Nocturne
First thing my landlady does is lay out this street map of the neighbourhood and go over it with a red marker pen. This block okay, this block not: this street fine in daytime, this one no good, anytime! When she’s done the map resembles a scene-of-crime production, red ink spreading like spatters of blood across the paper. Welcome to Philadelphia, I think, the ‘City of Brotherly Love.’
Despite my travel weariness I venture out in search of sustenance. It’s dark now and the street lights aren’t the best. I begin scanning people coming towards me on the pavement. This guy okay, that one a bit dodgy: that woman nice, those teens acting like their planning something. I’m failing to filter out, drawing my own red lines around people now as I give up on finding a restaurant and decide to walk down to the local supermarket.
When I re-emerge with an armful of shopping, I walk back up the street, turn, then turn again into the path leading-up to the front door of the apartment I’ve taken. Put the key in the lock: won’t turn. Take it out, put it between my lips, wet it with saliva, try again but with the same result. Fuck! My first night in Philadelphia and already I’m having problems. Begin rapping on the door. Put down my shopping and rap again, increasing the tempo until I’m pounding on the wood with both fists. Window cranks open above my head. ‘Can I help you?’ I step back and look up. A man stares down obliquely at me, but keeping himself square with the opening, hardly leaning out. ‘Ya want somethin? Lookin’ for somebody?’ Hey, I feel like telling him, what are you doing in there? That’s my apartment. What the hell’s going on? Instead, I explain my predicament over the keys.
‘Where you from?’ he asks, warily. ‘Scotland,’ I tell him, adding how I’ve just arrived and taken an apartment here. I point to the gold numerals scribed on the fanlight above the front door. ‘Eighteen Green Street, but I can’t get in, the keys don’t work.’ He falls silent for a moment, weighing this information, still staring down, gimlet-eyed like a cat watching its prey. ‘Okay,’ he says eventually, ‘stay where you are, don’t move a muscle and don’t go getting any big ideas.’ Then he disappears back inside the room.
A few moments later I hear his footfall approaching on the other side of the door which he cracks open, just enough open for me to see a shoulder and his outstretched arm holding the gun. ‘Alrighty,’ he says briskly ‘we’ll do this nice and easy. Start walking and keep your hands where I can count all the fingers.’ I take a step backwards colliding with my shopping, a stumble which gives him the chance to come up close holding the weapon against my side, prodding me with it until he’s turned me around and we’re back out on the street.
I start gibbering, giving him the whole story about why I’m in Philadelphia. ‘Doing research,’ I tell him in short breaths. ‘Links between business and education, I can prove it if you want.’ I mention my landlady by name. ‘She’ll vouch for me!’ I keep turning my head, glancing over my shoulder at him, praying he’ll start believing me. ‘It’s my first night in the city,’ I say, un-sticking the words from my throat. ‘Then I have this problem with the keys…!’ ‘U-huh’ is all he says ‘U-huh’ and ‘…Keep movin’ I’m wide awake now, but my legs are like chicken fat slithering me around like a drunk unsure about his next step. He keeps me right though, with the pistol.
We go left then left again after navigating a short incline. It’s a scene from a gangster movie: a living nightmare. I’ll wake up in a minute, sweating but safe in my bed, in the bed in my own apartment. Finally he turns me into an asphalt path leading to the front door of a house and rings the bell. Somebody slides open the spy-hole in the door then wrenches it open. It’s my landlady, eyes wide with astonishment. I almost fall into her arms.
‘Looks like you took a wrong turning on your way back from the store,’ she explains when I’ve stopped shaking. ‘You turned a street too early and tried the door of this gentleman’s property whose house backs on to mine. They’re both number eighteen but he’s on Brandywine, not Green Street.’
All three of us sit in the kitchen drinking coffee. Mine has a whisky in it. ‘Lucky he mentioned Scotland,’ my armed escort says, shaking his head and giving a humourless chuckle. ‘My father was stationed there during the Second War and loved the place. If he hadn’t mentioned Scotland I’d probably have popped him.’
It’s a thought I take upstairs to bed steeling myself against re-living it in my dreams. But I leave the light on anyway as an added precaution. Tomorrow I’ll put the whole event in my log providing my hand’s steady enough by that time.
