Saturday Night Fever

What you see is what you don’t get is a wysiwyg clause I rarely use in normal conversation. I was out last night to meet my adoring public. It was Saturday night and it was the Drop Inn so you can guarantee a crowd of at least four people and Wullie Dalziel. There’s a rule that nobody can kiss at the bar, unless it’s Brian Thompson, and he’s had a bit much and  he hears some song on the Jukebox and wants to do his wee Indian dance and wants to kiss you on the ear and tell you he loves you. But there was a middle-aged couple sitting at the bar that weren’t aware of this.  She looked like a mail-catalogue bride that had been sent from another continent and ended up in Dalmuir and was making the most of it by killing herself with drink and he looked as if he knew what he was doing with the high bar stools pressed so close together.   I dusted down Mary with her fluffy heid to give her an airing and young Bod and Kirsty swelled the paying public by one-hundred percent or a pint of lager, a heavy, vodka and coke and a cider and blackcurrant. It was loud. A black guy was singing Karaoke-style and he has to use some fancy Usain Bolt footwork to keep the microphone away from Vicky Grmmley -she had to content herself with dancing round him like a totem pole. Worse was to come. Later Mary said we should get up and dance. That’s when I knew she was drunk.  

    There was an awkward moment when D J Campbell asked me how the book was going and told me him and Denise had pledged. I could have cuddled him or let him beat me at pool.

    I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the pledge level has stalled. It’s a bit like Dracula coming to Whitley Bay and at the end of a couple of weeks other vampires are coming up and asking him: ‘What do we do now Dracula? We’ve bit everybody we know and even people we don’t know. Everywhere we turn all we see is other vampires moping about and these humans are slippery beasts that only ever come out in daylight. The only one left’s Wullie Dalziel.’

‘We’ll go somewhere else,’ said Dracula spitting (and Dracula never spits).  

‘That’s what you said when we were in Transylvania,’ said the other vampires.  

The night ended with Julie McCann getting into a fight over a pool game with a neighbour that didn’t help her with a gazebo that blew away when he should have. She said she was going to beat this guy, but I didn’t think she would have, because for one thing he didn’t have the kind of blonde hair that would light up a disco or Lannie’s heid. It was a stonker of a black ball. A stake through his heart. She said she did it for Benny.

Strange things happen. Pledge now.    http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole