Tel

  Chapter 6

  I had discussed Glasgow with James at some length. Having never been on a stag party and growing up with stories of the stag being tied naked to a lamppost and left to freeze until death became him or, at the very least, he was forced to have a limb removed, it was what I expected to happen but times had changed or so James told me anyway.

  “Lampposts are cliché now Tel,” he said. “I’ve never tied anyone up. That’s the kind of thing my Dad’s lot would do. Now we go to strippers and brothels and generally go wild for a weekend.”

  “Oh right,” I said. “But what do we do to make it special for the stag?” I asked.

  “We give him a mankini to wear and buy him copious amounts of drink. Then, later on, we get him a few lappies. What more do you think he needs?”

  Throughout our conversations, James was quite adamant that what happened on the stag trip would stay on the stag trip. I hoped he wasn’t referring to himself but when I saw him thrust four packs of condoms in his suitcase, unless he was using them for water bombs, I suspected he was contemplating soliciting half of Glasgow’s female population.

  I’ve mentioned before that he had a history with the ladies but with Jess on his arm I always presumed he would be faithful and honour his commitment to her. After all, why would he want to risk losing a goddess like Jess? But, as I have also said before, Men are strange characters and sometimes do things that even those closest to them cannot understand. Still, the weekend was to be full of surprises and maybe James remaining monogamous would be one of them.

  The flight up to Glasgow was an interesting affair by all accounts. I didn’t really see what happened because the obligatory pre-flight stag pints put me to sleep as soon as I sat in my seat but even I knew it wasn’t wise to fill the groom with six jager bombs before take-off. It was only a matter of time before he brought them up, mid-flight, resulting in an alcoholic splattering over the poor gentleman in front of him, who turned the air blue with profanities before fishing jager bomb coated chips out of his hair and wiping down his smart blue pinstriped suit with paper thin airline toilet paper.

  I only woke when the stewardess decided to plough her trolley into my head, which was dangling in the aisle and had somehow managed to acquire a moustache and spectacles by the way of a black felt tip pen. I wouldn’t have minded if it happened just the once, the stewardess drilling her trolley into my head that is, but she did it again, each time apologising like it was a common mistake. To do it once was a mistake, a second time was just careless but when she walked past me and smacked me on the kisser for the third time, with her right arse cheek of all places, well, she had either taken offence to my new look or she’d taken a liking to it and this was her mating ritual. I couldn’t be sure, and I was pretty groggy from the beers, so I let it be, otherwise I would have done something about it. I just didn’t feel like it at the time.

  When we landed James warned me that Glaswegians were somewhat of a different breed but I didn’t realise how much until we jumped in a taxi and the driver asked ‘where to big maaan?’ stretching the last word out for what seemed like an eternity. I wondered who he was talking to because I’ve never been the biggest of blokes but he was certainly staring in my direction so I answered unwittingly. Whether he was making comment to my growing midriff I did not know but I took offence none the less.

  Once I’d been duly offended and he’d established where we going, Glasgow’s West End, the taxi driver took great delight in telling us all about his history, where he grew up, what his future plans were (to own his own taxi firm) and how much he disliked his wife ‘cos she doesnay give heed,’ but mostly he talked of his love for ‘tha Celic’ as he put it.

  Jesus did old Hamish go on about his football team. Not one of us had the bravery to burst his bubble and mention just how bog standard Scottish football was but after an extremely detailed and concise breakdown of their current defensive weaknesses, he moved on to describing the city he was born and raised in.

  “Aye boys, you canny beat a night oot in Glazzy I tell ya.”

  “What are the birds like mate?” asked James, fuelling my curiosity further with regards to his intentions.

  Hamish just smiled, nodded and said, “Aye…Aye.” I didn’t really know what ‘aye’ meant but I was dumbfounded even further when he elaborated, “You’ll get ya hole boys nay bother.”

  James, like the scuzz bucket he was, laughed his socks off but I, not wanting to be an ignoramus, quietly asked him what it meant.

  “Get your hole,” he said, “as in….” and preceded to put his right forefinger through a circle he’d made with his left hand.

