huts first week

Wullie the Pole shouts me into the office. It’s just before three because I’m standing near the door counting the minutes as if I’m Houdini, underwater, wrapped in chains inside a locked cage.  I don’t know what I’ve done wrong now.

‘Here,’ Wullie the Pole slides a brown envelope across the desk towards me.

‘What is it?’

His eyebrows lift. ‘It’s Friday isn’t it?’

‘What happens on a Friday?’

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say Crackerjack, but I’m not sure Wullie the Pole would know what that is. And I suspect he’s working a ruse to make me work late. ‘Dunno,’ I admit.

‘Fine,’ he says, moving the brown envelope back across the desk towards him with his index finger as if he’s made the wrong move at draughts. ‘You’ll not be wanting your pay then?’

My face fires up and I stammer. ‘We don’t get paid, I mean I don’t get paid the first week- a week in lieu.’

‘Aye, but you get a sub on your wages, for all those expenses you had. Everybody gets a sub.’ Wulle the Pole pulls open the desk drawer and flings the brown envelope inside. ‘But if you don’t need it, I’ll let the wages department know.’ He sweeps up his set of keys, looks at the clock – it’s five past – and waves me towards the door. ‘Take your dust jacket off first,’ he reminds me.

I yank it off and hang it up. ‘If it’s alright with you, I’ll just take my wages.’

He grins and feigns surprise. ‘But surely you don’t have any expenses. At home your mother and father provide an adequate roof over your head. Give you pocket money. Provide enough for you to eat. And I feed you as well. You’d be getting fat, if you didn’t smoke so many of other people’s cigarettes.’

‘Aye,’ I say, ‘but I still want my wages.’

‘So be it,’ he says, yanks open the drawer, gets my wages, and presents them to me.

I feel the weight of coins, see the corner of a pound note and grin.

‘Don’t you need to check? Wullie the Pole ask solicitously.

‘No, it’s alright.’ I stuff the envelope into the side pocket of my denims. But I do check as soon as I’m standing outside the wards. My wages are just over six quid and my sub is for over a pound, fifty pence and some other coins, some smash. I’m rich. I just count once more to make sure. I’m officially a worker with a pay-packet and national insurance number with contributions. I nip into the pub to celebrate with a glass of coca cola.

Before I push through the swing doors into the bar the old-fashioned Wurlitzer Jukebox near the toilets pumps out, Baby Love, a pulsation that could be heard on the moon and hooks me into its orbit, and makes it hard to think.  I only dare peek in. The Village Tavern is nicknamed the Coast is Clear, because that’s where most of the men in the village disappear into after work—sometimes during work—and most weekends. Women appear glitzed up at night like stars in the sky and push men of their seats and make them stand, slouch and crouch as a punishment, because there’s not enough seats and tables in the lounge, not enough seats in the bar and the pool table and darts board thrill and spill a changing crop but of the same turnip beery faces.

Da’s sitting snug, his working shirt tore open at the collar, in his usual seat at the corner of the bar. His back is to the wall, the plate window tinted to head height above him like a bevel rail, and clear glass to the ceiling, rising above him and highlighting brown hair thinning at the crown. When he’s not sitting Da is tall and stocky, and a reminder he’s given me his big beaky nose, even though I didn’t ask for it. If there was a God He’d have given me Mum’s button nose and pretty much her face and eyes and my Da’s body, but it’s been shuffled all wrong and I’ve came out with the cow’s lick, which is the equivalent of the Devil’s thumbprint. Da’s carrying on with his workmates and cronies. They work on the roads in Glasgow and finish early on a Friday, and most other days, for a few drinks. The table in front of them is chock-a-block with pint glasses with dregs of beer and lager and the light-fingered measure of quarter gills of whisky in short’s glasses. Square-shape Tennet’s Lager ashtrays nail down the corners of the table and the atmosphere is heavier than Saturn. My Uncle Tam spots me first through the fug of fag smoke. He’s a wee man that looks like a ferret sporting a tradition tartan bunnet, he never takes off because he’s bald; I don’t think he’s ever been young. He elbows my da.  And though I’m near the door and too far away to hear what Uncle Tam says, I see them laughing. Uncle Tam spills out of his seat, swerving round tables and chairs and bounding towards me, deliberate and clumping, with Frankenstein feet that stumble over pauses in the sticky carpet. Red eyed, Uncle Tam’s clammy hand grips mine in a firm handshake, and he slaps me my shoulder and pulls me manfully towards the bar.

