Of Course I Love You,
I Just Don't Like You Very Much
By
J.E. MacKenzie
Mirador Publishing
First Published by Mirador Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 by J.E. Mackenzie
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers or author. Excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
First edition: 2011
Any reference to real names and places are purely fictional and are constructs of the author. Any offence the references produce is unintentional and in no way reflect the reality of any locations involved.
A copy of this work is available though the British Library.
IBSN : 978-1-908200-33-4
Legalities
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. A few liberties have been taken in describing actual people, places, events, organizations, and works to facilitate the recounting of the story, but any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, works or locales is entirely coincidental and is not intended at any point to be derogatory, defamatory or disrespectful to any such real person, organization, event, work or locale.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Author Biography
J.E. MacKenzie, originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, has studied and worked in a range of countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, India, Italy, France and, most recently, the Philippines. He is married with three daughters and one son. "Of Course I Love You, I Just Don't Like You Very Much" is his first, published novel, but he hopes very much that it will not be his last.
John Ewart MacKenzie, August 2011
Dedications and Thanks
I would like to dedicate this work in principle to my wife, Julie, and our four children, Cara, Andrew, Alexia and Natalya. Even over considerable distances at times, your love and support always make it worthwhile carrying out any project which might end up having some benefit for you.
I would also like to dedicate a supreme thank you to the people who took the time to proof-read early versions of the script and to provide ideas. I apologize if I've forgotten anyone but I am certainly indebted to Henriikka, Edith, Mary, Jeff, Charlie and Caroline-Anne. Many others have also been presented with various bits and pieces of manuscript and have presented helpful ideas. All brilliance is theirs. All omissions and apologies are my own.
Finally, I would like to close by thanking Sarah and all those at Mirador Publishing for guiding me through the publishing and production process, with all its technical, legal and other complications. Having struggled enough just to get a story together myself, none of what you find in the pages which follow would ever have seen the light of day without their assistance.
Guide to Scottish and Other Terms Employed
In order to assist readers who may not be entirely familiar with the Scottish vernacular and other terms employed from time to time in the text, the following guide has been provided. Most of these are purely Scottish slang elements although some have broader use throughout the United Kingdom and so are provided to assist non-British readers, as well as British readers who are, on the whole, more cultured and refined than most of the characters portrayed in the story.
A' - All
A'body - Everybody
Aboot - About
Ach - Expression of dismissal
Aff - Off
Afore - Before
Ah - I
Ahent - Behind
Ain - Own
An' - And
Arse - Crude expression for the human bottom, akin to ass in US English with which it is often considered interchangeable in UK English
Awa' - Away
Aye - Yes
Bairn - Literally "Baby" but can be applied to smaller children too
Bin - Garbage receptacle
Bog - Slang term for the toilet
Bollocks - UK-wide slang term, literally denoting the male testicles, but also widely used to indicate something of little to no worth, and also as an exclamation of annoyance
Buffer - An elderly person (applies to male and female)
Cannae - Can't
Car boot sale - UK equivalent of a US yard sale
Caud - Cold
Chav - Southern English equivalent of a ned in Scotland
Chippy - Shorthand term for a shop selling fish and chips
Clobber - Clothing
CofS - Church of Scotland, pronounced "C of S"
'Cos - Because
Crisps - Potato chips
Dae - Do
Daft - Stupid
Dearie - Term of familiarity or endearment
Dinna(e) - Don't
Doesnae - Doesn't
Eedjit - Idiot
Fag (UK) - Cigarette
Fag (US) - Homosexual
Falsers - False teeth
Fash - Worry
Fer - For
Flunky - Slang and not entirely polite expression for a functionary or official
Frae - From
Frazzled - Tired
Gaelic - Indigenous, Scottish language used in the Highlands and Islands
Gaunnae - Going to
Gimme - Contraction of "Give me"
Git (Noun) - A derogatory term referring to an unpleasant individual
Git (Verb) - Get
Glaikit - Stupid
Grub - Food
Guid - Good
Hae - Have
Haggis - A Scottish delicacy prepared from sheep's intestines and oatmeal
Handshandy - The act of masturbation
Hauf - Half
Heid - Head
Hisself - Himself
Holyrood - Location of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh
Hoose - House
HRH - His/Her Royal Highness (essentially an abbreviation to denote a member of the Royal Family in the UK)
Jings - Expression of surprise
Jist - Just
Jobby - Faeces
Kafflik - Catholic, as in Roman Catholic
Ken - To know
Kerfuffle - A fuss or commotion
Kirk - Church
Laddie - Young man
Ma - My
Mebbe - Maybe
MI6 - UK foreign intelligence service
Minger - Somebody lacking in physical attractiveness
Mon - Man
Motorway - UK English term for a 'highway' in US English
Nae - No
Naebody - Nobody
Nappy - Diaper
Ned - A young person, usually of low education, with a preference for knocked off alchol, casual sex, and "chilling out with their crew" over anything considered more beneficial to society
Ne'er - Never
NHS - National Health Service
No' - Not
Noo - Now
Numpty - Someone of low intellectual capacity
O' - Of
Och - Mark of emphasis, loosely equivalent to "Well" in other forms of English
Oor - Our
Oot - Out
Pear-shaped - Ruined
Polis - Police
Poncy - Derogatory term for someone or something too highbrow for their own good
Pratt - A stupid person
Proddy - Protestant
Puir - Poor
Quid - Slang term for a pound, the unit of currency of the United Kingdom, equivalent to the use of "buck" in the US to refer to a dollar
RAF - Royal Air Force
Ratarsed - Heavily drunk
Ruggerbugger - Aficionado of the sport of rugby
SAS - Special Air Service – the elite special forces unit of the British Army
Shite - Slang term for faeces, equivalent to "shit" in the rest of the Anglophone world
Snog - Verb or noun, indicating what is known elsewhere as a French kiss
Snuck - Sneeze
Spanner - UK equivalent of wrench in US English
