Unlikely Epiphany

The pale light struggles grimly to reveal itself as if dragged from the firmaments like a teenager from his bed on a school morning. Neville Vile refuses to fully open his eyes until this occurrence. Christmas Eve and the rain spatters heavily on Scotmid's corrugated roof.

Soon he will shop for tinsel and a small Christmas pud, maybe a bottle of whisky which will later send him off to sleep.

The woman in the flat below is a constant hooverer. Eight in the morning she begins as if she’s working a shift. He can hear the click of sucking appliances being fitted so she can click-click in the corners and along the skirting boards. Maybe her man has a dust allergy or maybe it’s part of an obsessive compulsion. Or maybe she’s merely a throwback to some ‘spic-and-span’ heritage when a housewife was spoken-ill of for ‘no’ keepin’ a clean hoose’. Bloody annoying whatever it was. Neville suffered from some form of Phonophobia or maybe Misophonia that was his own inheritance from his mother. ‘Noisy neighbours’ didn’t have to be particularly noisy to rattle his cage. The slightest hammering or ‘through the wall’ chattering was enough to ruin his ideal of perfect quiet. He’d even stopped using the ‘Quiet Coach’ on the inter-city because the absolute hush that he expected was never adhered to. Better among the rowdies where at least he wouldn’t suffer the crushing disappointment of his expectations.

He made himself tea and looked down upon the dismal morning. People were being blown back by the fierce winds, umbrellas buckling under the whoosh and swirl. Later he’d be ‘volunteering’ at the Salvation Army shelter where at least he’d be warm. Maybe he’d even cheer up surrounded by folk doing even worse in life than himself. Not a very selfless Christmas thought but it would have to do.

He remembered volunteering at a ‘drinker’s shelter’ for the homeless one Christmas when he was living in London. It was a drinker’s shelter as it was pointless banning the stuff because what you’d end up with is an empty building. What transpired was a multitude of pissed ‘guests’ and several dozen staff who were stone-cold sober.

If you’ve never seen a very drunk man attempting to break-dance around a tin of Kestral Extra then you may never have really lived. The Karaoke was a joy to behold, far more entertaining than any X-Factor you’ve ever watched. They should have drunk people on TV a lot more often.

As usual, Neville Vile felt far more at home among the drink-sodden down-at-heels than he did among the worthies and exuberant students that were his fellow volunteers. All Josh and Evangela’s no doubt looking to ‘give something back’ or add a bit of mentoring to their CVs. Mind you! That Gabby Logan was there with her bloke. Tiny, she was….

Neville Vile thought he didn’t like people; he almost prided himself on this notion. Deliberately lugubrious and curmudgeonly, especially around this ‘festive’ period, he saw it as all commercial and false bon homie. He defied any hope of a Scrooge-like epiphany. No ghostly visitations would turn him into a Cratchitt-saving reformist.

That is, until there was a loud knock on his front door……

All the Threes..

Since I was a kid there were certain things I had to do exactly three times, or in multiples of three (never four, never ever four). This was a direct consequence of my morbid concerns over my father’s mortality. If I didn’t do things three times then there would be dire consequences in this regard. Simply put, my father would die.

It was this dreadful responsibility that saw me running back three hundred yards to the very start of the stretch of railings to make sure I ‘tapped three, missed three, tapped three, missed three’. Even at aged twelve I vaguely envisioned myself tapping railings for the rest of my life; never getting it right, running back to the start time and again all in the cause of keeping my unwitting father alive.

And still I’m doing it; forty years later and ten after my father has actually died. It has become part of a worthless lifetime routine, an OCD I daren’t shake in case something unimaginable happens.

Three is a significant number. Triad trinity triangle. Father Son and Holy Ghost. Wilson Kepple and Betty.  Four, they say, is a perfect number, the square, the four winds, the four horsemen of the apocalypse , but I didn’t want my father dying in his forties, had to be at least sixty or preferably in his nineties.

Tetraphobia is fear of the number four apparently common in East Asia where they associate that number with ‘death’. It was also much feared in south Glasgow by a young teenager.

There was a cupboard in my room. I had to get into bed of a night, then get up and open and close the cupboard door. I had to do this three times and then try to convince myself to sleep keeping the urgent thought out of my mind that somehow I hadn’t performed the ritual properly and that I had to do it again. Because if I had to do it again; I’d have to do it a third time to keep everything balanced up.

The only other person I’ve ever met who suffered from something similar was my wee mate Davy from Cumbernauld. We’d spend hilarious hours tormenting each other with things we had to do to prevent our loved ones mysteriously perishing. I once made him do a ‘goat dance’ in the middle of the public bar in the Red Lion. With his big bush of red hair and beard and half-drunk he looked like a down-at-heel Jacobite bucking and snorting around the pool table.

Bought his old man a few years with that performance….

The Ballad of Bonkers Johnson

They didn’t call him ‘Bonkers’ because he was mad, it was due to his sexual promiscuity; and it wasn’t just the skirt either. Bonkers would shag the coos in the field given half a glimpse of prime meaty buttock and some suspected he already had. He didn’t call his dug ‘Wifey’ for nothing. Poor thing eyed him more warily than wearily and kept his arse to the fire. Many was the time his drunken master mistook his dug for an absent wife and made the very act eponymous leaving poor Wifey with ought but the rictus grin of forbearance.

And here he sat in an old paddle-pool in his back-yard splashing at the water and singing ‘Fields of Athenry’ loud enough to infuriate his Rangers-loving neighbour. The previous incumbent of the Bugs Bunny Baby Pool had long been snatched away by its ill-abused mother and was now living somewhere in the wilds of Niddrie, address unknown. At least, unknown to Bonkers, not that he was that arsed to find out. Children were an unnecessary expense unless you could claim on some fictitious childhood disability and get yourself some pocket-money DLA.

Neighbours (especially the hun one) had complained about his baby pool nudity but he continued the pursuit regardless. At least he wasn’t as bad as that felly in Falkirk that had been caught on camera having a wank while bouncing on his kiddies trampoline. He’d qualify almost anything in his own favour. He’d have made a great advocate if the defendant was always himself.

Bonkers Johnson was one of those types that didn’t see themselves as hideous individuals one little bit, while everyone that knew him saw quite clearly that he most definitely was.  God’s gift to womankind he thought himself and was oblivious to womankind making puking motions within a ten-mile radius. 

An uglier cratur you couldn’t imagine. Massive big globe of a Scotsman’s belly, crammed tight with chips and lager. A big-moon face the size of a monkey’s arse and jist aboot as rid, Johnson indulged in the F.A.T. diet – Farmfood’s, Aldi’s and Tennant's. He had as much idea of nutrition as he did about Quantum Physics. His philosophy, if he even had one, was ‘they widnae sell it in the shoaps if it wis bad fur ye, wid they?’ This went for cigarettes too, though he was currently trying to fiddle ‘wan ae they e-fags’ from the NHS and was down at the local Advice Shop to get them to help with his newest harassment. 

The Washing-Up Bowl

He’d finally forgotten her number. Maybe he’d forgotten it in his sleep weeks – maybe months, or years – ago, but he couldn’t recollect it now. Of all things, emptying the stoury washing-up bowl had brought it to mind. He’d went off his nut one time over this very thing. They were playing a silly game one night ‘name three things about me’ type of nonsense. She’d said blah, blah and then ‘you never empty the washing up bowl’. This was obviously something that got on her nerves and now she saw an opportunity to get it out there. To him it meant an utter rejection of his presence in her flat.

They both knew it wasn’t quite right him living there. Their relationship had been fractured beyond repair long before but he, still smitten, more smitten than she of him (she wasn’t the smitten type, at least not towards him, but towards her –ex as it turned out), had been hanging on to the carcass of their ‘love’ like grim death; almost rejoicing in her inability to pay her bills so that he could step in and help, the condition being….

Him, her and two cats that weren’t allowed out and literally climbed the walls and kept them awake half the night. (He was convinced she’d somehow managed to turn at least one of the cats against him).

She said that all the fusion music he listened to sounded like 1970s cop show themes, but the final split came over that damn remark about the washing-up bowl.

Her –ex, he suspected, would have had nothing whatsoever to do with washing up, never mind emptying the bowl.

The Heart Is the Matter

“How can you be a Socialist and not like people?”

Her question was jarring in its simplicity. Why, indeed, was he so concerned with the plight of his fellow man?

The question was too big, too vast for him this bright, sunny spring morning, when just walking around the park hand in hand seemed to negate any such deep considerations.

“I don’t not like people, I like you don’t I?” That this should be a question at all seemed to her to go right to the heart of the matter.

“I know you love me, but I’m not always sure that you like me”

He snorted in gentle dismissive derision, but he feared that she was about to go on.

“I mean, I do get on your nerves don’t I? I feel your impatience with me”

O dear! Funny how we fall in love, he thought, so urgent, so dramatic, so needful, and then spent the next months and years picking away at one another. The impossible plateau of mutual-worship, giving way to the drip-drip erosion towards the beige chasms of ordinary life.

He was good at the first part and piss-poor at the second. In fact, he pondered way too often these days that, in order for him to accrue any hero status at all in a relationship, the other party had to be suffering in some way; family problems, depression, a crisis of some sort, because as soon as things straightened out his purpose in the partnership seemed to diminish, at least within himself. Yes, he needed to be a hero, a rock, an ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ figure. His ego demanded it. 

