Every Day Free

The Asian taxi driver sat with the engine running, a half-full bottle of Irn Bru wedged upside down in a loop near the door, sloshing from one fare to the next, ready to use as a club.

‘Whit’s the matter with this door?’ The handlebars on Sammy’s mountain bike bucked and sheared, wouldn’t let him out of the taxi.

The more he pushed and pulled and shoved the bike, the redder his face got, till it reached a purple pitch around unshaven stubbly cheeks and jowls. The passenger had with a nose that drifted leftwards and eyes like a bloodhound. He filled the back cage of the cab and stained the seats with the unwashed odours of cheap deodorant and forgotten fags. He was wearing a nylon blue-shellsuit with the logo RFC, the uniform that younger kids wore when patrolling the streets. The engine was left running as the driver stepped out the door and danced around a puddle in the smirry rain as he lifted the front wheel of the bike out, and Sammy still attached to it, popped out behind the back wheel.

‘Whit’s the damage?’ Sammy squinted through the half-open window at the meter as he was speaking.

The taxi driver slid back into the safety of the front seat. ‘Four-eighty,’ he said in a clipped tone.

Sammy was all pockets.  He eventually paid the driver and the mountain bike bucked one last time and slid down his leg as he collected his twenty pence change. The taxi rattled along the road away from him. He used the front wheel of the bike to nudge open the gate. The Council had taken the hedges away, the hedges they used to jump over when they were younger doing the Grand National and replaced them with the metal teeth of a fence. Danny, his younger brother, was peeking out the curtains at him.

Sammy was already doing an inventory in his head of how much the house would be worth. His way of thinking was three bedrooms, big back and front garden. Fair sized living room, none of these wee boxes they built nowadays. Ex-Council house, when they did things right. Give you a bit of space to grow. He came up with a figure. £125 000. Give or take a few thousand and his youngest brother Ped already owed him over six grand.  That would come out of his cut when they sold. Forty-grand each. His wife Mary had already began spending it.

Danny was holding the front door open. He was smaller than Sammy, and liked to remind his older brother that he had more hair, which he spiked up with gel. Clean shaven, he liked to wear pressed trousers and keep himself fit, thought of himself as something of a businessman and a ladies’ man. His wife Cheryl had another word for it. She had a whole string of words and a good left hook. And she had all the connections.  

‘Whit’s with the bike? Danny was grinning, making a game out of it.

‘Mary wants us to get fit.’ Sammy ignored him for a few seconds, squaring the bike against the alcove at the front door, underneath a picture of Queen Elizabeth II. They had joked, when they were younger, that’s who their mum thought she was with her airs and fancy graces. That was before she got cancer. Before she died.

Danny shrugged. ‘Wouldnae dae you any harm.’

‘Where’s Ped?’ Sammy didn’t wait for an answer, scooting up the hall and into the living room. 

Ped looked up at Sammy when he came in. The telly was on, a kid’s programme, Bagpuss.  It offended him that Ped was watching that shite. If any of them should be mourning it should be him. Da has called him The Playboy. Allowed him to grow his hair long. The best clobber when he went to school. For God sake, Da never laid a finger on him.

‘Where did they put the old cunt?’ Sammy asked Ped. 

‘He’s in the back room.’ Ped stood up as if he was going to show him the way, his eyes fixed on the telly. ‘I never had enough money to buy a carry-oot.’

Sammy and Danny exchanged a look and shrugged in the same way. They stepped aside to let Ped pass them.

‘Don’t suppose anybody’s got a fag?’ Ped stood with his hand on the living-room door.

‘Nane of us smoke,’ said Danny.

‘Well, I was just asking,’ said Ped.

They followed him up the hall. Sammy was beeling. He knew the little cunt was having a dig at him stopping and starting again.

They stood in a knot outside the room door looking in at the casket propped up on two trestles. The curtains were closed, the light on, the double bed made up, never to be slept in again, and the room smelled like a municipal toilet that had just been cleaned and disinfected.

‘Might as well take a look.’ Sammy stepped into the room. He imagined spitting in the old cunt’s face, but the person in the box was someone smaller, all the agitation gone, someone he didn’t recognise. He remembered Da hushing him on the back lane and taking him to see the singing bush. When they got close enough all the sparrows in it stopped singing. When they stepped away, they started again. Sammy had clattered back and forward back and forward back and forward. It was a piece of magic, the sky coming down to play and Da had stood grinning at him.

‘One of they guys with dreadlocks came by,’ said Ped.

‘Dreadlocks?’ said Danny.

He looked at Sammy who had squeezed his lips together as if playing the trombone, shaking his head, unable to fathom what he meant.

‘Aye, one of those wee guys that’ll no’ meet your eyes. He said he was here to say Kaddish.’ He looked from one brother to the other. ‘I didnae know Da was Jewish.’

‘The beatings the bastard gave us I thought he was in the SS,’ said Sammy.

