by MARY EDWARD

TAFFY was 58 years old and 5 feet 3 inches tall. His real name was Joseph Macallum and he wasn’t Welsh, but he’d once spent three weeks in Cardiff with a boat and come back with an accent.

In those days he’d worked at something in the shipyards. Nobody could remember what it was, but as time passed Taffy sort of evolved into a self-employed painter and decorator. With his maturing trade came an endless supply of wee cards which assured potential customers that ‘no job was too big or too small’, and his rates were reasonable.

Taffy also described himself as single, but proof of a liaison, blessed or otherwise, certainly existed, for he had a married daughter living in Greenock. His own parentage was no less obscure, since he always claimed to have been born ‘a love child’.

Taffy liked his nickname and never tried to change it. He felt it to be useful to him on painting jobs because it gave him a topic of conversation. It was the same with being unmarried.

There was something kind of gallus about a bachelor.

And Taffy was definitely gallus. Even at 58. When he was dressed up his beige cavalry twills had a knife-edge crease and the buttons on his blazer shone like columns of gold medals. In times past, Taffy had been the best-dressed wee chancer in Partick, but the advent of the electronic security tag had diminished his wardrobe somewhat, so that shopping for clothes now involved entering a contract whereby goods were exchanged for cash.

Not that Taffy was averse to spending his own money. He didn’t drink much himself but he aways stood his round in the pub. And there was a noted carelessness in the way he’d throw several coins from his change on the waitress’s tray. But old habits die hard and when he went shopping Taffy had to content himself with lifting small, unguarded items like a couple of pairs of socks or a tube of fashioning gel for his hair.