Daft Wee Stories Read online

  What are we doing? he thought.

  He looked to the clubbers in front of him, the ones closer to the DJ, and watched them from behind as their shoulders and arses boogied away. A smile crept across his face. Then he glanced to the people to his side, and watched their faces as they moved in time to the music, here, in a darkened room full of people they don’t know – the fact that some of them looked deadly serious made him smile even more. Then he turned around to look at the rest of the club behind him. He saw one lassie reaching her hands out to random locations on each beat, like she was one of those 1950s telephone exchange operators, pulling out invisible cables and putting them back in. There was an angry-looking guy with his top off who looked like he was marching on the spot while knitting. And there was a lassie with her eyes shut, shaking her head and wagging her fingers side to side, like she was telling a wee boy that her answer was no and she won’t hear another word about it.

  He had to bite his bottom lip to stop himself from laughing. Honestly, he thought. ‘What the fuck is this?’

  The crowd cheered at some bit in the song, and he started to dance again. Until he realised what he was doing. He realised he didn’t know what he was doing. He looked at himself moving his arms and legs about, next to other people doing the same. It felt fucking mental. This whole thing suddenly felt like the most mental thing in the world. It felt peculiar. He tried one more time to start dancing and get back into it, but when he saw his hands wave around in front of his face, he thought, What are you fucking doing, mate? and stopped.

  He shook his head and smiled, then turned to his mates to tell them about it, this thing that had popped into his mind, but then he remembered they weren’t there. Just as well, really, it could have ruined their night. He could imagine how it would go. He’d tell one of them, then they’d be unable to dance, just like him. Then his other mates would ask why neither of them were dancing, which would pass it on to them, like a virus. It’d only be a matter of time before the other clubbers asked why a group of a dozen people were standing in the middle of the dancefloor, static. And then one by one, they’d all stop dancing as well, every last one of them.

  Jamie laughed at the thought. A whole club not dancing. That’s the sort of thing that could get a place shut down. A whole club not dancing, then walking out, then tweeting about it on their way home. Other clubbers in other clubs would read about it, catch the bug, stop dancing and fuck off up the road as well, never to return. Forget about all this other shite that can ruin a club like drug busts and fights, there’s an idea that could crush the entire clubbing scene in a fucking weekend. For ever.

  He turned to the guy next to him, some sweaty guy dancing with an empty bottle of water. Jamie just had to get this one out.

  ‘What are we doing, eh?’ shouted Jamie over the music.

  ‘What’s that, mate?’ asked the guy.

  ‘I said—’

  A fist came flying into the back of Jamie’s head from nowhere.

  The bouncer dragged him by the hair to the door, punched him once more in the chops and literally kicked his arse out onto the pavement. When Jamie looked up to the bouncer for an idea of what the fuck just happened, he got another boot in the arse, and one in the head for good measure.

  Jamie wasn’t the only one to have had that zany thought, you see. The bouncer, having stood rooted to the spot in club after club for over twenty years, had thought the very same thing, many, many times.

  It kept him awake at night, so it did. The impact that would have on the business. A lot of good lads in security would lose their jobs, many of them with families to feed and bills to pay. So when he overheard that loudmouth on the dancefloor, the one that had stopped dancing, well, I’m sure you’ll understand …

  You’ve just got to nip that sort of shite in the bud.

  DESERT ISLAND

  He was on an island. Somewhere. He didn’t know. The Pacific, maybe. The type he used to see in picture frames, hanging up in offices and waiting rooms, to help take people’s mind off things. The type you’d see pictured from above, green in the middle, within a ring of white sand, surrounded by an ocean of blue. He’d sometimes look at pictures like those if life wasn’t going that well, wishing he could be on that island, wherever it was, far away from everybody that was doing his nut in. And now here he was, on one, with palm trees to his left and a sunset to his right, watching his bare feet sink into the soft, powdery sand as he walked along the beach, slowly, like a man with all the time in the world.

  Hell. Hell on earth.