  “It’s a grreat place ta go oot but,” Hamish added. I listened intently, concentrating hard on how he would finish the sentence but the ‘but’ seemed to be the end of it. He just stared straight ahead drumming his steering wheel as ACDC’s Shoot To Thrill played in the background. But what I thought?

  “Where do you recommend then Hambo?” James asked. You’d have thought they were old army buddies the way he called him Hambo and patted him on the shoulder but James could be a smarmy bastard with both women and men. I could tell he took to Hamish the minute he’d learnt a new word for sex; the horny bastard loved anything remotely associated with filth.

  “Arr, I cudna tell ya. It’s been a long time since I went oot but,” Hamish said, again failing to finish his sentence.

  “But what Hamish?” I asked.

  “Eh?” Hambo looked at me perplexed, like I was talking double Dutch or had a speech impediment he couldn’t understand but I didn’t think I was being unreasonable asking him to complete at least one sentence.

  “You said, ‘it’s been a long time since you went out…but’…” thinking if I helped him he might understand where his error lay.

  “No I didnae,” he replied, as blunt as a pound shop army knife.

  He was surely taking the mickey out of me and if he wasn’t a big Scottish bruiser of a taxi driver I may have got aggressive but lucky for him he was big and Scottish so I left him alone and ended the conversation there and then.

  When we finally arrived in the West End of Glasgow, Hambo charged us the paltry sum of £10 for a ten mile journey. I had visited London not long before and very nearly had a stroke when charged a month’s wages for a bus ticket, so £10 for a taxi journey, split four ways, meant I took to Glasgow immediately. And when I saw our accommodation, an extremely appealing three storey tenement building smack bang in the middle of the action, I nearly soiled myself because for £50 we got to stay for two whole nights and sample a Scottish breakfast in the morning, which was pretty much the same as an English one but with a stomach turning Haggis mixture of sheep’s heart, liver, lungs and guts thrown in.

  The West End was packed with restaurants, bars, retro clothes shops and second hand stores. There was an eclectic mix of people, young and old, whilst the number of bedraggled women visiting the nearby Tesco’s Extra in their pyjamas indicated that a University couldn’t have been too far away. If I had any kind of skills to offer other than administration and had been brave enough to move more than an hour from my family, I might have been tempted to live there but I was a Mummy’s boy by heart, whether I liked to admit it or not.

  “Hello love. Sorry to disturb you...” James creepily asked one young lady wearing tiger print pyjama pants. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought of him as being polite and adorable but little would she know it was probably a con so he could find out what kind of tigress she actually was. The moralistic part of me hoped he was done with his playboy ways and would remain faithful to the wonderful Jess; I’d never quite liked the idea of infidelity and wasn’t keen on thinking of my best friend in such a light; but there was this other part of me, the devilish side, which couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to all three of us if he did cheat. “…Could you tell us where we could go and have a few drinks? We’ve never been here before so it would be ext
remely kind of you,” he said feigning an upper class English accent, trying hard to hide his thick brummy tones.

  The James I had known and, I guess, sort of admired throughout the years had always been quite the character with women, slowly gaining their trust through courteous charm before eventually embroiling them in all sorts of self-deprecating acts. It wasn’t behaviour befitting of a trustworthy gentleman but it was successful nonetheless.

  “Nay problem. Tha best place is Ashton Lane, duwn tha alley next t’ Iceland. There’s hunners of pubs down there like. Doesney really kick off until after eight but,” said this short, blonde girl with a tattoo peeking out of her shoulder strap. She was quite attractive I must admit, in fact compared to the air kissing Victoria she was a bloody princess but her accent did her no favours and that word but reared its ugly head again. It was becoming a bit of a nuisance. But what? I was dying to know. Like me, James sort of waited for her to finish but by the look on her face and the awkward silence, he must have quickly got the impression she was done.

  “Oh right, thanks very much. That’s ever so kind of you. I say, will you girls be going there later on?”

  “Give it a rest ya bawbag,” the girl quipped before walking her tiger pants off down the road.