Walk…Don’t Walk
His face is etched by age and fatigue, and around his feet are too many bags which have also seen better days. Because of the traffic roar I have to lean in close to hear what he’s saying.
Fortieth and Filbert Street, am I anyways close?
I shake my head. Hell no! You must be all of twenty blocks away, I tell him. I’d take a taxi if I were you. Only after saying it do I realise how ridiculous the suggestion is. I aint got enough for the bus ride never mind a cab, the man says morosely.
We’re standing at a pedestrian light on Philadelphia’s JFK Boulevard. It’s a light that doesn’t recognise green as being part of the colour spectrum, and I’ve seen people grow to be grandparents waiting for it to change. But this means there’s plenty of time for the man beside me on the pavement to say how he comes to be there.
Come all the way up from New Orleans, been travelin more’n two days already… He motions with his thumb. Hitchin rides, ya follow me? Jumpin anything comes along looks like bringing me back to Philly. I lean in even closer, smelling his sweat, almost sharing his exhaustion. His voice surfaces from what seems like a gravel bed, sharp stones which puncture his sentences releasing tiny hisses of air in places instead of words ‘Gotta get over to Filbert…friend there who’ll put me up…only place Ah wanna see tonight.
As if on cue, a yellow taxi angles across the boulevard and rocks to a standstill at the kerb. The driver leans out of the window showing plenty of gleaming teeth. You lookin’ to go someplace He addresses me directly, ignoring my companion with his many bags. I reckon it must be my appearance, all suited-up as I am for the convention I’ve just left at Federal Reserve Bank. I’d gone there earlier in the evening expecting to further my research, the reason for me being in Philadelphia at all. My brief was to draw parallels with Glasgow, make links between economic regeneration, the world of business enterprise and education. I thought the convention would provide me with some hot ideas to bring back to Scotland: but rather than enterprise the convention had turned out to be the familiar sad story of money – how to borrow it, how to make use of it and how to make more of it. I’d left before it even looked like ending.
Now I tell the cab driver I’m going no where except my apartment which is less than two blocks away. But this guy could do with a ride, I say nodding towards the sagging figure beside me on the pavement. He’s been travelling since yesterday and he’s done in. Needs to get to a friend’s house on Filbert Street otherwise he might well collapse from exhaustion. I fish two five dollar bills out of my pocket and offer them to the driver. If I give you this would you take him to where he wants to go or as close as ten dollars will stretch? The driver stares at me, then at the man, then back to me again. You goin’ with him? he asks. I shake my head. I’m almost home, and anyway he’s heading away in the other direction to me. The driver goes through his routine again staring at both of us in turn, smile absent now, lustrous teeth now shuttered by two straight, solemn lips. I wait thinking he’ll ask me where I’m from: this is what most people do when they hear my accent. But instead he makes a movement inside the cab and suddenly the boot-lid on the cab raises itself in the air.
Get in quick, I mutter leaning down to help the man throw his bags in. Get in quick before he changes his mind. I watch as he inserts himself stiffly through the rear door of the cab before closing the boot and moving back towards the driver. He revs the engine, guns the gas pedal, and without a backward glance shoots away leaving me standing at the kerb still clutching the dollars in my outstretched hand. I watch his tail lights all the way down the boulevard half-expecting him to stop and decant his passenger back on to the pavement. But he doesn’t, and eventually the cab disappears in the stream of traffic. I slide the bills between my fingers before restoring them to my pocket. It’s all supposed to be about money: but maybe, I think, there could be a little more to it than that……..
Gordon Wallace is an anonymous Scot who pesters publishers with his writing. Some of this is accepted by people capable of making mistakes. His next book is to be published soon, and some of his work has been broadcast on BBC radio which few people listen to. Late in life he realised that no matter how polished a piece of writing is, hardly anyone remembers the author’s name. Consequently, he expects to retain his anonymous status for the rest of his days. He is married to the artist, Mary Louise Coulouris, so his clothes often smell of paint. They live much of the year on the magnificent Greek island of Hydra which has no roads, no crime and too many rich people who own houses which they seldom occupy. His wife claims to love him, but he is unsure if the same goes for either of their grown-up children. Gordon Wallace is old enough to remember Little Deuce Coup sung by the Beach Boys.
