Huts53

‘What’s the matter with the playboy?’ Dad asked mum, over my head, as if I wasn’t there. He’d taken to calling me the playboy for some reason, which was no reason, but made sense to him.

Mum just nodded, as if she’d replied, and put the kettle back on the cooker ring, even though I still had a cup of tea sitting in front of me.

I’d owed mum that much money that I’d handed her my pay packet unopened. I didn’t expect angels to appear, and unroll a scroll and in a voice like thunder, say something like, ‘virtue is its own reward’, or church bells to toll, or her to take it. But she did, quietly slipping the brown envelope into her little apron pocket, with flowers on it. Mum smiled, as if she was proud of me.

I didn’t want to behave like a spoilt, only child, and say it was unfair, because it was totally fair. She proved a roof over my head, all my meals, did my washing and ironing, but even Jonah, inside the belly of a whale, knew he’d get out eventually. Without divine intervention, I was in for the whole weekend.

I didn’t even bother taking my usual going out bath. There was no point. I planned to just sit and rot, in my living room chair, like the money in my mum’s weedy pocket. I’d probably need to watch telly with mum and dad. There’d be something on. The last time I’d done that Bill and Ben were still Flowerpot men. I just wished I’d a hobby that could take me out of myself, something hands on, like learning to play the guitar, or saxophone; something that didn’t involve Playboy.

I smoked about five fags, one after the other, just looking out the window, watching the smoke curl around me, wondering what everyone else was doing. I knew I wouldn’t be missing anything. But was worried nobody would be missing me. It would be the same old music on the jukebox; the same old faces doing the same old things down the pub. But there was just that chance, just that one chance, it might not be. When I looked down I’d only one fag left. I hated asking mum, but had to.

‘Can I get money for some cigarettes please?’ I pleaded, all English, hoity toity, as if I was little Oliver asking for more gruel.

I’d worked the opportunity, instinctively, like a penalty box striker, but I didn’t want to jinx it by looking up. But when I heard mum’s slippers slapping down across the kitchen, to the place were she kept the penny jar, I knew it was going to be a long night, with a ten packet of fags, unless it was a real reddy, and she only gave me a penny to buy a single fag out of Johnny Graham’s.

I supposed I’d need to start looking through the ashtrays for fag doubts, and unravelling them to make roll ups to smoke and unravel the rolled up roll ups to make other roll ups. I’d need to be frugal, like the prisoners in Barlinnie, and call people ‘guv’ out of the side of my mouth-alright guv- and cut my matches up, with a Wilkinson razor blade, so that one match gave four lights.

‘Here,’ said mum, putting a shilling down on the table.

I nodded philosophically, supping at my tea, glad it saved me from one fag destitution, but hoping for more than a ten pack.

‘Get me milk, when you’re down there, will you?’ mum asked.

I nodded again, my fall into absolute poverty so sudden and complete, I didn’t even have time to put my mug of milky tea down.

‘You might need this,’ said mum handing me a pound note.

I pushed the shilling back towards her.

‘Just keep it,’ mum said.

I stuffed the money into my denim pockets, but looked at her quizzically. I’d enough for 200 fags and a crate of milk.

‘And I’ll get the milk,’ mum said, smiling shyly.

It took me a minute, but when I’d worked out what she meant I could have kissed her, if she wasn’t my mum, of course.

It was standing room only at the bar in The Horse and Barge which suited me just fine, because I didn’t have time for a bath, so after five minutes every male, smelled like a pig farmer in a sauna.

Barry Ferguson, nodded at the new bar maid Alex, and got me a pint up. It tasted of freedom. I almost drank it in one go.

I nodded at Alex, but she ignored me.

‘I’ll get this,’ said Barry, holding two fingers up so that Alex began pouring two pints.

‘How do you, eh, think, eh, it went earlier?’ asked Barry quietly.

‘Ok,’ I said, nodding, in affirmation, to Stairway to Heaven, glad of the other pint.

‘I’ll need to be half cut the next time I do that,’ Barry said looking me in the eye.

I laughed and so did Barry. ‘I’ll need to be fucking steaming, the next time you do that,’ I replied, sloping away from him through the crowd, as if nothing could touch me.

It got to that drunken end of the night stage. I couldn’t be bothered not looking and just stared fascinated like a five year old. Gillian Ambrose was like a Thunderbirds puppet. One pull of the string and her head tilted back and her hair tilted forward. Another and her ruby red lips moved in the approximation of a real smile. She’d swivel on her seat and look at me and not look at me at the same time. One hand gradually descended down and across and sat, nakedly, on the Fannylicker’s arm.

Fannylicker wasn’t his real name, of course. I’d learned that secret years ago.

‘Shhh,’ dad would say in the pub, nodding at me with my glass of lemonade and packet of plain crisps, before we went on the supporter’s bus to the Celtic games together, ‘There’s a young fellow present.’

And everybody would nod respectively, as if we were at mass, and call the Fannylicker by his other name Harry.

But then they’d forget I was there, or the Fannylicker was Harry, or Harry was the Fannylicker.

I didn’t know what a Fannylicker was then, of course. I just knew it was dirty. And that was enough to make me laugh nervously, whenever I heard it. By the time I was old enough to know what it really meant, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but some part of me did. The anatomical part I could quite understand, in the way I could understand Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods.

The Fannylicker sat, like a ginger tabby with ginger whiskers, curled up in his seat, watching Gillian Ambrose, stretching and strutting like a baldy Elvis. And he never even seemed to say much, just sat with his half filled pint, waiting to pounce.

I pushed off my chair, couldn’t take any more.

Gillian Ambrose pulled at my arm.

‘YOU COMING OUTSIDE FOR A FAG,’ she said, over the volume of speakers.

I knew the kind of fag she meant. ‘Ok,’ I said, following her outside.

Gillian walked around the back of the pub. She broke off a little dope and smelled it. I thought she was going to push it under my nose for me to sniff. She sat down on a beer barrel and spread out two Rizla papers, her hair hanging like a curtain between us.

‘You goin’ up the road with the Fannylicker?’ I asked abruptly.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said looking up at me, ‘sometimes you talk too fast. Your accent…’

‘Eh, you going up the road with that old guy?’ I said slowly.

Gillian flicked her pink tongue over the two Rizla papers, using her salvia to stick them together.

‘Nooo,’ she said, drawing it out. ‘I’m going up the road with you’.