An Unlikely Liaison

Bryant realised he was close to rock bottom. Any notion of an illustrious past was firmly in the trash can now. ‘Promising’ was no longer a word you could use for someone in their fifty-second year. ‘Past it’ was the more appropriate description.

He looked at his surroundings. ‘Functional’ was the first word he thought of. ‘Scabby’ followed closely on. It had the feel of a job centre about it. A place where people were forced to visit but weren’t really welcome; much less so now with this lot in power. Cheap carpeting, cheap ‘coffee’ tables, framed pastel prints on white walls. The view from the window was the back entrance of a funeral parlour where a Hertz was parked. Were they giving us an option to think about or did these fuckers have a sense of humour after all, however dark and devilish?

An ATOS waiting room. For people summoned to undertake Work Capability Tests. Already he was forty minutes past his allotted appointment time. The bloke next to him claims to have been waiting an hour and a half. He’s resting his head on his walking stick and mumbling nervously to himself. Interestingly no-one else in the room seems concerned about this behaviour. Norms change with circumstances and expectations; probably they’ve seen much worse.

The wee receptionist lassie is getting grief about all this slow-running. Folk are getting nippy. After all, there’s a lot at stake. To be or not to be capable of work, that was the question. To be left the fuck alone to deal with whatever mental or physical infirmity you claim to, or most definitely do, suffer from, or to be pamped on to Jobseekers Allowance and face hefty sanctions for not signing your name in the correct font. No fucking joke, in other words.

Bryant tried not to think of anything else except how he was going to put himself across when his turn finally came. Hard though, not to wish that you were elsewhere: that you hadn’t fucked up quite so much in your recent past. Could be on twenty-three grand a year as Supervisor of the accounts section but he just couldn’t hang on to it. Just couldn’t. Sitting here now it was easy to question why he just couldn’t. He wished now so much that he just fucking could have. Surely it was a better option than sitting in this room. Of course it was, but the pressure had been just too great on him. He just couldn’t hang on.

How to explain that to the ATOS person, that was his problem. He’d heard and read that they weren’t that big on the subtle nuances of the mind, the self-destructive quirks of the emotions. ‘Can you stand? Can you speak?’ That was more the ATOS approach. Or so he’d heard.

“Mr Bryant”

O aye, here we go. Another rather uninspiring room. Whoever had been given the contract had verged more towards the ‘Brutalist’ school of interior design, and this poor ATOS wifie had to sit in here all day we presume. Wonder what that did to her mood? Maybe her own mental health could now be held to be suspect?

“May I call you Andrew?”

You can call us anything you like dear, just let this go well and get us out of here and into the fresh, free air.

“I’m a senior mental health nurse Andrew and we’re here today to discuss your health, especially in relation to your fitness for work. I’ll ask you some general questions, and then we’ll go into a little detail as regards the answers you gave on your ESA claim form. Is that OK?”

Rather a redundant question that. We’ll take it as rhetorical. Wonder what would happen if the answer was no that’s not OK actually. That’s not OK at all. Pretty far from….

“Now you say that you’ve a recent history of depression. How has that affected you would you say?”

Well, one was offered one’s dream job. The job that was beyond one’s dreams actually. Working with people one liked, in an environment one loved, for wages higher than one had ever earned, and, regrettably, one fucked it up and left. One found that one couldn’t sleep; one found that one was anxious beyond endurance, one was swallowing illicit tranquilisers, and one was panicking like a bastard.

“I just couldn’t cope with it, I put myself under too much pressure and the only way to alleviate it, to get free from it was to leave”

“And did that help?”

“It took the tension away, but I was so sorry about it that I went home and drank for about a week”

“And that was when you attempted suicide?”

“Yes”

“And what did you do?”

“I took a load of anti-depressants and paracetamols”

Quite pretty this senior mental health nurse. Funny what you think about when you’re confessing to a total stranger who has the power to bestow heaven or hell into your life that you recently tried to top yourself by drunkenly swallowing a load of pills and tying a LIDLs bag over your head.

“Why a LIDLs bag..?”

Is there a hint of a wry smile on those pretty lips? Is she toying with me? Surely not…

“They don’t have any air-holes in them. I’d obviously thought it out”

How many people must she see every day? Assuming they do this every day. Maybe six or seven? That’s forty-odd a week. Well over a hundred a month. Christ! That must get to you. Mind you, most of its tick-box. Can you get a spoon to your lips without spilling soup all down your front? Can you be trusted not to attack people in company? Do you run out into busy roads often or not at all? Yes or no? Yes or no? Yes or no?

“And obviously the attempt wasn’t successful. Did you end up in hospital?”

“No I just woke up some time later and was very sick for quite a long time. Into the LIDLs bag ironically”

There’s a wee rapport going on here. We’re actually connecting through the recurrent amusement over the LIDLs bag. What terrific patter to use on a woman, and learned of so late in life. This talk of suicide and LIDLs bags has her squirming pleasurably in her no doubt expensive knickers. Life, often so mundane, can throw up some strange and joyous anomalies.

“And what if you were to start another job, maybe a less pressurising one, next week. How would that make you feel?”

Good question. I think I may be looking for a fresh LIDLs bag.

“The honest truth is that it would fill me full of dread. As I explained on my form, I’ve had a previously successful work record and a successful academic career, these last two jobs though, I can’t really explain how they’ve affected me. The smallest thing seems to become a huge, huge problem. I have zero confidence and can’t seem to do the simplest things right. It’s a really bleak feeling…”

“Your doctor wrote that you may suffer from General Anxiety Syndrome”

“Could be right. I certainly get anxious over things that never used to bother me”

“And the anti-depressants. Do you find that they help?”

“I certainly feel I need them, though I’d rather I didn’t”

“You say on your form that one of the side effects of these is that they make you impotent”

“They do yeah. Pity that the one thing that might give me a smile in life is sadly denied to me”

She looks startled for a split second then she starts giggling. The giggling turns to guffaws of uncontrollable laughter such that I might have to pat her back so that she can breathe. There are tears in her eyes, she’s trying to articulate apologies but they are beyond her.

My words have been a catalyst for all the tales of woe and injury she’s endured over these long months.

Hopefully she’ll recommend the support group.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Raymond Gilderoy walked a lonely road. He had gained only a nominal qualification in his forty-seven years and that was Queen’s Award for Being Misunderstood. The word enigma could have been invented for him. Chameleons studied versions of his life – and there were many versions – in seminars and lecture halls. They learned from him how better to ‘hide and appear, hide and appear’. For them, he was a master of disguise. Little did they know that Raymond Gilderoy had no more idea of his perceived skills in this area as he did of the laws of molecular physics and, lord knows, he knew little enough of those.

Raymond was a classic Kristoffian ‘walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction’ and he knew not the effect he had on others. His kindness was seen as weakness, his weakness as kindness, and all his strengths lay in subtleties and nuances so subtle and nuanced that they were glimpsed less often than meteors and those that glimpsed them were left so puzzled that they knew not whether to be profoundly impressed or deeply insulted.

He belonged to no class or genre, no club or society suited him. At meetings of LonersAnonymous people pointed at him and asked “who’s that lonely looking guy over there?” He stood alone at parties, not that he was invited to them anymore. He dreaded ‘breaking for coffee’ at training courses as folk mingled with anyone except him. Even his own anatomy betrayed him at these events as his innards whined and howled distinctly louder than anyone else’s  as if they were bidding for help to escape.

Even his mother never let him end a sentence; often pointing to objects outside the window at random so fearful was she of his obscure mutterings.

“Look at that bird that’s just landed on old Effie’s roof!”  she’d yell, then follow this up with a precipitative offer of more tea.

She knew that no-one could fuck a life up to such apparently irredeemable effect as her own eldest son.

Everything he touched, every opportunity he was given, every relationship he became entangled with turned to abject shite.

He knew not how to play the game of life.

Standing six foot four and as thin as a rake he stood out like a scarecrow in every crowd. He had a lifelong fear that his head was too small for his body; like he’d been painted by a bad artist weak on perspective. He felt his head belonged to a body at least a foot shorter. This had left him with the impression that his voice was ‘far away’ and that people, having to crane to hear it, very quickly tired of doing so.

At job interviews he leaned forward so hyper-extendedly that his questioners drew back nervously in their chairs and decided by osmosis never to share a work-place with him.

Yes, his was a lonely road, and he sometimes yearned to be at the end of it, though he had a sense of the sinfulness of such thoughts.

“Life is sweet” his Uncle Billy had ventured while busy dying of cancer and Raymond tried to live up to the simple profundity of this statement no matter how sour his reality often felt.

“How did you make life sweet?” What a question. And was there not an answer to every question?

A mixture of attitude and circumstances, there-in should lie the answer.

Maybe habits too? Maybe that’s what they called ‘a rut’. “My life’s in a rut” you’d hear people say, and what they’d mean is they’d got into a boring routine – a rut!

What is happiness? How does it manifest itself? Is it simply contentment? He’d heard it expressed thus. 

OK! Happiness and contentment; why not go for both?

Such were his thoughts as he went to visit his friend, Mad Betty in Leytonstone where she lived in her new one-bed flat.

