grimms15

‘Get up, ya lazy bastard!’ Jaz’s mum Senga shouts at her son. ‘It’s almost twelve, why don’t yeh go out and get a job like aw the rest of them? I need in here, anyway, to clean the room.’

She knocks a few crumbs off the linoleum against the wall and brandishes her brush over him with the veins in her scrawny neck bulging blue, her grey eyes jumping to his face. She is mottled pink as overripe ham from brow to the top of her breasts, and ginger hair suddenly hovers over him. Jaz grips the underside of the blankets as she tries to pull them off the bed. The other four makeshift beds are in disarray and haven’t yet been put away.  A swipe of her hand hits him on the side of the cheek.  ‘Get up and let me get on with the cleaning,’ she screams, spittle spotting his face.

‘Ach, shut up, will yeh.’ Jaz leaps out of bed with only his Y-fronts on and grabs at the brush handle. She is rail thin, in her polyester garb, but she holds on with a clenched-fist determination and a crazed face that amazes him. ‘C’mon Ma,’ he jockeys, ‘you’ll hurt yourself and end up back in the loony bin.’ But his tone has that hardness, his body pumped for action, but he lets go of the brush handle and steps over Pizza  Faces’s bed. On the floor next to his, a clay pot he uses as an ashtray, overflowing with blackend douts, where his brother’s face would usually be, somehow sickening him and reminding him of the fire the night before. ‘I need a pish anyway, put me on some scran.’

He hi-steps over the raft of scrunched up blankets to the window bay, where his shirt, socks and trousers lay heaped on a chair, and because his nose is fresh, he smells smoke on them. His bare feet are cold. He quickly pulls on his clothes, edging the curtains open. He looks out at the street below, the roofs across the road still covered in hoary frost.

His Ma, sneering, scurries sideways round a lop-sided chair into the joined-up strip of linoleum that is the kitchen. He hears her petulant banging about and the wheeze of gas as she sticks the kettle on. He thinks about going into the kitchen for a quick cold-water wash, but it’s took much hassle. Bread, margarine and stewed tea for breakfast holds equally little attraction. ‘I’m no’ wanting tea,’ he shouts, running his fingers though his hair and nipping behind her back into the lobby.

His heart gives a jolt when he checks his coat for fags and there’s none. Then he rakes through the lining of his pockets. But his luck picks up. A stub inside the box of Swann Vesta. Hustling into his coat, he’s got it in his gob and has lit up even before he’s outside on the landing. He cranes his neck to see if the lavvy door is open, and it is. And he just hopes that his luck holds, and somebody has left some scraps of bog roll, even the shiny stuff, or an old newspaper, otherwise he’d need to do settle for a quick morning  pish and hold shitting in until he got to the pub.

The thought that he’d be in the news now, front page, even, cheers him up. But he needs money now and a drink and a shag. The thought of Rab’s bare arse bouncing up and down on that wee thing last night made him splutter and laugh out loud, like a loony. He bites his lip. Feels around his jaw to see if he needs a shave.  His thoughts wander to Karen upstairs, but that mad dog he realises makes it too complicated. If he’d kept the gun, he could simply have shot it, but that was a no-brainer. But he is getting a hard on. The wee thing’s sister wasn’t much older but at least she had a bit of fluff on her fanny, a bit of meat on her bones, the beginning of a pair of tits, stuck to her chest like two golf balls. Tight as the night, he’d made his brother break her in for him before he shot him. He sniffs his fingers and realises he’s been jogging down the stairs,  walking smartly without thinking about direction, or traffic, has crossed the road and was standing outside Maggie Scott’s bar, beside the chippy. As he pushes through the swing of the doors he hopes the boys will be inside because he’s no money.

There is nobody much in. Danny McConnell is half scooped and pestering the barman to give him another pint on tick and he’ll give him the money later. Drew the barman, an older guy that once played professional football, but now walks with a limp, is telling him to fuck off, but in a good-natured way that means he can come back after he’s fucked off and gotten some more money.

‘Just one more pint,’ Danny says in a wheedling voice, and calls him, ‘my good friend,’ hand knitted in prayer, that makes Jaz want to hit him for being such a ponse and pain in the arse.

Godge is already scrambling out of the seat in the corner and up at the bar before he can join him, ordering both of them a drink. Rab is nowhere to be seen.     

Jaz nips into the toilet. At least it has toilet roll. And he’s out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Squinting, somebody Jaz doesn’t know is playing darts at the faraway end of the bar, a glass of whisky in his hand. The pub has that musty smell as if it has sunk into the canal and been pulled out and is waiting to dry. Wainscoted walls tinted the colour of algae and the walls patches of brown, and a modern touuch, with an ashtray nailed to every table. He falls into a seat beside Godge, back close to the walls, window about them, buzz of traffic percolating in, so they can see everybody and not be heard.

