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‘Just leave it,’ said Alice. ‘Please.’
‘No chance,’ said Donnie.
‘Look,’ said Toby. ‘I just think it’s important that certain rules are followed, certain consistencies are kept so that …’
‘Depends who you send it to,’ said Donnie, repeating Toby’s mistake. ‘Depends who you send it to. I don’t think that’s in the rule book. Let me just check …’ Donnie licked his thumb and leafed through an imaginary rule book and said ‘Nope’.
‘Sure,’ said Toby. ‘Sure. I take the point. But language evolves and …’
‘Oh!’ shouted Donnie, his eyes lighting up. ‘Oh! Did you hear that, everybody? Language evolves.’
‘B-b-but,’ stuttered Toby.
‘B-b-but?’ said Donnie, taking the utter piss. Alice stood up and walked away.
‘But,’ said Toby. ‘Certain rules should be obeyed, or at least …’
‘But not by you, eh, Toby? By us, but not by you.’
‘By all of us,’ said Toby. ‘S-s-so there’s some consistency, so there’s, there’s, there’s …’
‘Why?’ said Donnie, banging his hand on the table.
‘Because,’ said Toby, looking flustered as fuck. ‘Because without, without knowing what, what, what …’
‘Why?’ said Donnie again, giving the table another bang. He looked at the people around him. They were neither joining in nor trying to stop him. They were looking down at their drinks in silence.
Toby stuttered on. ‘Because … because … b-b-because …’
‘Why?’ asked Donnie, his eyes wide. ‘Whyyyyyy?’
Toby stood up sharply, bumping the table with his legs and spilling the drinks around him. Then he shouted at the top of his voice.
‘Because it’s all I’ve got!’
The pub, which was previously loud with chatter, fell silent.
Donnie looked at the rest of the staff to see if this was some kind of act. He’d never seen somebody shout like that before, he thought people only snapped like that in soap operas or on a stage. Not in real life.
Donnie looked at them all, waiting for them to laugh. But none of them looked up from their drinks.
Toby spoke again, but this time, with the pub being silent, he only needed to whisper to be heard by everybody in there.
‘It’s all I’ve got.’
Toby picked up his coat from the back of his seat and left.
What Donnie didn’t know, but what he found out later, was that Toby’s wife and kids had died in an accident.
Stookie (#ua8673331-6b28-5e2e-9b5f-d6c72270b93c)
Gerry had broken his arm. He fell in his back garden and landed in a bad way on the steps. He didn’t think he’d broken anything, his arm felt intact. But the pain just wouldn’t go away, even after a week. So he went to the hospital, where he found out that he’d broken the thing. It was a surprise. He didn’t think he’d done that much damage, he expected there to be much more pain from a broken arm. But no, he’d broken it, and he’d need to wear a plaster cast.
A plaster cast.
Or a stookie, as they used to call it when he was wee.
He never had a stookie himself when he was wee, but every now and then, somebody would come into school with one on, usually on the arm. It was usually boys that got it, he couldn’t remember any lassies wearing one, it was always the boys. That was maybe something to do with all the climbing about that boys did, all the climbing up drainpipes and trees, which lassies never seemed to do. He did sometimes see lassies wearing a kind of stookie, though. The soft ones that went around the neck. The cream-coloured ones made of foam. It made them look so stupid.
The nurse began putting on Gerry’s stookie. It was a new experience for him, even just to watch. He didn’t know how it was done. He had a memory of being in school and asking somebody how the stookie was put on, but he’d forgotten. He watched the nurse wrap the dry bandages around his arm. Then, when that was done, she began wrapping a wet bandage around. Wet with plaster.
He thought back to the lassies in school that used to wear the soft stookies around the neck, and wondered why they were always soft and never hard like a normal stookie. He wondered if a normal one would have made them look any less stupid.
God, he was such a cheeky cunt in school.
He couldn’t remember the names or faces of the lassies he slagged off for wearing the neck thing, but he remembered doing it. He remembered how it made them look like dogs, when dogs have to wear that thing that stops them licking their stitches when they’ve had an operation. He used to love laughing at the lassies that had to wear one, and he loved the way they couldn’t turn their neck for a quick comeback. It was funny saying something cheeky to them, then watching them have to turn their body all the way around to look at you because they couldn’t turn their neck.
Guys didn’t really get that type of slagging by having a stookie, though.
They were never laughed at, because having a stookie was almost something to be proud of. It was like a war wound. It meant you’d been up to stuff, something dangerous, and people would ask you what happened and how sore it was. Anybody that had their arm in a stookie would get all this respect, and people would cover the stookie in menshies.
There’s another word he hadn’t heard for years. Menshies. Mentions. People would write stuff on the stookie.
They’d write things like their name, or ‘Get well soon’, or write something funny. The rule was that you shouldn’t write anything dodgy, even for a laugh, because then the person with the stookie would get into the trouble. The teacher would just end up asking who wrote the thing on the stookie, and the person who wrote it would be grassed up.
