Ugly Puggly 10

I used to go to my local, three or four times a week.  I caught the odd cry of ‘Hi, Jim,’ but that was from old timers like Jock. He didn’t wait for a ‘hallo’ before he was ordering a pint of heavy for me. A lager-shandy for himself.

‘Cheers,’ I sucked in my breath and looked about. Heard men shouting the odds as they clacked dominoes at the back tables.

‘Here’s tae the old yins.’ Jock was getting a dig at me, squinting sideways, and licking the foam off the top of the glass. He was thin as flex of cord, wee and tanned, his hair still bottle black. His speech started sliding, like his false teeth, when he was drunk, but he liked to think he’d made something of himself because he got a job as a college lecturer. I reminded him he was still just a jumped-up carpet fitter that used to bully Ugly Puggly at school.  

 There was a lounge in The Drop Inn, but that was for women, or guys that wanted to play the puggy machine beside the women’s toilet in peace A couple of pints, a laugh with the boys, coins around the pool table and every player a pool shark. Every dart player a Jocky Wilson lookalike, or old guys that kept themselves spick, swept back grey hair, light flannels and neatly pressed trousers and shiny black shoes. In winter time, long thick coats you could hang your wife on.  

I sipped my pint, thinking I didn’t need a jacket then, and if I did it was denim, plenty of pockets for my fags and house keys and loose change, and staggered home cured like a fish, peeled off clothes reeking of drink and fag smoke.

‘You watch the fitba this week?’ Jock asked.

We huddled at the corner of the bar, looking out into the busy road growing dark and less busy and talking about the game. Conversation in dribs and drabs, and settled into ourselves. Round for round we went until our bodies slackened and out tongues found something more to say. The jukebox was overly loud. I was always saying that, but just more as I got older. Coldplay, Clocks when wee Ellen came in.

I didn’t see her at first, just noticed the big, sleekit grin on Jock’s face. Agnes’s elder sister. If Prince Charming had turned up with a glass slipper, her feet wouldn’t have fitted, and her face wouldn’t have fitted even less. She was the pumpkin with bad hair, the good fairy could do nothing with and stood fizzing, small, stocky and hard at my elbow.

‘The cancer,’ she screamed at me in a husky voice ‘She’s got the cancer, cause of you.’

My reply was quiet, ‘What kind?’

The truth about Aggie settling on me like a bad pint that gave me the shivers and boak.

She screamed even louder, ‘THE CANCER’.  She picked up a pint from the counter and poured it over my head. That seemed to satisfy her sense of fairness. Some guys even looked up from their phones as she stormed out. Clocks ended in a whine out.

Jock guided me by the elbow to a seat near the door. Attempted a dust-laden joke about women, and went back to the bar to order more drink, because one had accidentally been spilled on my head. Gave me time to get my breath back and to clean myself up as best I could. But I ghosted out the door, when his back was turned. My mind flittering from one thing to another.

Sleep-walking across the road, I kept to the back lanes, weaving between bins and burst black bags, with paper plates being blown about in the wind and rain. I walked to be alone and was alone because I walked. Cutting through a hole in the fence at the industrial estate, my trainers wet and muddy on overgrown land. Tufts of grass, bushes and even trees sunk their roots into the factory grounds that churned out Asbestos. Sheet after sheet, in their hundreds of thousands. Clyde-built. Great for insulation. Non-flammable. You could cut and shape it with a rusty saw. Water ran off it. Cheap as men, women and children’s unmarked graves. Every ships just a number on the board, until launch time. Then it was given a name. The three Queens, being world renowned. Clydebuilt.

The crane was lit up, a beacon for commercialism that never came. Built a college and square and christened it John Brown’s in a backwater which used to ring with hammering over the water. Working men, grew wings and, up hundreds of feet in the air, looked out over the unchanged splash of land opposite. Scrub and farmland until they levelled the fields and made an airport. Snow, sunshine and rain taken in their stride.

I kept to the Clyde shore and let the wind rip through me. Listening for the scuffling of small wee things I crept up on with my tramping feet. And in the moonlight looking for the changes in the ripples of the water. Looking for something. A familiar pattern. Something I could take home. The water and land would be here after I died. I knew that. After Agnes died.

All the tiredness wasn’t in my feet, but in my head. I kept to the Clyde even as it wandered its way through Glasgow City Centre and out at Glasgow Green. Somebody spoke to me, but I kept walking. I melted into the path ahead. Agnes was with me and I was talking to her, but without speaking. And then I stopped. The tiredness welled up and I sat down on a bench by the side of the path, a huddle of building beside it, and closed my eyes. I’d have to see her.

Shivering, I felt in my pockets for money. I didn’t use phones, but cash was still king. I wandered out to the nearest road, searching for a taxi or even a late-night bus. A neon sign marked out a kebab-shop and I was suddenly famished. Ellen’s dramatics. My own stumbling and tears. They were of the same stuff. And all gone, gone, gone.