“What do you think about? When you’re on a stake-out?”
somebody asked me, somewhere, I don’t remember who or where.
“I dunno. Except I’ve never called it a stake-out”, I said,
which was an honest answer, in at least two respects.
“So, what do you call
it?”
“You don’t call it anything, you just do it.”
But here I was, watching. Watching and thinking about that
question again, thinking about what it was I thinking about, and knowing that that was not normally what I would be
thinking about. Thinking about thinking. And so on.
Hunger. No, not hunger,
just a vague gnawing. Here, at midnight in a drip-lit avenue in King’s Park, your
body doesn’t have anything useful or amusing to do, so it says “hey, let’s eat…”
But you don’t, because here in the burbs there’s no place to do that, not now,
not in the damp of the dark hours. And anyway, sitting on your arse in a
borrowed (always, borrowed) car, whatever empty calories were pushed down your throat
would take up residence and never leave. You don’t burn up much of anything,
watching…
…watching, to see if Jimmy Rogerson would stay at the
maisonette of Michelle…what was it? Some north-country name…Michelle
Braithwaite, that’s it. If he would stay beyond a reasonable time…well, it was midnight already –
how much owling would Mrs Rogerson need, to count as evidence? It was already
much too deep in the night to be working late at the office and anyway, this was
no office, this was Michelle Braithwaite’s one-bedroom apartment. One bedroom. I
guess one would be enough.
I learned long ago not to be surprised by what motivated
people to involve themselves in irrational personal webs, and what – later –
made them ask me to pick around in the messes they made. I remember one Janice
McKechnie, asking me to follow her husband to a dive where he a met “a blonde”,
whereupon (the report would read) the couple left the premises so that she could
perform “a sex act” (the report would further read) on the bonnet of a BMW. Problem
was, the “blonde” was Janice McKechnie herself, in a wig. Exhibitionism like
that came at a price but at least she got photographic evidence of her talent.
Maybe she showed that to her buddies, safe at home and chardonnayed to the
gills? Maybe.
No BMW was in sight here, tonight, in a drizzle that would stifle even the most ardent, and you'd have to include
… whoa! Fox in the bins, raking through filter papers and
fag packets, searching for the El Dorado of a tray from an Asda ready-meal, a spag
bol not properly rinsed out with crusted tomato sauce in the corners. Maybe it
was living in the park round the corner, maybe its…nest? What do they call a
fox’s…? Sett? Naw, that’s a badger…den? A den is for dragons. Lair? Lair? Surely that was where Goldfinger
lives, inside a volcano, somewhere like Costa Rica.
No, it was actually “den”, my vagrant wandering mind told
me. A fox’s den. And that was what I had been stumbling towards – maybe its den
was in King's Park (the park, not the neighbourhood), somewhere deep-cloistered in tree roots and dark passages. More likely, the fox lived
right here on the streets, in a garage at the back of one of the gardens down
by the street properties, or in a bin store here at the flats, cubs mewling and
howling behind a 400 litre Centurion, as truly urban a creature as any schemie in
Castlemilk roaring and puking after a single litre of Buckie.
See? That’s the kind of place where your mind can wander,
here in the night, watching.
I chanced the radio. Scottish country dance music – whaaat?
At this time of night? Hit the button – now it’s jaaaazzzzzzz. Not the cool, smoky,
melancholy kind, but the kind that sounds like a box of car horns and parrots
had been dropped into a skip of balloons and hit with jaggy sticks. Punch the button and now, a
soothing voice…I pressed “seek” before Jesus could be mentioned. Now, local politics
as Councillor McClumphit attacked the traffic management proposals of
Councillor McDumphit. Change that station and now, show toons!
Click, off, and I left Oooookla-homa to play to some more
receptive soul here in the pit of the night. Who, after all, are the audience
for lonely radio messages echoing through the empty hours? Who’s listening, why and what do they want
(to hear)?
There’s a book in that alone, sure, but I won’t be writing it.
No matter, I had my own musical diversion now. A young man,
alone, and disgorged from a taxi on Aitkenhead Road, was rolling home, bawling
a “tune” to nobody in particular – nobody at
all, in fact, except me, and I wouldn’t be appearing on his Nielsen ratings
any time soon.
The passing drunk crossed the street and headed towards the
flats where Jimmy and Michelle were (you have to assume) scaling the peaks of
ecstasy. “Let the people sing their stories and their songs, let the…the people…and
the music of their …uh…let the people sing, let the people sing…uh…let them
sing the, their native land…”
Jesus, leathered as he was, Desi (as I had named him in my
own head, for no reason) should still have been able to get through two lines of
a song without a prompt, but no, that was altogether beyond him. Leonard Cohen once sang about a drunk like
Desi in a midnight choir, and most poetic he made it sound – but Desi wasn’t trying to be free, neither in his
own way nor any other.
But what about sex itself? Surely, when - like a bloodhound
of the carnal - you’re on the trail of people diving into the illicit and the
improper, your own instincts stir? No. No, it’s last thing on your mind when you’re
watching other people at play. And if not the very last thing, then at least some way behind kebab-lust,
midgie-raking foxes, Jimmy Shand and city council smackdowns. And that’s a long way behind. Other people’s
dalliances are the least sexy thing imaginable, like watching a really bad game
of chess with only two pieces.
Played by weird obsessives. Like actual chess.
Trapped in a borrowed car, stuck in the drear clutch of
darkness, waiting. And, yeah, watching…that’s the right word. Watching, that’s
what I call it, it’s that simple.
Next time anybody asks me what I think about when I’m on a
stake-out, that’s what I’ll say. I think about urban wildlife, misremembered
song lyrics, bad jazz and the proper word to describe certain things that are
drifting across my mind. And one of those proper words? Not “stake-out”, just “watching”.
*** *** ***
A smidgeon short of 2am, radio back on, tuned to a mournful woman
singing “did she jump or was she pushed?” and Jimmy Rogerson flees the scene,
quickly into his old Volvo. I hit the ignition and prepared to follow him back
to the happy home in East Kilbride.
But...hang on, he was heading north, back towards the city, ignoring
any opportunity to go “home”. Less than ten minutes later, he turned the Volvo
into the secure car park of the block of flats that sat where the Plaza Ballroom
once jived and twisted – using his own beeper to lift the barrier.
Oh.
Well, then.
What I said before, the empty hours, the wandering mind, the
distractions? Forget it. This had suddenly turned into work.