Spod - Geek or nerd
Staun' - Stand
Tae - To
Tak - Take
Take the piss - To make fun of
Telt - Told
Territorial Army - UK army reserves
Tosser - Derogatory term for someone of low intelligence and/or malicious intent
Tosspot - An exaggerated form of the term "Tosser"
Trackie - A track suit
Trainers - Sports shoes, UK equivalent of sneakers in US English
Tyke - A young person, held in low esteem by the speaker
Wanker - Literally one who practises masturbation, but used more generically to denote someone of low intelligence and/or common sense
Wee - Small or little
Wellies - Rubber boots
Whit - What
Wi' - With
Withoot - Without
Ye - You
Yer - Your
Yersel - Yourself
Yon - That
Youse - You (plural)
Chapter 1
Fate. All things considered, it really is a bit of a bastard. Other than that, however, it has to be one of the most widely known, but little understood phenomena known to mankind. Everybody thinks they know what it is regardless, despite a wide range of perspectives. Some see it as the determining factor in all that could conceivably happen, others as just a cheap superstition used by failed tabloid sports journalists to flog off their drunken ramblings as some sort of mystical insight into what will befall the sad punters who are thick enough to buy their outpourings. Of course, you could quite conceivably believe in some sort of metaphysical entity overseeing human destiny without giving entire credence to Mystic Maggie's lottery choices on page 23 under the second division football results, or without being completely convinced that you will trip over a tabby cat and fall into the arms of your life's true love who will also conveniently resemble the fit one off Big Brother. Hence just about everyone everywhere could be said to hold some sort of concept of what Fate is in their minds, even if nobody really knows just what it is.
Actually, it is one of those rare, common bonds which unite people across the world in a common culture. Strangely ignored by the United Nations, for whom universality is essentially constrained to such issues as human rights or the rights of the child, it is nonetheless true that wherever you go across the whole globe, you will encounter certain, inalienable facts.
For example, why do public telephone kiosks invariably smell of urine ? It doesn't matter whether you wander into a clapped out phone kiosk in Glasgow, or a brand new, state of the art telecommunications booth in Kuala Lumpur, you can be guaranteed that it will smell of the same, stale, piss-sodden stench. The only thing to have made any dent in the prevalence of these telephone-cubicles-cum-urinals in recent years has been the rise in popularity of the mobile cellular telephone. Even so, though, you can still be pretty much guaranteed that wherever you do find a phone box, you need only open the door to be showered with a truly golden aroma.
Another common culture worldwide has to be that of annoying dogs. Again, from Helsinki to Johannesburg and back, otherwise distinct and disparate cultures are united by the common, human tendency to produce total morons who will insist on keeping an evolutionarily advanced, canine predator as a domestic pet. And it's not just the fact of keeping the next best thing to guaranteed extermination this side of a live-in Tyrannosaurus Rex which sows a common thread across these idiots. Far from it, there's a common culture as well. Display even the slightest misgiving about your chance of escaping an encounter with one of their domesticated eating machines, and the stupid sods will always profess, in a tone of indignant disbelief, that it defies common sense that anyone could see their slavering carnivore as anything other than a cuddly playmate.
"But really," they will claim, "he's very friendly and he never bites."
Yeah, well of course he doesn't bite you, you stupid bastard. You're a repeat meal ticket if treated well. Everyone else is just a one-off convenience snack. The fact that the dogs themselves seem to have figured that much out long ago does at least lend some credence to the belief that dogs genuinely are smarter than their owners. Even so, neither can really be noted as likely candidates for a Nobel Prize for Unprecedented Intelligence in the near future.
And so it continues. Reality TV, boy bands, the general inability to comprehend that if everyone insists on standing right by the door on a crowded bus, it does nothing to ease the overall congestion and discomfort. All these factors and many others besides do so much more to reveal our shared humanity all across the world than much of the cutting edge anthropology for which PhDs and Professorships are routinely handed out. Yet by virtue of their banality and perhaps the rather dim light they shed on human nature, they are just as routinely ignored by the academic and respectable worlds.
One exception, however, to this otherwise glaring oversight by the academic community, is the concept of Fate, which has at least attracted a degree of study of one form or another, and been recognized as a common thread in the tapestry of humanity's development. To an extent, this may be due to its strong resonances with religion, which has always held a preeminent place in the world of study. It was built in to the Greek and Roman religious pantheons. Even if the precise form of Fate, or the Fates, could vary between that of beautiful women and vicious harpies, they were there all right. You might just want to double-check what you were getting into if blind-dating a girl in ancient Greece who put "Fate" in answer to a question such as, "If you could be said to look like a goddess, which one would it be ?"
Fate got a bit more sidelined in the Judaeo-Christian tradition where it gets made pretty clear that you don't have multiple deities hanging around with little more to do than screw their creations over for the hell of it. Theological scholars could nevertheless debate whether or not some Biblical predictions might constitute a precedent for a form of Fate, however. For example, when Jesus told Peter that he would deny Him three times before the cock crowed, did that constitute a fatalistic precedent which would have been impossible for Peter to avoid whether he wanted to do it or not ? Or did it simply forecast what Peter would have done in any case by virtue of the exercise of his own free will ? Or did it prove little definitively other than the fact that if He hadn't been so pre-occupied with saving humanity, Jesus could have had a spectacular career fleecing the bookies down the local chariot-racing stadium ?
