Ugly Puggly 75

Some dirty bastard had been sick in the close, on the first steps to the half-landing. It stuck to the wall and the pitted surface of the stair. A streaky band of lager and curry. The stench gave me the boak. I had my suspicions of who it was, but I wasn’t going to be chapping any doors, especially since Molly told me that the police wanted to talk to me. I was to go into the station and make an appointment. The police didn’t catch criminals now, they processed them. Well, they can go and fuck themselves, I’d told her.

The playboy clamped his fingers over his face and nose as a mask. I didn’t want to make a fuss. All he’d done was cry, and I didn’t want to start him again. Molly said his hysterics had worked to our advantage in the interview room of the police station. Hankies and sympathy were the order of the day. They weren’t able to tell her anything about Howard, but they’d got our details and would keep her and him posted.

She wanted a break from him, so I’d asked him to come to an AA meeting with me. He hadn’t been keen, but I told him that’s what Howard would have wanted him to do.

The meeting place was in the back of a church hall in the white scheme, up the top of the hill. The walk would do us good. Wee Jim was meeting us up there. My sponsor was keen to give me a dose of the told-you-sos, but with the playboy beside me, his self-righteous lecture was bound to be brief. I hadn’t really thought about a drink, but sometimes that was the way it came at you, indirectly. When you weren’t thinking about it, it was planning a hijack.

The playboy sat at the back with a younger girl with red hair in a puffy blue jacket. She squeezed her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking. A thin smile crossed her lips. Dave’s sobbing made her feel better. At least she wasn’t as bad as him.

There was only about ten of us.. After the top table had finished, we followed the well-worn floorboards that ran the length of the hall into the kitchen. The kind we used to put a bench down and play football on. Members huddled around the urn and wee Jim dished out the polystyrene cups and biscuits.

‘Here hen,’ wee Jim said, pushing the biscuit tin towards her.

Dave was standing beside her. They were two decades younger than other members. And might have been a lovely couple out viewing a derelict property for renovations to make into a nice middle-class second property for rent. But they were the derelicts and there was no saving us.

Despite the NO SMOKING sign hanging snuggly from a nail on the wall, a few members had a fag in their mouth and my eyes stung from fag smoke.

‘I’d rather have a cigarette,’ the girl spoke in a posh voice. She didn’t sound local.

Gordie from the top table breezed past wee Jim and held out a Silk Cut. He was a chubby with  boyish black curls and a florid face. He’d that Italian skin, yellowed by the weather of his life and mouth was crooked. ‘Whit age are yeh, anyway?’ He chuckled, ‘Yer breakin my heart, already’.

‘Are you winching, yet?’ another voice chimed behind him.

Wee Jim whirled around, almost spilling the biscuits. ‘Shut up, the lot o yeh. And gie the wee woman peace. Yeh should be ashamed of yersel.’

The playboy had already got her a cup to tea and his face flushed. A tendril of smoke rose between them. And I expected a director to come on and shout: Action. Somebody pushed a scalding cup of tea into one hand and a triangular slice of cheese sandwich in the other.

Wee Jim cornered me. ‘There’s a meetin on the night in the Partick Burgh Hall.’

I glanced over his head. ‘Cannae make it.’

His voice had the pitch of an angle-grinder. ‘Cannae make it? That’s how it aw starts. You miss wan meetin. Cannae make another. Then you know whit happens next. Don’t yeh?’

The playboy was greeting again and the girl had his arm on shoulder. She cuddled him. The older guys stopped chewing and looked over with nostalgic smiles on their faces. A cigarette clenched between her teeth she glared back at them.

‘There, there,’ she said, patting Dave on the back.

When we got outside she splashed through the puddles at our back. And nipped in front of us.

‘Phone me,’ she mimicked holding a phone up to her ear and then dashed away towards the high flats.

We didn’t speak until we cut down the steps near the school. ‘Fuck sake, yer a late bloomer. Yev shagged half the gay guys in the Glasgow, maybe mair. Maybe half the guys in Scotland, or even Europe. Anybody that speaks the language of cock.  Noo yer startin on the young lassies.’

He went in a huff. ‘Jealousy will get you nae were. It’s no like that. She’s gonnae help me find Howard—besides, I’m no longer daeing that.’  

The stairs and gable end of a house kept the worst of the wind and rain off us. ‘Daeing whit?’

‘Daeing anythin!’

I turned my head to make sure nobody was about and could hear us. And I did that pointing back and forth to get him in closer as if we were two mutes lip reading. ‘He’s deid,’ I hissed. ‘I know that. And you know that. But we need tae go oer this pantomime wae the police so they don’t know that.’

‘He’s no deid.’

‘Fuck sake. Whit planet are yeh on?’

He slapped his chest. ‘I’d know if he was deid.’

‘Pluto. Yer on Planet Pluto.’    

‘She’s gonnae help me. We’re gonnae put posters on lampposts and walls. Wae my phone-number. Askin for information. Maybe wae a wee reward.’  

I left him standing and stomped away. ‘He’s no a fuckin dog or cat.’