  Although I happily chuckled at her response the brief meeting didn’t really get my heart racing for the Glaswegian women. Oh, I know, it goes without saying that she wasn’t falling over herself to get to know me either but if it was a sign of things to come I was more frightened than turned on. For starters she couldn’t correctly pronounce the word ‘hundreds’ and calling someone a bawbag, if my translation was correct, was the type of behaviour I would expect from, well, a bloke really. It was unsurprising, however, that James found the whole thing a massive erection enhancer.

  “Wow, I like these Glasgow girls…feisty,” he said with a worrying smile on his face.

  The feisty female was right though; tucked away behind the main road was this old fashioned cobbled lane with a dozen or more bars and restaurants on it. It was all too sophisticated for my usual standards especially this converted cinema called The Loft which was exactly the kind of place I was usually way out of my depth in. I was insecure at heart so trendy places usually got me all nervous and panicky because I worried I wasn’t trendy enough and that the trendy people would look at me doubting my trendiness. Ideally, what I longed for was to own the coolest place in town, with a queue of people a mile long outside just so I would feel all important and special. It was very shallow of me I know but insecurities tend to make people shallow.

  As I stood in the toilet cubicle day dreaming and peeing all over the seat, like most men do, I even started to imagine what it would be like to own a bar.

  I knew I was shallow enough to want pretty women in my bar so I decided, as the boss; I could walk up and down the queue hand picking the talent as I went along. I wouldn’t take girls who knew they were pretty because nobody likes anyone who knows they’re pretty. I would only look out for the girls who were pleasing on the eye but didn’t know it or at least pretended they didn’t know it. I’d especially look out for girls who seemed genuinely nice, like they would help an old lady across the road and would be half decent in a conversation with my parents. I can spot nice girls from bad ones straight off. It’s usually because they actually take the time to speak with me, even if they don’t want to rip my kegs off like I hope but I appreciate it all the same.

  Manners cost nothing so if I picked a girl out of the queue and ushered her to the front but she made reference to the people left behind, like it wasn’t right that she should push in, then I’d probably let everyone in just to please her. Morals send me weak at the knees they really do.

  I wouldn’t want my bar being full of cavemen either, with ten men trying to maul one woman but sadly, for fairness and equality, there would have to be some blokes allowed in, probably a mixture of geeky fellas and the odd handsome devil. Even nice girls need to lust after a hot piece of ass every now and then; they just wouldn’t be caught blowing them in the toilets.

  If I’m one for equality though, then I would have to be fair to all demographics, there’s no point in being ageist so a healthy splattering of old bastards would get their chance to strut their stuff. I’d stick mainly to the 20-35 year olds but if Grandpa and Grandma Smith wanted a drink before bed then as long as they weren’t carrying a catheter they are okay by me.

  Profit would mean little in my bar; it’s more about the principles of the people. In fact, I reckoned I’d call it Principles Over Profit. No one would have a god damn clue what it meant but I would and, at the end of the day, that’s all that matters because it was my bar and my daydream.

  I must have been reflecting on Principles Over Profit for quite some time because I’d managed not only to cover the whole seat in urine but leak a large portion of it over my shoes as well but a friendly Glaswegian banging on the door telling me to ‘hurry up pisching’ brought me back to the real world.

  When I sauntered back to the stag, who had perked up after the horrors of the earlier flight, I found him chatting to a group of mesmerised ladies. Webber was a good looking chap by all accounts and, especially in our University days, had done a respectable level of heart breaking in his time but he’d strangely decided to get married at the ripe old age of twenty six, bang in the middle of his prime, therefore supposedly taking himself off the market but, like James, there was nothing to say he wouldn’t do anything inappropriate, after all it was his stag do and all kinds of misdemeanours were allowed on stag do’s apparently. Good guys are a rarity these days so if I had found Webber bollock naked in the toilet with a woman riding him like Sea Biscuit, I wouldn’t have been overly shocked.

