Gus the gorilla and friends

Gus Mc Arthur didn’t really fit in, but I didn’t really know why. Gus had a left- pegger- rocket shot when playing fitba. That might have something to do with him having the start of a belly. We were thin as blades of grass and he was heavier than us. Gerry Kerr was probably closest to him in solidity, but he was younger and the same age as me. Gus’s house was the second house along from the coup, facing St Stephen’s school. When he’d hear a group of us playing fitba in the playground Gus slunk across the road and hung about until teams were picked. The best player was usually the oldest player and they split the teams selecting the best players first and the worst last. That was usually the Shirley twins, the golden-haired Sammy and Gordy, four- years older than me. They were also the best players in terms of ability. The twins first mastered the David Carradine Kung Fu complexity of rolling the ball onto your heel and flicking up and over your head on the run. I’d mastered the art of getting a reddy and tripping over the ball when I tried such high- jinks. They’d spent all of the blue-sky summer on the street corner of Shakespeare and Wells Street, near their house, rolling a ball on their instep or outstep, or sitting on a ball waiting for a game to happen. When Sammy and Gordy weren’t playing fitba they spent most of their time goading each other and slapping each other around like cartoon characters.

For two day I’d been bereft as the twinnies when their ball went flatter than the cow’s lick on my head after a short-back-and-sides scalping. Not having a ball meant moping and a sore loss of identity. Wendy and Rab had a ball, but couldn’t find it and couldn’t be arsed anyway. Summy didn’t have a ball and even if he did he has to watch his sister Janey Mongo. Cammy and Jim didn’t bother too much about fitba and only played if there was nothing else to do. Murdy only played if everybody else was playing. He seemed to get more pleasure from the twinnies and my attempts to try and fix the burst ball with burning matches and hot knives, melting the plastic shell of the ball, and trying to bicycle-pump new life into it. The ball remained burst and our game dead. Sammy dyed his hair Ziggy Stardust orange, which made it easy to pick the two twins apart, but the next day Gordy dyed his hair redder and oranger.

Salvation came with the salt –and-pepper shock of Bill Munro’s hair and the team he trained on Singer’s Park. St Stephen’s schools dusty gravel park and wooden goal posts were for my old school team’s wet winter pasture; Singer’s lush green grass and metal goal posts was summer fare, an extension of the same playing fields, open to man and dog. The boys from Shakespeare, Dickens and Well Street would play across the park and sometimes we’d get gallus and challenge other teams from Dalmuir, or the Top-Of-The-Hill. Ten- a-side. Eleven- a-side. Twelve and thirteen-and-fourteen- a-side. Numbers didn’t matter. It was war. No referees and new players added like pieces of Lego, clicking together in the desire to win and beat the bastards from somewhere else. Even the older boys that smoke and drank and were a bit mad, like Billy Quinn, joined in. Gus McArthur never played in these big games that lasted all day and became longer in the telling and retelling of goals scored, balls that hit posts, and chances the could have and should have the back of the net, even though there weren’t any nets.

Bill Munro and the players of Clydebank Football club arrived with orange training cones and two bags of Aiddas Zephyr balls and broke our epic games up as effectively as if they were carrying truncheons. The twinnies and me would sometime hang about, loath to leave. We’d lean against the one bar stanchion that ran round the park and separated it from St Stephen’s and watched and listened as the professionals tensed their stomach muscles and a medicine ball was dropped from chest height to the grunter on the ground to show how hard they were, or should be. Mick Lanarch was banging in the goals and they’d signed a winger Davy Cooper, but as we watched them playing one-touch game a ball hit one player ping-ponged off another and past the startled face and sweep- over hair quiff of Jim Gallacher in between the goal posts.

‘They’re crap,’ Sammy snorted.

They were bigger; we were better was his message. It was a simple matter of ducking under the tubular- steel bar and showing them. We’d stand behind and to the side of the goals and play keepy-up with a training ball or try and nutmeg one another. Bill Munro or one of the other coaches would periodically tell us to leave the balls alone. We did. Then we didn’t. And it would all start again. We made ourselves useful. If one of the diddy Clydebank footballers knocked the ball too far and onto the gravel park we’d run and get it. We’d climb into bushes. Even when they kicked a ball over the fence and onto the train track we’d go and get it. That day, however, we waited. Sure enough McCabe a stocky midfielder skied the ball over the spiked fence that separated the grass park from Second Avenue. Bill Munro with a whistle in his mouth watched us running after it. We were laughing and joking. Behind us the whistle blew an insistent note; a new ball was brought on with shouts of ‘to me, to me’ like an anxious bird call, the game restarted.

