Free The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh Page A

all right,’ I said. `I wouldn’t hurt you. I’m not after your stuff.’
    I touched his shoulder and he flinched.
    `Leave me alone’ - a whisper - `just leave me alone.’
    A block later, I turned to look back. He was still there,
    frozen, whispering, covering his head.
    A small posse of boys gathered round the streaming
     
    window of the Finnieston Fish Emporium, eating sweets,
    transfixed by the ugliness of a gaping monkfish, whiskered sea monster. Across the road a policeman took a firm grip of a
    shabby suspect’s manacled wrists and huckled him from a
    patrol car to the station. The prisoner, head down, stumbled as if drunk, or too tired to care. The police braced himself with expert ease and checked the descent. Safe in the long
    arms of the law. Newspaper hoardings propped side by side
    declared the discovery of the toddler’s drowned body and the promise of full details on the slaughtered `vice girl’.
     
    At Charing Cross I was absorbed into the late-afternoon
    tide of office workers. Here, then, was sanity. The industrial age had given way to a white-collar revolution and the sons
    and daughters of shipyard toilers now tapped keyboards and
    answered telephones in wipe-clean sweatshops. They shuffled
    invisible paper and sped communications through electronic
    magic. Dark suits tramped along Bath Street, past the stormblasted spire of Renfield St Stephen’s, home to prepare for
    another day like the last and another after that. Cars crept at a sluggish pace towards curving slip roads and the motorway
    miles below, where three lanes of paralysed traffic shimmered in a heat haze. Buses forced their way to obedient queues of defeated commuters, unoiled brakes screaming at every
    touch. A coach, trapped in the gridlock, opened and closed
    its pneumatic doors, trying to raise a breeze from the stagnant air. Elevator buildings that inspired the Chicago skyline
    disgorged men and women crumpled by the day, some barely
    a step from the door before they lit their first fag of freedom, sucking long and hard, deep inhalations that revealed their
    cheekbones, smoke curling from their nostrils, working for a hit. And all around me mobile phones. People talk, talk,
    talking to a distant party while the world marched by.
     
    A gang of youths swooped through the crowds, flinging
    themselves with an echoing boom against the metal grilles of shut doorways, young Dodgers intent on intoxicating debauch.
    `A fucking three-hundred-pound gold chain!’ The
    homebound herd hesitated, for an instant, city radar thrown, then moved on.
    A bruised boy with the face of a prophet, stood whispering,
    `Any change, please? Any change?’ As each one turned from
    him, he offered his empty polystyrene cup, like a gift, to the next. I tipped him a pound.
    `You’ll only encourage him,’ grumbled a beefy man,
    sweating in his grey pinstripe, trundling by, without pause
    for debate.
    At West Nile Street I counted down the door numbers
    until I came to the one the voice had given me. A basement
    record shop. The front was painted pale blue, a gold on navy sign above the door read SIRENS, flanked on either side by the mirror image of a bigbusted mermaid strumming a guitar.
    I loped down concrete steps bevelled with years of use how many footsteps? - into a tiny courtyard choked with litter. The window reminded me of a joke we used to play as
    kids: `Excuse me, Mister, how much are your dead flies?? ‘I
    don’t sell dead flies.’ `So how come you’ve got six in your
    window?’ A long time ago someone had stretched nicotinecoloured cellophane across the glass to stop the records
    warping in the occasional sunlight. It hadn’t worked. Albums flopped halfheartedly among the dust, the distorted vinyl
    bowing their cardboard sleeves. It was almost as if whoever
    ran the shop didn’t want any customers. I had come to the
    right place.
    I pushed open the door, a bell announced my presence, and
    I was out of the city and into the gloom. A cool,