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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
FIRST EDITION
© Brian Limond 2017
Cover design by Lynn McGowan © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Brian Limond asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008172602
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008172626
Version: 2018-11-05
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Pavement
Taxi Patter
Grammar
Stookie
Keys
Trophies
New Life
Moustache
Porridge
The Clown
Biscuits
Suzie Spunkstain
The Curtain
In My Bin
The Other Side of the Counter
Cupid
The Dog
Box Set
Trainers
The Tree
The Daysnatcher
Soft Play
The New Icon
The Pub
The Speaker
Photography
Funny Face
The Bike
Benidorm
About the Publisher
Pavement
George had a baby. A wee baby boy, called Sam. And he wanted to make his son proud. Proud of his old dad. You couldn’t really make a baby feel proud of you, but George was thinking more about the future.
He wanted Sam to look back, when he was older, and think, ‘I’m so proud of my dad. He was there for me and cared about me. That man there is my dad.’
George was out one day with Sam, pushing him in his pram, and he was thinking about all that. All that stuff about making his son proud. He was looking at his son’s face looking back at him in the pram. Sam would look at George, then the sky and the people walking past. George wondered if Sam would ever remember all this, how much George was there for him.
Probably not. And that was a shame.
‘Watch yourself, pal!’ said somebody.
George stopped, and he saw a few workies looking at him. George had been walking on the pavement, and just a few feet in front of him was a new bit of pavement. The workies had been laying some fresh concrete, and it was still wet. The workie wanted to stop George before he went over it and left a mark.
‘Thanks,’ said George.
George had seen what happens when somebody went over wet concrete. You see it all around if you look for it. Walk around and you’ll see bits of pavement with footsteps in them, or wheels from prams, or bikes, or some other mark made by people who didn’t look where they were going.
Sometimes it was deliberate, though. Sometimes people wrote their name in it. George remembered that somebody had written their nickname outside the chippy where he grew up. It had been there for as long as he could remember. It was probably still there, and probably always would be. How was that for something to tell the grandweans?
Oh, and that got George thinking.
George watched the workies finish their work. He pretended to talk to Sam, as an excuse for hanging about. Eventually, some of them left in their council workie van, and some of them headed into a cafe nearby for their lunch.
George walked over to the edge of the wet concrete, and crouched down, like he was going to fetch something from the wee bag at the bottom of the pram.
Then he reached over to the concrete and began to write ‘Sam’.
As he made the letter ‘S’, he thought about Sam in the future, coming to this very spot, with George. George would tell him that he wrote it there. And Sam would know that his old dad was mad about him, even back then. He’d know that when he was a baby, his dad was there for him and thinking about him. He’d bring his mates and point to the writing and say, ‘That there was my dad.’
Just as George was beginning the letter ‘A’, a workie came out the cafe and asked George just what the hell he thought he was doing.
George said he was doing nothing. It was no use lying, though. He’d been caught red handed.
‘I asked you what the fuck you think you’re doing, mate,’ said the workie.
George tried to turn the tables by making a big deal about the workie’s swearing. He stood up and said, ‘Here, don’t you fucking swear in front of my wean. What’s your name, you’re getting reported.’
‘Fuck yer wean,’ said the workie, then he pointed at the writing. ‘I’m gonnae have to lay that again.’
George couldn’t believe his ears. He charged over to the workie, right over the concrete, and started shouting. ‘What did you say? Fuck my wean, aye? Fuck my fucking …’
The workie chinned him.
George punched him back, and the two of them fell onto the wet concrete.
The workie was much bigger, and held George’s face down, then he shouted for his workie mates to phone the police.
The police eventually came, and tried to take George away, but they couldn’t. The workie had been holding George’s face in the concrete until the police turned up. Now the wet concrete was dry and rock solid, and the left side of George’s face was stuck.
The police tried to talk to George, to calm him down, to tell him that they’d get him out, but he booted them away. He was fucking livid about how he was being treated as a criminal.
The police told him to go and fuck himself then, and they left him there. Then they took Sam back to his mum.
The next day, Sam and his mum came to visit George, to give him something to eat and drink, but mostly to tell him that he was a dummy. George didn’t want Sam seeing him like that, and he didn’t want to be told that he was a dummy, so he told her to fuck off.
So she did.
She came back a few days later. Then a few weeks later. Then she never came back at all.
George watched the years go by from down there on the pavement, as people offered him the leftovers from their kebabs or a drink from their half-finished bottles of beer. Somebody would sometimes put their jacket over him to keep him warm, but by the time he woke up the next morning, it had been stolen.
