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….