  I wasn’t adverse to a one night stand myself, I wasn’t very good at them but I didn’t object all the same. However, a lot had happened in that week and I just didn’t have the energy to go through the whole rigmarole of going back to some woman’s house, yanking her bra off, fumbling around for ten minutes before dissatisfying her for two, only to feel awkward and ashamed for the rest of the night. I also had about twenty one pints in me by that point and getting Terence Junior to work would have proven problematic both on a performance level and an emotional one. I’d probably end up telling the poor girl all about James and Jess and cry on her face whilst we were doing it missionary style. I’d be hammering away like a robot, desperately trying to maintain my woody whilst she’d be wailing Scottish sex words to me, rolling her R’s like a maniac, ‘Oche ay, that’s the spot, rrrright therrrre.’ The next thing she’d feel wasn’t a rousing crescendo in her nether regions but beads of snivelling snot on her face and a flaking penis inside her. No, I wasn’t prepared to do that to myself or my victim.

  Even when one of Webber’s new lady friends surprisingly took a shine to me, I didn’t jump at the chance to snog her face off because I just wasn’t up for it if truth be told. Plus, she kind of scared me a little bit and, to put it politely, she was pig ugly.

  “Eh, ya wee hotty. When ya gonna give us a kiss but…?” she asked me, quite sure of herself. God knows what she wanted with me but, looking back, I reckon I only fuelled her interest because I just didn’t give a damn whether she liked me or not. Some women are only interested when you don’t give a damn which doesn’t make any sense to me but it’s kind of a solid rule with them.

  “But what?” I asked. I’d had enough of these Scots not finishing their sentences so I challenged her to do just that.

  “What?” she asked flummoxed by what, I thought, was a straightforward question.

  “You said but at the end of your sentence, so I’m asking you but what?”

  The drink had taking its toll so I was feeling brave and ballsy and thought it my right to stand up for every English Language teacher out there.

  “Nay big man, I never.”

  “Listen love,” I continued, cheeky as hell, “You did. You started a senten
ce and then finished it with but… but, to me, that means you have something else to say.”

  I’m not going to lie, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder but the funny thing was, the more I got annoyed with her, the more I felt like giving her the once over, maybe going in for the kill myself like, almost to punish her in whatever feeble manner I could muster. I don’t mean I was going to beat her, just give her ten seconds of frantic, hard love making.

  “Hey hey hey big fella. You’re a hotty like but I canny have ya speaking to me like that. I dinny know what you’re talking about. Maybe I do say but at end of a sentence but it might be a Glasgae thing, I dinny know, but dinny think ya can talk ta me like that.”

  She got feistier the more annoyed she became and kept pronouncing but like it was the last god damn word in the dictionary. I, on the other hand, became a mixture of sexually stimulated and scared. I’ve never been one to handle aggression very well, especially when it is directed at me, which meant I usually ended up doing something daft to extinguish the situation.

  In this instance I chose to kiss her. It wasn’t the wisest thing I’d ever done, what with her being a bit of a lunatic and all, but with the alcoholic influence I felt a bit of a hero so I went in for the kill. Granted, it could have been better executed. First of all, and for reasons I still can’t comprehend, I went in tongue first. As you might have guessed by now, I’m fairly shambolic at kissing but I dived in like Victoria did when she showered me with saliva. Secondly, and again I’m not sure why, I felt her left breast as I did so.

  As you can well imagine, when I eventually let go she wasn’t best impressed that she was sporting a wet philtrum and a sore nipple and so stepped back and socked me one right in the midriff but it wasn’t like in the movies where the woman gently slaps the guy and, despite the shock of it all, he manages to stay on his feet and maintain his dignity; no this was a punch to the gut, a really hard one and I keeled over like I’d taken a bullet. I knelt there wheezing like a god damn asthma victim, listening to sniggers ringing round the bar and a ‘Jesus wept’ from James. Not one of them came to help me though so I slowly rose to my feet to face the rest of my beating but it never came, not physically anyway.

  “Ya deserved that big man,” she said, not sounding overly annoyed.

  “Yeah I guess I did. Sorry.”

  “Well, if I havnae damaged your guts, how about we go back ta mine and teach ya how to kiss proper like?”

