Boyracers (13 page)

‘I’m so happy, mate. This is the maist important day ay ma life.’

‘Wettin the baby’s heid?’

‘Naw. I’ve changed ma name tay Uriel.’

‘…’

We pass Belinda, waiting cold and patient outside Dolby’s house, but tonight the Brae is a magic carpet-ride into a town of riches, excess. Daylight disappearing rapid-style, covering its own ass, because the town is alive and we slam into Smith’s first, Brian commanding his lassie staff, ‘Get ma guests here a round ay Aftershocks,’ while me, Frannie and Dolby gridlock round the jukebox. Smith’s is a proper pub off the High Street, cobbled lane, everything made from wood, real horse-racing on the telly, real old geezer to hassle you like fuck at the jukebox. Scrooge, they call this annoying bugger.

‘Pit Sinatra oan,’ he croaks, like a wean pleading for a Christmas present. ‘Sinatra. Everyboady likes Sinatra.’

Dolby cares not. ‘Sorry mate. We’re payin for it eh.’

‘Fuckin Sinatra, boys, eh? Nane ay that modern stuff.’

‘Look, pal, it’s oor money, we’ll pit oan whit we want.’

‘Shelley! Ho! Shelley! Round ay Aftershocks? The laddie’s seventeenth …’

‘Naybody likes that garbage. Got tay play stuff everybody likes.’

‘Naw ye dinnay. It’s ma pound coin, ma choice.’

‘Sinatra! 0 … 6 … 7 …’

‘Hoi! Did you just type that in there?’

‘Boys. Haw, Uriel’s Angels? Leave that fuckin jukebox, here’s yer Aftershocks. Sawright, Shelley hen, I’ll ring it through the till later.’

‘Runt,’ Brian toasts, raising his wee beaker of Aftershock, gentlemanly, ‘here’s tay yer seventeenth, and yer first night pished.’

‘The runt.’

‘Runt.’

‘Runt,’ I manage, staring at the tiny red abyss at the bottom of the glass (blood? medicine?) before I throw it (mouthwash?) into my throat and screw shut my

‘AAaaaaGGGHH …’

‘Eeeeeeechhhhh …’

‘UH. UH. UH.’

Brian swallows calmly, then places the empty beaker onto the bar.

‘Right Shelley. Same again.’

The taste of washing-up liquid and nitrogen and aniseed in an illicit rave on my tongue, Frannie, Dolby, hunched, deformed with the awfulness of it. Frannie moans and I shake my head. Buffalo charge from one side of it to the other. Shoogle my arms like

plasticky

glasses lined back up on the bar, filled with, filled with

Scrooge wandering up to the jukebox, fumbling through the discs and wincing as

Oasis churn up the pub.

‘Hey, wee man,’ Scrooge calls to me. ‘Borrow a pound for the
jukebox
, pit some Neil Diamond oan?’

‘Borrow?’ I blink at him. ‘Ye’ll gie me it back?’

‘Aye.’ His lip raises, showing a rusty car grill of teeth. ‘How cheap d’ye hink am are? Jist tay pit Love Oan The Rocks oan.’

I flick a pound coin at him, and Brian’s new barmaid Shelley is

totally un-ugly! As she leans to pour the Aftershock, her cleavage looms, but she catches my gaze, pushes it away from her breasts.

‘Right.’ Brian lifts his beaker. ‘To ma boy Uriel. The artist formerly kent as Dolby.’

‘Uriel.’

‘Uriel’

‘Hmp.’

I gulp, knocking it back, and when my head revolves back to planet Earth I see Shelley sort of frowning, her brittle whisper to Brian, ‘you watch that laddie, the night,’ while I just grin at her, foxily, glowing.

‘She is so cool,’ Dolby mutters, wistful. ‘A cool girl with cleavage – who kens howtay mix cocktails.’

‘Oot ay oor league, boys.’

‘Never!’ I proclaim, slamming my beaker onto the bar with manly conviction, startling even myself.

Brian laughs. ‘You, runt? Every punter in here’s tried tay pull her.’

I glint drunkenly, watching the expert way she whips a packet of Ready Salted from the box, her arse rolling in her skirt, and I almost tell her I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does, but I’m just one of many bodies crushed in a cluster round the bar, waving empty glasses at her. Yet it’s me she responds to, promptly, maternally, and soon I’m trying to get my pound coin
back from Scrooge and his ugly puppet features are outraged. ‘Ye want it back, wee man? There it’s back then. I’ll gie ye yer measly one pound back. Ken how? Cos I’m no a cheap cunt like you.’

