The Rag & Bone Man

by U.V.Ray

The neighbour’s dog was whining in the night again. Its melancholy dog-song echoed around the houses. It woke Joe Fuegi up. He hadn’t made it into bed. Throughout the evening he’d consumed a whole bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label in front of the TV, and when he woke up the TV channel was on closedown for the night and he was sitting up in the chair, still in his clothes, with his head slumped forward on his chest. Aooowwwwoooo. Aooowwwwoooo. The dog wouldn’t shut up. And it was 3 a.m.

 

 

   Joe had been born with his left leg missing from the knee down and he wore a prosthetic limb. His leg ended in a stump instead of a knee joint, and the stump had to be inserted into a rubber cup in the leg. A lace-up leather harness then had to be strapped around his thigh to hold the limb in place. After wearing it all day he used to take it off in the evenings. It was like relieving aching feet of heavy work boots. He always propped the leg against the side of his chair as he sat and drank and watched TV. He liked the game shows. It bought a lump to his throat to see people win. He picked up the leg, rolled up his trouser and strapped it on. He went into the kitchen and chopped some liver into strips and put it in a dish. It was cold out there and he didn’t like the way his neighbours left the dog outside all night. Their yard backed onto his and there was a loose vertical slat in the fence. He went out and swung it aside. The white Jack Russell terrier would always come running through, licking his hands. Just as Joe so often did, he carried the excited dog inside and fed it the chopped liver. He thought he’d heard the neighbours calling the dog Freddy but he called it Adolf because it had a black mark like a moustache beneath its nose. After Adolf had finished eating Joe lay down on the sofa and the dog jumped up and lay next to him, nestling itself tight and warm against his chest. He slept off the drink until about 8 a.m. Then he carried Adolf back outside and pushed him back through the fence.

 

 

 

   The newspaper had already fallen through his letterbox. After sitting and reading through it he put on his overcoat and went out for breakfast. He got in his pick-up truck and drove into town. He parked on Smallbrook Queensway outside the music shop and walked around the corner to the Sunny Day Café. It was a cheap but clean place on Hurst Street with little blue table cloths and nets up the windows. It was owned by a short, fat Italian man called Sergio. He ordered bacon, sausage and eggs with fried bread. Sergio nodded and wiped down his hands on his apron. While Sergio fried his food at the cooker Joe sat and waited at a table near the middle of the room. A little girl about five years old walked over and stood staring at him. She was a sickly looking child. She was extremely thin and her hair was falling out in clumps. Her skin had a yellow hue to it and one of her eyes appeared to be clouded over. She was beautiful. It was heart-wrenching to look at her. Childhood cancer, Joe reckoned, feeling tears well up in his eyes. A feeling of awfulness instilled itself inside him. It was sense of helplessness.

 

 

   “What’s wrong with your face?” the little girl asked.

 

 

   “It’s called a tumour,” Joe told her. “But I’m okay. It just looks funny. It’s called a benign tumour.”  He reached up and touched the small growth, not much bigger than a pea that hung from the right side of his face.

 

 

   “I’m poorly, too,” she nodded. “And sometimes the other children make fun of me.”

 

 

Joe felt as if the tears were going to break into a full blown river. He wanted to wrap her up in cotton wool. He reached out and stroked her face. “That’s because in this world people can be truly vile. But they can’t change… it’s just the way they are. If you try and keep that in mind it makes them a little bit easier to deal with.”

 

 

  “My name’s Mathilda,” the little girl smiled, stepping closer towards him. She had on a little Tartan skirt and pink sweater.  “What’s yours?”

 

 

   “Joe.”

 

 

The girl’s mother, a dark haired woman with hardened, strained face, came over from her corner table and without acknowledging Joe, picked the girl up and carried her away. Over her mother’s shoulder Mathilda looked back and waved. “People really stink!” Joe added.

 

 

 

   He ate his breakfast and swilled it down with a mug of tea. He paid Sergio and said goodbye to Mathilda. Her mother didn’t even look up. She sat staring into her tea cup. Outside the café there was some teenage kid wearing a woolly hat and duffel coat. “Got any spare change?”

 

 

   “No, I’m sorry, I haven’t,” Joe said without breaking step.

