The death of Jim Largactil.

About ten of us where sitting in an L-shaped cluster of tables along the back wall of the old upstairs lounge in The Mountblow. That’s nearly a football team, but I’m adaptable capable of playing in goals and up front, modelling myself on Fulchester United’s old-fashioned Billy the Fish. Dirty Black had done the dirty on us, leaving their microphone and drum kit sprawled around their make-do stage at the main door onto Dumbarton Road, tables had been moved, so we couldn’t get into our usual seats facing the big screen. I was tempted to bash out a few numbers, but I’d left my guitar at home. I tried a few notes of The Fields of Athen-- something or other. I don’t usually get beyond that, before I get told to shut up, which is just as well, because that’s the only bit I learned. In any case the mike was switched off and I hadn’t had my first pint yet. Stardom could wait until Monday when I’d have more time to practice my yodelling.

We were watching the two small screens on the walls. One of the small screens was bigger than the other. So technically the stretchy necked screen to my right was a small-big screen and the one above the door was a small-small screen. Celtic were beating Hearts. There was no surprise there. The shock of winning in Moscow hadn’t quite worn off and we were still in a slow motion dream in which Samarras scores a goal every time he shoots and Celtic win the European Cup. And lo and behold, as it says in The Bible, it came to pass. Well, it wasn’t a pass, it was more a scuffed shot that went through the Heart’s keepers legs. That’s the kind of carry-on usually associated with Celtic goalkeepers in Europe, but being one goal up, we weren’t complaining. Well, I was, but that was more in the nature of there being no half-time pies. Laughing Boy had just won the jackpot on the fruit machine which meant he was only £40 down, which, to his way of thinking, put him strategically ahead. The fruit machine didn’t know this, of course, and just kept taking money off him quicker than he put it in. Hearts had started the second half quite well and were causing us the kind of problems Stirling were causing Rangers, but without scoring and without being the bottom of division 3. Laughing Boy ended this reverie in which everything pointed towards Rangers getting relegated from Division 3 by checking his phone. That’s one of the things I never do in company, usually because I can’t find it. Anyway no one phones me, why should they when they’re sitting next to me? I suppose I’m just old fashioned. And since the smoking ban in pubs I’ve tended to drink more to make up for it, even though I don’t smoke. Laughing Boy checks his phone-end of reverie- and tells us Jim Largactil died.

Jim Largctil wasn’t his real name of course. Sometimes it was plain Largactil and sometimes it was Largactil Jim. It was never James. Danny Doc and me sat in the Dropp Inn once and for ages, or until I’d potted at pool, which was much the same thing, asked that very question of what's his name? We asked Jim Welsh, but never did get to the right answer. Largactil answered to any name. Details like that didn’t bother him.

The first time I saw Jim Largactil, probably about twenty years ago, he was drinking in the Dropp Inn. I’d imagine it was the bar. There used to be a bar and lounge, a throwback to the days when couples went in the lounge to fight, fall out with each other and the guy escaped into the smoke bomb of the bar to play pool with his mates. Jim Largactil didn’t have any mates at that time, so we’d a lot in common. He was stood in the corner with his pint, smoking a fag and watching the pool. There were lots of shady guys and shady corners. I’m thinking Brian Thompson and Wullie Dalziel here, but, of course, you had Harry Ballantyne junior and senior. Calum ws still alive. Keegy. Don’t start me on Charlie Mac. Once I think about it there weren’t enough shady corners. You had to go out of the bus stop on the Dumbarton Road and stand waiting for a shady corner to come up. You could tell right away Jim Largactil wasn’t right. But for a guy that wasn’t right he was in the right place, because it was that kind of pub. Elaine ran it like a corner shop that kept running out of things. She’d need to tap the customers to pay for Dial a Keg. Most of the time you were guaranteed your money back. And there wasn’t many bars where the bar maid got more sloshed than the customers, but Fiona handled it well, probably because she was taking so much speed. Sometimes she gave you change and sometimes she give you the right change. Who would argue with a woman like that?

I’d guess Jim would be wearing a check shirt. That’s what I see him in and some kind of baggy jumper. Corduroy blue-green trousers and the kind of sensible shoes a Ranger’s supporter would wear. Jim didn’t bother. His allegiance could be bought. That was the only sensible thing about him. Sometimes he did get a bit of hair growth around the chin, but usually he was clean shaved. He’d a monochrome voice and braying donkey laugh, especially when he beat you at pool and told you, you where shite. Jim Largactil for about ten years was as much the fabric of the pub as jukebox, the pool table and the fruit machines. He lived across the road in a brownstone tenement, but he just used that to sleep in. He’d be first in the door in the morning, helping Agnes with her cleaning and he’d be last out at night. If there was an all- nighter on in the pub he’d a sneaky way of hanging about unseen. He’d a peculiar way of walking, as if a chair was stuck under his arse and he was falling backwards and stumbling forwards trying to outrun it. The strange thing is his teeth. Antipsychotics rot your teeth, but I can’t remember his teeth being rotten. I can, however, remember him getting his new shiny Red Rums.

Jim wasn’t a man to bother you, not unless he was tapping you for a fag, or money. He did give me a line in one of the stories I wrote. He used to sidle up beside you and whisper ‘have you got a fag?’ His hand would go up to his mouth and he’d make a furtive gesture of smoking. I’d always give him the same boring line, which was, ‘I don’t smoke’. He’d just do that donkey laugh at you and say ‘you should fuckin’ well start then!’

The first few weeks Jim was in the pub he was flush with money and part of the Monday club. That’s when he’d pay his debts and splash the cash. By Tuesday or Wednesday he was skint. People would buy him the odd pint, give him a fag. He’d collect glasses. He’d hang about. At Christmas and New Year Agnes Davis took him home. Agnes Pickering took him home. Elaine took him home. Fiona the barmaid was good to him. And he’d a couple of years were he had somewhere to go and something to do, even if it was just hanging about.

Jim was a good looking guy if you were Meta Bell. He might even have pulled one night when he went up the road with her (and Wullie Dalzeil’s cast-off Vicky Grimly, but that doesn’t count) but Jim wasn’t a man to kiss and tell, not unless you bought him a drink and gave him a fag first. But this was all old school and old pub.

When the ‘lounge’ got knocked down and it became a refurbished super- pub Jim didn’t fit in. Initially, he was allowed in, but his tendency to talk to himself under his breath and swear at people he didn’t know, or worse people he did know, meant he was largely excluded. There was no more tic. No more hanging about without money and there was no more home for Jim. He had to go back to the tenement across the road and live off carry-oots and pan-handled compassion.

He got thinner and thinner and you’d meet him wandering the streets. There were rumours that people that had drank in the pub, Ghillie for one, were giving him a hammering, taking his Monday book off him and cashing it. He was taken into hospital about two years ago and ran away, back to his old house in the tenement. The doors were locked. He slept outside covered in shite. Then he disappeared again. Forgotten. I’m not sure what age he was. The clock’s stopped. It doesn’t matter. Samarras is running through on goal.