Ugly Puggly 77

When they left for Drymen, I went to the shop and bought a bottle of Vladistock. I cracked it open on the main road and took a quick slug. It burned on the way down. But my body was vibrating like a tuning fork, and that was the tune it was waiting for. I wiped my chin with the back of my hand and darted across the road.

I didn’t bother with the niceties. I wasn’t holding a dinner party hoping for good conversation a little leg over. My phone rang. I looked at the screen and it was wee Jim. Some folk might see that as an augury, like a black feather falling from heaven. A chance to mend my ways. I saw it as a chance to turn my phone off. A talent for deception was wasted on him.

Pouring the vodka into a cup, I gulped it down, pausing only to take a breath. An ever-ready bottle was an antidote to normal life. One of those cleaning adverts where everything was shiny and they worked their way up from the floor to my toes to my tongue and even my brain felt renewed. My face was sopping wet. A mercurial reminder we are what we eat and drink, even if we don’t eat.

There was little point hanging around waiting for the condemnation. They were away on a fool’s errand. But I was no fool. I was only paranoid when Molly was out to get me. Picking up some clean clothes and ransacking a tin of HP tomato soup and squirreling it in my plastic bag. I’d tried to stay sober and it hadn’t worked. I’d s set of house keys for Ugly Puggly’s house so I went to his place to commune with the dead.

Money always solved the problem. I’d much of the money that Ugly Puggly told me to keep for him when we were going on our trip. A few days passed quickly enough. I was only making short journey outside for supplies and hunkering down for a battle with myself. My phone lost its charge and I’d an obligation to have no obligations. Things were going smoothly when I got arrested by After-You-Claude. The funny thing I couldn’t remember what he arrested me for and or where we were. It was an unprovoked attack.

A slap on one or both of my cheeks. I might have been resting my bleary eyes. When I opened them, my face was stinging. He wasn’t in uniform, but plainclothes. His wardrobe consisted of how a former nun would have dressed her middle-aged schoolteacher son before ironing the crease in her flannels and buffing his shiny shoes. After-You-Claude invited me to stand up or he’d arrest me. He was full of clichés, sniffing and declaring. ‘You smell like a pig!’

We were outside in the square. The pubs were open, but I was shut. Sleeping on a metallic public bench. I didn’t think that was a crime or I’d have went to sleep it off in the library which was just across the way. His stocky partner stood on the corner of the street, across from the parked cars and just down from Macintoshes. I sniffed the air, but could taste nothing but traffic fumes. ‘I cannae smell nothin.’ I told him. ‘But I didn’t want to antagonise him or his partner. I eased up a bum cheek and tested the firmness of my arse. ‘I might have had a wet fart.’

After-You-Claude announced to the world, even as a woman was passing pushing her wee girl in buggy. ‘You’ve shat yourself!’  

He’d a nasal voice and a non-Glasgow twang that irked me more than it should. That’s when I took a swing for him. I was rusty as a first-world-war, bolt-action rifle that had been left out in the rain, but I managed to scuff his balding head. He snorted. That was when he became After-You-Claude him and his detective pal lifted me and flung me in the back of their unmarked car.

They raced away with me in the back, but not to the police station, but to Cable Depot Road. An industrial estate parallel with the Clyde. After-You-Claude was old-fashioned enough to want afters. A little softening up of my face around the eyes. Punches to the gut.

‘Fuck you!’ I cried. Booze was as good anaesthetic as any. ‘You might pull a muscle or strain yer back torturing me yah fat bastard, but who’s countin the calories here? Me or you, yah fat bastard?’

After-You-Claude’s partner had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. I think he was called Gerry. He might even have dressed himself that morning in a dark suit, because he was only twenty years behind the times. ‘Enough,’ he snorted. I think he was just getting bored. They were ready to do the big turf out of their car, but he was professional enough to take a few details of who I was, my date of birth and where I stayed. That dull professionalism that spoiled many a relationship, whether social or sexual.

That changed everything. I’d been hiding in plain sight. After-You-Claude had been looking for me. I was their top suspect in the disappearance and possible murder of Ugly Puggly.

Good cop and bad cop became two cops, suddenly delighted with their haul.  After-You-Cluade had threatened to kill me. Then it was holding doors open and after you and after that phoneyness to two-parts nicesness.. All I had to do in the interview room was tell them were I’d buried the body.

Interview rooms were no longer what they were like in the old days. Then they’d an echo and smelled like toilet block and had as scarred table officers could bang your head on. Now we’d become Americanised, everything had to be recorded. Not just written down with the officer bending your fingers back until you signed it, but with tape machines. Times and dates and when and what for. They wrote down that they were writing down on their notebook. After-You-Claude became a different man in that room. He became a bureaucrat, smiling. ‘You want a cup of tea?’

‘I’d rather have a vodka.’

Gerry lounging in the tubular chair beside him, laughed. He tapped his pen on the top of his pad.

‘I can call you Jim? Right?’ After-You-Claude had one of those daft grins on his face. ‘Can I call you Jim?’

‘You can call me anythin yeh want, as long as yeh let me oot.’

‘Sure,’ he held up his hand. Gave his partner the eyes before turning back to me. ‘You can leave anytime. Just tell me how blood splatters were found in the kitchen and hallway of the house you now reside in? And how there was a big hole knocked in the gyprock of the hallway wall?’

My eyes welled up with tears. ‘Sure I can explain everythin.’