The Burn

The Burn by James Kelman

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Authors: James Kelman
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Surely not. The witness has already shown this clearly to be the case your Honour. Has he indeed. Aye, fuck, he has, on fucking numerous occasions, that’s how come he
got the boys out on strike last March.
    Ah.
    Naw but he’s fucking sick of it, he really is. High time he was an adult. Here he is forty-seven years of age and he’s a boy, a wee lad – in fact, he is all set to start
wearing short trousers and ankle-socks and a pair of fast-running sandshoes (plimsolls for the non-Scottish reader). What was he to do but that is the problem, that is the thing you get faced with
all the bloody time, wasnt it just bloody enervating. But you’ve got your brush you’ve got your brush and he stepped out and was moving, dragging his feet on fast, dragging because his
left leg was a nuisance, due to a fucking disability that made him limp – well it didni
make
him limp, he decided to limp, it was his decision, he could have found some new manner of
leg-motoring which would have allowed him not to limp, by some sort of circumlocutory means he could have performed a three-way shuffle to offset or otherwise bypass the limp and thus be of normal
perambulatory gait. This was these fucking books he read. Peter was a fucking avid reader and he had got stuck in the early Victorian era, even earlier, bastards like Goldsmith for some reason,
that’s what he read. Charles fucking Lamb, that’s who he read; all these tory essayists of the pre-chartist days, that other bastard that didni like Keats. Why did he read such shite.
Who knows, they fucking wreaked havoc with the syntax, never mind the fucking so-called sinecure of a job, the street cleaning. Order Order. Sorry Mister Speaker. But for christ sake, for christ
sake.
    Yet you had to laugh at his spirit I mean god almighty he was a spirited chappie, he was, he really and truly was. But he had to go fast. There was danger ahead. No time for quiet grins. Alright
he was good, he was still doing the business at forty-seven, but no self-congratulatory posturing if you please, even though he might still be doing it, even though he was still going strong at the
extraordinarily advanced age of thrice fifteen-and-two-thirds your honour, in the face of extraordinarily calamitous potentialities to wit said so-called sinecure. Mister Speaker Mister Speaker,
this side of the House would request that you advise us as to the appertaining set of circumstances of the aforementioned place and primary purpose of said chappie’s sinecure so-called.
Uproar. A Springburn street. Put on the Member for Glasgow North. The Member for Glasgow North has fuckt off for a glass of claret. Well return him post-haste.
    But the goodwife. Has the goodwife a word to say. Yes, indeed. The goodwife would bat him one on the gub. She thought all this was dead and buried. She thought the sinecure was not deserving of
the ‘so-called’ prefixed reference one iota, i.e. sinecure
qua
sinecure in the good lady’s opinion.
    She wouldni think it was possible but, it’s true, she thought it was all over as far as the problematics were concerned. Pussycats pussycats, I tought I saw. But there you are, getting to
the doddering stage, being spotted by a crouching cat, so much for his ability to cope, to withstand the helter skelter, the pell mell, the guys in the darkblue and the bulky shoulders. Bejasus he
was getting fucking drunk on the possibility of freedom, a genuine liberty, one that would be his prior to deceasement. What he fancied was a wee periscope from the coffin, so he could just lie
there watching the occasional passersby, the occasional birdie or fieldmouse:
    he was into another doorway and standing with his back pressed into the wall, eyes shut tight, but lips parted, getting breath, listening with the utmost concentration. Nothing. Nothing o christ
why was he an atheist this of all times he felt like screaming a howsyrfather yr paternoster a quick hail mary yr king billy for christ sake what

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