All his friends were mad; either mad or what others would call losers. Certainly they were outsiders, living on the verges of what we call society. Diagnosed bi-polar, paranoid-schizophrenic and claiming the appropriate benefits.

His oldest friend Moishe had once told him that he suspected his dentist of deliberately drilling holes in his teeth. The rationale for this was that Moishe would have to keep going for treatment, and the dentist would make more money from him. Raymond had said, that sounds terrible, why don’t you change your dentist? Moishe said “O he’s handy; he’s only ten minutes down the road”.

Raymond laughed until he thought he’d wet himself. Moishe was only laughing to join in.

This is what happened to outsiders cast adrift by the conventional; your only option was other outsiders. You congregated ashamedly with others of the same ilk. This didn’t make for a proud assemblage. What was left unspoken but what was completely understood by each involved was that this was a pact of failure – failure to fit in anywhere else.

Raymond had recently worked in a large office where this phenomenon was illustrated perfectly, though certainly not for the first time.

Banished as a virtual undesirable by the mainly young things in his ‘team’ he naturally becomes the prey of other undesirables. They can spot one another a mile off. They catch the scent of others rejection like sad perfume wafting through gloomy corridors. One, a beardy, corduroy type, had the habit of saying an exaggerated swooping ‘moooorning’ as he plodded into the office. The youngsters of course think this is risibly funny and make jokes about him. This man is to become Raymond’s lunch-time companion. He bores him rigid about his job detecting ‘internet abuse’ in the department. He slurps his soup and catches much of it in his beard.

Of another fellow inmate, one day a friendly female colleague tells him “Tam seems to have taken a shine to you; he doesn’t normally talk to the men”.

Tam wears his Scouts uniform to work.

Not that Raymond would necessarily have wanted things any other way. He found ‘conventional’ people, to the extent that such existed, to be rather boring with all their talk of cars and mortgages, kids and holidays. People who lived out-with these things or, more precisely, without such things, in general had more interesting tales to tell.

Put it this way, you’re less likely to find yourself cowering behind a sofa at the most intense point of an LSD trip while someone is throwing claw-hammers at you, if you’re saving up for your honeymoon in Gran Canarias and putting a deposit down on a little two-bedroom place

Such was not part of the careful flow of conventional lives.

Mad Betty was not conventional, although Raymond sensed that she deeply wanted to be. He could see her in a little two-up two-down with a big hairy husband and two adorable kids, but things just hadn’t turned out that way. Presently she was living with a Turkish cross-dresser and handing out business cards to tube-travellers offering ‘All services negotiable’ from the little dry-cleaning kiosk she worked in.

Here’s a question. How do you achieve happiness when you don’t know what makes you happy?

Mad Betty was once ‘happy’, but she couldn’t stand it.

Mad Betty was once in a state of such happiness she had to systematically destroy it.

Go figure! As they say in New York.

Raymond had never seen a ‘bi-polar’ condition until he saw it in Mad Betty. There were times when she could rule the world; striding the streets of Leytonstone in her big red woolly cardy performing wondrous tasks and favours like some twenty-three stone female Jesus. She had got Raymond and his mates gigs by simply demanding them from publicans, she could arrange your room like some Feng Shui Queen, scattering cushions, tacking Arabic rugs to walls in perfect symmetry to sofas and beds acquired from her many middle-class, Stoke Newington friends. You would suddenly own a keyboard, a guitar, an Armenian box zither. Before, you were living in a bedsit in Grove Green Road, now you were living on a magic carpet in a souk in Marrakech.

Then the awful slump would come.

The extraordinary energy and vitality of the ‘highs’ would lead to a dreadful plummeting into the lonely, weeping, darkness of the ‘lows’. She told Raymond once that during the high times she was constantly and terrifyingly aware of what was to follow. She could sense the tornado losing speed and power and witness herself falling to the depths of despair.

She would disappear for weeks and months. Shacked up in a room in someone’s house, she’d never say where. If she picked up the phone at all, she couldn’t articulate through the tears, breathless, endless sobs, the sound of a heart breaking or broken, until you decided it was cruel to phone at all and you were left only with concern for her. Raymond was a master at making crying women laugh, but even he had to admit defeat faced with this.

Then, one day she’d re-appear as if none of it had ever happened. Wouldn’t make reference to it, and ignored anyone who did and you’d find yourself dragged out of a pub and on a flight to Paris with her, courtesy of more money owed to American Express.

The Leytonstone area used to be quite a smart, trendy wee place but these days it was ‘seeing its arse a bit’ as a Liverpudlian may have put it. It still had the forest going for it and the Hollow Ponds but the A10 extension, against which many had demonstrated, had ripped a chunk of the Bohemian soul out of it.

Conveniently, it hadn’t had the same effect on neighbouring, Tory-controlled Wanstead where they’d buried it underground out of harm’s way, only for it to emerge spewing its fumes and concrete into the very heart of Leytonstone. Gone was the old red-brick asylum to be replaced by giant Tesco’s with ubiquitous car-park; gone was the classic Bearman’s department store to be replaced by Matalan; Leytonstone High Street, once so neat and semi-prosperous, was now littered with 99p shops and ‘pay-day loan’ companies.

The de-generation of a town. You only really see the full extent of it if you’ve been away a while. Long term denizens like Mad Betty barely even noticed.

During the working hours of between eight-thirty am and six pm she barely knew anything about the town other than what part of its itinerant population passed through the confines of the tube station. She occupied the little kiosk next to the newsagents and opposite the ticket office. Occasionally the phone would ring and startle her from her reverie, or unspeakable boredom as it otherwise may be termed. It would be the little Greek proprietor of the Dry Cleaners ‘upstairs’ on Church Street. Betty would take in items from punters at the kiosk, and they would be shipped upstairs for Dry Cleaning, then sent back down for collection. All Betty had to do was keep a record of who the items belonged to, when they were due for collection and, of course, take the money that was owed. Some days were busier than others, but whichever way you looked at it, this was dull stuff. The only thing that brightened it up were the strange acquaintances she would garner through the course of the day.

There was the little Indian bloke keen to convert her to his ideas about re-incarnation. He’d provide literature in the form of little pamphlets and booklets for her to read, then he’d come back to discuss them with her later. If one were looking for the darkly comic, Raymond had once suggested, you could see it as some sort of psychic offering of a way out of her current turgid existence, exemplified perfectly by her being imprisoned in a kiosk in a tube station nine and a half hours, six days a week, and into the nirvana of an after-life. Maybe he was her saviour, he suggested, and she’d better take better notice of his teachings.

There were some who brought her flowers maybe in condolence for her plight.

There were others with more lurid intentions.

Trapped as she was in her little commercial dungeon she was prey to every sad weirdo and pervert within a five-mile radius and beyond. One of these was a tinker from Kent who Betty referred to as ‘Big Nose’ and the utility of his large proboscis was the cause of much hilarity to Raymond at a not-much-later date.

“With his nose?” he’d ask incredulously whilst leaning on the little hatch of her kiosk.

“Absolutely” she’d reply “Fucking expert with it”

Mad Betty was no prude. She didn’t call it sex she called it passion. A socialist to her bones, Marx’s dictum ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his need’ applied just as much to physical pleasure as it did to money and food. It wasn’t promiscuity it was simply human sharing.

The fact that it sometimes involved gimp masks was neither here nor there.

Sometimes she’d be crying in her little kiosk. Punters would ask concernedly “are you OK?” and she would make up lies about recent bereavements or colds and allergies. But, in some ways, she was just crying about ending up working in her little kiosk underground.

Raymond stopped to sit in Forest Glade. In his mind he saw himself, his father and his younger brother Alan playing cricket in the clearing. Well, it wasn’t really cricket; it was one of the daft games his father would come up with.

His Dad was a great one for making up games. Squares in the carpet would become targets to roll marbles into, or bunkers on the fairways of golf courses he’d contrived. He’d made a cricket bat at his work (he was a woodwork machinist to trade) and they’d play out on the little square of grass behind the flats in East Kilbride. He’d devise the scoring so that you’d bet four for hitting the bin, six for hitting the clothes pole, and so on.

Later, for these games in Forest Glade, he’d insist they changed their names. Raymond would be Benjamin Netanyahu; his brother would be Bishop Muzorewa. Even in play his Dad had been political, although what the politics of Israel and Zimbabwe respectively had to do with family cricket in Leytonstone was never made clear.

He must have been proud of that old bat for it to travel over borders with them.

A work-mate of his Dads had once offered him the opinion that he was “neither fish nor fowl”.

Maybe he too was a chameleon.

Life seemed simpler back then in the mid-Seventies. That summer of 1976. There were cows that grazed on the fringes of Epping Forest. They’d sometime stray over Whipps Cross Road and further onto the residential streets. Big old cows roaming along Dyson Road, mooing at folk as if they owned the place.

It was a time of fresh discovery, moving down from Glasgow to this even bigger city. Although, if you’ve ever lived in London you’ll know that even though it’s London, you just live in your wee bit of it. You’d only really go ‘up west’ for a special treat or if you worked there.