The other stuff – buying houses, acquiring cars, promotions, invites to dinner parties – he seemed to rail against to the point of obliteration and self-destruction, with little sense of rationale or compromise.

A child trying to have a relationship with a grown-up, but sometimes the grown-up became a child and he, the child, became the grown-up.

“You don’t get on my nerves. I love you very much”

How does one insecure person convince another insecure person of that?

“Anyway, I’m no longer a Socialist. You’ve turned me into a Liberal Democrat”

Maybe now, the walk among the pleasing flowers could continue unhindered by any more home truths.

Never Beige

My father was certainly the only one at the wedding adorned with calf-length cowboy boots and wearing a brown pin-striped suit. He looked like an Albanian at a job interview, and puffing on cigars no less.

This was during my father’s cigar-smoking period, another seemingly conventional habit that he could make singularly odd. Why he’d started smoking cigars was a mystery to my mother and brother and I: if he inhaled he had to walk around the block for twenty minutes to clear his head and quell the resultant nausea. In characteristic style he’d smoke them down as far as he could, to maybe three-quarters of an inch then stick a pin in the end to allow him to smoke it down further without burning his lips. He wasn’t mean, just peculiar.

He once took up ‘blues harp’ style harmonica, fancying himself as the Scottish (and white) Sonny Boy Williamson. He drove my poor mother demented for many weeks as he endeavoured, as is appropriate to this musical idiom, to ‘bend’ a note in imitation of a hobo-filled train passing a jailhouse on a lonesome Mississippi night. But, this was a Kilmarnock afternoon and not the musical accompaniment my mother needed during her viewing of ‘Home and Away’.

She refused to walk with him as he insisted on wearing a beret. No-one else in Ayrshire let alone Kilmarnock wore a beret. Maybe ‘up Byers Road’ or in posher parts of Edinburgh you’d get away with this Bohemian look, but Kilmarnock is not, and never will be, Bohemia. The ‘bunnet’ was considered respectable headwear for the working class Scot, and usually this was what he would wear, but for reasons known only to himself he had decided to purchase a beret which he now wished to perch jauntily and Gallic-ally on his napper and my mother was having none of it.

It’s as if the man sought deliberately to be unconventional. To support ‘the wrong team’ in whatever way he could. From good upper-working class aspirant stock he seemed to want nothing more than to live in a tower block in a housing scheme.  He was one of the few people you’d meet, outside of religious sects pursuing singularly devout monastic leanings, who was actively ‘downwardly mobile’.

Mary Michie

Mary Michie edged along an unknown road in the dark. She couldn’t see three feet in front of her but even if she could, her tears would have blinded her.

“Awkward sod would have to die during the bloody black-out”

Her heart was broken.

They’d not even offered her a bed at the hospital even though it was the middle of the night. Just sent her on her way, a grieving woman just widowed.

She wouldn’t have taken them up on such an offer anyway, she was too upset to sleep. The seventeen mile walk from the hospital in Erskine to Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow was actually good for her in a way. It gave her time to think about her predicament, terrifying though it may be. Though, she could have done without the black, bleak darkness.

Gangrene they’d said, from an old wound suffered in the last fiasco. Lost the lower part of a leg. Her lovely man had let her children and nieces play with his wooden leg – made a big joke out of it. Finally succumbed to an injury from the first war in the midst of a second. She’d held his hand as he died. Said ‘goodbye my lovely man’. Now she had to harden her heart and look after their children.

How lonely life can be sometimes. Lonely and so, so tough. Experiences either shape you or destroy you, she thought. She had no option but to adapt.

She was glad he was out of his pain; the agonies and indignities at the end. She was also glad she could at least be with him at the end. They’d meant so much to each other.

She stumbled home to her children in the darkness. She had much to suffer yet, and she could only hope that out of darkness came some shred of light.

Bryant the Rabbit

Bryant was often amazed by how much talent he lacked. He seemed to lack that particular commodity to a degree so immense it was like trying to conceptualise the size of a hundred billion galaxies in your mind; or why anyone found Jack Whitehall anything other than deeply irritating. And it wasn’t just the amount of talent he lacked either; it was the consistency with which he lacked it. He lacked talent constantly.

But, for some reason, he had banked his whole life on the vague idea that it was there somewhere, latent and just waiting to introduce itself and make everything alright. He had strange conceit, shared by no-one else who ever knew him or knew him now that he should not be working on a help-desk for Dunlogan City Council; that this situation was somehow aberrant. It was due to this fantastical way of thinking that, ironically, he wasn’t very talented at his job either. He gave off an air, not in an arrogant way but more a devil-may-care sort of approach that the job was beneath him. He’d crack jokes with his colleagues and callers alike, engage them in lengthy conversations unrelated to anything they’d enquired about. Sometimes he’d just wander off around the corridors of the vast old local government building and chat to folk as he met them. In this way, he could be gone as long as forty minutes and had been ‘spoken to’ about this very matter on two occasions now, occurrences which he had resented greatly, airing this grievance with his colleagues apparently unaware that it was they that had expressed their dis-satisfaction over his prolonged absences.

He used words and language in a way that not any other of his work-mates did. It was like he was from another time. As if a Dicken’s character or Sebastian Dangerfield had been kicked out of a time machine to be placed here on a help-desk.

Little did he know also that several of his co-workers had complained to management about his choice of words and language and his continued re-telling, for instance, of his experiences as a sperm-donor in Liverpool. The rest were alternately bemused and amused by his apparent insistence on relating the more bizarre details of his life’s history. They felt somehow like his audience and, to Bryant, they were.

He shared nothing of what they themselves held dear in their lives. They had partners whereas he seemed to have had a string of failed relationships left somewhere in some murky, semi-comical past.

“Never get involved with a Scouse girl – fucking nightmare. Like being in a mega-extended episode of Brookside!”

Many of them had children and he did not. At least not in the normal sense. His sperm-donor story suggested he may have a few dozen roaming around the Merseyside area.

“Aw six-foot-four and wondering why they have a proclivity for strong drink and macaroon bars”

They had cars and houses and nearby relatives where he had none of these. His surviving Scottish family – a mother and brother no less – still lived in London where he himself had lived for many years; a fact he constantly belaboured them about. In reality, he had so very little in common with any form of social humanity that any of them knew or cared about.

It had crossed some of their minds that he might be from outer space like David Bowie in that film.

Of course, when you’re different, people will believe anything about you. After all, there was the evidence of his visit to the ladies toilet. Was that not evidence enough that he was a dangerous pervert? It all added up with the sperm-donor stuff and the lack of a girlfriend. And, what about all these previous women - where were they now?

Moira Barton, the help-desk team leader – whom Bryant had christened Morbid Bastard – thought of him, and she thought of him too often for her liking ‘you can have all the degrees you want, but they mean nothing without common sense’ (which for her meant anything the Daily Mail said) – as a left-wing waster and constantly marked him down at report time, or Performance Appraisal and Participation (PAP), and made sure he was the lowest marked of his grade.

Sitting there with his union coaster on his desk and his talk of ‘tories’ and the Queen being a ‘worthless parasite’ he may as well have been wearing pince-nez and frizzy hair and talking Russian. If there was a category for ‘Bolshevik’ on the appraisal form she’d have gladly ticked it.

He still hadn’t been forgiven for being the only one of the help-desk staff to join the strike against government cuts the previous March. What they hadn’t countenanced was that he hadn’t forgiven them either. Still, he had to try and get on with them or life would become intolerable. Or should he say even more intolerable.

He breezed in his usual manner then spoiled his apparent exuberance by expounding that last night he’d had a dream, a nightmare in fact, that he worked at Dunlogan City Council and woke up to find that it was true. This produced the usual groans from some and wry smiles from others. Morbid had placed him as far away from herself as it was possible to be on the little ‘ten-man’ team so he was free to spray his venom and wit around at will. His style of delivery still induced a response to these familiar remarks. He was nothing if not laconic and charming. Any time the subject of smoking came up, or attempts to give it up always produced ‘I tried those nicotine patches once…..but I couldn’t get them lit’. There was always someone who hadn’t got the simple subtlety of that gag the last eight times he’d cracked it then suddenly got it and the unexpected guffaw was drawn. Bryant thrived on such moments. He particularly liked to make women laugh which gave him some mild notoriety as a womaniser a tag that no-one deserved least. Still, if during the course of a working day he managed to coax that tinkle of female laughter for him, they day had been a huge success and he’d revel over it time and again in his mind.

One day, he’d made Jeanette McStay laugh, and it had moved him to go home and write a wee story about it. It involved her falling for him after happening upon him playing a ‘blistering’ Open Mic set in a local pub. She would never see this story or even know about it as she was getting married in the coming summer to one of the managers of another section.

