Daft Wee Stories (11 page)

She took a bite of her biscuit and nodded with a shrug.

He swiped through pictures of her grandchildren, pictures of them when they were babies, then when they grew into toddlers, then into teenagers.

She thought about how much it had cost for the plane tickets.

And the cost of the private investigators, including the ones that failed. And then there was the cost of the taxi from the airport because her son refused to pick her up.

Add them together and you're easily talking about £2,000.

About the same price as that jacket.

Hiya.

How are you enjoying the book so far? Thanks for getting it, I really appreciate it. In return, I'd like to do something for you. A favour.

You see, I have some pictures. Some rather compromising pictures that have come into my possession. Pictures of an adult, taken secretly and without consent, with the sole intention of causing the person embarrassment.

Pictures of you.

Now, I won't say what's in these pictures, I don't want to cause you any further discomfort, but I think you know what. Without spelling it out, it's that thing you sometimes do. OK, I'll leave it there, I think you know what I mean. I just want to move on to what comes next and how we can tackle this.

As I said, the pictures have come into my possession; I was not the person who took them. But I know the person who did. He is a disturbed and very damaged individual, but he's a professional. In short, this is what he does to pay the rent. All he wants out of this is cash. A lot.

Fortunately for you, me and this guy go back. We're by no means friends, but we do go back, and this person owes me. So I managed to cut you a deal.

He's asking for £100.

It's a fraction of what you would have to pay if I wasn't here, but I understand if it's still a bit steep. Which is why I'm going to pay most of it myself, to thank you for getting my book.

So all I need from you now is a tenner.

A tenner and this guy is gone.

Just hand it to me if you see me out and about, you'll recognise me from the picture on the cover sleeve. No need to stop and chat.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of the book, and I hope to see you soon.

All the best,

Limmy

Romy fancied some lunch, she was starving. She stood on the pavement, looking at the cafe across the road, before looking up the hill to her left. She wasn't sure where to go. The place she usually went to was a fifteen-minute walk up the hill, but she really couldn't be fucked with that, she wanted something now. But the cafe across the road, she didn't fancy that either. It was an all-right-looking place, but there was something about it she didn't like. It's not like she'd had a bad experience in there, she was pretty sure she'd never been in, but maybe that was it: it was unfamiliar. She stood for almost a minute, looking between the cafe and the hill, the hill and the cafe. Eventually she sighed and crossed the road to the cafe. She didn't want to, but she really was starving.

When she got in, she realised the place wasn't that unfamiliar at all. It was quite familiar, in fact. It had a homely feel to it, with its worn-down wooden tables and wine-bottle candlestick holders. She liked that look, but she didn't like it here for some reason, she just did not like this place. Had she been here before? Or did the decor remind her of somewhere else that she didn't like? She wasn't sure.

‘Hi, what can I get you?' asked the guy behind the counter. Even he looked familiar, with his floppy hair and studenty way to him, but she couldn't say for certain if she'd seen him before or if, like the cafe itself, he just had a familiar look. A floppy-haired student. Ten a penny.

She turned around to look at the blackboard to see what was on offer, and noticed that she somehow knew instinctively where on the wall the blackboard was. Maybe she saw it on the way in. ‘Can I have a cheese and ham toastie please?' she asked. ‘And a tea?'

‘No bother,' he said. ‘Just take a seat and I'll bring it over.' So she sat down.

Her eyes wandered around the cafe, to the furniture, to the walls, to the counter, to the general shape of the place. And there was that funny feeling again. She had a feeling that she didn't want a cheese toastie after all. She had an urge to tell the guy to just leave it, that she'd changed her mind because she had to go and catch the train or something.

But why?

She tried to remember. What was it about this place? Did something happen? She couldn't remember the food being crap, or being shocked at the price, or the guy behind the counter being rude or moody. She wondered again if maybe she'd had a bad experience in another place that looked similar to here, but no, it was here. Whatever it was, it happened here.