Raymond hadn’t taken to at first. Leaving Glasgow had been hard on him, though God knows he wasn’t built, physically or emotionally, for survival in that tough city. Possibly, it was just the shock of the new and the fact that no-one seemed to understand his accent, or affected not to at any rate. Typically, he became more Scottish now that he was away from the place. Your male Scot abroad, especially in England, seems to have an over-powering need to establish his credentials, and those credentials are pronouncedly Caledonian.

Other than donning full highland kilt and wielding a Claymore he could not have represented the archetype of his race any better. The Scot, it seemed, was in London to drink and act pseudo-aggressively at every turn. Only a year into his stay he was arrested on a tube train while singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ to two plain-clothes policemen.  They had been summoned by London Underground staff as he’d entered their premises with beer glass half full and mouthing incomprehensible oaths to one and all. Taken from the train to Francis Road nick he’d been charged with creating a public nuisance and banged up for the night. Two weeks later in court it the officer’s statement was read out to general titters from those present…

“Not only was Mr Gilderoy unable to stand up, he was unable to sit down either”

His mother and father were not best pleased.

Being neither fish nor fowl he chose drink as his common denominator, or maybe it chose him. He was a drinking Scot and there’s no more consistent identity than that. It wasn’t hard to find other Scots to drink with. It couldn’t have been easier had there been a casting agency you rang up and asked ‘I need some fellow-Scots to drink with, two or three will do’ and they’d appear almost instantly; bearded, bedraggled and cynical with newly received Giro’s in hand.

One such was Andy McCartney, a man made for drink. Andy looked like an angry Jacobite, or Groundskeeper Willie. A wee wiry flame haired Jock, Andy was a drink machine. He and Raymond would become brothers in booze.

Going into his early twenties Raymond was a troubled and aimless individual. He gave up an early job as a Clerical Officer with the Inland Revenue to bugger off to France with two of the unlikeliest people imaginable. The idea, very loosely was that they would visit Paris and busk. That was about the sum total of it.

He’d met Moishe when he’d advertised for a singer for his band. Moishe had turned up at his door and started singing. He was in his mid-twenties, a single of child of Monty and Phyllis, an elderly Jewish couple from Gants Hill. Phyllis was mentally ill and Monty pretended to be deaf so he wouldn’t have to listen to her manipulative and destructive antics. Moishe was the anxious, zany and totally dependent product of this crazy union.

Ray was a thirty year old virgin from Berwick-On-Tweed.  Six years in the Army he was a man of almost unmovable habit. If Tuesday was ‘laundry night’ then that was that, it couldn’t easily be changed. Surprising then, that he could so easily be persuaded to undertake this mad trip.

Moishe had only weeks before been let out of Goodmayes Mental Hospital after a very serious suicide attempt when his life had only just been saved, yet Phyllis and Monty had no difficulty in letting their only son travel to France with two odd-balls and no conceivable itinerary or plan.

Strange!

Our first night in Calais we slept in the ruins of a castle, and on the second day’s blazing sunshine we began to walk the twenty-odd kilometres to Boulogne so that we could catch the motorway to Paris.

We hitched for lifts but three of us were never going to get picked up so we decided to split up and meet in Paris. I, being seventeen and mainly concerned with finishing the duty free whisky, was the obvious candidate to look after Moishe, while RAY, with his army background was best equipped to strike off on his own.

They watched their friend stride purposefully along the long inclining road into the setting Flanders sun.

And then a storm of biblical proportions broke around them.

They had eventually gotten a lift from a well-meaning French social worker with limited English. Moishe thought it funny to ask him ‘voulez-vouz mangez mon pantalon?’ which was not only a profoundly inappropriate question but probably grammatically incorrect. Eventually the kind man dropped them off at a camp-site, probably erroneously assuming that they were properly equipped with tents and the like.

All they had were sleeping bags, and the only available cover they could find was the camp toilet.

Sleeping, or rather, not sleeping at all, in a camp toilet is a busy affair. People will insist on coming in and using it, usually for one or another purpose and they generally don’t expect or appreciate anyone sprawled on the floor in sleeping bags. Oaths are verbalised along the lines of ‘what the fuck are you doing sprawled on the floor in the camp toilet?’ Aromas are left and noises are made. It is generally not a pleasant ‘sleeping’ environment.

First light Raymond and Moishe decided very quickly not to even attempt to hitch to Paris but, instead to jump on the first available train to that most romantic of cities.

They found their friend Ray as planned under the Eiffel Tower. He was trying to catch up on sleep on a bench in the Parc du Champ de Mars. He’d hitch-hiked throughout the rainy, windy night and his sleep had been disturbed by the Gendarmerie since the early hours.

They didn’t tell him they’d caught the train.

Raymond thought of all this as he walked along Colworth Road and on towards the High Road. He looked down at the motorway where before there used to be Fillebrook Road. He’d fallen in love on Fillebrook Road; made love to Penny in a house on Fillebrook Road, now it didn’t even exist. He’d lost this piece of his romantic history so that motorists could travel in and out of London quicker.

Glaswegian drinking partners form close bonds. They very quickly become like bosom brothers; like soldiers in the trenches; Battle of Britain boys. There’s no closer male-bonding than Glaswegian piss-heads – at least at the start. The relationship subsequently turns to hues and colours more akin to bruises and bumps.

Raymond and Andy had painted Leytonstone a blurred shade of red. Aided by the odd tax rebate and giro they had become the dynamic duo, carousing and marauding around The Crown, The North Star and The Red Lion and any other pubs that stood in their way. Two Glaswegian piss-heads in London, a sight sometimes welcome and often dreaded.

Such was their camaraderie that even the sleeping hours couldn’t part them. Andy shared a little bedsit on Colworth Road with his girlfriend Theresa. Theresa was of feral Essex stock. Not intellectual in any conceivable form (she once expressed the bizarre notion that Lester Piggot was the Prime Minister of South Africa. Another famous time she was asked at the Post Office to provide identification to which request she produced a signed photograph of herself) she possessed however the cunning of a street-wise fox. There was no shop in the area that was safe from her determination to obtain credit. All that she required from Andy was that he fuck her frequently, give her child, and slap her when she got out of line and these requirements he willingly fulfilled.

So telling her that his new found friend in drink was going to be sharing the nuptial bed was not going to present a problem.

Raymond had offered to sleep on the floor beside the bed but Andy was adamant that there was room enough for three. There was nothing but manly and practical purpose behind this, no hint of any undue shenanigans was ever on the agenda, just a friendly, drunken arrangement.

Bit weird when they started shagging though….!

Stars

  

His stars must have been aligned just right. Allison Teale had just witnessed his gig – and he’d torn the place up. Emboldened by a couple of pints and whiskies he’d got up and sung his three songs with great poise and passion; he’d replicated how he’d sung in his own bedroom for years when he hadn’t had the bottle to do it in public. His guitar-playing and his voice had infused, became one animal. At one point he’d felt the music rise like a bird and the power of it had enraptured the audience who had roared and clapped at the end. And then...

Allison Teale. Sultry and beautiful; the object of his affection and desire when he’d worked in the job centre with her. He was known as a mild, harmless flirt with many of the women in the office, he enjoyed making them laugh, but...with Allison Teale he became all tongue-tied, the rhythm of his speech became awkward. Just to be in her company it seemed, wiped his brain of his usual material, his one-liners sounded stupid, sometimes bordering on crude.

Anyway, it was well known she was spoken for. She lived with some Steve bloke, also a musician, and she was always bumming him up on Facebook – Steve’s playing this club, Steve this and that. He’d never met Steve, but he despised the man.

But she’d seen his performance and was now standing in front of him.

-what’s this Davie MacCallum all about, Mister Wylie?

-o hi Allison! Didn’t know you were in..

-I’m asking, what’s with the stage name?

-o you know, for tax reasons..

She smiled at this – you were terrific, absolutely brilliant. I didn’t realise...

He could tell that she meant this, she was looking him in a way he was unused to being looked at by Allison Teale. It sent lightning sparks of pleasure to many of the right places, not least wherever his ego lived.

Just to enhance the illusion of his new-found superstardom a man interrupted their conversation to politely ask for his autograph. Davie wondered if the man was kidding, this was an open mic night in a pub in Edinburgh for goodness sake, why would anyone want his autograph? Seeing the man was ardent in his wish Davie duly signed. He glowed inside with the thought of how this would surely look to Allison. This was impressive. Women liked impressive.

She said that she was with a group of work-mates and asked if he would like to join their company. All the while he’s getting ‘bloody great mate’ and ‘loved your songs’ from people in the pub. He felt like he was walking on air and thought to himself that if his life ended tonight then he was quite satisfied.

He was introduced to her friends; three smiling females, and one slightly scunnered looking bloke. Blokes don’t like other blokes impressing females they happen to be in the company of. If his nose had been any further out of joint he’d have required corrective surgery. Dave was delighted about this, for once it wasn’t him being introduced to the impressive bloke.

They all said how good they’d thought he’d been, compliments he accepted demurely and with due reticence. Inside he was screaming ‘yes ya beauty!’

