Lynne went into the coffee shop while I waited outside with the pushchair. An old guy sat outside, a big round bear of a man, looking huge at the tiny aluminium table he was sitting at. He watched me as I crouched in front of the baby, prodding her and pulling faces.
‘Is that your first?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Aye, I brought up my daughter by myself,’ he replied. ‘Since she was six weeks old and her mother tried to kill her.’
The old guy then proceeded to tell me his life story. He lived in Canada, had a good job and was married, but when his kid was born his wife went a bit loopy. The doctors wouldn’t talk to him about it; they just gave him the pills and left him to get on with it, he said. He would come home from work and find that his wife had shut the baby in the cupboard under the sink with a three bar fire, that kind of thing. Finally he had enough and decided to take the kid and come back to Glasgow.
He bought a plane ticket, but he didn’t have any papers for the baby and was wondering how he was going to get her through check-in, but somehow everything went his way. A stewardess saw him struggling with his bag and the baby and offered to help, picking up the kid and walking straight through customs. He was able to go through as a single person. Then he was sat on the plane feeling like a criminal, which technically he was, when a man came out of the cockpit, with gold braid on his jacket and a fancy cap.
‘He looked like an admiral!’ the old guy said.
He started to sweat, but the man just asked if he wanted a travel cot for the kid. He could have laughed with relief.
When they landed in Glasgow he had to smuggle his baby through customs again. His luck held; in front of him a customs official had broken an ornament that an old dear in a big hat was carrying in her luggage. She looked like Margaret Rutherford, he said. She was going apeshit, and everyone was fussing round her. He walked straight past it all, and found himself back in Glasgow with nothing but a baby, a bag of clothes and twenty-six Canadian dollars.
He managed to tell me this whole story in the time it took Lynne to buy two coffees.
‘It took me seven years of messing about to get a divorce and custody of the child,’ he said. ‘But she is thirty-three now, she has two degrees and she works down south.’
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘Audrey,’ he smiled.
Just then Lynne came out of the coffee shop and started telling me why it had taken so bloody long to make two fucking coffees. I was hoping the old guy would hang on so I could tell him how much I had appreciated his story, but he must have assumed that I had lost interest in him. He picked up his shopping bags and sloped off down the street by himself. I just let him go.
