Handle With Care and Other Stories

by Ann MacLaren

  It didn’t seem like a hard fall, she wasn’t up a great height, but she managed to go down with all her weight on one arm. Did I say Rita’s quite a hefty girl?

  She got the sympathy vote, of course. We had to call the mountain rescue team and they came and brought her down on a stretcher. A bit over the top if you ask me. It was only a fractured wrist and collar bone. The leader of the team gave me a right ticking off when he heard what had happened. In front of Joe too. I was humiliated. I didn’t do it deliberately. I was just defending myself.

  We all followed the stretcher down to the loch side where an ambulance was waiting. Nobody spoke to me, not even Joe. Rita was basking in all the attention, obviously. I went and stood on the pier at the car park, trying to look suitably contrite and a wee bit dejected, waiting for Joe to come and put his arm around me and tell me everything would be okay, and maybe suggest a wee drink and a bite to eat once we got back to Glasgow. But no. He did come over, but he started on at me about thoughtlessness and responsibility and impulsiveness, and I just thought, I’ll show you impulsiveness.

  No, I didn’t push him into the loch, although I was definitely tempted. But I thought I’d leave with my dignity intact – the little that was left of my dignity anyhow. I just leaned over and kissed his cheek and left him standing there, looking confused. He’ll be sorry, I know he will.

  No more walking club for me. I’ll be striking out on my own in future, and I’ll be treading carefully. Avoiding that ball bearing effect.

  And I’ll definitely be keeping clear of chocolate digestives.

  In Concert

  The bean dish was a mistake. In fact, the whole Mexican restaurant experience was a mistake. We should have eaten at home before we left, but Ella wanted to make a night of it and was in that “You never take me anywhere” mode.

  “I’ve heard the food’s great, Sammy, and it’s just round the corner from the Concert Hall. I’ll book us a table.”

  It was nothing to write home about. Ella had a chicken burrito and I had the chilli con carne – more beans than meat, and it was far too spicy so I had to wash it down with a couple of beers. And the service was very slow; we nearly missed the start of the concert.

  We don’t particularly like classical music, but Madge next door had given us the tickets as a wee thank you for looking after her dog while she was in the hospital for an operation. Bunion. Funny name for a dog, but he’s a friendly wee thing. Well, we couldn’t not go. And it was an inoffensive piece – Beethoven’s Pastoral. I’d heard bits of that before, on the radio.

  The concert started well enough, I was quite enjoying the music, but when we were halfway through the second movement my stomach began to make funny sort of burbling noises; you know, a bit like air in the pipes when you turn on the central heating. I’ve always been bothered by flatulence. Well, I say bothered, but it’s other people it bothers really, not me. Anyway, I was sitting there hoping it wouldn’t try to compete with the orchestra when I realised it was moving south a bit. It wasn’t long before I felt the twinges of colic nipping at me, which wasn’t pleasant; but at least the third movement had started – a lot of these classical pieces have three movements, I don’t know how I know that, but I do, I must’ve read it somewhere – so it wouldn’t be long till it was finished and I’d get out of the hall quickly and into the street, where I could let rip without it bothering anybody. Except Ella. She’s always giving me grief for doing that but what does she expect me to do? Cork it?

  I had a quick glance at the programme and saw to my horror that there were five movements in this symphony. Five! Good grief! Don’t get me wrong, it was pleasant enough to listen to; but I was a bit distracted by this point. I was feeling very uncomfortable, wondering if I’d make it to the end of the concert, or if I’d have to incur Ella’s wrath by getting up and going out before it finished. The music died away and I tried to relax. Three down, two to go.

  The fourth movement had barely started when my bowels began to rumble. I wasn’t as worried about this as you might think; I don’t know if you’re familiar with Beethoven’s Pastoral, but the fourth movement’s the one with the thunder storm. The approaching thunder certainly covered up the wee noises I was making.

  And then I remembered – because, as I said earlier, I’ve heard bits of this music before – we’d soon be moving into the calm after the storm, and it would get quiet. Very quiet. I panicked. I’d have to get up and get out while the thunderstorm provided cover.

  Madge had very thoughtfully got us expensive seats, right down near the front and next to the aisle, but Ella had the end seat. She’s a big woman, likes to be able to drape herself a bit; she’d have to shift to let me out. She wouldn’t be pleased. No matter, my insides were telling me to make a quick exit.

  I nudged Ella, who I think had been dozing – although she would deny that, she always says she’s just resting her eyes – because she looked at me quite confused. I motioned with my head for her to move and let me out, but she didn’t understand.

  “Wind,” I mouthed, and made to get up.

  Ella looked around her, puzzled, then up to the ceiling. She shrugged her shoulders. She told me later she’d thought maybe somebody had organised a strong wind in the hall to coincide with the storm in the music, make it seem more realistic. Stupid woman.

  “Me! Wind!” I tried to whisper but it came out like a hiss.

  Ella glowered at me and indicated that I should stay in my seat. She did this by flapping her hand at me: I mean, really! You’d think I was a wee boy.

  By this time the storm was reaching its peak, and things were taking a turn for the worse in the trouser department. I had to get out of there. Quickly.

