Sweaty

Sweaty was jumpy. He reached for a wrench. Rubbed grit from the window and squinted his one good eye to look through plastic into the yard. Neither tall, nor slim, well-spoken or polite. Twenty years earlier, he would have been taken in by the police for questioning about The Bible John murders because he’d his reddish-brown hair and a side-shed. But being a baby then gave him an alibi. His crimes were more the usual grab-bag. He’d broken into lockups and taken something he shouldn’t.  

McGinlay’s Yard was now piled high as the canal embankment with scraped cars and tyres. Everything was paid in cash. Near the gate, an oil drum burnt plastic wire for the copper content and other useless papers and parts were added to the smoke plumes. Sweaty knew what was coming. His body ricocheted around the cabin like a dum-dum bullet. Balanced between dead and dread and a table filled with oil-stained documents nobody would read, chairs and floors held together with gaffer tape. He squeezed his face against the window again.

The sun was lower than his forehead. Bloodshot clouds threatened earthbound thunderstorms. A gunshot sound of a motorbike and pannier as it hurtled through the tunnel.

Something was coming. Something big. The yard dog—son of the son of Eat Yeh—yelped and whined and ran to the canal-end of the yard. It paddled and ducked under a hole in the fence some enterprising Trafalgar Street kids had made.

Lainey’s hair wasn’t just blonde. It was a star falling out of the sky with comets trailing behind it. Sputniks went off course and experienced gravitational wobbles. The QE2’s sister ship ran aground in  Damuir Canal. An invasion of big boats and ocean liners were likewise sucked into the Dalmiur Triangle. All because Lainey had stood beside Julie outside the Drop Inn and their hair had been mistaken for a light-house on the starboard side.

Sweaty was dead by that time. Natural causes they said. But there was a stink somewhere.

During the Covid years, Lainey’s hair went into what physicist’s calls ‘soft-glow’ as near melt-down as it’s possible to get without her going to an ice-cream van and swearing loudly about paying two-fucking-quid for a cone.

No wonder her hair got angrier and angrier at the threat of it being nationalised. Wee Johnny and other kids in the street were conducting ghost tours. Directing Japanese, German and Scandinavian tourists towards it and buying bottles of Buckfast with the proceeds. The threat of becoming a public-order issue made the Scottish government act and issued tourists with thick gloves and warnings not to feed the natives drink.

A team of experts drafted from the Drop Inn opted for deep geological repositories as a long-term solution. International cooperation and continuous monitoring and surveillance were critical to ensuring long-term safety.

In the short-term, Sweaty’s best jumper would be used as a dampener and binding agent to prevent critical mass. Assembled experts, who knew all the dodges, were in consensus more drink was needed from the bar or afar. And Lainey would still receive Housing Benefit in the interregnum period. But she was in deep shit— per standard government (JSA) regulations regarding the unemployed—she had signed a form and agreed to be buried for ten-thousand years. They concurred, after two members of the quorum absconded to make travel arrangements, deep caves were no worse than Rwanda, especially if they were in Sweden. They would have a two-for-one peroxide party before she went abroad so Lainey could fit in and visit Abba-land with Julie.