“Denis! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, Sasha. I’ve finally retired and I bought a place with a bit of land about twelve miles away.”
“Lads, I’d like you to meet Denis. I’ve known him let me see, must be over forty years. He’s another tale teller and if anything an even bigger liar than I am.
“I draw the line at that, Sasha. I can tell a tale or two, but nobody is a bigger liar than you. I certainly don’t qualify.” They laughed and Sasha’s drinking friends settled down to what promised to an unusually good night’s entertainment.
“How come you moved up here, Denis? I thought you were settled in that place near Shrewsbury. That’s in the deep south, Alf, you turn left at Carlisle and keep going for a couple of hundred miles. Don’t take any notice of Alf, Denis, He went to Lancaster once and it took him six months to recover from the culture shock of going that far south. Lancaster must be what, Lads, seventy miles? It’s Alf’s rôle to have the piss taken out of him. We buy him extra beer to compensate. That right, Alf.”
Alf grinned sheepishly and replied, “I’m not too clever, Denis. Sometimes I wonder why these boffins associate with me. Just keep it simple or I’ll interrupt till I do I understand. Because I won’t sit here all night not knowing what’s going on.”
“Bloody hell, Alf. That’s why we associate with you for the sheer shock value of hearing a word like associate come out of your mouth!”
Alf looked around grinning and said quietly, “Fuck of, Geoff.”
“I heard that, Alfred Winstanley!”
“Oh shit! Sorry, Gladys. I won’t do it again, well not tonight anyway.”
Denis grinned and continued, “So did I, think I was settled down there I mean. But the urban blight is spreading out of the towns faster than cancer. I went home one day to find Belinda crying. Now you know me, Sasha, I can cope with being reviled, forced into fights, even spat at, but I draw the line at being cried at by women.” Sasha was laughing at the look on his old friend’s face as he continued, “The old couple next door had been broken into and she’d had her smalls rifled through. Belinda said it’s like being violated. Well I don’t know about that, I haven’t done a great deal of violating recently, but I knew the writing was on the wall for staying there. Belinda would take some time to think it through, but I knew eventually I’d get an emotional ultimatum to move, or I’d be cried at at regular intervals till we did.”
“You need a glass, Denis. Gladys, a pint of bitter for my friend and pour him a glass out of my bottle too. This is clearly a medical emergency of some severity. I can understand all that, Denis, but how come you ended up here?”
“Pure fluke. I wanted somewhere where the cancer from the cities couldn’t reach till after I was safely dead, but Scotland and Ireland were out.”
Stan interrupted, “How so, Denis? Plenty of really rural places in both with no danger of urban blight for decades at least.”
“Belinda’s an Irish Catholic. Her family are still in Donegal, I’m from Unst, Shetland with a load of family in the western Isles and Oban. My grandfather was Norwegian. All hard line Presbyterian bigots and if anything worse than Belinda’s family. My great Uncle Charlie was a minister and in his eyes there was no such thing as marriage to a papist. So to the day he died he referred to my kids as the Johansen bastards. When I went to his funeral one of my cousins expressed surprise I was there and I told him I was just making sure the old bastard was really dead.” Gales of laughter resulted at that and the audience were now sure they were in for a good night. This friend of Sasha’s could certainly tell a tale too.
“I’ve been to Donegal and the Hebrides on holiday. Nobody even asked what religion I was. I don’t get it. Oh I’m Eric, Denis.”
“Well, Eric, I don’t doubt that for a second, but as a holiday maker you’re just a wallet and a credit card ripe for the plucking. Different rules apply to their own. Anyway I pored over an atlas of Britain and came up with Cumbria. I considered Northumberland but there’s something I don’t like about east coasters. I think that constant cold wind affects them all. From Dover up to Orkney they’re all the same, bitter, uncharitable, surly and suspicious. Mind, I wouldn’t want you think me an ungenerous bigot, there are exceptions and I’ve met them both.” At that there was a necessary break for laughter and the gents.
Five minutes later, Denis was going again, “Before spending any serious money, I bought a trashed place out west and did it up whilst looking around. Paid seven thousand cash for it and sold it for forty-five eighteen months, later. I probably made twenty-five thousand profit, so I could afford a better place than what I first thought.”
At the mention of twenty-five thousand pounds profit in a year and a half Alf nearly choked on his beer, before saying, “How the hell did you manage that?”
“It’s a long story. You really want to hear it?”
