Brian ‘Bing’ Finley was a success. If success was measured in terms of cars, houses, sex and enough money to keep him in Smarties until the twenty-seventh century then, indeed he was successful. If it meant staggering halitosis, piles the size of black grapes and a penis so microscopic as to be almost clitoral then, he wasn’t doing quite so well.
He ran his own dating agency, ‘Horny n’ Desperate’ and found it difficult to keep up with demand for its services. Apparently, there were a lot of horny and desperate folk out there and Finley was minting it. His demographic was remarkably obvious – low-end Jeremy Kyle, high-end X-Factor. He offered blind dates in Ibiza, threesome’s in Holiday Inns and for the more serious of a certain age, The Nifty Fifty Club with painkillers included and tubes of Ralgex for the more adventurous. He had all his clients sign pre-date clauses that FinleyFling Enterprises could be held in no way responsible for the eventualities of ‘a date’. All participants were of a legal age and assumed sane enough to pay and enter an agreement. This last expectation was far from the case.
“Scrotum-tightening? That’s a new one!”
Bing Finley’s mother, Maisie, a wizened old blouse of a woman who swanned about amid a swarm of her own bitter-sweet perfume and air of propriety, looked at her son in puzzlement. Early-Alzheimer’s had rendered her into a state of happy befuddlement. She was beginning to perceive her son as her young husband and this state of affairs rendered his exclamation ‘scrotum-tightening’ weirdly titillating.
“Suffering shite! Superglue? Talk aboot Baw-Stick!”
While his mother’s mind meandered into images unimaginable to anyone other than the most LSD-addled, her son put down the magazine he was reading from. Keeping up with the sexual kinks and foibles of an increasingly inventive human race, though ultimately lucrative, was often disturbing.
Finley’s ‘needs’ seemed by comparison, basic and perfunctory. If he could perform his primal biological ‘requirements’ without shedding any article of clothing, then this allowed him to get on with his day with minimum disruption. Due to his manly limitations and the degree of his haste, a great many of his sexual partners, male and female, were often unaware he had entered their bodily confines at all.
For all his money, the family surroundings were hardly palatial. A ‘bought’ council-house in the notorious Blackhill area on the north-side of Glasgow furnished, as if dipped in the aspic-kitsch of 1970’s glam-rock Britain. Tatty, beige leather-upholstered sofa, literally bursting at its foamy, flammable seams; scummy, miasmic carpeting bearing the decades of various splatterings of brown sauce, pale ale, talcum powder and spent sperm; the place smelled of potato peelings steeped in stale urine, a pot pourri of decay and fecund neglect.
Finley believed in ‘keeping’ money not spending it. The more he had of it the less he wanted to part with it. For this reason, though probably by now a millionaire, his compulsive miserliness forced himself and his ailing mother to live in near-squalor.
Finley looked like a fifty-four year old Peter Kay who had suffered a five-year heroin habit and who’d shopped extensively at Mister Byrite on the day of its closure in the early eighties. His skin had a squamate, waxy quality that suggested a diet of fried luncheon meat while his fibrous Elvis-quiff lent him a seedy lycanthropy which sent grown women scurrying up closes.