Meanwhile, over in the Far East, the Hindu tradition took more of a middle ground with the concept of Karma. More precisely defined than in the Greco-Roman tradition, but with the depersonalization you'd find in your local Synagogue or Church, Karma took Fate out of the exclusively clerical world and let it take on the world of the law. However, as The Clash put it so memorably, if you fight the law, you're unlikely to win, and that is pretty much the Karma take on Fate. No longer is there any question of an external force deciding for you whether you're heading for deep shit or taking steps to save you from damnation. If you stick to Karma then you make your bed of roses and you lie in it. Or, as the case may be, you make your shit and you sink in it, although you're unlikely to read the latter summation in the typical marketing material of your local Hindu place of worship.
What's more, it's not just the religious who are into all this. You'll find plenty of atheists and agnostics who inexplicably enough possess some sort of belief in Murphy's Law. Insurance companies have based vastly expensive marketing campaigns on very similar to identical premises. In popular culture, you didn't need a degree in Divinity to follow the Jedi psycho-babble concerning the Force and Destiny which permeated the original Star Wars trilogy, although admittedly a serious spliff or joint would help if you were really going to take it seriously. However, you first need to strip out the Death Star, the lightsabers and Yoda's bizarre ability to speak English like a souvenir salesperson in Bali for a moment, and stop wondering whether Princess Leia was afflicted by temporary blindness every time she went to get her hair done. You can then consider whether what's left, namely most of that seemingly endless diatribe about Luke Skywalker's destiny as a Jedi Knight, is little more than a rehash of the old debate about what constitutes Fate and whether anyone can avoid it or not.
***
As far as Tom Wilton was concerned, though, neither theological, philosophical nor popular cultural references really nailed it. He had a much more down to earth concept of what Fate was, and it helped him to conceptualize it perfectly.
For Tom, Fate had no face. Fate had no gender. Fate had precious little by way of personality and was not a deity. That did not mean that Fate could not be personified, though. Far from it. Fate may have had no face but the face was not important. What was important was that Fate had an anus. And it used it. Frequently and heavily. In the popular vernacular of North America, for Tom at least, Fate was quite literally an asshole.
As a Welsh Methodist, and effectively honorary Church of Scotland member now that he lived in Perth, Scotland, Tom did not actually believe in Fate as some sort of intrinsic deity. Technically speaking, from a theological standpoint, he didn't believe in it at all. Yet there was part of him that couldn't help a kind of gut feeling that Fate liked to crap on him, and that Fate seemed to think it was all very funny. It was hard to define, and Tom freely admitted that it was essentially illogical, but still, he just could not shake the feeling that his life seemed to lurch from dealing with one load of shit landed on him by Fate to the next.
Obviously, of course, Tom had to admit that by global standards he was hardly in deep shit. He did not live in a warzone. He had never suffered from famine. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and other natural disasters were about as common in Perthshire as state visits from the President of Mongolia. Even the things that could more conceivably blight British lives had so far failed to afflict him. He and his family had not suffered from cancer or meningitis. They had not been the victims of road accidents. They were not in any debt beyond a manageable mortgage and did not suffer from alcohol abuse or domestic violence.
Overall, Fate just didn't have it in for Tom in the way that it clearly did for millions of kids across Africa, for flooding victims in Asia, or for those who had bought property in the idyllic Mediterranean beach resort of Ibiza before it became the alcohol- and condom-logged Mecca for inarticulate neds from Dundee to Dresden. The Scots term "ned" in this instance referred quite accurately to all those youngsters of moderate educational levels who were too stupid to realise that you could end up broke, naked and legless in the gutter for much less without ever having to leave Scotland, Germany or whichever other country lacking a Mediterranean coastline they happened to have crawled out from.
The thing was though, that that sort of Fate just wasn't funny. Nor could it be seen to be particularly personally directed, ironic or smug. No, Fate liked to take a dump on Tom in a much more snide fashion, and the fact that he wasn't in poverty or ill health ironically made it considerably less likely that anybody would have much sympathy for him. Even if a sympathetic ear was what he really needed.
Underpinning the day to day alimentary deposits which Fate liked to release into the toilet bowl of Tom's life, was his fundamentally low self-esteem, and it was here that Fate had royally shafted him. Tom was a bright enough, personable and well-intentioned, young man in his mid-thirties. Average height, regular haircut (light brown), normal eyes, reasonable build, he was fairly average looks-wise but certainly far from bad-looking and probably better looking than several male celebrities at least. Although, mind you, as he reflected himself, if you were going to count sports stars, that would hardly be a challenge these days. Half the rugby stars who seemed to have achieved deity status in northern Wales when he was growing up there, looked like they'd tried and failed to remove their faces with a tin opener. After that, but before leaving for central Scotland, he'd lived in London, where it appeared that most of England was in love with the likes of the national football team's star player. This was a man who almost always had his photo taken with his mouth wide open and a pained expression on his face. Tom wondered if the guy maybe had permanent toothache of a quite painful variety. However, looking like a failed case which had fallen off a drunk dentist's chair clearly did little to put off several of Great Britain's more physically attractive women from finding these athletes desirable life partners. Although, mind you, the more cynical might dare to question if this might not have something to do with them each getting paid the equivalent of a middle income country's GDP every week just to kick the remnants of a dead cow around a field. Nice work if you can get it, for sure.
