My Life as a Man Read Online Free Page B

me scurrying off with cockcrow in my ears.
    I went into the factory with my mind made up. I’d keep on asking until I found out all there was to know about her. But when I came out of the lavatory (the smell of piss up my nose, if
you sat on the toilet holes poked in the partitions at eye height, brown stains in the wash basin . . . thirty years of this; did I say thirty years?) I found the foreman, Ronnie, going through my
rucksack, and that put it out of my head. I’d been leaving the rucksack under a bench where the coats were hung, and there he was down on his knees with the straps undone and the flap thrown
back.
    ‘You’re sleeping rough,’ he said. He pulled out a shirt, and the pair of underpants wound in it fell out on the floor. ‘What kind of day’s work you going to do if
you’re sleeping rough?’

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    T hursday night it went wrong. Since the Hairy Bastard threw me out, I’d been sleeping on Tony’s bedroom floor. There are people like
    that, nice guys you think of first when you need a favour. All he asked was that I was out of there before his parents got up. At least it meant for three days I got to work early enough to check
    the car in the private car park.
    Thursday night I was outside their flat at half eleven on the dot, which was our arrangement, waiting for Tony to open the door and slip me inside. Time passed. I’d walked around for
hours; I was starving. I could hardly wait to get inside. Tony would have made sandwiches, the way he’d done the other nights – he was a decent guy. I put my ear to the door, then got
down on my hunkers and lifted the flap of the letterbox. There were coats hung behind the door, but I could hear screaming and shouting.
    When the door opened, it nearly pulled me off my feet. I tried to push it further open and Tony’s voice whispered, ‘May’s home.’
    ‘So what?’
    ‘She’s up the stick.’ A good job in London, I’d heard his father boasting, not just a pretty face. Now big sister was home and looking for somebody to hold the baby. A
bit old-fashioned, but it was a family tragedy, I’m not stupid, I could see that.
    ‘I only need one more night,’ I said.
    ‘No chance, Harry. None of us’ll—’ His head whipped round as if somebody had come into the lobby behind him. ‘The old man’s going mental. None of us’ll
get any sleep tonight,’ he said, and nearly took my nose off, he shut the door so fast.
    That night I slept rough.
    I didn’t have the hang of it. I hadn’t even the sense to put another shirt out of the rucksack on top of the one I was wearing. When I woke up in the morning at the back of a close,
my legs had gone numb and my neck felt as if I’d grown a hump overnight. I thought it must be time to go to work, but there were hours still to go. I walked about, and the rain came on just
after it got light. No bread, no cheese, no slug of milk out of Tony’s kitchen before his folk were up. Pissing against a wall in a backcourt. A woman shot up her window and yelled down at
me. The hygiene Gestapo. There was a guy in a long black coat used to beg in Kelvingrove Park when the good weather arrived, ambushed the girls in particular, held out his hand, never said a word,
challenged them with a stare. I mean, this was a fierce-looking guy, except that every spring he’d shrunk a little and one came when he wasn’t around any more. Winters are cold this far
north.
    I bought breakfast at a corner shop. A macaroon bar wiped me out. Not a penny left. Well, one. I threw it up and toed it into the road. Thank God it was Friday.
    Strange thing is, seeing the car with its windows steamed up that morning, I envied her, sitting inside in comfort, warm and out of the rain.
    Funny, too, how quickly I’d fallen into the routine of the work. It wasn’t hard and, for sure, didn’t take any brains. One of the other boys, a long drink of water called
Sammy, grumbled at me, ‘What you whistling for? I’m bored out of