Boyracers (18 page)

Stirling Castle.

‘Dolby, Dolby, give us yer answer do.’

Linlithgow Country Park.

‘We’re half-crazy aw for the love ay you.’

B&Q.

‘Been years since we had some nookie, and that was wi a wookie.’

Langlees.

‘But you’re still sweet, in the driver’s seat, so pull us a skank or two!’

as Dolby puts his palms on the ceiling of the car for a few seconds, laughs, ‘Well, one ay youse fuckin drive then,’ and Brian swaps Bon Jovi for Deacon Blue, frog-singing away to Dignity, and soon we’re all unleashing our throats on the bit that goes ‘Set it up again! Set it up again! Set it up again! Set it up again!’ like the Tartan Army invading
the pitch at Wembley, until I think some more about the words, pause, then say:

‘Sortay patronisin, that song, when ye think about it really.’

‘How d’ye mean?’ says Frannie, bobbing his head in time to the music.

‘It’s patronising tay the working classes, in’t it?’

Brian turns down the volume and I shift nervously in my seat. ‘Whit the fuck are you talking about now?’

‘Well, it’s aboot this cooncil-worker, an everybody laughs at him cos he’s cleanin the streets. But he’s gonnay save up his money, buy a ship, an call it Dignity.’

Brian is waiting for the punchline. ‘Aye?’

‘So, it’s sayin that ye have tay have money tay have dignity. That it’s somethin ye can buy.’

‘But he’s no buyin actual dignity,’ Frannie says, baffled. ‘He’s buyin a dinghy. Just wants tay go oot in his boat.’

‘Aye. Called Dignity. It’s a … metaphor for … aw, never mind.’

‘Oh. I wonder who’s daein Higher English?’ tuts Brian. ‘Anyway, whaur is the fuckin dignity in cleanin the streets! Nay dignity in that. Let him buy his wee boat for fuck’s sake, leave him alane.’

‘How’s there nay dignity in cleanin the streets?’ I say.

‘When did the song come oot?’ asks Dolby.

‘Dunno. 1987?’

‘Thatcher.’ I pounce on this. ‘Only Thatcher could convince us that cleanin the streets has nay dignity.’

‘Here we fuckin go.’

‘Wages Day is the same. Like, ye can only enjoy life if ye’ve just been paid.’

‘Ye
can
only enjoy life if ye’ve just been paid.’

‘I havenay just been paid,’ I say.

‘You dinnay work,’ Brian sneers, wrenching his frame round from
the front seat to take me, firmly, to task. ‘In case ye didnay realise, aw these crisps an cans ay juice ye’ve been shovin doon yer scrawny throat are on us. Cos it’s wages day an we’ve aw been paid an we’re enjoyin oursels. You,
runt
, huvnay even goat a fuckin job, so dinnay talk tay us about enjoyment. Who’s bein patronisin now, eh? Ye think we get up oot oor beds an work for the life-fulfillin experience ay it?’

‘I’m no sayin that, but–’

‘Once you’ve got a job, wi nay seven-week summer holidays an nay study-leave, then ye can fuckin lecture us about dignity, wee man.’

Brian grips his Irn-Bru with result.

We stop at a red light. A council worker crosses with a lumpen rubbish cart, as dignity-free as anyone I’ve ever seen. Neither does he look like he’s saving up for any. The lights change. Dolby speeds up. Brian plays Wages Day, deliberately.

‘They’re closing doon the ABC and opening up a multiplex,’ Frannie utters this, monotone, as we pass the cinema for what seems like the millionth time this week. Tonight it is showing Jurassic Park 3. Rain starts to form little bodies on the glass. ‘Think aboot aw the films that have been shown there ower the years,’ Frannies sighs. ‘Gone Wi the Wind. Star Wars. Robin Hood: Prince ay Thieves. It’s sortay, like, a cultural history.’

‘No it isnay,’ Brian snorts, unimpressed. ‘I’m sick ay this pish. It’s
progress
. Sa shite picture hoose anyway. The seats are uncomfy as fuck.’

‘Progress-shmogress,’ I say, still rankled by the Deacon Blue
argument
and sensitive to Frannie’s vision of folks in old-style hats traipsing out from a showing of Calamity Jane. ‘Progress is a capitalist myth.’

‘Capitalist myth?’ Brian shouts. ‘You’re a capitalist myth, ya cunt! Whaur wid we be withoot capitalism? A fuckin borin world that, eh Dolby?’

‘Borin,’ Dolby replies robotically.

‘Nay Nike. Nay MTV. Nay McDonalds–’

‘Nay Glasgow Rangers,’ I goad.

Brian glares, at the same moment in which the veins at my temples (which feel like they’ve been laced with fireworks and have been
threatening
gently all night) are set off.

‘Whit ye tryin tay say about the Rangers, like?’

