Rat Bites

Maddy got up early on the day of the hospital appointment. Her hip was giving her gyp. Dr Fleming, her G.P., had put her on the waiting list for a replacement. She’d joked she’d be like The Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austen. The reality was even though her breasts were hanging like doom on her stomach, with a swamp in between, hurdling a bath panel was too much. She settled for a cat-nip wash with a soapy sponge in the little sink.

Fags were Maddy’s daytime dream, but Frank being Frank, meant that side of her life was finished. She could hardly get a cup of coffee down her throat before he was flinging her old black funeral coat at her and harrying her across the Clyde Canal bridge. The smell of fag smoke, of old cherished pleasures, clung to her clothes and she was keen to get to the bus stop on Dumbarton Road as if running away from it helped.

But Frank and Maddy lost time on the bridge over the brown water of the Clyde Canal. They dragged their feet and, slack- wristed, loafed on the railing with mouldy grey- blue bread like daft tourists. She waited with an open mouth for an oil-slick coloured group of mallards to come closer, shape-up, shimmer out of the water, and do bird tricks with their little rusty legs and piston-whip cold air, like store-bought mechanical toys.

Later, he warned her, ‘watch the steps, they’re slippy,’ as if she was wearing clown boots and not heels.

Maddy with her hip, didn’t take kindly to his suggestion or the stairs. She dawdled down the long way; up and round and down the camel backed hump The Council built for pinging cyclists.

The bus stop on Dumbarton Road was one of those plug-in jobs, just a metal pole, wired into the pavement; the wind and rain given municipal permission to bludgeon through thin clothing like a blunt scythe.

‘The bus is always fucking late,’ Frank whined, drunk on the testosterone of car fumes.

Maddy made a clucking noise with her tongue, put her arm through his and buttoned herself into his body. She pulled him into the taupe- grey secret warmth of her funeral coat and away from the madness of the edge of the pavement. She patted his hand. Some kids passed the bus stop, unfettered and uncaring of the brooding silences of the field-drab tenement blocks, caterwauling like seagulls, the way youngsters do. They looked nice and smart in their school uniforms. She kept an eye on him. He too was like a big kid, vain about his hair, the way they are. She didn’t want to say anything about what might happen. ‘The bus.’ ‘The bus.’ He kept going on about the bus, doing his usual trick of expecting the impossible yesterday. She let him ramble on. There was one every fifteen minutes.

He rocked on his heels and bore a grudge against every car that passed because it wasn’t a 46 bus. In an odd way, the feeling seemed to be reciprocated. There was nothing but snarl from the cars. And they didn’t seem to like the zigzag lines on the road beside the row of sheltered housing; speeding up to get over them quicker. Maddy could almost have laughed when the kids pressed the STOP button and the traffic was tricked into stopping by the red light. Windscreen wipers worked furiously to calm the situation. Horns blared in duet wailing like Bagpuss for a change of colour, a change of venue. The silver of segs in Frank’s good shoes caught and carried the drumbeat of his body. He stamped his feet, like a toffee-nosed brat, when the bus went up Duntocher Road.

‘Fuck this Maddy,’ he said, ‘I’m walking.’

The damp air acted as a ceiling and carried the thump of the bus behind, down past Ramjams, charging up gears. Maddy’s face settled like sediment into- what did I tell you - smugness.
The bus indicated and took a right; away from them.

‘That’s a 64.’ Frank’s hand flitted towards the meal-brown comfort of King George tobacco and ripped through the other pockets in his coat.

‘Maddy,’ he held out a packet of Asda Antacid Tablets, ‘what am I meant to do with these?’

Her Suddenly Madame Glamour perfume caught on Frank’s throat, like a cockle-burr memory, as she grabbed for his arm. He fell in that way old men do, clutching at an idea of youth that was no longer alive.

Frank pushed at her flapping helping hands and got up. He coughed and was down again, bent over like the point on an anvil. She let him settle. He dared his body to cough again, and straightened up in half-shut stages, like the blade on an old ivory handled pocket-knife. He patted his jacket pocket and stared at her before popping an antacid tablet into his mouth.

When the 46 came it had few passengers and they were spread out like paper hats after a picnic. The driver had his eye on the wing mirror and foot on the accelerator, gunning the engine. Before Frank and Maddie could get their feet the double-decker moved out into the flow of the traffic. Maddie fussed with her bag’s insides rolling about like an empty apartment block. She found the gold sneck on her purse cursed, and even when she got if finally open, then she had to find the proper coins and there was always that fiddly bit at the end, putting it into the cash box, watching the machine eat it and spit out a ticket for two, as if they were at the shows. Frank was impatient to get a seat, marching to the back of the lower tier without her, as if there was a crowd of people pushing in behind him. Maddy let him have the window seat, men liked that kind of thing, pulling up snug beside him.

Three young girls got on at the Plots. Frank thought they must be about twelve or thirteen. They’d on the green jacket with the embossed gold around the rim and badge with a Latin motto that said something like our parents are loaded and sending us to a snobby school. They shrieked and screamed and squealed their way up the bus and piled into the seats across from them.

Frank started talking about the old days when John Brown’s was John Brown’s and thousands of work boots and different coloured overalls marched in and out to the sound of a whistle. Maddy hummed and hawed in all the right places. She didn’t want to remind him that the fences were eight- feet- high and topped with barbed-wire and that wasn’t to keep the riff-raff out that was to keep the workers in. Asbestos was also not mentioned and the way it was used for insulation and fireproofing, which fell like fine rain far and wide. Asbestosis, grey pearls of profit, planted in the poor workers’ lungs. Maddy had no breath for any of these things. She just clung onto Frank as the bus swayed and went on its way. She wondered how Frank would get on in a world without her and she dabbed at her eyes, whilst he looked out the window and feigned not to notice.