Ugly Puggly 58

Our fellowship gave me a medal for being sober for a month. It was a wee plastic disc. I kept it in my side-pocket beside the van keys. I rubbed it for luck. The commonest injury in AA parlance was taking a drink. There was always a story about that. Most of them involved luck. Or unluck with your number on it.

Heathcliffe, for example, was just going to the shops when he tripped over a plastic bag full of beer. If he’d tripped over a leprechaun dangling a fishing rod attached to a pot of gold, he’d have been fine.

Then there was the geezer that went to Tesco and ended up drinking tequila in Mexico. But that was a longer story, involving a World Cup.

When Jeff turned up again and told me a long story about how unlucky he’d been, I showed him my medal and would even let him hold it.

‘Fuck off,’ he spat. And drove away at high speed in his shiny new Land Rover.

It was almost a relief to get into the house and the saturnine gloom. I didn’t mention having spoken to him to either Ugly Puggly or Dave. Some things were better left unsaid. Unsaid was a sister to unluck. I kept them locked up together.

 Ugly Puggly was in the kitchen. He’d put on weight. He no longer did the heavy lifting of long calculations. Instead, he read poetry mostly, and ate steaming plates of pasta with us. He’d always quip he’d knocked it together with various ingredients he’d found, which made me uneasy.  

Dave used a spoon instead of a fork. He wore a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, which probably wasn’t his. It was too big for him, with long flapping sleeves that crept up his hands, and reminded me of the kind of T-shirts Ugly Puggly and me wore when we were kids. It made him look younger. He turned around and grinned at me, a fizz of growth on his jawline, when he saw I was watching him. He was complaining about his mum, between munching on mouthfuls of garlic bread.  

‘She calls everybody “my little friends” as if I’m five.’

I wasn’t a believer in weighing myself, but the notches on my belt grew longer. And I’d become addicted to mints. A common failing in the Fellowship was always to have something in your mouth. Guys that had bodies like the drip running down a window pane bloomed into Santa Claus figures almost overnight.  I hoped I wasn’t like that yet, but I did have the beginning of a wheeze.

 ‘Some of them are tiddlers, I bet.’ I mimicked the curl of a cock, with the digit of my pinky finger curling back and forward, acting as childish bait.

‘You’d very well know,’ he spluttered. Wiping pasta sauce from his mouth, he mirrored back the same message with his pinky.

Ugly Puggly coughed. We both put our cutlery on the table and waited to see how bad it would be. He kept us off-balance by waving an arm, exhorting us to get tucked into the grub. But we pushed our plates away as if they were filled with school cabbage we were made to digest or there’d be no pudding.

I got up and filled the kettle to make the tea. ‘How’s yer latest wee thing goin?’ I asked Dave.

‘Great,’ he twiddled with his spoon and pasta. ‘I’ve got another 550 followers.’

I wasn’t sure what platform he was on. He’d some idea about becoming an actor. And he was trying to fuck everybody on Facebook was my take on his way of courting popularity. But he’d said I was just old fashioned. That only old fogeys were on Facebook, anyway.

‘It’s difficult,’ said Ugly Puggly.  

‘Difficult?’

‘Aye, he’s goin up against the establishment.’

‘Who?’ I rocked back on my heels looking at Ugly Puggly and then Dave and waiting for one of them to explain.

‘Aye, he’s gone green,’ said Ugly Puggly.

‘I’d huv put it rather differently—is it venereal?’ The teabag in his mug went damp at the bottom where I’d washed it out. I handed it to him. Then put a mug of tea down on the table in front of Dave.

‘They start aff mockin yeh.’ Ugly Puggly sipped at his tea.

‘Well, they cannae go much wrang wae the playboy, then can they?’

I expected Dave to come up with something. But it was Ugly Puggly that spoke for him. ‘See,’ he said. ‘Half the work’s already been done. It’s like they rape trials. First they start wae the evidence. Picking holes in it. Insisting rape wasn’t rape, but just a bit of mutual frolicking that got out of hand. Then the silly goose panicked and called the police to save her reputation.’

‘You make it sound like a Victorian drama,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should be on his Facebook page.’

‘It’s no Fakebook,’ chimed Dave.

‘Anyway,’ Ugly Puggly said. ‘That whit they dae wae global warming. First, they say it’s no global. Then they say it’s no warming. And insist on calling it something neutral like nice hot sunny weather for everybody—including Eskimos.’

‘Then they challenge causation. She hurt herself. Hot sunny weather is a perfectly natural phenomenon.’

‘Whit’s that got tae dae wae the playboy?’

‘Stop calling me “the playboy”, I’m hoping to grow my following and get elected as a Councillor for the Green Party.’

‘Fuck me,’ I gasped.

‘No thanks,’ Dave said.

‘If nane of these tactics work they play dirty,’ muttered Ugly Puggly.

‘You keep sayin “they”, who yeh talkin about?’

Dave sniggered. ‘You’re so thick. Oil companies, energy corporations, countries like Saudi and Iran and Russia. Countries like America where the economy is run for the few and not the many.’

‘You mean everybody—but you?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. But at least I’m tryin tae dae somethin.’

‘That’s the whole problem,’ said Ugly Puggly. ‘We argue among oursel. The prosecution fiscal accuses the women of being sluts. Or worse, sluts with a big mouth that is just out for the money. We seen that in the Epstein trial. Not only were they after money. The whole trial was a waste of public money.

‘We’re no longer speaking about sex, but tax dollars wasted. They want to save money, save jobs and most of all save themselves.’

‘Then they argue if we wait a bit longer, somethin will turn up to show them all to be liars. And if no, we’ll fix it with this amazing new technology that’s been untried—the leg shutter. And it will save the poorest countries and the poorest communities and it will save tax dollars.’

‘Sounds a bit like yer roof tiles,’ I said.  

Ugly Puggly smiled. ‘It does,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t set out to rape the victims again, until they learned to shut up.’

Dave giggled. ‘It might still work, yeh no.’ Then corrected himself. ‘I meant Howard’s roof-tiles gadget and not rape.’ But then added. ‘Maybe a bit of both, in my case.’