  I reckon I judge most situations quite well. Once, I knew my Nan wouldn’t appreciate Goldie Lookin Chain’s ‘Your Mother’s Got a Penis’ but I still played it at her 80th birthday party and then watched her cry into the cake. It’s a kind of sixth sense I have but it didn’t work for me in Glasgow because I truly never expected such a reaction. After being bulldozed in my belly however, I wasn’t ready to turn her down but before I could formally agree to her request she grew tired, grabbed my head and told her mate she was taking me home to play with my bobbie. Again, I was still new to the Glasgow dialect but I presumed she meant Little Terence.

  As I was dragged out the door, James gave me a fist pump like I was some kind of hero. I remember the fist pump vividly because it was the last time I saw a friendly face for ten whole hours. I was ordered to a house in the south side of Glasgow, miles from where I was actually staying, so it felt more like a kidnapping than anything else. She could have carried out all sorts of devious acts on me and no one would have known where I was or how to save me. For all they knew, I could have been in a basement, tied to a chair with an apple in my mouth as she whipped me half to death whilst her husband looked on in the corner. Thankfully, that never happened but you never do know who you’re going home with.

  The taxi journey back to her house was eventful to say the least. For fifteen minutes she feverishly tried to unzip my flies as I frantically tried to do them up again. I’m not overly keen on getting Little Terence out on public transport at the best of times but even more so when I got the feeling that if mine had flopped out the taxi driver would have quickly whipped his out as well, so eager was he to stare at us through the rear view mirror.

  I was slightly concerned that he was staring in the hope of seeing my cod piece, obviously that would have been weird for a heterosexual male, but I was hopeful he was simply trying to get an eyeful of my tormentor’s chest. She did have some rather large assets and discretion was not one of her better qualities.

  “Do you like what you see?” she asked, as she licked me ear. She could have been asking either one of us but I chose to answer on both our behalf’s.

  “You have a specious quality about you,” I told her.

  “A wha?” she replied, dumbfounded. Instead of answering I just kissed her again, partly because I couldn’t be bothered to explain it and partly because I didn’t know how to. It was a word I had recently picked up from a book but didn’t really know its exact meaning, I just felt like sounding intelligent for a change. I think I said it in the right context although she didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “Talk dirrrty to me,” she drooled in my ear.

  I’d never been one for acting. Once I played a sailor in a school production of Sweeney Todd but that was the extent of my abilities so getting involved in role play wasn’t a strong point I must say.

  “Errm, not in here hey, the taxi driver might hear,” I answered, sheepish as hell.

  “Talk dirty to me!” she demanded so, hoping to avoid another beating from Rocky, I had to say something to save myself from one. The trouble was, the taxi driving perv was almost soiling himself at the thought of some dirty talk. I could tell he was listening to every god damn thing we said anticipating filth to seep from our lips so I felt the pressure even more.

  “Errm…you like that do you? You like that?” I said as I stroked her hair.

  “Like what? You’re nay doin anything?” she replied, disgruntled, so I moved on from massaging her hair like a salon assistant and continued with,

  “Oh, wait till I get you home…you’re in for so much trouble you really are.”

  “Oh yeah, what kind o’ trouble?”

  That turned her on somewhat because she quickly grabbed my crotch, smiling like a crazed maniac.

  “You’re…just in for trouble…I’m going to do things to you that you never imagined,” I said very uncomfortably. I don’t know who was enjoying it more, Rocky or Sir Pervsalot in the front seat.

  “Oche, yeah, what kind o’ things? Come on, tell me more big maan. Say dirrty things to mae.” She was breathing pretty heavily at that point and was rubbing my crotch like she was trying to polish a scratch out of a car door.

  “Oh well…I’m going to…do you…hard…yeah, that’s right…do you!”

  When she stopped the scratch removal and started to eagerly look out the window I figured she’d come to her senses and realised I was useless at dirty talk but instead she requested that the pervert in the front seat drop us off next to a park that we could walk across and get to her house quicker; always a sensible thing to do in the middle of the night I thought. Not being from Glasgow and having heard wild rumours of stabbings, muggings and shootings on every corner, I wasn’t keen to venture across a badly lit, secluded area in the early hours of a Saturday morning but she assured me it would be perfectly fine and dragged me into the darkness, pushed me against a tree and frantically pulled my kegs down.