“That’s what they’re all here for, Denis. Long stories, well tall stories anyway. You keep em entertained and give us all a rest from Sasha’s lies. And I’ll keep you all going in beer. There’s sausage rolls on later round the other side, but I’ll fetch a tray in for you.”
“Gladys is without doubt the best barmaid this side of heaven itself, Denis, and you have to admit she looks the part with em resting on the bar like that.”
“Sasha, you’re nothing but a dirty old man. I’d tell Elle but she already knows.”
“Ease off on the old, Gladys. You keep going, Denis.”
“We’d started by looking in estate agents out west for a small holding and hadn’t had any luck. We’d been talking about putting our stuff into storage and renting whilst we kept looking. Belinda spotted a place through the window and drew it to my attention. We arranged to look at it. As soon as we pulled up outside the place I liked the setting. It was a middle terraced house on the inland side of the coast road facing the Solway. It was fifty feet above sea level and less than a hundred yards from the sea, but to be affected by coastal erosion the coastal railway and the road would have to be taken out first.
“Over the Solway I could see the Isle of Mann off to my left and Scotland off to my right. Turned out the cemetery off to our right on the other side of the road owned the field in front of the house and it could never be built on because it was reserved for graves when the cemetery was full and by the time that happened I’d be in it. The immediate area was nice, and I found out later it was having millions of EU regeneration money pumped into it.
“I could see while Belinda was already mentally turning her back on it I was hearing the sound of cash registers. The place was a just after the first world war substantially brick built shell in excellent condition. It just looked shabby. You could tell most of the nearby houses were in already private ownership. The area originally entirely local authority housing was going uphill. When the estate agent turned up and let us in it was pretty grim. They were selling it on behalf of the building society who’d repossessed it some three years earlier. In the mean time it had been heavily vandalised. The Velux window in the roof had been ripped off. Inside, some of the door casings were missing. The copper hot water cylinder and most of the pipe work had been stolen and though the central heating unit back boiler was still there the Baxi Bermuda gas fire that should have been in front of it was gone. The place had been subject to considerable DIY work by a completely ham fisted idiot, but I could see it had potential for some serious money to be made. Any one want another?”
“You shut your mouth, Denis. You’re telling the tale and the entertainer gets free drink.”
Sasha looked around him and Geoff said, “I’ll get em in, Sasha. Gladys, set em up, Girl, I’m in the chair.”
“We went back to the car and Belinda said, ‘You are not serious about that place, Denis. It’s a ruin.’ It took me a while to calm her down enough to listen, but I managed. I told her that though it backed up to a grim estate with a poor reputation the houses on the front were inaccessible from the estate behind, because behind the eight foot back wall of the house there was a service road with another eight foot back wall on the other side of it.”
“ ‘How long? How long have I got to live in a dump?” She’d come round to my way of thinking.”
“ ‘You’ve got to give six months notice to train your replacement right? It’ll be done long before that,’ I told her. Well I was right, but if only I’d known what I was in for. The following day I went for some cash and then to the estate agents. The lassie at the estate agent’s said, ‘You do realise you can’t get a mortgage on it, and we’d have to have proof you can afford to pay for it.”
“ ‘Yeah, fine,’ I said pulling out a wad, waving it under her nose saying ‘There’re three hundred and fifty proofs here all bearing the queen’s head, the signature of the governor of the bank of England promising to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds, and I want a receipt for them signed by the manager and witnessed by another member of staff.’ I don’t think she could have seen that much cash before because she sounded kinda faint. Anyway after a fair bit of buggering about I got the place. Belinda was still down in Madeley, but I moved in mid August, ready to start my new job teaching on the first of September. That’s when I found out what I’d done.
“The weird thing was I rang the phone company and after taking my details they said I’d have a landline at the flick of a switch and they gave me the number. I went to B&Q for a phone. I couldn’t have been gone twenty minutes, because it was only just down the road. I plugged it in, and I had a working landline. If only everything else had been that simple.
“There was no electricity and the place had a card operated meter. There were also wires hanging down from from the ceilings and the walls and sticking up from the floors. The wiring was just the wires never having been connected to anything, you know after the electricians do a first fix. Obviously the gas was off because a three meter length of the copper gas pipe was missing from the supply line. The two lavatories flushed, but the water went nowhere except all over the floor. As you gathered the water supply was fine, and there was extra coming in via the hole in the roof where the Velux had been when it rained.