About ten years later, George saw Sam go by with his schoolmates.
One of his mates pointed at George and said, ‘That’s your dad!’, and Sam laughed.
Sam didn’t know it really actually was his dad, and neither did his mate. His mate just said it in the way that a person might point at a tramp and say, ‘Oh look, there’s your dad.’
Taxi Patter
Vinnie was down in London for a few days. Down from Glasgow. It was lovely weather down in London. It always was. He’d been down before, and even when the weather wasn’t that nice, like if it was cloudy or pissing down, it was always better than whatever it was up the road.
Today, though, it was lovely, and all the Londoners were dressed for the occasion, with their T-shirts and shorts and bare legs.
When Vinnie got in a taxi, it was one of the first things the taxi driver mentioned.
‘Lovely weather, isn’t it?’ said the driver.
‘Aye,’ said Vinnie. ‘It’s roasting.’
The driver smiled at Vinnie in the mirror. ‘You from Scotland, yeah?’
‘Aye, just down for the day.’
‘Down for a spot of sightseeing?’ asked the driver.
‘Aye,’ said Vinnie.
But that wasn’t the truth. He didn’t want to talk about it, because he knew he’d come across as stupid. He wasn’t down for a spot of sightseeing, he was actually down for a concert. But he’d made an arse of it.
He was supposed to be seeing Art Garfunkel.
There was only one UK date on his world tour, and that was London, tonight. Or so Vinnie had thought. But it turned out it was last night.
Vinnie had found out when he got off the train. The second he got off, he saw an Art Garfunkel poster in the station, advertising the tour. He walked over to it, because he’d never seen the poster before, and because Art Garfunkel was the reason he was down. He saw that the London date was on Thursday, not Friday. And next to it were all these other dates.
He didn’t know there were other UK dates. He’d only ever known about a tour from the Art Garfunkel forum. Somebody on the forum mentioned that the only UK date was in London.
But, looking back, they maybe just asked if Art’s only UK date was London. They were maybe just asking, rather than saying that it was.
Or it could be that the person just said that they themselves were going to see the concert in London.
So Vinnie had gone ahead and searched for ‘Art Garfunkel’ and ‘London’, and up came the London date. Just London. And Vinnie took that as confirmation that Art was only going to be in London. So he booked it. Then he came all the way down from Glasgow to London, got off the train, and saw the poster with the dates.
And there on the poster was a date for Glasgow.
It had already passed, it was last Wednesday. Vinnie could have made it. He dearly would have loved to have made it. But now he wasn’t going to see him in either Glasgow or London, and he felt so fucking stupid.
He loved Art Garfunkel.
Really, what a talented singer and songwriter.
Vinnie wasn’t sure if it was Art who wrote all the songs in Simon & Garfunkel, but he must have. He was the main singer. Plus the fact that he left the band to go solo and then went on to write ‘Bright Eyes’, whereas Simon, the short one, disappeared without a trace. That tells you everything you need to know about Art.
Vinnie couldn’t wait to see him live. But that just wouldn’t be happening, not tonight anyway.
It didn’t piss him off, though. He was used to it. He was used to things like this happening. But he couldn’t laugh it off either. And he didn’t want to go into it all with the driver.
So when the driver asked him if he was down for some sightseeing, he just said ‘Aye’.
The driver nodded and started driving, looking out the window to the side. He wasn’t looking at other cars, though. He was looking at the people on the pavement. And he’d turn his head all the way around to look at some of them.
‘And what a day for it,’ said the driver, looking at the people going by. ‘D’you know what I mean?’
‘Aye,’ said Vinnie.
He thought he knew what the driver meant, but then the driver gave him a look in the mirror that made Vinnie think that he didn’t know.
Vinnie asked ‘For sightseeing?’
‘Yeah,’ said the driver. ‘If you know what I mean.’
Vinnie didn’t know what he meant, and it must have shown, because the driver looked at him again and said, ‘The women.’
Vinnie got it now.
‘Oh, right, right, aye,’ said Vinnie. ‘The lassies. The women. Aye.’
What the driver meant was the women. What he meant was, because it was a nice day, because it was lovely and warm, women were wearing less clothes. Instead of getting all wrapped up in big coats and pairs of tights, they were stripping down to keep cool. They were out in their bare legs or wearing thin clothes that let you see their bodies.
Vinnie got it. He looked out the window at them, and after a while, he started getting hard.
He was going to cover it up. He reached over for his bag, which was lying next to him on the back seat. He was going to pick it up and cover his bulge. But then he realised that it didn’t matter, when he thought about it.
