Ugly Puggly

Agnes said, ‘Did you see The Clydebank Post?’

‘Nah, why would I?’ I shook my head. Sitting on the stairs, pulling on my work boots. A snarled lace, and with my eyesight, I was finding it difficult to find and hook the eyelet.  Nobody read The Clydebank Post now, but grannies with blue rinse. I was in a hurry to get back after lunch.

Agnes would have had the blue rinse, but she dyed her hair black. Not crow black and spikey the way it’d been at school. I guess she’d be my bit on the side, as my mother used to say, but we’d gone beyond that. Now we didn’t even bother with sex, but kept bickering at each other. Habit, sheer habit. We couldn’t let each other alone, but not in the way folk thought. If either of us had modern phones, we’d text each other and get found out by our partners. Unsmiley faces and snarls.

‘I mean,’ and she smirked. ‘It’s Ugly Puggly.’

‘Fuck!’ I said. She handed me the paper already creased, tapped a pointy nail at Courtroom News. ‘Whit’s he done noo?’

And she laughed. A gleam in her dark eyes. It made me we wander back to the forest of our past and briefly ponder if it might not be too late for that fuck after all.

‘He’s fuckin’ crazy,’ a note of admiration in her voice.  

I was already scanning the headlines and read most of the report. And I had to agree with her. ‘He’s always been crazy,’ I muttered. ‘We all change, but he stays the same.’

She tugged the paper away from me and held it by her side. ‘You better to be goin.’ On tiptoes, she kissed the side of my unshaven cheek. ‘But you’ve got to admit, broken glass. That is brilliant—are you gonnae go and see him?’

‘Why would I?’ I was on the defensive. I sat down on the top stair and shoved my foot into the boot. I’d tie my laces in the van. ‘He’s nothin’ tae me.’

‘Suit yersel, I’ve got hoovering to dae, anyway.’

Turned my head and squinted up at her. She was wearing a dark skirt and a white blouse. She smelled good. She always did smell good. I could almost taste her. ‘It’s no like that… I might stay for a cuppa.’

‘Aye, but you were like brothers once.’

‘Nah, but that was my ma.’

‘Fuck off and wipe your feet on the way oot. Go back to Alice Growler. That slut of a wife of yours.’

‘Don’t be like that!’

‘Like whit?’

She wandered through to the kitchen. A stack of those pithy sayings on the wall with punchy captions that made you want to punch whoever had made them up: If you want breakfast in bed tomorrow, sleep in the kitchen tonight.

I shuffled through. She sat with her back to me on the computer.

‘You win.’ I put a hand on her shoulder, watching her move the cursor on CandyCrush and not make worlds dissolve. ‘I’ll go an see him.’  

She patted my hand and squeezed my fingers. ‘There’s nae milk.’

‘Who said anything about milk?’

The glint was in her eye again. ‘For tea?’

She led me by the hand back through to the bedroom that looked onto the canal and pulled down the blinds. She angled her head to pluck out her hooped gold earrings.

I kicked my boots under the chair and was pulling off my regulation Council work jumper and Brazil t-shirt in one huff, and was sitting on the bed.

‘Whit would your ma have done?’ she asked. She’d pulled the quilt back, but kept her slip on. The sight of that gap where her cleavage started had always thrilled me.      

But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. ‘Agnes, don’t start acting as if you gi’e a fuck. My Ma would ha’e done the same as Jesus. She’d have taken him up to heaven in a winged chariot and gi’en him a pair of fuckin’ wings the same colour as yer drawers. And a harp to sing, “Alleluia!”’.

She rolled out of bed, practically, before she’d been in it. And picked up an earring and stuck it back in. Her wee nose was pointing at annoyed o’clock.  

I pulled my jumper back over my head and went through to the toilet. ‘I’ll see you the morra,’ I shouted, splashing the pan.

‘Don’t bother,’ she replied. ‘I might be oot.’

‘Oot where?’

‘Oot somewhere.’

I heard her clomping down the stairs. I let myself out. She watched me from the front window. I waved a hand, but she didn’t wave back. But I wasn’t waving at her. The neighbour above her was also staring out.

‘Council workmen,’ I mouthed the words at her. ‘Whit can you expect? No even good for a fuck. Good for fuck all?’

She’d taken on that stricken look of somebody caught out and wandered away before I’d finished. I was acting crazy, just like Ugly Puggly. At least he was locked up. And I knew just where to get him.

I used the work van and nipped up to Gartnavel before knocking off time. A cold snap. It’s started snowing. I could tell my gaffer I didn’t know where Dumbarton Road ended and got lost in Partick, found myself circling ring-roads.  I’d been up to the locked wards a few times, but not in the last few years. Perhaps more than that. Thatcher was Prime Minister, and she wasn’t yet classified as demented.  

The buzzer for the ward sounded in the office. I could hear it from outside the locked doors. I waited a few minutes before trying again. A few patients came to have a look. And I smiled, like a plonker in a B-movie, to show I wasn’t dangerous. They wandered away. I hit the buzzer again.

A rosy-cheeked young auxiliary nurse appeared. They called them something else now, like Care Assistants. She’d already looked through the glass and decided I was harmless enough. Keying in the code, she held the door open and shut to speak through. ‘It’s not visiting time.’

I’d already decided that if I didn’t get in that would be it. I’d tell whatever God that didn’t exist, that at least I’d tried. I knew the rules. Make yourself small. Invisible. Tell lots of lies. ‘That’s OK, I’m a lawyer, here to see…’ and I nearly said, Ugly Puggly. ‘Howard Lowther.’

A slight thaw in her face, but a shake of her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she laughed.

I pointed at the logo on my jumper. ‘But I’m Council. We’re practically related. And I only want to see him for five minutes. That can’t hurt anybody.’

The door opened a smidgen. ‘But he doesn’t speak. Doesn’t communicate in any way.’

‘All he does is draw.’ I cut her off. ‘It’s like logorrhoea, but with ink, toothpaste, fag ash. And if he’s got paint, he favours gold and red. He can do everything. Naïve art. Commercial art noveau. Old classics. New classics. People used to buy him things to paint. But I guess you know all that.’

A shake of her head. ‘But he’s really good,’ she admitted.

‘He’s better than good. He’s a genius.’ I blew it by saying too much. ‘Just five minutes. In and out.’

‘No, I can’t,’ she’d a firm grip on the door.

Ugly Puggly appeared at her back. He startled her and his bony body had slinked past her before she recovered. He was standing outside the locked ward with me.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said, shaking my hand.

The auxiliary pulled the door fully open. ‘Come back in this second,’ she hissed.

Ugly Puggly craned his neck and looked down at her. ‘Or what? Exactly?’ He looked at her and then at me. ‘I’m being held against my will for no reason. I’m not a voluntary patient. And I’ve not been assessed by a psychiatrist because I refuse to speak to those charlatans. I was on a seven-day-detention order, but that ran out yesterday. And you have a legal obligation to inform your patients if it has been extended. You’re too young to understand how corrupt the whole system is.’

He tugged at my arm. ‘Come, I think we’re free to go, Jim.’