Bryant lived in a flat down by the beachside in Dunlogan. It possessed no central heating and was freezing in the long winter months, so much so that he’d return from work of an evening and head straight for bed fully clothed. He’d moved so many times in his life that he just couldn’t face another upheaval. Every ‘move’ seemed to incur a loss. Most people he’d noticed seemed to carry their ‘stuff’ with them through their life. They chose to keep what they wanted and discard what they didn’t. Bryant had lost whole loads of ‘stuff’. Big moves, drastic moves, heart-breaking moves, moves to different cities and parts of cities had all meant he’d had to leave ‘stuff’ behind. Favourite rugs, CDs, guitars, amplifiers, furniture. Bits of himself left behind to be wilfully forgotten because remembering the stuff meant remembering why the move was made. Now he had new stuff, it would be nice to keep it.

The part of Dunlogan City Council that Bryant worked in was the McGowan Annexe in the Newcross area of the city. The building once housed a school for the deaf and owned a synonymous quiet, deferential quality that was quite eerie; as if it was a building not designed for speech. Every noise echoed a remembrance to its former incumbents and people tended to talk quietly almost at a whisper. Indeed, the help-desk, due to its inherent nature, was the noisiest part of the building. Phones were constantly ringing and the operatives spoke at a normal level, perhaps because callers would not understand why there was any ghostly need for hushed reverence.

His colleagues would spy Bryant often on a section of his lap around the building (he’d sometimes saunter around it four or five times before coming back). Though palpably on his own, they could see his mouth move and his hands gesticulating expressively, as if in some torment or frustration. They never asked him about this but would get clues from his comments on returning. They were all about ‘Why do people…?’ and ‘How do you explain…?’ and were largely ignored as his colleagues competed to be the first to answer the next call.

Then there were the days of the yellow pencil.

Dunlogan City Council had over seven hundred staff and they all had to be appraised at two times each year: in-year and end-of-year. Well over a hundred managers; all of them in fact had no idea how to do the new on-line system. There were three participants to each appraisal; the person being appraised, their manager, and the manager’s manager. Each had to have access at different stages of the process. This was the nightmare that they all phoned the help-desk multiple times about. For two weeks the phones were red-hot, and this intensity increased the closer they got to the deadline for submission. From very senior managers to bog-standard team leaders they were queuing up to receive blessed help from the ‘experts’ i.e. help-desk staff who knew precious little more than they did themselves.

“Who’s got the yellow pencil?” became a question so oft-repeated that God in his heaven must have been awoken by its insistence and wondered ‘what the hell has happened down there?’

If you could see a yellow pencil depicted on the screen in front of you that wasn’t ‘greyed-out’ then you had access to the appraisal and could input your comments. Therefore, the question “do you have the yellow pencil” became ubiquitous but the problems did not stop there. Some had ‘the yellow pencil’ at the wrong stage of the process i.e. a manager’s manager had it before the manager had made any comments that he could either ratify or not or the member of staff had access before there was anything input for he or she to comment on. As the final submission date grew ever-nearer the mass panic was about how to get all concerned at the right stage of the process.

Only two members of the team had powers of I.T. intervention i.e. to take over control of other folks machines: one was Morbid Bastard who had no idea what she was doing and had attempted to avoid the whole debacle by claiming she had ‘faith in her team’ and the other was a wee guy called Joseph who was quite understandably of people asking him to ‘do this one for us’. So, the team had to try and guide people through the best it could.

Bryant oscillated between breakdown-time hysteria to screaming hilarity. He envisioned staff being escorted from the building by nurses as they gibbered ‘but, he said he had the yellow pencil’. For weeks after he’d approach members of the team in a surreptitious manner and whisper with hand half-over mouth ‘who’s got the yellow pencil. Is it you…?’

Bryant generally sat alone at a table towards the rear of the canteen. He liked to read a book or look out the window at the snow falling if it was that time of year. The other four at lunch sat together (the team would have two lunch sittings, the other five manning the phones). He couldn’t imagine joining them. Any patter or banter he had was strictly for the work area; he wouldn’t know what to talk to them about in a lunch-break situation. He feared, quite correctly, that it would be then that the stark divisions and differences in their lives and concerns would be truly and bleakly glaring.

Sometimes he’d be joined by the big lugubrious bloke, Stuart, who monitored everyone’s internet usage. In fact, all he’d ever talk about was everybody’s internet usage. Basically, Stuart had no-one else to sit with either, and they had a mutual though unspoken recognition of this fact. Bryant dearly wished that Stuart did have someone else to sit with because he dreaded these assignations intently. They had become two people who had long ago exhausted every topic of conversation they could possibly share (Stuart monitoring everyone’s internet usage) and were now compelled to continue to sit together until the end of time or until one of them died. If it hadn’t been snowing really quite heavily Bryant would be walking the streets of Dunlogan quite happily to avoid sitting here with Stuart.

This is what happens with outsiders; people who don’t quite fit in. He imagined that his fellow team-members were highly amused by his lunch-time predicament. He hoped they were; at least would be entertained by it.

“If people didn’t use the internet at work at all and just stuck to the intranet, then they wouldn’t run into trouble” If he’d said this once he’d said it six times and Bryant had always responded “then, what would you do Stuart? You’d lose you’re cushy little job”

Stuart had ended up doing the internet monitoring job basically because they could find nothing else that he was any good at. He’d been on the help-desk for a while but had ended up off long-term with stress, then they put him on Recruitment but he’d somehow managed to lose a load of online applications so now they had him sat in a corner of the HR department scrutinising staff internet usage to make sure they weren’t watching porn or learning how to make bombs. He had to hope some of them were otherwise they may have had to make him sit in a darkened room ordering bin liners.

Moira Barton was one of those people that was bad at her job but refused to recognise this fact, and so far this lack of self-insight had served her well. Aged just thirty-two she had become leader of her own team. She did what many bad managers do and courted favourites and used these to ostracise those she did not approve of or felt threatened by. The person she liked to ostracise most was Neil Bryant whom she disapproved of heartily and felt threatened by. She disliked clever people. By clever she meant people who didn’t read the Daily Mail (Bryant read the Guardian, the very worst choice of all in the eyes of Moira – Guardian readers liked Asylum Seekers and single mothers) and people who used big words (he’d used the word ‘procrastinate’ last week). He was also a trade unionist and had a Social Science degree. He was, she summated, the very epitome of everything she hated in a human being. And now he was sat in his chair on her section, her section – dressed as a rabbit.

A huge, big, white bunny rabbit.

Moira felt unsteady and held the back of her chair (a special swivel one for team-leaders). She hadn’t even had time to take off her jacket. The rest of her team and many on neighbouring teams looked to see how she would react. Many had been sniggering and whispering since he’d come in dressed this way. They wondered if he’d travelled in that way (he had) and what was going to happen about it. People had been phoned and had come from other parts of the building to see him sitting there. He’d said ‘hello’ and ‘good morning’ to them as if nothing was amiss and was quite busy answering early morning phone calls. Young Simon who sat next to him on the team said ‘what the fuck, Neil?’ and laughed uproariously. And now Morbid Bastard had arrived and she looked as if she’d seen one of her team sitting there dressed as a rabbit. She turned on her high heels and almost ran out the office. It was obvious she was off to look for someone senior to herself.

Some murmured that this was all to do with the trouble over the key to the archive vaults.

It was sometimes necessary for a member of the help-desk team to visit the archive room. A phone call may have been received concerning an ex-employee; dates of employment, grade or whatever and their file would have been archived in the vaults on the basement floor. Morbid Bastard had designated Bryant to be the officer who would collect files on these occasions. There was a basic problem with this assignment and that was that the help-desk team did not possess a key to the archive vaults. Two keys were in existence, one held by the pensions team who needed access to the vaults due to imminent redundancies and the other was held by the recruitment team who provided references for employers. Neither of these teams was at all keen on lending the key out to anyone else including the help-desk team. Bryant had been discovered one day attempting to take the relevant key belonging to the pension’s team of its hook on the wall and all hell had let loose. ‘That key must be available to my team at all times and MUST NOT be removed by other teams’. E-mails of this nature flew around. Morbid Bastard bottled it, the other team leader was a higher grade and Bryant was left in the invidious position of receiving requests for files from his team and not having access to a key to procure them.

And now he had come to work dressed as a six-foot-four white bunny rabbit.

Brenda McLair looked over at Neil Bryant dressed as a rabbit and felt deeply sad. What a thing to be doing and why was he doing it? She’d giggled along with her colleagues at first and she’d thought better of it. This was an act of not-so-quiet-but-really-quite-public desperation, and it wasn’t funny at all. She’d always been fond of Bryant and could see a great gentle kindness within him. Really too gentle and too kind, and that was his trouble. She loved the names he made up for some of the staff he didn’t like (which amounted to quite a few). There was Morbid Bastard obviously and she smiled when she thought of Morbid having to tell her boss that Neil Bryant was sitting dressed as a rabbit. They’d think old Morbid had finally lost it. Then her own boss, Joyce Fraser, whom he’d branded Fatticus Mongnicitus. Not very PC for a union man making fun of someone’s weight but she was an old bitch right enough. She and Bryant had often discussed how it was that so many complete incompetents, folk who are totally useless at ‘managing’ people get to be managers?