  It was the loneliness. James had been stuck on the island for over two years now. Maybe three. Or maybe five, it was hard to say. He didn’t keep track, not to begin with anyway. Keeping track was for people who wanted to count the days until they were rescued, like the castaways you’d see in films. It helped prevent them from losing the plot. But he didn’t want to be rescued; this was like a dream come true. If anybody had tried to rescue him back then, he’d have climbed up one of those palm trees and told them to fuck off.

  But that was then. After a while, one day of sand and sea began to merge into every other day of sand and sea. Sand and sea on a Saturday. Sand and sea on a Tuesday. He’d fall asleep looking at it all, and when he’d wake up, there it would be, same as before. He found himself counting ants under a rock one day just to give himself something to do, and that’s when he knew it was time to start counting days instead. Then he just counted weeks. Or was it months? He couldn’t tell you how long he’d been there, he really couldn’t. Could have been five hundred years, for all he knew. Nobody told him otherwise, because since arriving on the island, he hadn’t spoken a word to another living soul.

  And that was killing him. The loneliness. If anything on this island would finish him, it was that. He didn’t know why he cared so much, maybe it was because everything else was taken care of. He didn’t have to worry about food or drink: there was plenty, not only from the island but also from everything washed up in the wreckage. And he wasn’t worried about being eaten himself, nothing here was capable of that. A wild boar, maybe, if it had a go at his face while he slept, but he doubted it – they seemed as scared of him as he was of them. No, he wasn’t worried about boars or going hungry. That wasn’t what killed you in a place like this.

  It was the loneliness. The never-ending loneliness.

  Yet as he looked up from his feet to the beach in the distance, he saw something that told him that maybe he wasn’t alone after all. Something on the sand. Walking. He rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

  It was a man.

  It couldn’t be, could it? James searched for alternative explanations for the sight. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, only to get closer and discover that it was merely a man-shaped tree stump. In his fragile state of mind, an upset like that might put him over the edge. He might go berserk and start punching fuck out it, causing himself an injury. Or worse, he might decide to befriend it.

  But after a few more paces, he could see that there would be no need to brace himself for an upset. It was a man, definitely a man, with ragged trousers and a beard coming down to his belly. And he was walking this way. James began wondering who the man was, how he got here and when. But as they drew closer, James knew that the man had arrived here the same way as himself. He recognised him. He remembered him vaguely from the cruise.

  The cruise! Jesus, he’d almost forgotten. It seemed like centuries ago. Now, seeing this guy, it was all coming back.

  The cruise. It was his wife Lisa’s idea. They’d never been on a cruise before, it was never something he fancied, but they saw it on a shopping channel on a particularly shite telly night. What started off as a slagging session of the presenter turned into them both saying, ‘You know, that actually looks quite nice.’ There were videos showing people relaxing on deckchairs around the swimming pool, there was an all-inclusive bar, and the food looked good. It looked all right. A nice, lazy way to spend a fortnight. The reality, of course, was
a bit different.

  The deck chairs by the pool were nabbed each morning by the same dozen or so couples, who would get up at the crack of dawn to claim the chairs with their towels, then bugger off for half the day. The all-inclusive bar was at least three people deep from midday onwards; you didn’t stand a chance of being served unless you were a queue-jumping prick who didn’t give a fuck. As for the food, the food was nice, but not where you had to eat it. Your table was numbered, and there you would eat in front of the exact same people three times a day for two weeks solid, getting to know the sights and sounds of each other’s eating habits intimately.

  By the end, nobody liked anybody. Nobody even tried to pretend. Yes, it was all coming back to him now. And as the guy brushed past James without saying a word, James breathed a sigh of relief.

  He reckoned it had all come back to him, too.

  JINXED

  ‘What are we doing here?’ asked Claire, as Marty drove them into the scrapyard. It was a Friday night. They were supposed to be going for a meal.

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m thinking of getting a new motor.’