He totters to his warren in the corner, muttering, and in the mirror that hangs solemnly above the bar I see myself, hands curled round a drink as though trying to keep warm, and I’m suddenly a young version of my own Dad. The hair swept back from a worried forehead. The frown. Life minus four decades

sledgehammer break from the pooltable shatters

Frannie groans as Shelley passes, her 22 womanly years moving, sensuous. ‘Shelley, psst.’ I gesture her over like a bairn who wants the teacher to see his best work. ‘Shelley, tell us. I’m dyin tay know. Whit’s yer favourite Narnia book?’

Shelley frowns at me, washing a glass.

‘Ih?’

‘Yer favourite Narnia book,’ Frannie translates wearily. ‘It’s his chat-up line.’

‘Oh. I’d say, um. Probably The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’

‘Wrong!’ I make a noise like a buzzer on a quiz show. ‘Everybody says that.’

She nods, and I can tell she’s impressed by the subtlety of this
sociological
experiment, and Frannie is hunkered right up to me on the bar stool and Brian and Dolby are taunting each other across the pool table like Apollo Creed from the Rocky films

‘Long have I kent you?’ I ask Frannie, minding fine games at the Hallglen ash park when I was 12 and Frannie was about 15. Matches that would last till the sun dripped away behind the roofs of the scheme and we couldn’t see anything and we were a horde of bairns playing spot-the-ball in the dark, kicking clods of ash and falling in, falling out, falling about. Everything simple. Dolly dimple.

‘Dunno,’ shrugs Frannie. ‘Four years?’

‘Man,’ I marvel. ‘I’ve always admired your attitude to life. Ken? Always a smile on yer face. Always tellin jokes, nay matter whit. You’re the man.’

‘Naw,’ Frannie mutters, his face darkening, ‘I’m no the man, Alvin.’ His voice is ironed out. Insistent. ‘I work in Tesco. That disnay make me the man.’

‘It does!’ I protest. It is suddenly the most important thing in the world, that I make him see this. ‘You, Dolby, Brian. Youse are aw ma heroes. I owe youse everythin –’

‘Alvin, yer no listenin tay me–’

‘Naw, you’re no listenin, Fran. You’re the man. Fran the man. You’re, like, Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. You’re Ally McCoist.’

The shutters are coming down on Frannie’s eyes, revealing someone quietly loading a shotgun. He talks firmly, as if aware that there are lawyers present.

‘Noo, listen–’

‘– I’m no Coisty. Coisty lives in a big hoose in Bearsden. Coisty’s scored mair goals than anybody in the Scottish League, ever. Ye listenin? I’m the guy that cleans Coisty’s windays.’

‘… the Man, ken …?’ A dribble of schnapps runs down the inside of my glass.

‘I dinnay lord it about at university. I dinnay even run a bar like that big-nippled prick ower there.’

Brian cannons a ball into a pocket and smugly sips his pint,
preteneding
it wasn’t that great a shot

‘… aw ma heroes, ken …’

‘I work,’ Frannie raises his eyebrows, as if to make me see the simplicity of this, ‘in Tesco.’

‘But you fuckin love it there, man.’

He sighs and shakes his head. ‘I love it cos I’m 19 and I’ve nothin tay spend ma money on but petrol and U2 CDs–’

‘… always gawin on aboot how much ye love it in Tesco …’

‘No sure I’ll love it when I’m fuckin 30 though, get me?’

Brian’s barmaid patrols the counter like an Amazon, pausing to wipe a spillage just in front of us, catching my eye again. She has a smile like the actress Kirsten Dunst. Man, I’d love to

‘Get me?’ Frannie is not angry, but he’s that way someone goes once they suspect an argument about music is actually a thinly-veiled attack on their belief system.

‘Aye, man, I get ye.’ I mumble, knowing my compliment has shot past him and into waste, into the cold of outer space, into

the queue for Rosie’s, here, suddenly, before I’ve hardly even noticed. The wind whipping bits of paper across a neon sky. Cosmetic faces creased against the cold and I feel lost, orphaned, fighting to be awake to the evening’s possibilities, then I am, I’m into it/up for it! Wahey! A
storm rumbles out from the doors of the nightclub and I will get in this time, even though I haven’t thought of a fake date of birth or nothing. Dolby and Frannie arguing about petrol money owed from last week and the Aftershock is at the piano in the front cortex of my brain, taking requests, and the cinema is showing Shrek and a girl from Graeme High School pretends to be with me and the bouncer doesn’t even

‘Heddy haw!’ Frannie roars. They slap my back, making me cough, laugh, splutter all at once. ‘The runt’s made it in. How does it feel?’ Brian says, before gesturing to a barman he knows who serves him before a wall of pissed-off clubbers. Dolby waves to a girl on the stairs.