A couple of people came over with pints for him and claps on the back to indicate their appreciation of his performance. He accepted these graciously. The fella who ran the Open Mic came over to express his liking of his act and asked Davie if he’d consider doing the half hour spot in three weeks time. Davie said he’d be delighted. The bloke followed on by saying he didn’t usually offer this spot to people after just one performance but would make an exception in Davie’s case so good did he think he was. Allison Teale and her mates were all listening to this – he wondered if perhaps he was dreaming?

After the bloke had gone he’d joked with Allison and her friends that all these compliments were just so he would buy a round which he got up to do. At the bar he glanced around and saw Allison was looking at him.

She was impressed.

The night wore on and the drink flowed. He found that Allison Teale was keen to monopolise his company and they talked and laughed a lot. They laughed about Facebook and the fact that they were friends on their along with a good many others from the job centre. She asked if he was aware that she no longer lived with Stevie and that they had finished for good. He faked concern and sympathy at this news while inside he screamed ‘yes ya beauty!’ Being the person he was though he did feel genuine sympathy with the pain this had caused her. He expressed empathy with her plight by telling her how badly he’d felt at the break-up of his last relationship. She enquired about the reasons for this and he made her smile when he said he’d need to write a book about his love life so intricate and unfortunate was it.

When she said again that she was unaware of his musical talents he asked was she not aware of his myspace site, a link for which was always prominent on his Facebook page? She said she was unaware of it. He didn’t know if it was the drink or a growing and very pleasurable knowledge that they were enjoying their intimacy but he found himself telling her of his disappointment that she was one of the few of his Facebook friends who hadn’t listened to any of the songs on his myspace site. He told her that Sami and Meeta and Else and Mags from the job centre had listened one evening and had regaled him with compliments on his songs and his singing and still she, Allison Teale, had not listened. He also told her that anytime that he saw her little green ‘chat’ dot meaning she was online he would re-post the link to his myspace site in the hope she would stumble on it, but she hadn’t. He told her that the only one of his Facebook friends that he badly wanted to hear his songs was very nearly the only one who hadn’t.

He was telling her that he sought her attention.

Out of propriety she turned her attention to her friends while he shared a laugh with the people sat at the table next to them. He was on good form and his comments and one-liners were raising guffaws. They seemed to want to court his attention and be associated with him in this way. It seemed clear that this was because of the stir his performance had caused. He thought back at the power he’d felt up there in front of the mic. He now knew what the phrase ‘having an audience in the palm of your hands’ meant. He’d sang the words perfectly and with nuance. He’d played his guitar expressively and was note-perfect. He hadn’t felt it was possible to sing a wrong note or fluff a chord. He was in total control. And he hadn’t been aware of her presence. Probably if he had have been it would have made him nervous, possibly marred his performance. What a stroke of luck he’d had.

His stars must have been in perfect alignment. 

Crying-Faced Bastard Speaks 1

It’s Sunday and I’m bored and, mindful of any propensity this state induces for a return to bad ways I decide to just take a walk around Edinburgh. Walking up through Mountcastle toward Duddingston and the impressively looming Arthur’s Seat one realises one is in ‘Bungalow World’. I feel eminently comfortable in Bungalow World it reminds me of my Granny and Granpa’s bungalow in Ayr and the concomitant aromas of apples and roses. Bungalow world is beige in every way – there is no skulduggery going on here, just well-to-do families or well-to-done elderly folk trimming hedges and washing cars. No for sale signs here, these people, like their abodely investments, are solid as oak.

These are places where bowling clubs thrive, for Christ’s sake!

I will never aspire to Bungalow World mores the pity. In so many ways, we all end up where we’re supposed to be which in my case is a rented flat on the top floor of a tenement – higher in fact, but lower on the social scale.

Scanning the impressive, lyrical expanse of Duddingson Loch (where it was that the Reverend Walker was depicted as skating with such alacrity and style) I decide on a theme for my walk. Let this be a Victor Meldrew/Larry David tribute walk. Let’s see what truly annoys me on this walk today.

Anyone that even vaguely knows me knows that I am very easily annoyed, and increasingly intolerant of my fellow human. The heat magnifies this to a degree where I will be forced, for my own safety, indoors. Only a few weekends ago I narrowly escaped being punched by a well-built youth half my age when I demonstrated annoyance at the music from his parked car when I was trying to read. You may think this brave of me, but you didn’t see me almost cringingly back down when he got out of his car.

Straight away my first pet hate speeds past me as I resume walking towards town - cyclists on the pavement. These people should be punished by the state, or pedestrians should be allowed to remove them from their bikes in some manner that doesn’t put others at risk (maybe throw them into a handy hedge or down an embankment).

This is a growing phenomenon which needs to be nipped in the bud. Too often I’ve maybe taken a wee step sideways on the pavement, maybe to avoid a dog or a child, only to risk being shunted up the arse by a speeding cyclist from behind. Apart from the toll on one’s blood pressure it could potentially be most embarrassing attending A&E with a set of bike handles inserted in ones anal cavity.

Walking through The Meadows, a pleasantly umbrageous area of Edinburgh, I spy a couple under the shade of a burly oak kissing and canoodling. This sort of behaviour annoys me immensely, largely I suspect because I am not one of the participants (well, the male one at any rate), but also because I am of the opinion that such activities should be conducted in private (Is this not a Protestant country? What would John Knox think?). There’s something quite arrogant about displaying ones ardour and passion in such a public place. I believe a three-strike approach to this is appropriate. Third offence results in chemical castration for the male and a year spent with no make- up and messy hair for the female. I’ll leave gay relationships alone as they’ve been persecuted to the extent that they deserve to rub our faces in it.

I notice that the Edinburgh Buddhist HQ is located in leafy, middle-class, arty-farty Marchmont and not in the far less salubrious Pilton. This is further evidence to me that Buddhism and the middle-classes have utterly embraced each other. Spiritual enlightenment and Nirvana now seem, in the west at any rate, the domain of those positioned to afford it. This is much the same with other such ‘alternative’ therapies and the like. The Meadowlark ‘space for wellness’ is also located there. I, being a mere weegie pleb, would be far too intimidated to even enter its portals. They’d think I was there to fix the photocopier or to empty the bins. Believe me, I know of which I speak, having naively tried to ‘join in’ with such things in the past.

I’m more at home on buses, though I hate them also, sometimes to the point of screaming out loud.

Pebbles

There’s a man on the beach that’s just shouted ‘Fuck off!’ to his dog which was scurrying and barking around his legs.

Do dogs respond to expletives I wonder? Maybe only Scottish ones..

The rain spots on this paper as I write and blurs the ink.

Cyclists scare the shit out of me when they whizz past me from behind. One step to the side to avoid a puddle and I could have handle-bars up my arse; perhaps a first for A&E but rather humiliating all the same.

Who let them back on the Prom?

Which cunt invented the wheel anyway?

I stand in the rain for five minutes waiting to cross a road while cunts in their comfortable, warm cars roll past insouciantly giving me nary a thought or a glance.

Cars made the world a very selfish place. Give them only to those that really need them I say – doctors, the disabled, getaway drivers – and stop them guzzling all the oil.

The thoughts of a man - often happy sometimes sad - off to visit his favourite graveyard in the rain; kicking pebbles as he goes.  

You know sometimes when you just can’t afford to think about certain things? Some things you almost physically have to shake out of your head? That’s a good time to visit a graveyard and commune with the dead who don’t even care anymore.

Seeing how neat graveyards are and how well tended the graves can lead you to think that more respect is paid to the dead than to the living. All the flowers and mementos (I even saw grave cleaning fluid advertised in one of those wee pamphlets that come with The Sunday Post and the like offering cheap prices for incontinence equipment and bendy shoes) and the Gardens of Remembrance all kept spick and span.

Not sure about photos of dead folk on the gravestones though. Wee bit spooky for some reason. Probably because there’s no way they look like that now. Mind you, in the States I hear you can have a pre-recorded voice of the deceased at the grave (well, obviously it’s pre-recorded!). It’ll say ‘Hi!’ and ‘Welcome..!’ Maybe it’ll even ask ‘How are you today?’ and ‘Have a nice day..!’ when you leave. Only in America.

Did you know that there’s an ‘open day’ at Seafield Crematorium every year during the Leith Festival? You didn’t did you? (I will persist in writing as if anyone ever reads this pish – and while we’re in parenthesis, it’s Seafield Graveyard I’m currently in). I went one year and it really is a sparkling day out for all the family. Bring Granddad, he’ll be particularly thrilled.

I steal names from gravestones and use them as characters in daft little stories – a sort of semi-literate Burke or Hare, that’s me!

‘Arthur Zebedee Brake’ – couldn’t resist that one.

‘Raymond ‘Wizzo’ Wisdom’

‘Euphemia B Short’

All of these people lived at one time or another and are now immortalised in this epic work. The cliché now is to ask…

“I wonder what their lives were like?”

On that we can merely ponder.

I’d suggest that old Arthur Z may have been a lay-preacher with the Temperance Movement who fell for a woman who betrayed him with an Indian Lascar on Leith Links. This turned him to drink and he lost his life chasing the electric hare at Powderhall.

Only joking Arty boy, I bet you were a top guy.