Maybe, she thought, maybe the problem wasn't with the cafe, but with her. Did she do something the last time she was in that made her feel that she could never come back again? Did she come in here drunk one night and make an arse of herself? She started to feel ashamed, until she realised places like this shut about 6 p.m. No, she'd never been in here drunk, she'd never made an arse of herself in here at all. But she had been in here, she was sure of it, and something was telling her to leave.

She forced herself to forget it, to not even try to remember, her memory was shite. She looked around at the pictures on the wall to help her let it go. There were photos, paintings and drawings of Glasgow, just the usual stuff she'd seen in dozens of cafes about here, nothing out of the ordinary. Except …

One of them caught her eye.

It was an old black-and-white photo, of this very cafe, taken from across the road. She didn't know how old it was, but it was old enough for there to be a cobbled street outside. Every man on the street was wearing a hat. Every woman had a long, flowing skirt that came down to their feet. It was that old. Could it be …?

She heard the guy behind the counter approach her, but she didn't turn to look. She couldn't take her eyes off the photo. She thought she knew why. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? She didn't believe in any of that.

She remembered seeing a hypnotist do it one night. A hypnotist came to her local and did a show, the standard routine of making people bark like dogs or making them believe their seats were on fire. But at the end of the night, he said he'd like to show another side of hypnosis: the ability for hypnosis to help delve deep into forgotten memories, not just from this life, but from past lives that have gone before. She watched as her mate sat on a seat in front of the pub, her eyes closed, talking conversationally about her life in Ancient Egypt. It was amazing to watch, but did she believe it? No. Of course not. Now, though, she wasn't so sure.

But how would that explain the familiarity of the guy behind the counter? Or the position of the blackboard on the wall?

She snapped out of her trance as the plate was put on the table.

‘There you are,' smiled the guy, ‘one cheese and ham toastie, and I'll just get your tea.'

She smiled back, and watched the guy return to the counter, dragging his feet behind with a scuff, scuff, scuff.

She picked up her toastie, but her attention returned to the photo on the wall once again. She felt herself being pulled in, only to be pulled out with the sound of that scuff, scuff, scuff of the guy from the counter coming over with her tea.

‘And here's your tea,' he said. ‘Enjoy.'

‘Thanks,' she said.

And off he scuffed again. Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff …

Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff …

…

… scuff, scuff …

…

…

… scuff …

… scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff …

… scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff. Scuff, scuff. Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff …

…

…

…

… scuff.

She remembered now.

I've got a mate, Roddy, who told me about a break-in he had a few weeks ago. It's only now he felt he could speak about it, and I can understand why, because what happened was pretty fucking bad.

He told me that he heard a sound coming from his kitchen in the middle of the night, but that was nothing new. He had this dishwasher with a special feature where it would pop the door open when it was finished, letting all the steam out. So if he heard a sound coming from somewhere in the house, he'd just assume it was that. But this night he thought he could hear something else. The floor creaking. And mumbling.

He picked up a fork that was sitting on his bedside table – it was the only kind of weapon he could find – and he headed out the room. He told me that, in hindsight, he should have just stayed in there and hid under the bed. But he went out into the hall. Nobody was there, and he couldn't hear anything coming from anywhere else in the flat, so he thought it was maybe nothing. But when he opened the living-room door, somebody shone a torch in his face then hit him with it over the head.

He remembered decking it, and being held down by somebody. Then a lamp got turned on, and he could see that there were two guys. Both of them had their faces covered with scarves and they had their hoods up. The one that was holding him down asked him where his bank cards were and got Roddy to tell him the PINs, before telling the other one to fuck off to get the money out the bank. The one that was holding him down found the fork and held it to Roddy's face, telling him that if he tried to move then he'd take out his eyes.

When the other guy was away to the cash machine, the guy that was holding him down pished on the floor. Roddy said he didn't know if the guy was trying to humiliate him or if he genuinely needed to pish without taking his eyes off Roddy, but either way it was degrading. It created a puddle on the laminate floor, and Roddy was face down in it. And he couldn't move away because of the fork at his eye.