It was this failure to appreciate the untouchable wonder of sports stars, and ironically being too intelligent to bow down and worship at the altar of male sports culture, which had first led to Tom's self-esteem issues, or which had at least precipitated them. For, while growing up in a small town in northern Wales, it had been simply unacceptable to have been caught asking questions alluding to what was the point of rugby. The general effect had been kind of like asking the local cops in North Korea if they didn't honestly think that Kim Jong-Il was a bit of a twat really, or like turning up to a Greenpeace rally in a polar bear fur coat with the head still attached.
It was simply unimaginable and inconceivable to the immature boys, aged from around eight to eighty, who set the tone on societal acceptability, that anybody normal would not enjoy spending their time having the shit kicked out of them on a knackered patch of grass which resembled the Somme circa mid-1916 more than anything remotely like a sports facility. And besides that, there was the camaraderie of the archaic changing rooms, smelling of a different sweaty jockstrap from every week since about 1842, where general bigotry against anybody not quite like "us" was an obviously character-building and essential part of growing up. How could you possibly do anything other than adore all of this without being some sort of mentally incapacitated, socially inadequate, destined-to-lose faggot ?
It would be unfair to describe all ruggerbuggers as brainless idiots since some of them had gone on to take jobs which were simply impossible to perform without a brain. However, rugby did seem to hold an incredible capacity to anaesthetize their brains in the cases of those who had one to start with. How else could they have missed the irony of routinely lambasting everyone as a homosexual and queer by virtue of not loving rugby ? If they'd possessed slightly more self-awareness than a squashed earthworm, then they might have noticed that participation in their sport was strictly limited to men only (women's rugby was considered some sort of joke). It also regularly involved kneeling down together and sticking their hands up each other's crotches while some failed sergeant-major of a coach screamed at them to, "grab on to what you find, and hold on tight". After the game, schoolboys who showed any reluctance to strip off and get into the showers with the others in the changing rooms could only be reticent on account of being gay, obviously. Overall, Tom had found rugby players to be probably the queerest bunch of homophobes he was ever likely to encounter.
What did for him, though, was the integration of the rugby culture into life off the pitch. At school, everybody was supposed to play the stupid sport, and if you weren't part of the rugby in-crowd, you were a homosexual loser, of course. This was repeated ad nauseam by the rugby-playing elite, and, critically, tacitly reinforced by several rugby-enthused teachers and other members of the establishment. It had started so early that Tom actually believed he was homosexual for long enough because he simply thought it was a derogatory term of abuse for losers, without any reference to human attraction one way or the other. He was quite surprised around the age of twelve when he was informed that a homosexual (aka a gay, fag, queer or so forth, depending on which prejudiced athletics star you were talking to at the time) was someone who found members of their own sex attractive.
"But that can't be right," he had opined, "because I'm homosexual and I think I'd much rather go out with a girl than a boy."
Sadly predictably, such a remark of course did little to encourage any reaction which would have boosted his self-esteem considerably, but by then it was largely too late anyway. When all this was repeated to you continuously, you just started to accept it, even if you knew logically that it was a crock of shite. Tom's family were good to him, he did well in his exams, he had friends at his Church, and he wasn't stupid. Nonetheless, when your peers insist on reminding you day in and day out that you don't fit in and you're a queer misfit, at least on an emotional level you start to believe it.
Finally, Tom made his bid to escape on graduating from school and applying to study mathematics at university in London. London appealed because not everybody there seemed to be entirely obsessed with bloody rugby. Mathematics appealed because most of the ruggerbuggers he knew were too thick to study it. However, this was where Fate really nailed him.
Surprisingly, for once Fate shat on his head with something that did not actually look like what it was at first. Normally, Tom would just stagger from one disaster to another, but at least when it hit him, he had some idea of just how screwed he was. This was not the case with Elaine Massey.
With hindsight, he could see how it had developed, but at the time he was wide open to what hit him without even realising it. His childhood had been spent growing up as one of the gay losers who shouldn't even bother talking to the girls because he was too uninteresting, unappealing, and generally uncool for it to be worth his effort or their time. Furthermore, all the girls were needed to sate the needs of the guys who did matter, namely those who could play rugby.
It had in fact been quite frustrating to have been told he was homosexual without actually being gay. He had nothing against homosexuals himself. If anything, he felt quite an affinity towards them, even if for no better reason than that if the ruggerbuggers didn't like them, then there had to be something OK about them. However, it doesn't do much to assuage your own frustrations or sense of inadequacy when you're automatically defined as off limits to those you might physically find attractive, by virtue of being an untouchable cretin. The sadly common tendency among many teenage girls to gravitate towards whichever guys are defined as being cool had done little to alleviate this.
Hence he was quite taken aback when his fellow maths student, Elaine, took an interest in going out for dinner with him after they were assigned as a study pair in second year. Elaine was from the local area, and quite attractive, with jet black hair and soft brown eyes which she normally emphasized subtly with a light touch of eye shadow. Predictably enough, the relationship had taken some time to blossom as Tom had assumed from the start that she would be out of his league anyway. Exactly who was in his league would have been hard for him to have defined, but two arms, two legs, a semi-functioning brain, and no criminal record for violent assault probably would have been a pretty good start.
