Robert James

ROBERT

JAMES

Calum Cumming

Copyright © 2020 by Calum Cumming.

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ISBN 978-1-950303-12-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-950303-13-7 (Ebook)

LCCN 2020924656

An unbreakable sex

of free people

The greatest achievement of Aberdeen

Has welded forever to standing

Long live the will

Of the creation of womb

The United mighty

Scotland

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

What was the enduring value of a failed marriage thought Robert? It had lasted no more than 3 years. Five minutes and your almost there, said Robert to himself quietly as he had reached the underpass on Tory-glen Road. He smelt the damp cement and human urine. Robert was 55, his parents were dead and he had never had kids. Was this the end of the line-the decision was his to see his own flesh and blood continue or to end with him. He unconditionally loved a womanhood. Particularly in a McPhail in Dunedin for she had touched his inner being. He had lost touch with his Angie in America. They had briefly lived in America- or that like somewhere 25 years ago. For that had been their spirit of freedom that had inhabited his soul.

Failure lived here. More dun in the South East end of the city. It all hangs together in the final analysis or so they say and we all have a history. That past mistakes should inform triumph, but like the thin coating of the last of the butter on the last of the once bitten discarded stale crust, triumphs of no more than this act of survival in this place of urban decline were miraculous, for daily miracles were acted out here every day.

Amongst the cobwebs of the skirting.

We all need something to hold onto.

Robert was on the green. On themselves, the estate where Robert lived, acted out the honest community of making him welcome here when he had arrived in here a year or two ago. The female servants of the virgin Mary had come out of their doors, congregated at a distance. Old and young-mixed ages, players on a chessboard. They had sung in the closes, opposite Robert, in his high home. Behind the glass as he heard and saw them all. And the women had sung a Glasgow song.

That great old place I miss/love so much, has seen much better days

And still we talk about it as we go our separate ways.

Oh but Glasgow gave me more than it ever took away,

And prepared me for life on the road

For it is a precious human and queer thing to appeal for a lost soul who had like a fleck of humanity suddenly appeared. The white Skye marble 4 storey tower block lay at the bottom of the hill and like the other ordered multi storeys; some with padlocked rusty orange slatted sheet metal over the windows poked up into the miserable smear of the grey lowland sky. He held his blue plastic shopping bag.

He walked on under the thud of the road junction and looked towards the box of light that shafted the exit. Robert chased the pavement and hurried on down in this late Scots November afternoon. Robert had saved a few hundred pounds and he saw that someone had dumped a blue and silver sun chair in the underpass. It was unusual to see anything left here-was it an invitation to a way out? It was ever thus, but as he saw it there was no need for poverty in Scotland. This small very rich country the best example of the inequity of Western Capitalism he could imagine for himself. Was it acceptable that at least 65% of this city was on benefits. It was for the realists in economic principles to perhaps not eliminate poverty once and for all here. For that would require a visionary prophet-that, based upon concrete actions, would lead Scotland to the liberation of my soul and intellectual sentiment. That had little or nothing to do with climbing on top. For the bitches were to let the doggies keep on rolling.

Robert did not like to think of the well you know...his sense of freedom as world class. For Scotland now was a country that had become a victim of its own state of fluid consciousness. That was a common problem of experience that had taken root like invasive cancer. The unravelled inside rubber of a golf ball. Everyone here was forced into some sort of a hard ball trade off. Dare I say both big and little cons. Deceits of the heart. Keeping debt just above water level-no more than that.

He exited the underpass and walked up and over the hill on the tarmac footpath. Did you know that generally footpaths in this country are made wide? It allows two to pass. Robert reflected on this useless piece of information as he walked on. To his right was the Paki shop owned by Assam and further down was the Broadsword pub, replete with roll-over metal security, barbed wire on the flat black tar flack roof and cameras. Robert sometimes went into open slashed shiny black vinyl and foam of the pub for a pint and he had encountered punters last summer. He remembered after he had moved to the estate he had met two