Scratch

by Gillan, Danny

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Jim, you can’t even get to three o’clock on a bank holiday Monday without phoning me for a pint. There’s not a chance you’d last a week on your own abroad.’

  Terry was right. I’d never been very good with my own company; to be honest, I’d never found myself all that interesting. No doubt Simon/Joe would have something to say about that.

  ‘What about Ms Fraser?’ Terry said.

  ‘What about her?’ I attempted nonchalance.

  ‘You telling me you’re going to disappear off around the world when she’s coming home? I don’t think so, mate.’

  ‘Just because her dad was desperate for company doesn’t mean she will be. She’s married, for God’s sake. She probably doesn’t even remember me.’

  ‘She remembers you enough to tell her dad you’re a wanker.’

  ‘I think you’ll find she said I was a gullible wee shite. He called me a wanker; and you, come to think of it.’

  ‘Aye, but I bet it was her who planted the idea in his head.’

  ‘Fuck off and get us another beer.’

  Terry went through to the kitchen to lighten the fridge’s load and I sat back on the couch.

  Paula’s dad had told us her language school in Germany had hit the skids and she and her husband were moving to Scotland for the foreseeable future. I didn’t particularly want to know, but he’d gone on to say that Paula’s husband, Ingo (the childish part of me had secretly hoped I would be able to take the piss out of his name, but Ingo was fairly cool, unfortunately), was a German linguist she’d met and married in London five years earlier. They’d pooled their resources and taken out a mortgage on a small, run down office building in his home city of Munich. After years of trying to turn it into a successful private college teaching English as a foreign language and getting deeper into debt with each passing year, they had finally given up and decided to call it a day.

  I’d tried to pretend I was sorry to hear this as Simon/Joe informed us that Paula had been offered a job teaching German at Glasgow University and Ingo had secured a post as an English teacher at Holyrood, my old secondary school in Govanhill. I had subtly discovered this would mean Paula would be earning more than Ingo and, according to her dad, Paula didn’t have a problem with that. This was useful information.

  ‘So,’ Terry said, handing me a nicely chilled Stella and resuming his position on the armchair. ‘Are you seriously going to watch the game with Joe on Saturday?’

  ‘Course I am, and you’re coming too.’ I had, through nothing more than an innate sense of compassion and a desire to do right by the older generation, invited Paula’s dad to the pub to watch the football with us the following weekend.

  ‘It’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ I don’t know why, but I was determined to pretend that none of anything had a thing to do with Paula Fraser.

  ‘Don’t you think Joe knows you’re only being nice to him because of Paula?’

  ‘I’m not; he’s a good old guy. He’s the first person I’ve met who could shut you up for more than five minutes. Besides, he said yes. The man’s only looking for a bit of a social life, nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Aye, right. I still don’t think you should have given him your mobile number and email. That man’s not the most stable of individuals.’

  ‘Ach, he’s fine. He’ll be fine.’ Terry looked even less convinced than I felt.

  Chapter 6

  Two days later, I was two days past the point of admitting Terry was right.

  The first text arrived at 6.30 on the morning after Terry had been over. The bing-bong of my mobile’s message alert woke me from a very pleasant dream about something I won’t go into here. I pawed at my bedside cabinet and brought the phone over until it was a few inches from my face, the light from its screen feeling like a supernova in the darkness.

  - bruce lee invented his own martial art -

  I dropped the phone back on to the cabinet with a groan and tried to get back to sleep. I had a Stella hangover, which is never pleasant. At around quarter-to-seven, just as I was slipping back into the welcoming arms of the Sandman, I heard it again: bing-bong.

  I lay there trying to ignore it for a while, but eventually lost the fight with my curiosity and fumbled on top of the small unit once again.

  - he called it jeet kune do -

  I switched the phone off at that point, and didn’t turn it back on until I got into work. There were another five messages.

  ‘Oh Christ.’

  ‘What’s up?’ Terry asked.

  I shook my head. ‘My new best mate gets up awful early.’

  Terry laughed. ‘Give us a look.’ I passed the phone over the desk without bothering to read the texts.