‘Whit you havin’?’ he says, and elbows us a thick-necked guy out of the way to find us space at the bar. The pub is awash with beer tumblers and customers and its horse-shoe shape takes flight through the bar and makes a circuit into the lounge. Two big-haired barmaids, with thick bodies move as if they are on wheels, they patrol the space in between behind the bar and swat away confusion with a smile and laugh and promote a common understanding of hand signals and grunts from the locals. But it’s the manager Pat Loch that eyes us, and moves in our direction.

‘Coke,’ I say, and Uncle Tam snorts in derision.

‘Gee him a lager,’ he shouts to make himself heard.

Pat Loch’s face is never still and his eyes slide over me. I’d went to school with his son. He’d the same enormous jug ears and ginger hair as his dad, but was only half way to having the same Neanderthal body. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but nobody wanted to be his enemy.

My pint is placed down in a space near my elbow. ‘Fifteen pence,’ Pat Loch winks at me. Nobody argues with Pat Loch.  

Uncle Tam turns and looks back at the table he’d been sitting at. He waves expansively.  ‘And you better give me a round as well.’ He pulls a fiver out of his corner pocket and holds it up to his nose to look at it. Cocks a finger and points at me, ‘You better give him another one, while he’s waiting’.

Night fell into the day. Next thing Mum bangs on the wall in the next bedroom. Then she’s almost shaking me out of my bed.

‘Look at the state of you,’ Mum says. ‘You’re a disgrace’.

I cling onto my sheets like the toggles on a life raft. ‘But Mum. It’s Saturday.’ My hangover is outside my head, bigger than both of us, bigger than my bedroom.

‘I’m warning you. Get up out of that bed now and get to work…or do I need to shout on your da!’

The decision is taken out of my hands. I try to swallow the sourness down, cup my hand over my mouth. I’ve no time to lock the toilet door or register why I’m bollock rushing past Mum, before I’m kneeling, spewing up in the toilet pan.

Then I remember I barfed on her back, but I didn’t mean to. She was nice about it. But I don’t know what she said. I think I was in love with her. She asked me if I was going to be all right. Course I was. All I had to do was sit down, even though I was already sitting down. I remember trying to remember her name, but it came up each time like gloop.

Nobody that worked in the hospital, which was just about everybody, would let me buy a drink. It was my first week. Everyone I’d known all my life hugged and kissed me as if I was a new-born puppy. They bought me lager. Slipped it to me, because it didn’t do any harm. I didn’t like the taste. I’d rather have drunk Coke, but that was just plain stupid. I was handed pint after pint, in a befuddle of fags. I didn’t know if I was drinking, or staring at the carpet…I didn’t know.

Everybody thought I was funny. Hilarious. I thought I was funny. There was a girl, standing exposed and vulnerable from the glare of the lights at the bar. I shut my eyes for a second and tried to send her a psychic message.  I staggered like a condemned building, weaving and ploughing, high stepping over and around bodies. A bedraggled girl with a pink streak in her hair at the bar. Smudged eyeliner. Steady eyes, golden brown, and a clear and watchful expression that made my stomach go all watery.  Small hands and sharp elbows, keeping space, keeping time to the music.

‘What’s the matter with your face?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said, turning her back on me. She had a ruffled Brummie accent, a life blown off course by a pitted skin condition that, up close, left her plain and overly thin.

I stood before her swaying as if my feet were in a plant pot. Deciding on a course of action that didn’t involve thinking, certainly not dancing in the small rectangle of wooden flooring near the pool table.

 She decided for us. Like me, she was a student. But it was weird the way she talked about Glenboig Hospital that threw me. I eventually gathered she was from another planet. Not one that I recognized.

‘The patients were just so dead brilliant… it was an honour to serve them, to be with them.’

She whispered these things to me in a conspiratorial tone as we clinched together on the dance floor. Sharp faced, she smelled of too many cigarettes and patchouli oil, but her lips were soft as pillows. Unfocused, I was just going to tell her something deadly important. But I fell asleep with a pint still in my hand. When I woke up she was still talking, but it was a different lifetime. I could feel her knees beating out the music, squeezed in next to mine. I had to tell her something. I had to tell her something very urgently. But I didn’t

The banging echoes in my head. Saturday is the same as any other work day now. I mourn the loss of my weekends.