid without a care in the world. The tail of his shirt was hanging below his jumper in the way that boys liked to wear it. Faded jeans. That silly, quirky grin.
Rules. Number fifty-six.
I felt sick to my stomach. Rules. My rules.
The boy glanced up, curious. I must have been staring right at him. Of course I was. He was still walking and I willed him to stop. He wasn’t going to. He was nearly in front of me. Stop, you have to stop.
Two more steps and he would be number fifty-six.
Then, from somewhere off my radar, a shape pushed past the boy, barging into his shoulder and knocking him over. The shape charged past me.
I watched the boy pick himself up and offer a dirty look to the person that had shoved him.
I followed his gaze and saw a short, stocky guy in his mid-twenties barrelling back up the street, not mindful in the least of anyone around him. I was looking at the back of number fifty-six.
Or number three depending on how you looked at it.