  She looked at him. ‘That’s good, Marty. But …’

  ‘I know this isn’t the best time,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to nip in before they shut for the weekend; just want to find out what they’d give me for this.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, shrugging and shaking her head.

  That was very diplomatic of her, considering. She was starving. He’d told her he was taking her out for a meal, so she made sure she didn’t have that much for lunch and she kept away from the snacks. Now she was starving. Done up to the nines on a Friday night, starving, in a scrapyard.

  Any other couple would be arguing like fuck at this, but they were loved up to the eyeballs. They’d been seeing each other for five years, but it was like they had only just started going out – it was still fresh and fun and surprising. That was mainly down to Marty, and the fact he was a bit of a dafty. The things he’d do, the things he’d say. It was like he just didn’t have a clue, about anything. She found that out quite early on, when they first went to see a film together, with him leaning over every minute to ask who was who and why was this and how come they were doing that. He was just so fucking stupid, it used to do her nut in. But eventually it was one of the main things that kept them going through thick and thin, because the pair of them would have such a good laugh together, mainly at Marty’s expense. And no wonder. The amount of shite that went over that guy’s head, it was hysterical.

  Marty got out the motor and walked over to some guy in a hard hat at the wee portacabin office in the distance. Claire watched in the rear-view mirror as Marty said hello to the guy, before doing that same thing that Marty always did at the start of any conversation with a stranger. He just stood there saying nothing, trying to find the right words to say before saying them, his mouth open, his eyes looking up and to the right, like a schoolboy that had just been asked to do some hard-as-fuck sum in his head. He never used to do that, but Claire had taken the piss out of him so much over the years for the things he’d say. The howlers he would come away with in front of the telly, the questions he’d ask, the comments he’d make, the stuff that revealed that he just didn’t get it. Claire would turn her head towards him and say, ‘Tell me you’re joking,’ but there he’d be with his face all red. So these days he just learned to keep it zipped until he had a wee think beforehand. Or sometimes he just kept his thoughts to himself.

  Marty eventually started explaining whatever it was he was trying to explain to the guy in the hard hat. The guy looked at his watch, nodded, then turned to walk away. Marty reached out his hand for a handshake, but the guy didn’t see, so Marty pretended that he was actually putting his hand out to then bring it up to his face for a wee scratch of his chin. Claire laughed. Nice try, she thought. He was such a clown, he really was. He was like Stan Laurel or something.

  The scrapyard claw crashed through the roof, taking off her left arm and a few of her ribs. For a split second, she wasn’t sure what had just happened. She glanced at Marty through the rear-view mirror, as if he’d be able to shed some light on the situation, but he looked like he didn’t know what was happening either. His hands were on his face and he was screaming, like that guy from that painting, she couldn’t remember its name right now.

  The claw’s grip began to tighten, crushing the sides of the motor and her along with it. Her organs were squeezed out the hole where her arm used to be, like a tube of three-stripe toothpaste. Marty looked on, frozen to the spot, as the claw lifted the motor towards the crusher. He turned to shout at the guy in the crane, but nothing came out. Nothing. And he stayed like that, speechless, as the motor was dropped into the big machine that squashed his vehicle and girlfriend into a one-metre cube of metal, plastic and sludge.

  ‘Claire! Oh my God, Claire!’ he shouted, finally finding his voice. The guy in the hard hat ran from the crane; he didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he soon worked it out. Him and Marty ran over to the bleeding block of steel.

  ‘Claire,’ said Marty quietly. He didn’t know what to do. What was he to do now?

  He turned to the guy in the hard hat, slowly.

  And smiled.

  The hard-hat guy started getting worried. Very worried.

  But it was all right!

  Because what the crane guy didn’t know was there was this programme called Jinxed. It was a hidden-camera show, a bit like Candid Camera or Beadle’s About or Punk’d. They’d do a big practical joke, then the film crew would appear at the end, along with the presenter who’d say, ‘You’ve been jinxed!’

