Short Story: Meg Macdougall's Haugh: Under the…

Short Story: Meg Macdougall's Haugh: Under the Stack- Part 4

He had a rare imagination. Everybody said that. Some people thought he was a born liar, but they didn't understand. They thought the truth was what they saw. He knew it was often far from that. He wasn't sure when he realised that, but he'd noticed the signs from an early age. Take Meg McDougall's haugh.

Meg McDougall ran the shop at the top of Burnside. She was a formidable woman but she was good to the Bosquet family. She had a soft spot for Catherine Bosquet and used to pay her a little something to run the shop on a Sunday morning.

Meg's haugh was famous. Paul loved Meg's haugh, the thick gluey glutinous gelatined meat she boiled in a huge oval black iron pot. He got to stir the pot if Meg was in a good mood. You could stand a stick straight up in the haugh and breath in the hot meaty steam that made your mouth water and your head giddy. When it cooled enough and nobody was about, you could stick two fingers in the haugh and fill your mouth with the stringy meaty soup. You had to be careful. If Meg caught you, she would slap you so hard around the ears that you'd be listening to a choir of off-key angels for the next half hour. That haugh was worth the risk.

Stuff fell in the haugh. Slivers of firewood. Brittle bits of fire lighter. Spent matches. Cigarette buts. Various forms of insect life. None of these discomfited Meg or his mother. They just laughed and stirred the odds and ends in deeper. Everything in the pot was reduced to haugh which was then poured into small tin bowls. These were left on a windowsill to cool to a thick meaty jelly, and then sold as McDougall's Haugh, a legend throughout Lochee and in Dundee itself.

Paul stopped eating the haugh when he discovered the truth, though it was not the bits and bobs that scunnered him. It was Tanya.

Meg had an enormous Alsatian bitch that served as her family. Tanya was a placid lump of dog that lay around the shop farting into the sawdust sprinkled on the floor. She would raise her huge head, jaws slavering, and gaze mournfully into the eyes of any customer who expected her to shift her carcass. New customers learned to step over her or, if infirm, to work their way around her. Paul had little time for Tanya but tolerated her until he discovered the truth.

Tanya licked the haugh. Tanya not only licked the haugh, she slavered into it, long trails of slimy saliva make silvery patterns across the brown bubbling surface. The boy was scunnered. He told his mother. She reprimanded him for using the word 'scunner' and intimated he should the word 'sickened' or that 'it turned his stomach'.

Neither of these expressions was remotely adequate. Paul was fair scunnered and that was that. His mother pointed out they only purchased and ate McDougall's Haugh when she herself made a batch on a Sunday morning. During that time Tanya was not allowed into the backroom of the shop, so there was no reason to be quite so fastidious. He always knew when his mother was prevaricating; she bludgeoned him over the head with words she knew were beyond him, beyond even what he read in The Wizard.

He would not be counselled; neither would he eat the haugh, regardless of the day it was made. He would not betray Meg, Tanya or the haugh, but he felt betrayed. Though his eyes widened and his stomach rumbled as Joe gorged himself on his share, he would not eat the haugh. He was in possession of knowledge and what he knew changed how he saw the world.

Tanya died from stomach cancer when she was nine. She licked her share of Meg McDougall's haugh till the day she died.