5

There were no pyramids in Egypt, Glasgow, where Lou Perlman lived. He’d wondered many times about the name of this neighbourhood, which lay pocketed in the East End of Glasgow between Shettleston Road to the north and Tollcross Road to the south. Small area, a cluster of a few streets, some two-storey blocks of 1930s vintage, none of the classic Victorian sandstone tenements you found in other parts of the city. On some maps Egypt wasn’t even noted, as if cartographers were so baffled by the origins of the name that they ignored it. It was, Perlman often thought, a place lacking character. It was certainly not scenic. You wouldn’t drag tourists out here from such picturesque places as the Botanic Gardens or the Glasgow Art Gallery. But there was an anonymity about it he enjoyed, a sense of privacy, tucked away from the roar of traffic rolling east and west along the main roads.

He guessed he was the only Jew living in Egypt. The Jewish community in Glasgow – some 4,000 out of a total population of around 610,000 (about 1.2 million if you included the whole Metropolitan area) – had usually lived in the Southside, particularly in the slums of the old Gorbals, where they’d first come at the turn of the twentieth century as immigrants from Eastern Europe. Later they’d graduated to the suburbs of Shawlands, then Giffnock, and later still into the prosperous beyond of Newton Mearns. Perlman’s family considered it an act of defiance on Lou’s part to live this far into the East End, and typical of his contrary nature, but he didn’t give a damn what that cake-making, tea-drinking rabble of aunts and uncles and cousins thought.

I’m a Jew in Egypt, and I like it.

Five-twenty a.m. and freezing when he parked his dented Mondeo and hurried, head bent, towards his house, which was one of two old blackened sandstones in the street. He stuck the key into the lock, shut and bolted the door behind him. He switched on the light in the hallway. Superstitiously, he touched the mezuzah on the door jamb. It had been painted over many times in the years Perlman had lived here. Now it was covered in the same dull blue gloss as the door itself.

This faded house seemed to gather itself around him as he walked, turning on more sixty-watt lights, into the living room. He struck a match and held it to the gas fire and heard the familiar swish of blue flame rushing through the old-fashioned mantles. He spread his hands for warmth. What the house needed was modern central heating with thermostats. The bloody house needs more than heat, he thought. It needs new paint, new roof, new carpets, furniture, all kinds of stuff. He sat down in a chair close to the fire and kicked off his shoes and pushed his toes towards the gas flames.

Living like this, he thought. Tut tut. Upstairs rooms you never use. Cupboards crammed with old newspapers and magazines you don’t get round to throwing away, and books in haphazard stacks, and a bird cage for the canary you once considered buying, but didn’t. Nice to have something yellow and chirpy and fluffy, you’d thought in a lonesome moment. But the bird would have died from neglect.

Perlman, canary killer.

He gazed at the framed photographs above the fireplace. He’d hung these years ago in an attempt to make the house feel like a place where a person actually lived, but now as he looked at them he remembered his own desperation at the time. That instinct to connect yourself and your history to the soul of this house, as if you wanted to belong in the same way as the mortar, the bricks, the floorboards. The photographs were of immigrant families taken in the early years of the twentieth century in the Gorbals, unsmiling bearded men and their plain sturdy women and their shoeless kids. Some of the men had a rabbinical intensity about them. The women looked careworn.

The black-grey tenements, a little fuzzy in the background, seemed already to be vanishing into a future that would demolish them. Lou had found these pictures in a cardboard box at the Barras market, and when he’d first hung them he’d pretended they were family members, but they were just unknown Jews from this shtetl or that, Poles, Russians, Latvians: they’d journeyed to a new life from the anti-Semitism and pogroms of Eastern Europe only to find a different form of purgatory in the Gorbals.

The one personal photograph in this gallery of strangers was of his parents, Etta and Ephraim, who’d fled the menace of Bavaria in 1935. Etta, small and fair-haired, almost Teutonic; Ephraim dark-eyed and secretive, Semitic. They’d chosen Glasgow because Ephraim had a cousin who operated a small car-repair business in the Gorbals, and there were promises of work and accommodation. Ephraim laboured grudgingly in the shop for three years – pishtons, carberryators, what do I know of zuch zings? – before he found work in his old trade as a printer. Overjoyed, he and Etta had moved out of Cousin Lev’s cramped quarters in Nicholson Street just before the outbreak of war, and settled in a two-room flat in Kingston Street. How proud Etta had been of this spacious paradise, how tidy and particular, forever sweeping, polishing, attacking cobwebs with a broomstick, setting and emptying mouse-traps. Lou could close his eyes and see her, all whirl and purpose.

He gazed at his parents for a moment longer. When Lou was ten Etta died suddenly. One day she’d been bright and industrious, the next dead on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the broken pieces of a porcelain bowl and the browning crab-apples it had contained. Ephraim overnight became old and distant, wedded to a grief. Lou remembered how his father would sit in front of the fire, hunched over a copy of the Evening Citizen, scanning the front page endlessly as coals sparked and kindling spat and split in the chimney. If Ephraim heard these sounds or absorbed anything of the newspaper, he gave no sign. He went through the motions of a life for another ten years before he followed his wife. His death was recorded as cardiac failure.

Heartbreak, Lou thought, was nearer to the truth.

At the funeral, Colin had whispered in his ear: This is only a shell we’re burying, little brother. The real man died the same day as his wife. Lou had felt an unbearable sadness at the waste of his father’s life, and his eyes had filled with tears during the service. By contrast, Colin had seemed detached, as if death was something that happened only to other people. The expression on his face said: This isn’t going to happen to me, oh no.

Perlman looked away from the picture of his parents.

Once, many years before, he’d hung another picture alongside that of Etta and Ephraim, but he’d taken it down. He thought of it now, that lovely oval face and the mouth so intelligent you knew it belonged to a woman who’d never utter anything shallow or dull. I desire her, he thought. It’s wrong, and I know it, and I can’t help myself any more than poor Ephraim could help being married to the dead.

He found the CD he hadn’t opened, and he ripped the cellophane from it and slid the disc into the slot of the player: his sound-system, a Bose, was the only expensive thing he owned. He sat back and listened to Monk play ‘Dinah’. The sound was mischievous, pert, Monk having some fun. Lou listened, tapped a foot. ‘I Surrender Dear’ came up next, slow and touching and then briefly upbeat. By the time ‘Ruby, My Dear’ played, and the room filled with the melancholy of the tune, Lou Perlman was asleep.

Troubled sleep.

He dreamed of black iron girders, which were strangely aligned, joined in defiance of logic. He dreamed he was walking beneath them and they cast weird shadows across his face. He dreamed of a man hanging, not from a rope, but from a nylon stocking.

He woke cold even though the gas fire hissed and the mantles glowed red. Wrapping himself tightly in his coat, he stumbled towards the stairs and staggered up to his bedroom, which felt like the inside of an ice-cube. There was a narrow unmade bed and a heap of clothes and shoes and newspapers and a poster on the wall of the Celtic team that had won the European Cup in 1967. The Lisbon Lions.

Old heroes.

He lay face down and slumped back into sleep, this time dreamless.