  Claire and Marty had watched it the other night. It was another one that Marty didn’t quite get. He just wasn’t sure about one or two things. Pretty fundamental things, as it turned out. He was going to ask Claire at the time, but he didn’t want her to take the piss again. Anyway, he reckoned he got the gist of it and how it all worked.

  The guy in the hard hat ran away to phone an ambulance. And the police. Marty glanced around for the film crew. They were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You’ve been jinxed!’ shouted Marty.

  But still no film crew appeared. And where was Claire? He hoped this didn’t take too long. They were supposed to be going for a meal.

  Daft Marty.

  The amount of shite that went over his head.

  It was hysterical.

  STEVIE

  I’m in a shop. An electrical shop. The kind that sells tellies and cameras and things for your computer, that kind of place. And I’m at the counter being served. I won’t bother telling you what I’m buying, you wouldn’t be interested. I’m not even interested. You buy stuff, hoping it’ll make you happier, but it never really does. Well, it does a wee bit, but not as much as you were hoping for.

  Anyway, I get served by the guy. Looks about twenty-eight. And his wee name badge tells me his name is Stevie.

  ‘All right? Let me take that for you, mate,’ says Stevie, and gives me a smile and a wink.

  That did something, that. What he did there, that smile and a wink. I don’t know what it was exactly, but that did something. It wasn’t a big, giant smile. It wasn’t a big fake Disneyland smile where we’re all pretending we’ve worked everything out and nobody dies any more. It was just a wee smile, that kind of smile where you keep your mouth shut and tense up your cheeks. Friendly, but considerate. Considerate of my feelings. He thought I’d maybe want a smile, but he was considerate enough to not ram his joy down my throat with a cheesy Cheshire-Cat grin.

  Then there was the wink. In case the smile seemed too reserved, the wink made up for it. But it wasn’t too bold. It wasn’t the kind of wink that puts you on the spot. Sometimes a wink can do that, it can make your brain freeze, you don’t know what to do. But it was just a quick wink. Then he looked down to the counter, that’s the important thing. Immediately after winking he looked down to the counter, right away. He didn’t stay looking at me wai
ting for a reply wink or to see what I thought. He just gave me it. He gave me that wink with no expectation of anything in return, like a gift. Then he looked down.

  And he called me ‘mate’. He could have called me ‘sir’. Some people like being called ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, it makes them feel like they’re being treated with respect, like they’re a member of the royal family coming to look at a factory or launch a ship. Some people like it because it creates a distance, which makes things a bit easier and less personal when complaints or demands are made, it makes it easier for both sides. But Stevie called me ‘mate’. Not because he feels I’m undeserving of respect, but because he knows I don’t need it. Nor did he do it to get familiar with me so that I feel uncomfortable making complaints or demands, but to make me feel like I can tell him anything. We’re mates, after all. Not real mates, obviously, but for the duration of this wee thing we’ve got going on, we’re mates just like any others.

  Stevie’s all right.

  He beeps the barcode with his laser gun and reaches under the counter to pull out a poly bag. He flaps the bag up and down to open it up, but in doing so he wafts a leaflet off the counter and down onto his side of the floor. I watch him as he bends over to pick it up, and what I see makes me like Stevie even more.

  It’s not that I like him even more because I’m watching his arse. I am watching his arse, but that’s not it, it’s the whole thing. It’s the way he’s bending over. He’s bending over in that bow-legged way, his knees slightly bent and pointed outwards, and his upper body bent right over. I don’t know what it is about him bending over like that, it’s like there’s something open about it. I know that ‘open’ isn’t the best word to use, because it makes you visualise him bent over with an open arsehole, but that’s the only word that springs to mind. Open.

  It’s the way you imagine people to bend over in the wild, or in the jungle. You sometimes see programmes with Amazonian tribes where the men wear nothing but a wee piece of cloth tied around their waist. And every now and then, there’s a shot of one of them from behind, somewhere in the background, bending over to pick something up. Cock, balls, arse, the lot, there it is, they don’t give a fuck. They don’t give a fuck because they’ve got nothing to hide. And that’s the same with Stevie here.