 

 

   “Yeah, jog on, bro’, look after yourself. Look after number one!” The kid said, breathing into his hands and stamping his feet, theatrically making out it was colder than it actually was. Playing the victim.

 

 

   “Son,” Joe stopped walking and held out his palms. “Take a good look around you, kiddo. All any of us have got is ourselves! That’s just the way it is! Get used to it.”

 

 

  It was market day. Saturday. And on market days Joe always got his vegetables from Dave. Dave the Rave, to his friends, on account of his weekend speed binges in the dance clubs around town. Joe was too old for all that now, but he knew about Dave. Anyone who had even the loosest connections around town knew about it. Dave had a stall on the market in St.Martin’s Square. Joe was heading towards market along Smallbrook Queensway when he realised he’d have to use the queers’ toilets near the underpass by the Rotunda. The Cottages, they were known as. He could walk back to the Café but he might not make it. So he went into one of the cubicles in the Cottages and sat down. There was a hole crudely cut into the dividing partition between him and the next cubicle. The glory hole. He plugged it up with a good handful of toilet tissue. Across the inside of his cubicle door someone had had scrawled in blue marker pen: “when I die bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass.”  As he sat there the tissue was suddenly poked out of the hole from the other side by an erect penis. It was a curved, ruddy penis with a grotesque bulbous head and it protruded through the hole and just hung there waiting. Joe ignored it. And then an excited, breathy voice from the other side of the partition demanded, “Suck it and see!”

 

 

   “I’m going to give you one chance – and one chance only – to get that outta my face, now!” Joe warned, looking up towards the open top of the cubicle. “You betta put that back in your trousers or I’ll cut it off and shove it down your throat, you understand me, Sunshine?”

 

 

   “Come onnnnn…  you know you want to… what else are you here for?  Suck it! See what happens.”

 

 

Joe hurriedly finished what he was doing, pulled up his trousers and went around to the next cubicle. He shouldered the door open and grabbed the guy under the chin and shoved him against the wall, squeezing the sides of his face so that his lips bunched up like a fish. “I’ll show you what’s gonna fuckin’ happen.” If he had been a young kid Joe would have let him off lightly. But this guy was about forty, with receding, flyaway hair and large flaky scabs on his scalp: a complete fucking lowlife loser.

 

 

   “You dirty bastards never learn do you?” Joe pulled out his Stanley knife and slashed the simpering cunt across the throat. He didn’t dig the blade in hard enough to kill him. Just deep enough to open him up. The queer slumped down on the toilet clutching his throat; the blood ran through his fingers and down his buttoned-up denim jacket. “Jesus, man, you’ve got a serious problem,” he coughed.

 

 

   “I’m the one with the problem?” Joe laughed. He tugged off a load of toilet tissue and stuffed it hard into the guy’s mouth, thudding the back of his head against the wall as he did so. “I don’t think so, pal.” He retracted the Stanley blade, returned the knife to his pocket and walked out, leaving the queer spitting mouthfuls of toilet tissue.

 

 

 

   Joe Fuegi was fifty-two years old. When he was eighteen, his parents were killed in a London tube train crash when the train rammed into the end of a dead-end tunnel at Moorgate. Joe had inherited his father’s scrap yard. Yeah, he was a rag ‘n’ bone man. It was a title he liked the sound of. Somebody should make a horror film about a rag ‘n’ bone man. He’d lived and worked on the yard all his life. His parents had been in the first car. The thirty foot carriage was concertinaed down to just two feet. No one travelling in it stood a chance. That was in 1975 and he was listening to the Loaded album by The Velvet Underground when he got the news. There was no other family to speak of and Joe had pretty much been alone since that moment when the policeman had turned up at the door carrying his helmet under his arm and dropped the bombshell.  There’s a song on the Loaded album called Train Round the Bend. It was playing at the very moment Joe closed the door and found himself alone in the world for the first time. The realisation had run him through like a rapier sword.

