The Long Glasgow Kiss Read Free Page B

turned my gut: that pink, scrubbed, fleshy-faced look of accountants, lawyers and other lower-middle-class Glaswegians out slumming it. This was their little charabanc ride to vice. I guessed there were more than a few Glasgow Corporation bureaucrats and even a copper or two here by personal Sneddon invitation. The stench of venality mingled with the sweat and booze-tinged air.
    A cheer from the crowd drew my attention back to the fighters. I didn’t mind a boxing match myself, but this was not sport. No skill other than using your face and head to break your opponent’s knuckles. The face of each fighter was the mirror image of his opponent: white skin puffed and swollen and smeared with spit, sweat and vivid streaks of blood; eyes reduced to slits, hair sweat-plastered to their scalps. And both faces were expressionless. No fear or anger or hate; just the emotionless concentration of two men engaged in the hard physical work of doing harm to another human being. Each punch had the sound of either a wet slap or an ugly, dull thud. Neither man made an attempt to dodge his opponent’s blows; this was all about beating the shit out of each other until someone fell down and didn’t get up. Both fighters looked exhausted. In bare-knuckle there are no rounds, no breaks for rest or recovery. If you were knocked to the ground you had thirty seconds to get back up to ‘scratch’, the scored line in the centre of the fighting area.
    There’s something about bare-knuckle fighting that holds your unwilling attention, and I found myself focussed on the brutality on the raised platform. The fighters seemed oblivious to everything around them. Probably everything before them and after them. I remembered the feeling from the war. In combat you have no past, no history, no future; no connections to the world outside. You’re not even connected to the men you kill in any human way. I recognized the same dislocation in these two men. One was slightly smaller but heavier-set than the other. Blood from his nose was back-of-the-hand smeared across his upper lip and cheek and one distended eyelid was purpling up and threatening to close over his eye. It looked as if it was only a matter of time before his larger opponent would be able to take advantage of his compromised vision, but the smaller man suddenly swung an ungainly but brutal left hook. It connected with the bigger fighter’s cheek with a sickening snap. Even across the barn and through the cigarette haze I could see the big man had stepped out of his body for a moment and his arms hung limp at his side.
    The spectators roared delight and fury, depending on whom they’d placed their money, and the smaller guy slammed a nose-breaking jab into his opponent’s face. Blood cascaded over the big man’s mouth. More roars from the crowd. This was the end. The smaller fighter had the smell of victory in his bloody nostrils and tore into his adversary, his bare-fisted punches slapping loudly into the bigger man’s ribs and gut. Another roundhouse left sent a viscous arc of blood and saliva through the air and the big man dropped like a felled tree.
    There was no congratulation for the winner or commiseration for the loser; the serious business of settling bets got underway and there was another jostle around Sneddon’s illegal bookie and a couple of enforcers. Sneddon would be happy: the disgruntled faces hanging back outnumbered the beaming, eager grins of the winners.
    After a while, everyone made for the bar and I eased back into a corner with my gut-rot Scotch and contemplated the success I had made of my life. It had so very nearly gone wrong. A few different choices and I could have ended up wealthy and contented three thousand miles from Glasgow, missing out on the edifying experience of watching two bruised apes beat the crap out of each other in a Scottish barn.
    Twinkletoes returned with a shortish, compactly built and hard-looking man wearing a suit that was well tailored