Visiting Piershill Cemetery is a more poignant affair. It has a large section which holds Jewish graves which were desecrated by anti-Semites as recently as 1995. The Jewish graves there, again, throw up some great names – Lazarus Goldstone; Israel Brodie and Hyman Zoltie. The last name gives us an illustration of the plight of the Jews throughout history. As with most others the stones have a Hebrew name and a Gentile. Hyman felt the need to go through life known as Howard Denton in an attempt to hide his Jewish identity. Sad that this is illustrated in death as in life.

Piershill Cemetery is also the resting place of The Great Lafayette, a world famous magician and illusionist of the early twentieth century who died in a fire in a theatre he was performing in in 1911. Many thousands lined the streets to Piershill on the day of his funeral. He is buried there with his dog ‘Beauty’ which he adored and had been given to him by Harry Houdini. On the centenary of his death Paul Daniels visited his grave to pay his respects to the great performer.

It is said you can still here The Great Lafayette spinning in his grave to this day.

The Scotmid Murders

1

“I’m gonna change my middle name to ‘fuck-up’! Walter ‘Fuck-up’ Davis”

This he muttered to no-one but himself rising from a sweat-soaked bed in a room colder than Margaret Thatcher’s pussy.

Experience and an awful case of the shakes told him that the day ahead was gonna be just lousy; as lousy as far too many times before.

He looked out of the window of his third-floor tenement window. If he’d had the guts he’d have jumped out of it long ago. It was only the hope of some so-far illusive redemption coupled with the thought that it wouldn’t kill him and he’d end up just as fucked up only now in a wheelchair that stopped him.

The weather was grey and rainy; the swell from the sea soaked the promenade as he watched parents’ guide their children to warm, cosy schools. He watched with a mournful heart and wished he was one of those parents; even being one of the children would be vastly more desirable. Most children hadn’t yet had time to be this emotionally and physically shattered.

Why did he have to live such a stereotypical life? He wondered as this as he watched the first customers of the day entered Scotmid’s, or ‘the schemie Co-op’ as the locals termed it, as the doors were opened seven o’clock sharp. Such a desperate crew – staff that resented this first influx of saddo’s eager to purchase milk or, more likely, just to mill about the store because it was better than sitting in some damp flat or bedsit where loneliness poured through the pores like moisture through a cheap sponge.

He had turned into an archetype. A lonesome private eye; prone to too much Bourbon in the evening; consumed in a dark corner in the loneliest bar in town. No-one wanted to know a private eye, even if they only suspected that was what he was. He knew too much, suspected too much, was a snoop by nature. Having a conversation with him was like treading through a minefield; who knows what you might give away. Who you knew and everything in your sad little world would be scrutinised as a matter of course.  A private eye had to observe; and the best place to observe was from dark corners where people could forget you were there.

Take this new case he was on – ‘The Scotmid Murders’. Handily his flat faced the front doors of the shop so he could easily eye the comings and goings. No one could understand it, least of all Walter ‘Fuck-up’ Davis. Three killings in two weeks; local police baffled; everyone looked to the private eye to solve it. They’d barely look at him in the street but they all fervently hoped he’d come up with the answer that would put a stop to the terror.

And the manner of the killings? There appeared to be no rhyme or reason. The only common denominators were that all three were irrevocably dead; they had all occurred within the premises and; perhaps more bizarrely; they all seem to have occurred during opening hours; in broad daylight in this typically miserable mid-April on the Scottish east coast.

This meant the murderer, assuming they were one and the same was either a customer, or more likely someone posing as one, or a member of the Scotmid staff. Whoever it was – they had a seriously deranged mind!

Walter pondered this as he shivered down his first drink of the day; a good three-fingers of Aldi’s own-brand Bourbon with a splash of grapefruit squash. A perfectly disgusting concoction; the Bourbon was for his nerves, the grapefruit juice, he kidded himself, gave him much needed vitamins. The last theory of the desperate alcoholic! He accompanied this abomination with a badly constructed roll-up which he drew at hungrily. This made him cough until he vomited violently into the bucket beside the bed.

2

Portobello is a seaside town past it’s time. A one-time popular resort, especially for Glaswegians who would flock in droves to drink and watch the popular variety shows of the day. Pretty much what they do in Blackpool still. The Glaswegian comic Tommy Morgan was a huge star in the town back in the 1920s. The town had changed; the pier and the entertainment had gone. The height of excitement seemed to be the auld wifies sitting and smoking in front of the converted cinema now bingo hall – they had put in special speakers outside so that they could do this. Such is the persistent power of the fag in Scotland.

Walter could remember at school in Glasgow around the age of fifteen when careers officers were showing the extent of their faith in you by taking you to visit potential employers in the area – Belgrove Abattoir (vegetarians weren’t allowed in those days), Tennants Lager factory and, totally off the map in these PC, health-conscious times, WD and HO Wills Tobacco factory where we were all surreptitiously and due to a blind eye turned by the teacher handed a handful of smokes each by the supervisor blokey who’d showed us around. These days he’d have ended up in court!

Portobello was now a changed place; some would say for the better. The plebby types kept to themselves up the west side of town amid the run-down flats and council houses, and the better-off (or English as they would be better identified) kept themselves east where the kayak club was and the little cafes that sold exotic bread and the tea was never PG.

There was little trouble in the town, and it was considered a great place to bring up kids and dogs that ranged and paddled along the sandy beach. To Walter it was idyllic, but it didn’t stop him fucking up on occasion.

The relative placidity of the town made these three murders all the more shocking. The first had been a local hairdresser, or barber as he would perhaps be more properly termed as he still cut hair in a George Formby style no matter what you asked him for. His name was Geordie Taggart and Walter wondered if some disgruntled customer had taken it out on him after he’d left the shop looking like he should head directly to one selling ukulele’s.

The second seemed inexplicable. A thirty-eight year old female treasurer of the Portobello Sailing and Kayak club; by profession, a solicitor in Edinburgh. Her body had been found by a member of staff helping to close up shop. She’d had her head bashed in by a heavy object and dumped in a freezer beside the pizzas and frozen ready-meals. For some reason this had caused greater alarm than the murder Of Geordie Taggart. Walter pondered whether the great and good of the town could get along without a local barber, but the treasurer of the local Kayak Club? Somehow this seemed beyond the pale..

The third though seemed totally baffling. A young unemployed joiner from the local scheme had been found upside down in a large refuse bin at the back of the store strangled by the wire from his own head-phones.

Walter had thought long and hard to work out any linkage between the three killings. He’d discounted the notion that these murders had been committed by more than one person – all three reeked of the same vindictiveness or vengeance. What would incite one person to commit three murders in the same place in such a short period of time?

Someone had reached a breaking point, and Walter had to find out who…

3

“It had to be a male who had committed these murders..!”

Walter was addressing Brian Marker, store manager of Scotmid’s.

“A woman wouldn't have the strength to lift a fifteen stone body into one of those large bins, and the person who killed to solicitor had hit her with a mighty thump with something reasonably heavy. The death of the hairdresser was less clear cut, if you’ll excuse the pun, but still a deep gash in the neck with a steel comb found at the scene and with clumps of his hair scattered around? That’s more confusing, not to say unsettling..’

“Are there any leads..?” the manager enquired.

“Well, apart from the obvious, the murderer was present in the store on at least three occasions in the past two weeks when the killings took place, and, to my mind, the killer was male. All three killings were violent and needed some considerable strength and intent to carry out. Any unusually disgruntled customers or colleagues you can think of who may be capable of this?”

Walter looked around the manager’s dingy office. He may be manager but Walter thought he’d still be earning way less than the twenty grand a year mark. A lot of responsibility for very little pay; the way of the world at the lower end of commerce these days.

“We get customer’s moaning about having to queue at times but, all in all, they are a friendly bunch and stand around chatting. Staff-wise? Odd bit of sniping about some not pulling their weight, etc, but definitely not anything out of the ordinary that I’ve noticed. Actually, come to think of it, we do have one customer who worries some of the younger female staff. He works in the amusement arcade down the front. Some of the girls find him a bit creepy. And, if you’re talking about big blokes, our security guard is six-foot six but he’s very popular with everyone here. I honestly can’t think of any other likely candidate for well….murder”

“What about yourself Mr Marker?” The question had to be ventured. Walter Davis cut a shambling figure but he was nothing if not thorough.

Brian Marker looked like the honest, lowly aspirer he was; maybe Area Manager in a few years and Walter knew his question was a pointless one. Brian Marker was no more capable of murder as he was of insulting his mother.

“Not me Mister Davis. Don’t have it in me”. Walter looked into his eyes and knew his culprit was elsewhere.

4

The amusement arcade was on the west side of town where the poorer people lived. You knew this because there was a Wimpy Bar inside. Why were there still Wimpy Bars? They came from such a bygone age when people bought Goblin hamburgers in tins. Wealthy folk didn’t entertain Wimpy Bars, or amusement arcades for that matter. It was somehow necessarily below them, as if they’d be socially contaminated if they ever entered one.

Walter didn’t have any such reservations – he knew his place.

Entering one of these arcades took you right back in time, although Penny Falls now required two pence pieces, unless you went big time and tried the ten pence one. Cincinnati Kid or what! And that air-football table! Games from the Ark.

