Bellydancing and Beyond Box set

Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

While Sheryl was picking through the shopping on her drive, Conway, still in his candlewick pyjamas, was frying up a bit of bacon and black pudding.

Conway was a man who never forgot, a man who clung onto a grudge like a drowning man with plank of wood. A man so eaten up with anger from the past that he no longer made sense. He lived on Rennies, black coffee and meat, which stirred around in his innards like a bullet in motion with nowhere to go.

That morning, his bullet was working overtime. That morning, as he opened up The Argyll Advertiser, he saw something that would make him shake.

NEFERTITI TAKES ON THE BIG BOYS

Our Local Middle Eastern connection will hit the big time next week as she shimmies for the American Wrestlers. ‘It was all my Rodger’s idea,’ says Nefertiti. But everyone knows Nefertiti’s talents are as legendary as Egypt itself, and next week, the boys in town won’t know what hit them as she performs her new Death by Seven Veils dance to the crowd. ‘It’s a new piece,’ says Nefertiti, ‘based on an old Egyptian legend about a mummification that went horribly wrong.’

Beside the article was a picture of Nefertiti posing outside the Argyll. In the background stood a small man with a heavy moustache and sideburns, a man who had never really left the seventies, a man, (unlike most of his contemporaries) who was blessed with a full head of hair and a great set of teeth, which he chose to show off with the aid of Grecian 2000 and a smile that Conway would notice even in a dim bar.

Rodger was not aware that he was in the photo; Rodger had been in the Argyll all afternoon with Martin, making plans about how they were going to take on the art world. His smile was induced by an afternoon of larger and the promise of a prosperous future with Martin. To Rodger, Conway was just a bad memory from a past he would rather forget, a past that he had hoped his Grecian 2000 and new accent would protect him from.

Conway emptied his fridge and threw all the contents into the fry pan, buttered some bread and wrote a note to his wife. He pulled a pile of files and floppies from under his bed and put them into a box, along with a photograph of himself twenty years ago and one of his pet dog, Pep, standing in front of the Azaleas, blocking any view of his wife Edna. He wrote a letter to Archibald McConical, his boss, explaining the need for absence due to unforeseeable circumstances and; forgetting the note, left a message to Edna on their phone about an important mission and don’t wait up; for the foreseeable future.

Then with his trusty laptop, he sped off in his yellow Fiesta and headed for the M9.

He stopped at a service station, stocked up on a supply of Rennies and then, remembering Archibald McConical’s last words about the need for redundancies, left an abusive message on his phone, finishing along the lines of ‘the Omega file is mine’.

‘Let’s see who’s smart now,’ he mumbled, while crunching on some Rennies. He tuned the radio up a notch, licked the foam from his lips and headed for the Argyll in Lochgilphead.

Every week, Chubby sent the Argyll Advertiser to her half-brother Conway. She wrote a small column in the ‘oot and aboot’ section, and Conway was her biggest fan.

Chubby saw herself as a woman of wit and intelligence, a woman whose talents stretched far beyond the realms of butchering a cow. Hector, the editor, saw her as a cheap source of local news and was happy to exploit her. Chubby knew more local people than anyone in the area, and her butchering skills attracted more customers than the Co-op on Christmas Eve, selling almost out of date B.O.G Offs. Since Chubby started writing, Hector’s sales had doubled, and he was more than happy to indulge in her fantasy of being Lochgilphead’s answer to Oscar Wilde.

Every Saturday morning, Conway read out Chubby’s Column to Edna, occasionally snorting a small spray of black pudding when he came across something funny. Edna never laughed, but with a tight lip, brushed off the spray from the table and walked from the room. ‘She’s a lesbian built like a brick shithouse,’ she said, ‘and she ain’t funny.’ But Conway never listened, in his dismal world of thieves and ambitious police, Chubby’s column was the highlight of the week.