I left and walked by mistake to my old flat, to the red fire escape in Thistle Street. Now even though it was late I climbed to the very top, and the view from there is terrifying. I peered through Tom and Sandra’s window. The telly was on, the flat dark, and they had fallen asleep on the settee, watching some late-night film. The young couple were spread out and tousled, lying half clasped to each other. Jep had crawled on top of them and rested there, content.
I banged on the glass door till they awoke and let me in. I put ‘Love is in the Air’ on their stereo and danced madly. I made them dance, too. They laughed and danced on the settee, bouncing up and down, and I stood on the kitchen work surface, dancing there. And Jep stood up too. He has found his feet. He was dancing before he can walk.
I knelt to dance with my son. We put the song on replay replay replay. I gave myself carpet burns dancing with him, like the carpet burns I’ve got from fucking Stephan. All of these burns are celebratory ones. These are my Burns nights.
Sometimes I know I am a proper person. Sometimes I know I live in the same world as other people, that I know the things they know, that I can get by the way they do. I have competence, nous, knowhow, capability, confidence, bravado and pluck. I am your average man or woman in the street. Wiring plugs, putting on a double duvet cover, having to do with the council. None of us any wiser than the other. No one is better or worse than me.
Other times I tell myself Andy, you’ve not got a fucking clue,
Last night I was in Deep Sea, the fish shop across the road from CC’s. It was one in the morning and I hadn’t eaten all day. They said, “You’ll have to wait ten minutes for fish.”
All right. I was starving. And my fish would be fried fresh and perfect. Smuggle it back to the flat for Jep and me. A shared midnight snack. Make the flat smelly with fish and hot grease. Nanna Jean once said “Never go too early to the fish shop. They’ll heat up last night’s leftovers. The hardened, stewed-over scraps. Better wait ten minutes while they fry up the new.”
So I lean again the cold window, sitting with two hard lads with footballer’s perms. Their mate is at the counter and they’re all waiting for fish. Sniggering and scowling at each other, the mirrors, the deep-fat fryers, the woman serving on, bored and sweating in her blue-checked pinny.
The Polish men come in and the fun begins.
Oh ay, the boy at the counter raises an eyebrow to his pals. Look at the state of this pair. They are a gay Polish couple, middle – aged, one more pished out of his mind than the other. It is the worst-for-wear one, the scraggily bearded, dirty-overcoated one, who speaks the better English. He holds all of his Scottish notes out for counting and demands their special.
Hard-faced by nature, the proprietor looks at him, hand on hip, her feet foursquare in sandals on the tiled floor. The bank of fat fryers between them, she stands her ground. “Fish will be ten minutes. That special enough for you, doll?”
He doesn’t follow. “You do me your special in two minutes, and I take that,” he says, provoking laughter in the boy at his side, who slouches and leans in close. “You’re laughing at me?”
“Yep,” says the boy. “I’m fuckin’ laughing at you,” making his friends beside me crease up even more.
“You do a special in two minutes,” says the Pole. “What do they do in the special?” he asks.
The boy blinks. “They’ll do you a deep-fried Mars bar.”
“A…?”
“A bar of chocolate. Tossed in the deep fat. Battered like a fish,” the boy grins. “Heart attack and chips.”
“You laugh at me again.”
“You take your pick.” The boy spreads his work-chapped hands.
Here the woman behind the counter gives me a rapid semaphore. She mouths half of two or three words at me. My fish is almost done. Two pounds seventy. Do I want salt and sauce on that?
And I nod back, shrug, mouth bits of things to her and between us make it all understood. So easy.
The Polish man is getting his friend to help him pick out things at random. They point at things in the glass tanks, where everything is battered and looks the same. Now his friend is in a hurry to go. He doesn’t speak the language, but he knows they are being laughed at. We are all laughing at them, even the grim woman serving on.
“Some of these...and this...and that.”
Battered mushrooms, black pudding, haggis.
“Salt and sauce?”
“Salt and yes, pepper, everything.”
The boy beside him explodes in mirth, “Pepper! You don’t ask for pepper!” His friends laugh too and I think, that’s right. You don’t ask for pepper in a fish-and-chip shop. But why not?
The pole looks at the boy and there’s a sexy look in his eye. Bless him if he thinks this is flirtation. “You think this is funny?”
The boy tosses his head. “Who is this cunt?”
“Come and eat my special with me?”
The boy tells him to haddaway tae fuck and the Pole’s friend – the less articulate, more cautious friend – leads him away, out of the shop, and down Leith Walk.
The woman at the counter rolls her eyes. She does it for my benefit. I’m thinking: I’m included. I’m part of those who get the joke. With a flick of her head she tells me the fish is ready.
I don’t often go to cloney, denim-and-leather, flock-wallpapered bars like this. I’m out with German Angie and this bar, in the New Town, quite close to the block of flats where she