 

 

 

Ever since he was a kid Joe collected tin soldiers. He used to play with them. Now he had thousands of them standing in orderly platoons in glass display cabinets in his living room. Napoleonic and 1st World War mainly, but also a few American Civil War. He liked the way they were devoid of a soul. They were hollow and couldn’t be hurt. Even when the paint would begin to chip away from their faces and their uniforms they didn’t feel anything inside. Joe had wished he was like that. But he wasn’t. Having been born without his left leg he was set apart from everyone else. Children could be cruel and that’s why he’d experienced an immediate rapport with the little girl in the café. But it wasn’t that, exactly, that had gotten to him. It was just the way most other people didn’t think about anything too deeply. They didn’t feel or appreciate anything. They were like his collection of tin soldiers: like Joe wanted to be. But being the way he was had instilled in him empathy for the human condition. He watched people. As a child he was always on the outside looking in. And that sensitivity to the world around him had left him with scars inside. But he’d also learned that in life it was simply the force of your will against the world. It has been said that only the tough survive. But Joe reckoned that wasn’t entirely correct. He was tough enough alright. Life had made him that way; life had turned his heart to stone. But being tough was no defence against the relentless march of the hollow men. If you had a heart the world would drive a nail right through it. Even a heart of stone can be shattered with a single sledge-hammer blow. And Joe’s had been shattered. He just didn’t let anyone see it. He didn’t let anyone get too close. When he was younger he’d always been glad he’d never had any children. Apart from the fact that kids fuck up your life, he told himself it was because he didn’t want to be disappointed in them. But as he’d aged he realised that was just a defence mechanism. It was a cog in the same wheel. He feared intimacy with other human beings. This was a part of himself he’d simply learned to accept. It is said that you should always look at the state of a man’s shoes. Joe always made sure he checked the backs of them as well because people are always concealing something unsavoury about themselves beneath the polished front they present to the rest of humanity.  

 

 

 

   When Joe got to Dave the Rave’s stall he was standing beneath the striped canopies with his hands thrust into the money bag attached to the waistband of his faded jeans, loudly telling another stall-holder one of his tales. Joe often secretly referred to these stories as The Bullshit Chronicles. As he got closer Joe only caught the tail-end of what Dave was saying. “…Well, you gotta be careful what you say, haven’t you? I mean here’s this guy, completely off his fucking tits, telling me he’d like to see a copy. So there’s me telling him… ha ha ha… telling him I’d certainly like to…. ha ha ha ha… I’d really like to…. ha ha ha ha ha… I told him I wouldn’t mind giving him one.” Dave’s bald head had turned purple from laughter. He slapped the other the stall-holder on the back, still laughing, “… well, only turns out the bloke’s a fucking up-hill gardener ain’t he.” Both men rocked around with laughter and then Dave came bounding over to his stall where Joe was stood waiting. “Joe, my man, so what you know?”

 

 

  “Erm… not much.”

 

 

Dave picked up a brown paper bag and started filling it with Joe’s usual order.  “Ah, not much.” He shook his head. “Yeah, I’m hearin’ ya. Same all over, man.”  He said in his usual dismissive tone, staring out into the crowds of shoppers as he carelessly tossed the items into the bag.  Dave had obviously been out raving the previous night. He must have been about twenty-seven. Joe didn’t like the kid too much.

 

 

   “Hey Dave,” Joe pointed. “Drop me some of those asparagus spears in, I’m making a risotto tonight.”

 

 

   “Woe… risotto lotto!” Dave flung the wrap of asparagus spears high in the air and caught them in the brown bag like a fielder catching a cricket ball. He folded over the top of the bag and presented it to Joe. “One-fifty-eight,” he said, with a fake cheerful wink of his eye. It dawned on Joe what an annoying little twat Dave was. He might not come here again, he thought.

 

 

Dave held out his soiled palm and Joe counted out the exact money in small change, put the bag under his arm and nodded, “see you, Dave.”

 

 

On the way back to the truck he stopped at the butcher’s and bought some fresh liver for Adolf.

 

 

 

   Joe placed his bag of shopping on the passenger seat. He was making risotto for two tonight. Every other Saturday Joe booked himself a girl. He usually had a different one each time. He operated it on a rota system. But this week the agency had a new girl started. They told him she was twenty-five years old. She was called Juliet. Though he didn’t suppose it mattered what she was called. If she was any good he’d add her to the rota. He fired the old truck up and turned on the radio. Alright Now by Free. Joe yanked up the volume. He shoved the auto box into D and pulled out into the late morning traffic.

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~ This piece was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 and was filed under Short Story, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~