The Credit Draper

Episode 16

Solly laughed. “What are ye feart of ?” “Nothing.” “Ye think God’s looking down on ye or something?” Avram wrapped his arms around his chest, said nothing.

“I promise ye He isnae.”

“What do you know?”

“I’ll tell ye what I know. God’s got better things to do with His time than worry about what Avram Escovitz does on a Shabbos afternoon.”

“Like what?”

“Jesus, Patsy. I dinnae know.” Solly shrugged, screwed up his face as he searched for an answer.

“Other people. People with big problems. People who are really suffering. Like… I dinnae know… like the Jews in Russia.”

Avram thought about this. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

“Come on, then. We’re late already.” Avram took off uneasily at Solly’s shoulder. But as they leapt in and out of the tramlines, the two of them racing across the south side of the city in the darkening afternoon, his burden of guilt was soon forgotten.

They passed wagons being loaded in a railway goods yard, the belching towers of an electricity generating station, a giant hospital, picture houses splashed with matinee posters, a ballroom preparing for the night to come.

They ran through the beery stench emanating from countless pubs, followed the tree-lined railings of a public park, then across a recreation ground of colourful crowded football pitches with their sidelines of staunch supporters. “Almost there,” Solly panted.

“Where?”

“Round the next corner.”

Avram heard their destination before he saw it. A low rumble of voices conjoined into some audible life form, swishing and swirling in the air, rising sharply to a united gasp of disappointment, disintegrating into an outbreak of applause.

He raced ahead past Solly, then stopped at the corner. There in front of him stood the stadium, pulsating from the presence of some vibrant beast locked within.

A blanket of mist, cigarette smoke and steamy breath hovered above the stand and the terraces, the corrugated walls heaved from the bodies inside. “Where are we?” he screamed, dizzy from the noise.

“Cathkin,” Solly said with a showman’s flourish of his hands. “Home of the Hi-hi’s.”

The Hi-hi’s. Avram knew the nickname of Third Lanark Football Club from the street games, along with others like ‘The Bully Wee’, ‘The Jags’, ‘The Spiders’, and especially ‘The Bhoys’ for Celtic and ‘The Gers’ for Rangers.

He knew the names of the players too, memorised off cigarette cards Solly collected from customers coming out of the tobacco shops, from punters mulling around in the lanes outside his father’s betting premises.

He knew these names better than he knew the names of everyday objects in the Kahn household. But the one card he had never seen was the one of his namesake, Celtic’s Patsy Gallacher. That was a collector’s item which never made it into Solly’s begging hands.

“We’ll soon get in,” Solly said. He’d joined a crowd of other boys huddled outside a paybox by a corrugated gate.

“I have no money,” Avram said.

Scattered

Solly grinned back at him. “Me neither. They open the gates 20 minutes from the end to let people out. That’s when we nip in. Easy as you like.”

As Solly spoke, the gate was dragged aside, a few men in red scarves exited. “What’s the score?” Solly asked. “Three-nil to the Bhoys,” one of them muttered sourly.

“The Bhoys?” Avram said. “Celtic play in there?”

Solly grabbed him by the arm, pushed him through the gates along with the other boys who scattered like beetles into the rear of the crowd.

“Of course Celtic are playing. I’m taking ye to see yer hero. Come on. Down to the front quick. Or we won’t see a thing.”

Crouching down, Avram squeezed a path through a curtain of coat-tails, down terraces littered with the dregs of beef tea, cigarette butts squashed by feet stamping against the cold.

The game carried on out of sight, but in his imagination he could see each move across the park from the noise above him

Of course Celtic are playing. I’m taking you to see yer hero. Come on. Down to the front quick. Or we won’t see a thing.

and the straining of bodies in the direction of the ball. Just crawling through the forest of legs was a game in itself, finding a gap here and there to burrow through, avoiding the kicks and curses when he trod on a foot or grazed an ankle.

Eventually, he managed to twist out of the sea of spectators to arrive flat up beside Solly against the enclosure wall. It was as if he had emerged out of a caravan of stragglers into the Promised Land.

He gasped at the emerald expanse. “It’s so…”

Solly smiled. “So… what?”

“So… green.”

“What did ye expect?”

“I don’t know. Not like this.”

He couldn’t believe how close he stood to the pitch. So close he could smell the earthy aroma of the churned-up turf. The players loomed as shiny giants above him in clouds of snorting breath, baggy shorts flapping around their thick white hairy thighs as they came in close to take a throw-in or to drag a ball along the touchline throwing up divots with their studs.

The thwack of boots on leather echoed in his ears and around this stadium bowl awash in the colours of Third Lanark red and Celtic green. The same colours moved around the pitch in a twist and a weave and a swoop as the players followed the ball. At either end the goalkeepers’ bright yellow jerseys shone like warm beacons in the dying light.

Avram wrapped an arm around Solly’s shoulder, the two of them jumped up and down screaming: “Come on the Bhoys. Come on the Bhoys.”

“Where’s Patsy?” Avram asked breathlessly.

“Him there. Standing right in front of yer nose. And see the Hi-hi’s goalie.” Solly pointed to the far end of the pitch where a long, lone, figure prowled between goalposts almost invisible in the half-light. “That’s Brownlie. Scotland’s keeper.”

More tomorrow.

The Credit Draper is the first in a trilogy by J. David Simons. He has written five novels and is published by Saraband. His work can be purchased at saraband.net