a day in the sun

Winter broke like a stick and the sun clothed itself in clouds to give spring an airing and my world expanded to more than school rooms and cold rooms, Star Trek, Benny Hill and light entertainment on the telly. From the cupboard door in the hall, I grabbed an army-green nylon Parker to keep out the cold, the fur round the hood chewed by the weather and the inside damp with a fungal, mushroomy smell, compost that helped my brain expand outside the classrooms. Boredom had tied a hangman’s knot in my throat. I went outside to see what all the fuss was about with the squawking of crows on the roofs below us and the barking of Sandy the Golden Labrador. I went in for Summy because he was a bit like me, he never went anywhere, because there was nowhere to go.

‘Hey’ said Summy. ‘Imagine there really was a Gestapo.’

            He saved up strange stuff like that and just blurted it out, because I’d told him yesterday my Da had smacked me about because I’d been giving cheek to my mum. ‘I hate the cunt,’ I’d said, ‘and I hope he dies a miserable and painful death. The auld cunt, just wait until I’m older’.

He stared at me. Tried to speak, the weight of his eyelids, heavy with tears, dragged his chin down and he turned the other way, ushering his wee sister, Janey Mongo back up the hall, before he sobbed, holding the internal door shut so she couldn’t escape and annoy us. It wasn’t his fault Janey Mongo stunk of shite and Summy whose job it was to take care of her, also stunk of shite, and his mum was an alky and a cow and she died. That was just the luck of the draw as we seen it.

Summy’s da had already picked a winner. The social worker that was meant to be keeping an eye on Janey Mungo. I’d never seen her, but Cammy and Jim, who lived upstairs from Summy, said she wasn’t bad looking and had big tits. The normal rules didn’t seem to apply to how long he should wait until shagging her and moving her into his house. Summy’s da was loaded because he worked for the Shah of Iran, and he even had a car that sat outside his door for months at a time doing nothing. But how he got one wife, never mind two, was beyond my understanding, he looked like a potato. I know the Daily Record played things like that up. Was always finding pictures of potatoes that look like Jesus, or the Virgin Mary in ready-fried form,  although not a gambler, if you gave me a spade and a potato field seven out of ten unwashed spuds would look like him.  Summy was a chip off the old block.

Sandy, the golden Labrador, was sprawled in its usual place in the front garden, so lazy that it didn’t raise its head or whack its tail in greeting when we passed. Car wheels, going up, or down the hill, were the only things that seemed to rouse it. Growling in recognition, rushing through the fat dog-sized hole in the hedge to stalk its prey and going barking bonkers as it aced down the hill, before doddling back up the hill, broken. One day, perhaps in forty-million years, it would catch a car and slobber it to bits.

Janey Mongo was smart enough to figure how to unlatch the Yale on the front door, tried catching us with her cries, tried tagging along like a wooden turkey tail. We had to wing it away from her, and leave her stranded beside the grass triangle on the wrong side of the road spewing snottery tears and wailing as if she’d lost the reason to live.

We slowed at the bottom of the hill, wandered up to near the High School, raiding the skips outside the derelict houses on Shelley to see if we could get magnets out of old speakers or tellies. I already had a few and Summy wanted some too, because magnets were really cool and if you got lost you could always find the North Pole with them. I showed him a few magnets I’d got and showed them how they worked, was going to give him one, but didn’t, stuck them back in my coat pocket and felt them tingling my fingers as if they were magic beans.

            ‘Fuck off,’ said Summy, ‘you’re just a fucking dick sometimes.’ He darted a look, measured the distance, lobbed a brick towards the house, but missed by miles and the scaffolding pole rung from the blow, because he was a dick.

I showed him how it was done. I didn’t smash a window, because most of the glass was smithereens, but I did smack the brickwork near the window with a satisfying thud. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about his mum, but I didn’t know how to.