The strangest, strangest thing happened to me yesterday. I was walking down Niddrie Mains Road on my way to getting my underpants scraped for the summer when I bumps into my big mate Davie who was trying to chase a squirrel up a tree. Well, I say ‘big’ but this was the shock and I’m still not over it yet.
“Hiya, Davie, man….”
He looks at me with this hurt sort of knowing look on his face.
“Ye’ll have noticed?” he says almost confrontationally.
“Aye” I says “Ye’ve eh..”. He prompts me to go on by jutting his jaw like a fighter goading an opponent and, for the first time I realise I’m looking down on my friend instead of up.
“Ye, erm…ye appear to have lost….well…height!”
“D’ye think I don’t know that” he lunged, his face roughly at my shoulder level.
“Ah used tae be able to reach the branches o’ these trees nae bother”.
“Right enough," says I "Why is it you chase the squirrels, anyway?”
He looked at me as if I’d just asked why the sun rises in the morning or why the tide comes in and out.
“Somebody fucking has to d’aint they”.
I took this as a statement and not a question but ah wis beginning to wonder if someone had spiked my tea wi’ a tab ae strong acid. Ma big mate wis noo ma wee mate and ma heid was birlin’. I even let my bus go by, a number 30 up tae the fort so flabbergasted was I by this whole thing. If I’d got on that bus I’d have got to have sexual congress with Sinnaed Gilchrist up at her new flat in the Heights and later got battered by her new boyfriend, Cambo Sharpe who’s the leader aff ae the Niddrie Shamrock.
“Eh, whit height wur ye before, Davie?”
“Six foot four” he answered a little tearfully. He looked up at the squirrels hatefully like they were taunting him. I was almost afraid to ask the next obvious question.
“And what height are you now?”
“Five foot three”. With this he put his face in his hands, his shoulders rocking with the grief of the thing.
Fucking weird, eh? I hope I never wake up one morning one foot and an inch smaller. I’m only five-six as it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment