Читать книгу That’s Your Lot - Limmy - Страница 5

George had a baby. A wee baby boy, called Sam. And he wanted to make his son proud. Proud of his old dad. You couldn’t really make a baby feel proud of you, but George was thinking more about the future.

He wanted Sam to look back, when he was older, and think, ‘I’m so proud of my dad. He was there for me and cared about me. That man there is my dad.’

George was out one day with Sam, pushing him in his pram, and he was thinking about all that. All that stuff about making his son proud. He was looking at his son’s face looking back at him in the pram. Sam would look at George, then the sky and the people walking past. George wondered if Sam would ever remember all this, how much George was there for him.

Probably not. And that was a shame.

‘Watch yourself, pal!’ said somebody.

George stopped, and he saw a few workies looking at him. George had been walking on the pavement, and just a few feet in front of him was a new bit of pavement. The workies had been laying some fresh concrete, and it was still wet. The workie wanted to stop George before he went over it and left a mark.

‘Thanks,’ said George.

George had seen what happens when somebody went over wet concrete. You see it all around if you look for it. Walk around and you’ll see bits of pavement with footsteps in them, or wheels from prams, or bikes, or some other mark made by people who didn’t look where they were going.

Sometimes it was deliberate, though. Sometimes people wrote their name in it. George remembered that somebody had written their nickname outside the chippy where he grew up. It had been there for as long as he could remember. It was probably still there, and probably always would be. How was that for something to tell the grandweans?

Oh, and that got George thinking.

George watched the workies finish their work. He pretended to talk to Sam, as an excuse for hanging about. Eventually, some of them left in their council workie van, and some of them headed into a cafe nearby for their lunch.

George walked over to the edge of the wet concrete, and crouched down, like he was going to fetch something from the wee bag at the bottom of the pram.

Then he reached over to the concrete and began to write ‘Sam’.

As he made the letter ‘S’, he thought about Sam in the future, coming to this very spot, with George. George would tell him that he wrote it there. And Sam would know that his old dad was mad about him, even back then. He’d know that when he was a baby, his dad was there for him and thinking about him. He’d bring his mates and point to the writing and say, ‘That there was my dad.’

Just as George was beginning the letter ‘A’, a workie came out the cafe and asked George just what the hell he thought he was doing.

George said he was doing nothing. It was no use lying, though. He’d been caught red handed.

‘I asked you what the fuck you think you’re doing, mate,’ said the workie.

George tried to turn the tables by making a big deal about the workie’s swearing. He stood up and said, ‘Here, don’t you fucking swear in front of my wean. What’s your name, you’re getting reported.’

‘Fuck yer wean,’ said the workie, then he pointed at the writing. ‘I’m gonnae have to lay that again.’

George couldn’t believe his ears. He charged over to the workie, right over the concrete, and started shouting. ‘What did you say? Fuck my wean, aye? Fuck my fucking …’

The workie chinned him.

George punched him back, and the two of them fell onto the wet concrete.

The workie was much bigger, and held George’s face down, then he shouted for his workie mates to phone the police.

The police eventually came, and tried to take George away, but they couldn’t. The workie had been holding George’s face in the concrete until the police turned up. Now the wet concrete was dry and rock solid, and the left side of George’s face was stuck.

The police tried to talk to George, to calm him down, to tell him that they’d get him out, but he booted them away. He was fucking livid about how he was being treated as a criminal.

The police told him to go and fuck himself then, and they left him there. Then they took Sam back to his mum.

The next day, Sam and his mum came to visit George, to give him something to eat and drink, but mostly to tell him that he was a dummy. George didn’t want Sam seeing him like that, and he didn’t want to be told that he was a dummy, so he told her to fuck off.

So she did.

She came back a few days later. Then a few weeks later. Then she never came back at all.

George watched the years go by from down there on the pavement, as people offered him the leftovers from their kebabs or a drink from their half-finished bottles of beer. Somebody would sometimes put their jacket over him to keep him warm, but by the time he woke up the next morning, it had been stolen.

About ten years later, George saw Sam go by with his schoolmates.

One of his mates pointed at George and said, ‘That’s your dad!’, and Sam laughed.

Sam didn’t know it really actually was his dad, and neither did his mate. His mate just said it in the way that a person might point at a tramp and say, ‘Oh look, there’s your dad.’