December 5, 2007
BEHIND FARRAGO’S WAINSCOT
| ANDREW FERGUSON |
lies a cigarette end, dropped by a man who, in 1972, opened this emporium in candlemaker row and kind of forgot to close it since: now he stands, same man, long silver hair and a fixed expression aimed at the customers who dare to breach his peace, rifle the clothes racks, make no excuses (or purchases) and leave.
sometimes he thinks venus isn’t a planet but a meteor, crashing back into his life. she was gone in 1972, when he painted the wainscot, smoking as he worked (he was young then). it was a listed building. he wasn’t meant to paint the wainscot purple, but the authorities still haven’t caught up with him. venus, meantime (venus carmichael, you know the song: it was . . . oh never mind)
had crashed out of his life, gone to california on the back of her hit & mixing with david, and neil, and stephen, and all the bright young boys, who, noting her bony scots ass and remembering her song was something about clowns, let her stay, in the valley, the canyon, she wrote songs with all of them,
a scots planet under the la la stars, whilst back in edinburgh he painted the wainscot, put leaflets round doors, opened farrago one february morning, watched the snow melt off shy customers onto the clothes. those were good years for him too, despite her, as scotland caught up with the sixties, not carnaby street, exactly, but still the paisley patterns sold and he could girn at the customers all he liked.
she came back in 1980, when her luck and the cocaine ran out. business had turned bad, though thatcher’s students liked his military greatcoats (good in the right-wing wind that whips off the north sea and bites bony scots asses in the dark days). she told him he was looking old; took off again, on the royalties still trickling in,
took a dormobile round europe with her guitar playing low level gigs where she used to be big—germany, sweden, yugoslavia for some strange reason where tito’s general tried to lay her bony scots ass. she found drink, blotted most of it out; she hadn’t drunk for years, didn’t like the taste of it she said, although truth was she just wanted to be different from her small town friends
like him, still in farrago, stuck inside of mobile with the memphis blues again, no mend to the ache inside, behind the wainscot where the mice scratched—or he hoped they were mice—in late winter afternoons, with greyfriars churchyard looming behind him, and the customers oppressed by the purple wainscot, his grimaces driving them from among the paisley patterns.
summer came. she woke one morning, in the now forgotten borderlands, where germany meets poland meets czechoslovakia. the dormobile had a puncture. she got up, bleary in the hot sun with the birds making such a racket, fixed the tyre, fixed herself some coffee decided some things. what to give up, who to go see, a new direction. meanwhile he
not knowing any of this, had a flurry of activity as something he sold became fashionable. he forgot to order more of it, accidentally on purpose. the customers dwindled away again so he was unprepared for her visit, the meteor bursting through the door, the cracked bell finally fell off: it was quite an entrance. (that was the thing, he thought, years later
she always knew where he was, that bloody shop, he could’ve moved house five times; not that he had). She helped out through the nineties, ordering stock, but mostly out making contacts, fixing low level gigs again, lured south by a contract, a comeback tour. he’s given up smoking years ago but he stares at the wainscot, wondering if it was about time he painted it, and changed the shop’s name.
Candlemaker Row Characters,
Andrew C Ferguson,
Sea Holly Press, 2006
Andrew C Ferguson’s poetry has appeared or will shortly appear in Chapman, The Shantytown Anomaly, and Dark Fantasy Newsletter. He has written for various anthologies of short fiction, and was particularly pleased to sell a story to the US recently (www.ravenelectrick.com/sportyspecgls.html) with a cricket-playing Moslem as hero. When not wasting time on Facebook he can be found performing with spoken word collective Writers’ Bloc (www.writers-bloc.org.uk ).