Strangely enough, this had actually worked in Tom's favour, since he had been completely convinced that there was no way short of major bribery or a loaded shotgun to the face that Elaine would even have considered going out with him. And even then she probably would have needed a few minutes to make up her mind. Consequently, he was fairly relaxed around her, and concentrated more on genuinely helping her out with her advanced calculus than on finding an excuse to stick his face down her front. His underlying sense of sarcastic but not normally hurtful humour also came to the fore. In short, he actually did everything just right that a guy on the pull should have done, precisely because he wasn't on the pull.
All of this, needless to say, had quite impressed Elaine. Following a number of short-lived but failed romantic liaisons from around the age of sixteen onwards, she was looking for some decent relationship material. Not being the most imaginative or self-aware of girls, she had failed to realise that her somewhat prickly personality might have had something to do with the failure of the previous boyfriends to stick around for too long, but this didn't bother Tom so much. This was predominantly down to his not seeing himself as her boyfriend, and not having much in the way of an ego to be offended, but such minor issues were not of immediate concern to Elaine.
What was of concern to her was that Tom didn't seem to respond to her more and more obvious attempts to demonstrate that she might be interested in slightly more than his ability to calculate trigonometric derivatives. Bloody hell, she'd thought to herself one day, if she'd simply dropped her top and asked him what he made of these two, he'd probably have responded that he was very impressed by the near symmetry which was only partially offset by the co-sine bearing of the left nipple, which was itself influenced by the underlying logarithmic misalignment of the ribcage below.
With the benefit of hindsight, Tom should have known that she wasn't a good match for him because she did not ultimately get her attraction across to him by addressing the fundamental lack of self-worth which was preventing him from seeing it. Rather, she had simply asked him baldly if he would like to go out to dinner with her, and when it had finished, had kissed him goodnight on the lips. Even Tom had not been quite ignorant enough to have viewed this simply as a standard social routine which Elaine would have been following as a good Catholic girl, and they had started dating from there.
Tom could hardly believe that someone as good-looking as Elaine could be interested in someone like him. He had, almost immediately, fallen in love with Elaine as a girlfriend per se, rather than with Elaine as Elaine. For sure she had her good points. When not stressed out, she was relaxed with a decent sense of humour. She did not force her tastes in religion, politics or entertainment onto him. She also generally possessed more than the level of most girlfriends' tolerance for his addiction to James Bond, and comedy shows which English literature students regarded as the cultural equivalent of wearing a T-shirt in polite society bearing the legend, "I caught gonorrhoea from my dog."
All of this made him initially blind to, and later no less than extremely forgiving of and inclined to ignore completely, her less than desirable characteristics. Critically, his schooldays had led to a meek acceptance of any criticism she threw his way, no matter how unjustified. Given that whenever she got stressed out, Elaine had to have someone to blame, whether fairly or otherwise, this meant that when times of stress came along, Tom suddenly became a highly complicit whipping boy. This was initially no big deal. Elaine was at some pains to keep Tom as her boyfriend, Tom was infatuated with having a girlfriend at all, and other than exam times, their student days were not all that stressful. Tom should have been warned, he recognized ruefully later, by the fact that he was generally better at maths than Elaine, and that to compensate for the inadequacy this generated in her, she would resort to insulting put-downs, but he was just too used to this sort of thing to see it as anything untoward.
However, similar to the effect of eating an entire box of all-bran, Fate was simply generating a long-burning, slow-release turd and it was heading right Tom's way. They both graduated and found employment in London, Tom as a civil servant with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Elaine as an on-call PA, finding employment through an agency.
Tom was slowly starting to recognize that Elaine might not be everyone's dream woman, but he figured that it was silly to look for any idealized figure who probably didn't exist anyway. He was also still convinced that if he didn't have Elaine, the only women who would vaguely consider going out with him were probably in desperate need of a UK passport, a straitjacket and a heavy dose of sedative, or all three at once. He remained perplexed as to why Elaine should like him but considered himself fortunate that she did, and reckoned that a little bit of verbal abuse here and there was merely a small price to pay.
Resolving to do something before this otherwise decent situation changed for the worse, Tom got down on one knee and asked Elaine to marry him. Again with hindsight, this was probably the day when Fate really unclenched its sphincter and let go quite spectacularly because she said yes.
Thanks to Tom having what looked like the more impressive job, Elaine's own self-opinion had to be maintained by reminding herself, and him, that he wasn't all that clever. Tom advanced relatively quickly in the Department but nothing he did impressed Elaine, unless she was talking in his absence to her parents and friends and wanted to impress them.
Not being completely clueless, Tom had divined that work was perhaps not the satisfying experience in life that Elaine needed, and had suggested that perhaps they have a child together. Being at a loss for any obvious reason to object that week, Elaine had agreed but that was when things had really started to go downhill.
Pregnancy had been nine months of sheer grit, hard work, and thankless suffering. To be fair, it hadn't been a laugh a minute for Elaine either, but she had made damn sure that she didn't suffer in silence. Tom was informed that he had no idea what she was going through, even though she described it in expansive detail whenever she wasn't too busy inhaling more breath with which to talk. How the hell could he be so selfless as to try to sleep when she was being kept awake by raging hormones which he couldn't understand anyway ? So what, if he had to go to work the next day ? She was trying to create a life, and if all he could think of to do was to take her to the maternity clinic, clean the house, wash the dishes, and get her more hot chocolate while she was watching the TV, what bloody use was he ? She didn't need a failed civil servant turned fucking housemaid, thank you very much. She needed a man who could love her and give her the emotional support which he so clearly just wasn't interested in providing. When he asked what practical form this should take, she simply sniffed in disgust and turned on her heel to go and sob noisily and pointedly on the toilet for half an hour, opining that none of her friends had to put up with useless husbands like hers.