“I taped off the ring main wiring and went for a dozen ceiling roses and switches for the lighting before attempting to have the electricity connected. A neighbour told me I had to buy a card for the meter. I went for one, cost me a tenner, and put it in and still no joy. Now I’d never had any dealings with those kind of electric meters, initially I hadn’t even recognised it for what it was, but the neighbour shewed me this one was shewing three hundred and odd quid in the red, due to standing charges accumulating when the house was empty. It was no bloody wonder my tenner hadn’t done anything.
“I rang the supplier to say I wanted the meter replacing with a normal one to be told, ‘That is normal round there, Sir.’ ”
“I replied, ‘Well it’s not normal to me. I’ve never seen one before. I want a meter that just delivers electricity that gets paid for via a bank direct debit that I never even have to think about.’ ”
“ ‘They might want a credit check for that, sir.’ The tone was respectful as he asked, ‘What may I ask do you do for a living? And how are you paid?’ ”
“ ‘I’m a mathematician and I’ve just taken a job teaching at the local school, and I’ll be paid through the bank the same as every other civil servant.’ I was told that would be fine and an engineer would be round first thing the following Monday morning with my new meter.”
“There’s a lot of unemployment out there, Denis. Most of the meters, gas as well as electric are some kind of pay as you go. It’s actually a bloody expensive way to buy services because the admin costs are high. I read it’s twice the price to buy electric that way rather than by direct debit on a rolling contract.” Most of the audience were nodding in agreement with Stan.
“That first night after the various tradesmen had been in to weigh up the job. I slept on a camp bed with no electricity having waited till dark to take a pee outside. I’d considered peeing in the sink or the bath, till I realised they likely drained into the sewer too. It was a hot sultry August night in the middle of a heat wave and I was sleeping buck naked in the front room on, not in, a sleeping bag surrounded by my tools. Just as it was getting light I was awoken by a loud noise at the back. I stood up and reached for the first thing to hand, it was a seven pound sledge hammer. The lad who came in with the torch would have been sixteen or so.
“I’d silently moved behind the door after hearing the bang and when he entered he hadn’t seen me when the sledge hammer hit his shoulder with what I’m proud to admit was a brutal level of force. I heard the bones crunch rather than break. Screaming like a bloody bansidhe he was as he left clutching his shoulder. He wasn’t moving quickly, but much as I would have liked to hit him again it didn’t seem wise as I’d get away with once as self defence seeing as how he’d had a jimmy bar in his hand which must have had his finger prints all over it. As I stood at the shattered back door frame he’d jimmied open thinking more bloody expense with my balls swinging in the cooling breeze I shouted, ‘If ye come back, next time I’ll rip your bollocks off and make ye eat them.’ ”
“Why didn’t you chase after him, Denis?” Geoff asked jokingly as the others, including Gladys, were laughing fit to burst.
Denis didn’t hesitate in his reply and said with a straight face, “What with no bloody shoes on?” It was a few minutes before Denis could resume.
“Just before school started I was at the front of the house when an under grown wee runt riding a bike down the pavement stopped and asked me, ‘Hey, Marra, is it true you hit a marra with an axe?’ I’d already leaned that marra meant man and it was a local form of address. I smiled and said, ‘You could get into a lot of trouble for that it was only a sledge hammer.’ Apparently I became known as the psycho who teaches maths at the school. Tellingly I was never visited by any members of the local light fingered brigade again.”
“I’ve heard about you, Denis. I’ve a cousin lives out west. He told me you attacked three lads outside a supermarket before Christmas last year.”
“Not true, Geoff. Nearly, but not quite. I’d been shopping after school and had bought the drink. Sasha will tell you I like a drink.” There were grins all round as Denis had already proved that. “You know how dark it can be at half past four at that time of year. It was light when I went in, but I knew it wouldn’t be when I came out, so I’d parked my five oh five as close as I could to the supermarket doors underneath the big flood lights, so I could see what I was doing unloading the shopping. I’d just opened the boot and reached in to push all the tools out of the way so I could fit the shopping in. I’d got two trolleys full, one with just drink in it. I heard a voice behind me say, ‘We’ll take the drink, Marra.’ They got lucky. In the boot was a fourteen pound sledgehammer which was in my hands as I turned to say, ‘Not today you won’t, Lads.’ I put the loudmouth at sixteen and the other two at a couple of years younger. One of the younger one said, ‘Fucking hell, it’s the psycho from the school,’ and they fled. Apparently my reputation was enhanced just by living on the estate where I did. Normal people just didn’t live there.”