The nurse finished putting on the stookie, and told Gerry that he’d have to wait a short while in the hospital while the plaster dried.
As he waited, he thought about if he’d get his son to draw some menshies on it when he got home. Alex wasn’t able to write yet, but he could draw some squiggles, or maybe get out his paints and paint some flowers. That would be nice. There was the potential for some embarrassment, going around with a stookie covered in daisies, but it would be a nice embarrassment.
Gerry remembered a boy from school.
There was one boy in school who came in with a stookie on. But he didn’t get any respect. Nothing like it.
People wrote stuff on his stookie, but it was nothing nice. It was nothing but fucking horrible stuff, and he had to just take it. They’d hold his arm and then write all this horrible stuff on it. Nobody had any fear of being grassed on, because the boy knew what would happen if he grassed.
The nurse came and tapped on the stookie with her finger. She told Gerry that the plaster seemed to be dry enough now for him to leave, so he was free to go. He left the hospital and headed for the bus stop.
As he waited for the bus, he felt his arm begin to itch. He looked at his stookie, and thought back to that boy from his school.
He could barely remember the boy’s name. It was maybe William. William McDonald or William Campbell, one of these Scottish surnames ‒ he wasn’t sure. But Gerry remembered what was on the stookie. He looked at his own stookie and he could remember what was on William’s stookie like it was right there in front of him. He remembered that there were lots of things written on it, lots of drawings as well, but biggest of all was the word ‘TRAMP’.
The bus came and Gerry got on. He realised as he tried to get the change out of his pocket that things were going to be a lot harder with the stookie on. It was his right arm that was in the stookie, leaving his left arm free, but his change was in his right trouser pocket. Getting the change out of his right pocket with his left hand felt like he was using his left hand to shake somebody’s hand when they were using their right.
‘Hurry up,’ he heard somebody saying on the bus. Somebody up the back.
He looked towards the voice, but he couldn’t tell who said it. The bus was busy, with most of the people looking at him and the rest looking elsewhere. Nobody looked guilty.
The bus driver, who hadn’t yet moved the bus away from the bus stop, stepped on the pedal and moved the bus away sharply. Gerry stumbled, and banged the stookie against one of the metal bars. It went clink.
Somebody laughed.
He heard a woman somewhere say something about how Gerry was going to break his arm again, or break the other one. A couple of other people laughed at that and said something else.
By the time the bus was slowing down for the next stop, Gerry still hadn’t managed to get his money out. He took a step towards the bus driver and said, ‘Sorry, I’ll just …’ meaning to say, ‘I’ll just be a second,’ but the driver interrupted him.
‘Give me it when you get off,’ said the driver, pointing his thumb to the back of the bus. ‘You’re blocking the aisle. Move.’
‘Thanks,’ said Gerry, and he walked down the aisle.
He looked for a seat, but there weren’t any. There was a guy up the back sitting next to a spare seat, but he had his bag on it. Gerry was sure the guy had seen him but was pretending that he didn’t.
The bus got moving again, and Gerry held onto one of the metal bars so he didn’t fall over. He glanced at a few people, and saw that some were still looking at him, even from close up. He looked away, and down to his stookie.
He kept his eyes there, on the stookie.
As he looked at it, he thought back to the stookie on William, and what was written. He remembered. He couldn’t remember every word, but he could remember their shape, like he was looking at it on his stookie with half-closed eyes. He remembered how the word ‘TRAMP’ was written. They were in capitals, but the line on the letter p dropped down like a small p. It had looked too much like the letter D, so he drew the line down further to make it more like a p.
He remembered that it was him that wrote ‘TRAMP’.
He wrote about half of the other stuff as well. He forgot that. He couldn’t remember if he started it, but he wrote at least half of the stuff on that stookie, or told people what to write or what to draw.
He remembered that he drew a picture of William with flies around his head, like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. He could see it on his own stookie, down near the fingers, down at the bottom right of the word ‘TRAMP’, near the line that came down.
Gerry looked away.
He looked up from his stookie and saw that he was being watched by a boy on one of the seats. He was maybe about six or seven, a couple of years older than Alex. Gerry looked down so that he wasn’t staring back. He saw that one of the boy’s socks was white, but the other was light grey.
A thought came to him. He never found out how William broke his arm.
Gerry looked at the boy’s face again, and saw that the boy was now looking at the stookie. Gerry turned the stookie away quickly so that the boy couldn’t see what was written there, before coming to his senses and remembering that there was nothing there.
The stookie began to make his arm itch again. His skin felt hot and sweaty.
He thought about getting home, and letting Alex draw some menshies on his arm. The idea didn’t appeal to him as much as it did back at the hospital, but it was maybe because of being on the bus and how much his arm itched.
He looped his left arm around the bar that he’d been holding onto, his good arm, and poked the fingers under the stookie to give it a scratch, where it was itching. But he couldn’t quite reach it.
And oh, it itched like fuck.