  I stood up and tried to squeeze past Ella, but instead of moving her big fat legs to the side she just sat tight. I could see she was mad at me. But the storm on stage was passing, and the orchestra was about to progress quietly into the final movement. It was now or never.

  I should have known better. I lifted my leg up high to step over Ella, and involuntarily broke wind. It was quite loud, and I might have got away with it, the audience might have thought it was one of the instruments that had gone off key; but as I pulled my other leg over Ella’s knees I inadvertently let fly another. The orchestra slithered to a stop. I headed towards the door trying to look relaxed and unconcerned – though I knew Ella would be livid.

  Did I mention this was a Glasgow audience? No polite turning away and pretending nothing had happened here. No sweeping the embarrassing scene under the carpet. No saving of blushes. The silence was broken before I was halfway up the aisle:

  “Was that an attempt at the Trumpet Voluntary?” shouted a man up near the back.

  “Trumpet involuntary, more like,” somebody replied.

  People began to laugh, and before I reached the door they were all chipping in their tuppenceworth.

  “Sounded like wood-wind to me.”

  “Better out than in.”

  “Wherever you be let your wind blow free.”

  Even the wee woman that held the door open for me as I rushed past felt moved to comment:

  “Ye’ll feel the better o’ that, son.”

  I hurried outside and made myself comfortable in the fresh air; then I went and sat in the car.

  Ella’s huff lasted three days. She told me later, once she was speaking to me again, that it took the orchestra fifteen minutes to compose themselves, but when they did, they started again at the beginning of the last movement, and everybody managed not to laugh – although the big man playing the double bass had a huge grin on his face the whole time, and his shoulders were heaving.

  And I know Madge has been told the whole story – the way the two of them burst into that “Let it go, let it go...” song when I’m driving them to the shops. You’d think women didn’t pass wind. Just wait till Ella does a wee fluff, as she calls it, in publ
ic. That’ll be a different story.

  Ella says she’s never showing her face in that concert hall again; says it’ll be all the same crowd that goes and she wouldn’t want to be recognised, and anyway, she didn’t really think that kind of music was for the likes of us. I don’t know what she’s talking about – it wasn’t that bad.

  I’m surprised they haven’t called me in for an audition.

  Old Annie

  It was a polystyrene container full of chips and tomato sauce that changed old Annie’s life. She could have stepped over it, of course, ignored it, or kicked it into the side like she usually did with the bits of rubbish that accumulated in the close mouth, because it would be gone anyway in a couple of days. The seagulls would make short work of the chips, the empty container would be picked up by the wind and deposited in the middle of the road where it would be reduced to fragments by a passing car, then dispersed along the length of the street to mingle with the crisp packets, beer cans and sweetie papers clinging to hedges, wrapped around railings or bunched up in the gutter.

  But she didn’t step over it. She stood looking down at it and wondered what made a person deliberately ignore the big black local authority bin, right there on the pavement, and throw their unwanted supper into the entrance to our close. She wondered why, since the city was obviously populated by huge numbers of these persons who seemed happy to add to the large quantities of human detritus around them, the council didn’t employ more street sweepers. She also wondered why it was that you never heard of somebody being fined for dropping litter. Or for letting their dog foul the pavement. And then she wondered why she was bothering to ask herself such stupid questions when she already knew the answers? Nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. Did even she give a damn?

  Having stared at the chips for longer than she really needed to, Annie came to a momentous decision. She would lift the whole mess up and deposit it in the council bin. She would never have believed herself capable of picking up someone else’s rubbish, the very thought of it would once have made her feel sick. But she bent down, gingerly lifted the offending item with two fingers of each hand, and carried it the few steps to the bin at the edge of the pavement. She felt a bit embarrassed afterwards, wondering if any of the neighbours had been watching her. Silly old bat’s got nothing better to do with her time now, they would think. If Joe had been alive he’d have given her a ticking off, told her she could catch all sorts from picking things up in the street. But if Joe had been alive she would probably have stepped over the chips because she wouldn’t have had time to stop.

  Later, when she invited me in for a cup of tea and told me all this, Annie said that she hadn’t been sure what it was about that particular discarded container that had stopped her in her tracks.

  “It puzzled me,” she confessed. “So I went up to the church and spoke to Father Muldoon. He thought that, since it was the Monday after Easter Sunday the flesh colour of the chips and the blood red of the tomato sauce had reminded me of Christ’s suffering.”

  Annie had liked the sound of that but, ever the realist, thought it much more likely that she had been reminded of her recently departed husband, who had split his skull when he fell, drunk, down a flight of concrete steps. I suggested that the true reason she had been forced to consider this disgusting mess on the doorstep was that now that she had no husband to run after, now that she didn’t have to dash down to the butcher’s to buy something for his tea, or hurry along to the newsagent’s for his daily paper, she had time to stop and consider some of the more unpleasant aspects of our everyday life.

  “It’s a good sign,” I told her. “You’re moving on.”

  She wasn’t convinced. But her initial embarrassment had obviously given way to a sense of achievement.

