Butcher Boy

The train takes me home.



Our house was miles from the coast but the gulls still wheeled around it. That was the first thing I noticed when we moved. We were by the seaside. There was a cherry blossom tree in our garden but the branches were still young and so the birds would nest in our gutter instead. The birds would wake me up in the morning. I could still climb the tree.



Even though our house was new, the town itself was old. It had been a port for years - years before any Glaswegians were decanted there. Next to the angles of our house and the prim lettering of the new shopping centre there was something a little unsettling about the fish and chip shops with bubble gum machines, the amusement arcades, the flaking white stucco of the pub and the bookies. In town, we were in the midst of the prescribed gaiety of a holiday weekend. You weren’t meant to live there. Even then it felt like the past.



The barber on Bank Street wore a built-up shoe and had a Tubeway Army LP cover in the window. Craig once went down with a pound and got a number two all over. He couldn’t leave the house for a week. When I went I’d shut my eyes, grip the arms of the chair and then go to the Saturday matinee at The George across the road itching, itching.



It wasn’t until I got older that I appreciated the darkness of a winter afternoon at the barbers, the drowsy warmth of the radio and the Calor Gas heater. It’s only now I understand the delicacy and tenderness of the transaction.



This thought takes me home.



Our house was painted with the same blues and yellows they’d used for the hospital and the school. When it was sunny, you could smell the creosote on the fence. And around us, houses were packed so tightly you’d be surrounded by the clacking echo of your feet wherever you went. The crisp geometry left crisp shadows, but if you walked in any one direction from our house for even ten minutes you’d be in woods black as dried blood.



You’d stumble across the embers of fires in these woods, matted fleece snagged on fence posts, the bones and skulls of animals picked clean and then bleached over the summer. This wasn’t the New Town and you’d feel lost - but back through the nettles and over the motorway you could see numbers two to sixteen Lomond Place and you could imagine the calm and gentle rituals of eight tables being laid for dinner.



Last Saturday I stood there, looking across at those houses - still, small, dimpled glass, blistered wood - and I felt that gentleness again.



The moment you leave, I realised, is the moment you’re more in love than you’ve ever been.



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