Godge is half-cut, his eyes bleary as he looks across at him. And he’s in a hurry to get drunk.  Before Jaz has finished his pint, Godge drinks a whisky, then a half pint of lager and stumbles up to the bar for more. He comes back gabbling on about some Ranger’s player Rangers might sign, despite knowing Jaz has no interest in football. Jaz picks up Godges fags from the table and sticks a Senoir Service in his gob and lights it. He sniffs and tugs at his ear, and takes a deep breathe before speaking. ‘About last night…’ he says, adding to the wealth of fag smoke in the room.

Godge holds one hand up, crocked at the wrist so it flops down, cutting off some thought. ‘I want out,’ he says, almost greeting like a wain, ‘I mean, I didn’t really do anything.’ His head drops to his chest. Then he does, starts crying, like he’s got teary hiccups. Drew the barman has a dishrag in his hand and is cleaning glasses, peers over, and Danny, who is still standing at the bar, turns to see what he is looking at but when he sees who it is, quickly looks away, leaves his empty glass and stumbles out the door.

Jaz grabs Godge by the lapels of his coat, pulling him half way across the table, his half pint of lager falling to the floor.

‘Hi,’ shouts Danny, ‘whit’s your game!’ And he’s lifting the hatch.

Jaz hold his hands up, and reaches into the inside of his coat pocket, ‘it’s already Danny, he’s just drunk, I’ll get him up the road.’  

Danny lets the hatch falls and retreats behind the bar, watching the dart player pitching his darts into cork.

Jaz’s chair scrapes on broken tiles as he pulls it in closer to Godge’s and his head drops so that he is at the same level as his drunken companion.

‘Nah, nah,’ Godge mumbles, ‘I want out. I want out.’

‘Listen ya stupid cunt,’ says Jaz. ‘You were there and you were just involved as the rest of us.’

‘Not, not, not,’ Godge says in a mantra, which changes to, ‘I need another drink’. And he turns with red-rimmed eyes and looks at Jaz. ‘You want another drink?’ He pushes up from the chair without waiting for an answer. Jaz tugs his elbow, pulls him backwards and the chair creaks as he falls back into the seat.

‘I didnae care,’ says Godge, and he sounds soberer with a bit of defiance in his voice and he meets Jaz’s gaze. ‘I’m turnin’ myself in. I didnae dae anything.’

‘Godge, Godge, Godge,’ Jaz takes a swig of lager and flings his arm around his pals necks.

Danny rings the bells behind the bar and shouts, ‘That’s last orders. Last orders at the bar.’

‘Let me tell you something Godge, you give yourself up and the game’s a bogey. You don’t want to be a grass. And the police will roll me and Rab up like an old mat. But think about this pal. I’ll put my hands up and say I did it, I shot that boy, the wee bastard.’ Jaz leans in closer so he can see the sweat on Godge’s forehead rolling down his face. ‘The boys in blue will be delighted with that. Result, they’ll be saying to themselves. Cut and dried. And I’ll make it easy for them.’ He slaps Godge on the back. ‘But I’ll be having  a wee word with Rab first. And we’ll get our stories straight, it was you that raped and killed they two wee lassies and set the house on fire to disguise the fact. You that made that boy shag his ain wee sisters so that it would muddy the waters and make it look that he killed himself with that shotgun. You that did all of these things. And you know whit, the police don’t give a fuck who they get as long as they’ve got a body, anybody. And it will be you caught het. And you know what they dae to nonces in prison, pal.’  He pats his the knee, under the table. ‘Think about that pal.’ And he stand up and pulls an open razor out of his breast pocket and slashes down his left ear to the chin, blood spurting so he has to jump out the way to stop it splashing on the cuff of his coat.

Jaz points down at him, he's holding his cheek together, ‘be warned’.

And on his way out of the pub, the long swagger across empty tables and chairs, made shorter by the shot of adrenalin, he looks across at Danny behind the bar, ‘You didn’t see anything, mate,’ he advises him and pauses, near the swing of the door. He reaches for the razor, bloodied, but once more stored inside breast pocket, the darts player, giving him the eye, but the guy is lucky, because he saves himself with a funny, ‘I’m blind,’ the dart player, says, ‘I cannae even hit double twenty with my nose.’

Jaz lets go of the blade and keeps walking out into Dumbarton Road. Still daylight. He knows he’ll need to catch up with Rab before opening times that night.