“You said they got lucky, Denis. What did you mean?”
“It’s like this, Stan. With the sledgehammer in my hands I felt confident and safe. They were no threat because I could have taken all three out in a few heartbeats. If I’d not had it in my hands I’d have felt insecure and would have attacked immediately and taken the older one out before he’d realised I’d turned round. They all start crying when as they’re going down I drop to my knees and start biting their thighs. The other two would have either run or been taken away with the older one in ambulances.”
“Fuck me. Is he for real, Sasha?”
“Oh yes. He’s for real all right, Stan, and I’ve seen him do much worse than that and walk away at odds of over ten to one.”
“I’m no worse than you, Sasha, and you were with me when that happened, and I didn’t see you holding back. But back to the tale. The engineer from the electricity board was ok. He even credited my account with not just my tenner but another ten quid too, for my trouble he said. Electric sorted.”
Gladys interrupted, “Ok, Gentlemen, I can see I’m going to have the door shut to the best room with this kind of language flying about. Just try to keep the volume down. Take a break now, Denis. I’ll get the sausage rolls.”
The men ate and the conversation was of a more more general nature for a while. Gladys cleared the plates away and replenished their glasses before Denis resumed after a three-quarter of an hour break.
“Gas was next, Yellow pages, find a gas fitter. He came round that evening. He seemed nervous, said he didn’t do work on the estate and had nearly turned the job down. The only thing that convinced him to risk it was the selection of polysylabic words I’d used. Oh, long words, Alf. He asked me what I did and I told him about my new job starting in September and he told me his daughter was in year eleven there. He replaced the pipe work that night, came round the following day with a new hot water cylinder, fitted it and told me the Baxi was on order and he’d have it fitted within two days. I offered to put the money up front but he said no it would be ok.
“The roofer came from Maryport. Now I’m pretty good with accents, but I had to ask for a few repeats, there.” There was a round of laughter at that. “He said three days work and three hundred quid plus whatever the Velux cost, but he couldn’t do the job till Monday the first of September, my first day at my new job. I gave him a key and my phone number and said I’d probably be home before five, but there were no guarantees.
“Wouldn’t you know it, the pretty wee redhead in the front row of my registration group turned out to be my gas fitter’s daughter and like her dad she was a lovely person. Rather differently the under grown wee runt I’d spoken on the front to was a refugee from a family of public minded citizens who spent a lot of their time assisting Her Majesty’s constabulary with their enquiries and he was in my year seven special needs class.
“I got home after my first day at work as the roofers were tidying up to be told, ‘I managed to get a couple more lad’s on the job, so it’s all done. We reset your ridge tiles, replaced a dozen or so slates and re-slated your porch putting in the extra row of slates, some amateur job that was, all of which you knew about. We also replaced the lead valley flashing on the right hand side valley at the front which was cracked beyond repair which you didn’t know about. Rather than buy the new wooden guttering which I originally thought you needed I managed to line yours with a black plastic gutter which you can’t see from the ground which saved a good bit. I don’t know what the Velux will cost because they haven’t worked out the trade price yet. They don’t make one that size any more, so I picked up the next size down framed it in and re-slated round it. I’ll let you have it for whatever it costs me. The job’s done and two hundred and forty will do it. I’ll send you the bill for the Velux ok?’ Not often a job comes in cheaper than quoted, so I gave him an extra thirty quid and told him to have a drink with his lads on me.
“But the best bit was the sewers. The neighbour had told me the previous owner had been into drugs. His marriage had folded and to make sure his wife got half off nothing he did a lot of the damage himself. I subsequently found all sorts of crap, including a lot of broken glass, in the floor space between up and downstairs so that figured. Apparently he’d smashed the sewers and filled the inspection chamber with rubbish, which explained why the lavatories didn’t work. I dug the inspection chamber out, it must have been two and a half feet down to the invert level, what that’s? the invert level is the level of the bottom of the inside of the pipe, but special bits that look like the bottom half of a pipe are used in inspection chambers. Even after cleaning out, the sewer still didn’t run.
“Yellow pages again. I rang UnBlock Cumbria to pressure jet the pipes out. The inspection chamber invert was maybe six inches down on the neighbour on one side which was the end of terrace house and the beginning of the sewer run, but it was a six feet down on the other side.
