benny 3

There was a bit of a scuffle when the pub closed. Nothing serious. Stevie couldn’t even be bothered looking. He was more interested in whether the chippie was still open. It wasnae. But the Kebab shop was. That was just the same, only the chips were those dried oven type things that you would only give to a dog, but couldnae. It was an old joke: the dog was turning on a spit, getting frazzled into Kebab meat by a couple of gas jets that made it smell better than it tasted. He wasn’t after a watercress soufflé, that cured bowel cancer, just enough hot meat to fill the pit of his stomach, clog his arteries and kill him stone dead before the fags did. There wasn’t, understandably, much of a queue, but the service was good, because there were more people behind the counter than on the customer’s side. Just to be on the safe side Stevie got chips and cheese with his Kebab. The cheese made the chips look good and it was only an extra 20p, practically a bargain, but he didn’t really like cheese. He looked at the change in his hands for a few seconds, trying to work out if he’d been cheated, looked at the guy that had given him his food order, as if he was going to say ‘yeh, I cheated you out of a pound coin mate’, but he was as inscrutable as a Chinky, even though he was a Paki. They were all the same. And he couldn’t work out how much he’d given him and how much he’d left and by the time he’d done all that he was half way out the door and forgot where he’d started and the pavement stopped.

Stevie knew that he had to pick himself up off the pavement because that was embarrassing, but as pavements go it was kinda comfy and he had a warm parcel of Kebab meat for a pillow.

‘You better get up off there, or you’ll give lifted.’

Stevie recognized the voice, knew who it was, but didn’t want to look up in case he was right. It was the Dragon Lady, so called because when she was younger her party trick was to breathe smoke through her outsized nostrils. That. And other things. Stevie eye’s picked out the points of her black boots. He didn’t want to look up, or he’d need to talk to her, or more precisely listen. She had the voice of a long playing record set to the speed of a 45, that way she could get in even more information that she needed, desperately to tell anybody with ears.

‘Who stole my Kebab?’ asked Stevie sitting up and looking about him.

‘You’re fucking wearing it, ya half-wit. It wouldnae suprize me if you’ve got concussion. You’re just lucky you landed on that big fat head of yours or you could have been hurt…’

Stevie patted his cheek, not sure if it was blood, or Kebab sauce. He put his fingers in his mouth. It tasted too spicy for blood. In fact he thought it tasted better that way, mashed up and pureed on the pavement.

‘…there’s the police…’ that part of Dragon Lady’s monologue cut through his consciousness.

Stevie lurched up and stood beside his alibi. That way the police might have some pity on him, thinking he was out with his girlfriend for a quiet refreshment and had accidentally stumbled while having a post prandial walk. He didn’t want to have to speak to them because that would defeat the whole purpose of getting pissed and going into the Kebab shop; off the main drag. She leaned into him and patted his hand, as if he was some kind of dog, and she was saying ‘there-there’. Stevie took a deep breath and stepped away from her, figuring it would be better if he just got jailed.

The Dragon Lady was good at rejection. It was written in the stars, with the sign of the bull, with a face like a horse. She was just one of the boys, with the lumpy body of a builder and a range of Paisley pattern golf jumpers that no golfer would wear and a plunging V line that covered two golf ball sized tits. Not that Stevie, or anybody else, had been desperate enough to look in the rough for them, lately.

‘C’mon you’re coming back to mines,’ said the Dragon Lady, ‘I’ve got a couple of cans and a smoke.’

He watched two police come out of their car and put on their hats, as if that made them real police. One of them looked at him. Stevie stared back. He wasn’t going to give the arsehole any satisfaction by looking away. The Dragon Lady pulled at his arm.

‘C’mon,’ she said, but what she was really saying was there was still time to get away.

But Stevie’s Kebabed- dyed hair and face said all that needed to be said. He was as philosophical as the Dragon Lady about all that astrology and I Ching crap. Over the years he had worked his magic and distilled the essence of his philosophy into a swaying cat stance and state of Zen like acceptance: if the bastards were going to jail you; they were going to jail you. Fuck them.

His hands were setting themselves into a position to be shackled and his mouth was twisting into his William Wallace as Mel Gibson as Stevie rant- that would strike the oppressors down: that they may take his county, but they would never take his Freedom. Only, of course, they would, the bastards. And it would be a £30 fine, which was the kind of pain in the arse that a Kebabed William Wallace never had to put up with.

The Dragon Lady pulled at his wrists again. He almost felt himself drifting away from his troubles with the police and into bigger trouble with her. He tried to explain something, but all she said was ‘shut the fuck up’ and started winching the face off him. Even the two police couldn’t watch that. They drifted across Dumbarton Road were there was a full scale riot happening.

‘That was a lucky escape,’ said the Dragon Lady smiling.

Stevie wasn’t so sure. He searched his pockets for his fags. He needed a smoke and time to think about things. But the Dragon Lady had shackled him and was pulling him back to her lair at Elinger Court, one of the places that the Council put drug addicts, alcoholics and people of no fixed abode. Only the latter didn’t want to stay there and Stevie didn’t want to go there, but felt he owed her Big Time.

‘It’s not that I don’t like you,’ Stevie prised his hand away from her grasp, ‘it’s just that I’m engaged.’ He tried to think of somebody that he could be engaged to, but if his eyes were the windows of the soul, he was showing himself to be a fucking liar, or rather, a non fucking liar.

‘I’m not asking to marry you,’ said the Dragon Lady, pulling him along Dumbarton Road like a lost child. She stopped suddenly and faced him. ‘I’m just asking you to come back to my house, for a wee drink and a smoke. Is that such a bad thing?’ she asked.

Her direct approach befuddled Stevie. ‘Nah,’ he said emphatically, glad that was all settled. She really was a great guy. One of his best mates, ever.