Keys (#ua8673331-6b28-5e2e-9b5f-d6c72270b93c)
Gary had made a stupid mistake.
Him and Linda had a back garden, and at the back of the garden was their garden fence. It was a high wooden fence with a padlock on it, and behind the fence was a lane, where the bins were kept. The key for the padlock was on a keyring that also held a key for the back door of their house.
Gary had taken a bin bag out to the bins. He’d unlocked the padlock and left the key in the lock while he put the bag in the bin. But while he was there, he saw the bin for bottles and glass, and remembered that they had some bottles in the house that he’d like to bin as well.
He walked back through the gate, into his garden, and he was about to lock the padlock. But he decided not to. He didn’t really have to. It was only a ten-second walk from the gate to the house. Did he really need to lock the padlock just for that? Maybe he would have if it wasn’t for the padlock being rusty, which made it a pain in the arse to get the key in and out of. It could sometimes take almost a minute to lock and unlock it, and he couldn’t be bothered with that.
So instead, he left the key in the padlock. He was sure it was safe. It wasn’t as if somebody was going to rush up and grab the keys from the padlock during the ten seconds or so that he was away. But he had a look down the lane, just in case anybody was about to walk by. When he saw that nobody was there, he walked back to his house to get the bottles. If anybody managed to jump out from a hiding place and grab the keys from that rusty padlock in under ten seconds, well, they’d earned them.
He walked through the back door and into his kitchen where the bottles were. There were over a dozen of them, so he opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, with the intention of getting one of the reusable bags to carry the bottles out to the bin.
But then his dad phoned, wanting some computer advice.
He wanted to know how to move a video off his phone and onto his computer, because his phone was running out of space. So Gary talked him through it.
By the time he came off the phone, Gary had forgotten about the bottles, and he’d forgotten about the keys that he’d left in the padlock. He closed the door of the cupboard under the kitchen sink, without remembering why it was open in the first place.
The next day, Linda asked him to take the bottles out to the bin at the back, and that’s when he remembered that he didn’t get round to doing it the day before. He felt daft for forgetting to take out the bottles, but then the daft feeling was replaced with dread, when he remembered that he’d left the keys out there overnight.
He was about to tell Linda what had happened, but he hadn’t yet checked to see if the keys were still there. There was no point in owning up to making such a stupid mistake if nothing bad had come from it. They had a spare key for the back door, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. But it was. She’d know that somebody out there had the other key. Even if they didn’t, even if the keys were still there, she’d know he left the back door unlocked overnight.
He’d check first. There was no point in sticking himself in it when he didn’t need to.
He picked up the bottles in the house and put them in a bag, then carried them out to the gate. He could see that the gate was open, and he looked behind to see if Linda saw it as well. There would be questions if she saw that. But she wasn’t looking.
From a distance, it looked like the keys were no longer in the padlock. That was a sight that he did not want to see, so he looked away until he got closer, hoping that when he got to the padlock, he’d see that the keys were there.
But the keys were gone.
He felt his heart begin to thump.
He was about to search the ground to see if the keys had dropped down, maybe with the wind blowing the padlock during the night, but first he had another look towards the house to see if Linda was looking. And thank fuck she wasn’t.
He put down the bag of bottles and looked around in the pebbles that made up the path to the gate. While he was pushing the pebbles around, he was pushing the thought out of his head that somebody had stolen the keys. Somebody had stolen the keys from the padlock, which included the key to the back door. The back door to their fucking house.
He pushed the pebbles around some more, then looked in the same place over and over. He stood up and looked at the padlock. It was a pointless thing to do, and he knew it.
He took in a deep breath. He could feel his pulse in his temples.
This was bad. Seriously bad.
He remembered that he was supposed to be putting bottles in the bin, and he was certain that if Linda didn’t hear the sound of bottles crashing on top of bottles, she’d be wondering why. So he picked up the bag and emptied out the bottles. Then he had another look for the keys.
He looked at the grass in the lane, to see if the keys were there. He knew that he himself didn’t drop them there, he definitely left the keys in the padlock, but maybe the person who took them from the padlock then dropped them in the lane accidentally. It was possible.
He got down on all fours, then looked at the lane from down low, hoping to see the shiny keys sticking up from the grass. But he couldn’t see them.
He was going to have to tell Linda. He was actually going to have to tell her.
His throat tightened and his heart beat faster. He had to tell Linda that somebody had the key to their back door.
But he didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to.
It wouldn’t just be a case of getting the lock in the door changed, because it wasn’t as simple as that. The back door wasn’t a normal door like that. They had fancy patio doors that they’d spent a fortune on, and the lock was part of the door. You couldn’t just unscrew the lock and then put in a new one. If you replaced the lock then you’d probably have to replace the door as well, and that would cost a fortune. And he just did not want to tell Linda that. So he kept his mouth shut. He knew he was putting the security of their home at risk, but it was a risk worth taking for now, until he worked out what to do.
For now, he would just keep a lookout.