“To set the scene, I’d had a lad come round that day to fit the house with an alarm system and he was taking a break when the lads from UnBlock Cumbria came round. They weighed the job up and decided to start at the beginning of the sewer. They told me on the other side the four inch sewer dropped into a three foot main drain that ran about twelve feet down and it would be difficult to rod into half way down from that end. Ok so far, so good. They jetted out the first section which was solid due to the activities of the previous owner which was fine, but still didn’t give me a working sewer. Then they started on the other side.
“Somehow I just knew it was going to be grim when I saw the broken bamboo drain rod pieces coming back as the jet nozzle forced its way forward. When I heard the rumbling sound I started running away from the inspection chamber as fast as I could. The alarm guy was in front of me and I couldn’t keep up with him, he was a lanky six foot three and his hobby was fell running, but even he wasn’t fast enough. The pressure jet guys were wearing protective clothing. God alone knows what the pressure behind that couple of hundred gallons of shite was, but I do know it went fifty feet straight up out of the inspection chamber before coming down like an umbrella and covering everything in sight including the alarm guy and me. I suppose I should have been grateful when one of the jetting lads shouted, ‘That’s got it. It’s running clear now,’ but I wasn’t. I’d heard that dirty song rugby players sing, ‘The Shower of Shit over Shropshire’ years before, but I’ve lived through the shower of shit over Cumbria and trust me it was no bloody song.”
Yet again it was several minutes before Denis could continue “They told me the camera shewed the main sewer was unbroken so I had an upstairs lavatory but the branch pipe from the downstairs lavatory was completely collapsed, ‘It looks smashed to pieces’ the boss said. Clearly the neighbour knew what he was talking about. I subsequently replaced that with a length of modern poly pipe, but I was awful glad that day that I’d already repaired the shower.
“I was happy to move. The idiot who had the place before me was Cumbrian born and bred and they told me he had a Workington accent. Problem was his name was McCorquodale or something like that, any way it was mac something. I sound like what I am, a Scot from the north, and I was getting threatening phone calls to repay money. I think they linked his name and my voice, added two and two together and got five. I told the idiots that I wasn’t Garreth McCorquodale and had no idea where he was, but if they harrased me any more I’d send a couple of of my wife’s cousins who weren’t yet in the H blocks for terrorism round to visit. I doubt anything would have happened, but I’m not sorry to have left the place.”
“That wasn’t sensible was it? Suppose he’d called your bluff. Your missus isn’t really related to IRA terrorists is she?”
Sasha looked at Denis then back to Alf and said, “Best leave it there, Alf. Denis may or may not tell you that one some other time. He’ll have to know you a lot better and be confident you can keep your mouth shut before he goes there.”
“Thanks, Sasha. We moved from there to the small holding a couple of months ago. I’d no idea where you lived. I knew it was in this neck of the woods, but that’s an awful lot of ground to cover, Sasha. I put some enquiries out, but you seemed to have just dropped off the grid.”
“So how come you’re here starring at the weekly bullshit session?”
“Belinda went out to get her hair done this afternoon. She got to blathering with another lassie in the hairdresser’s, and, seeing as they were both going shopping at Tesco after, they had coffee together. This lassie Gwen mentioned her old man was going out to the pub tonight. She said it was the men’s story telling night and invited her round for a girls night in with some friends and a bottle of wine or two. Now I ask you, how many retired professional liars do you know called Sasha? She found out which pub and here I am. I only live twelve miles a way. Christ man it’s good to see you. I’d wondered if you were dead.”
“Nah. Mark Twain had the right of it when he said, ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration.’ But doubtless there’re plenty that wish I were, but I’ve no plans on dying yet, for there’re far to many people left for me to upset. When I go I’m being buried in my apple orchard. I’ve even selected the variety of apple I want planted over me so my personality can live on. I want a nice sour one to suit my style, and have chosen a cider apple called Tremlett’s Bitter.”
Amidst the laughter Gerry said, “I’m Gerry, Gwen’s old man.”
“So this is all your fault is it?”
“Aye, but it’s solved one problem for you, Denis.”
“What’s that then, Gerry?”
“You don’t have to find a decent local now. Welcome to the taproom of the Green Dragon, home from home and meeting place of the local branch of the Grumpy Old Men’s Society.”