Predictably enough, when their son Michael was born, Elaine had post-natal depression severe enough to make the average death row look like a street party. And she had no intent of disappointing on her wedding vow to share whatever she had with her husband. Once more, Tom saw the rear end of Fate at work, and cursed himself for not having seen this one coming. Elaine would always react badly to stress. Having a child was a highly stressful experience in many ways. You do the math, he thought bitterly to himself, having missed that one despite his expertise in quantum algebraics.
Next on Elaine's list of woes in life which were exacerbated by her husband's general inadequacy, was her desire to become a homeowner. Fat chance of that in the London area, with rocketing property prices and her husband being the only salary earner at that point with some glorified summer job equivalent from the government. As far as she could see, there was about as much of them getting a foot onto the property ladder as of Nigeria hosting the Winter Olympics.
Tom applied his ingenuity and resourcefulness to the question at hand and came up with what appeared to be a quite intelligent solution, but which turned out to be more akin to a bad vindaloo in the colon of Fate. The British Government was attempting to encourage more flexibility in the employment of its civil servants, and one aspect which was under consideration at the time was the need to move said civil servants between national and local government levels, in order to broaden the average experience level across them all.
Hence it was that Tom saw an opportunity to apply for a job as part of the team directly supporting the Provost of Perth and Kinross Council in central Scotland. It would give him a small promotion while re-locating them to Perth. While still a highly desirable part of the country to live in where most people were concerned, Perth's property prices made the much higher ones of London look like they were in a different currency. So it was that Tom reckoned that a move to Scotland could solve their problems.
Seeing this as a chance to get what she wanted, Elaine agreed, but discovered within about half an hour of arriving that in fact she hated anywhere that wasn't the South-East of England, and particularly Scotland. That had been six years ago, and her attitude had, admittedly, changed since then – for the worse. Elaine now regarded Scotland as somewhere below Sierra Leone and Haiti on the global development index, and would not hesitate to announce this at the top of her voice, regardless of the setting.
An abrupt end to the civil service flexibility programme and a slight fall in the British housing market had made any immediate relocation back to the London area practically and economically unfeasible, and so Tom had acquiesced when Elaine had demanded that they have a second child as this was something that she really needed to balance her hormones and emotions. He should have known better after the experience of the pregnancy with Michael but he was no gynaecologist. Their younger son, Chris, had been born when Michael was four, after a pregnancy which for both him and his father had been like living through a nuclear weapons test, only one which had gone on for nine months.
That had been three years ago and with Elaine having found a job a couple of years later, they were still in Perth. Tom was now the right hand man to the Provost, he had a nice house, and Michael and Chris were a couple of great kids who loved their dad. All in all, it was a great set-up with the minor reservation that he was married to a serial bully who had seemingly missed her true career vocation when Saddam Hussein had got the job instead.
***
It was a bright but chilly, April morning as Tom bustled out of the house with Michael and Chris on his way to drop them at the institution comprising their school and playgroup, before heading into the town centre where he worked. The morning was one of those quite typical of central Scotland at that time of year. With a crisp blue sky and a shimmering sun rising from behind the deep purple of the hills set behind the town perimeters, there was a freshness and a beauty to the morning which looked exquisite, and which often did on the rather expensive portrait calendars routinely sold with this sort of scene on them. If you were there to feel it, however, it had a bitch of a chill to it. It was probably just as well for the romanticism of Scotland that calendars didn't do sound as well as pictures as the rugged backdrop of Rob Roy might have been a bit offset by one of the locals commenting, "Jings, mon. If it gets much cauder, ma piss'll freeze hauf ways to the ground, d'ye ken ?" Alternatively, as one Canadian tourist had been caught on radio remarking the previous July, "To hell with this for a summer vacation. We'd be warmer doing the Hudson Bay in February. I don't give a rat's ass if our ancestors came from here – all I'm seeing is precisely why they got the hell out to where we live now."
Not being one to complain quite so roundly about things – that was, after all, Elaine's principal function in the family – Tom stooped down to ensure that Michael was properly fastened into his Transformers battle gear coat, and that Chris was adequately protected against the elements by his Thomas the Tank Engine overcoat and Ghostbusters woolly hat. He genuinely envied his sons. First of all, try as you might, no three piece suit and overcoat combination would ever keep out this sort of biting wind with the effectiveness of his sons' apparel. Second, while he could perhaps live without Thomas trying to bore into his tunnel up the back, as a fan two and a half decades ago of the first generation of Transformers and Ghostbusters toys, he wanted some of that for himself. However, it just wasn't the done thing for senior council authority members to turn up at work announcing that they were "Here to Save the World" and asking "Who Ya Gonna Call ?" A new sewage and drainage system for Perth, a reduction of pesticides in the fields around Kinross, and the question of re-opening rail connections to Crieff were all clearly vital questions. All the same, you didn't want to over-egg the pudding by upping the drama of the situation too heavily.
Besides which, you didn't want to attract the obvious laughter of neds on the bus. Tom and Elaine had a single car between them, and while his work was served by numerous bus lines, hers was quite out of the way, leading, not unfairly, to the conclusion that he should take the bus. Since his work started shortly after the school's dropping off time, it made sense for him to take them in with him. Elaine normally picked them up in the car after school although the fact that she had to go all the way across Perth to do so remained a sore point.
