1

Tommy Dugdale is a stand-up comic. A failed one. A has-been from the start of his career. A never-even-was. Audiences from Blackpool to Benidorm hate him. Existentialism is funnier. Bus timetables get more laughs. The Rosetta stone makes more sense.

In his time, this Flying Dutchman of the comedy circuit has played every venue there is. From working men’s clubs through holiday parks to stag nights. From strip clubs to seedy cabarets. Everything except wakes and funerals, where the grief his jokes create might be appreciated.

Tommy used to be on the books of a London talent agency run by a Mr. Gee. In his frenetic entertainment world, talent was a euphemism for anything he could put on a stage, make a few quid off and not be arrested for. It was Mr. Gee who gave Tommy his start. Sent him sailing off into the world of laughter. On to rocks. He should have drowned, but he didn’t drown. He kept washing up on shore, coming back for more work.

Until in the end, Mr. Gee pulled a gun on him, a Dirty Harry Magnum. “No more gigs with me, Tommy. You’re fired. Go away. Go to Patagonia. Entertain the penguins.” He squeezed the trigger. A little flag on a stick popped out of the barrel saying “Laugh!”

But when Mr. Gee saw Tommy walk into his local pub on a cold and miserable Thursday evening he could have just descended from heaven on a cloud. His appearance was the answer to a desperate prayer.

“Tommy Dugdale! Thank God.”

“How’s tricks, Mr. Gee?”

He grabbed Tommy by both elbows.

“Are these great beads of sweat running down my face or did I just come out of the shower?”

“What’s up?”

“Problems, Tommy. Trouble, son. I’ve got an Irish band due, but they’re caught in traffic or they got lost. I don’t know because their un-fecking-smart phones keep cutting out. They’re late, and there’s a crowd out there waiting for them.”

He put a finger to his lips, pointed into the air with another.

“Listen. Hear that?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. Nothing. Bleeding nada. That’s my problem. Those yobs out there want to get themselves wound up with some loud music before they head off to the clubs to cause mayhem. How are they going to get wound up inside a bloody Black Hole? They won’t hang round much longer because there are other pubs that have got bands already going full throttle, bands much better than this crowd of Dublin gits I got the misfortune to be representing.”

He was wearing a tie-pin that sported a solid-gold naked dancing girl with diamonds for nipples and a ruby between her legs.

“It is not a propitious start to their London tour, is it?”

“It isn’t.”

“That’s why I need your help.”

“I can’t sing to save my life.”

“Not singing, you moron. I want you to go out there and do your patter, tell a few jokes. Fill that Black Hole for me. I don’t expect miracles. I’m old enough not to. Just engage them, Tommy. Amuse them. Bemuse them. A smile, some chuckles, a few giggles. Just keep them in their chairs till the band gets here. Do that for me, then you’ll suddenly have a hundred quid in your pocket.”

“All right.”

“Bless you, Tommy.”

“How do I look?”

Mr. Gee wondered if it was a trick question. He folded his arms, stepped back and studied him.

Tommy Dugdale had stopped growing vertically when he was thirteen. Horizontally, he was a slowly expanding universe. His gut sagged down under a paint-flecked, black T-shirt. The anorak he had on stank of sweat and plaster and concrete. His shapeless trousers looked like he’d been wearing them every day since puberty. His work boots were caked with clay. The hair around his bald patch stood up like it was magnetized.

“You look great. Where are you working these days?”

“At a building site in Walthamstow.”

Mr. Gee turned him around and gave him a shove.

“Do me proud, Tommy.”

His sudden appearance on the stage didn’t faze the resident MC, who was slumped behind his drums. He cracked a cymbal and drummed a roll and purred into the microphone.

“We are proud to present this evening direct from an engagement in Walthamstow, the one and only Tommy Dugdale.”

Nobody clapped, except two louts who must have lived in Walthamstow. Tommy thumped across the stage to the mike in his dirty boots. This is what he said:

“I was walking along the street the other day, minding my own business, when I saw this bloke coming towards me carrying a pig in his arms. The funny thing about this pig was that it only had three legs. So I stopped him and I asked him, what’s with the pig? He gives it a little cuddle, a peck on its snout.

“This is no ordinary pig, he says. This pig is a hero. A few days ago, we were taking a walk along the canal and our little lad fell in. He can’t swim. The pig jumped in after him, grabbed his shirt collar in its mouth and waded back to the bank with him. Saved his life. The wife was in tears.

“I said, well, it certainly is an amazing pig. But why does it only have three legs? The bloke says…”

Wait for it.

“…A pig like this, he says, you don’t eat all at once…”

Confused silence.

The MC cracked the cymbal again.

“We are proud to present, direct from The Stardust in Birmingham, Siam O’Connor and The Heartbeat of Dublin Band.”

They crashed onto the stage in a tangle of instruments and beer cans.  The vocalist, a pretty lass in a short, tight skirt, tripped on a cable and fell down, exposing her panties to the audience, the sight of which got everyone wound up right away.

2

Alec Swipple sat down heavily on a stool with a pint.

He was a lumbering, over-weight and round-shouldered man with a shock of steely-gray hair that made him look like Beethoven when he scowled, which he did most of the time. Despite a paucity of personal human resources himself, he was assistant manager in the Human Resources Department of a London confectionery company.

Alec was an ordinary working-class bloke, and did the things an ordinary bloke does. He got up and went to work. Got a bit drunk after work. Went home to his wife, Mabel. Got up the next morning, went to work again; got a bit drunk again. He worried all the time. About money, his weight, about his messy garden. But worrying was like getting up and going to work, like the weather. A normal part of his life. As far as lives went, his was far from spectacular, but he was happy with it because he didn’t know anything better.

