Scotfree2 Tales From Scotland

by Gordon M Burns

'So, sir, where's the man?' Asked Tom noting the shop door still shut.

  'Young woman with a pram passed by here,' Dave began, 'said he'd gone to Austria.'

  'Where?'

  'Austria?' Dave questioned the doubt in Tom's voice.'

  'Austria? Don't you mean Australia?'

  'No - Austria.'

  All winters in early January are dismal-dark and the news, looking forward or looking back, depressing. Each winter tries its best to differ from the ones before but the dread intent is still the same. Accordingly, January could be cracking-cold and ermined-cranreuch, a lyrical term now long forgotten and replaced with frosty-freezing brassy-cold. Lately weather forecasting has replaced the weather with your weather, therefore it is personally your fault and Frank's for giving his name to the storm that you conjured up a storm that is about to cause upset, structural damage and death. This year these storms have been further anthropomorphised my the Met Office by giving them names so that from what you learnt from Eva and f your own experience of Frank, you just know a storm by that name is going to be a bugger. Seemingly, Eva and Frank's sexual preference - but probably only Frank's - jumped upon and exposed only because we had not the sense to notice the gales in the past. Silly us for going down the shops in our goonies and baffies and not detecting that said dressing gown, whipped off by the snell wind, and slippers, drenched by the lashing rain, unsuitable clothing to be wearing outside our homes in any weather. Yet the fact that folk still do nip round the shops dressed in bed clothes, points to the Met's abject failure in raising awareness of the dangers in buying crisp multipacks in the teeth of Force Ten. All the same, we in Scotland might have noticed if the Met had given those storms really nasty sounding names like Moist Mucus, Smear Squirt, Vicious Vomit, or what everyone calls Frank, an odd orifice. However, even if they did, this would do nothing to alleviate the obvious - January always has and always will come with culling gales. Great depressions suiting the Hogmanay after-mood which, being two or so weeks earlier than the days, natural lengthening, puts the Circadian Reel right off-kilter. January's jig can schottische wet snow round the ankles, then freeze the fifty shades of snow-slush into grey-streaky perma-ice until one night along comes a balmy-blast, melts the lot and creates a deluge that wrecks havoc. Interior walls of buildings become smear-marked with a tidemark was from a dirty bath as the resulting floods, throughout town and country, scupper early January hopes of communications with work, with school, with any other modern centrally situated infrastructure such as supermarkets where the sell the multipacks of crisps. Therefore, best keep indoors except to pick up the morning paper, for the latest news, at the wee shop round the corner.

  'Beavers.'

  'What you on about Dave?'

  'All that flooding up by Alyth wi' cars stalked on top o' each other like copulating beetles, Alex - some folk's blaming the beavers for that.'

  'What? Copulation?' Alex asked.

  'No, the actual flood.'

  'Beavers in Alyth?' Tom questioned. 'Sure you don't mean Kirriemuir?'

  'No, Aylth,' Dave confirmed, 'though who put beavers there, eh?'

  'Did they no come doun frae Inverness?' Asked Tom.

  'What? Beavers?'

  Tom gave them a sideways look that managed a nod and a wink to go with it. For something to look at, in hope that what they heard was not what what Tom implied at that time in the morning, they looked at the shop door. It was shut, three lock-bolted.

  'Austria, you say Dave?'

  'Aye, Alex, Lech - seemingly.'

  'Lech?'

  Dave might tire of answering questions only to find the answer itself becoming the question but he knew the folly in such hope as in wishing January had not decided to settle in for a hundred days of wind and rain this year. Both were matters, like most events in his life, he could not alter.

  'Lech? Austria? What'll he do there?'

  'Ski, the young woman said.'

  'Ski, Dave? Can the Boy-sir ski?'

  'I very much doubt it.' Tom interrupted attempting to determine the line between fact and fiction for Alex and Dave - a job in life, which, if lost, would leave him lacking justification for his existence. 'He'll hae got himself a personal trainer ...' Over the echoing of the words personal (marvelled on) and trainer (questioned) Tom ignored and continued undeterred: 'and she told him ...'

  'She? How'd he manage to get a she?'

  'Och-kik, how would I know, Dave - eh?' Tom panicked down the narrow road be had opened for himself. 'Inverness or off the Internet - where'ya think - is that not where you find them these days? But that's where he possibly is now - Lech - getting personally trained, or so to speak.'

  More questions at him inspired imaginative answers pinged back along the lines of ... the Internet you say - LudmilaChat what's that - what's her name - Ruslana - a Russian name - she's Ukrainian - then he could have met her in Inverness - what's she training?

  'Hold it! Ukrainian,' Dave interrupted. 'What's he want with a Ukrainian?'

  'A Ukrainian or an Ukrainian, did you not hear, Tom? It was a she, so I expected he wanted her for a something personal, the lucky sod,' noted Alex resentfully. 'So, eh - man amongst us, eh?' He finished open-endingly.

  Shoes, examined as a catalyst to spark this further, looked oh-so wet.

  'Soh-oh! That'll be the note to follow doh,' cheeped up Dave suddenly. 'Julie Andrews,' he explained cheerfully enough. 'Uplifting singer, good looking in her time and one I still might like to take on the piste,' he expanded. However, this time the door could not be glared at by the others and blamed. 'What?' He asked bemused. 'What you all looking at - Sound of Music was set in Austria - no?' However, he was skating dicey was the ice he felt the others let him glide to a crashing ending. 'Just saying, her voice's uplifting.'