"Ooh, Daddy, it's too cold to walk," moaned Chris, in his strangely hybrid accent. Half Welsh, half English and born and raised in Scotland, Chris had acquired an accent which was like and unlike all of those three. Broadly speaking, wherever he was, he sounded like he was from somewhere else. Tom reckoned, though, that he could have quite a promising career as a Bond film villain since an unplaceable accent was almost as much a prerequisite these days as a secret mountain base and an army of heavily armed henchmen to order around who were only marginally smarter than a national rugby team.
"Not to worry." Tom scooped Chris up and set him squarely on his shoulders for the short walk to the bus stop. Michael sniffed slightly but being considerably older than Chris and also tall enough to be level with his father's upper chest already, Michael was sufficiently intelligent to have figured out that Chris was the only one who might realistically be spared walking without the car these days.
"Carrying him again, eh ? Yer molly-coddling will be the ruin of yon bairn, ye mark my words."
Shit. Tom had been hoping to get away without old Mr McGregor offering his usual running commentary on the state of Tom's dress sense, his home repair or, the old git's favourite, his parenting skills, but the cutting words arcing over the shoulder-height hedge between their two front gardens confirmed that he wasn't going to make it this morning.
"Whit did I tell ye ? If ye're gaunnae go picking him up every time he's jist a wee bit frazzled, yon boy'll ne'er learn tae walk proper like, or tae tak responsibility fer hisself.
"Honestly, ah'm tellin' ye this for yer ain guid, mon. Ye dinnae want a child that ends up in a wheelchair, now dae ye ? But if every time he cannae be daein' wi' the effort to git somethin' done fer hisself, he kens ye're there fer tae dae it fer him, d'ye's ken whit'll happen ? He'll lose the power o' his muscles, that's whit. And yon's jist the start. Afore ye ken whit's happenin' he'll hae suffered brain damage an' then he'll be lost. He'll jist sit there takin' drugs a' day long, readin' pornography, an' committin' crimes, an'…"
"Well, thanks, Mr McGregor. It's good to know you care so much," responded Tom, wrestling with the temptation to point out that plenty of people managed to take drugs, read porn and commit crime without having been looked after a little by their fathers as youngsters. He also omitted to ask exactly what sort of crimes the brain-damaged were notorious for committing. Serial fly-tipping of clinical waste perhaps ? Drag-racing wheelchairs ? "It's good to have a neighbour like you to keep me on the straight and narrow in these things. Unfortunately though, I think Chris may have hurt his knee yesterday, so I'd maybe better give him a lift this one time. And talking of time, there'll be a bus along very soon so while I'd love to stay and benefit from more of your wisdom and advice, maybe we could do it later ?"
Ideally about three million years later but it seemed beyond improbable that Fate would be constipated for quite so long.
"Ah well, slippery slope, slippery slope…" sighed Mr McGregor and turned away.
Really, the entire incident was typical of McGregor. He adopted the moral high ground as if he owned it, while rejoicing inwardly at being able to use it, and at the fact that despite his exercise thereof, if he was remotely correct then whoever he was talking to was on a one-way trip to hell anyhow.
Old Mr McGregor was sadly the archetypal old, Scottish git. To become one, you required a minimum age of about fifty, going on ninety-eight, at least five cloth caps which it was probably illegal to buy if you were any younger, and the firm conviction that anybody who hadn't lived through whatever war was going on when you were young had no idea what real hardship was like. This was a unique class of person, but quite numerous in its manifestations nonetheless.
Old gits in Scotland could usually be found clustered in groups around tables in normally dark pubs. There they would sit and drink various lagers and specials which, like their hats, were probably reserved by the manufacturers and salespeople for customers who still thought in old money. The topics of conversation could vary to a degree but almost always had to come back to why things were not as good as they used to be, why they could never be as good again, and why everybody else was too stupid to see that they were digging their own graves by virtue of whatever happened to be popular at the moment.
Smiling in particular seemed to be quite clearly prohibited with a single exception. This occurred when a table of old gits would be overlooking a newsagent's or corner shop which happened to sell ice-creams, and which had one of those advertising stands which consisted of a rectangular metal frame, inside of which hung a metal sheet, printed on both sides with pictures of the ice-creams on sale, and hanging freely. In the event that some poor sod, with a weakness for parallel parking or some other reverse manoeuvre, backed their car onto the pavement and got it entangled in one of these ice-cream signs, one old git would be permitted a brief smirk to accompany the remark, "Ah telt ye he/she was gaunnae dae that." The other old gits would acknowledge his great wisdom and then all hilarity had to end as serious drinking and bitching about the world continued.
Otherwise, you simply couldn't be an old git if anything else cheered you up. This even applied to the religious ones. An old git exiting Church on a bright, sunny day, and greeted by the Minister, "It's a lovely day, isn't it ?" was virtually obliged to respond, "Aye, but we'll pay for this," before marching off to find the darkest possible corner of the pub in which to sit.
As for old Mr McGregor, he was, at least as far as Tom could see, the old git without equal. Nothing was right with the world unless everything was wrong. Initially, Tom had wondered if he disliked Tom and his family for not being Scottish, or because Michael (and later, Chris) were too small and loud, but having seen him in action with a few other people, he had come to the conclusion that McGregor just disliked them for being other people.
One of the world's greatest mysteries to Tom was how come Mrs McGregor stuck with him. She was the main reason that Tom went to great lengths to force himself always to be as polite as possible to her husband. Unlike him, she was bright and cheerful, and she loved the kids, whom she would happily babysit whenever Tom and Elaine had a need or emergency. This had turned out to be quite a godsend more than once. She never said much about her husband and Tom could not for the life of him figure out why she would put up with such a miserable old sod.