  On the whole, oral sex is something of a treat but sometimes it’s too much of a treat. Less than thirty seconds after she clamped her burgundy lips onto little Terence I could feel myself approaching the point of no return and had to whip it away sharpish before I painted her in months of pent up frustration, lying that I saw someone hiding in the bushes.

  Fortunately she believed me, “Oche ay, let’s get ya back then and ya can returrn the favour on me big man.”

  I wished she would have stopped calling me big man because it made me feel like a fraud if truth be told. I also wished she
hadn’t asked me to return the favour because I was completely hopeless at kissing her on the lips so I wasn’t going to fair much better when it came to her lady bits. To add to the ever growing pressure, when she unlocked the door and tentatively walked through it she turned to me and said, “Keep quiet. I dinny want to wake the kids.”

  Well, if I’d been nervous before I could barely concentrate after that, in fear of emotionally scarring her children if they happened to walk in on a complete stranger attempting to find their Mother’s erogenous zone whilst she wailed instructions at him.

  “You’re shite at this aren’t ya big maan,” Rocky stated, not long after we had got down to the business at hand.

  “Err, no no, I’m just a bit worried your kids might walk in that’s all,” I said trying to blame my inadequacies in the bedroom on her little scallywags.

  “Dinny worry big man, they know not ta come in,” she replied, as if it was a daily occurrence and the children knew the protocol when their Mum was playing hide the sausage. “Enough a this foreplay shite biggun, why don’t ya just do me!”

  In general, when a woman barks out a sexual order of any kind you know they mean business. They’re not messing about; they expect you to carry out their desires in their entirety and if they aren’t screaming the place down within ten seconds you’re branded a failure and a freak and likely to be shipped out in next to no time. The problem on my part was that attempting to ‘do’ Rocky required Little Terence to stand to attention but, at that exact moment in time, he had chosen to misbehave. The pressure of the situation and the inordinate amount of pints had taken its toll on him so I stalled her by nibbling and licking her breasts like they were a pair of chicken drumsticks but that only compounded my troubles because the more time I spent coating her chest in saliva the more I realised I’d been sold a dud. Throughout the night, two thirds of her assets had seductively and strategically been on show, leading me to believe that when the final third came out I’d be in for a real treat but once the wonderbra was off, well, I’d seen smaller headlamps on an artic lorry. It looked like she’d glued giant mushrooms to a set of water balloons and you know how much I hate mushrooms.

  “Ya got a Johnny biggun,” she asked slightly frustrated.

  “Ahh, no, no I haven’t. Shit, sorry,” I announced, feigning disappointment.

  “Dinny matter, wait there,” she said before rising from the bed with her bra around her waist, walking out the door and into what I feared was one of her children’s bedrooms. I heard muffled voices before she came back with a fresh ribbed condom of the strawberry variety.

  “Where did you get that from,” I asked, praying she hadn’t just borrowed protection from her fourteen year old daughter.

  “Ma wee girl had one in her room. Nae bother, we’re good to go.”

  In desperation I tried to put the condom on a flaccid Johnson. I knew it was a bold move, in the history of men I don’t think such a manoeuvre has ever been pulled off but I hoped that if I could at least dangle it off the tip, a miracle might just happen. All I succeeded in doing was losing it once my entry had been made. At that point the mission became a resounding failure, if it hadn’t been already, and our night took a turn for the worst.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted. “Are ye gay or someut?”

  I really didn’t know what to say. I mean, I knew I wasn’t gay but I also knew we weren’t going to have sex anytime soon. If I’d just let her finish the job off in the park I could have been home, half satisfied that I’d been able to perform, even if it was for only thirty seconds, but I knew that if I kept on trying she would have eventually beaten me up. I could think of only one thing to do and so I broke down and pleaded for her pity.

  “I’m so sorry; I don’t know what to say. It’s not you, it’s me; I’m just a bit messed up at the minute with some personal issues. I’m really sorry.”

