Free Prized Possessions by Jessica Stirling

of a one for the booze. Beer made him sick and spirits made his head spin so he was usually sober when most of those around him were falling down drunk, which was a big advantage when it came to getting off with girls.
    Next to motorcycles, girls were Jackie Hallop’s passion in life. He liked them even more than he liked money. If the ladies generally preferred money to Jackie then that was just dandy, for Jackie had acquired the knack of making the two things – Jackie and cash – seem indissoluble.
    Pale blue suit, silk tie, wristlet watch, plump buffalo-hide wallet with its edging of fivers were advertising pure and simple, bait to sucker unwary victims into believing that Jackie Hallop was a gentleman in the making.
    Even Babs Conway wasn’t that daft.
    She lived just three floors up from the Hallops and saw Jackie for what he really was, slight, scrofulous and almost indistinguishable from the Neds who lolled about the street corners. She knew that he slept four to a bed with his brothers and, when it suited him, wouldn’t get up until noon.
    Babs was also aware, however, that Jackie had money to burn and that he fancied her and that when he chatted her up there was a delicious undercurrent of opportunity running through the conversation. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the Hallops’ repair shop in Kingston Lane offered sanctuary when the prospect of another evening wasted at home became just too tedious for words.
    The group that gathered round the stove in Hallops’ repair shed were not all mercenaries. Occasionally – though not often – they talked of things other than money and the fun it could purchase.
    Polly and Babs had escaped the poverty trap thanks to Mammy’s efforts and the Hallop boys through their connection with Mr Manone. But others in the company hadn’t shaken off their birthright and remained moral outcasts from the system and blamed capitalism for their descent into lawlessness. Such a one was Patsy Walsh. His aim was not to escape into the middle class but to overthrow that class, to destroy an exploitative kultur that deliberately robbed the workers of their will to fight.
    Polly found this aspect of Patsy Walsh both interesting and, in its way, rather attractive. She was not in favour of what he did but she had been reared in a tough neighbourhood and some of that toughness had affected her too. How could it be otherwise? She was not put off by what Patsy did for a living and, if she had been more open about it, might even have confessed that she found the anomalies and paradoxes in his character intriguing.
    Patsy was a house-breaker, a negotiator, a salesman, a voice in the wilderness; a wheedling, gentle honeycomb of a voice who, given the chance, could have argued intelligently with Baldwin or Beaverbrook. He was also a fellow traveller, a disciple of Marx and had confided in Polly that he’d been in Berlin that jolly day in May when the Communists had attacked the police stations and nine comrades had been martyred. He had seen things in Germany, he said, that made Glasgow’s hunger marches look like a Christmas pantomime.
    If Patsy had been less adept at breaking into houses and offices he might have been treated as a buffoon by the young men who met around the stove to share tea, toast and margarine, and talk of movie stars, football heroes, dancing – and money. As it was, they all held him just a little in awe and even Polly was not immune to his rough charms.
    She crouched on a bench by the stove with Babs and Patsy beside her.
    Jackie straddled a motorcycle, his narrow thighs embracing the saddle, arms folded on the handlebars while Patsy discoursed on international injustice and the national disgrace of having in power a Labour Party that was too scared to do anything original or effective.
    Polly listened intently, nodding now and then in agreement.
    She had removed her Scotch tammy to expose her chestnut hair. She had a