Then again, life was full of mysteries, he supposed. After all, how come he put up with Elaine ? That was a question he'd been asked on more than one occasion, and which he still struggled to answer.
Chapter 2
Elaine Wilton sat in her office and stared in disgust at the never-ending stream of raindrops flowing down the window. Bloody hell, did it ever stop raining in this fucking country ?
Of course, she'd known that Scotland was notorious for a higher than average rainfall before she'd moved up here from the green and pleasant London area, but this was taking the piss. The amount of liquid falling out of the sky was only equalled by the amount of liquid which seemed to flow down the locals' throats any time they managed to combine the dual proximities of a paycheque and a pub together.
Stupid tossers. There was a relatively famous story about how the Duke of Edinburgh, in one of his many less than discreet moments, had got into a whole lot of trouble when visiting a driving school north of the border. Apparently he had asked one of the instructors, "How do you keep the locals off the booze long enough for any of them to pass up here ?" Those who thought HRH to be a loudmouthed nincompoop, completely out of touch with the common people, ought to come and live here, Elaine reckoned. As far as her own experience had confirmed things, the old Duke was a highly perceptive and well-informed observer of the local culture.
Of course, it wasn't just the weather and the local drinking customs which were getting to her right now. For the past couple of weeks, she had been struggling considerably with her job. It just wasn't fair. She was supposed to have one of the most cushy assignments known to the British job market, but since the debacle of what was meant to have been her employer's break into the big time, it had got a whole lot harder.
Put simply, Elaine worked as an "Administration Executive" for a wealthy dimwit. What this meant in practice was that it was her job to manage all the finances and legal paperwork for some female ned named Sharon Tidworth who had managed to "come second" (in every sense of that particular phrase) on Big Brother a few years back. She had then married a briefly famous soccer star from Hungary before divorcing him and shoring up her ready cash when necessary by dropping her top for photo-shoots in a few lads' mags. Sharon had even had to drop her knickers once when she needed a down-payment on a new Ferrari but since she had gone on to shag the photographer during the shoot anyhow, that had probably required little to no extra effort to earn the cash.
To tell the truth, she had probably had more men inside her than Murrayfield Stadium down in Edinburgh, but it generally kept her in funds. And to think that they claimed that prostitution was illegal in the UK.
Overall, Sharon actually had sufficient funds invested to maintain a steady income which would have been more than sufficient for anyone without quite such vulgar tastes, but she had to do what for her constituted work every now and again due to cash flow concerns.
Elaine's job consisted of ensuring that she didn't get screwed - in the non-sexual sense of that phrase at least - by those writing her contracts, that her various properties were kept legally hers, and that she didn't end up in trouble with the law for any tax irregularities.
From Elaine's perspective, although she found what constituted Sharon's occupation to be in very poor taste, she had in fact obtained a fairly sweet deal since her employer was too thick and too preoccupied with finding men she hadn't slept with yet to pay much attention to the details of Elaine's own contract. Hence Elaine somehow managed to get away with working about twenty hours a week for a reasonable salary. She had also managed to keep herself distanced from the more distasteful end of things by virtue of Sharon having a showbiz agent to handle the promotional side of her engagements. Elaine just had to worry about the admin.
Or at least, such had been the case until the recently dismissed agent had finally scored Sharon a big-time deal with the now internationally famous Feel or No Feel.
***
This fiasco had all started with the launch of TitTV, the UK's first – and given how things had worked out, likely last – hard core pornography cable channel. Having utilized a loophole in the otherwise stringent British broadcasting laws, some genius had managed to launch this project which permitted the broadcasting of hard core porn between ten pm and four am. This was only possible on a still strictly controlled subscriber channel which required an individual access code to be entered by the TV remote, ostensibly to prevent children seeing any of it.
Predictably enough, user access codes had flooded school blogs and pupil chatrooms within half an hour of it being launched.
Not to be deterred by this level of notoriety, TitTV had aimed for self-promotion through mass controversy. The highlight of this was their new show, Feel or No Feel. As the name implied, this was designed as a pornographic parody of the hit TV game show Real or Not Real. The original had seen the presenter Tony Ailsmond basically winding up morons who were easily manipulated emotionally and in need of a bit of cash. They would be presented with some twenty odd boxes, each containing an unknown amount of money, and then eliminate them one by one until they reached the last one which could contain anything between one pound and a million which would become theirs. At various times in the interim, the so-called Cashier would call up and offer them a deal to take a certain amount in between the values of the boxes which they had yet to open, and which, if accepted, would terminate the game. The question was whether this would become a real deal nor not. The British public was generally kept entertained by watching these people burst into tears at the thought of losing out on forty grand because they couldn't calculate basic probabilities.
Feel or No Feel, not being inhibited by intelligence or good taste like its original, chose contestants who were, for the most part, overweight, middle-aged, male losers. The contestant on the night would have a choice of twenty boxes, each about the size of a coffin. Each box contained a nude female porn star (currently working or retired) with the best choice containing a gorgeous girl from well beyond the contestant's league or dreams. The bottom end of the spectrum, meanwhile, was a woman in her eighties who had last made porn when it was being shot in black and white to entertain the troops in the Korean War.
The idea was that the contestant would eliminate different porn stars while being kept aware of the relative gorgeousness of the options left. As he did so, the "Flasher" (ha ha) would call up and offer alternative choices somewhere in between. At the end of the show, the contestant would then get to screw his choice on-screen.