Limmy Limmy - That’s Your Lot

Cheryl looked at him and everybody else. Lisa looked up from her hands and waited for Alan to speak. Cheryl sat down and started rubbing Lisa’s back again.

Alan had been standing on the rug, but now he felt like sitting. He pulled over a small table that was behind him, then he sat down on it and began to speak more quietly. He realised that although he was feeling good, he was potentially causing pain to the others, so he didn’t smile, even though he wanted to.

‘I don’t know why I want to die,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know. But I know that I don’t enjoy my life. I’ve gone too far into a life that I don’t like, and I just want it all to end.’

He looked at Lisa.

‘But as I was up there on the bridge, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to end my life, not completely. I just wanted to end this one, if that makes sense. I think I could enjoy life, if I was somebody else.’

‘Then be somebody else,’ said Lisa. ‘Do whatever you want. Leave if you want to. I’d rather you were somewhere else than here and wanting to jump off the fucking …’

She broke down again. Cheryl gave her back a rub and kissed her head.

‘I thought about that,’ he said. ‘I thought about it on the bridge. I thought about just running away. Just getting some money and getting on a plane and going to Canada or somewhere and starting again. But that would cost a ton of money. It would cost a serious ton of money, and I’d have to find somewhere to live and get my head around it all and think about all the forms and, oh, I don’t know. There’s always something. There’s always something.’

He rubbed his head.

‘I want to stay here, but I just want everything to be different. I want to be home, but with different faces and places, doing different things with different … I really don’t know. I know that it all sounds like it won’t change a thing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me now, but it made sense to me when I was up on the bridge, and I’m not going to go back up there to try and remember. I told myself I was going to do it and that’s why I asked you here and I’m going to do it. I have to.’

‘Do what?’ asked Steven. He looked at Alan’s hands to see if he was holding a razor, in case Alan’s plan was to cut his wrist or his throat, right in front of them all. But there was no razor.

‘Please don’t feel bad,’ said Alan. ‘But I told myself that if I don’t then I’d end up killing myself and I’d never see you again anyway. You’d lose me anyway.’

Anne didn’t get it. She looked at Lisa and she could see that Lisa didn’t get it either. Neither did Cheryl or anybody else. Anne looked to Alan and said, ‘Alan, I don’t think anybody knows what you mean.’

Alan took another deep breath and tried to remember how much sense it made on the bridge, then he said it.

‘After you leave here tonight, you don’t know me. After tonight, my name will be Craig.’

There was quiet in the room as they thought about what he could mean. Steven asked, ‘What do you mean? You’re changing your name?’

‘No,’ said Alan. ‘Well, aye. But not just the name.’ He took a breath and tried to keep it simple. ‘After tonight, I’ll be a guy called Craig.’

Before they left, Alan told them the best way to go about it all. The technicalities. The dos and don’ts. He’d thought it all out.

Lisa was heartbroken, and asked him if he was joking. She wanted him to tell her he was joking. She said it must be a joke and she wouldn’t go through with it, but he explained again that it was either this or he was going up to that bridge. If they spoke to him again, he’d be found the following day, floating face down in the Clyde, and that was a promise.

They left, and for the following couple of weeks, they never saw him.

Then, they did.

They started to see him around. They’d get a glimpse of him, then he’d be gone for a month. He’d be passing by as a passenger on a bus, or he’d be seen coming out of a building or getting into a car. Lisa had never seen him herself and wanted every detail about who he was with and what he was doing.

Anne saw him in a park. He was with a group of people, studenty types. One of them had a guitar, and they had a tightrope tied between a couple of trees. They were people like that. They were the type of people that Alan used to laugh at, but Anne said he looked like he was having a good time.

Steven saw him in a club. Steven was with a lassie he’d just met, a lassie he’d got dancing with. She said she wanted to introduce him to her mates, and she led Steven towards a table. One of her mates was Craig. Steven and Craig had said ‘Pleased to meet you’ to each other, like it was the first time they’d met. Steven stood around for a minute, to pretend that everything was normal, then he told the lassie that he had to go to the toilet. He took a detour to the cloakroom, got his jacket and left. It was too much.

Lisa was worried that she’d never see Craig again after that, that he’d move away or be found face down in the Clyde like he promised.

But then she finally saw him, in Lidl.

There was something different about him. Nothing much, but something. His hair was a bit longer at the top than the last time she saw him. The denims he was wearing were a darker shade of blue than he usually wore, but that was nothing much. He was wearing a jumper, and that was something.

He walked past her, but she didn’t look at him, not directly. She watched his reflection on the metal edge at the front of the shelf. He might have turned his head to look at her, but she couldn’t be sure. Then he was gone.

She saw him in there again a week after that. And then a few days after that.

The last time she saw him, he walked around the aisles for ten minutes, but then only left with a couple of packets of crisps.

The next time they were in, she would smile at him.

Or she might just go ahead and talk to him. She thought it would be all right, because it wasn’t like she’d be talking to Alan. She wouldn’t be talking to him as Alan. She’d be talking to Craig. She liked the guy. And you read things about supermarkets, about how that’s where some couples first meet.

There was an explosion.

Frank had been walking to the job centre. To get there, Frank would usually leave his house and stay on that side of the street for ten minutes, walking past the tenements, past the community centre and the factory. Then there would be more tenements, and when he reached those, he’d cross over to the job centre.

It was when he reached the factory that the explosion happened.

When it happened, in that first instant, he didn’t know that it was an explosion. He didn’t know if it was something that had happened inside him, like a heart attack or a stroke, or something that had happened outside his body, out in the open. Whatever it was, the combination of the sound and the force made him fall on his side and bang his head on the ground.

His eyes were shut and his ears were ringing. He couldn’t see or hear anything, but he could smell dust. It reminded him of whenever he walked past the flats over in Finnieston, the ones that were being demolished, and the dust that blew onto the street. The smell told him that the thing that had happened hadn’t just happened to him, it was no heart attack. He knew that when he opened his eyes, he was going to see something.

He opened them slowly and narrowly, so that the dust he could smell wouldn’t go in his eyes.

He looked in front of him. Through the dust he could see that it was like half the factory and the surrounding tenements were lying on the road. There were twisted sheets of corrugated iron, there was broken glass and broken window frames. Strewn across the road were building bricks from the factory, and large blocks of sandstone from the tenements. The scene looked like a sandcastle that had been kicked across a beach.