Ugly Puggly 99

Molly said if a job is worth doing it’s worth doing right, or something along those lines. It suited us both. She hadn’t trusted me to pack the camper van. The playboy was travelling separately in a glittering new dark blue Hyundai. He was no longer in our gang. It had been the first electric car I’d seen. Plenty of room in the boot to pack his condoms and lube. Silent in stealth mode, so he could sneak away. Ugly Puggly would have been all over it, and would have checked out the battery, comparing the miles per KWh to the collection he had ring-fenced by snaking cables into his hut. Darrell was driving, but Dave was in charge. He told us in a high voice that carried over to where his erstwhile manager was sitting in neutral, such people were ten-a-penny before going to speak to his gaggle of fans.

They were young girls mostly. They giggled and fluttered around him, trying to attract his attention. They waited patiently outside the metal gate they’d once freely hopped over to retrieve lost balls, skipping ropes, or wayward pets that came to shite on the green. He signed an autograph on a ginger-haired girl’s arm in blue biro. While he held her hand, steadying his cursive, she blushed like she’d been set on fire from the hair downwards to the blotching on her neck and cheeks and chest, which darkened and consumed her body.   

Her self-consciousness buckled her resolve. She pulled her arm away before he was finished, retreating behind her taller and darker friend who stuck out her boobs. I’d a mind to wander over and tell her it didn’t matter. He was a poof anyway. But wee Jim had also come to see us off and had my ear.

‘Funny that,’ wee Jim remarked, looking over and sniggering. ‘I member Billy Connolly coming to play the basement in the Club Bar.  Weird looking cunt, wae long hair and long beard. He was lucky somebody ne er banjoed im.’

I laughed at his joke. Molly slid the doors open and pushed in the last of our stuff in two black plastic bags. The door banging shut with a satisfying click. She looked over and smiled.

Jim carried on talking. ‘Next hing you know, he’s fuckin Sir William Connolly. And stupid cunts are bangin on that they met im and he might have said “Hallo” back to them. And that showed he wisnae stuck up.’

Molly wandered across and then away again. ‘I quite like im.’

‘I dae tae,’ I admitted. ‘But I jist don’t find him that funny.’

Wee Jim waited for the playboy to finish him meeting and greeting with his pubescent audience and get into the car and silently speed away, with a queenly wave of his arm and hand.   

‘Oh, he’s funny awright, when he’s tryin no tae be funny. He’s like that oer guy.’ He gurned while he tried to remember the other guy’s name, but gave up with a sneer. ‘That’s no the important hing.’

I leaned against the van and waited for him to tell me, and he looked furtively about to check if anybody was listening. He whispered, ‘He’s a bit of a drinker.’

He’d told me that story before, ‘Is he?’  

I played innocent to The Big Yin’s dalliances with fags, drugs, drink and sex with Pamela Stevenson, which sounded almost as good as sex with Pamela Anderson without having a fly wank and without needing to watch her bouncing along on Baywatch without the adverts on ITV spoiling it.

‘Aye,’ he nodded his head and smacked his lips. ‘He’s wan of us.’

‘Really?’

But he adopted a different tone to fraternity member that could be accused of gossiping. ‘Yeh got yer phone?’

‘Aye,’ I tapped my pocket. It wasn’t there, but I knew it was somewhere close at hand.

‘Yeh can phone me anytime. Yeh know that. Day or night.’

‘I hope I don’t need tae.’ I laughed, he didn’t.

‘You got yer itinerary?’  

I rolled my eyes and sighed, close to saying no, to see if he’d combust, but I nodded my head which reassured him. A rhombus of late autumnal sunlight reflected off the van window and gave his grizzled face a glow.

‘It’s in England,’ he reminded me as if we were setting off like Hannibal crossing the Alps in winter on elephants.

The itinerary was two sheets of stapled paper. We were following behind the playboy, but he had booked us into hotels with fancy names and London prices that had brought a hollow laugh from Molly. But Dave insisted he had the money and he was paying. We were his slow-moving support act as he met his fans in nationwide anti-gigs, closing roads and full-on protest covered by mainstream media before doing the bunk across the Channel.

Wee Jim made his own maps not of bars and places to see, but where were dragons. When we were staying in the Alana in Manchester, for example, he’d inked in the nearest AA meeting point within walking distance. He offered the accompanying contact number of Eric, one of our brethren that could be relied on from the top table to meet me.

I thought he was going to hug me before he left, but it turned into a protracted handshake. He slapped my arm. ‘Let go and let god.’ Holding up his Samsung phone as a reminder, he clanged shut the gate behind him. It began raining and he bent his body into it, hurrying away.  

I’d a gut feeling I wouldn’t see him again. The same feeling that I wouldn’t see Ugly Puggly again. I hobbled up the stairs. Molly would be checking that everything was off. Her sister had a spare set of keys. I wasn’t sure if it was too late, not to go. Fighting global warming wasn’t my fight. Ugly Puggly had always said we’d be dead before the worst of it kicked in. I was sure he was already dead. And I was the last man standing. But I was tired. So tired.

[The End.]