Lucky

Going to the bookies, I stopped on top of the canal bridge, between one side of humanity in Dalmuir and the other side of humanity in Dalmuir. The primordial smell of sewerage made my eyes water and gave me time for a David Attenborough moment. Breathing through my mouth I could almost taste the essential honking duckness of primitive life. The hordes of seagulls, those well-known hyenas of the air, which refused to be cute and ate all the bread, diluted the effect. Then my luck ran out.

Robert The Dad crunched along the tinder canal cycle path. His shoulders jabbed out left to right, like the ancestral memory of a Neanderthal boxer, and his head was always up, sniffing the air, looking for trouble. He couldn’t fail to miss me.

Robert The Dad was biologically my partner’s son’s dad. But he was a lot of other things. His mouth was already going and his teeth flashing even before he got near enough for me to hear him. He was always the same, never letting go of your ear and scampering after you, like a little dog yakking big. And it was too late to avoid him.

‘…You know what I told the Paki bastard?’ said Robert.

I’d missed the first part of what he said as he came up the wooden steps, but that didn’t really matter. He was more of a monologue than dialogue man. And it was a simple jigsaw with four parts: how they couldnae, how they shouldnae, and who the fuck did they think they were anyway? Then it went back to the beginning again, which might only be three, but he had the knack of making any conversation seeming longer. But the last part was always a crescendo with flashing teeth. So if I listened and just placed the right word, in the right place, I could finish his conversations for him.

It was Pakis, but at other times it was: his ex-wife (fat cow); his ex-girlfriend (thin cow); his ex-brother (shitebag) and his ex-mum (fat cow; dead and rotting in hell); all whom were interchangeable. They, even those in hell, were against him.

I don’t know what I’d done to be classified as his only mate. Maybe it was some kind of Darwinian genetic flaw, or maybe it was because I was taller and inadvertently evolved to show more interest than the average orange traffic cone. But then Robert did say something that caught my attention.

‘I told they Paki bastards…you might complain to me about him coming into the shop shouting and swearing, but you still take his money. You still serve him drink!’

‘They still take his money,’ said Robert winding down a bit, but looking at me to see if I understood that he wasn’t happy with that.

Maybe it would be better, I thought, if they didn’t take his money. But Robert wouldn’t be happy with that either. So I just nodded, to show that I agreed with every word he’d ever said, before he even said them, so I kept nodding in advance.

I tried to block Robert from my mind as I wandered along the cycle path towards the bookies, but it was made more difficult because Robert insisted on following me, back the way he’d come, to tell me who else was a bastard.

The funny thing was he didn’t classify his son, young Robert or Bob, as we liked to call him, as a bastard, even though it was his (‘ex-wife Cassie, fat cow’) of a mum that brought him up. Robert’s son, sniffed glue, done Charley, and drunk Buckfast every day, to blot- out having Robert for a dad, for his formative first five years, which showed an early grasp of logic.

I gallantly tried to intervene, to give Bob, Robert’s son, some manly advice, but I didn’t have any, so I suggested it would be a good idea to go to school now and again. But he didn’t listen and got too old to get expelled. Now he was shouting at Pakis. I’m sure there was some graph in a dog-eared blue leafed jotter, on squared paper, in his old school, with the appropriate peaks and troughs, linking these associative events and showing it was all my fault.

I got buried, like ticker-tape, under so many balled up bookie’s slips that I ran out of time to turn it about, but knew my luck had to change.

There was only Cassie and me in, when someone chapped our door. I’d acquired that rarely used psychic gift that was able to determine the good knock-which wasn’t too soft and not to hard, the kind that Father Christmas would use before he started ‘yo, ho, hoing,’ when it wasn’t even Christmas- and the bad knock. And I was in no doubt, as I sprang up from my seat, with a ready made smile knitted onto my face, that it was a good knock, bringing tinsel and treats and sprigs of holly in November.

It was our neighbours. Mother and daughter. My smile began to unravel. She lived just around the corner from us, but I looked past them, down all the little run-off alleyways with smashed streetlights, to see if anyone else had chapped the door and run away. The mother pushed her daughter forward, so that she stood in front of us, like an offering. The mother expected me to know her daughter’s name, just because I’d been staying there about ten years and said ‘hello,’ to her in her pram, which I thought was a bit unfair. That, and pets, were one of my pet hates She might even have been deluded enough to think that I knew her name. But I was lucky, after all, because then she gave me a clue:

‘Your Bob called our Sandra a fuckin’ cow!’ the mother’s black hair shifted like a hat over her eyes, as she spoke, so matter- of- factly.

Now, I had Sandra, her mother, and a fact, outside my front door. Etiquette suggested that I should, at least, bring them into the hallway, but I didn’t like any of them. I thought of shutting the door and signalling to them through the letterbox, with a Queen Elizabeth type wave of the fingers, but I knew that wouldn’t work. It hadn’t worked before.

‘I’m really sorry Sandra,’ I said looking at her mother to see how much further I had to go. ‘You’re not a cow. You’re not a fucking cow. And I’m sorry that anyone has called you one’.

Sandra stepped backward and kinda sideways, as if the little fat fucker was ready to skulk away, but we both looked to her mum to see if that was ok.

Sandra’s mother stepped forward, filling the gap, on my doorstep.

‘I sat my driving test today,’ she said, without any preamble.

‘That’s nice,’ I said, edging the door shut. I’d been brought up with manners, but never had cause to use them.

‘Your Bob lay on the road, in front of the car, and wouldn’t let me out of the lay-by. We couldn’t get him to move. The driving instructor threatened to call the police, and, finally, had to drag him away, holding his legs, while I reversed out’.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said sincerely, because I also had trouble reversing out of those little streets. ‘Did you pass?’ I eagerly asked.

She sniffed, as if she was going to cry. I hate dogs, cats and women crying. It’s on my list.

I practiced putting my hand through the letterbox and waving, when they were away. I was lucky because I’d passed my test twenty-years ago. Everything was much easier then.