It’s bound to be more complex than this. Economics is, isn’t it? But I can’t grasp it, not really, but on a classic Star Trek repeat the other day Mr Spock said

then an advert for Doritos came on which had loads of mates laughing over a bowl of crisps and ended with the word Friendchips and these years I’m living in now, should I forget, are the Best of My Life, hey, so fuck it, fuck them all, I am not going to take on Brian because I’ve just

stopped

caring

but before I know it I’m talking like this, ‘Glasgow Rangers Football Club does not represent the workin man, Brian. They dinnay even represent Scotland.’

‘Oh. An whit dae they “represent”?’ Brian makes inverted commas with his fingers sarcastically.

‘The Queen, the crown, greed, exploitation, the Empire, Thatcherism–’

‘Thatcherism?’ he laughs, looking to the others for back-up, but
they seem tired, ironed-flat by the whole topic. ‘Come ontay fuck, Alvin, they’re a fitba team, no a political party!’

‘Everythin’s political,’ I mutter, staring at him, my mean headache turning sideways,

sideways.

‘Yer arse is fuckin political!’

‘My arse
is
political,’ I laugh, hysterical and useless. ‘Who owns my arse!’

We pass the carcass of a dog strewn across the road. It has an eye missing and tyre-tracks across its back.

‘So let me get this straight,’ Brian is a fighter jet screaming from Fortress Ibrox. ‘Not only are ye a poof an runt, but now yer a socialist and a pape?’

‘A pape?’ I blink (really wishing Dolby would change this fuckin Deacon Blue album now). ‘How’s that, likes? Because I dinnay agree wi your narrow-minded-Brian-Mann views I’m a Catholic? That makes sense!’ Adrenaline surging and I’m making this a bigger deal than it is and pissing the three of them off simply because Frannie mentioned the ABC is closing down, but I’m past caring, beyond the thunderdome, clouds are gathering on the horizon, things passing from simple to complex with frightening speed and a heroine is screaming somewhere each time I issue words, as though I’m a
lunatic
brandishing a knife, my life passing for Chinese water-torture, incidents slow-dripping in my head: my unquenchable love for Tyra, Derek coming home a defeated man, Connor fucking Livingstone, the Spider-Man movie only in pre-production, Mum undead, losing my virginity (did I come too early?), Belinda needing a service, a broken leg in an accident that wasn’t our fault – I know it wasn’t – but which could result in some drive-by outside the Callendar Arms bar, Connor-cunting-Livingstone, exams, U2 tour dates still
unannounced, the future, I owe it to myself repeated like a mantra in each of my dreams, and during all of this I am trying to turn my squeak into a roar, become Russell Crowe fighting tigers in Gladiator while simultaneously placating my horror at the crushing boredom of everything and everyone around me.

‘See these part-time bigots like you?’ I am raging. ‘I’ve less respect for them than the full-time wans. At least Nazis and the KKK believed in it. You just switch it on and aff when it suits ye.’

‘Naw I dinnay,’ Brian roars. ‘Fuckin Protestant through and through.’

‘No yer no.’

‘Aye I am. Twenty home games last season, ya bas.’

I ignore this, hammering on Thor-like. ‘You live in a fantasy world called “The Fortunes of Glasgow Rangers Football Club”. It disnay matter if they win or lose. You’re just a consumer – a means tay an end fir the fat fuckers that own the club, who’re gettin rich aff the stupit fuckin emotional attachement tay Rangers they’ve managed tay sell ye.’

‘Listen tay it,’ Brian laughs. ‘Me in a fantasy world? You’re the cunt that still reads The Hobbit an Lord ay the fuckin Flies.’

‘Rings.’

‘Whaur’s the reality there? Ye canny fuckin
deal
wi reality, Alvin.’ He lunges into the tone of some angry beast, and though I’m out of order calling him worse than a Nazi, especially when his Dad is a British soldier, and though he’s throaty with resentment, jabbing his finger at me from the front seat, and even though this is one of my very best mates and I really fucking love the guy, what can I do?

Things are getting difficult.

‘Now you listen tay me, runt,’ he snarls. ‘Ye canny just tag along wi us in this car and go’ (affects poofy voice) ‘
I tink tis is wrong and I tink tat is wrong
.’

‘Tag along?’ I say, startled.

‘Ye’re too fuckin young tay be hinging oot wi us, anyway. We’ve been tryin tay avoid you for months.’

‘Brian,’ Dolby barks, as I melt into the back seat.

‘Ye want tay ken somethin else?’ he laughs, blundering through my defences. ‘You didnay even shag Shelley fay the pub.’

‘Enough!’ Dolby demands.

‘You
couldnay
shag her, ye were that fuckin pished.’

Ice slowly spreads on my skin.

‘Ye put yer heid on her tits and asked her tay hold ye.’