  ‘Jesus, he really likes Bruce Lee, doesn’t he?’

  Throughout the rest of the day I received twelve more. None contained a ‘hello’ or a ‘how are you?’, just random facts about the life of Bruce. Early in the day I lost hope that not answering might put Joe off.

  The next evening he switched to emails, though the theme remained consistent.

  : he created the show kung-fu but the studio didn’t want an asian lead and gave the role to david carradine :

  That was the first. The seventeenth was:

  : he was quarter german on his mothers side :

  German? Despite, by this point, wanting to throw my ageing PC through the window and watch with glee as it exploded in a million pieces on the pavement below, this one caught my interest.

  It was close to eleven at night, and I had spent most of the evening drinking cheap red wine and trying not to look up every time I heard the dwip that told me another email had slithered into my inbox.

  Being sad, single and lonely, I had the full Sky TV package, and spent a few futile seconds trying to concentrate on The Geena Davis Show. I had seen this episode at least four times; bizarrely, it was also the only episode I had ever seen. Ms Davis deserved better, frankly.

  However, being sad, single and lonely, I never gave up hope that someday, sometime soon, someone I actually wanted to hear from might email me, and I therefore slouched my way to the computer desk before long.

  So, Bruce Lee was a bit German. Was that why Ingo found favour with Paula’s dad? Was that, in any possible way, subconsciously why Paula was drawn to the Germanic language?

  After all, my dad’s favourite singer is Bobby Darin, and I can think of no other earthly reason why If I Was a Carpenter makes me want to cry every time I hear it.

  There was possibly something profound to be gleaned from this line of thought but, given I had downed almost two litres of Blossom Hill, all I could think of for the rest of that night was whether or not I could get away with inventing a Chinese granny. Fortunately I lapsed into a coma before I could explore this idea in any sort of depth.

  Chapter 7

  As the second of my four weeks’ notice began, things started to happen on the flat selling front. I’d had nine viewers already. Most were young couples or single guys a few years younger than me. There was one scary, middle-aged man with a squint and a scar who offered me sixty-five grand cash without so much as opening a cupboard door.

  ‘But it’s ninety,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, but I’ll give you cash. No surveys, my lawyer will take care of the paperwork. I can have a suitcase full of fifty quid notes here by tomorrow. What do you reckon son, eh, eh?’

  ‘But it’s ninety. The price, it’s ninety.’

  ‘But I’m offering you cash.’

  ‘So is everyone else. Why would I want to drop twenty-five thousand from the price just so I can have lots of easily stolen notes, when I can get ninety grand deposited straight into my bank account?’

  ‘Jesus, you don’t know a fucking thing about life, do you? I’m wasting my time here.’ He turned and stormed back out of the door, slamming it behind him. I still have no idea what that was all about.

  Fortunately the other viewers were
of a more recognisable level of sanity, and Gordon from the estate agents phoned on the Monday to say I had three interested parties who wanted to arrange surveys, and two of them had expressed a desire to move in as soon as possible. All going well, it looked like I would indeed become homeless at roughly the same time as I became unemployed. It seemed that for the first time in my life I had planned something that was actually going to happen. Scary.

  I made a coffee for Terry and myself and sat back at my desk. I smiled at Patrick as he rushed passed us towards his office. I had perfected the art of doing just enough work for it not to be worth Patrick’s while pulling me up, given that I would be gone in a couple of weeks, and not one iota more. Terry had joined me in this endeavour, apparently forgetting he was staying on after I left.

  ‘I think we can now officially agree that Joe Fraser is truly mental.’ Terry drank some coffee and raised his eyebrows.

  This was the first time I’d heard the full name spoken out loud. Maybe it was because of the boxer that Mr Fraser had wanted to be called Joe. ‘So it would seem,’ I said. ‘He’s pretty funny, though.’

  Simon/Joe had met Terry and me to watch the Hibs-Celtic match in Kelly’s, a pub not far from my flat. I’m a Celtic man, and assumed Joe would be of the same persuasion, but it turned out he had embraced Hibs as his Irish-Catholic (but not really, honest) team of choice. Terry’s a Rangers supporter, and therefore hated us both for ninety minutes, making for an interesting afternoon.

