Huts65

Time was measured the old fashioned way: the number of times Fat Billy from behind the bar, collecting empties, cuffed me on the back of the neck, changing my head's trajectory from LaLa land, and told me to go up the road. I know he didn’t really mean it. But my eyes were getting too heavy for my head. Pints of heavy kept reappearing on my table, as regularly as the lights went on in low flying UFOs in Bonnybridge. They kept advancing and retreating, like a childhood game of statues, or shut-eye-runaway. Mocking me. I don’t know if I was drinking them, or willing them into submission.

‘Snoddy-Snodgrass.’

I kept saying his name, to remind myself of it, and pumping his hand up and down, in a handshake, when he slid into the seat beside me. I’d played football with him in the school team. We’d been mates. Best mates. Well not exactly mates, but we knew each other. We’d both started working in Glendevon Hospital at the same time, before he got booted out.

‘What’d… d…you doing with yourself now?’ I asked, taking a drink out of one of my advancing pints, but somehow missing my mouth and spilling some.

‘It’s no problem,’ I said, knocking over his drink with my glass.

‘Jesus,’ he said, jumping up just because a little bit of beer got splashed onto his denims.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, scrambling in my pockets for coins, and falling back into my chair, ‘I’ll get us another one’.

But Snoddy-Snodgrass was too busy fussing about, shaking himself down, like a girl on the dance floor. He looked at me as if it was my fault.

I couldn’t remember the reason why I hated him. He was gone before I’d fully worked it out so that I could tell him.

‘That’s the last time I’m telling you to get up the road,’ said Fat Billy, off the cuff, but he’d said the same thing the last time.

The old Wurlitzer was hitched up another gear and trying to pump out Love is Here and Now You’re Gone, through the fag smoke, which was a bad sign, not only because people were drunk enough to remember they could dance, which took even more space and oxygen, but also because the slow records always came on last and it reminded me of something I’d forgot.

Gerry Keenan squeezed into the seat beside me. ‘Fuckin’ hell it’s wild in here the night,’ he said, with admiration, clutching his pint as if I was going to steal it.

I looked at his little poodle perm-head, and laughed, because I liked him. It was quite difficult to make out what he was saying because of the music and because Gerry tended to smoke a fag and talk out of the side of his mouth, as if he was starring in one of those prison movies and someone was suddenly going to stick a mirror through the bars and read his lips and call him “a dirty squealer”.

I don’t know how we got onto the subject. At one point I thought he said that he liked cricket. I shook my head and put my arm around my new best pal, wee Gerry, and told him what I thought he said. I pulled my arm away when he confirmed that he did like cricket. It was no wonder he learned how to talk out of the side of his mouth. If I’d such secrets I’d have done the same.

But it all got too much for me. I leaned in towards him to hear more. I’d never met anybody that liked cricket. He said something about England always getting fucked at it, which made it kind of palatable, but still not understandable.

I don’t know if I knew it was time to go up the road. But my body dragged me that way. I found myself slumped up against a wooden pillar, outside The Horse and Barge.

Gillian Ambrose was cupping a joint, standing outside. Her stare dissected me like an insect, bit by bit. ‘You’re drunk,’ she said, in the annoying Brummie accent she had.

‘What are you the police?’ I finally slurred out, weaving away from her.

‘You said you’d phone me?’ she said accusingly, but there was something like pleading in her tone, that stopped me and made me circle back towards her.

I didn’t know how to tell her that I couldn’t use the phone. It made me tongue-tied and too nervous, and I’d be just as quick walking up and flinging a brick through her window with a message attached, as I would be going in the other direction and putting a penny in the phone box.

‘You said you’d phone me,’ I roared at her instead, going on the attack, forgetting to remember that only rich people had phones and we didn’t have one in the house.

I’d confused myself enough to confuse her. I could see doubt creeping into her flinty eyes.

‘Did I?’ she said, moving from foot to foot.

Her eyes sparkled. I was almost close enough to taste the cherry off her lipstick.

‘You’re shagging James Munn,’ I said, spoiling everything.

I must have been off balance, because I fell when she shoved me. I watching her lovely long legs stomp away from me, back to the pub.

‘Wait,’ I shouted.

I didn’t need to think when I took the short cut home. Up through the blue bell woods and three stepping-stones over the stream. It might as well have been tarmac. I’d been doing it since primary school. The stones must have been slippy that night. I fell from one to the other and missed the third, filling my Weegin shoes with enough water to have a bath in, and soaking my denims.

Dad was in bed, but mum was still sitting in her chair, dozing in front of the fire. She looked old.

‘Is that you?’ she said, looking me up and down and smiling at the sight of me.

‘Aye,’ I replied, as sober as I could.

‘What did you do with your jacket?’

I patted my chest and arms, as if that would help me find it.

‘Was that you throwing up outside?’ mum asked.

‘Must have been something I ate,’ I lied, not even fooling myself. ‘I seen Bundy,’ I added, changing the subject.

‘How is she?’ asked mum, her eyes creasing into concern.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘She’s good’.

‘I’m off to bed now,’ said mum.

I opened my eyes, at the kitchen table, and I had a cold mug of tea in front of me. Mum had also made me toast and cheese. I chewed on a bit. Then another bit. Then I ate the lot, before going to my bed. You couldn’t beat toast and cheese.