She thought of the time out smoking in the bike-shed in the freezing cold. He’d joked that the smoking ban had been brought in to improve people’s health now, as well as cancer; they were risking hypothermia and double-pneumonia by standing out in the icy winds puffing on fags. She’d asked about his past and he’d mentioned he’d been doing a PhD and teaching in a ‘plastic-university’ as he’d put it then a relationship had gone wrong and he’d looked sad. Then another joke; she knew he liked to make her laugh. She was attracted to him but there was a frailty to him that frightened her, as if he’d crack under hardly any pressure at all. There was little to support and sustain such sensitivity that he had. She wondered if this was maybe a very public breakdown?

In actual fact, Bryant was enjoying life as a giant rabbit immensely. So much so, that he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it long ago. He was utterly and ridiculously apparent at the same time as feeling completely anonymous. He didn’t exist anymore, only a giant rabbit did. He wasn’t Neil Bryant now, he was a huge rabbit. The idea was fascinating. Even on the bus this morning he could hear the laughter and the jibes of the wideos but they weren’t aimed at Neil Bryant, they were aimed at a big white rabbit. And for some reason he felt immune from the prospect of violence, far more so than Neil Bryant who’d been picked on for a lifetime. In a strange way, it would be in thoroughly poor taste to start beating up someone who had the balls to come on a bus dressed as a rabbit. He knew that he better not depend on this though, but who cares? he thought. he always felt threatened anyway.

He watched them all through his rabbit eyes peering over at him, still laughing even after half an hour or so. What made him laugh was that he was answering phones perfectly normally to people who didn’t know, had no idea, that he was dressed as a giant rabbit.

Bill Struthers was a career-long local government man. He rocked no boats, and went with flows. And now, for the first time in his entire forty-year career, from two-tier to unitary authority, through boundary changes, cuts, planning and plots and counter-plots that would make the Borgia’s seem like Quakers, a member of his staff was telling him that a council officer was sitting at his work-station dressed as a rabbit.

“And have you spoken to him yet?” He didn’t like Moira Barton; he’d seen her type too often. Mad careerist but incompetent as hell. Dangerous too. Had once had a friend of his up for sexual harassment. You couldn’t sexually harass her type with a blow-torch. Hard as nails.

“Erm, not yet Bill”

“Well, don’t you think you should, and make sure his union rep is with him?”

“Well, Bill, I was wondering if you would….erm, should. He must have lost the plot. He could be dangerous”

She had a point there, Struthers thought, he was retiring in six months and he didn’t want to be left open to allegations that he’d put his staff in a vulnerable situation. And what if something did happen? He was dressed as a rabbit, after all.

“Right OK. You go find a union rep – George Campbell would be best and then come back here”

After she’d left Bill Struthers pondered about what was the issue here. Obviously the chaps mental health may be a factor. It wasn’t normal to come to work dressed as a rabbit. But, other than that…? George Campbell would know full well there was no dress-code to enforce. The Help-desk didn’t actually see the public so they could all be dressed as rabbits and it would make no difference whatsoever. The only other issue would be if it was distracting or upsetting the other staff, he supposed. He decided they’d go with that one.

George Campbell was union Branch Secretary and fancied himself something rotten. Polished cowboy boots, dress trousers and a definite quiff, he was a rockabilly union rep and sharp as a needle. He didn’t like Moira Barton either and liked even less that one of his troops had apparently come to work dressed as a gregarious plant-eating mammal of the furry persuasion. He’d stood on picket lines with Neil Bryant, loyal as they come, and now he was either making some opaque eco-political statement or he was cooking on another planet. He decided immediately that they’d plead the latter, but he’d need to speak to him alone first, which is what he told Moira Barton.

Work was continuing as usual on the Help-desk, the nature of it ensured this. Phones didn’t answer themselves. By this time the entire team had arrived and only Moira Barton was missing in action, but the team were used to that; she wasn’t exactly integral to the running of things. Strangely; as a collective group they weren’t all that surprised that they had in their midst a Bryant dressed as a giant rodent. It was if they’d always expected such an occurrence, and it actually seemed to cheer them all up. They were now the team with the rabbit working on it and, in a less generous sense, proved their point that Bryant was indeed a strange nutter and not normal like the rest of them. Yes, there was definitely a collective sense of vindication. Weren’t we always telling you that we had a weirdo on our team, an outsider, who one day for sure would turn up to work dressed as Harvey the rabbit?

Bryant seemed his normal self; quoting Burns on the phone to folk, all his little aphorisms and jokes. Helpful and formative and generally acting like a perfectly sane giant rabbit. His big bunny ears flopped and quivered expressively as he explained premium rates for Sunday road-working and the statutory hours expected of estate concierges.

But, he knew this false orderliness couldn’t last. His first visitor was George Campbell who asked him to join him in the union room. This necessitated him walking through the adjacent ‘spur’ of this grand old civic building. Never before had it seen his like as Bryant strode down the central corridor as if it was indeed a rabbit that controlled the place. Rabbit-in-Chief.

“This for charity, Neil?” asked George Campbell, who really had thought he’d seen it all. He’d once successfully represented a member who’d accessed highly salacious pornography on his work PC two hundred and seventy seven times on the grounds that he was ‘severely sight impaired and couldn’t read the splash-screen warnings’. He offered Bryant a strong cup of filtered coffee, another American affectation that he fostered.

Bryant snorted out a laugh “Nah, it’s definitely not for charity George..”

“Can ye not take the head off that thing while we talk; it’s more than weird having a discussion with you dressed as a rabbit I can tell you”

“It’s aw one piece George, sorry”

“You are clothed under that costume I take it?” George asked this with mock-alarm but he was very much hoping for the answer he got which confirmed that Bryant was at least attired in shorts and a t-shirt. The idea that he may have been naked under the costume had an anthropomorphic quality that Campbell did not want to ponder for long.

“So whit’s it aw aboot Neil? Have you lost the plot son?” Campbell was actually much younger than Bryant but his experience and street-nous was much greater, also he was his Branch Secretary. Both men accepted that all of this was valid reason for Campbell’s fatherly approach.

“Guess I must have George. I’m dressed as a rabbit!” This was not meant to be clever or wise-ass. 

The pair shared banter like the working class warriors they were. Many a freezing-cold picket line morning added credible value to their comradeship.

“Seriously though, Neil. Is this some sort of crack-up? Stress? Problems?”

“No more than usual, George. Maybe it is some sort of mid-life crisis? I am kinda sick of working here but then, I’m kinda sick of a lot of things..” This statement hung in the air between them. It begged a closeness that could exist but wasn’t sure it wanted to. Campbell broke an uncomfortable silence.

“Nae problem then. We get you signed off with work-related stress. Take six months, weigh-up your options, then come back if you want. We’ll get you moved to another team; everyone knows you and Barton don’t exactly ‘hit-it-off’”

“Mibbe yer right George. But that does kinda put it all down to me though doesn’t it. It does kinda lay it all at my door. I mean, there’s nothing else wrong with the place. Barton’s no’ an incompetent, vindictive bitch. It’s just me that’s lost the plot. It’s just big wierdo Neil that’s finally cracked under the strain. It’s no’ the petty wee moral judgements and favouritism; it’s no’ the bullying and whispering; it’s no’ the havin’ to work with fucking scabs who won’t even support their own interests. It’s just big, stupit Neil Bryant who we always knew was weird cos he reads the Guardian and goes on strike. Nah fuck that George. Let them discipline me if they want or can. Ahm like that cunt in that film ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m fuckin’ not gonna take it anymore…”

There was a prolonged silence before Campbell uttered the immortal words..

“Well Neil, I have to say. That’s the best speech I’ve ever heard from a man dressed as a rabbit”. And with this they both cracked-up laughing until they thought they would never stop.

Moira Barton sat prim in her chair next to her boss. She almost swooned when close to authority; it almost gave her an orgasm, the thought of it. During sex with her husband Graham who was a team leader in accounts, she’d helped make sure of that, she thought of figures such as George W Bush and Peter Mandelson to bring her to sexual climax. She’d recently had a helluva time explaining to her husband why she’d cried out ‘O Barack!’ as she’d reached her peak of ecstasy.

On the opposite side of the table was George Campbell, whom she despised with a passion bordering on the murderous. Union reps for her were in league with dark forces like Osama Bin Laden and Ken Livingstone. She took every opportunity while on her team to downgrade and malign the man (a strategy she had to be careful about because he was actually two grades above her). She spoke of the time when he ‘stole in front of her’ to use the running machine in the gym, how much he sweated, and she actively discouraged her little entourage from joining the union yet raged over Bryant’s pro-union stance. In short, one didn’t ‘get on’ by being involved in dirty things like unions.

And next to the Beelzebubian Campbell sat Bryant in his rabbit suit. Barton was sure he was smiling behind his big lagomorphian face.

Bill Struthers spoke first. “Neil, can you maybe explain why you’re dressed this way?”

Bryant looked around at his three companions quickly as if for confirmation “You mean the rabbit suit?” Campbell stifled a laugh and Struthers smiled and was glad of the break in the tension. Barton could only feel betrayed by this sense of collusion.

“Yes Neil, the rabbit suit”

Finally, he’d got their attention….!

The Grandfather Clock

‘A Grandfather Clock you say?’

Looking at Chas McKinven, you’d never in a million years think of him owning a grandfather Clock never mind his urgency over it.