  Kelly’s was about as traditional as they come, pub-wise. It was wee, cramped and uncomfortable; it was also welcoming, warm and funny as fuck. As the name implied, its clientele tended to favour Parkhead over Ibrox, but the bigoted sarcasm was only ever three-quarters meant. The very fact Terry didn’t feel the need to wear protective clothing and a crucifix said it all. Apparently it had a ladies toilet somewhere, but I’d never spotted it.

  ‘Currant bun, currant bun, there’s the fucking currant bun!’ greeted Terry and me, or rather Terry, as we walked through the smoker guarded door.

  ‘Is that better than a cream bun, do you think?’ I asked as we pushed our way through the throng.

  ‘Aye, fuck off the lot o’ ye,’ Terry shouted as loudly as he could, earning a roar of laughter. Despite being a lifelong ‘gers fan, Terry didn’t regard himself as a ‘hun’, with its implications of all sorts of nonsense about union jacks and oppression of the Irish and Protestantism. He supported Rangers because they were his dad’s team, that was all.

  Equally, despite happily allowing myself to be called a ‘tim’ in the company of other bhoys, I’ve never understood the apparent need some pricks have of associating the fact my favourite team wear green and white hoops with those terrorist fuckwits who used to be scary till Al Qaeda came along. I felt a connection with the Irish, but it had bugger all to do with football.

  We managed to get a couple of pints in and squeezed as near to the wall-mounted TV as the packed punters would allow.

  ‘Do you think Joe will turn up?’ Terry had to shout over the cheers as Scotsport showed a repeat of Celtic’s four goals against Dunfermline from the previous week.

  ‘Don’t see why not.’

  ‘Bruce started as a child actor, you know.’

  I jumped, sloshing half my beer over my shirt. I turned to see Joe, pint of Guinness in hand, smiling at me.

  ‘Joe, hey, you made it.’

  ‘Afternoon, James. Hello, Terence. Please, call me Simon.’

  I couldn’t prevent myself from blurting out: ‘Why?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Joe/Simon was still smiling.

  ‘Last week you wanted us to call you Joe and you didn’t like Guinness!’ I didn’t mean to shout, but I did.

  Simon looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Ah, but that was last week, wasn’t it now?’

  ‘Hey, Simon,’ Terry said. ‘When is it Paula’s getting back?’

  ‘Wh—?’ I began.

  ‘The twenty-eighth, Terence,’ Simon replied.

  ‘The twenty-eighth. Really?’ I said.

  The ref blew for kick-off and any chance of conversation disappeared for forty-five minutes.

  Hibs got a lucky goal in the 43rd minute. When half-time arrived I was conflicted; I was pissed-off my team were one down, but happy that, with his boys in the lead, Simon might be in a gregarious and forthcoming mood.

  ‘So, where’s Paula staying when she gets back?’ I asked after getting a round in.

  Simon smiled that knowing smile again and, I’m almost certain, winked at Terry. ‘They’re going to stay with us till they get themselves sorted out.’

  ‘Cool, cool.’ I nodded.

  ‘She phoned her mother last night. Turns out Ingo can’t come over right away, so it’ll just be Paula for the first couple of weeks.’

  ‘Oh, okay. Why’s that?’

  Terry began to silently wet himself behind Simon’s shoulder at my attempted indifference.

  ‘The poor lad’s grandfather is on his last legs, so he doesn’t want to leave yet.’ I smiled inwardly. ‘Do you find that funny, James?’ Apparently I had also smiled outwardly.

  ‘God no, that’s terrible. Poor guy.’

  Simon gave a nod and turned to Terry. ‘Terence, would you say James here still has designs on my daughter?’

  Terry, the bastard, avoided my eyes. ‘My guess would be you already know the answer to that, Simon.’

  Simon stayed silent for a second, then nodded again. ‘James, you should know that Paula’s marriage is, to my knowledge, a happy one. My son-in-law is a decent young man who treats her well. If you try to complicate things, it won’t only be Ingo you’ll annoy.’