‘Wee man,’ Frannie beams, proud. ‘Ye made it. Whit d’ye think?’ Well, I think

it’s rising around me like a temple of hedonism and I drink it in, the Aftershock and schnapps swilling a miniature wave-machine between my ears. Young boys/girls darting behind the bar, shaking drinks,
lifting
glasses, pouring smiles. The dancefloor filled with prettiness. A staircase rising in the centre of everything, girls lounging on its celestial steps, as if in a colour remake of some classic black and white film. They release smoke into the strobe-lit air, turn, slowly, posingly, as muscled shirts appear by magic and hover at their sides. Gyr

ating hips, kiss-tinged schoolgirl lips, locked in an ecstatic jam, waves of pink, violet, red smashing and rippling against a shore of heads.

!This is it!

Dolby shouts something as we’re contracted into the crush of bodies. Two women, breast to breast, blocking my path. ‘Whoa, hen –’ I laugh, unsteady on my feet and they chuck me a dirty look, as I am forced to the stairs, sole oasis in this coruscating beauty reach the

front step

gasping. Sitting down. Laughing. Sweat beginning to rise and coat my skin and I scan round. Brian caught in the snare of the two girls. He raises a sly eyebrow at their jiggling bodies. Frannie frantically tapping his mobile.

‘Is

    it

       ringing?’ he says, his facial movements seeming to down-gear as if on slow film stock. ‘Hoi,’ the bouncer commands, looming above, and I don’t believe it. It’s the Outlaw. ‘Need tay move. Canny sit here, mate.’ Further up the stairs, three gorgeous girls are sharing a Smirnoff Ice and office stories, arranged like empty dresses.

‘Whit about them?’ I nod over towards them. ‘Are they movin?’

The bouncer’s lips lift, like the thing in Alien, to show a row of rock-hard teeth. ‘Are you givin me hassle?’

‘I’m … just … ken …’ stuttering my way back to the dancefloor, terrified, retreating from the xenomorph in the bomber jacket. He stares after me, mad, death-filled.

‘Alvin!’ Dolby/Uriel grabbing my shirt, pointing towards a Britney Spears lookalike and her mate. ‘Two stunners up ahead. I dare ye.’

‘Watch this,’ I nod to Dolby, then grin and saunter towards them, a superb chat-up line forming. I am confident of this. I am King Alvin of the Allison clan. I am young and I am alive. There’s a flicker of life from the girls as I approach, but their posture is locked. Wary. I am not
wearing Ben Sherman and my hair is not cut in any sort of fashionable style. I am a threat. I must be opposed.

‘Evening,’ I smile, Fonzily.

‘Hello.’

‘Hiya.’ One of them scratches the bridge of her nose. It is slim and faultless.

‘My mate over there –’ I gesture to Brian, formally slugging his Becks. This is a cracking chat-up line. ‘Do you reckon he’s gay?’

‘What?’ One of them blinks. The other one, who is nothing like Britney close up, stares away, distracted.

‘I said my mate over there –’

‘I heard you.’

‘Well.’ I try to connect with her large, blue eyes, though this is like trying to shake hands with smoke. ‘I was watching Rikki Lake, and she said that you can’t tell if someone’s gay or straight just by appearances, so …’

The girl stares at me over the rim of her Bacardi Breezer, looks across at the queue for the toilets, perhaps needing to go? No, I refuse to believe that this princess has a bladder or bowels. But she’s not getting the subtlety of this chat-up line at all.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘Well, I was just wondering if … it’s possible … if you can tell …’

‘Tell what?’

‘Um …’ I say, ‘if he’s, um, gay or, um not …’ My god, what am I talking about? What the fuck am I doing here?

Non-Britney picks lint from the front of her dress. ‘What does it matter if he’s gay or not?’

‘Uh, that’s not what I’m getting at,’ I point out. ‘Do you think you can
tell
if–’

‘It’s what’s inside that counts,’ she shrugs, devoid of empathy with
me. ‘You shouldn’t judge people by whether they’re gay or straight. That’s phomo-hobic.’