Bill and the UFO6

Todger raced ahead of them, in a barking-mad frenzy in the sure knowledge there was more food on the horizon. From a distance his mouth was a fur- ball smile and doggy woofs competed with the klaxon sound of Fire Engines.

Wendy slowed down. ‘I’m knackered. She was bent over like a Zimmer frame, gasping for breath, with her long fingers clutching her denim knees. A cascade of sweat ran down her neck, past the strand of loose hair that had fell away from her black helmet haircut, down her long stringy neck and circled the white collar of the red Adidas t-shirt she favoured before becoming part of it; part of her.

Summy noticed –not that he was looking- she never seemed to have that top off, wore it inside her sleeping bag and also during the day. She covered its tackiness by spraying it with woman’s perfume, or men’s aftershave. It was too smelly to be sure. But she also covered it up with a blue blouse with a John Lewis label that looked like a man’s shirt, which she bunched around her waist and closed the curtain on the possibility of her having pebble breasts.

Phil and Summy raced past her caught up in their own individual competition and stopped, sitting close together to get their breath back on the grey electricity box, with the red triangle with a yellow loose limbed woman inside, shocked by lightning bolts, which said DANGER also in red.

‘I won.’ Summy’s breath was ragged, blowing out of his fat gob, like a crimson balloon.

‘No you never.’ Phil watched him having another Spazi Atchoo-Atchoo sneezing fit. He just shook his head and felt sorry for Summy in the way prescribed by the Commando comic book, Geneva rules of convention, which stated quite clearly, that cheats and Achtung-Achtung Germans never win. He patted him on the back sympathetically.

Rab and Bill were miles behind. They strolled, passing a fag back and forth between them, ignoring the black Hiroshama cloud of smoke behind them and the threat of getting lifted for attempting to burn down a sweet shop, which no judge could ignore, because it sounded the meanest kind of crime, that would have Scottish grannies in an uproar rattling their teeth and copies of Radio Times T.V. listings. They ignored the enormity of it all; the threat of spending the rest of their natural lives in damp dark police cells listening to themselves crying and saying it was all a gigantic mistake; turning supergrass and shopping their only friends and having long conversations, like Robert the Bruce, with the solitary spider in their cell about where it all went wrong.

Summy slumped to the ground and wedged himself in between the lamppost and the electricity box. His body adopted the triangular, rock like safety position, used when on a barren hill and there was lightning in the sky. He was partially hidden from the road and pavement. But it wasn’t enough. He had been first to spot the fact that his life had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Fuck!’ he muttered with his head in his hands.

A lone figure bounced of lampposts and hedge in his way up Second Avenue. Mr Summerville started his shouty Elvis personification, ‘you ain’t nothing but a hound dog,’ his arms shooting out suddenly and helping his mouth wail, fingers almost knocking his specs off his nose.

‘There’s my dad’. Summy couldn’t make himself any smaller behind the lamppost.

Phil and Wendy grinned at each other. Everybody liked Mr Summeville, but no sane person, even under the duress of Chinese burns ripping their skin off, would admit to liking his or her own dad. They were all the same, unable to adapt to new technology, holding the phone at arm’s length and shouting down it as if it was a set of bars and they were talking through them, not to their mate, but to some new kind of animal at the other end of the zoo. Dads panicked on the phone, tapping their feet as if it worked by pedal power, until they got off.

Todger had been sitting chewing grass on the half moon sitting area that helped split the street, but he bounded up to Mr Summerville because he smelt of fag smoke and booze and that pointed in the general direction of food. He barked as his feet hopefully.

Summy avoided looking at his dad, in the half chance he and his clinking Whyte and Mackay bottles and cans of McEwans Pale Ale would melt away. There was every chance that would happen, because he was wearing his long tweed old man’s coat. It was the kind of coat no normal person, not even a dead man would wear to his funeral. It was on par with goatee beards. Even if he were in the Siberian Tundra Summy wouldn’t have put it on his back. Even if his pecker had threatened to fall off, he’d have waited to skin a passing Polar bear. Mr Summerville swayed a bit, but kept patting the pockets on his coat fondly. That’s where he kept his house keys. It also kept the rain off, even in a dazzling clear blue sky. And when he stuck his hands in his pockets, the way he did coming up Second Avenue, then the tweed ensemble would shuggle him from side to side and, like an old friend, find him the way home.

‘Oh. It’s you.’ Mr Summerville peered at his son sitting on the ‘electricity can kill you’ box with some distaste. But he quickly perked up since he saw that the lad had company. ‘Is that your wee pals?’

‘Have you been drinking Da?’

Summy had never been a boy that believed in the empirical evidence of his own eyes. When he was younger, and played at toy soldiers with plastic figures with Phil in front of the two bar electric fire rug frontier, he always kept something back. So when Phil’s plastic cowboys da, da, dat-ed all his plastic Indians, a plastic sniper would start firing from his ginger hair, or a plastic Indian looking very like a green Japanese infantry man would turn up in the Indian camp with a bazooka, wiping all the circling cowboys out. ‘That’s Geranimo,’ he’d explain, with a shake of his head that Phil came to recognize.

But Summy’s dad was an old hand at the game. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘And is this all your wee pals?’

Bill and Rab had got to the electricity box and joined the others. They smiled back at him, because drunk people always say the same thing twice, that’s why they always have so much to say and Mr Summerville was one of the best, because instead of standing around gawping when he ran out of things to say he just dug deep into his coat pocket and handed out money. Usually it was 10p each, but once he’d even handed Bill 50p!

Right on cue he stood trying to figure out how much he had cupped in his hand. He swayed from side to side and even Elvis couldn’t help him count it. It was all brown penny and two-penny bits, some sixpences, a couple of shillings, some ten pences, but hidden away there were other coins. ‘San-Fre-Ann’ he flung the coins up in the air.

Todger barked as they bounced but he was shoved and hauled aside as Wendy nipped in and started picking up pennies and two pennies. She pushed at Summy’s leg. His foot was on a silver coin, trying to protect it. Bill was scooping up coins and putting them in his pocket. Rab was almost crawling along the pavement. Then it was finished and they were each counting coins, carefully nursed in the fingers, against their chest, avoiding eye contact until the count was finished.

‘57p.’ Wendy looked at Rab to see how much he’d got.

‘41p.’ He was a bit downcast. Only someone getting less would cheer him up.

‘77p.’ Phil was beaming.

‘21p.’ Summy had been more concerned with keeping an eye on his old man than collecting coins.

‘Thanks Mr Summerville,’ said Wendy.

‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks.’

Mr Summerville was overcome with warmth and affection for the whole younger generation. He searched his pockets for more coins, but found none. Summy’s fingers scrunched up on his coat, pulling him away from his new young friends. ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’ He roughly pulled away from Summy. ‘What about you?’ he said to Phil in a jocular tone, ‘are you whinching?’

Phil didn’t know what way to look. One minute he’d been normal, the next he’d been picked upon, but he was used to it. His face, however, wasn’t and went solar flare red and his feet felt stuck to the pavement like moon boots. Whinching was an old folk past-time, the equivalent of snogging, or kissing. It was like two giant cranes knocking into each other, locking lips and trying to pull the other over. It was obscene. The only thing worse than that was being asked if he was ‘courting’. That was something somebody like Henry VIII did. His auntie Alice, everybody and his granny, all seemed keen to ask him the same question. They’d all be sitting on the couch and there’d be a herd movement and all their necks would turn and look at him. His sisters would be giggling in the background. He’d get hotter and redder than a Red Dwarf, brighter than magma and even though he’d dissolve into a puddle of embarrassment he’d have to shame- faced mumble something, even if it was a simple ‘yes,’ or ‘no’, because they were already cackling among themselves, ahead of him and his life. Their need for teenage spots, break-ups and door slamming went undiluted, but Phil had hoped he’d have been safe from all that with his mates.

‘What about you?’ Mr Summerville was talking to Rab, so Summy could relax, ‘you look as if you should be whinching.’

‘I’m seeing somebody.’ Rab puffed out his Wrangler jacket, and nodded, using the formal language of the elders to try and disguise the fact that he was lying and only a drunk would believe him.

Mr Summerville turned to look at Wendy, his carry-out bag banging against his knee as he studied her, his face going through a multitude of emotions, until he got the words right. ‘Na son. You’re not quite ready for it yet.’

Then he looked at Bill and back at Wendy. ‘You two.’ He spoke as if he knew them well. ‘You two.’ He smiled and waved his finger at them as if they were infants. ‘Are you two brothers?’

Summy pulled at his arm, away from his friends and mouthed at them in a language drunk people didn’t understand: ‘I’ll get him up the road.’

‘I’ll get myself up the road,’ roared Mr Summerville pulling away from his son’s grip.