  'Oh, aye, voice uplifting, is it? Mair like on the piste, eh? No' think the young lassie was taking the proverbial pish out of you?' Asked Tom. Dave took the rise, rode it, but not as far as ridicule and back in case he lost their regard. Tom moved the subject on. 'Talking of which, how long is it the pub's been closed do you think?'

  'Eh, three years?' Replied Dave eager for a change.

  'Three years? Aye, could be,' Alex offered. 'Drayman found Sam sitting dead on his toilet, eh, hardly a dignified way to go.'

  'Depends what you were doing,' said Dave inviting a pause of time for looks around. 'So-eh, anyway, why's you asking?'

  'Price of the Courier was thirty-four pence then, huh, feck!' Tom informed them. 'And look it at now - one hundred percent increase in three years and you wonder why.'

  'Why what? Is we on about the odds of crapping out of it on the toilet?'

  It was but a little toilet humour to chuckle and cough-up on until the shoppie opened fro there was nothing stranger that real life. Alternatively, they could spit out or swallow down the strange notion that an online a one pound bet could net two point one million and might close the only within five miles shop for good. After all, if it were one of them and not the Boy-sir, would they not be finding themselves some Ukrainian trainer for the apr?s ski in Lech?

  'Hmm, odds are against this door opening today.' Dave noted dryly as the rain turned from steady drizzle to determined washer-totally-perished. 'Which is all very well and fine, but if he shuts the shop permanently where'll we buy the Courier? Where will we find out what's going on.'

  'Think the shop will shut for good, Tom?' Asked Alex

  'Em, like-em, could he not, um-er, ken, just sell it?' Dave presented the follow on.

  'Like Sam at the pub tried? The Boy-sir's been trying to sell up for years but no one is interested - no profit to be made when were so close to the delights of the Co-opie in Fordie and twenty-four hour Tesco's in town.'

  'All the same just to ...' he tailed off

  'Just the same what, Alex?'

  'Just to abandon us just like that is a bit thoughtless.'

  They muttered variously in manners designed to not offend by keeping thoughts all to
themselves. The rain streamed off their umbrellas and no matter how much spate ran down the burns here on a spot inhabited for at least one thousand years, they should indeed stay dry. The whole nation would drown before water lapped their feet. Once a burgh but now village, the kirk that weaved it altogether was all but threadbare now and gone was the knowledge of how to break bread together. Expanding so large that the urbanised spread broke free of its hogback-ridge, the community shrunk inwards in the process. The three of them had known a burgh council, two pubs, an hotel, a bakers, a butchers, a general store, a post office, a central cafe, one linen factory, one smiddy, a manufacturer of ladies silken undergarments for Harrods's, a railway station, two joiners, one of which doubled as an undertakers, and a community that once knitted itself round Frank's shop but not any more.

  'Right, so no Courier, but-em, what about necessities?'

  'What, trainers Dave? Pick them up off the Internet.'

  Dave, never the same since Amy his wife died, pointed out to Tom that he preferred to try before buying and that Frank had sold Fox's Rocky packs cheaper than Tesco did. They agreed that was so but many still tried on in town before buying online and that most people either nipped in the car along to Fordie or did a weekly shop in town.

  'Maybe he found her in town,' Alex ventured. 'There's a lot of them there now - they shop at Lidls.'

  Establishing that it was Ruslana he referred to, Tom told him that the Boy-sir never shopped there, never read the Courier, had no time to go shop-about Inverness therefore, it would be on LudmilaChat he found her but as that was all just his conjecture, went on to tell them to get fibre-optics. Yeah-but, with the pub now shut, they did not know how. Tom explained about tablets. One bought by his daughter for Christmas could have essentials from Tesco's or Asda's delivered to your door.

  'Which, as I said to Jane, is fine.' Tom was getting towards his ending point before walking off alone to face daytime TV. 'But ...'

  'Aye - but what?'

  'No Courier, so no births, acknowledgements and deaths.'

  'So no chance anyone kenning you ever upped and died then?' Dave asked.

  The enormity of that soaked in.

  'We needn't be standing in the rain' Alex told them. The wind turned from out the east. 'Only, I've got a got a DVD of it.'

  'It?' They asked guardedly.

  Rain rolled off their canopies as chilling dribbles dripping from ribs to necks. Glancing out the rain was incessant and unchanging.

  'Sound of Music, Julie Andrews - just if you fancy coming round to watch it. Could do something to drink and bite to eat at the same ...'

  'Hmm? Musicals b not my thing,' said Dave.

  'No' mine either, Alex' Tom confirmed.

  Brollies drifted apart on an unseen front bearing pressure on them. In between the old men a rain-curtain fell the drowning sound of which gave reason not to talk and cause to stray away from a spot where once bread was baked and bought by now no longer broken for how that had come about had been now forgotten because it was January, the season winter where looking back swallowed regret and forward queasy to behold. The locks remained locked upon the door; one ancient a fist required to turn the key and two modern padlocks required in modern times to deter break-ins. It was not until the young woman rolled by like a breath of Spring pushing her pram and child that on seeing her though eyes that watered in the wind, they just could about recall summer.

  'Look, my love,' Dave spoke to her, 'mind telling these here what you told me earlier?'

  'About wee Claudia here? The peck to push her up the street in hope to ski down the otherside?'

  And with that noted, they exchanged smiles and morning greetings through the wind then realised the papers must be inside the shop for they were not waiting out. Next came sweet sounds to sooth the sorrow and heal the wounds these men inflicted unmindfully on each other, for the Boy-sir's diesel van came round the bend to drive away their fears.

  One Amongst Us