Bill and the UFO18

Bill was out of breath going up Clarke Street; the equivalent of mountaineering without Sherpas and guy-ropes, but he had a guide dog: Todger. He cursed aliens for always landing somewhere higher up than a fridge freezer, but not too much, in case they could read his thoughts. If their technology was so advanced he wondered why they didn’t just land somewhere more accessible like Dalmuir Duck Pond. He manfully rested half way up; sweat running down the back of his neck, and carefully propped his arse on the sharpened green spars of a wooden fence and lit up a fag. The garden was levelled off, manicured rather than gardened, with the fluting sounds of a little rock garden waterfall. A pipe smoking gnome was casting its little red fishing-pole into the pond, which was populated by feeding carp and other ornamental fish. Bill puffed on his fag and eyed the garden critically. With its long perpendicular lines and closely cropped grass it would have made a perfect landing pad. He stubbed the fag out, saving half until later.

Todger bounded towards him anxious that there might have been some food coming out of his owner’s pockets. He nosed him up and down, checking that it was really Bill inside his black overcoat.

The overhanging branches of the privet hedges and the Ash and Elm trees were a midge paradise. They didn’t even need to dive bomb Bill or Todger. The pair brought their sweating strained bodies straight into their midst. Bill tried to make a run for it, but his flapping Faifley coat made it difficult so he pulled it up and over his humpback rucksack and stood sweating, sniffing the coat to see if it was giving off some kind of swarming midge pheromone. He put the coat down and walked a few steps away from it, peering into the darkness as it lay like a tramp’s dead body under the Municipal golf course hedging, to see if the midges preferred him or it. He slapped at his face and head, but the midges were unrelenting as winter rain. Todger made Bill’s mind up for him by going and lying on top of the coat, snuggling down, as if settled for the night. Bill picked the coat up and wrapped it around his face and body; a black niqab that held off his attackers and made him feel like a ninja. He slid under the fence and out into the golf course. Todger whined and scrambled to get under and catch up with him. Somehow being on the other side of the hedging made everything seem quieter. He walked up hill three of the course towards the gap in the trees that would take him onto the dirt lane. Beyond that was the bright neon lit Boulevard. The Pinetrees Hotel across the road was lit up like a spaceship. Bill let the coat slip from his head and pulled it back up and over his rucksack so that he looked like a Faifley native.

He felt conspicuous clambering up the stairs onto the flyover, which took him onto the foreign territory of Duntocher. He tried whistling, to settle his nerves, but his tongue was too dry and felt giddy with the thrum of the cars’ lights racing below him on the dual carriageway. Todger barked with excitement, having no such inhibitions. His neck seemed elasticised, jerking like a stone in the empty can of his head, thrown one way, then another as he threw himself into the light beam show. He careered along the bridge, his paws scratching out and coming to a skidding halt, then bounding back towards Bill when a car passed and went the other way.

The solidity of the pavement on the Duntocher side helped reassure Bill that he was on the right track. He pulled the black Crombie over his shoulders, tucking it in at the neck so that it fitted better. His head was pragmatically kept down, eyes on the road ahead, as he walked away from the drifting disco beat of The Pinetrees, in case anybody stopped him and asked him for a light, or a dance, or what he was doing. He’d no answers, his feet did the talking moving swiftly away, but there was no back streets and had to pass through the middle of Duntocher to get to the Old Kilpatrick Hills. The staggerers were beginning to move in a steady stream away from the pubs, O’Donnell’s and The Duntiglennan, zombies in reverse gear, weaving their way towards The Pinetrees where they could make their last stand. A few of them nudged him on the way past, like a shark’s sandpaper body rubbing against skin, to see what it was made of, but he kept walking. He didn’t even look back when a girl with yellow cockatoo hair shrilled loudly: ‘look at the state of that.’

Todger wagged his tail, enjoying all the pungent smells that a night out brought to his sniffing-snuffling nose. He raced ahead of Bill, his paws, a snare drumbeat on the Tarmac as he picked up the scent he loved best. He fell on an almost untouched black pudding supper lying on the ground across from the Zander’s Chippy, still wrapped in its headless- headline newspaper cover, like an Arthurian knight drooling and falling on The Holy Grail.

Bill hadn’t felt hungry until he smelled chips. He’d never thought he’d feel jealous of Todger, but as he watched him ripping into the supper with doggy growls he swallowed down bitter disappointment that he couldn’t get down on all fours and join him. He bent down, as if tying his laces and fingered the pound note still hidden in his sock. The Chippy was mobbed with nodding drunks, swaying like Triffids, falling over each other, but there was some kind of order in the mazy line order that snaked to the counter, which reassured him. Bill crossed the road and joined the queue. His black Crombie seemed to give him an air of invisibility, so that he thought maybe the old drunk guy might have known what he was talking about with the coat, even when he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about when he was talking about anything else. He got in and out of the shop with a vingery smile from the harassed woman behind the counter.

‘Oi,’ a voice shouted from a gaggle of drunks, shipwrecked against a dry- stone wall one of them was peeing against.

Bill fingered the loose change he had left in his pocket. After buying fags, chips and a bottle of ginger beer it wasn’t much. He thought maybe he’d be better making a run for it, but he couldn’t because Todger has wandered over and was eating chips out of the man’s hand. When Bill got closer he saw the man was actually a woman, but she’d on a manky black biker jacket and biker trousers.

‘What’s the dog’s name.’ She patted Todger and tickled him under the chin, which he seemed to enjoy, but not as much as the loose chips that fell into his waiting gullet.

Bill squinted sideways to see if she had a motorbike. ‘Eh, he’s called Todger.’

‘He’s takin’ the piss.’ The man that had being peeing turned around zipped up and thrust his hand into the chip poke and crammed his mouth with his booty.

‘Nah.’ The biker woman tickled Todger under the chin again. ‘I used to have a dog just like that. She made kissing noises at the dog. ‘And he was a Todger too.’

‘Fuck me. You treat that dog better than you treat me,’ the biker man growled.

‘Oh, but Tam,’ she said, ‘the dog's better behaved.’

Todger padded towards Bill; invisible again, who still had some chips left. They walked past a garage. Bill parked his arse on the wall, with the forecourt lights left on it was like sitting in his living room. He wondered what they were doing at home and, if they had even noticed they were missing. He swore he’d never go back, but shivered, and a tear trickled out and made him squint when he looked up at the pinpoint light of the stars.