Ugly Puggly 71

Rain bounced off pavements and roads, but it had mostly stopped when I caught up with Ugly Puggly. I didn’t have a jacket on and was drookit and shivering. He headed towards his house. I caught up with him just when he’d turned the corner and past the parking bay, where every householder tried to squeeze in more than their fair share of cars. Some were double-parked.

Through the windscreen of a shiny Mercedes, a pair of bleary eyes opened and shut like the lens of an old-fashioned Kodak camera. Jeff tried to open up the window to say something. His lips twitched, but he opened the door and staggered out. He’d been put in an aging machine and fast-forwarded twenty years. His once slick hair could no longer muster enough follicles to cover the dam of his shiny bald spot. He’d shrunk into his suit his breath was reeking of enough booze to bend his steps into a marionette’s doll bobbling along in wee steps, before someone up above jerked on the line.

‘Guess whit?’ he asked.  

‘Yer drunk?’  

‘Nah, I’m jist,’ bumping into my chest with his head down, he bounced back as if one of us had failed to notice his bleary-eyed disbelief. ‘Yer deid—I came to warn yeh.’  

Ugly Puggly ran his fingers through his damp hair. ‘I guess I’m deid tae,’ he humoured him, adding a lightness to his voice.

Jeff stared at him and his reply made me smile. ‘You got any smokes?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Ugly Puggly grinned. ‘Neither dae you.’

‘That’s right asshole.’ He stepped close enough to almost trip on my toes. ‘Who ur you, again?’

‘I’m naebody.’

‘Too fuckin right,’ he laughed. ‘Yer naebody and yer deid and yeh don’t even know it. They’re gonnae bury yeh deep enough so naebody will find yeh. No even Lassie and Flipper combined would be able to find yeh on a sunny day wae a fish in yer tail.’

I played along, but my voice trembled. ‘I know.’ I disguised it with a cheeky grin.  

His head turned like a squeaky gate and he stared at Ugly Puggly, his jaw working and trying to catch up with his thoughts. ‘Yer even deider.’ His arm waved up and down. ‘Poof—and yer gone.’

I should have known there was no point talking to a drunk man, but I tried anyway it was in the AA handbook, how to tame drunks. ‘Nae need for that.’   

‘I came to warn yeh,’ he cried. ‘That’s us even.’

‘Cheers pal.’

‘I’m no yer pal. Yer jist a fuckin blarin idiot.’ His hand and wrist waved me away although I’d kept my distance. He glowered at Ugly Pubbly and growled and rocked like a mother holding a colicky baby, before falling sideways and finding there was a car door. By careful measurements and hand-over-hand adjustments, he found out the door was attached to a car and he had the key held up at his nose.

An urge seized me to take the car keys off him. But some of my best friends were drunk drivers. And if you couldn’t beat them, I often joined them. We often used the weather as an excuse. It was too wet, too dry, too good a day to waste. The place we were going was too far. And it was too late to do anything differently. Kids really should be in their beds when it was this dark. I’d run through all the excuses in my head, like a Woolworth mix-‘n’-max.

His Mercedes reversed out of the bay in a perfect half circle. When he switched the car headlights on he’d no longer be invisible and as he gunned along Singers Road he’d nothing much to worry about but stationary objects such as lampposts and parked cars. The Old Folk’s home was surrounded by a firm iron-wrought fence that let cats through to hunt for mice and rats but kept out stray cars. We listened to the distant growl of his engine disappear into the ether.

Ugly Puggly’s shrug said it all and he had insider knowledge of mental-health problems His diagnosis was, ‘He’s oot his tree.’   

‘Aye,’ I agreed. ‘But yer no the wan they’re gonnae nail yer hauns and feet tae the floor, like yon Jimmy Boyle. And laugh when they’re daeing it.’

Ugly Puggly’s lips puckered. ‘I hink yer gettin a bit mixed up. It’s me they want tae nail to the floor.’

‘Whatever,’ I replied, before admitting, ‘I don’t know where that came fae? Must be paranoid or somethin. Everybody jist want their pound of flesh.’

A guy walking a wee rat-like dog with bat ears passed us. He a hat pulled low and his collar was up so we couldn’t see his face. If I’d a dog like that I’d have been hiding too.

‘Merchant of Venice,’ Ugly Puggly muttered.

‘Whit?’

‘That’s where yeh get the notion of a pound of flesh. A Jewish merchant demanding payment. The less is more rule.’

‘I still don’t have a Scooby whit yer talkin about.’

He acted surprised. ‘Well, it was a risque joke, wont it? A pound of flesh was yer tadger. But you couldn’t say cock, even in Elizabethan England, where men dressed up a women, and the leadin man fell in love with a beautiful boy—who turned oot to be a woman, after aw—wae such unfailing regularity it was like waitin for the Auchenshuggle bus.’

The rain started again and I stepped around him, heading towards his door. Part of me was listening out for the squeaking of the windmill, but we’d shut that down.

He caught up with me and kept ranting on.

‘Tarzan always had to wear some kind of loincloth tae avoid censor. It was said that Johnny Weissmuller had such a big cock he was always tryin tae fling it intae wan Jane after another. If you know whit I mean?’

‘Nah,’ I sighed. ‘Jist get the keys and open the door. Every pub I drank in had a resident Tarzan. Some of the busier pubs had three Tarzans, aw workin shifts: Backshift Tarzan for the lounge-bar. Nightshift Tarzan, for the good-time girls that had lost their way. And Alky Tarzan that couldnae find his cock and had a bad case of the jitters and thought a crocodile might have bitten it aff. I’m fucked if yeh can teach me anythin about Tarzan.’

He looked up at the living-room window. Like me he was on edge, checking to see if lights were on, when there was no electricity. Putting the key in the lock, we both stepped back when he pushed open the door. The same old musty smell reassured us.

Ugly Puggly patted my arm. ‘They dressed Jesus up at Tarzan.’

‘Who?’

‘The church. They could put a crown of thorns on his heid. Nail his hauns and feet tae a lump of wood. Put a big lance through his side. They might even have admitted to being a Jew, but no a circumcised Jew. They didn’t have the ba’s to give Jesus a tadger. But no self-respecting Roman would huv dressed somebody they were gonnae nail tae a cross. They came intae the world naked as a virgin birth and went oot of the world the same way. That wiz the Roman way.

Ready to bolt, I looked into the darkness of the lobby and listened for anything untoward, waiting for someone to spring out of the darkness. ‘Who the fuck cares about aw that shite?’