Ugly Puggly 2

I waited until we were stranded between traffic lights on Great Western Road before I spoke. People thought Ugly Puggly was being ignorant, because he didn’t do small talk, and had a tendency to stare so hard dogs would bite him and children would go red faced and cry. Adults would grow angry, without being quite sure why, but he was just being Ugly Puggly. So it was best to ask him direct questions. The gears stuck and grinded as we jerked forward. ‘Where you want me to drop you aff?’

‘Your house,’ he stared out the window as we moved three inches forward and came to a slow stop.

‘No, no happening.’

We’d got beyond the first set of traffic lights before I spoke again. ‘I cannae put you up. I’ve got a wife and kids. Remember?’

We got through the junction at Crow Road. You used to be able to come out that way before the hospital blocked it off with a bollard, pedestrianizing, and added fifteen or twenty minutes to your journey. I took my foot off the accelerator, now we were down to Flintstone pace. ‘I can gee you some money if you need it.’

We got past MacDonald’s and a fancy car tried to cut into our lane. No way. I held my nerve and kept the van crawling forward until her car bucked away and back into the even slower moving lane.

‘Yes, I do need some money,’ he said.

I squinted at him and fiddled with the radio. Elton John was warbling some shite, but it was better than adverts. I’d about seventy pence on me. ‘How much?’

We’d almost hit Clydebank before he answered. ‘That depends on a number of variables.’

I braked sharply. ‘Shut up.’ I’d asked the wrong question. Even as a primary school kid he wasn’t right. He memorised a book of logarithms. Algorithms might rule the world now, but to him they made sense, perfect sense. He’d scored the highest schoolboy score in Glasgow for math, but when they asked him to sit it again because they were convinced he cheated he drew a picture of a rainbow trout on the exam paper. I knew because he stayed next door to us. And he’d told my mum.

She’d been like a mum to him too. His mum was older. And he’d a brother and sister but they were what I thought of them as adults. His dad I couldn’t really remember, other than he had a car, which he washed with a big sponge and bucket of soapy water on a Sunday. You’d handled snapshots of his mum with gloves on. Her hair was dyed orange and her face was orange as makeup would allow. She was bug-eyed and drew on her eyebrows with thick black pencil. Ugly Buggly took after her. He was a strange kid, but he loved my mum. And I guess she loved him back. She told him painting a rainbow trout is always the right answer—and she’d laughed. She was always laughing in the memories I had of her.

At her funeral, I was going to say Ugly Buggly howled like some animal. But I’d have got it wrong. Ugly Buggly howled like Ugly Buggly. You could hit him, slap him, spit on him and he wouldn’t even blink. One of the boys at school told him to stick his tongue out. He stuck it out and he stapled it. Ugly Buggly didn’t cry, didn’t ask why. He just wandered away and continued being Ugly Buggly. With mum gone, there was no room for him in our house. He still lived next door, but I didn’t see him much. My mum would have said it was because I hadn’t been looking.

‘Right,’ I got through the roundabout. ‘Let me put this another way. How much do you need and what do you need it for?’

‘I need enough for a pair of shoes, say £30 because I need to break into the house. The ground is spiked with glass.’   

‘Fuck,’ I grunted.  Looking down at his feet, I was mad at myself. I hadn’t noticed he’d no shoes on. But I wasn’t sure it would have made any difference.

‘Why’s yer garden full of broken glass?’

He didn’t seem to notice the slight derision in my voice. I guess he was used to that.

‘To keep Murdo’s dog from shitting in it,’ he replied.

Murdo lived a few doors along from us when we were younger. He’d three daughters that were all a bit older than us. One of them was a stunner. Not that Ugly Buggly would have noticed. Murdo must be in his seventies now. But I didn’t know he’d a dog. Ugly Buggly’s garden had a slope that ran down to the stairs. It hadn’t been fenced. I guessed most folk thought because it was so overgrown it was common ground.

We got stuck with the lights on red and only one or two cars getting through when they changed at the Boulevard. ‘So whit happened then? Did the dog get hurt?’

‘Not really, but he called the police.’

‘Because of the glass?’

‘No, because I shat in his front garden.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Well, his dog shat in my garden. It’s private property. I explained that to the police. That was their job to protect private property and not just for the rich.’

I laughed, ‘Oh, they’d love that.’

He shook his head. ‘No they didn’t. They said a child could get hurt with all that broken glass.’

‘I told them a child shouldn’t be out on its own. And it shouldn’t be on my private property.’

‘It’s council property,’ I reminded him. We got through the lights and down into Duntocher Road. ‘They’d like that even less,’ I said out of the side of my mouth.

‘They didn’t like it at all. They assaulted me by putting on the handcuffs too tight and pulling me into the van like a dog. They changed the subject from glass to common indecency. But I explained that I’d been wearing a kilt—the National costume. And I explained Scot’s law to them. That if a man was caught short he had the right to squat down and do a shit anytime anyplace, even in front of a burly police sergeant. That’s probably why they panicked a bit.’

I put the handbrake on. ‘I’m no gettin’ involved in this,’ I told him. ‘You’re on your own-e-oh.’

With anyone else that would have sounded cruel. But when I was about eight and kicking a ball about Ugly Buggly had told me how insignificant I was to sixty digits. He said he was working on the assumption that the earth was around five billion years old. He told me he was being kind. If he used as a baseline the furthest away planet in our solar system of around thirty billion years, I’d be even more insignificant. It didn’t matter if I was a single-cell organism or lived another one-hundred years, I’d no value and was nothing less than probability.

Longevity was overrated and putting walls around infinity was a trick of the mind. The more infinities there were the more interesting the world became. Ugly Buggly lived on a different planet.  

‘I’ll get you thirty quid,’ I told him. ‘And that’s us quits.’ But when I tapped my back pocket, I realised I didn’t have my Keycard. I’d have booted him out without any money, but he didn’t have any shoes and the snow started falling again. ‘Fuck!’