When the other guy came back, the one holding him down stood up and booted Roddy in the chest. He told him that if he tried to report any of it to the police then the pair of them would come back and kill him; they knew where he lived.

Pretty fucking bad.

Anyway, I got myself one of those dishwashers, they're magic. I didn't know they existed until Roddy told me. With my old one, you had to open the door manually, and if you forgot, all the steam turned back to water, leaving the dishes wet.

Now they're bone dry and can go straight into the cupboard.

There once was this guy doing a shite. Let's call him Donnie.

He was doing a shite in the toilet in his house. Trying to, anyway, but he had a feeling he was in for a wait. It was going to be one of them. One of those right tearjerkers. He was fine at the moment, but he knew that somewhere down the line, in maybe five, ten, fifteen minutes, things were going to get hard. He didn't want to think about it, so he thought about something else. He looked at his fingernails, then looked at the floor. Then he looked straight ahead, then back to his nails. Then he looked to the tiles on the wall, the ones to the right, above the bath. And that's where his mind stayed. God, he hated those tiles.

The tiles were purple, ugly as fuck, but they were nothing to do with him. He'd only moved in about six months ago, and despite the effort he'd put into doing up the rest of the house, he never got round to doing up the toilet. It was low priority, as far as he was concerned, hardly the most important room in one's home – it's the room you shite in, after all. But it was a bit of an embarrassment when he got people round. He'd always have to get his excuses in quickly before they wandered off to the toilet, explaining that he hadn't got round to doing it up and that he knew it was a state, just in case they actually thought he was responsible for it or that he planned on keeping it like that because he was into it. They really were that bad, the tiles. What was worse was that they were only on that one wall. It would be bad enough if it was purple all around, but the fact that all the tiles in the toilet were white except for this one wall, it just somehow made it worse. Maybe it was because the purple stood out more against the white, but it was probably because the white tiles showed you how good it could have been, and then you got this big ugly wall of purple that ruined everything. Why the fuck did they do that? Maybe that was the worst thing, the mystery, wondering what possessed them to go and ruin a perfectly good—

One of the tiles moved.

That's what it looked like anyway. He didn't know which tile moved, if any, but it felt like one of them had changed their angle slightly, showing a slightly different reflection of the toilet than before. It could have just been him moving on the toilet, but he wasn't sure that he did move. It could have been his neighbour. Maybe his neighbour went into his toilet next door and the weight on the floor somehow had a knock-on effect on the wall, and … no. His neighbour wasn't on that side, his neighbour was behind the wall to the left of where he was sitting. Behind the wall to the right, the purple one, was, well, he wasn't quite sure.

He opened the toilet door while remaining seated on the pan, and leaned around slowly for a look, for a wee reminder, being careful to not nip the half-inch of shite poking out his arse. The toilet was halfway between the upstairs and downstairs. He could see the kitchen downstairs, and that its ceiling probably came to about halfway up the purple tiles. Then he looked upstairs and saw that his bedroom was probably behind the top half. Except …

He raised his finger to point at the level of the upstairs floor, where his bedroom was, then he drew an imaginary line from there to inside the toilet and along the purple wall.

Hold on. Hold on a second here. That's strange.

The bedroom floor seemed to start quite a bit higher than halfway up the toilet wall, like there was some kind of gap between the kitchen ceiling below and the bedroom floor above. Not just a wee gap for the pipes and electrics, but a gap of considerable height. About the height of a dog, and a Great Dane at that. That's hell of a strange. He wondered if he was just being stupid and filling his head up with interesting thoughts to divert attention from the task at hand. But there was no doubt about it, there was something behind those tiles. There was a gap unaccounted for. What the fuck is that, man? That's freaky. So freaky that the shite that was making good progress out his rear end just stopped. It just hung there, as if it was as freaked as he was.