Random by Craig Robertson Page B

make-up. She looked at me. I didn’t like that. She was someone’s daughter. Some father waiting to be hurt.
    Four. A jaikie bouncing from bin to bin. That special Scottish pallor on his face; white skin gone grey, red nose and battered cheeks. He was smiling all over his face and just for a second I envied him. He most probably didn’t have any more than a couple of quid in his pocket and his brain was fried with Bucky but he was happy. Remember happy?
    He stopped me, cut across my path and stood there so I couldn’t pass. He started singing to me with his hand held out in front of him. This wasn’t good, not good at all. It was changing things and it would make people look at us. At me.
    I could smell him. Dampness on his clothes, foul BO and rancid breath. He was murdering ‘Danny Boy’ with this stupid grin on him. I wanted away, wanted past, wanted to keep counting. People were flooding by and I wasn’t counting them.
    I scrambled into my pocket and pulled out a couple of pound coins, thrusting them at him to buy freedom. I needed past him, had to get on. But instead of getting away, it made him thank me, grasping at my hands, his breath hammering at me.
    Panic took a hold. I wanted to shake him off, throw him to the ground. People were passing by and everything was changing. The dirty, drunken old bastard didn’t know what he was doing. I couldn’t have this.
    He treated me to another verse of ‘Danny Boy’. I was his new best friend but I wanted to be anywhere else but there.
    I tore my hand out of his, breathing hard and dancing round him. He was shouting at me as I moved. I ignored him and prayed everyone else was doing the same.
    I marched on, counting and walking. Ticking them off as they passed me, then and not before. Walking. Counting. Waiting.
    Five and six passed in a blur. Seven, eight, nine rushed by and I felt as if a flood was going over me. Business suits and green school uniforms, ladies doing lunch and builders’ bums. I was drowning in possibilities and realities.
    I was spinning, reeling out of control and had to regain it. Ten, eleven, twelve, they kept coming. I was counting, trying to slow my breathing and calm my nerves all at once.
    It was eighteen before I was remotely settled. A balding businessman with a briefcase stuffed under his arm. He caught me looking at him and glared. That was OK. He’d never think anything of it.
    Nineteen and twenty were a young couple hand-in-hand. I was composed now. He was tall and fair, she was short and bottle-blonde. I was fine again. They were giggling and whispering.
    I slowed, I breathed out. I kept counting. Walking and counting. I had crossed Blythswood Street and had already counted past thirty.
    So many people. It wouldn’t be long.
    There was a rush through the mid-forties and a lull before a few more crossed my path. Not for the first time it struck me how many of the population of the dear green place came in only two colours, ash grey or sunbed orange. The browbeaten and UV beaten. Glasgow was all-sorts. All races, shapes and sizes and they kept coming past me. I tried to paint quick pen pictures of them in my mind but how could you tell the reasonably well-off from the struggling, the Protestant from the Catholic, the asylum seeker from Jock Tamson’s bairn, the Pole from the Partick boy? How did you differentiate the oppressed from the oppressor, the trodden down and those that trod on them, the deserving and those that deserved it?
    I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Maybe better that I didn’t know.
    Past the queue at Greggs and past Paperino’s. Three to go and I had a definite feeling of how close it was. I itched for it. I wanted to look ahead but stopped myself.
    Fifty-four, near the corner of Douglas Street, was a young bearded guy with a bag over his shoulder and a look of superior stupidity on his face. A student. A member of the most feckless, pampered bunch of idiots on the planet. Time was he’d have been planning