  “I feel as if I’ve made a small contribution towards a cleaner world,” she stated proudly. “I might even do it again some time.”

  And she did. She began to make a habit of lifting the odd bit of litter here and there as she walked to the shops every morning. In no time she had the close mouth clean and tidy, and had even picked up all the rubbish from below the bushes of the ground floor’s front gardens – although the owners didn’t seem to notice the difference since they never once mentioned it. She began to take a polythene bag with her every time she went out, so that she could lift things up from the pavement and carry them along to the nearest bin. After a while she became bolder and ventured into other close mouths, lifting soggy sheets of newspaper, twisted beer cans, bits of glass and chip wrappers. She even lifted a used condom once, though after that she began to carry a pair of rubber gloves in her pocket. She no longer worried about what the neighbours thought of her, although she was sorry that the young couple in the flat above had begun to avoid her.

  “I suppose they all think I’m losing my marbles,” she said.

  “Not at all,” I contradicted. But she was right. Comments were being made:

  “Losing Joe has unhinged her.”

  “It’s not natural, is it?”

  “Oh well, as long as it keeps her happy.”

  Our street soon became the cleanest in the area, and the funny thing was, people stopped dropping their half finished chip suppers, or leaving their beer cans or lemonade bottles against the wall. Maybe when they saw how clean and tidy the place was they felt they didn’t want to be responsible for messing it up again. It hadn’t mattered so much when the place looked like a giant rubbish tip.

  There was always something, of course. Usually a small piece of litter like a bus ticket, or occasionally a cigarette packet, but it didn’t take Annie long to lift these few items every day. That gave her time to concentrate on other streets, then later the main road, and the shopping centre.

  She became almost an institution as she walked the streets around here, looking every inch the well-dressed bag lady, rummaging here and there and stooping every so often to lift her bits and pieces.

  “I have this rule,” Annie told me, “that I never go back home until I’ve filled at least half a bag. Some days I have to walk a fair distance to find even a tiny scrap of paper, but I can usually rely on places like the cash machine at the shopping centre or the spare bit of ground at the back of the church. And there’s always the mini-market and the primary school, so I’m never stuck.”

  It wasn’t long before the local newspaper got to hear about Annie. They did an article about her and the story took up the whole of the front page. There was a big colour picture of her dropping a polystyrene container full of chips and tomato sauce into a bin. I wondered if they’d bought it specially, just for the photo, but apparently the photo-shoot was done just after lunchtime, outside the Secondary School. The photographer must have known there would be no shortage of props.

  In the article she said that she liked to keep busy because it was lonely being on her own, what with her husband just passed on and her only daughter being in Australia. There was a whip-round in the newspaper office after that, and they roped in some of their advertisers, so in no time at all Annie was off down under for three weeks. She had a great time, but she said she wouldn’t like to be away for so long again; she came back to an awful mess.

  She was on local radio too. They had her on a phone-in programme, and a teacher phoned to ask if she’d be interested in going along to her school to talk to the children. Annie was a bit nervous about that but it was very successful. Now she’s been round all the schools in the area, talking to the kids and judging anti-litter poster competitions.

  “They all seem very enthusiastic, and some of them even remember not to throw their crisp bags and sweetie papers on the ground,” she told the listeners when the radio station did a follow-up programme recently. “In fact, with all this publicity it’s a wonder there’s any litter lying around the streets in our area. But, there’s always something to be lifted.”

  Annie’s been picking up other people’s rubbish for
over a year now. Sometimes she finds a bit of money. Never much, just the odd one or two or five pence piece, and very occasionally a bit more, like the time she found three pound coins in the gutter outside the chip shop. She keeps it all in a box and every few months puts it in the collecting tin in the Oxfam shop. Once she found a wallet complete with credit cards and about fifty pounds in cash, but she took that to the police station. She got five pounds as a reward, and that went into the box too. She also handed in a gold crucifix and chain but she never heard any more about that.

  People often stop to talk to her as she works. They ask her why she does it, what she gets out of it, and she tells tell them that she does it because it makes her happy, because she hopes it makes others happy to live in such a clean, litter-free environment. Do they want to help her? Nobody ever does.

  Annie always comes out to speak to me as I’m passing her door. She’s done this every day since I retired because she thinks she might persuade me to take over when she gives up. Not that she’s ready to throw in the towel yet, you understand, but she’s not getting any younger, and her arthritis plays up in the frosty weather.

  “You could always go round with me for a while,” she offered yesterday morning. “To get you used to it. There’s no money in it, of course, just a clean world. But we all know cleanliness is next to Godliness so that should be reward enough. It’s not always easy the first time, but it’s not all that difficult either. It just requires a little bit of courage and a large amount of leg work. Good for the heart. And the soul.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told her, then made my escape.

  But a funny thing happened on the way back from the shops this morning. I saw a plastic bottle sticking out from the park railings and I couldn’t help myself. I picked it up and carried it home to put in the recycling bin. I saw Annie’s curtains twitching as I passed, but I pretended I hadn’t seen her. I was a bit shaken though – had to pour myself a large brandy. Two actually.