I'm sitting in a pub near the Gallowgate listening to a jazz band called the Uptown Shufflers with my grandpa. He's drumming the beat on the table with his hands. He tilts towards me, and I lean in, watching his lips. 'I just can't get my head around it. Tomorrow I'll be eighty seven years old.'
I nod my head, not sure what to say, and go to buy more whiskies.
***
I've not heard my grandpa's voice since 1990, when I was five and he was sixty six. He had cancer. They removed his voice box. He speaks now in something between a croak and a whisper, manipulating the air with his lungs. I remember going to see him in the hospital after the operation. I was used to jumping up but this time I stood next to the bed. 'Hello grandpa,' I said. He smiled and wrote on a notepad, holding it up for me to see. 'Hello Alan.' Then he let me see the hole they'd left in his throat.
***
'Do you like this kind of music?' Grandpa asks as he sits down again. He's been up watching folk dancing at the front of the stage.
'Yeah, I like listening to it. I don't exactly know any of the songs but it sounds great.'
He nods. He seems to know all the songs by heart.
'Have you heard that Michael Bublé?' I ask. 'Bit of a Sinatra sound-a-like.'
He sits back and reprimands me with an eyebrow.
'Well, okay, more of a Sinatra imitation.'
***
After the war my grandparents emigrated to Australia. There are pictures in a family photo album of them coming off the boat at Sydney. My gran was elfin and glamorous; my grandpa was clean-cut and sturdy. Their first son was born in Australia. I don't know what grandpa worked as over there but he brought back a circle of iron from a gangplank at the shipyards, screwed on a curved handle and used it to make pancakes. One side is smooth, black, a perfect griddle. The other is corrugated, and worn. I wonder whose footsteps, if any, used to be there.
***
Grandpa looks around the pub. It is quintessentially old-fashioned. All that's missing is sawdust on the floor and fugs of cigarette smoke near the ceiling. All around us are grey heads. I am the youngest customer by a number of decades.
'Don't see anyone I recognise,' he says. Mildly surprised.
'Does that happen often? Bumping into folk from school you've not seen in years?'
'Not so much these days. Happens less and less the older you get.' He holds up his hands and pushes them together, as though squeezing a balloon.
***
This is one of my favourite stories: It is Christmas Eve, 1942. Grandpa has just arrived in New York City. He is fresh off the boat, eighteen years old, conscripted to the Royal Navy. Glasgow has been living with war for the best part of three years. Blackout curtains and air-raid sirens and bombs dropping along the Clyde. But New York is dazzling. Festive decorations and Christmas carolers and a fifty foot tree. Seven dollars to the pound. The commanding officer tells grandpa to report back in 48 hours.
***
Grandpa sips his whisky and stares at it. 'I never started drinking this stuff until I was forty,' he says. 'Never drank, never smoked.' He pours imaginary drinks down his throat and holds up invisible cigarettes while he talks. 'Never interested me. My dad and my brothers, they were big drinkers. One time I had to take your gran's uncle to the pub for a drink. So I was sitting there having lemonade. It was a long horse-shoe bar,' he traces out the shape with his fingers, 'and round the other side were my dad and my little brother. They saw me across the room and came marching round demanding to know what I was doing in the pub. I was thirty-two! My brother was seven years younger than me!' He slaps his knee and I laugh along.
***
I phone grandpa the next day, on his actual birthday. 'Thanks for taking me to that bar,' he says. 'I enjoyed myself.'
'So did I,' I say. 'Good to hear some live music. You going to the dancing tonight?'
'Yes,' he says. 'Just getting myself ready.'
'You gonna celebrate your milestone with a wee drink?'
'Maybe after. Not before.' Grandpa goes to Latin dancing twice a week. The Ballroom class wasn't challenging enough, apparently.
'Is Joan going to be there?' Joan is a woman grandpa dances with when he goes. Beautiful dancer, so he tells me.
'Yes.'
'Why don't you tell her you know a great wee jazz band to go and see on a Saturday afternoon?'
He's still laughing when I hang up.
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