joie de vivre

I was first up, flung some dampish clothes on my chittering frame. Wet outside, but not inside the tent. Wife still sleeping. Wains out cold. I’d no socks, stuck on a pair of working boots unlaced to keep my feet dry. I planned another hour of shut-eye before leaving for work. I’d dug a hole the day before to use as a latrine. Some dirty buggers didn’t bother. Shat where they stood. But I remember my old Ma, holding me on the edge of the pavement at the L of Kilbowie Road and Dumbarton Road where that fancy shop Debenhams had a branch on the corner. Wee white bum a hanging basket, I was trying to squirt a shit, but it wouldn’t come. Then it did. Thought I was a big boy, achieved something.

‘Best leave it in the gutter, where’ll wash away with the rain,’ Ma said.

On the slope of the stink, near the railway tracks at Singers Road, I trod on a shit, but it was wrapped in a black plastic bag. That riled me. The way some folk scooped up their shit, but didn’t put it in the proper receptacle. A bin for human waste was just over the bridge, at the canal. There was the usual talk of DNA tests and prosecutions. But if the council did its bit and emptied it now and again there wouldn’t be so many flies and punters wouldn’t fling their sacks in the canal.

I’d a good spot for shitting, behind a bush. Rhododendron. Great cover and it wasn’t jaggy, even offered a bit of protection from the wind and rain. Used to be swampland so the soil a tad watery, but I’d set up the plank (borrowed from a building site) on two bricks to balance over. The boys danced their pink arses round the bush until we backfill and picked a new spot nearby. But it wasn’t easy. All the good spots were already shit in.  

Something like a bird screeched. I breenged down the slope, almost slipping, gorge rising even higher in my throat. I was ready to trepan whatever dirty bastard thought he could shit in our hole and get away with it. But it was an old man, shirt and tie, boiler suit unbuttoned, scrawny body laid bare. His arse had fallen off the plank and he’d fell backwards, a soft oily landing in his own watery waste. Even with the wind and rain beginning to whip he stunk worse than a bloated plague rat. He could have been anything between fifty-to-ninety years old. The screech from his mouth was enough to wake the weans, as the slow-motion, knee-splaying parody tried to right himself. ‘Can you no help me son?’  He peered at me with grey eyes and held his hand out in lamentation. ‘Is that you son? Is that you Daniel?’

I wasn’t going to grab that hand, but I held out a copy of The Sun, quality bog roll in anybody’s language, for him to grasp. And with a groan, he found purchase and stood before me in all his glory. He quickly buttoned himself into the body of his boiler suit and adjusted his tie. His boots were worming, a toe poking out.

‘Havenae got a fag son, have you?’

Shook my head. ‘Nah, don’t smoke.’

He gave a wee stagger and I held him by the elbow as he looked as if he was going to have a stroke and fall over.

‘Sorry, son, sometimes I get the shits and need to go, when I’ve just been. It’s hell. Hell on earth.’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘That’s a shame.’

‘Your old man was the salt of the earth you know.’

His voice had a fervent ring and I didn’t stop him, or caution him, my Da was more a desolation, a salt to earth.

‘And your mother! Whit a great wee woman she was.’ He cocked his head to look up at me. ‘You’re just like her. You havenae got a fag, have yeh?’

‘Nah, I don’t smoke.’

‘Aye, old habits die hard.’

A rumble in my stomach and I thought I’d have to go in front of him. ‘No, about time you were moving on, old fellow.’ Nodded my head in the general direction of the tarmac road. Other folk were beginning to stir, heads going from side to side, looking for likely spots to shit.

‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘I remember when I used to walk down Kilbowie Road and I’d see the QE2 rising above the tenements. I was just a boy and I hated the noise and the cold and the hard work, but what I’d give for it now. At least you could nip away and park your arse for a few minutes in a stall.’

‘But all that runoff into the Clyde. Wasn’t good for the water.’

‘Whit dae you know?’ He was turning nasty on me.

I didn’t have time for it, but tried to pacify him. ‘Look, old man, some people had houses with toilets in them and all the works. And what did they dae? Vandalised them. Ran them into the ground. Didn’t know how to live as civilised beings. Think of it, all those hundreds of thousands of miles of pipes, all going to waste.’ I sniffed. ‘And anway, it’s a well-known fact that it’s healthier for you, to go outside. You and your children build up immunity to all manner of things.’ He didn’t seem convinced. ‘And think of the smell. When you’re outside, you can empty your guts and the wind takes it away and you’re feeding the soil, when you cover over your shit. It’s organic. All natural.’

I shooed him away.

‘You’ve been listening too much to the googlebox,’ he muttered, shifting his feet and stumbling away. ‘If you believe that shite, you’ll believe anything. In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit, right enough. Didn’t think I’d be meeting wan at my age. But there you go.’