He was unaccustomed to reflection or self-awareness, had always been a stranger to mental or emotional extremes. But now something preyed on his well-being and he had become a victim of turmoil.

To add to that burden he carried on his rounded shoulders, Alec had the misfortune to be Tommy Dugdale’s best mate. They had first set eyes on each other in Standard One of St. Mary’s Primary School, two little fat boys, and had never been far out of each others orbit since.

Alec spotted Tommy coming through from the other bar clutching money in his hand.

“Been selling your blood again? Evening, Mr. Gee.”

“Hello, Alec.”

Tommy wasn’t happy.

“You said a hundred quid, not fifty.”

“What are you complaining about? You told one joke, and it went down like The Titanic. Fifty quid for one bad joke. I bet it’s a long time since you earned that much easy money in the trade. Where was the last place you worked?”

“Two nights in September at a club in Chislehurst. But the bastard never paid me.”

“What happened?”

“There were complications.”

“Tommy, complications have been happening to you since you started out. You chose the wrong profession. You should have joined the Provisional IRA.”

“Can I get you a pint, Mr. Gee?”

“No, I’m all right, Alec. Let me give you some advice, Tommy.  Your patter doesn’t go anywhere. Your jokes belong in the BBC’s archives.  The smoking’s got to your voice. That gut and the bags under your eyes and those chins – the spotlight picks it all out. See you around, Alec.”

“Cheers, Mr. Gee.”

Tommy stared off after him, muttering.

“What’s he talking about? I’ve had a gut like this, bags under my eyes and these chins all my adult life. Did Gillian come in yet?”

“You expecting her?”

“Yeah. What’s the time?”

“The big hand is on twelve and the little hand is on seven.”

“You ready for another pint?”

“Yeah, Tommy. Thanks.”

Gillian Cox was a tiny, bad-tempered bowling ball of flesh and muscle, all breasts and thighs and beefy arms. She worked in a local supermarket, and Tommy had met her just after his divorce when, one night, she knocked on the door of his flat, with a suitcase and a black eye, a present from her boyfriend.

She was not an easy woman for men to handle. They found it easier to slap her about than try to reason with her, because reasoning with Gillian was harder than climbing the Eiger in slippers.

Tommy brought her in, took care of her swollen eye, opened a bottle of wine and sat with her the rest of the night as she poured out her grievances. With the sun coming up, they had staggered to the tangle of sheets that was Tommy’s bed.

And Gillian stayed. At the time, Alec had commented, in his acid-tongued way:

“Little Tommy Dugdale, shining stumpy knight on a white horse.  You knights are supposed to slay the dragons, not let them move in with you.”

For Gillian, the attraction to Tommy was that he made her laugh, sometimes until tears ran down her cheeks. Just being himself, he was a very funny little man. It was only when he got up on a stage that he made people want to throw their drinks at him.

For Tommy, the attraction to Gillian was the fact that she was shorter than him. Most women could rest their elbows on his head.

When he back from the bar with two pints, he asked, “Did you hear what they found when they were knocking down that old house on Commercial Street the other day?”

“What old house?”

“They came across a wardrobe in the rubble. Opened it and found a skeleton. I’m not kidding. It had a gold medal round the neck saying, Hide-and-Seek Champion of Ireland, 1956.”

Alec sniffed.

“Why don’t you ever laugh at my jokes, a little spontaneous chuckle once in a while, just to be polite?”

“Because I’ve been knocking about with you since we were kids.  I’ve heard it all before. I know what you’re going to say before you open your mouth. I can read you like a book. If you weren’t there, Tommy, I could write you. What’s there to laugh at?”

“You’re in a bad mood tonight. Not that you’re never not. What’s up?”

“Nothing. What joke did you tell in there?”

“The pig with three legs.”

“Wot you don’t eat all at once?”

“Yeah.”

Gillian never showed up after all, but things got lively around them as the evening wore on. A badly-thrown dart nearly took a girl’s eye out.  Someone almost choked to death on a pickled onion and had to be squeezed and pummeled by a dock worker until it came up again. A man kept going on about his mother’s miraculous cure at Lourdes until someone punched him. The barmaid found a pair of dentures at the bottom of an empty glass.

“What’s wrong, Alec? You’ve been down in the dumps all night.”

“Nothing, Tommy. I’m just tired.”

“We better be making tracks. Give you a lift back?”

“I’m a bit down, but I’m not suicidal. I’ll catch a cab.”

“All right, then.”

Tommy got behind the wheel of his old Rover and drove home. He lived in a ground-floor flat in a Victorian tenement down a cobbled mews. Dozing while he drove, his foot hit the brake a blink before he crashed into the wall behind his parking space. That near-miss woke him up, and gave the Rover itself quite a turn.

The lights were on in the flat. He went in. There wasn’t any sign of Gillian, but he found a dead man lying on the carpet, making an awful mess.

He was wearing a turtleneck sweater, corduroy slacks and brown loafers. The slacks were down round his knees. His underpants were red, with a pattern of grinning blue sharks swimming over them. A blade was buried in his chest, with the handle broken off and gone.

Blood had blackened the sweater. A pool of it stretched from his shoulder to his thigh, turning the rug into a quagmire. Thin red streams had run in all directions over the linoleum. The bone in his nose was shattered. His forehead was bruised. The thick, curly hair was sticky with blood and matted around the crown.

The furniture had been knocked around. There were blood streaks down the walls. Plates and cups lay smashed on the floor of the kitchenette. A bottle of gin stood open on the sink bench. And on the kitchen table, there were two uneaten cartons of chicken curry.

https://www.amazon.com/Pig-Three-legs-David-Turri-ebook/dp/B01M1YITQA/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8