These arcades seem always to be empty. Walter was convinced they were fronts for money laundering or drug running, but then, he thought the worst of everything, even himself.

He was here to talk to the man that Marker had fingered as a possible loose-screw. He knew Archie Campbell on sight. Tattoos around his neck and all the way up his arms, and probably other places that Walter couldn’t identify. The ultimate knuckle-head, seventeen stone of muscled danger and an attitude like a hungry Rottweiler. He operated as security guard here, though what he had to keep secure was a complete mystery to Walter as the place was deserted. Maybe he was expecting a tooled-up team from Leith intent on raiding the grab-a-teddy machine that had never actually appeared.

Campbell had a permanent look of disdain on his face as if the world had dealt him a bad hand and had kept dealing it. An ex-con, he’d spent time for petty theft and serious violence. These places were the only places that would employ him.

“You been in Scotmid’s recently Archie?” Walter studied the eyes of this man but they were long practiced to remain blank and unreadable.

“Aye ah huv, why you asking? It’s no aboot the murders is it? Ah cannae believe that if it is” Campbell spoke like Rebus and Begbie combined; as if he’d been to east coast elocution lessons”

“Well Archie! I’ve been told you’ve been a wee bit of an intimidating presence in there on occasions”

“Ach! Thae lassies, they cannae take a joke likesay. Jist my way”

“Were ye in there two Wednesdays ago, last Thursday and Sunday jist gone?”

“Depends whit times yir talkin aboot but I can tell ye that I had shifts those days”

Walter checked the times of the shifts and decided it wasn’t feasible that Campbell could have been in the store that the murders had taken place.

“See youse pokenosers ye draw the wrong conclusions and ye don’t mind who it hurts. I might have done a number of things Mister Davis but I don’t go around killing folk in supermarkets or any place else for that matter. Ye should check yer facts before accusin’”

Walter had little to say in his own defence. In the background he could hear that someone had won big time on the Penny Falls.

5

“There has to be a link between the three murders, has to be”

Walter was talking to the wall; something he’d been doing most of his life but he needed something to bounce off.

“A strangulation with head-phone wires; a slashing with a steel hair comb; someone clobbered with something heavy and dumped in the freezer..”

“A hairdresser, an unemployed joiner and a solicitor who’s also treasurer of the kayak club”

“Why would anyone want to kill a hairdresser, an unemployed joiner and a solicitor? What was the link?”

“Botch jobs!” It came to him through the ether. Bad haircut, bad work from an out of work joiner doing a foreigner, bad representation by a solicitor. Surely nothing to do with the Kayak Club! A member of staff of Scotmid was unlikely ever to apply for or afford to join Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club.

Surely one person had not suffered all three of these fates, but maybe one might lead him to motives for the others.

Then he remembered.

As he’d been wondering around Scotmid pondering clues he’d noticed something. Possibly the worst haircut he’d ever seen on the head of the big chap with the cut-price sticker gun. A haircut of the brutalist school that could only have been performed by an in-patient of Carstairs Mental Hospital or….Geordie Taggart.

The cut price sticker gun!

Heavy enough to break the skull of a respected solicitor and treasurer of the Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club? But, why?

And that still left the unemployed joiner. Where was the linkage there?

6

Donny Brooke had, apart from a name which connoted violence, an unfortunate disposition. This, along with the care home haircut and quite striking acne – one could hardly keep oneself from holding him down and joining the dots with a biro, made him the ideal murder suspect. This man had every motive in the world to kill at least someone.

Walter established that he had indeed suffered a recent haircut from Geordie Taggart but as yet no admission that he had actually killed him.

“I know you done for the solicitor lady” I was bluffing but sometimes you have to start somewhere and hope for a break.

Young Donny looked shook up, his eyes dilated with fear. I knew I had my man.

“I didn’t kill anyone”

“Indentations and bruises on her head correctly match the shape of the sticker gun. The sticker gun you alone were assigned by the store manager the day she was murdered” Again I had no certainty of the veracity of that statement. I was only vaguely aware of the meaning of the word veracity.

“And your haircut, were you a happy with it? Must have made you a wow with the ladies. One of them told me it made you look like Forest Gump on a bad hair day” This wasn’t even remotely true but I was getting his goat, and many murderers have a very low tolerance for that.

“This is just pure harassment” Donny blustered and flustered now like a bird unable to break free of a cage 

“I need a solicitor”

 I swear he failed completely to see the irony of this.

7

So far I’d been sailing my own kayak on this one and the local police had been making their own enquiries and were not coming to anywhere near the same conclusions. Detective Inspector Tam Henderson seemed not be able to make any connections between the three murders and almost seemed to be assuming they were three separate incidents, which they surely were but he seemed not to think committed by the same perpetrator.

This was how he spoke. Trained to speak in front of TV cameras he used words like perpetrators whenever he was given the opportunity.

Indeed, it seemed to Walter that the man was suffering most pressure from the friends and colleagues of the eminent solicitor and treasurer of Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club who seemed to want this case prioritised.

Such is the power of the well-off.

This tended to skew his case somewhat and left Walter to join up some links that he thought had gotten him to the truth. He just needed an admission of guilt, a witness or some form of forensic evidence which would lead to Donny Brooke being sent to where they don’t let you out no matter how often you ask them.

This came from an unexpected source.

He was to learn from one of the female sales assistant that on the day of the solicitor’s murder she had had a contretemps with young Donny Boy.

Now, one thing that apparently annoyed the life out of young Donny was how the well-to-do of the town were the pushiest when it came to insisting that they get first dibs on the cut-price stickers. He wanted the pensioners or the unemployed to avail themselves of the bargains he stickered. The solicitor’s mistake this day was to insist that Donny sticker her items first and kept barging in before the more deferential oldies.

Not grounds for murder you may rightly say.

But, this was a man on the edge. A man with a chronic hair-do laughed at by female colleagues.

This was also the same man who too often sat on the same bus as a tough-looking unemployed/actually employed joiner whose tsssk tsssk tssk from his headphones prevented the actually rather refined and well-read young shop assistant from reading his book and annoyed the living fuck out of him.

These factors combined came to what’s known as ‘The Scotmid Murders’, eventually admitted to by a man who’s nerves had become very frayed by very everyday things and the moral is; if well-off people would leave alone bargains they don’t need to those who do; if people would stop annoying the shit out of people on buses with their shitty music, and, maybe more importantly, if there were a regulatory body preventing shitey hairdressers trading then….these things wouldn't happen.

8

Walter Davis, private eye, looked down from his window at the entrance of Scotmid’s and pondered the case he’d just solved.

Needless murders over needless acts and still we was an unhappy and unresolved man.

Only tonight he was having Morrison’s own Bourbon. That bit more expensive but a little less rough.

The Comedian Who Hated His Audience

It was only after he’d finished that he realised he’d come over a photo of Vladimir Putin. That this picture appeared on the front page of The Guardian only confirmed the moral felony. Guardian readers were not supposed to relieve themselves whilst viewing hard-core porn online, let alone spill their seed over pictures of probably corrupt Russian leaders. It had been the nearest thing to hand.

Soundtracks to such activities weren’t usually Benny Goodman playing Royal Garden Blue either.

Was nothing in his life as it should be? It was as if he was out of sync constantly, as if someone or something had set a metronome at odds to the rhythm of life and he alone had to play to the metronome.

Now he would have to shower again.

He had resorted to wanking out of a boredom so deeply set in it made him yawn. Such a boredom was worthy of the scrutiny of psychologists. What would they make of someone so utterly bored? His friend was training to be a Life Coach. Did he need a life coach; someone to help him develop strategies to move away from this demobilising ennui?

He was a hopeless case. He was so bored he thought that he didn’t deserve to live, and that if there was someone somewhere, a real lover of life who’d been told he or she had an incurable disease and was going to die, then it was only right that he should give that person his remaining years, which would only be filled with interminable boredom, and take ownership of the killer disease. There would be justice and fairness in that act.

He’d felt this strongly when his Dad was dying of cancer. He’d asked a God he didn’t believe in to give his dad his life, and he’d take the cancer. No actually, he’d tried to make a deal that he didn’t get the actual cancer but instead died painlessly in his sleep (a coward even in his nobility).

Days yawned before him and he was acutely aware of how the hours dragged.

‘No character’ was how a schoolteacher had described him to his parents. He’d always resented this but now he could see clearly what she was getting at. ‘No character’ in the sense that he couldn’t fill his time productively or in any disciplined way. After 35 years of playing the guitar, for instance, he was still shit. Wouldn’t practice you see. He could have been bloody Segovia by now. ‘Inveterate procrastinator’ was another term she could have fairly used. Always tomorrow he was going to start, and he’d yet to give any such proclamation truthful resonance. ‘Never tomorrow’ was nearer the mark.

And now this stand-up stuff. He breaks out in cold sweats on stage as he forgets yet another line or the next topic in his routine. He’d rather lay himself open to this horror than actually practice the routine thoroughly as you were supposed to. He avoided doing this while claiming to himself that it mitigated against improvisation. In this he was dangerously wrong. You learned it backward and word for word and then you were free to improvise or at least appear to be doing so knowing you had the safety net of the written routine to fall back on.

