Urban Spacemen

A door flung open. Wet spray rattled across the linoleum, echoing the sloping rain in the night outside. A chill moment hung in the too-warm air and its bitter beer-swill fug. Maxwell Dargie heaved into a barstool that had seen better days. The door slammed on its wire springs behind him.

'Gie’s a pint, Cherlie! I’ve got a thirst like a badger’s airse!'

Dargie’s pint of the usual materialised on the bar-top.

Tastes better in a straight gless, appreciated Dargie, lifting the pint skyward, eyeing it with more affection than he had mustered for his manic charge along Princes Street.

On whose pavements, Dargie had swept headlong past crowds, while the rain fell in puddles around his feet. He was oblivious to the passing passers-by, the shop-front windows. Princes Street rain, sharp and reflective, made its inhabitant faces sharp in turn, to the point of enmity.

Dargie ignored the crowds in the manner of a down-and-out. He pushed through them with drunken uncertainty, weaving a little, threatening to touch an arm or a shoulder. He made the danger of intrusion his mask. A path opened up before him. No-one wanted his grainy, skinny face breathing God-knows what stale guff in theirs. No-one wanted to be confronted with whatever anger drove him to stotter down the rain-soaked street to prop up some boozy dive with his mean and probably nefariously supplemented dole.

In the warm pub, Dargie relaxed through several pints. Conversations sparked to life, animated, a little too loud, and died away as if they had never been. Pub talk. And Dargie, as the night wore off and the drink wore on, washed himself up beside a scruff-suited individual. Both slumped on the bar, holding their half-optimistic glasses before them in a kind of alcoholic bewilderment.

His new companion was muttering to Dargie and the pint glass, ‘I’m no fae aroon here. Had a job interview… Nae chance, pal.’ He laughed.

Dargie eyed him, ‘Naebody’s fae roon here. Me, I’m no even fae this planet!’

‘Fit planet are you aff, then?’

‘I’m fae Axelmaxeltactaractarus.’

They collapsed in laughter till each held the other upright.

‘Time for another pint, and a wee nippie chaser,’ said the scruff-suited man,‘Twa pints o eichty and twa nips. ‘At’s for me an for the man in the moon here!’

Later, in the cool of the night, with a light rain falling. Dargie and his boozing buddy wore away at the streets in a vague attempt to reach civilisation. They danced on through the drizzle arm in arm, a symbiosis of drunks, eclipsing binaries holding each other in stable orbit from which, alone, they might spin away into darkness.

 © BH 2012

---

Found this lurking in Andy McCallum Craford's blog, posted there in 2012. Thought it worth sharing. Let's face it, as so often happens, the aliens on this planet are us.