Ask Specky Al....!

In adversity, most of us suffer from a version of Stockholm Syndrome. Any little kind word or gesture is accepted with pathetic gratitude.

“I’m sorry, sir…erm…Mr Bryden, but we have no record of any claim under your name, or even under the National Insurance number you gave us. Nothing at all. Very sorry, sir”

This has been happening all day. No benefit claim, no bank account. Something very strange is going on.

He – Bernie – has a key to my flat. He tells me he’ll give me until the end of the month to find ‘somewhere else’. He even wears some of my clothes which seem to fit him even though I’m six four and he’s almost a midget (under four foot anyway). Of an evening he takes control of the remote and drinks my whisky. I’m scared to go out unless he changes the locks.

“You know, the landlord wants me to change the locks. He doesn’t know who you are and talks of getting the police. I always talk him around saying there’s no harm in you and you’ll do the right thing…in time”

He has a remarkably deep, authoritative voice for a midget and, as I rely on him for food, I don’t argue.

I’m Sam Bryden – or at least I used to be – and society seems to have wiped me from its records. My best friends claim to only faintly know me ‘from somewhere’. All of my personal paperwork has disappeared and seemingly can’t be replaced because I have no official identity. My N.I. number belongs to someone who is “deceased some time ago, sir. Obviously, we can’t divulge any further information”.

The only clue or guidance I’ve had so far is when the chap at Scottish Power advised me to “ask Specky Al”. He’d put the phone down before I could ask “Who’s Specky Al?”

I ponder my future. Does this new state of affairs make me free? Can I now roam the world unbidden? Well, obviously not is the quick answer. No passport, no documentation to obtain one. 

"Just the UK, then?"

“And what will you live on?” asks the midget Bernie who lives in my flat. "No cards, no money. You’ll be a vagrant as soon as you walk onto the street. Even the hostels won’t take you in without proof of identity”

I looked in my wallet again to find not even a library card.

“What should I do?”

“Ask Specky Al”

I pick up my guitar and find I no longer know how to play. Not even a basic chord. I clear my throat to sing, and what emanates is a strangled squawk like a seagull having something larger than himself shoved up his shiter.

I walk the beach. Dogs run up to me and sniff, their owner’s squint their eyes as if they can’t see me properly under the suns glare. I look for my reflection in a café window and find I’m becoming increasingly, well….indistinct!

I stop approaching people I know from church as it’s upsetting when good Christian folk claim not to know who you are, although some scrunch up their eyes and say “didn’t you used to do my gardening?”

I’m becoming no more than semi-visible.

I visit the priest who tells me “the bins are around the back, young man”. I explain what’s happening and he eyes me warily then tells me “you’re being taught a lesson in humility. You’ve thought rather a lot of yourself – your talents, your cleverness, your sharp-wittedness – and now you’re being brought down a peg or two. ‘All is vanity’ – Ecclesiastes 1:12”

“Is it perhaps erm…God who’s teaching me this lesson?” Maybe if it’s God, I think, then he can just make everything all right again?

“No, it’s not God, actually. It’s…..”

I leave quickly before I hear the name.

So now I just sit on the beach invisible to the world. The dogs still sniff around me sensing my presence but their owners just call them back thinking they’ve found some dog-shite. I fight with the gulls for the fast-food scraps left behind by the revellers and fish and chip wrappers left by Maw. Paw and the weans. 

Now and again I think of my past life – the singing, the songs I wrote, the recordings, the gigs I played – and realise it was all an illusion. I was a fraud and a phoney, only it needed a higher power to show me this, to take away my ill-conceived ambitions, even if it left me a non-person, sitting invisible and semi-starving on a beach.

When the winds and the rains come I coory-up next to the old disused toilets at the end of the beach. One day I saw a poster badly glued and fluttering on the concrete wall..

“Don’t miss the multi-talented, the wonderful, the genius of Granton…”

I read no further but go back to my shivering slumber.

It seems I’m to continue learning my lesson.