Guilt. The big G, the Catholic faith's greatest gift to humankind and its subspecies, psychiatrists... well, I guess that's putting it a little too harshly; I've met a lot of Jews and they seem to have just as hard a time of it as we do, and they've been around longer, so maybe it wasn't the Church's invention... but I maintain it
Some people get away from it; they honestly seem to just shuck guilt off like a backpack as soon as they leave home; I couldn't. I took it all too seriously, from the start. I believed. I knew they were right; my ma, the priest, my teachers; I was a sinner, I was dirty and soiled and horrible and it was going to be a full time job saving me from the fires and the torment; real professional work was going to be needed to rescue me from the eternal damnation I felt forced to agree I so thoroughly deserved.
Original sin was a revelation to me, once I understood it properly. At last, I realised, it wasn't necessary to have actually done something to feel guilty; this dreadful, constant, nagging sensation of wracked responsibility could be accounted for just by being
So I felt guilty, even after I'd left school, even after I'd stopped going to church (oh, Jesus,
That Tuesday evening I'd called in to see my ma and whatever brothers and sisters happened to be in the house. Our flat was on Tennant Road, in the Paisley suburb of Ferguslie Park, the roughest area in Paisley at the time, a wasteland of bad architecture and 'problem' families. It was a toss-up which were the most broken; the families or the houses.
Ferguslie Park lay in a triangle of land formed by three railway lines, so no matter what direction you approached it from, it was always on the wrong side of the tracks. The streets were full of glass and the ground- floor windows were full of hardboard panelling. The only thing holding up the walls was the graffiti.
Spray paint was something of a status symbol amongst the local gangs then, like owning a Parker pen; a sign you'd arrived as a menace to society and could afford to devote some of your valuable time to the theory and practice of artistic despoliation as well as the more strategically effective but less aesthetically satisfying forms such as smashing holes in walls, wrecking cars, and carrying out al fresco, enthusiastic, but usually non-improving amateur plastic surgery on the faces and bodies of rival gang members.
The closes in the squat, ugly, buildings silted up overnight with empty bottles of fortified wine and drained cans of strong lager; it was as though people put out wine bottles instead of milk bottles, waiting for a morning delivery that never came.
I didn't stay long at my ma's; the place depressed me. That made me feel guilty too, because I felt I ought to love her so much it would outweigh the bad memories the place held for me. Our flat always smelled of cheap cooking; that's the only way I can describe it. It was the smell of old chip fat, reheated cans of cheap Irish Stew, too many cans of baked beans and burned slices of white sliced bread, and the greasily solidified remains of fish suppers, take-away Chinese meals and curries; all overlaid by the smell of cigarette smoke. At least my youngest brothers and sisters were past the age of regular vomiting.
My ma, as usual, started trying to persuade me to go to church; at least to go to confession. I wanted to talk about how she was, how the kids were, whether she'd heard anything from da ... anything but the one thing she wanted to talk about. So we didn't talk together; we talked apart.
It washed over me, I felt guilty and inadequate and hopeless and nervously out of place. I just sat nodding or shrugging or very occasionally shaking my head, and concentrated on trying to put one of wee Andrew's toy cars back together for him (he was crying). It was cold in the flat, and damp, but I was sweating. My ma was smoking her usual number of fags and I had always promised not to smoke so I couldn't take out my own packet. I sat there, scanting for a cigarette and trying clumsily to mend my wee brother's toy car and wanting to get away...
I got away. Left a fiver on the ledge beside the little container of holy water by the front door, and got out, but not without promising that I'd come back after the pubs were shut with some fish suppers, also not without promising to think about going to chapel again or at least to go and see Father McNaught to have a talk, and to be good generally and work hard... the faint smell of urine in the close was almost a relief; it was like I'd just started breathing again.
It was raining; I turned my collar up and tramped across the street, feet crunching on the broken glass that was Ferguslie's equivalent of a gravel drive, then marched over the muddy grass, past half-burned sheets of hardboard and sodden chip pokes and half-crumpled aluminium take-away containers holding little greasy puddles of rainwater, until I was out of sight of the flat. I ducked into a close on Bankfoot Drive, and lit up, sucking at the smoke like life itself. The close stank, there was illiterate graffiti carved into the tiled wall opposite, and I could hear a man shouting in one of the upstairs flats. The flat nearest to me turned their telly up, presumably to drown out the noise from upstairs. I smoked my sawn-off Embassy and looked out at the damp dreariness of Ferguslie Park, shivering a little as some water ran down my neck.
Dear Ferguslie; my cradle, my adventure playground. I'd moved away from it, but only a mile away. It still held me. Christ, what a dump, what a sorry mess it was. They should make a documentary about it; it was ideal material. Urban deprivation?< The failure of post-war town planning? An indictment of the ghettoisation of problem families? It was all here. Bring lots of film and fashionable theories, chaps, but don't forget the lockable petrol cap and theft-proof wheelnuts for the Range-Rover. And maybe a riot gun or two.
I wanted out of this. I wanted away.
I reached into my jacket's inside pocket and took out some folded sheets of paper. One of my flatmates had let me use his typewriter to print out a few of my songs. I'd bought real stave paper from a music shop, carefully transcribed all the quavers and hemi-demi-semiquavers from my old exercise jotters, and then typed in the words underneath.
I knew I'd never make it as a singer-songwriter, so I was currently looking for a band to make rich and famous. I had a third or fourth-hand bass guitar I'd almost learned to play, and knew the most basic rudiments of writing music. I'd started out with my own system of musical notation; at the age of eight I'd invented a way of writing down music based on the use of graph paper and twenty coloured pens I'd been given for Christmas. Curiously enough this system, though complicated, did work. It became a sort of personal institution, something I was proud of, and I'd spent the last eight years stubbornly resisting the inevitable, refusing to learn the system everybody else used and trying to persuade anybody who'd listen that my way was better. I honestly, fervently believed that the musical world would see that my system was superior, and change over. It would be like going metric, it would be like decimalisation ...
Insane.
Anyway, I had, with much ill grace, finally bought myself a teach-yourself music book, and grudgingly learned about the basic arithmetic of staves and time signatures, even if diminished minor sevenths and chord progressions still seemed like higher mathematics (I wasn't worried; I knew what the songs sounded like in my head, and they were brilliant. It would be a minor matter to transfer them into the real world. Any fool could play a guitar or a keyboard and notate; the real talent lay in thinking up the tunes).
And tonight I was off to the Union of the Paisley College of Technology, where a band called Frozen Gold were playing. A lad I'd known at school, who now worked as an assistant on one of the lathes in Dinwoodie's, had seen the group play in some pub in Glasgow and recommended them. I was sceptical in the extreme.
I tramped through the rain, shoulders hunched, hands as deep in the shallow pockets of my corduroy bomber jacket as they would go. I kept the Embassy Regal between my lips and smoked it down to the filter, staring down