‘They wulnae geemie it back boss, says it’s in stores or sumfin’

Bryant had been working here two years now. Two long, harrowing years; and he thought he’d heard it all, but he never had. There was always something else to surprise him.

McKinven appeared as a shambling wreck of a man. Appeared? Sometimes, if you saw him outside the confines of the office he could look almost alright. Talking away to his mates full of the usual macho bravado that you needed in an area like this, but as soon as he walked through these doors he crumpled like an empty crisp bag in the rain. Which version was the act it was impossible to say. Probably, elements of both.  

This area was where poor people lived, but they weren’t like poor people of 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago. These were the poor in the era of Technicolour, the digital-age poor. Poor is a relative term. They certainly weren’t rich, not in any monetary sense. There were some Catholic monks in the church along the road who were maybe spiritually rich. At least you hoped they were, otherwise what was the point?

Poor, yet they managed to have all they needed, and it was his job to maintain this status quo.

These sorts of neighbourhoods were forever changing. If you went back in a time machine 50 years you wouldn’t recognise it as the same place. Once thriving industries cease to thrive then disappear. Maybe a building stays that gets used as a thousand different things. The city council begins a new initiative to gentrify the area; community development agencies move in by the dozens; new houses appear nice on the plans but ugly and cheap looking when they’re up. Pipes and fixings turn to rust quickly in this rainiest of places.

The reason affluent neighbourhoods stay exactly the same through the decades and centuries, is because they were built that way; sturdy and constant like the people that can afford to live there. The only ‘community development’ they want in Stockbridge Village is better parking facilities at the local Waitrose or a hot-stone therapist that does home visits.

Maybe in Stockbridge Village they worried about Grandfather Clocks!

People were born. They had no choice in the matter. If you were born around here a number of factors became important. Who would be your parents? Would you be tough enough to survive? Maybe you’d be good looking, maybe not. Maybe you’d be clever, maybe not.

Maybe you wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance!

People joked about the spurious lineage of some of the ‘families’ around her, but it was often no joke. Jeremy Kyle wasn’t popular for nothing. He’d hit upon a motherlode of dysfunction; a shit-storm of broken-ness. Probably, his show played it up a bit with the help of would-be celebrities but, in essence, it was based on reality. There weren’t ‘extended families’ in the old sense, there were ‘sprawling jigsaws of families’. Try and be a family genealogist around here and you’d have your work cut out. It sometimes appeared that everyone was related to everyone else.

McKinven here had sisters, cousins, brothers, step-fathers, step-mothers, aunties, uncles, wives, girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-in-laws, and a fair selection of outlaws. He’d been in and out of jail so many times only the authorities had any chance of making sense of the mosaic of his life of crime and misdemeanours. He was on prescribed medication, un-prescribed medication, heroin, methadone, Valium, legal-highs, alcohol, probably solvents for all anyone knew. He had bruises, limps, broken bones, chib-marks, scars from ancient feuds with family, friends, police, courts, social workers, support workers, job centres, doctors, doctors receptionists, psychiatrists’, housing officers. The whole panoply of community support knew well of Chas McKinven.

And, here he was bubbling like a child about a Grandfather Clock.

Folk died young in this area. Some bright-sparks at the university had done a study of it and come up with a number. Fifty-four was the average life expectancy. It was no surprise whatsoever to hear of a client dying, thought Bryant, no surprise at all. A judicious period of time was waited then their file was archived. Folk you’d been speaking to about very intimate health problems one day were dead the next. Overdose or misadventure? - impossible for even the doctors to tell.

Some indeed, many were different. A brother/cousin/some sort of relation of McKinven’s, James, was to be seen regularly wheeling a Flymo around in a wheelie-bin. Red-bearded and Jacobite-fierce he’d mow a lawn for a small price or maybe free for an auld wifie who’d give him tea and a sandwich; determined not to be ground down again by his own nature and environment. Not easy to clean your act up in an area where low temptation lurked around every corner. People were beaten up for ‘swimming against the tide’ in this locale.

Easy for someone like Bryant to say ‘but surely’ and ‘perhaps if you’ to folk self-isolated from old habits and old acquaintance. Easier to drown than to stay afloat the rest of your life. The rest of your life is a very long time. Well, maybe not, if 54 is when the race is run.

He and his three adviser colleagues were life-support in this area, well, along with doctors and maybe the odd decent housing officer and drug counsellor. They came here when snags were met. Post Office pin numbers were lost, payments hadn’t come, new benefits needed applying for, Sherriff Officers had come banging on the door, food bank referrals, a whole raft of problems were laid at these doors on a daily basis. Bryant often wondered how they, the clients, would cope without this place? And, yet probably they would find a way.

They had to..

Rube

Dear Squinty

You mentioned in a private correspondence it was people reading my poems instead of my penis (both words start with the letter P you see). You asked how I would describe myself and I will – cynical, cunning, cowardly cute, circumspect and cunt.

Hope this helps

PS Can wee perhaps meet sometime at a cliff edge and jump off?

PPS I wish I was Frankie Fraser

Rube – Howard Rubens – is the man in the ill-fitting Orient replica shirt. He hopes they go down this year as it’s an easy trip to Dagenham & Redbridge in the lower division. I say ‘man’ but he wouldn’t think of himself as such. A penis hanging off a poor excuse. He’d spent a lifetime dodging around this low opinion, and not always successfully.

A creature of borderline-Autistic habit he shuffled his way to his morning breakfast at the unadorned, unwelcoming café at the bottom of Cranley Gardens, where he’d have a bland roll with fish filling and a cup of tea.

Gants Hill/Newbury Park stark and featureless. The Great Eastern Road offering a fast way out to Southend and then jump in the sea and swim for France. Rube has lived here nearly all his life since early childhood in the same house where he still lives alone and parentless. Both taken within three weeks, his life-long dread realised. Yet, it wasn’t so bad. There was actually a lot of good in it. Free of the tension and quite a lot of the guilt. He couldn’t admit this though. Not as himself. But, sometimes after exactly three pints he almost rejoiced in this new-found freedom, as if he’d discovered someone inside himself that had hibernated for decades.

He didn’t often have his pints though, unless the coin had called it. One could have too much of a good thing.

Rube sang a song at my door thirty eight years ago and it’s been virtually downhill since. He knows every Greg Lake lyric there is and remains frozen in 1972 (there’s almost no-one else left in the East of Eden fan club). He still buys the albums, but they are all made by bands and artists who had hit their peak in that year or thereabouts – King Crimson, James Taylor, Babe Ruth. It’s where his head is happiest.

Many of us live lives of unreported, virtually unnoticed torment. Lives of dramatic subtlety- the stuff of Ackroyd and Pinter. Rube once told me he believed his dentist was drilling holes in his teeth deliberately. When I asked why, he said to make him go back for more treatment. I said, if you believe that why don’t you change your dentist. He said, ah, he’s handy, he’s only ten minutes down the road.

His mother, Phyllis, claimed to be on speaking terms with the noted classical actor, Derek Jacobi. How this unlikely relationship came about was never clear, though one could imagine her forcing herself upon such a person at some Jewish fund-raising function in the area.

It appeared to me that his mother was Rube’s chief tormentor; I once wrote to his psychiatrist expressing this opinion. Though, who am I to know the ins-and-outs, the intricacies of such a relationship? She just seemed to make things harder for him.

He would visit me at Clays Lane and receive phone calls from her urging him to come home before she burned down the house; that sort of stuff. She’d be drunk on cider and God knows what sort of medication she was on.

His father, Monty, pretended to be deaf. Rube does this now too. ‘Pardon’ he says like a deaf person, just like old Monty.

Annoyingly, after all these years, he still makes out to have trouble with my accent.

English bastard!

I took him to France once, hitch-hiking, boozing and busking on the Paris Metro. Fair freaked him out. Only weeks before he’d been an inmate in Goodmayes loony-bin. Proper loony he was too - none of your malingerers. He’d proved this by swallowing seventy-odd pills and the ambulance folk only just managed to save him. Now here he was in this wee Spartan room screaming and wailing and generally acting the cunt.

Ray and I went to visit him and he was clearly out where the buses don’t run. Making grabs at his father’s groin he was, clearly trying to express something of a very primal nature.

Someone made the bizarre suggestion that a day out to Southend with his parents and Ray and I tagging along would be a good idea. What an odd collection of souls took to the road that day. The ever-bickering Phyllis; the deaf-pretender Monty; their raving son Howard; and the two of us. Ray was a lump of a bloke from Berwick, disciplined by six years in the army (a form of induced Autism?) and totally bewildered by anything other than pristine mental health.

Rube requested I sing a song. I had often busked with Rube down the London tubes and had learned some songs from him. He loved the Irish folk band Planxty and, of course knew all their songs. It was for this reason that I found myself singing Spancil Hill the old Irish lament of exile in the back of a car heading for the coast. Phyllis eyed me nervously and somewhat cynically like I’d been revealed as an active member of the I.R.A., Monty pretended not to hear.

Only weeks later we were in France trying to catch some sleep in the ruins of an old castle just outside Calais.

It should be known that, while a patient in Goodmayes, his creative urges still functioned. It was there he wrote the sadly unheralded ‘Modecate Shuffle’ named after the powerful tranquilizers he was on and their effect on one’s gait. He wrote many songs and poems. Another was in tribute to Zbigniew Boniek, a notable east European footballer of the nineteen-seventies who he referred to as ‘a pretty funky Pole’.