The phone rang.

-Wanker...!

It was Bill Wilkinson, fellow stand-up and possibly a homosexual. Bill had also assumed the mantle of his agent, a request that had never actually been made. Bill thought Robin should be making greater effort. Bill was absolutely right.

-Ah Bill, how pleasant to hear from you...

Never mind that, tosser – two references to male sexual manipulation in as many seconds, definitely a homosexual –you didn’t turn up for the showcase last night, why not...?

Robin, in the mists of time, had added himself to the long list of wannabe stand-up comedians residing in this grand old city of Edinburgh, city of the annual comedy festival. He’d often wondered why it was the host of the world’s most renowned comedy festival. It could only be because it held the requisite number of venues to stage such an event. The city surely held no other claim to it. It had no great comedy tradition for one thing - surely the main thing. Name one great comedy hero that hailed from Edinburgh, and don’t say Harry Lauder. Alright do say Harry Lauder, but that was a hundred years ago. Ronnie Corbett? Do me a favour. And the good citizens of Edinburgh? Not especially noted for their dazzling wit and repartee. It is in the west of Scotland that you find your comedians; professional and otherwise. In fact, a visit to Glasgow 50 miles or so across country would introduce you to a culture where everyone is a comedian – man woman and child. The patter would be as incessant as the rain in that bold city. Your ears would bleed with the weight of one-liners. You’d find yourself running at full pelt for Queen Street station to board a train back to comparatively humour-free Edinburgh, such being the pain in your sides from chuckling and guffawing.

Robin was from Glasgow. That’s why he now lived in Edinburgh. Glasgow was the city for laughs alright. It was also the city for bullying, knifings, territorial gang warfare and dark skies at ten in the morning. Robin felt safer in Edinburgh.

-wisnae my thing Billy boy. Bill hated being called Billy Boy, he was an ardent Celtic fan and the protestant connotation irked him –pissed-up students and wankers, don’t understand the McBride wit..

Truth was he’d bottled it and contemplated suicide, and then he’d bottled that as well.

-who does understand the McBride wit? Countered Billy boy –especially if the McBride wit sits on its arse at home..

This summation of the situation could not be argued with. The McBride wit had decided not to shake a leg and had decided to drown itself in the best part of a bottle of Bells. The McBride wit had thus transformed itself into a drunken self-pitying wreck until the McBride wit could no longer stay awake and had fallen asleep in its clothes. Comedians? There was too many of them. Who needed another one?

-aye well, he said – how did it go anyway? Was it a good night? Robin could feel a spasm of genuine remorse that he’d missed another opportunity for his ego to be warmly massaged. He very rarely, if ever, bombed or died as they said in the trade. Except that one night which still brought him out in a fresh frisson of terror whenever he thought about it, when the audience was infiltrated by bevvied Rangers supporters who were not attuned to his wry wit. Rangers supporters didn’t do wry wit. Some of them wouldn’t know what wry meant. Some of them wouldn’t be able to spell it.

Robin wasn’t good with hecklers. His mind went blank and he’d be reduced to petrified silence. Sometimes he was convinced that a stage was no place to be for a physical coward. His primary fear in life was that he would be picked on and humiliated as he had been so many times growing up and even as an adult (adult!! He didn’t feel that word had ever applied to him, an adult was someone he would never be). What if it happened on a stage in front of an audience?

So hecklers and the fear of them was the bane of his life. He couldn’t risk upsetting one to the point where they got up on stage and punched him (although this had happened notably to Jim Jeffries and Jerry Sadowitz and in a ‘rite of passage’ sort of a way had only enhanced their reputations). Up until now though he’d managed to ride the heckles with a boyish look of puzzlement which the audience took to be part of the act. When would he be found out though?

-Spazmo went down well again you’ll be nauseated to hear. Have to say that boy is going places, pure mainstream though he may be. Had them creasing up with his coffee-shop observations..

‘Spazmo’ was Don McGill, a seriously slick black comic in the Michael McIntyre mould who’d been attracting serious interest from agent’s influential with the Festival organisers. He was a toned-down Chris Rock who attracted a black as well as white audience who enjoyed his gentle admonishments of racial stereotyping and the absurdities of multiculturalism and political correctness. The other comics called him ‘Spazmo’ because they didn’t like him and resented his success which he continued to achieve with good looking sang-froide. ‘Mainstream’ comics were generally treated with this sort of disdain by their largely less successful, often less talented, peers. They also called him Spazmo because he spoke with a pronounced lisp. This distasteful moniker had been bestowed on him by the comic community when they’d realised that he had more drive and stage-craft than most of them put together. Soon he’d be within the radar of the derision of such as Stewart Lee, and once you’d attracted the derision of Stewart Lee, you’d made it.

It was pretty certain that Stewart Lee hadn’t even heard of Robin McBride.

Robin McBride didn’t really fit in to a category, mainstream or otherwise. His comedy sprang from the pain of his life.

 I was once a ( freelance) sperm donor when I was a student in Liverpool (yes I was a wanker for a living – some people would say I’ve carried this on, but...they don’t really know me)

It wasn’t my main income, of course, just beer money really, a supplementary income if you will.

You didn’t get much for it in those days; you couldn’t command fees for your sperm then, as you can now. It was before they changed the law which meant that any resulting offspring could legally seek you out when they hit eighteen

Can you imagine that, your biological kid, or kids plural, who knows how prolific your sperm became after you were done with it? Imagine they approached you, got in touch like. You’d most likely be a terrible disappointment to them for one thing – their expectations would not likely be met by the reality that you’re a forty year old civil servant, still on the lowest rung of the civil service ladder and who eighteen years previously had sought the avenue of sperm-donoring as a source of beer money

I knew a girl once who didn’t know who her father was – sought him out – turned out he was an active white supremacist in South Africa

Anyway, I did the sperm-donoring for a while and you know the sperm-doctor chappy (he actually resembled sperm, so devoted to it had he become, that he’d come to resemble his lifes work, he had white hair and it spiralled to a sort of peak, a bit like an ice cream. I sat looking at him in amazement, but he paid me the highest compliment a man can ever receive, he said – you know, you have an abnormally high sperm count, an abnormally high sperm count. And he’d seen some sperm in his time, a lot of sperm. God, the sperm that man had seen....

Such an asset was I to his organisation that after a few weeks of committed and successful donoring, he let me bring it from home; I could do it at home and bring it in on the bus.

I never thought about it at the time, when youre young and vibrant you worry less, but...say that bus had been involved in an accident and, god forbid I had been killed. I would have been found there, dead on the bus, with a vial of my own sperm in my pocket. Now, nobody wants to be in that position. What would the police and the ambulance people have made of that? They probably wouldn’t put 2 and 2 together and say ‘He must have been taking a vial of his own sperm to the sperm-donor –place..!’ Most people wouldn’t know of such places back then.

Invitro fertilisation was, well in its infancy. Theyd have no explanation, no explanation other than ‘Here’s a guy who liked to carry small containers of his own sperm around the place, how odd’.

And, worse, if it had been a crash there’s every chance that vial would have broken, and its contents burst asunder, what would they have made of that? Covered in your own sperm all around the pocket, groinal-type area. Maybe they’d have seen those movies where people are aroused by car crashes and injuries and that and thought, ‘this must have been one of those guys, he realised in a split second that the bus was about to crash and this is result, covered in sperm...

Another thing that I found interesting about the whole sperm-donoring thing, was where they put you to do it was a little toilety-place, just a plain room with white tiles and that, but there was no like stimulants. You’d have thought that given the nature of the task ahead, that there would be a little stimulation in there, some soft porn at least, get you in and out, and not labouring up there for hours, but no...

In fact, all there was this Home and Gardens magazine. Now, I don’t know how you feel about garden furniture, but it doesn’t light my candle...no matter how you might dress it up..

Which is interesting given what I saw on the internet some time back, and it’s even worse I think than that bloke in Falkirk who was reported for masturbating whilst bouncing up and down on a trampoline in his garden. An intriguing social image you have to admit. I think they drink a lot in Falkirk..

No, this was this guy in America, his neighbour; upset by his behaviour caught him on film on her mobile, making love, if that’s the correct term to a garden table, yeh through the hole in the middle

Sex, to me, while it should be adventuress and playful, you know fruit, licky stuff...it shouldn’t be arduous, you know not such a chore that you find yourself lugging garden furniture about the place. And a good sized garden table, well you’d have to hold it up to achieve centrality. This is to dis-regard completely the obvious chafing problem. This is hard, compacted plastic you’re dealing with this, not soft, warm fleshiness at all..

I would have loved to be at the court case, that would have been a gas..

Anyway I’m left in the toilety room in the sperm-donoring place with the copy of Home and Garden, when I come across...no that’s phrased incorrectly. The only human beings I can find are this family, depicted in their back garden having a barbecue. It’s the wife and husband, son and daughter domestic idyll...so I’m gonna have to use that. Problem is, in the picture, they’re sorta bunched, and I can’t concentrate to the extent I need to because of the proximity of the husband, and especially the two kids, I mean they are disconcertingly close.

