Bill and the UFO29

Phil pushed in behind Wendy’s skinny denim ass, careful not to get too close and brush up against her and make her mad and snipe at him with her infamous curled up lower lip and give him a reddy. He’d helped empty his granny’s house in Holly Street, during the week, when she died of cancer, which was a shame, but she was 61, and his dad had walked down Kilbowie road and through the town to put a notice in The Clydebank Post. He hadn’t asked and Phil hadn’t bothered going with him. Somehow, behind the swing of the newspaper office’s main door, he expected to hear the tap of a 1000 typewriters, the whirl of printing machines chewing up pulp paper and the looked for glamour of TV sets’ series like The Rockford Files in the cut and thrust of the newspaper world, but it was smaller than he expected; Dr Who’s TARDIS effect in reverse. Phil’s dad would have found it difficult to manoeuvre granny’s old Victorian double wardrobe around the low ceilings and it would have been a very tight squeeze to put it down horizontally on the floor, which was tacky, as if someone had ripped up the tiles and forgotten to replace them with anything else. An empty ten packet of Mayfair was scrunched up underfoot like boxed roadkill. Summy felt the bump and recovered his feet quickly enough to set it spinning and curved it into the corner with an Adidis Kick toe-poke. Rab coughed and hawked up, as if he was going to spit on the floor, but he swallowed it back down. The front office smelled and tasted, on the back of his throat and tongue, of concrete and dust, as if the building were still waiting to be finished. Summy stood at the back with his bum smeared against the ingrained windscreen dirt, several generations of dead midges, grandfathers, fathers and sons, on the frontline of The Clydebank Post plate glass window. A ticket shaped barrier which seemed to be made out of an amalgam of chipboard and Balsa sheet, separated them from access to the main office.

Bill’s eyes began to run as soon as he got in the door and he sneezed and sneezed, held his nose, as if that was going to help and sneezed some more. ‘I’ve got to go outside.’ He flapped his long coat and pushed back through the way they’d come.

‘Fuck sake,’ said Rab, ‘it’s your uncle we’ve come to see,’ but it was a fresh air complaint, Bill was already outside.

Bill sniffed a few times checking that no one had followed him and immediately stopped sneezing. His lips puckered in appreciation around the last of the doubts he’d scrounged from Wendy. He let the smoke drift down and play on his lungs as he waited under the rainbow red awning, which gave The Clydebank Post’s office on Dumbarton Road the Mediterranean look of a Scottish first day sun worshipper’s burnt nose, on an otherwise inconspicuous mahogany facing brick façade. Todger panted and whined pressing into his leg, so that he had to tickle his fur-ball throat to mimic the dog getting fed, but his canine friend was not so easily fooled, and whined some more for the real food-stuff.

‘There. There.’ Bill patted Todger on the head, but that had little effect on him either.

‘Stay.’ He tried to nudge the door open with one hand, and flick Todger with the outside of his toe in the other direction, to stop him following. He went back outside.

‘Sit,’ he tried, with the same effect. Todger followed him into the office and barked to announce his presence and the fact he had not been fed.

The office girl caught them out of the corner of her eye. Wendy stood behind the boys, blending in so well the office girl thought she was just another one of the stupid lads that sometimes swaggered in, with their hands in their pockets and dared each other to ask if they were in this weeks ‘Court Room News’ ’ section. The one at the front with the cut-off denim jacket and half nipped fag behind the ear, eyeing her up her tits, certainly looked as if he might be. She banged away on an electric typewriter, blancmange arms and legs so white she looked painted in Colgate, spilling out of the wrong sized dress, and long red hair that looked as if it could only be cut by conventional wire cutters, and ignored them long enough, to let them know, who was in charge. Half spinning in her office chair, getting off the carousel her nonchalance had created, her grey eyes showed for an instance she’d lost control and wobbled on her heels, as she walked up to the barrier that separated the staff of the Clydebank Post from the riff-raff that came in the front door.

‘Yes.’ She gave the gang of lads the look.

‘Eh,’ said Rab and forgot what he was going to say.

‘We want to speak to the photographer,’ Wendy cut in from the back.

‘Why?’ If her clown painted lips could have shrugged they would have. But the office girl recovered herself enough and so did not show she was surprised that she was speaking to a fellow female.

‘He’s my uncle,’ said Phil, trying on a white lie.

‘Oh,’ the sound of surprise escaped from the office girls lips like a let down bicycle tyre. She regained her sense of balance quickly making Phil step backwards with her shrewish blast. ‘Well, he’s not here.’

‘When will he be back.’ Summy stepped to the front, and played diplomat.

The office girl thought he was quite a handsome boy and so well manners, so she moderated her bad tempered way by not scowling her ginger eyebrows. ‘He’ll no’ be,’ was all she said, before turning her back on them, like a tug liner and going back to running her newspaper The Clydebank Post.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me,’ said Rab.

The office girl took her time sitting down. She didn’t want any more accidents. She started typing and pooh-poohed them away with the type of hand wave that had not been seen in those parts since Queen Elizabeth had arrived at John Brown’s Shipyard to launch the Cunard liner named after her.

‘Don’t worry,’ piped up Phil. ‘Bill will know where he stays.’