Rube shambles back home worriedly. He mumbles to himself and clicks his throat anxiously. It’s a nervous habit and is more pronounced on his ‘bad days’. He needs to get to the nutter’s club by one for the pool tournament and he’s worried he won’t fit in lunch before then.

All in all, he’s gotten through thus far, just gotten through….

Smelly's Re-United

What became of the Smelly’s? All of those poor lads and lassies everyone avoided at school except as figures of revulsion and derision. The poor ‘matted’ folk, caked in grime and God knew what else.

I knew of two Smelly’s – one in primary and one in secondary school – and I didn’t know them by any other name. They must have had names (no-ones Christened ‘Smelly’) and I’m sure the teachers must have referred to them by name, but I can’t remember either. They were just….Smelly!

So, with these thoughts and questions in mind I registered with ‘Smelly’s Re-United’ which was a social media site I did not expect to find but there it is. The blurb says ‘This site is for Smelly’s only. Please respect this rule and don’t pretend to be a Smelly just to take part’

I wanted to find out what had happened to the Smelly’s in my schools so I went ahead and entered the name of my primary school and sure enough it came up with a list of individuals and what dates they had attended. It appeared that there had been Smelly’s going way back to the fifties right up to about the eighties. Between 1969 and 1971 when I was there was a chap named George Francis so I clicked on this name and brought up his page. Sure enough class 2A 69’ to 71’. His blurb gave little away other than he still lived in Glasgow.

‘George – I was in the same class as you for two years at Carhill. I was Davie McCallum then but have changed my name since. How have you been?’

It was true I did feel like an interloper; like someone who didn’t belong here. I was never a Smelly but I felt I shared some sort of affinity having been bullied so badly. Perhaps I should have been on Bullied at School Re-United?

I had a great many questions I wanted to ask Smelly, or should I say – George. Who were his parents that let him go to school in such a state? Did the school ever enquire into the matter? I know they turned a blind eye to casual bullying; did they do the same with Smelly’s? How did it feel to be sitting there day after day being reviled or spat at? Did you become inured emotionally? How did you cope with it? And, most pertinently to my nosiness; what had become of him since? I had to wait some days for a reply to my introduction.

‘Not sure how to respond. As I recall you were not a Smelly. This site is for Smelly’s only. Explain your motives’

I was gobsmacked by this. Not by its defensiveness but by the fact that it was articulate. Now that I thought, I don’t recall that I ever heard Smelly/George utter a word in the whole two years I shared a classroom with him, now it was ‘explain your motives’. It also struck me that he was referring to he and his fellow travellers on this site as ‘Smelly’s’. Surely they’d want to forget but no! maybe that was the whole point. Maybe they discoursed as a form of therapy. After all, this place was for those thought of as the very ‘lowest of the low’. In terms of social currency, he remembered, there were none so poor as the smelly’s. This was a shared experience and really very exclusive to a very particular type of hurt and, he hoped, healing. He should explain himself and leave.

‘I’ve been thinking about this George and, of course, you are bang on. I don’t belong here. I was badly bullied at our school but that’s not the same. I guess I was just curious about a number of things, but this is perhaps not the place to be so trivial. I’m sorry to intrude and will understand if you don’t want to talk any further and want me to leave the site’

Truth was that now I really was curious and hoped that George would let me chat with him. I felt I was entering a doorway into a truly unique human experience. The experience of the utterly degraded and excluded. I felt privileged to be in this world of the Smelly’s but knew I might not be here very long.

I thought of my days at Carhill. It was a working class school in a working class area, housed in a Victorian building. My brother was a few years below me and would be in the ‘junior’ playground while I was being bullied among the big boys. After one particularly humiliating scene I swear to this day that my brother and a couple of his wee pals came through to console me. I think my emotions have been cauterised like a welding joint ever since, like I can’t get past it somehow. The utter shame.

I was beginning to portray George/Smelly in my mind as the big Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unsmiling and unresponsive, how did he perceive all around him?

There was no response for days and then…

‘I think you should know David that not everything was as it seemed back then. If anything, I seem to remember you getting a rawer deal than most. As for me, well, let’s just say that I survived intact’

This was curiouser and curiouser. ‘Survived intact’?

‘I must say George, I’m intrigued to know what you mean. Surely it must have been a humiliating experience for you as well as your friends on this site’

And it was here that he let me in on the devilish cunning of the whole thing. He told me that Smelly’s weren’t actually Smelly’s at all. In fact, it was all a ruse to keep everyone off their backs. When Smelly’s went home, they washed and scrubbed up and sat with their perfectly ordinary families at the table for tea. Then, in the morning, they donned the Smelly ‘outfit’ again and made for school.

‘Teachers never bothered us, and apart from the insults, neither did anyone else. No bullying because people wouldn’t touch us for fear of the dirt or contamination. We were free just to soak up the lessons and, you wouldn’t have noticed, pass all our exams with flying colours. Every Smelly on this site, almost without exception, was top of the class in everything. I often felt, David, like encouraging you to become one of us, but that would have given the game away’

I was invited by George, after he had consulted the others, to remain on the site as an ‘honorary Smelly’ but I chose to leave and never go back. I always felt they were laughing at me….

The Not So Driven Man

“Ever wonder why no-one from the planet’s Green-leaning parties or environmental concern groups ever says anything very substantial about car-usage or the restriction of such?”

Except Joan, his entire newly-founded Cabinet looked at him as if he’d fallen from the skies. He took a few seconds to look around this antique, stately room before speaking.

“Because they all drive cars…”

Pollitt knew this wasn’t wholly true. It was mainly because, if there was one vote-losing policy it was restricting people’s right to drive. Ruin the NHS, have the poor relying on Food Banks, but for God sake don’t touch drivers. Electoral suicide. The only time Brits looked to insurrection it was when there were fuel shortages like back in the day. They wouldn’t stand for it.

You could prove global warming right in their faces and they’d say fine, do what you have to, but don’t stop us driving. Don’t even try…!

Barry Pollitt knew he was the wrong man to be Prime Minister, principally because he was the best man for the job. If you wanted an honest man who would look at the problems of the world squarely and take appropriate action, he was perfect. Unfortunately, nobody really wanted such a man for Prime Minister. In so many ways, it was the last thing they wanted.

He was Prime Minister by default and everybody knew it.

The Tories had become so right wing, they’d gone off the map completely. Out of Europe in a fit of pique; so many cuts in services, to the disabled, to the poor that even loyal tories were desperate for a less evil version of themselves. They’d presided over a cull and were now virtually unelectable. Cameron had become, even against his own almost-forgotten predictions, power mad and had reverted to Bullingdon-type and had made enemies out of his contemporaries Johnston and Osbourn by denying them a chance at the top job. The Labour Party had gone through a disastrous Milburn period when it didn’t know if it was the party of the past or the future and had elected Pollitt out of equal parts desperation and complacency. He had one thing the others hadn’t – charisma. The ‘5% what you say, 95% how you say it’ factor they hadn’t seen since the early Blair years.

And now here he was at his first Cabinet meeting telling them he wanted the British public to stop driving their cars.

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Desmond Flynn, looked around at their faces, the elected government of the only-just United Kingdom and smiled. This was going to be fun, he thought.

But, news travels extremely fast in political circles. No sooner had Pollitt uttered his proposals, it seemed that the entire ‘Westminster village’ was abuzz with it. Newspaper editors held wildcat meetings. Labour Party grandees whispered prophecies of doom and wondered who they could wheel in next. Within minutes power industry moguls were weighing up costs and plotting downfalls.

Everyone began devising plausible ways of denying the truth of Barry Pollitt’s statements.

Virtually no-one of any powerful consequence saw any merit in what he had said at all. A few Greenpeace types were wheeled out on Andy Marr’s show and the like to verify statistics and give it ‘the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh-unless..’ routine, but no-one of any consequence backed him at all.

There were even early hints that he was some sort of crack-pot or maybe even a crack-head.

‘He says that private cars are a major cause of global warming. Is he mad?’

‘He wants us to drive only on certain days of the week. Is he insane?’

The policy proposed by Pollitt was the one adopted by the city of Paris for a brief period only six years ago and before in the nineteen-nineties in an effort to reduce smog levels in the city. Odd numbered-registration numbers one day, even-numbered the next with penalties imposed for non-compliance. Car-sharing to be encouraged and rewarded with tax-breaks. He'd exempted those needing vehicles due to disability. Was this such a big deal?

Seemingly it was!

Much was made of the fact that Pollitt himself didn’t drive. He’d witnessed a young child being killed by what had transpired to be a drunk-driver in the town of his youth and had been scared off driving as a consequence. The press screamed that this was what made Pollitt prejudiced against drivers.

‘How can a non-driver tell drivers what to do?’

There were demonstrations on the streets of Britain. Much horn-tooting as snakes of cars clogged up Whitehall and the motorways.

Pollitt had appointed the joyously named Joan Green as his Environment and Transport Ministers combined. She was one of only three Green Party MP’s elected and, Pollitt thought, the most likely to support him in his new ecological adventure.

