by Limmy
And that’s what this guy was like. Hovering about. He didn’t look like he was browsing. If a person was browsing, they’d usually browse around just one type of item. They’d maybe browse around the items for doors, like the door knockers and nameplates, or browse around the trophies and medals ‒ but they’d never drift from the door items to the trophies, like this guy was doing. Nobody ever came into his shop for a nameplate and a trophy, it was either one or the other.
This guy was a thief. He was just waiting for Martin to turn his back, then he’d grab something shiny, and out the door he’d go. He’d be off with the heel protectors, thinking that they were made of solid gold, and he’d go around the pubs trying to sell them.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Martin.
That was the line that normally caused these cunts to leave. They’d say nothing in reply, like they hadn’t heard you, then they’d leave a few seconds later when they realised there was no way you were taking your eyes off them.
The guy looked at Martin and said ‘Yeah’, in that posh way. He played with his fingers, like an awkward teenager. It could be that he wasn’t a thief, but just shy, and he didn’t know how to ask for what he wanted. You couldn’t be sure, though, not yet.
The door beeped as another man entered the shop. He was wearing denims and a suit jacket, and was pulling a shoebox out of a large paper bag. Martin didn’t like two people in the shop at the one time. The guy with the shoebox was less likely to be a thief than the first guy, but he couldn’t ask the first guy to leave.
‘We’re shut,’ said Martin.
‘Shut?’ asked the man, looking at the other guy. ‘But …’
‘I said we’re shut.’
The man didn’t like the attitude. ‘Fuck off, then.’
‘You fuck off.’
The man opened the door and left. The other guy decided to leave as well, slipping out before the door closed over.
Good. Fuck off. Pair of cunts.
You know, he used to joke about all the trophies on the wall being like a trophy cabinet, like he’d earned them. It was obviously a joke, but these cunts wouldn’t even crack a smile. But see seriously? All joking aside? He fucking deserved a trophy, for the cunts he had to put up with in there.
New Life
Alan had gathered all his mates and a few family members at his flat. His girlfriend Lisa was there as well. It was a surprise. There was going to be an announcement, he said. Not even Lisa knew what it was about. It wasn’t his birthday or anything.
They came into the flat, smiling and asking questions. They were to be there at 7 p.m. Some of them had asked what they were to wear, but Alan had told them that it didn’t matter. Just wear what you want, it was nothing fancy, they weren’t going out clubbing. It was just an announcement.
‘What do you mean when you say you’re going to make an announcement?’ asked Lisa throughout the week.
‘Just wait, you’ll see,’ said Alan.
Alan seemed more upbeat lately than he had been for quite some time. Whatever the announcement was, it was good to see him like that. Lisa wondered if it was a new job, but would he really get everybody around just to announce that?
Everybody arrived and chatted for a few minutes while Alan took their coats and got them drinks. Alan’s best mate Steven said it was like one of those murder mystery weekends you hear about, but Alan said it was going be nothing like that, don’t get your hopes up.
They were enjoying it, though. Steven said he liked it, whatever it was, and Alan said he did as well. It was exciting and he was glad he came up with the idea.
Alan walked into the middle of the living room where everybody was, and stood on the rug in front of the telly. He cleared his throat in the jokey way that a person does when they want to make a speech.
‘Oh,’ said Anne, another one of Alan’s pals. ‘Here it is.’
‘The announcement,’ said Lisa. ‘At last.’
She really didn’t know what this could be. It could only be a good thing. All of this was a good thing. Alan rarely came up with an idea by himself, but it wasn’t his fault. He’d been struggling for a while, with everything.
‘So,’ said Alan. ‘Here it is.’
He looked nervous. Lisa asked him if he wanted to sit down, but he said that he was fine. He was just trying to think of how to get this across, the thing he had to say.
‘So,’ he said again. ‘As you know, I’ve had … no, in fact, first of all, thanks for coming, everybody, let me just say that first.’
‘You’re welcome, mate,’ said Steven.
Alan nodded and got back into it.
‘Right,’ said Alan. ‘So, as you know, I’m prone to getting a bit down.’
The happy atmosphere in the room subsided. The smiles were still there, but their eyes were no longer smiling. They began to realise that the thing that Alan had to say was a bit more serious than they first thought.
He turned the wrist of his right hand around to face everybody. There was a scar on it. ‘And you all know about this.’
Lisa looked at everybody in the room, and saw that they were becoming uncomfortable. Chris, one of Alan’s cousins, turned his head away to look at the wall to his side, even though there was nothing there of interest.
‘Alan,’ said Lisa. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. It’s all right, everybody.’
He smiled at everybody until he got a smile back. Then he continued to talk.
‘You all know about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to you all. You know how hard I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried everything. Pills, counselling, everything. I’ve tried everything. And it worked, for a while. But there I was again. On Monday, I think.’
This was the first time that Lisa had heard anything about Monday. ‘There you were again what?’ she asked. ‘What happened on Monday?’
Alan took a deep breath and just came out and said it. ‘I was about to kill myself.’
‘Jesus,’ said Steven.
