Such a sedate sport but there are undercurrents. Beneath the surface of blousons and starched skirts and merry chatter seethes exclusion and a deep bigotry. There's bias in west of Scotland bowling clubs!
What looked like a smallish amount of soapy water in a
bucket now took on the watery dimensions of a tidal wave as it spilled onto the
bathroom floor after having been toppled. So thought janitor and keen pederast,
Jake Arnott, who was now splashing about in watery substances and wondering how
on earth he was going to soak it all up before the finishing up of the
committee meeting in approximately no time at all (he could hear the all-male
members bantering and the scraping of chairs as they rose from their seats)
The subject for discussion that morning was falling
membership and what within the rules and 'ethos' of the century old club should
be done about it.
Outside, it was 'Ladies Day' on the two immaculate greens.
Women in white rolled woods inexpertly at jacks, here more for a blether than
the competition. Happy just to be out in some morning sunshine for a change
though there was a chill in the air which gave them something to talk about.
"Giy cauld, Jeannie. Ye do well tae wear yon
cardigan"
"Aye, Jeannie!" (they seemed all to be named thus)
"Nary a cloot til May is oot!"
This last seemed to provoke hoots and clucks of laughter far
beyond what the statement merited. They had all lived in Scotland for many
decades but remained surprised by the fact that, more often than not, it was a
country with a notoriously cold climate. This environmental consistency still
surprised them on an almost daily basis.
In clumps the old men started appearing from the committee
room. They wore blazers and flannels that had seen better days and they spoke
in an idiom they imagined important men, say Glasgow city councillors, might
use. Like they had plums in their mouths, but those plums had gone sour.
Thus, they mangled the Scots tongue almost beyond
recognition.
"O'coorse, Charlie boy, wi' yer renowned injun-uity wi'
pubic relations, we can increase yon membership bi' muckle hunners bi'
Christmas. O' the right types o'coorse!"
"Forby, F. Scott, aprons and sashes. Aprons and sashes
and mibbes the odd bowler hat".
"It'll be like nabbin' puddocks in the seggs!!"
The one looked at the other in mutual incomprehension until
a realisation dawned that neither had understood the words that had been
spoken.
The general direction of the rosacea-faced ensemble was, as
ever, the members bar whose big windows allowed a fond gaze at the greens and
the odd flash of bloomer and support stocking.
"Bliddy anti-aphrodisiacal, or what? It's nae bliddy
wonder we dinnae attract the young yins! Pit ye aff the houghmagandie for good,
that wid!!"
Thus exclaimed G K Chesterton as he farted loudly, his leg
raised as if resting on a low stool.
"We need to tart up this place. Gi' it a wee bit glamour"
Chesterton did not possess a sense of irony.
Around the tatty, tartan walls of the bar hung photographs
of a variety of shabby, brylcreemed men holding mediocre looking trophies. All
wore blazers sporting the club crest (a goat playing a flute) and they smiled
for the camera like their groins were being tweaked by bulldog clips.
"Mibbes if you stoapped expelling wind in the bar,
Chesterton. That wid be a stert!"
This from club secretary, Tam 'The Ram' Solzhenitsyn, who
had only just entered the room and into the full gust of the other man's parp.
Solzhenitsyn didn't mind bloomers and medical stockings and had enjoyed
intimate knowledge of at least half the females currently on the green and more
besides.
Unattractive females, he found, were gratifyingly eager for
a man's attentions.
Tam had been a foreman at 'The Clenny' and was used to the
various aromas of human wastage but still he found Chesterton's anal effluence
repellent. He had watched the man eat his cabbage and ham at club dinners (and
wasn't that a rather 'Irish' dish?) and knew this to be the cause of the sour
reek that would be expelled freely in the company of men (never women for that
wasn't the 'done thing').
The bowling club stood at the very top of the hill of
tenements. They were not run-down tenements like you would find in other parts
of the city. These tenements had tiled entrances; indeed, the tiling continued
dado-style all the way up the stairwell. This made them a ‘cut-above’ in the
tenement world. And this was the catchment area for the bowling club along with
the surrounding and similarly tenemented streets, crescents and avenues.
Within these tenements are apartments, and within the
apartments real lives were being lived. Some of them perfectly normal lives but
not all.
Charlie Dickens lived in a top-floor tenement apartment with
his wife Jeannie. Jeannie had been an exotic dancer at the Clyde Club in nearby
Shawfield when she’d met Charlie: tassles, skimpy drawers, the ‘hale shebang’.
The fact that she was in her late fifties at the time and ‘well past her
sell-by date’ didn’t put Charlie off in the slightest.
“Pull ma seemit doon when ye’ve feenished, son!” was what
she’d said after the first time and they were married the following Tuesday at
Martha Street registery office and honeymooning in Dunoon for a fortnight.
“Why no’ huv a wet t-shirt night or lassies strippin’ an’
that? Ahd be up fer it!”
Charlie thought of the wrinkled old frame underneath his
wife’s tattered goonie. The lumps and folds and surgical stockings and
visualised an audience of puking prospective bowlers.
“Or a swinger’s night? I’ve always fancied that Anatole
France that calls the bingo!”
