for a change, here's one of my dad's stories

I'm terrified about forgetting stuff.

My dad's been telling me stories recently. He keeps telling me I should write things down, that all these hours I've wasted on the internet could have been better spent writing about my thoughts and experiences, making some kind of record of what I've been up to... I have mentioned my blog, but I'm not sure he knows what a 'blog' is.

He says he wishes he'd written stuff down when he was younger. Before he started his 30 year career at Sony he worked on the buses in Aberdeen as a conductor. The weirdest and most wonderful bits of humanity that Aberdeen had to offer were on the late buses and my dad saw them all. Tonight he told me about the ladies of the night.

One of the local legends was a woman called Big Teeny. Big Teeny would ride the last buses round the city and clobber unruly drunks with her handbag. No joke. Many's a time she saved the conductor from getting a thump for telling thugs to keep the language down. He'd ask, all polite, if the lads could keep the swearing down and before they could kick his ass Big Teeny would stagger down from the back and give them a concussion with whatever it is that prostitutes keep in their bags.

One night, Big Teeny had been hitting the home brew pretty hard and was causing a ruckus on the bus. It was an unspoken rule that the Ladies (Big Teeny, Ma Maudie and Snuffy Ivy with the adenoidal problems) didn't pay on the buses - it was thought that there should be at least one place in the city where they rode for free. As it were. My dad, new to the job and naive as to the way things worked, asked Big Teeny if she had the thruppeny ticket she needed to travel. Big Teeny swelled up like bagpipes and replied:

"FECK OFF. D'YA NAE KEN WHO I AM?!"

He'd had a rough day. He wasn't in the mood.

"Alright, that's it, I'm not having that kind of language on my bus. Get off, go on, bugger off, you've got no ticket and you're not getting a free ride out of us."

Big Teeny gets off, effing and blinding her way up Union Street, home brew still in hand. The driver stops the bus and calls my dad.

"Charles? Did that woman I see walking up the street just get off this bus?"

"Aye, she did."

"And was that her I heard yelling?"

"Aye, that was her."

"Would I be right in thinking that you just threw her off this bus?"

"Aye, I did."

"Charles, are you fecking mad? Do you know who that was?"

"No, who?"

"That was Big Teeny, you eejit."

And my dad said, oh shit...

Because everyone knew who Big Teeny was, by reputation if not by sight. She was legendary, not only for being a very accomplished whore, but for being a tough bitch to cross. A couple of years before the showdown with my father, she'd been tried for murder on account of breaking a bottle in half and stabbing a man in the throat with it.

She pleaded guilty, but maintained that it was self-defence, the guy was trying to rape her. You wouldn't expect a boxer to be beaten up in the street, the judge said, so even prostitutes have the right not to be raped.

Big Teeny walked free. But everyone knew that she killed a man, and nobody messed with her again. Well, almost nobody. Safe to say my dad didn't walk home on his own much after that.

*****

I realises that doing this is important to me. I don't want to get old and not remember my stories.