‘For God’s sake, Alan,’ said Cheryl, sympathetically. She gave Lisa’s back a rub.
Lisa put her face in her hands and was instantly in tears.
‘I was up at the Erskine Bridge,’ said Alan. ‘I walked all the way up there. Took me over an hour. I walked all the way up there and I was going to throw myself off. And I knew that if I did, that was it.’
He looked at his wrist.
‘No going back this time,’ he said. ‘You step off that bridge, it’s over. No ambulance, no rushing to the hospital. You step off there, and it’s over. Doesn’t matter how much you change your mind on the way down, it’s over.’
‘Shut up,’ said Lisa from behind her hands. ‘Just shut up.’
‘We better leave,’ said Cheryl to everybody else, standing up. ‘We should go. Come on.’
‘No,’ said Alan. He looked at everybody and smiled. ‘Because this is what I want to say. I’ve got something to say. I swear this will be the last time that you’ll hear me talk about this. Will you hear me out?’
Cheryl looked at him and everybody else. Lisa looked up from her hands and waited for Alan to speak. Cheryl sat down and started rubbing Lisa’s back again.
Alan had been standing on the rug, but now he felt like sitting. He pulled over a small table that was behind him, then he sat down on it and began to speak more quietly. He realised that although he was feeling good, he was potentially causing pain to the others, so he didn’t smile, even though he wanted to.
‘I don’t know why I want to die,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know. But I know that I don’t enjoy my life. I’ve gone too far into a life that I don’t like, and I just want it all to end.’
He looked at Lisa.
‘But as I was up there on the bridge, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to end my life, not completely. I just wanted to end this one, if that makes sense. I think I could enjoy life, if I was somebody else.’
‘Then be somebody else,’ said Lisa.
‘Do whatever you want. Leave if you want to. I’d rather you were somewhere else than here and wanting to jump off the fucking …’
She broke down again. Cheryl gave her back a rub and kissed her head.
‘I thought about that,’ he said. ‘I thought about it on the bridge. I thought about just running away. Just getting some money and getting on a plane and going to Canada or somewhere and starting again. But that would cost a ton of money. It would cost a serious ton of money, and I’d have to find somewhere to live and get my head around it all and think about all the forms and, oh, I don’t know. There’s always something. There’s always something.’
He rubbed his head.
‘I want to stay here, but I just want everything to be different. I want to be home, but with different faces and places, doing different things with different … I really don’t know. I know that it all sounds like it won’t change a thing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me now, but it made sense to me when I was up on the bridge, and I’m not going to go back up there to try and remember. I told myself I was going to do it and that’s why I asked you here and I’m going to do it. I have to.’
‘Do what?’ asked Steven. He looked at Alan’s hands to see if he was holding a razor, in case Alan’s plan was to cut his wrist or his throat, right in front of them all. But there was no razor.
‘Please don’t feel bad,’ said Alan. ‘But I told myself that if I don’t then I’d end up killing myself and I’d never see you again anyway. You’d lose me anyway.’
Anne didn’t get it. She looked at Lisa and she could see that Lisa didn’t get it either. Neither did Cheryl or anybody else. Anne looked to Alan and said, ‘Alan, I don’t think anybody knows what you mean.’
Alan took another deep breath and tried to remember how much sense it made on the bridge, then he said it.
‘After you leave here tonight, you don’t know me. After tonight, my name will be Craig.’
There was quiet in the room as they thought about what he could mean. Steven asked, ‘What do you mean? You’re changing your name?’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘Well, aye. But not just the name.’ He took a breath and tried to keep it simple. ‘After tonight, I’ll be a guy called Craig.’
Before they left, Alan told them the best way to go about it all. The technicalities. The dos and don’ts. He’d thought it all out.
Lisa was heartbroken, and asked him if he was joking. She wanted him to tell her he was joking. She said it must be a joke and she wouldn’t go through with it, but he explained again that it was either this or he was going up to that bridge. If they spoke to him again, he’d be found the following day, floating face down in the Clyde, and that was a promise.
They left, and for the following couple of weeks, they never saw him.
Then, they did.
They started to see him around. They’d get a glimpse of him, then he’d be gone for a month. He’d be passing by as a passenger on a bus, or he’d be seen coming out of a building or getting into a car. Lisa had never seen him herself and wanted every detail about who he was with and what he was doing.
Anne saw him in a park. He was with a group of people, studenty types. One of them had a guitar, and they had a tightrope tied between a couple of trees. They were people like that. They were the type of people that Alan used to laugh at, but Anne said he looked like he was having a good time.
Steven saw him in a club. Steven was with a lassie he’d just met, a lassie he’d got dancing with. She said she wanted to introduce him to her mates, and she led Steven towards a table. One of her mates was Craig. Steven and Craig had said ‘Pleased to meet you’ to each other, like it was the first time they’d met. Steven stood around for a minute, to pretend that everything was normal, then he told the lassie that he had to go to the toilet. He took a detour to the cloakroom, got his jacket and left. It was too much.
