Bill and the UFO3

Wendy and Rab were camping out in their back garden in Shakespeare Avenue. They’d a canvas tent made out of the same kind of material that deck chairs were made out of, but less stripey, because it was camouflage green. It was pretty big- about the size of a garden hut, shrunk to the size of a squinty dog kennel. But Rab could get a bit shirty about the dilapidated ship shape of his tent. When he was pushed he blamed the thalidomide guy ropes and crap metal stays, which were really loose bits of string and wooden clothes pegs that tended to buckle, split and splinter. But that side of it was Wendy’s job. Plastic ones were better, he argued, for the sake of arguing, but only for hanging out washing.

At the start of the summer, Rab was all proud of his tent, making a fuss if shoes were worn inside its cathedral gloom, or moaning if anybody sat on his shit brown coloured sleeping bag with moth eaten yellow lining; stole one of his fags; or hid his two- battery black metal cased authentic policeman’s torch with only one battery. By the end of the summer he was just the same. That was the good thing about Rab; he was consistent. He always moaned about something, or nothing. Wendy and him kept moving the tent because the ground sheet got tangled, or leaked and as an added extra, it saved them having to cut the grass. The tent just muck-rollered it.

Summy and Phil drifted in that general direction, because it was too hot, they’d no money, and there was nothing else to do, so they might as well do it together with Rab and Wendy. Even there arguments and attempts to see who could spit through their teeth dribbled out, were half cracked, and endlessly boring, like adult conversation about the shocking price of things, or whether Ladybirds were called Ladybugs. Summy even slyly suggested, out of the side of his mouth, that Rab and Wendy moved pitches just to get away from the lingering smell of their tent, a place where old black sannies went to die. Phil said it was just the smell of Wendy, but had a big gormless grin on his face, which dared Summy to disagree, and that way it would be proved, beyond doubt, that he fancied Wendy. But that didn’t work either. They agreed to disagree, that the smell just followed the tent about like bum rot, or a Wendy smell, because there wasn’t much to do when they got into the tent, but fart and blame somebody else. It was a bit like Poker, but without the playing cards and a lot noisier.

Summy made farting noises with his arm, cranking back and forth under his armpit ‘Imagine sleeping with your sister every night.’ He blew out his cheeks, like a speech bubble, because his head just wasn’t big enough to take on the enormity of such a thought.

‘Or Wendy.’ Phil added putting his fingers up to his mouth and making ou-oooh gagging and spewing noises.

Summy was trying to figure it out and his face was contorting and suffering the consequence of his efforts. ‘That’s just what I said.’

Phil tried to encourage him. ‘No-oh I meant if Wendy wasn’t your sister and was just Wendy.’

‘That would be even worse.’ Summy put his thumb in his mouth and nibbled at his nail to help him think. ‘I’d rather shag a toilet roll.’

‘What’d you mean?’ Phil took a step into the shadow of the garages. He had his top off, his neck was a riot of red, made more prominent by the pale colour of the Adidas top he’d hooked round his backside.

Summy slid slowly down the panel of the garage like an oldster until his bum rested on the jutting concrete base. The sole of his feet Samba trainers trailed this way and that, onto the border between the muck and the tarmac road, creating a dusty fissure. ‘I don’t mean I’d shag that shiny kind of toilet roll. But the other stuffs ok. Eh? Eh? As long as you wet it first like paper-mâché its like the inside of a real girl only crumblier.’ There was a pleading tone in his voice and his face and chest went all splotchy crimson.

‘You’re such a spaz –ball.’ Phil pointed towards the overgrown bushes in Murphy’s garden. ‘See that blackbird over there. I bet if I had a sling I could kill it. But I don’t have a sling. I could kill it with a gun.’ He took aim with his finger.

‘You couldnae kill a slug.’

Summy put a clenched fist up to his nose and blew out one nostril, like a torpedo tube and then did the same with the other side.

Phil pushed him on the shoulder. ‘You’re greeting like a baby.’

Summy had his head pushed down in supplication to his misery, as if he was under water, or was going to be sick. ‘It’s the pollen,’ he sniffed, snorkelling one nostril, then the other. ‘That’s a bit better.’ He lifted his head and glared at Phil.

‘You’re still greetin’ ah think you just made the whole thing up because you’re a big baby. I’ve never seen any pollen. Where is it?’

‘It’s in the flowers.’ His head shuttled from one side to the other, but there was only hot tarmac, grass up at the Old Folk’s Home and weeds in all of the back gardens. ‘There,’ he said, ‘pointing to some orange lilies in Porter’s garden.’

‘Nah,’ Phil shook his head, ‘You might be a spaz-ball, but I’m no’. How does that get from there to here?’

‘It’s carried in the wind.’ Summy tried not to sniff.

‘There isn’t any wind.’

‘The sun carries it as well.’ Summy gave in, sniffed, and wiped at his cheekbones and eyes, with the back of his hand, as if he had dog paws.

‘Nah. I’m no’ wearing it. I think it’s like Batman. One minute he’s got pointy ears and the next minute he’s got a flat head. That’s not normal. I think its more to do with ...’ Phil delicately flicked Summy on the bridge of the nose to emphasise his point. Summy sniffed and pushed him away, but was too caught up in pawing at his streaming eyes to do so with any great conviction. ‘I think,’ said Phil, growing into his role as elder statesman, ‘you were probably lying down in the sun one day and a seed went up your conker of a nose and it’s probably still there growing.’ Phil could see it happening right in front of him. ‘You’ll probably need to see a tree surgeon when you’re older.’

They stood close together, but far enough away from the corner of Chalmer’s garage so that they didn’t get creosote onto their clothes and listened. There was no sound apart from sniffing. Summy peered around the corner to see if the tent had mysteriously moved again, since the day before yesterday, when Rab had been moaning about dog shite on the grass, and kicked the grass as if it was its fault. They had to be careful because if Mrs Morrison spotted them she was likely to invite them into the house for lemonade. And they didn’t like to be ignorant and not go in, especially since Rab was likely to make a face and batter them later. Neither of them could explain to him that it wasnae their fault they’d been brought up with real lemonade out of a Garvie’s bottle and not poncey warm stuff with lemons floating about in a cloudy swirl that looked as if somebody had peed in the glass.

The upside of having a tent outside was they didn’t have to go inside. It wasn’t that they disliked Mrs Morrison, you couldn’t dislike someone’s Ma, especially when they weren’t well and might be drop-down-dying at any minute, but that didn’t make them like her either. It was that no man’s land of getting battered off Rab for saying something bad about her, or never mentioning her as if she didn’t exist. Even her own children spent most of the summer outside. But it was difficult to avoid her. She was a big beanbag of a woman with the ability to sneak around garden corners. Phil would be saying something and a shadow would appear and he would need to be alert and in an instant switch to sotto altar boy voice and peels of ‘Hi Mrs Morrisson.’ And she’d be there, inviting them all in for lemonade. Then it was difficult to escape. She was stationary enough once she’d waddled to her chair, hoarding her bulk in the bank against further expenditures of energy, but in a weight to word ratio she was world champ of the super whisper. ‘What’s that you’re doing now?’ she’d ask Summy when he was in their toilet, eyeing up the shiny toilet roll, and couldn’t pee with the super whisper buzzing about his head like a plague of midges, and had to wait until he got back into the garden to unzip and pee outside the tent. But he wasn’t going to get blamed for shitting on the grass. That wasnae him. That was definitely a dog, probably Todger, and he wouldn’t hear any different.