notes for tomorrow.

My face and body blur into view with the neonatal features of a  melting snowman, something crying and vaguely human. Find a formula. Then milk and bread and things dunked in tea and dropped from a great distance into my mouth. I become a marvel of robustness.

    I’m wheeled about in a black battleship. Everything black. The colour of hearses. And if it wasn’t black it wasn’t a proper colour. But a colour trying to be black, fiddling around the edges of black, like blue or navy, which wasn’t a colour more an imperial ambition, or it was green, white and gold Auchenshuggle bus, and if it was that you better get your fat arse in gear and hurry up and get on with it. Silver chrome handles for bumping its back wagon wheels  on and off buses, up and down pavements and stairs. Stumpty-legged wheels at the front for stability.  Everything fits inside the pram. Messages and milk, go on the bottom tray. Phyllis can safely slide in beside me. There’s even room for Stephen. Jo’s too old, she turns away in disgust, wouldn’t be seen dead in a pram. But that way there’s more room.

Instead of wild animals, cats and dogs, everyone has children instead, to give me somebody to play with. We all live in exactly the same type of house. There’s no room to be snooty. There is room for goldfish, as long as it stays in its plastic bag, not bothering you. If cats and dog could be kept in a plastic bag, not bothering you, can I get one Mum?  The answer to everything begins with no and works it way up  the scree of  maybe and then tumbles back to no.  

What happened to Goldie is a lesson. Lessons are as good for you as porridge. Goldie got drunk and fell down the lavvy pan. Cats and dogs (and horses) are safer on the telly or on the celluloid screen at the ABC minors, where every Saturday we come, but only if we’ve got a shilling. We’re not going without a shilling. That would be robbery. Cats and dogs (and horses, which don’t exist in real life) are always trying to fight through a blizzard and find their way home. Not to our house they don’t.

Birds are great pets. You fling them a bit of bread and they don’t bother you. The wee birds are the best because they’re cocky. They weave in and out and give the big birds a hard time. Pigeons stoat about looking stupid like Laurel and Hardy waiting for the piano to fall. The slower birds wear bibs and  are taken and put on remand in the middle of the duck pond. They need to waddle about and quack to be let out. Seagulls with their black pirate feathers are on the line looting bread and making off with the spoils. You can never keep a seagull because they don’t listen, always yattering on and on.  

We keep pictures of ourselves in a strongbox, hid from view,  in the cupboard in Mum’s room, with the carpet curled up against the door and a rickety table pushed up against it to keep off marauders. You get them out to cheer you up, because it’s the school holidays.  Black and white photos with blues skies, sepia long legs, ice-cream cones, impossible smiles, strange surroundings, and people that look like you.

‘Whose that?’

‘Dunno.’

The best clobber. The worst hair. And hats. People wore hats. Hats made you bald, of course, but only if you were a man. Perms and pigtails. School ties and blazers. Girls with skelly-eyes.

‘Sorry, that’s my sister.’

Every face something new. Weighed down with age. Old men staring the camera, knowing they’re going to die. Smiling. There are gaps in life. But who wants to see the boring bits?