So what I do is I fold the page so that it’s just the wife.

Now the wife is nothing special, she’s not wearing a Basque or stockings or anything, she’s actually wearing a pinny (amazing I can remember vividly after so many years), and I bet this woman, when she got this little homely photo-shoot job for House and Garden never dreamed that she’d be the subject of such desperate, sensual attention. Because, I wasn’t the only donor to have been in that toilety place for this purpose. There could have been dozens, for this was a well-thumbed magazine, furiously using this woman, imagining her doing all sorts of things, in and out of that pinny of hers..

Comedy wasn’t difficult – you were either funny to a group of people or you weren’t, and the funnier you were the greater in number the group of people would be. That was the theory anyway. Some comedians were very funny to a little group of people and not funny at all to a much larger group of people. The opposite applied too. To many connoisseurs of comedy, the most famous were the least funny. Philosophers of comedy tried to analyse and pontificate on what funny was. Though as Ken Dodd famously said, none of them had to play the Glasgow Empire

To Robin McBride’s mind, there were now way too many comedians. At Festival time the city of Edinburgh was infested by them. The railings around Princes Gardens were festooned with poster after poster, hundreds of yards of them. There was an overload of mirth. The product was being diluted by over-exuberance. Yet, he couldn’t deny there was a market for it. The principle of supply and demand in this area was sound. It had become a career of choice for many. Young and Oxbridge-educated lampooning their privilege, middle-aged Scousers telling you about their hilarious families and holidays in Rhyl, thousands of Sarah’s and Jeremy’s and Sean’s all with their whacky perceptions of ordinary life.

One day maybe, he thought, every human on the planet will be a professional comedian. Audiences will comprise of professional comedians watching other professional comedians perform and then follow them on to the stage one at a time when it’s their turn.

Laughter, it seemed, was the hottest property on the planet. In fact, the more he thought about it, the healthier this sounded. Maybe one day, laughter would expose and eradicate war and suffering. Laughter would indeed be the best medicine.

Either that, or people would just laugh and ignore the troubles of the world. Warmongers would remain rich, and comedians would get rich and turn up at charity events proclaiming the importance of caring and sharing.

What a cynic he was. Just as a bit of brightness appeared on the horizon he slammed the door shut and was back in his gloom. But that was his comedy – droll, self-deprecating, bordering on maudlin.

He couldn’t stand all those happy comics. To him happy and comic did not belong together. Milligan was far from happy; Cook was depressive and bored; Sadowitz was/is angry and misanthropic. Woody Allen, Tommy Cooper, Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Lenny Bruce. The list was endless. All troubled in some way.

Why were there no women there? He had never liked female comedians, that’s why. Couldn’t think of one he liked. Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman? ‘Spose so! Women weren’t miserable enough. They were too optimistic about life to be truly funny about it. And it was probably no coincidence that the two he’d thought of were Jewish. Jews were natural comedians, they’d had to be.

I’ve lived a sort of ramshackle life; it’s followed no real direction, no great determination have I demonstrated, quite the opposite in fact. I’ve had over 30 jobs and over 40 addresses – that tells the story perfectly. Most people when you ask them, I ask people at work, how many addresses have you lived at? They say, ‘well I grew up in such and such, then I got a flat when I was at uni, then I got married we bought a place and then we moved to where we are now, that’s 4’, and that’s pretty normal, then they ask ‘Why? How many addresses have you had?’ and I say 42.

I guess you’re more likely to get caught in weird situations the less normal or mainstream your life is. If you play by the rules, the rules pretty much protect you. Put it this way you’re less likely to find yourself cowering behind a sofa, at the most intense point of an LSD trip while someone is throwing claw-hammers at you, if you’re saving up for your honeymoon in Gran Canarias and putting a deposit down on a little 2-bedroom place...

Funny thing about comedians is that they don’t necessarily like people very much. How could you entertain people you didn’t like? Well, they weren’t really people for one thing, they were an amorphous mass called ‘audience’. The happier you made ‘audience’ the better off you’d be –egotistically, financially, maybe even in the sense of revenge.

Or maybe he was generalising too broadly, or speaking too much from personal experience. Maybe he should say that this comedian didn’t like people very much. But he’d met others who seemed to have little but contempt for their fellow humans. Comedians were often damaged goods, and who had damaged them? Other people of course.

Robin thought of his childhood in Glasgow. It wasn’t a happy one. It shaped who he was. It shaped his comedy.

I once sellotaped my head-hair onto my pubic area. At primary school I was moved on a year due to being cleverer than my contemporaries. I never considered this an advantage as it meant that for the rest of my schooldays I was a year younger than my classmates. In puberty this can prove crucial in a number of not-so-subtle ways.

 One of these was pubic hair growth. Being 12 not thirteen was a big deal. Being thirteen not fourteen was an even bigger one.  When changing for gym or swimming the presence or otherwise of pubic hair was of vital importance – a defining moment no less. Well, for me it was.

Older boys had pubic hair I didn’t. What to do? Manufacture some? Snip some from the head and attach to pubic area? Brilliant!! I toyed with the idea of elastoplasts, thinking it may match my skin tone, but it was too dark, if only you could have gotten the clear stuff back then. I tried glue – but it doesn’t work well with skin and hair, don’t ask me why, I’m not a chemist. Sellotape doesn’t work much better but by this time it was worth a try and I was desperate. My school days were a series of humiliations and failures as it was, so I was determined to win on this one. I would have pubic hair and that was that. I spent ages in the toilet at home. My mother and father must have thought I was merely masturbating. Indeed, I’m pretty sure they would have rathered I was if they’d have known what I was really up to, attempting to simulate pubic maturity by snipping off hair from my head and attaching it to sellotape and then attempting to secure it onto my groin. The stuff of child psychologists, I fear.

The end result was impressive enough, admittedly to my desperate young mind, for me to attend school with my underpants full of sellotape and hair. I got through the changing room experience without comment.

Trouble is that when your swimming, water tends to have a degenerative effect on any glue-based adhesive. Afterwards, I put my trousers straight on over my wringing-wet swimming trunks and hoped no-one would wonder why there were pieces of hairy sellotape floating about the pool.

His past was comical, he had made it so, but at the time it was no joke. Some things you just couldn’t make light of.

You know folks, so victimised and bullied was I at school, that even the teachers had a go ha ha yeh I know crazy innit?

Comedy wasn’t about literal truth though. It was about a funny slant, even of the most painful events. People wanted you to make light of things – they wanted to laugh and be entertained. It was grotesque really. The comedian and the audience connived to trivialise pain. So what! You might say. The world is full of pain – horrible pain. We need relief from it, not constant reminders.

Yeh even the teachers hated me, I could see it in their eyes.

No matter, it wasn’t worth making an issue out of. He had more important things to take care of.

He’d started this comedy racket accidently. Started doing the Edinburgh Open Mic circuit as a singer/songwriter. His songs weren’t that strong but his voice was. Strong and sensual, he was told it had a hypnotic quality. Women seemed to like it at any rate, and that was pretty much all that mattered to him. Sexual conquest through musical talent was quite a thrill if you thought about it – singing women into bed. He’d even sang a couple of men there too and thereby discovering quite late on his bisexuality.

In a sort of Billy Connolly-esque way his little comedy monologues and one-liners began to become more of an attraction than he’d intended. People began to request certain routines – the sperm-donor thing becoming a particular favourite. He had a natural comedic intuition for the best way to deliver a line; his timing was well-tuned and totally natural. From just filling in between songs, the comedy quickly began to be the main thing with a couple of songs thrown in as fillers. Now he didn’t even do any songs, they tended to spoil the comedy mood. He dabbled with comic songs, but these he felt were contrived. Unless you were as good as Loudon Wainwright or Digby thingy off Radio 4 you shouldn’t bother.

This was supposed to be a dream come true. This was to be the making of him.

And still it bored him.

Did you ever look at nature in detail? The rivulets and patterns the sea leaves on the beach, the delicate curves of a flower, the way the sun glints on the pavement after a spring shower...AND STILL FEEL FUCKING BORED RIGID!!! 

He would need to make more of an effort.

I went out with a girl who was turned on by the sound and rumble of trains. I found this out as we were walking across the Hungerford Bridge in London on our way to see a show at the Royal Festival Hall. 

Don’t know if you know, but it’s a footpath across the Thames which runs alongside the railway line where trains go in and out of Charing Cross, and this train was rumbling by and she started grabbing me, which was really unlike her cos she wasn’t really into the old hanky panky that much, nowhere near as much as I was anyway, so shes cuddling me and, I swear, her eyes went way up in her head, like she was in some sort of sensual trance. I was thinking ‘fuck the show, let’s get a fast cab home’, but then the train had gone and so had the moment..

Put a seed of an idea in my head though. My brother worked in a library and he procured for me these soundtrack LPs of train noises and that ‘Diesel Deltics thru tunnels’ was the one I thought would be a winner. So I made some nice food that night, got some nice wine and made it all romantic and that. Then I shoved on the LP. She wasn’t best pleased, didn’t see the funny side at all, which was the least I was hoping for. We didn’t last long after that....