He left his bag where it was. Because when he actually thought about it, it was all right, when he thought about what the driver said.
He’d said it was a good day for sightseeing, a good day to look at women. To look at them and get turned on by them.
He wanted Vinnie to know that he fancied women, and he wanted to know if Vinnie fancied women as well, and the driver would like it if Vinnie did. For some reason.
Vinnie didn’t know why the driver wanted any of that, but it didn’t matter. Vinnie was fine with it, because he fancied women as well.
‘Look,’ said Vinnie.
The driver looked out the window to the side, to see what lassie Vinnie was talking about.
‘Who?’ said the driver, looking at Vinnie in the mirror, then he looked out the side window again.
‘No,’ said Vinnie. ‘Look here.’
The driver looked in the mirror, down to where Vinnie’s hands were, and saw that Vinnie had a hard-on. It was bulging underneath his tracksuit bottoms.
Vinnie saw the look on the driver’s face, and it was like the driver didn’t know what Vinnie was meaning. Vinnie thought that maybe the driver just thought his trackie bottoms were baggy and what he was looking at was just a big baggy bit raised in the air.
So Vinnie pulled the trackie leg tight to show the shape of his hard-on, so that the driver knew what it was and what Vinnie was talking about. But the driver still had that same look.
The driver even turned his head around to see it with his own eyes, in case he couldn’t see it properly in the mirror, but he still had that same look. Vinnie smiled at him, but the driver looked away and didn’t say anything.
What had happened?
Why did the driver act funny when Vinnie showed him his hard-on?
Was he gay?
Maybe that was it.
Maybe the driver was doing that thing that people do in taxis, the thing where the driver and the passenger say things that they’re not really interested in, things like when you ask the driver what time he started and what time he finishes, or when the driver asks you if that’s you on your way home now after a night out.
You know, taxi patter.
Vinnie had seen that being talked about on a stand-up comedy thing on the telly. Maybe the driver was just pretending to be into women, because that’s just what you do. Vinnie sometimes pretended to be into football if the driver had football on the radio. He’d ask the driver who was playing and what the score was, even though he didn’t care.
It’s just taxi patter. It’s just people pretending, but the driver got caught out. He fucked it up.
Vinnie sympathised, because he himself knew all about fucking things up. Just look at how he fucked up going to the concert, coming all the way down here when he could have went to the concert back in Glasgow.
He looked at the driver, and he could see that the guy looked ashamed. He felt for him, so he decided to change the subject.
He leaned forward and put his hand on the driver’s shoulder to let him know it was all right.
‘Do you like Art Garfunkel?’
Grammar
Donnie started a new job, at an office. When he got there, he sent a group email to all the staff, introducing himself. It was a short and informal thing, nothing more than a few sentences. Most people replied saying hello back, putting in smileys or saying funny things in return. Some people didn’t reply, but then they said hello in person later.
But this one person, called Toby, only replied to correct his grammar.
There was a bit in Donnie’s email where he said ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’.
Toby had replied to it, copying everybody else in, to say: ‘should *have*’.
Donnie thought of replying with something a bit cheeky, a bit funny, because he hoped that’s how Toby meant it as well. He hoped Toby didn’t mean it the way it came across, because the way it came across made Toby look a grumpy cunt that enjoyed embarrassing Donnie on his first day. And Donnie didn’t want to work with somebody like that.
In the end, Donnie just replied with ‘Oops. Thanks!’
He hoped for a jokey reply, something where Toby would say he was only joking, or maybe having a bad day. But he didn’t get a reply.
Donnie wondered who Toby was, and he walked around the office until he heard somebody mentioning Toby’s name. Donnie turned around and expected to see some kind of Oscar the Grouch, or some kind of anti-social Mr Bean. But Toby looked all right. He looked about 40, just an average sort of guy in a suit. He didn’t look grumpy either. He was chatting to another member of staff, smiling away. And that made Donnie feel a bit better somehow.
A few days later, Donnie had to send another email around, this time something to do with work rather than introducing himself. This email wasn’t for everybody in the office, but it was for a good number of them, and one of the people in the list was Toby.
Everybody replied normally, saying things like ‘Good idea’ or ‘I think we should discuss this further.’ But Toby replied again, simply to criticise Donnie’s grasp of the English language.
Donnie had accidentally typed ‘there’ instead of ‘their’.
The full sentence was ‘We could cut the cost of printing their brochures if we print it at the same time as we print there pamphlets.’
And it was an accident.