  I sat on the end of the bed looking pitiful, hoping she would mother me and take care of me. I even sniffed a bit just for effect but she was like an iron lady, built of nothing but desire and contempt.

  “Ya bloody pansy, I’ll finish me-self off,” she said reaching into her bed side cabinet, knocking the contents of her ashtray on the floor, and pulling out what looked like a thirteen inch aubergine. I fell to the floor exhausted and leaned up against the edge of the bed, listening to her toy go to work. I was ashamed, embarrassed and drunk. I didn’t know where I was or who I was with. I could barely ask for a taxi number, not whilst she was enjoying herself, so instead I laid my head on the dirty carpet and tried to pretend I was anywhere but there.

  I don’t recall what the time was when I woke. I looked at my wrist but during the embarrassment of my so-called ‘one night stand’ I seemed to have lost my watch. It was still dark outside so I couldn’t have been asleep long but it was my stomach that woke me not the shame of my endeavours. Dragging myself off the floor I stumbled through the door and out into the hallway searching for a toilet.

  “Oh, ya woke up deed ya?” Rocky asked, disgusted with my mere appearance, closing the toilet door behind her. She still didn’t see the funny side of our sexual dalliance.

  “Yeah, sorry…” I apologised. I felt I should apologise to her for everything. “I’m actually desperate for the toilet…” I continued but she didn’t move or offer me entrance, she just stood there looking me up and down. “Can I go in please?” I asked like a naughty school boy waiting for permission from the teacher.

  “I woudnae if I were you big man. It needs a few minutes,” she answered without a hint of shame. Although I was nearly sick in my mouth at the thought of her recent concoction I was bursting at the seams so pushed my way passed, opening the door to what seemed like a stench of animal carcasses. Boy, if I failed to get it up before, the little fella was never going to rise after my nostrils had been victim to such a crime. Imagine if I had touched what had been swimming around her bowels with little Terence? He could have been contaminated for life.

  It was almost impossible to permanently sit there inhaling her toxic fumes so I took off my shirt in an attempt to cover my nostrils but the smell broke the cotton like a knife through butter and I figured I would simply end up dying in some stranger’s toilet from asphyxiation. However, amongst the trauma of it all I’d also missed a vital component of my visit, namely checking that the host actually had some God damn loo roll. Rocky had kindly warned me about the horrific stench but she failed to mention she’d used up all the paper as well, so I was left with nothing to wipe with but a white hand towel.

  I kind of panicked if I’m honest. I didn’t even think about asking her for a fresh batch, I’d already upset her enough so I just grabbed the hand towel and got busy regardless of how I was planning to dispose of the thing. When it came to doing so I merely saw an open window and launched the towel through it, thinking it would sail into the fresh air like a brown kite. The trouble was my eyesight had become slightly blurred by the gaseous fumes and my judgement was questionable because of the many beers so I hadn’t noticed the window wasn’t actually open. I can’t tell you how scared I was as I watched a brown and white towel sliding down the inside of the window pane, leaving a smelly smudge in its wake.

  I figured there was only one reasonable thing to do, a cowardly but nonetheless necessary thing, which was to leg it out of the house, escape the brown stained, erection diffusing prison and run into the cold Glasgow night air where freedom and oxygen were found in equal measure. So, I bolted out of the bathroom and down the stairs as fast as my barely wiped bottom would allow. As I did I heard a stir from Rocky’s bedroom but what did I care, I was gone, out of there and there was nothing she could do to stop me. Well, she couldn’t stop me but her locked front door could and my escape was duly halted by me frantically pulling at the handle, wishfully thinking it might magically open and that Rocky wouldn’t find me leaving smelly brown finger prints all over it.

  Needless to say the door
never did open in time and I’m pretty ashamed of what happened when Rocky joined me at the bottom of the stairs, wearing what seemed to be a watch similar to the one I had recently misplaced. I got out in the end but it was not without pain and suffering so, for the sake of my pride, its best I keep what happened to myself. All you need to know is that I learnt some valuable lessons that night which I hope never to repeat…but I am a man after all and I’m sure I’ll make the same mistakes again one day in the future.