‘The wee guy said you cannae leave Da alone. Somebody’ll need to sit with him all night.’ Ped’s face settled like a pond that a stone had been thrown into. An expression both brothers knew all too well. They waited for the inevitable excuse.

‘I would, but with Donna, being pregnant...’

‘I would as well, but I couldnae stand him,’ said Sammy.

‘I cannae.’ Danny didn’t bother explaining. ‘Doesnae matter anyway. We don’t believe in all that shite.’

‘But mum would have wanted us too,’ said Ped.

It was like a blow to Sammy’s stomach. Ped had just been a baby when she died, but he remembered. His pouchy eyes filled up and he snorted, getting mad again. ‘I’m no daeing it and that’s it.’ He glowered at one brother, then the other.

‘Naebody said you should big man.’ Danny patted his arm and the touch of warmth seemed to deflate him, casting hunchback shadows around the room, as his shoulders rounded.

‘We’ll get somebody from the pub to sit with him,’ said Sammy, swelling up like a toad. ‘Go on. Phone a taxi.’ He smacked Ped on the chest.

‘But we don’t know any Jews,’ said Ped.

‘You didnae say he had to be Jewish. It could be a fuckin’ Paki, for all we care.’

Ped was the one with all the big ideas and the one with a new-fangled mobile phone. He’d left it sitting on the mantelpiece in the living room.

Sammy pulled out an unopened packet of twenty Regal and opening them, gave Ped one and passed him his lighter. They stood for a minute blowing smoke over the coffin.

In the pub Sammy pulled out a wad of cash and bought the first round. Danny had a quick look round the pub, for anybody that looked vaguely Jewish. He hit on a guy sitting alone in the corner, wedged in beside the Fruit Machine, a grey mane of hair, thin and bent as a blade of grass, nursing a whisky and water.

‘Ask him whit school he went to,’ said Ped.

‘Fuck off,’ said Danny, taking a glass of whisky and a pint of heavy over to the table where the old man was sitting.

Sammy and Ped supped their pints, waiting for Danny to come back. They had another.

Danny nodded to them as he approached the bar. Their shoulders slackened and they knew from the way he strutted he’d cut a deal. They made a space between them to hear him out.

Danny held his finger up, taking his time, ordering another round, letting Sammy pay, before he said anything. ‘I gave him my set of keys for the house. I’ve wrote the address down and he’ll get a taxi up there and stay overnight.’ A fizz of beer grew on his top lip, he licked it away.

‘Whit’s the catch?’ asked Sammy.

‘Fifty quid, six cans of Tennent’s and a half bottle.’ 

‘Fuck off,’ said Sammy. ‘He’s no even daeing anything. All he’s doin’ is sitting. You could’ve given him a tenner and a bottle of Eldorardo.’

‘Is he even Jewish?’ asked Ped.

‘Said he is,’ said Danny. ‘And I’m no’ goin’ into the toilets and takin’ a sneaky look at his cock. That’s no’ my game. You can if you want to.’

‘Nah, I’ll gee it a miss,’ said Ped, shaking his head and looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar.

The brothers were the last to leave the pub. Because of their grievous loss, and because Harry the barman knew Sammy was carrying a few quid, he let them stay a few hours after the pub had emptied. They stood outside in the rain waiting for a taxi to pick them up.

‘I’ve no’ got my phone or I’d have phone us one,’ said Ped. He slumped with a shoulder against the outside wall, doing a pish outside the side door they had just come out of.

‘We’ll drop you off,’ said Sammy, holding himself upright, scanning up and down the road for headlights and the sign of a taxi. Ped lived only two streets away from their Da’s house and he figured it would be easier that way.  

When they got to their Da’s house Ped couldn’t find his house keys, any keys, or even his pockets, and Danny insisted he needed to use the toilet. Sammy asked the taxi driver to wait. He clocked the meter before they went, in case the driver got any fancy ideas about doing them.

Sammy used his set of keys to get into the house. Danny pushed past him, scuttling up the hall and into the toilet.  Ped staggered towards the living room to retrieve his phone.

Sammy looked into the room where the coffin was. A stiff legged chair was set up beside it and an empty can lay on its side beneath the coffin. His squarish head jabbed forward, searching for the old man they’d paid to sit with the coffin. He somehow expected him to pop up from some hiding place such as under the bed. He tracked back down the hall, meeting Danny coming out of the toilet and pulling up his zip.

Ped giggling, held his hand up and shushed them when they came into the living room. The old man was sitting sparked out, the empty carry-oot back at his feet and two bars from the electric fire heating his legs and making the room stiff with the smell of old men.

‘Fucking old cunt!’ Sammy picked up the phone from the mantelpiece and smashed it down on the old man’s head. He slumped sideways, making no sound, blood and a clear fluid merging and staining the arm rest.

‘You’ve broke my phone. Ya stupid cunt,’ said Ped.

‘I think you’ve killed him,’ said Danny.

‘Aye, I think I have,’ replied Sammy and he’d never felt more sober.