Donnie knew the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’, it was just a slip-up. He got the first ‘their’ right, so it was obviously just a slip-up, just a normal mistake that anybody could make. But there was Toby on it again, making Donnie look incompetent for the second time in his first week on the job.
Donnie just replied with ‘Thank you, wordsmith.’
By replying with that, he wanted to gently suggest that Toby was being a smart arse, without it looking too sarcastic. It was Donnie’s first week, after all. He didn’t want to go in hard with the cheek when he’d barely got his feet under the table. But he also didn’t want to be picked on. He wanted his reply to be just enough to put Toby off criticising him in the future, knowing that Donnie would fire back.
But as it turned out, Donnie wasn’t being picked on. As time went on, Donnie discovered that Toby did it with everybody, all the time. But nobody else seemed to mind. They would either reply to the corrections with ‘Thanks, Toby’ or say nothing at all.
Nobody even seemed to bitch about him, not in front of Donnie anyway. If anything, they would defend Toby, even if they were the victim of Toby’s cuntishness. Like when Toby corrected Alice.
Alice had sent an email where she said the word ‘colour’s’ instead of ‘colours’. She was talking about the colours in the colour printer that they had up the back of the office, because it wasn’t working properly. She’d said ‘And there’s something wrong with the colour’s on all of the printouts.’
Toby had replied with ‘The plural of colour is colours.’
Donnie asked Alice how she felt about that. It was verging on nasty, as far as Donnie was concerned. It was one thing to correct somebody’s grammar, but another to type a reply like that.
Alice said that it was okay, because Toby corrects people’s mistakes all the time. But Donnie said that there was a difference with this particular reply. It implied that Alice didn’t just make a typo due to typing fast or autocorrect or losing concentration; it implied that she didn’t know how to make a word plural, like she would make the mistake again because she just didn’t know to do it, like she was in nursery school.
That’s the impression that Donnie got, and he wanted Alice to be upset about it. But she wasn’t. She just shrugged it off and said it was okay, and that it was a silly mistake anyway.
Donnie said that somebody should say something, but Alice said that it really was okay and that Toby was a nice guy. Just leave it.
Donnie tried to leave it, but when you’re seeing somebody correcting everybody’s grammar on a daily basis, you just want to say something. You just want to tell the guy to give it a rest with the corrections. What does it matter?
It’s not as if the mistakes are being printed on the pamphlets and sent out, resulting in embarrassment for the company. It’s not as if Toby was some kind of copyeditor or sub-editor, where it was his job to correct everybody’s spelling and grammar before it went to print. He worked in accounts. His job was to do with numbers, not words. Just stick to your fucking job, mate.
Donnie tried to leave him alone, he tried to forget about him. He tried to ignore his ways.
He managed it for almost a month. He told himself that he wouldn’t react or bitch or try to get anybody else bitching. He’d just be like everybody else and take no notice. Almost a month he managed it.
But then it all came out at the office party. They’d all booked a big table at a restaurant, and they all got drunk.
Donnie wasn’t sitting near Toby, but he’d look over to Toby now and then, and try to listen in to his conversations. There was nothing interesting to listen to, but then Donnie heard something that he had to jump on.
He heard Toby say ‘It depends who you send it to.’
It was a mistake!
‘Wait!’ shouted Donnie, pointing at Toby.
Toby didn’t hear, but Alice did, and she stopped talking to see what Donnie was doing. It didn’t look good to her.
‘Toby!’ shouted Donnie again, and Toby looked around to see Donnie smiling and pointing. When Donnie saw that he had Toby’s attention, he asked him, ‘What did you just say there?’
‘What did I say when?’ asked Toby, looking at everybody else.
To Donnie, Toby seemed sober, while he himself felt drunk. He knew he probably wouldn’t fare well against somebody so alert, but this might be his only shot. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Even with the rest of the staff looking at him with their straight faces, looking concerned, he knew that they’d appreciate somebody just telling it like it is.
‘What did you say when?’ asked Donnie, grinning. ‘What did you say when? I’ll tell you what did you say when. You said, and I quote, “It depends who you send it to.”’
Toby gave a confused smile, and searched the faces of everybody around to see if they were equally as confused. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Well,’ said Donnie, raising his eyebrows. ‘I’ll tell you what on earth I am talking about. You said “It depends who you send it to.” But should it not be something like “Depends to whom you send it”?’
Donnie was half out his seat, and somebody put their hand on his shoulder to gently put him back down. Some people were asking him to just leave it.
Toby wasn’t smiling anymore. Donnie reckoned he looked caught out, that’s what he reckoned. He looked caught the fuck out.