Sammy snatched the ball up from the curve of the stank near the bus stop. He flung it to Gordy who flung it to me, none of us wanted to be het. I hurdled the shallow broken wall, little more than a stepping stone, which was over the other side of Second Avenue. We ran close together through the long grass of the coup, up through a gap in the privet hedge and into Gordy and Sammy’s back garden.

‘Adidas Zephyr,’ Gordy whistled. His back and neck were sunburned a flaking red colour that matched his Adidas top. He looped the ball to Sammy.

We sheltered from our crime in the cave of overgrown privet at the back of his dad’s garage. We were edgy, expecting to hear sirens and cops beating the bushes for us.

‘Top of the range.’ Sammy smacking his lips together patted the ball and rolled it round and round in his hands. ‘That’s worth about twenty-quid.’

‘Where will we keep it?’ I asked.

‘Och, just leave it here.’ Sammy shoulder shrugged, but didn’t raise his eyes from the ball.

‘But what if somebody steals it?’ I asked.

Sammy eyed me, and glanced at his twin, whilst hugging the ball to himself. ‘We’ll take a shot each.’

He sounded sincere and I nodded agreement.
Sammy pointed at me. ‘You take it for one night and we’ll take it for a night each.’

‘Dunno,’ I said, thinking ahead, ‘my Mum will want to know where I got it.’

‘Well we can take your shot for you.’ Sammy flung the ball up, it hit the hedge and he caught it with expertly on the black and white of his Adidas Kick trainer. ’When it’s your shot you can come down and get the ball anytime.’
I squinted up into the speckled light at Gordy who had the sun behind him, and glanced towards Sammy; no longer sure which twin was which. ‘That sounds fair.’ I slapped at midges on my upper arm and bare chest. Sensing blood the flying dots swirled round my head and eyes. I dashed with wind- milling arms into sunlight and the warmth of the drying-green leaving the twinnies and the ball behind.

In the days following we were careful with the Adidas Zephyr, protective of it milk-white sheen and leather coating and only playing fitba on clean cut grass, making sure that any rocks or stones were moved to the side of the park. Then we got careless and started kicking it about street corners. When we had a side- off on the tarmac of St Stephen’s school the Zephyr was the only ball for us.

Gerry made a face when he saw Gus McAthur crossing the road to join us. ‘I hate him,’ Gerry said.

‘I can’t stand him either,’ I agreed.

Summy and Jim grogged to show what they thought of him, but Cammy didn’t seem that fussed. He was hanging onto the top of the wall of the derelict toilets and curling his body out and upwards and onto the roof.

‘I’d love to smash him.’ Gerry’s lips pushed up and his nose twitched like a rat as he sneered.

‘I’d smash him as well,’ said Jim.

Then Summy mumbled something.

I found myself agreeing and disagreeing, ‘but he’s bigger than us.’

‘Aye, but there’s mair of us.’ Gerry lowered his voice and he glanced across the playground at the peeling paint of black railings where Gus was standing kicking my ball about, close to where Sammy and Gordy squared up to each other as they picked a team that would win the match. ‘If he does anything we’ll all batter him.’
Gerry played in my team and Gus was in the opposing team. Our game started in the shadow of the school gym. One goal post was the door of a dilapidated brick shed with a corrugated roof, mildewed with dirt and growing weeds, loosely attached to the back wall and staircase of the main building. The other goalpost was less clear-cut. On one side the marker was the fenced stairs that led to Jannie Bisset’s basement. A bundle of sweat stained shirts and a blue Bay City Roller jumper was the other makeshift goal post.

Our team got ahead to 7-6. Gus dunted into me when I was on the ball, I fell on my arse, and he hit a rocket past Gerry and it thudded against the doors to make it 7-7.

I sprung up. ‘Foul! What the fuck you daeing?’

Gus’s dark eyes glared levelly at me, but he said nothing.

The ball trickled towards Gordy and he put his foot on it. Waiting.

‘What the fuck you daeing.’ My voice rose in stages. I stepped in close to Gus and my arms jerked outward as I pushed him towards the doors of the brick shed with two hands.

He staggered backwards, but just as quickly came forwards and hooked my below the eye. My head rocked backwards and I now knew what it meant to be seeing stars. His next punch caught me on the top of the head. I ran at him, but he easily held me off raining blows down on shoulders and face.
Gerry’s smack on the side of Gus’s cheek caught him unawares and gave me a space to gather breath and nurse my aches and pains. Summy kicked Gus a toe-poke up his fat arse. Jim whooping rushed in from one side. Cammy the other. Gargoyle confusion more than hurt slid across Gus’s face as he pushed and fended them off. Then he made a mazy run without the ball, one way then another, side- stepping and sprinting away from us. I’d never seen him running so fast. After that he no longer came to play fitba in the old school.