Joan Green wasn’t so sure. She liked the idea of raising her party’s profile and having someone in government certainly did that but, the Green Party had skirted the issue of car usage for as long as it had existed and, though she gave the outward appearance of resolution, inside she wanted to run as far away as possible from this ‘car-accident waiting to happen’, as she’d quipped with her dinner party friends at home in Brighton. The Green Party manifesto was further left than anything  the Labour Party had attempted for fifty years (mainly because it had little chance of major electoral success), but it blanched from telling it’s friends and supporters, never mind the electorate, that they couldn’t drive their Renault Picasso’s. That was political suicide, however much environmental sense it made. Carbon emissions could be cut back in other, less controversial ways. Global agreements could be reached; other forms of energy could be adopted. Windfarms and renewables. Nuclear, even.

Pollitt was both a political cynic and an idealist. He’d gone along with the National Executive on most of their ‘election winning’ policies, bland and innocuous though they were designed to be. Slight rise in Minimum Wage, new job deals for the unemployed, tax and interest rates fiddled about with so that they made little real difference to anyone; protect the NHS while privatising little chunks of it. The usual ‘smoke and mirrors’ pragmatic nonsense of politics which had no effect on the grand design of power and wealth staying very much in the hands of power elites. Once elected, he’d blind-sided them with a little bit of idealism, for which he’d either be assassinated or in some other form got rid of. Maybe they’d mire him in some contrived scandal – his very own Zinoviev letter? He didn’t care that much. Let them do what they wanted. At least his point would have been made.

He looked out onto the gardens at the back of Downing Street. What use was a Prime Minister anyway? Just a puppet of the powerful. 

Might as well cause a stir while you have the chance…

The Ballad of Hoots Venuti

In his shiny old Italian-cut suit, winkle-pickers, trademark gold lateral incisor and thinning quiff, Frankie ‘Hoots’ Venuti lent the appearance of a particularly hungry gypsy’s whippet. He looked more like a wartime spiv than the almost-faded cabaret singer he was. Once described as the ‘Joe Longthorne of West Lothian’, for all the resonance that description now held, he may as well have been known as West Lothian’s Joe Stalin. If the term ‘has-been’ hadn’t been invented it would have been freshly applied to Hoots Venuti: quite some time ago. He had battled against being fashionable so successfully that it had almost become a positive image, as if a compere could legitimately introduce him as ‘still unfashionable and jaded after all these years. Ladies and gentlemen – Hoots Venuti..’

This dreich September morning found the ageing Hoots glugging noisily upon a bottle of Irn Bru. He had made himself soaking drunk on Scotland’s ‘first national drink’ (probably owned by the French or Japanese but, who cares?) and was trying to remedy the situation with the second. Last evening was a blur of half-remembered conversations and fully drained glasses. He thought that being a ‘whisky man’ gave him a sort of showbiz grandeur; like what Danny La Rue might drink, but, instead, it made him very drunk, very loud and very ill.

Some shuffling behind him reminded him that he’d woken up beside his long-time partner, Mags. He heard her auld lungs rattle and wheeze; like an old broken-down squeeze box. Her C.O.P.D. must be kicking in again he thought. Folk around here wore those letters after their names like they signified a qualification. ‘Mags Myres (C.O.P.D: First Class)’.

Mags would be surprised when she finally awoke that she’d been sharing a bed with Hoots. It could have been any one of half a dozen men. She’d broken his heart enough times to make a hundred omelettes. Yes, that was it, thought Hoots, coughing now himself from the exertion of retrieving his underwear from the strewn floor; she’d made an omelette of his broken heart. Might be a lyric there. This creative impulse so late in the proverbial day from a man who’s only offering to the world of song-writing had been a radio jingle some thirty years ago for a chain of butcher’s shops in Dundee..

“McGinley’s Mince, McGinley’s Mince

You won’t taste better, before or since..”

He’d sung it ‘Buddy Grecco-style’ with a wee touch Bobby Darin thrown in.

Among the debris in the room was Mags prosthetic leg propped up against the tall-boy. Ironic that thought Hoots sadly. She’d been propped up against many a tall boy since. The sight of the false leg still provoked a number of emotions in Venuti. Principle still, even after maybe five years, was a sort of numb rage. Megs had lost her leg due to a still-mysterious ‘sexual accident’. All she would tell him was that some ‘electrical equipment had gone wrong’ and the resultant burns had necessitated the amputation of her left leg. What had happened to ‘the other man’ is something she would never discuss, but he noticed his best friend and manager, Fishy Lieberman, walked very gingerly for some while after the event.

Far from this leading to greater fidelity on Mags’ part, she now seemed to have become some sort of ‘novelty ride’ and more in demand than ever. He had a kick at the leg as he hobbled his way towards the bathroom.

Too often these days Fishy Leiberman had cause to look back on more successful days when his ‘books’ were filled with better quality acts. He’d once managed Jimmy Logan’s career, admittedly the last years of it but still: big name. Kelly Marie, Neil Reid, Dorothy Paul. He’d known and worked with them all. Now, his main act was Hoots Venuti and a lassie, Rena Horn, that played the clarinet by utelising a very unexpected part of her anatomy. He’d muse sardonically sometimes that he should mould the two of them into a double act and then retire. ‘Hoots and Horn’ had quite a ring to it actually. Maybe he’d have ‘Mags Myres, the One-Legged Tap-Dancer’ supporting them. Fishy had a cruel laugh to himself then poured himself another Famous Grouse. He couldn’t really afford such expensive whisky but appearances had to be kept. Couldn’t be offering Grants to business acquaintances even though he knew very few of them could afford the good stuff either. ‘Show business’ was all about ‘show’, after all.

Fishy Leiberman found he was gazing at the signed portrait of Johnny Beattie on his office wall and once again found himself puzzled over what exactly it was, as an entertainer, that had made that man popular.

Nettie Duncan had been hanging her washing in the back green when the terrible pain had started just below her heart and spread down her arms causing her to collapse in a heap. The next she knew she’d awoken in the Southern General hospital to find her daughter gazing down at her concernedly.

“Oh Donna” she said and raised her hand to stroke her daughters face “I’m sorry to have worried you. You have your own troubles”

Donna smiled sadly. Her mother looked resigned and old although she was at least ten years younger than her appearance suggested. She’d been a very fine looking woman in her prime but precious little of her beauty had survived. Bad health and a bad man had seen to that. Her father’s idea of family life was to get drunk and terrorise them all on a regular basis. Well no, she thought, regular they maybe could have handled. It was the irregularity that really kept them on their toes. Memories of a childhood in bed of a night dreading the warning signs. They’d hear him singing on the street ‘Billy Boys’ or something equally foreboding and unfriendly. Then he’d start.

The accumulated effects were now being expressed all too eloquently by her mother’s ailing body. 

This woman who never had a sour word for anyone. Not even for a son in prison, or a younger daughter who lived not twenty miles away yet never paid a visit. This had irked Donna for more years than she cared to remember. Her, the dutiful, loving daughter offered the same amount of love and respect as the other two, but, that was her mother’s way. Equal shares for all and less for herself. A loving mother, no matter what.

Maybe this was because Nettie Duncan, Henrietta Drummond as was, herself had a past? She hadn’t always been the fearful wife of a tyrant and a mother of three. There was a time when she was a young, leggy, toothsome beauty. Donna had seen the photographs but her mother would never fill in the narrative.

Maybe this would be her last chance to find out.

Margaret ‘Mags’ Myers had been born behind some bins in Barlanark. This alliterative beginning had been the closest thing to symmetry in her existence to date. Her subsequent life had been devoted to the temporary oblivion offered by alcohol and sex. Abused by a series of step-fathers as a child she’d come to view sex as a combination of love and war. The love she sought so desperately and the war was her domination of men in general. There were times that she made her sex a most aggressive act. It sought to hurt and punish. Which is what she did on a daily basis to the only man who ever really loved her. She derided Hoots, she belittled him, she criticised him constantly, she laughed at him not with him. She mocked him and insulted him. And all because he loved her.

She pitied him for that.

She couldn’t quite understand why he kept her around. Surely no man should put up with what she’d done to him? Such a man couldn’t really be a man. Not a real man. She hadn’t even supported his career or what was left of it. He had become pathetic, and she thought him pretty ropey to start with. What, to him, was glitter and shabbazz, to her was cheap tinsel. He had become like a sad impersonator of what wasn’t very special to start with. Oh maybe back in the day, there had been some sort of kitsch-y attraction, she’d have to give him that. Maybe, with effort, she could just about remember what she had found attractive about him. She’d have to really try though.

She rummelled her hand beneath the duvet for her false teeth and farted wetly, following-through only very slightly.

Signs of Life Among the Graves

Bryant stood under a tree in the graveyard. The summer twilight threw his long shadow that reached almost to the foot of the young man’s grave. Whereupon lay several little miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s which had been left during this afternoon’s procession.

The dead young man had been popular.

Bryant eyed the bottles hungrily like they were the only things that mattered to him in the entire world. After a four-day binge on cheap sherry-wine and impossible cider, his nerve-ends were screeching for alcohol. All his last pennies had been donated to the cause of poisoning his blood and creating this mouldy, sick sweat on his back and brow.

