Given lodging
Big Lou would have been happy to discuss theology at greater length with Fat Bob had it not been for her eagerness to find out what happened next. This was Oliver Twist, she thought – the universal story of the young man cast adrift in the city. Predators circled, ready to dazzle and then devour the innocent in all their guilelessness. Being press-ganged into the Navy might not be as unattractive a fate as it seemed, when conscription into a street gang was a possible alternative.
“Tell me one thing, Bob,” she said. “Does this have a happy ending?”
Bob looked puzzled. “My story? A happy ending? I’m not quite there yet, Lou, not quite at the end …”
She smiled. “Oh, I know you’re not, Bob. But this particular chapter of your life – this bit in Glasgow: does it end well? You see, I can’t bear an unhappy story. I just can’t.”
Bob reassured her. “There’s no unhappy ending, Lou, so you can stop worrying. You see, I don’t like unhappy endings either.”
“People tell me it’s burying your head in the sand,” Big Lou continued. “They say that life is hard – cruel even. They say that the only story worth telling is one of how things go wrong.”
Fat Bob snorted. “That’s just not true, Lou.”
“Of course it isn’t. There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don’t rant and rage.”
Fat Bob nodded his vigorous agreement. “You’re right. Because if there weren’t, then would any of us carry on? I don’t think so, Lou. There’d be no point.”
He spoke with such feeling that Big Lou felt there was nothing she could add. And she knew then, as if she had not known before, that this was the man whom she had always hoped would exist. The others – the Elvis impersonator, who had shown his true colours at that desperate Elvis convention at the Crieff Hydro, the slightly seedy chef, the Jacobite plasterer – were all a distraction. This man was the person for whom she had been destined all along. She had read somewhere that all of us, no matter what our personal predilections might be – and creative Eros bestowed so many options – all of us cherished the hope that there would be one whom we could love with all our heart because he or she was just right; that we knew what we were looking for, even if we sometimes seemed to pursue the very opposite, and consequently, and with utter predictability, were unhappy, unbelieving of the optimistic lies we told ourselves.
As she looked at Fat Bob, thinking just this, he looked at her, and thought much the same thing. He closed his eyes. She was real, because she was still there when he opened them; she, who could have been sent by some divine agency charged with the consolation of those from whom the world, thus far, had withheld much consolation.
“I’ll tell you what happened, Lou,” Bob continued. “I got back to my shed and lay there in the dark, wondering what I would do the following day about some clean clothes. I could get away with what I was wearing for one more day, perhaps, but I had left the rest of my things in the house I had run away from and I was not going to go back there.
“We take a lot for granted, don’t we – those of us who have somewhere to live; who have a washing machine to launder some clothes; and somewhere to wash ourselves and clean our teeth? If you live on the street, you don’t have any of that, and you have to work out every day how you’re going to do any of those very ordinary things.”
Big Lou nodded. “I can imagine it, Bob.” “I got to sleep eventually and slept through until I heard a delivery lorry grinding its gears in the road outside. I opened the door of my shed and looked out – and saw a girl staring at me. She was about my age, and she was standing there, holding a lead with a small black dog at the end of it. I did not know what to do. I wondered whether I should run away – it would have been easy enough to push past her and disappear down the road, but something stopped me from doing that. I think it was the fact that she was looking at me with concern.
“The first thing she did was to ask me my name. I told her, and then she said, ‘Why are you in my Uncle Billy’s shed?’ I said that it was because I had nowhere else to sleep. She took a moment or two to take this in, and then she asked where I had come from. I answered that question, telling her that I had come to Glasgow to find a job and to send money back to my mother and family. Then she said, ‘You can’t live in a shed, you know. You can come back and stay at our place. It’s just round the corner.’
“I said, ‘But what will your parents say? They won’t want me.’
“She did not seem to be worried about that. ‘They won’t know,’ she said. ‘You can have my big brother’s room. They never go in there. It’s full of his stuff – you can hardly get in.’”
Big Lou’s mouth was wide open with astonishment. “You went?” she asked.
“Yes, and I moved in. She meant it. She let me in at nights and brought me food. She brought me some clothes from a charity shop.”
The first thing the girl did was to ask me my name. I told her,
and then she said, ‘Why are you in my Uncle Billy’s shed?’
“And they never found you?”
“Not for a whole week,” said Bob. “Then her mother came in and found me asleep on her big brother’s bed. I woke up to find her father standing over me. He was called Jock.”
“And then?”
“He listened to my story and then went off to discuss the situation with his wife. Then he came back and said that it was an awful pity that people like me had to sleep rough and that there should be a law against it. He said I could stay.” “And did you?”
Fat Bob nodded. “For four years,” he said. “They were so kind to me. They treated me as a member of the family. They also gave me a job in their bakery. And that was where I discovered my strength. They had large sacks of flour, you see, and these needed to be shifted from time to time. Usually, it took four people to do this – one at each corner of the sack – but I could do it by myself. Jim said that he had never seen anything like it, and it was his idea that I should compete in the Largs Highland Games. They took me down there in the bakery van and I won all the events I entered. That was the beginning.”
He had been talking for some time. Now he stopped.
“You were so lucky to have found those people,” she said. “It could have worked out very differently. For so many young people, it probably does.”
“There are plenty of folk like that in the world,” said Bob. “We don’t hear enough about them because we’re so busy looking at all the wretched things that happen.”
“Yes,’ said Big Lou. “The good things that happen – the acts of kindness, the concern for others …”
“Are forgotten about,” said Bob. “I wish it were otherwise.”
“So do I,” said Big Lou. “But it isn’t, is it?”
© Alexander Mccall Smith, 2021. A Promise of Ankles (Scotland Street 14) is available now. Love in the Time of Bertie (Scotland Street 15) will be published by Polygon in hardback in November 2021.