Lisa was worried that she’d never see Craig again after that, that he’d move away or be found face down in the Clyde like he promised.
But then she finally saw him, in Lidl.
There was something different about him. Nothing much, but something. His hair was a bit longer at the top than the last time she saw him. The denims he was wearing were a darker shade of blue than he usually wore, but that was nothing much. He was wearing a jumper, and that was something.
He walked past her, but she didn’t look at him, not directly. She watched his reflection on the metal edge at the front of the shelf. He might have turned his head to look at her, but she couldn’t be sure. Then he was gone.
She saw him in there again a week after that. And then a few days after that.
The last time she saw him, he walked around the aisles for ten minutes, but then only left with a couple of packets of crisps.
The next time they were in, she would smile at him.
Or she might just go ahead and talk to him. She thought it would be all right, because it wasn’t like she’d be talking to Alan. She wouldn’t be talking to him as Alan. She’d be talking to Craig. She liked the guy. And you read things about supermarkets, about how that’s where some couples first meet.
Moustache
There was an explosion.
Frank had been walking to the job centre. To get there, Frank would usually leave his house and stay on that side of the street for ten minutes, walking past the tenements, past the community centre and the factory. Then there would be more tenements, and when he reached those, he’d cross over to the job centre.
It was when he reached the factory that the explosion happened.
When it happened, in that first instant, he didn’t know that it was an explosion. He didn’t know if it was something that had happened inside him, like a heart attack or a stroke, or something that had happened outside his body, out in the open. Whatever it was, the combination of the sound and the force made him fall on his side and bang his head on the ground.
His eyes were shut and his ears were ringing. He couldn’t see or hear anything, but he could smell dust. It reminded him of whenever he walked past the flats over in Finnieston, the ones that were being demolished, and the dust that blew onto the street. The smell told him that the thing that had happened hadn’t just happened to him, it was no heart attack. He knew that when he opened his eyes, he was going to see something.
He opened them slowly and narrowly, so that the dust he could smell wouldn’t go in his eyes.
He looked in front of him. Through the dust he could see that it was like half the factory and the surrounding tenements were lying on the road. There were twisted sheets of corrugated iron, there was broken glass and broken window frames. Strewn across the road were building bricks from the factory, and large blocks of sandstone from the tenements. The scene looked like a sandcastle that had been kicked across a beach.
There had been an explosion at the factory.
Frank checked himself, his arms and legs, and saw they were intact. He looked towards the rubble in front of him, and waited for the dust to clear.
It was quiet. He thought he had been deafened, but he realised he wasn’t when he heard the first scream. People had been shocked into silence. But after the first scream, others began to follow.
There was a rumble, then the sound of something crashing to the ground, either a building or part of one. People screamed and shouted again. A mix of women and men.
Frank looked at his arms and legs again and gave them a squeeze, to double check that they were fine. When he was sure that they were, he got to his feet, and began to walk diagonally across the road.
A few people ran past him, some heading the way he was heading, and some heading back the way he came. A guy in his forties, around the same age as Frank, emerged from the dust. He had blood on his head. He stopped to look Frank up and down, then he rubbed his eyes and carried on walking.
Frank walked forward towards the sounds of people shouting, people speaking, or the sound of anything moving, anything that sounded like it was being m
oved by somebody trying to free themselves from the disaster.
He heard the sound of a female voice, and he began jogging towards it. He found a woman lying underneath one of the sheets of corrugated iron. She was wearing a blue coat, that was either light blue or looked light blue because of the dust. The sheet she was under didn’t look like it had either hurt her or pinned her down. She was crawling away from underneath it.
Then he heard a boy’s voice, groaning.
Frank looked towards the direction of the voice, then looked at the woman. She looked like she’d able to sort herself out, but he’d come back after finding the boy.
He ran towards the boy’s groaning until he found him. He was with another boy. Both of them looked around 12. They were on the ground at opposite ends from each other, like when two boys of that age share a bed but don’t want to be face to face.
One was sitting up, and the other was leaning on an elbow, as both of them pushed away the broken wood that had landed on their legs.
Frank could see that they were both able to move their legs and feet. One was smiling. The other was in pain, but judging by his face, it looked like the pain was nothing much, on a par with grazing a knee or banging a shin.
He was about to head back to the woman when he heard panting.
It was the sound of a man in a lot of pain, breathing through his teeth, quickly. Then it stopped, then started again.
It came from the right, towards the factory. Looking in that direction, Frank could see a flashing yellow light, which he thought was the light from a fire engine or some other emergency service. But then he saw that the yellow light was coming from flames. Through the dust, he could see that the factory was on fire.
Frank walked in that direction slowly. There was more rubble. It became higher, and the dust cloud was thicker.
‘Hello?’ shouted Frank. But the man didn’t shout back, he only panted and coughed.
Frank walked towards the sound, until he saw a hand sticking out from the rubble. Then he saw the guy’s legs. They were trapped, but in a far worse way than the boys. The legs were underneath a short but heavy-looking beam of wood, and they looked broken. One of the legs was bent in the wrong direction at the knee.