Dishevelled could have been a word purely invented for him, he was a picture of grime and toxicity; an ‘Aqualung’ figure that frightened children and respectable women.

In this albeit brief Scottish summer he’d chosen to sleep in the graveyard. He’d hide in the enclosure of one of the bigger vaults until the parkie locked up, then he’d bask or bake in the last glimmer of evening sun and hopefully drop off into some sort of doze after the days peripatetic exertions; a tattered old sleeping bag to help keep out the nip of the night air.

But now…..

Well, the Jack Daniel’s would ease his pain considerably. The stoor of sweat and grime wafted to his nostrils as he took off his coat to lie next to the grave. He looked at the relevant dates – John Burns born 9/10/1994 died 5/7/2014.

“19 years old! Christ son! I could have been your grandfather. Just as well for you I wasn’t”

Bryant reached for one of the wee bottles at the base of the gravestone. He opened it quickly and drank about half the fluid. He coughed violently and was almost sick, but managed to hold his bile down and feel the effects of the alcohol like a welcome, warm glow in the midst of a toxic wasteland. Like Jesus had appeared within his body to heal his sickness. Sometimes whisky (or in this case whiskey, he thought) was like a good religion, but most times it was Old Nick himself.

“How low can a man get” he murmured in the direction of the stone “than to steal booze from a dead man’s grave? Ach well son! It’s not as if you’ll be needing it eh?”

He’d never felt alone in graveyards. Too many times he’d felt alone outside of them, but, in graveyards a man could seek peace and find it. Dead folk welcomed the company and, by Christ, you had a captive audience for these little chats.

“I feel I owe you young John Burns. For these fine wee lifesaving bottles that were left in tribute to you. I promise I’ll no’ make a habit of it”

Bryant rolled a fag and sipped from his wee bottle again. He noticed, with a happy feeling that actually brought tears to his eyes, that they seemed to be bigger-than-average miniatures, not the wee one-shot jobs these. There was a good couple of halves in each. The young man must have been recognised through his choice of drink. There was a couple of cans of coke as well.

“Jack and Coke they cry it, eh John? You were a Jack and Coke man, son…well, here’s tae ye from an auld derelict that ye’ve jist saved”

He raised his bottle to the stone in mock honour. It crossed his mind that he may be glad of the coke in the morning to quench his thirst.

The mid-evening sirens sounded from without this sanctuary for the dead and living. He was well out of sight of the cemetery-keepers house and he re-arranged himself to sit supported by the trunk of the pretty blossom tree which threw its shadow increasingly over the grave of John Burns. There was no-one to disturb him from his palliating drink and his wee bit smoke. He felt like this, against all odds, was the best night of his entire life.

“Strange to be talking about someone’s life in a graveyard but I feel I owe you, John Burns, and since you’re not going anywhere soon, you may as well listen to the sad story of mine”

Bryant lived most of his life these days in his head. As he treaded the streets hither and yon he kept up a constant dialogue with himself. Cheering himself up and knocking himself down. Constantly berating himself for his mistakes, then his spirits would be lifted by a lucky find in a bin or a hand-out from the state and his life would be tolerable until, inevitably, he’d reach a downturn again and life would seem an impossible thing for him to pursue. His inner chattering would then dwell on escape, a leap from bridges, a tumble down Arthur’s Seat perhaps. Or, like that bloke the other week, a ‘heider’ from the Scott Monument and ‘splatt’ all over Princes Street to hold up the morning traffic. 

He must have waited all night until the monument staff opened up then forced himself through and up the stairs. He’d let out a scream when he’d jumped, so it said in the paper. Such patience and determination to end your life so publically. Bryant didn’t have the moxie for that. His was a slow methodical suicide and this latest, most unexpected and relief-giving intake of alcohol, would add to the accumulation that would eventually end his life forever.

“Wonder if anyone will come and talk to me when I’m six-foot under?” Not likely, he thought. They cremate vagrants and down-and-outs, much cheaper.

“Mine’s has been a life ruined and wasted, John Burns, a name by the way, that you shared with a gallant man indeed, a labour leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bet you didn’t know that. A gallant man and a gallant life. You’ll be surprised I know things like that eh Johnny boy? Auld down-and-out like me..but, I was not-always-as-you-see-me-now” He enunciated each word to show the dead man his educational credentials. The intake of booze had given fresh swagger to his demeanour. He felt able to speak both for and to the gravestone. All of a sudden a maudlin thought overtook him. He reflected that he was talking about a wasted life to a lad who hadn’t even had the chance to waste his.

“By Jesus son. I’d give you all my years and lie in that ground in place of ye. For I’ve made a terrible mess of my time. Let’s just get that straight”

The light was fading and a wave of sickness passed through Bryant’s gut to remind him that his bliss was temporary and needed re-fuelling. He opened the second bottle. There was no sound inside the cemetery. The birds in the trees were sleeping. He heard a dog barking in the faraway streets and up in the town centre the world cracked on oblivious to Bryant’s pain and transient joy.

“Which is how it should be. For how could a world bear the pain and joy of so many billions? A man had to keep to himself, and if he spoke at all, make sure it’s only to the dead who welcome the intrusion.

Might be a brand new form of therapy” Bryant coughed convulsively as he laughed “Gravestone Therapy – that’ll have the psychiatrists up in arms. Over a hundred years since Freud and you might as well have been talking to the dead”

Ah Johnny boy. I’ll no’ patronise you wi’ ‘what might you have been’ and all that pish. It’s what I might have been that’s mair to the point.

See when you get like this, son, it’s remarkably difficult to pick yourself up again. You have to have real cause to do so, and I find to my shame that I do not possess such a cause. For what would I rise up Lazarus-like out of this sea of despond and ruin? At my age….?”

As he spoke these words, an old familiar…surge? he couldn’t call it a surge exactly more a hope instantly dashed against the rocks of its own repeated disappointment. It teased only for a second then cowered away ashamed. This maybe I could was like the horse you backed despite years of coming in last.

“Ye have to have a cause in life or else you just drift, and I my dear dead friend am just that very drifter. A multitude of jobs I’ve had over the years, and, by definition, have committed myself to precisely none of them. Same with women. Well, except for the last one. The killer blow you might say.

A wool-gatherer and a bletherer I have been, son. A procrastinator of the very highest degree..”

Alcohol to the alcoholic is a constant process of topping-up, and this laborious routine allows the drinker to resume drunkenness relatively quickly and Bryant, now merry-maudlin, was in the mood for exhortation, a useless effort when talking to gravestones.

“But time runs out on the procrastinator. Pretty soon I will becomes I should have. Maybe you know this more than me, I wouldn’t know…Heh! Maybe I should go on Mastermind with it. Willie Bryant, your specialist subject is ‘procrastination, your time starts now. What is the etymological root of the word ‘procrastination’? I’ll answer that in a minute, Magnus…..

Good one eh, Johnny boy? And I just thought of that. I should have been a comedy writer. See that Johnny, did you see that? Should have been. Three words is all that is, yet they sum up so much…should, could, would there’s another three but, ye, didnae another three that trump the lot.

Anyway, life’s not all what thae bastard Tories claim it is. Maist o’ them have got it all wrapped up from birth then have the cheek to tell the rest of us how we should be living as if it was some sort of level playing field. No’ a’ of us were trained to be good at this Capitalism thing, the vast majority of us didnae even vote for it, then somehow we’re a’ meant tae be good at it or hell mend us. They create the world they’re good at and blame the rest of us for not keeping up. It’s no’ a fair world Johnny boy, but sorry to go on. You’ll have your own troubles”.

Bryant noticed the dark settle down like a shroud around him. He could barely see the outline of the trees and what he could see had become blurred by the second then the third bottle. Like the time-served bevvy-merchant he was, his evaluation of alcohol and the quantity thereof had become acute. Half-pished he may be but he knew that if he could get to sleep by about the fourth or fifth bottle he’d have a few left for the morning which he could dilute with the coke. All good jakey’s had this micro-surgeon-like analysis when it came to the sauce. It really was an ill-used resource that could be more productively applied to industry or economics.

“They should have alkies on Newsnight saying stuff like ‘well, Jeremy, in a purely fiscal sense a cut in the welfare budget would help our trade deficit especially in the third quarter’ and all that pish that no-one knows anything about but somehow it rules our life. I met that Will Hutton once when I was ‘an academic’, Johnny Boy, and do you know I’ve never met anyone with such a giant-sized head. No-one listened to a word he said, we all just gazed at his enormous head”

Bryant could feel all the weariness of his day, and indeed his life, begin to sap his already waning enthusiasm. He was both glad and sad about this, as he’d almost begun to enjoy himself. Here among the dead. Somehow they were more respondent to him than the living. But, strategically speaking, if he could sleep, that was the best thing. He could then face the next day afresh with his wee cache of security.

“It’ll be goodnight from me and goodnight from him pretty soon Johnny boy. I thank you from the bottom of my empty and broken heart for the good deed you have done tonight, however unwittingly. I’ll have one more fag then I’ll be lying right here alongside you Johnny boy, at least you’ll not be lonely the night”

The thrum of traffic was pleasant to his ear. His sickness had been temporarily quelled and wild horses could not keep him from his hard-earned slumber.