We drive for the rest of the night in silence.

Frannie mentions once, ‘I dunno whaur they’re buildin the multiplex.’

slam four doors, go four separate ways, and that night I argue with Derek across the kitchen table about his silly paranoia – Mum still alive? following him? the stupid cunt – and he sucks up spaghetti and replies that if I’d been more paranoid when she disappeared, phoned the police quicker, they might have found her, so I punch him, and then he punches back, then there’s a flurry of punches which Dad breaks up, horrified, and I run to my room saying that I hate them both, knowing I’ve missed Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that I also have no friends in the world, that Tyra doesn’t – couldn’t ever – love me, that my Higher exams represent my doom and that I am totally alone, so I just listen to Stairway to Heaven, watching the rain drip transparent patterns on the window, marvelling at how they wrote such a song, so
intricate
, then read some of Stephen King’s Carrie and just sleep.

I dream about aliens. Aliens and the Blair Witch. Frannie and Dolby picking them up in Belinda and taking them out and treating them 
right. The Blair Witch tastes haggis and Irn-Bru for the first time. She likes it.

Monday night.

I head down to Dolby’s. Belinda is parked outside like an obedient dog, her rust flaking. Dolby is halfway through his dinner and an episode of Babylon 5, so I natter to his Dad, who for some reason is keen to teach me House of the Rising Sun on guitar. I can’t get my fingers round the frets, and have to pretend this is really funny, since Dolby’s Dad looks like Lee Van Clef in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and is notorious for dispensing dead-arms with accuracy, so I try again.

‘Gon,’ he urges, all satanic, ‘play Layla.’

Later, in his bedroom, Dolby chucks me a package. I don’t catch it instantly, having lost all feeling in my arm, but I do recognise the cover. It’s the new release by Pink Floyd, Is There Anybody Out There? It’s essentially The Wall album recorded live in 1980 when Roger Waters was still in the band!

‘That’s from Brian,’ Dolby says. ‘He’s sorry about the other night. Didnay want tay give it tay ye himsel, cos he’s embarrassed.’

‘Right,’ I say, knowing it’s a lie and that Dolby has bought this. ‘Tell him thanks.’

‘Cool, eh?’ Dolby nods at the CD.

‘Cool,’ I agree, slightly disappointed that forever The Wall will remind me of Brian’s mouth twisted with resentment, the
un
shagging of Shelley, until I run my hand across the hardback book that
accompanies
the CD, the four faces of Pink Floyd on the cover, their eyes cut out like empty masks, while inside The Wall concert explodes in a burst of stage lights. David Gilmour’s guitar glinting and his shadow, thrown by a spotlight, bleeding across the audience, and huge,
marching hammers, and a nimbus of mist, and floating, malevolent teacher puppets, all of this plucked from the fog of the past and made real, apparent, whole.

‘Dolby,’ I begin, but can’t express any of it.

‘I know!’ he grins.

‘Naw,’ I say. ‘It’s just too …’

‘I know!’ he almost squeaks, his eyes screwed shut. ‘I know!’

We listen to it.

For an hour and a half we lie still on the bed, watching the graphic equaliser blipping up and down, his plasma ball flicking tongues of electricity, the shifting blues and greens of the fish tank and the
spectral
, gliding shapes of the fish. It is our own private Pink Floyd light show. The scent of Dolby’s incense (jasmine) curls in the air, revealing itself the way a pretty, stoned girl might take off clothes.

Outside the sky turns from grey to dark grey, the white concrete of the Hallglen scheme becoming dull alabaster, and we cannot hear the drunks shouting, the children baiting them, car alarms going on, off, bottles being kicked, smashed, while we lie on our stomachs with our chins in our hands, just listening to the Floyd.

Sometimes, the world is too fine, just stuffed with good things.

The CD makes a small
shick
sound as it spins to a halt. Dolby turns over, scratching his belly. ‘If you make it away, Alvin,’ he says quietly, ‘make it for the four of us eh.’

and we both gaze down at the bedspread, then talk about the album, how Roger Waters is a songwriting genius, he really is.

but none of this resolves what to do about Tyra’s party. It is the focus of my existence, the light above my bed, only a day away and going on without me. How can I concentrate on exam revision? I am doomed to spend loose hours feeling my mind pinball from the new
singles chart to the wrongs of global capitalism to whether or not we should print DA BOYZ on Belinda to the question of Tyra’s
underwear
(betcha it’s white lace) and Stephen King’s best book (surely The Shining). Frannie’s just off the phone. His Mum and Dad are finally divorcing. Maybe it’s cos his Dad lost his job at Motorola recently, the contract punted off to Jakarta or somewhere else that sounds like a dance act. I dunno. He phones me up, and when I ask him about it, he falls silent for a good long while, only space crackling and hissing between us.