Extract from 'The Starship Leith'

Howard Rubens, or ‘Rube’ to his friends, had no idea why he was now living in Leith. One minute he was walking round to his local café in Gants Hill for his morning stodge, the next he was feeling decidedly cold and under-dressed in the Leith Walk Café eating what looked like dog poo and drinking tea the colour of mud. Not, only that, but the place seemed to be full of Scots! He’d been asked only £4.50 for his surprisingly tasty repast (the ‘dog poo’ had been, of course stovies), and saw no reason why he should not now investigate his predicament further in the street outside only to find that none of it resembled Gants Hill at all. It didn’t resemble Ilford, Newbury Park or even Dagenham. He wondered if maybe the powerful anti-psychotics he took were to blame, and he was now suffering baffling hallucinations. 

He asked a passer-by outside a shop that seemed to be selling computers and dart-boards where he in fact was. He was answered with a ‘Leith Walk, mate’ that sounded like a declaration of war more than simple geographical information. Leith Walk? What the fuck was a ‘Leith Walk’? He’d never heard of a Leith Walk.

It was then that Bryant had appeared all smiles and laughter.

“You made it, old friend. I wished for it and here you are”

Pleased as he was to see his old mucker he felt as if his brain had been poured through an industrial-strength food blender then pureed back into his head via the constellation Canis Major where the doppleganger soul of a 1980s talent show host urged him to say “Tonight Matthew, I’m going off my fucking nut!”

“It’s like that time you kidnapped me and took me to France”

“Many years ago Rube, many years ago”

Bryant and a mutual friend named Army Joe had sprung Rube from Goodmayes mental hospital and wheeched him across the channel on a hovercraft to land at Calais. From there they marched toward Boulogne, slept a night in a caravan park toilet and in the morning hitched to Paris where they would annoy and baffle Metro commuters with renditions of ‘The Wild Rover’ and ‘A Pub With No Beer’. One ticket collector at The Trocadero asked them to move along as ‘they were making him nervous’.

"Like draws aye to like, like an auld horse to a fell dyke"

Bryant was fond of baffling his old friend with quaint Scottish proverbs.

Rube would spend days ruminating over them.

Rube’s big hero was Spike Milligan. Bryant envied him the ability to recite large swathes of Milligan material word-for-word and in perfect imitation. Rube was also a keen misogynist and would make a point of ignoring women, especially ones he found attractive, to a degree that was embarrassing to all concerned. He’d run away from Madeleine Cathcart on a number of occasions, one time running out of the Water o’ Leith shouting ‘unclean, unclean’. His ill-disposition toward the female sex just happened to be in direct proportion to their failings in succumbing to his hard-core physical desires, and even most of the more soft-core ones.

Rube was a balding ball of a bloke in an undersized Leyton Orient replica top which barely covered his gibbous moon of a belly. The waistband of his cheap chino’s strained to the limit and, if the stretching button popped it may have someone’s eye out.

If he was sexually attractive, it was only to those of the female world so far down the road of dementia-d bewilderment that they would be prepared to believe that he was the re-incarnation of a heterosexual Rock Hudson sent to Leith to seek out g-spots in council care homes.

In secret he imagined himself a Jewish super-sleuth named Maurice Speigel who Bogarted his way around London’s east end making young women swoon and clipping gangsters on the chin when they fell out of line. As a side-line, Speigel was a cashier at a local but lucrative tailoring outfit. Even in fantasy Rube was pragmatic.

His other hero was the emperor Caligula. Bryant had once told him that the mad emperor was fond of shoving rotting vegetables up his arse and setting them alight. Rube had found his vision of this occurrence hilarious.

Rube had written two songs for the band Bryant and he had started in the mid to late seventies. One was ‘The Amazing Mickey Titz (Is Covered in Yellow Dust)’ and the other was about Polish football legend Zbigniew Boniek. 'I Really Love You Zbigniew' had a rather incongruous reggae beat (one would have thought of 10CC's Dreadlock Holiday but Rube's song was better and more meaningful).

Bryant bid Rube stroll with him around the deciduous Leith Links. He calmed his old friend’s nerves advising him of comforting sleeping arrangements and the prospect of pints in pubs which were ‘nothing like Trainspotting’.