“He hasn’t paid!”
Shit. I nash up the crisps aisle, clipping the corner of some ket shelf, sending them clattering behind me, before spinning around the reduced stotties and pelting it down the bog rolls and toothpaste. The exit is in sight but the electric doors are slowly closing on all of us. For a split second I’m sure I see a Nanna in the self-serve queue punching the air and cheering. Peg it lad! You’re ganna make it!
I can feel the cold, sharp corner of the ham rashers diggin’ in me groin.
“Sir stop!”
Fucking ‘Sir’? I’ve gotta laugh. What a show they’re getting today. I’m clutching me stuffed joggers, hobbling like an absolute troll laughing me heed off. I think that’s Ian van Dahl on the speakers too. Get in. Today is definitely The Day.
I twizzle to seek a deserved prize, a little something to mark the occasion and thoughtlessly grab a bottle of bot-knows-what before sprinting onwards. I’m really gonna make it now.
And just as the automatic doors squash up the last bit of free fresh air… Just as I’m one mega-leap away from a personal best… TWACK. Decked.
I’m lying on the manky tiles on me back with old Si the fat bastard pinning me legs.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! Yi fuckin’ bastad! Let iz GAN!”
“Yi blummin’ idiot. This crap AGAIN?”
I love Si, but I never let him know. He loves me too. I can tell by the way he’s always lurking about the Tesco entrance to keep an eye out for me. We both fancied Jackie Hague in year nine but I was the one she smoked her first bucket with. He hated that. We were in the same English class, all of us, reading Of Mice and Men out loud paragraph by paragraph. I always thought he was a bit of a Lennie. Me? I’m a George.
“Yi fat bastad!”
“Yir a dickhead Robbin. Why you keep doing this?”
I pull the rashers out me boxers and whack him on the heed with them.
“You love it man you fat bastad.”
“I’ll love it when you get banged up again.”
Just as Si reaches for the ham packet I knee him in the stomach and throw myself at the doors, prising them open with my fingernails. I can hear his smashed-up walkie talkie crackling on the floor and I know his meaty crew are on the way. I’m off like a shot.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t get the goods, but I made it. I always make it. See my Ma was a dancer and she had knees like ram-raids. I saw her knee a thousand men right in the dick. Cheers for the knees Ma.
At the end of Coatsy Road I stop and buckle, both with laughter and exhaustion. The first streetlight of the evening zlitches on and spotlights me.
“Oh tell me why, do we build castles in the sky?”
Mint. And what’s this? A whole bottle of… port, in me fist! Nice work lad! So I did score after all. I just wish it was edible.
Me guts rumble and I wobble. It’s been a canny while now since I ate. Yesterday I think? Sinking this bottle will fill some hole and buzz my brain for another long night, so I de-ravel the fussy plastic wrap and unplug the cork.
“Cheers to Robbin Hood. Pirate. Emcee. Fucking legend!”
As I raise the bottle to the spotlight, Mr Miller’s cat skulks from under a car and rubs his arse end up my ankle.
“Here man Shearer, urgh yer a minger!”
I shake him off and he meows into the darkening street. It’s not that I diven’t like cats, but I dain’t want his arse on my Air Max’s. I nearly had my heed lobbed off on a washing line while nicking these bad lads, and then it took me hours to scrub and dry them at Riverside Park.
I make my way up the sticky-jack cut towards Granda’s house. He’ll be in as always, sittin’ with a bag uv nuts balanced on his massive belly, drinking tinnies in front of the box. I reckon it’s about Corrie time so he’ll be smashed by now.
The wind hoolies and whistles between the houses and whips up to the chimneys, catching in me lungs along its way. I sort of like the way it does that. It pulls the air from out me mouth and steals it away into the night. It freaks me out that we’re all just chewing on the same gusts out here, like me breath is the next person’s and their breath is someone else’s. I heard once that every breath you take has fragments of dead people in it, their ashes and that. We could be chewing on Elvis or summit. Knowing my luck me insides are probably full of Maggie Thatcher’s bones.
It’s starting to drizzle so I pull up me hood and pick up pace. The rain can keep me clothes damp for days and the theatre stopped us huddling by their warm air vents last Winter. Fucking snobs.
When I reach Granda’s I sit on me honkers and spy through the hedge into the glowing living room. Just as I expected. Corrie’s on and he’s in his greasy, grey armchair, muckle ashtray teetering on the side overflowing with rollies. I watch him a while, expressionless, flicking ash into his crumpled tinnie, popping peanuts like pills. I don’t think he can even chew them with his six brown teeth.
I come every day to see him. The same way people go to the cemetery to visit relatives. This vision of him is something I can rely on, a constant cornerstone no matter what. I like to see that he’s still kicking, but more than that, I like the way it feels in me guts when I see his grizzly beard and thin comb over. When I was a kid I used to think “are you just pulling clumps from the top and sticking them on your chin?” His beard is the stuff of nightmares. At my Mam’s wake I remember my Nanna, pissed, telling the whole YMCA that she once saw a daddy long legs crawl from out of it and fly into the air. “He’s a fucking grotty eco-system” she shouted, over jukebox Tina Turner, swashing a Guinness about over my head.
Through the hedge, I smile at his hands. Gnarly shovels that used to dwarf my teeny grip. Every Sunday, while the lasses prepared the roast, he’d walk me down to The Black Bull. His rough, yellow-stained sausage fingers grazed my little knuckles but I daren’t let loose and show it hurt. I felt like one of the gadgies, drinking in the afternoon while Nanna was at home cooking. And I remember his smell as I mimicked his footsteps. Baccy and wood-stain and coal smoke. Everything seemed yellow back then.
Me tired legs wobble again and I keel owa onto the path, using the port as a tiny cane to stop iz, but it doesn’t manage me force. The bottle smashes to smitherines and I land on it’s shards.
“Argh yi fucker!”
I get mesel upright and check me trainers for damage.
“Robbin?”
Granda is standing at the window straining in the dark to catch a glimpse of the clatter. I drop my head and march as fast as I can further up the cut and off into the night. Please don’t see me Granda. Don’t see me like this.