In his mind’s eye were the swinging gonad’s of Anatole
France, like pendulums in a Grandfather clock slapping onto the toothless face
of his wife.
“Bliddy swingers night, not at all. We’re no’ bloody
heathens. Even the Catholics would draw the line there!!”
It wasn’t often he had a good word for the tatty-pickers but
the thought of his wifes auld dugs revealed before a be-blazered public moved
them just a tad closer to their camp.
“Aye, like you widnae like to gie Jeannie Burns a good
seeing to?”
His wife had hit a usually soft spot in his trousers which
was showing signs of an unlikely tumescence.
Jeannie Burns! That golden vision of perfumed loveliness in
leopard-skin tights. The busty sexagenarian oozed sex appeal like nobody
Charlie Dickens could think of since Rita Fairclough was in her prime. And
everybody knew that Rab Burns was impotent and incapable of the houghmagandie.
Limp as wet lettuce, even Viagra couldn’t raise the stone-dead.
“Mibbe a Vicars and Tarts night would be OK!”
A glint returned in the very soul of Jeannie Dickens. At
last, some action.
If he could, Jake Arnott would ‘self-identify’ as a Sexual
Taxidermist with a Tendency toward Bestiality (STTTB – not one of the more
common acronyms among the non-binary mixture). He liked to fuck domestic
animals then stuff them then fuck them again (which made him a necrophiliac, of
sorts). He was made aware of his somewhat abhorrent sexuality when he found
himself becoming aroused during episodes of Animal Magic and when John Noakes
stroked Shep fondly on Blue Peter (his parents noticed his visits to the
bathroom on these occasions and whenever Skippy the Bush Kangaroo made an
appearance).
Humans did not ‘do it’ for Jake. In fact, and as was common
in his field of occupation, he didn’t like humans at all.
Attending the ‘Customer Service’ courses with all his
janitor colleagues was a bit like you’d imagine a Diversity seminar attended by
Nazi’s. The role plays often turned violent as all the janitors in attendance
found that they didn’t even like each other never mind those they were supposed
to serve.
“Ye’re no’ even a proper janny, ya clown. Ye’re a security gerd
at the dole!’
“You widnae know a good steam boiler fae a boil oan yer
erse!”
These were course and bitter men and every one owned a gimpy
leg. Seeing them all leave the seminar at once was like witnessing an exercise
in unsynchronised limping. How they had come by their limbic injuries was never
made clear, but they seemed to be a pre-requisite for their trade.
“So, you’re applying for the post of janitor Mr Swine? Let’s
see your limp.”
Jake Arnott hated the folk he worked for. Bloody orange
bastards he called them as he slurped on his bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine and
kicked the old boiler he teased and coaxed into operation on a daily basis. If
only they knew his true identity, he’d be out on his bony old bahoukie. Eugene
Apostles Creed O’Neil was not a name they would take to easily, nor his weekly
devotions at St Mary Star of the Sea Chapel in The Calton. He had applied for
the job out of sheer badness. As a child he’d been brought up in a tenement
whose back green backed on to a local Orange Lodge and their chants and flutes
had kept him awake many a school night. He blamed this for the fact that he’d
left school only with a note from his teacher with ‘Janny material’ written on
it.
He had infiltrated and now he was going to destroy in a most
spectacular and Catholic way.
The Vicars and Tarts Night was really a swinger’s night in
disguise.
“Vicars and tarts, eh? Wee tad risqué is it no’?” so said
Gabriel Garcia Marquez as he tucked his willy away at the urinals. “Blasphemous
anaw nae doot!” Refusing to enter the true spirit of the event and in defiance
of his Catholic-sounding name he had dressed in the strict severity of a
Presbyterian minister in the Pastor Jack Glass/Ian Paisley mould. He lifted his
bible from the off-white tiling and left his toilet companion, Compton ‘The
Horse’ Mckenzie wondering if Marquez had any idea of the carnal carnage that
was taking place all around him in this very building and even on the dark lawn
of the bowling green. Vicars were being de-frocked and Tarts were performing
acts a seasoned prostitute would have blanched at.
Anatole France and Jeannie Dickens coupled gloriously and
with great vigour in the club trophy room her orgasmic wails rattling the very
windows and her false teeth flying from her mouth along with unutterable oaths
of pleasure.
Charlie Dickens and Jeannie Burns were ‘getting it on’ on a
billiard table. Tam ‘The Ram’ Solzhenitsyn was practising onanism in the tiny
room where the galoshes were kept. For inspiration he used his favourite
picture of Princess Anne in horse-jumping mode.
“Oh Annie, thae jodhpurs!” he groaned as he climaxed
gloriously then gave a gasping rendition of the national anthem.
In the midst of all this, in the very shadows a figure
lurked. It was dressed as the pope and held under its arm a stuffed beast that
was difficult to distinguish in the gloom. Was it a dog or a pig, maybe a sheep?
(it was a small ass such as that which a midget Jesus may have rode into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.)
Only Eugene Apostles Creed O’Neil knew that the beast was
stuffed with dynamite.
No comments:
Post a Comment