Free Pilgrim Soul by Gordon Ferris Page B

didn’t match any on file, and no one had seen anything. Temporary blindness was a contagious disease in Glasgow.
    Eddie Paton was back working part time while his head healed. It was a slow business. He was a sliver of his old self. You could see where his wife had taken in the tartan waistcoat and the trousers without cutting off the material, just in case he became Big Eddie again. On present progress it seemed unlikely. He was smoking more than ever, and his left eyelid had a tendency to twitch when he got excited.
    And whether my writing had improved or Eddie was less engaged, he rarely put a blue pencil near any of my drafts. Some mornings he’d barely emerge from his fug-filled office. I could see him toying with drafts and old stories, but often just staring into space. I was tempted to go in, grab him by the lapels and shake him. Tell him to snap out of it. But I’d seen other men with the same introspective look. It was probably how others saw me at times. You just had to get over it.
    The news about my predecessor Wullie McAllister was worse. His brother Stewart and I visited him at the convalescent home out by Erskine. I’d borrowed Sam’s car and picked Stewart up. Afterwards we sat by the Clyde in the car, windows rolled down, watching the ships go by. More refugees bound for the promised land.
    ‘He’s not going to get any better, is he?’ Stewart asked.
    I shook my head in denial. ‘He’s got more colour to him.’
    ‘But he doesn’t even recognise me.’
    I didn’t answer for a while. ‘You’re getting the worst of it,’ I said.
    The two men had lived together as brothers. Yet their ties weren’t blood. The title was for convenience and propriety. A very queer relationship.
    I told Sam about our visit that night when she called.
    ‘Douglas, if I ever end up doolally will you promise to push me off Ben Nevis?’
    ‘Will the top of Hope Street do? It might be all that I can manage.’
    ‘Just make it quick.’
    ‘Does that mean we’re going to grow old together?’ I broke into Burns:
    ‘John Anderson, my jo, John,
    We clamb the hill thegither;
    And mony a cantie day, John,
    We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
    Now we maun totter down, John,
    And hand in hand we’ll go,
    And sleep thegither at the foot,
    John Anderson, my jo.’
    ‘Have you been at the poetry bottle again?’
    We were heading rapidly towards Christmas and the turn of the year. It meant I was rising in the dark and going home in the dark to the great echoing house. We’d closed down all the rooms except the kitchen, one bathroom and my bedroom. My mind was closing down with it, room by room, as I tried to barricade myself off from the past. For sanity I kept up my morning swim though it was getting harder and harder to leave the quilt and face the cold plunge.
    Sam was due back in seven days.
    In my constant search for news stories I was patrolling the streets by the light of gas lamps in the mid-afternoon. Like a Dickensian ghost. Between restless nights and the cosy warmth of the newsroom, I found myself jolting awake at my desk at times. As though my brain had switched off, then on again.
    Often enough the hunt for a column led me south of the Clyde. As we neared Christmas I noticed lit candles in some of the windows of tenements around South Portland Street. The soft glow threw the nine-branched menorah in clear silhouette against the net curtains. Isaac Feldmann had told me that only eight candles counted; the central or side one was the shamash – the servant – used to light the significant others. Each night the number of candles would grow by one. When I saw four lit in the window above Isaac’s shop I went in.
    ‘Happy Hanukkah, Isaac!’ I called out to the empty shop. I heard rustling from the back and at last he shambled out, muttering away until he saw me.
    ‘Ach, Douglas, thank you. You remembered it’s our Festival of Lights?’
    ‘You think I learned nothing from you and Hannah? I just wanted to wish