  ‘Hah, hey, eh, wow, sure, of course.’ It wasn’t the most eloquent moment of my life. ‘If she’s happy I’m happy, Simon.’

  Simon’s eyes grabbed mine in a tractor beam as he leaned forward. ‘I will remember you said that, James.’

  I felt a sting in my left eye. At first I thought I had overdone the hair-gel again, before realising it was sweat pouring down from my forehead. ‘Understood.’

  Simon held my gaze for another couple of seconds. ‘Good lad. In that case, I’m happy to continue with our social arrangement. Terence, I believe this round is yours.’

  Terry took a moment to get his bearings then embarked on the long trek through the green and white jungle, swinging his empty pint glass in front of him like a machete as he carved a path through the drunken foliage (some of them had shamrocks).

  ‘Have you spoken to your parents yet, James?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Ah, eh, not yet, as it happens.’ He’d thrown me with that one. Again.

  ‘You know, when I was working I used to offer a mediation service to my patients, where it was appropriate. Is it something like that you’re waiting for?’

  ‘Not if it costs sixty quid an hour!’ I gave it my best false laugh.

  ‘That laugh needs a bit of work, lad. You do know you’re going to have to talk to them eventually?’

  This was an issue I’d have gladly spent hours discussing with Paula Fraser. Simon Fraser, on the other hand ...

  ‘’Mon the Hibies, ‘mon the Hibies.’ Terry budged in, clasping three pints between his overstretched fingers. I rescued my lager from his faltering grasp and took a big swig.

  ‘So you’re a Hibs fan now?’ I said, glad of the interruption.

  ‘I am if they’re beating your mob.’

  ‘Quite right, Terence. Loyalty is a very transient commodity.’ Simon took a draught from his pint and emerged with a white foam moustache, which his tongue greedily wiped from his top lip. He smiled that smile at me, again.

  Thankfully the second half got underway then. Many ‘f’ words, ‘c’ words and ‘that referee’s a blind bastard’ words were happily, yet angrily, exchanged. Hibs won 2-1.

  At full-time the atmosphere in Kelly’s was subdued. Well, mostly. Terry and Simon were delighted, and their exuberant hugging and dancing like twats began to draw antagonistic looks from the regular
s.

  ‘Time to go, guys.’ I ushered them out the door before they provoked a hooliganistic hoo-hah.

  ‘Where to now, lads?’ Simon had one elbow perched on Terry’s shoulder and was swaying gently.

  ‘One more in Stube?’ Terry said, with a look I knew meant one wouldn’t be anything like enough.

  ‘Lead on, young Terence,’ Simon said. ‘Onward, James.’

  I did as I was told.

  Three pints later, I felt remarkably sober.

  ‘You understand, Terence,’ Simon was saying, ‘he didn’t learn it, he created it.’

  ‘Wow, that’s pretty huge.’ Terry was drunk enough to be almost as fascinated by Bruce Lee as Simon.

  ‘His philosophy was based on the power of water.’

  ‘Water? That’s rubbish.’ I was bored and thought I’d spice things up a bit.

  ‘Oh, do you think so, James?’ Simon rounded on me.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Tell me, have you ever jumped in a river, or put your hand under a running tap?’

  ‘The tap thing, yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘And did the water stop moving; did it cease to flow?’ Simon arched his eyebrows and nodded.

  ‘No, Simon. No it did not.’

  ‘Correct, James, it simply found another path to its destination.’ Apparently satisfied with his argument, Simon turned back to Terry. ‘What’s the point of blocking then punching, when you can do both at the same time? Tell me that, Terence, tell me that.’

  ‘Makes perfect sense to me, Simon.’ Terry was clearly having a Mr Miyagi moment, and looked on in awe as Simon demonstrated his point by thrusting his left arm out quickly to the side, fist clenched, almost braining a guy squeezing past with a tray of drinks.

  ‘It’s all about control, Terence.’ Simon appeared oblivious as the poor boy with the tray flinched and hurried away.

  My attention wandered, and I was randomly checking out other people in the pub trying to decide if they were as enlightened as I had recently become when I heard Terry say: ‘So you’ve actually studied the moves?’