“What’s the matter with you? Hey, leave your boyfriend behind. He’s got an old lady he could be cheering up, here.”
Simon shrugged helplessly. Wearing his trendy footballer’s top. Katy could have punched him, grinning like that. Shelley’s mum looked her square in the eye. “Hey, I’m not a wicked person. You’ye got to believe that.” She sounded so desperate, but spoiled that by very deliberately fetching one of Katy’s ciggies and taking a long drag. “I’m really not a wicked person.”
Their snowman is finished. Douggie did a sculpture unit on his art foundation course, so this isn’t your usual three blobs with eyes and buttons. “He’s a bit of a hunk!” says Shelley, stepping back to survey.
“I hate that phrase,” says Douggie, who can be prissy. He’s taken off his jacket, showing off his muscles and his green checky shirt. “Hunky. Like men were edible.”
Yet he has made a sexy snowman who, if he were ice cream or sparkling icing sugar, Shelley would have no qualms over eating.
“Race you,” says Douggie as he turns and runs out of the park. He leaves his sexy snowman, his flatmate, his jacket behind and he vaults the iron fence, back onto Queen Street. He’s pelting towards CC’s.
She’s used to him running off. Usually on their ad hoc nights out he’s never to be seen again and she knows he’s gone off with some feller.
Tonight, breathless, she catches up with him at the crowded bar. Karaoke night at CC’s. Two dykes are up doing Meatloaf. ‘Real Dead Ringer For Love.’ “Same old lot in here,” says Shelley, jabbing him in the ribs.
With a pint each they struggle through the upper floor, the black and white lino, the pressed bodies in denim, plaid, leather and Lycra, through the scents of two dozen aftershaves. Downstairs it’s Step-Back-In-Time night. They dance desultorily — loving it — to the Nolans, Tight Fit, Boney M. Someone shoves poppers under their nose and says she’s “Tanya, from Texas!” Douggie see Tanya in the gents later, handing her little bottle along the blokes at the urinal.
Past three there’s a new arrival in the sweaty basement.
He swaggers in wearing Douggie’s abandoned jacket and nothing else. The crush of bodies pulls back when he appears. Startled by his presence, his nakedness. His cool.
Shelley tries to tell Douggie. The newcomer dances at his shoulder. Breaking into his space.
I know he’s there, Douggie’s eyes tell her. Hers tell him: You’ve cracked it.
She draws back to let Douggie flirt.
Abba is on. Douggie dances with his new man. Soon it is time to go. Shelley tugs his elbow. “You can’t take him home!”
“Why not?”
“He isn’t real!”
“He’s real as anyone else here!”
“But...he’ll melt!”
Douggie laughs at her. His new man waits to be propositioned and taken home on the nightbus.
Shelley gets on the same bus at the top of Leith Walk. She feels like she’s walking three paces behind, so she won’t cramp his style. From the back seat she watches Douggie laugh and joke with his snow man. She stares at their twinned, white, shaved necks. The snowman’s is, of course, the whiter. As the bus slides through the glossy dark Douggie’s arm goes round his new feller’s shoulders. His hand kneads gently at the sexy back of that neck. The pressure and warmth of that gesture, she knows, is melting the snowman already. His flesh is glittering. Shelley stares at the streets going by and knows that next morning she’ll be there to talk it through with Douggie, when there’s nothing left.
OUT OF SEASON
“Don’t knock it Robert,” she told him.
Aunty Jane was getting cross as she clip-clopped across the piazza di San Marco clutching her useless sun hat, swinging her bag and scattering the evil pigeons as she went. “We can’t help the time of year,” she went on. “It’s cheap, all right? That’s all that matters.” Robert took a last look at the towers, domes and scaffolding, and followed her across to the arcade of shops. They were glowing with coloured crystal and glass, beckoning to her through the fog.
That’s all she wanted to come for, he found himself thinking. The shopping. The shopping and the Italian men. Outside an expensive café a mini orchestra had started to play. ‘We Are the Champions’.
He hurried after his aunty knowing that, by the time he caught up with her, her mood with him would have changed. It always did. They were best mates really. Otherwise, how could they work together? How could they come on holiday together.
SANTA’S LITTLE HELPERS
Back at home in Whitby, they even had rooms next door to each other in the Christmas Hotel. They were high in the attic, far from the paying guests.
When Robert had been down on his luck and, after a new direction for his pitiful career, it had been Aunty Jane’s suggestion that he join her in the fishing town and become an elf, one of Santa’s happy little helpers in the Christmas Hotel.
The Edwardian hotel looked out blearily across the wet black rocks of the shore and the crumbling priory. It was filled mainly with pensioners and run by an evil-looking woman with grotesquely swollen legs, whose idea of fun was to celebrate Christmas every day of the year. The ancient visitors lapped her sales gimmicks up.
All summer Robert had waited on, ran around and been a general kind of servant, all dressed as an elf in a skin-tight green costume
