Daft About Lager
| TOP BRASS | UK |
| Cans | Watneys |
| PET bottles | |
“Aye, lad,” confirmed the typical northerner, his flat cap fluttering in the breeze, “where there’s muck there’s brass!”
Young Timmy Higgins brushed the dust from his eyes and peered at his pint unnaturally through the grim, grey daylight. “Aye,” he went. “There’s nowt like brass, Bill. Nowt.”
“Aye.”
Just then Tina Pearson, the Boss’s personal secretary, crossed the yard from the gym to the wages office, her long legs scissoring and squeaking noisily beneath the flimsy body-hugging, nylon boob-tube she’d somehow stretched into a dress.
Young Timmy Higgins wiped the yard-and-a-half of drool from his mouth with the back of his dusty hand and spilt his lager onto Bill’s boot. But Bill couldn’t take his eyes off Tina until her shadow had disappeared behind the wages office door. Then he turned on Timmy with a face tight with rage. “Ay, up, yer young bugger!” he roared, straightening Timmy’s pint. “That’s yer lager yer spillin’ there, lad!”
“Sorry,” whined Young Timmy Higgins, emptying the last of his 2-litre PET bottle into his chipped enamel tin mug. “I was watching Tina. She’s a beau…”
“She’s not for you, son!” laughed Bill, tilting his tweed cap to a rakish angle. “You’re just recently wed, lad. Aye, besides, a young woman like that needs a man of experience. Someone that’s already been through the trials and rigours of wedlock and come out the other side with his manhood intact.”
“She was in my class at school,” squeaked Young Timmy eagerly. “They all said that her and the teacher had something…well, y’know…that they had something…going!”
“WHA’!” erupted Bill, breaking his lunch. “Young Tina and that fat old bag, Missus Ogden?!”
“No! Mister Arkwright,” Timmy giggled.
“The Boss’s son!”
“Aye.”
Bill sighed and, cupping his unshaven chin in a large, dusty hand, looked up at the giant brass letters above the factory gates. ‘ARKWRIGHT & SONS. WORK FER NOWT!’ His mind wandered back over all the years he’d worked there. How he’d met Edna, a clerk in the packaging department. How they’d fallen in love and married. How the marriage had failed when he found her behind the bike sheds with the eldest of the Arkwright boys, Arthur (45). He thought of all the pain and grief it’d caused him, until he met Sharon, a girl young enough to be his daughter, from the Cleaner’s Department. She’d left him, of course, for another Arkwright boy, Norman (37). And now Tina. Someone he’d watched grow from a snotty kid into one of Grimsby’s most vivacious women, in love with Stanley bloody Arkwright. He turned and looked at Young Timmy Higgins, desperate to erase the image of Tina Pearson and Stanley bloody Arkwright from his mind. “What’s that yer drinkin’, anyway?” he asked.
Timmy looked up from his lager. “I dunno, Bill. It was something the wife just put in me sandwich box.”
“Where’s the bottle, then?” Bill said sternly, his patience, and hair, thin.
“Hey, Bill!” Timmy Higgins squealed, picking the empty 2-litre PET bottle from the dust. “It’s called Top Brass! Here, that’s a good name, t’ain’t it?”
Bill snatched the lad’s mug from his hand. “Give it here!” he snarled. “Let a man of experience taste it.”
Bill tipped the cool lager to his lips and spat it out again. “Yuk! That’s muck, that is!”
“Aye,” went Young Timmy Higgins. “But like you always say, Bill, where there’s muck there’s brass.”
And never a truer word has ever been said.
