Day 2

Hard going today, was on a computer course in Birmingham and didn't get home til 7.30 with my head a shed. So forgive me for not reaching the count, I'm not so short but I'll make it up tomorrow, I promise....

Shugsy’s real name is Allan Burns but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call him that since school. Come to think of it, even the teachers ended up calling him Shugsy in the end. Shugsy is, well, a bit slow or, as Dorothy describes Gregory in Gregory’s Girl; slow and awkward, yeah slow and awkward. It is almost as if the teenage Shugs had carried on growing physically but mentally he hasn’t really kept pace. It’s not as if he’s thick or anything, it’s just occasionally it takes a while for the hamster to pedal the wheel quick enough for the light to burn at 100 watts. Marlene and me just treat as him as a lovable dope really, he’d probably have been better off being born as an Old English Sheepdog but then we’d have had no-one to lug the furniture around. Shugsy comes from a long line of Shugsy’s, his dad and granddad both carried the name but I’ve never satisfactorily found out where it comes from, it’s just some Glasgow thing, which is where he was born and lived until his mum brought him down to escape from the relentless grind of nineteen seventies Girvan. Even though he’s been south of the border for twenty odd years, he’s never lost his accent, if anything it’s got more pronounced as he gets older. Put it this way, we didn’t need the subtitles on when we watched Rab C Nesbitt or Chewin The Fat, we just got Shugsy to tell us what was going on. As I said Shugsy can look a bit imposing as he clatters down the street, I always remember when we were about fifteen and people were giving him a bit of a wide berth as we strolled along and he turned to me and said ‘why’s everyone lookin’ at us funny George?’ I just shook my head, and he still doesn’t know the effect he has on strangers. Having said that, I’ve never seen him raise more than his voice, and he doesn’t even do that except when he’s blootered. We did fall out once but it was over something so trivial I doubt he remembers, I do though, at the time we were twelve or thirteen and it seemed like that was the end of everything, I remember not seeing him for a month during the summer holidays and worrying about what I was going to say when I saw him again. Then we bumped into each other in town and it was like we’d only seen each other a couple of hours previously. I suspect he’d be the same if I emigrated to Australia and we met up again decades later. So that’s us; good old dependable, slow and awkward Shugsy, sweet-natured dreamer Marlene and me, the brains of the operation, God help us.

I’m sitting here now looking at a photograph of the three of us. We’re sitting on the top of some hillside in the Lake District somewhere. The camera was balanced on a cairn as I remember and I’d set the self-timer and run back into shot. Just as the flash went off though the camera had fallen slightly to one side, meaning we’re a bit lop-sided but the picture is so good that I kept it anyway. Marlene is looking a bit wistful, her chestnut hair blowing over one eye and she’s shielding her other eye with her hand. Even though the sun is reflected on her face, Marlene’s skin still looks pale, almost pearlescent, as it always did. I’m turned slightly to one side trying to bat a mosquito away and Shugsy’s standing between us both, one arm on my shoulder and the other paw wrapped round Marlene’s waist, with his tongue hanging out, the daft ha’peth. He’s got some ridiculous sunglasses balanced on his bushy head, which wasn’t like him, they were probably mine and he wanted to borrow them for comic value. The light is perfect, that time that my mother always calls ‘the best part of the day’ to which I always feigned ignorance and it drives her batty. I know she’s referring to the light you usually get only at dusk when the sun is balanced between up and down. Funny how things turn out really, if I could have stayed there forever I would have been happy but once the balance got tipped away from me, I knew things were never going to be the same. I’ve never really cried since but I knew now I was about to let go. When the levee broke inside of me I sobbed until I was dry heaving and I had to hide the photograph because the pain was physical.


It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the three of us were big into role-playing. And by that I don’t mean the sort of idiotic scenario you have to do in some office training course. I had to do one of those once when I started working for the well-known sandwich sellers I earned a crust from (‘scuse the pun). It was the usual customer and ‘sandwich artist’ (their title for the drones behind the counter) set-up with the twist that the ‘customer’ used to work for the firm and demanded a sandwich that we no longer provided. I was nearly sacked there and then as I recall, after inviting the customer round the other side of the counter to see if they could find the salami that they insisted we still sold. I’ve never seen the point of acting out situations which happen in real life every day, I learnt more in the first week ‘on the job’ than I ever did in ‘Sub University’. I shit you not, they really did think sending new employees away for a fortnight to an industrial estate on the edge of Hemel Hempstead and issuing us with a diploma in sandwich assembly was enough to equip us for a career in food management. No, we were role-players of the hexagonal dice and spells variety. We started on the common-or-garden Dungeons and Dragons but soon graduated onto a variation which was based on the Star Wars trilogy. Look, I did warn you, it isn’t going to get much better than this, and much as I hate to put you off, if you really have an irrational hatred of geeks, it’s best we part company now, have a nice life. Stick with me though, it does get better, then it gets downright fucking heartbreaking and ends up….oh I dunno, getting a bit carried away there, my mother wouldn’t be happy with that kind of attitude.

OK, another thing while I’m being all up front and personal, our virginity status (Statii?) I know you want to know, don’t lie. Well, I’m not, just about but it was so long ago I may as well be. Marlene thinks she isn’t, but medically speaking we’re not sure. Basically, one night she decided she was sick of having the thing around so she got drunk at a works do and virtually threw herself at some poor sap who thought it was Christmas. Come to think of it, it was a Christmas do. Anyway, he was hoonered as well and she doesn’t know if he managed to park his car in the garage. They woke up the next morning, still in bed together but mortally embarrassed. She’s never spoken about it since and I’ve never asked, so I assume nothing has happened since. Shugsy had his heart broken when he was sixteen, I don’t think he got around to consummating the relationship and he hasn’t been with a girl since. I don’t think of him as a sexual being and I don’t think he does either. So now you know.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, back when we spent many a happy evening trekking across the desert wastelands of Tatooine, or escaping from bounty hunters by the skin of our teeth in a knackered old spaceship. I almost always took the role of gamesmaster, Shugsy didn’t really have the breadth of imagination required to conjure up an alien world and Marlene didn’t want to give up her character which seemed to be pitched somewhere between Princess Leia and Boadicea. God alone knows how many hours we spent, I can’t even remember when we stopped or why, I guess real life took over for a while and we just never got back into it. I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I’d find all the old gaming stuff, probably in the commodious wardrobe up in the loft room that looks like it should be the gateway to Narnia. I bet Marlene and Shugsy would be up for re-animating the old characters. It wouldn’t be quite the same though, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

Daily Word Count: 1,474
Total Word Count: 3,282
% under target: 1.56%
Words to go: 46,718
Word (s) of the day (thanks L&K!): commodious & pearlescent