Boyracers (21 page)

Monday at school is abysmal. In my practice English essay I completely mix up George Orwell, Orson Welles and H.G. Wells (how easy is that?). I have to endure a common room on the boil with the news that Connor and Tyra are, officially, an item. On the desk at the back of my Modern Studies class I write

before initialling and dating it. Later in the day I get summoned back to Mrs Costa’s room and handed a scrubbing brush.

When I get home I find Derek sititng in the garden, a joint in one hand and his pinkie extended. His ginger beard and chest fuzz have grown out of control recently. ‘Whaur’s Dad?’ I ask, waving the smoke from my face. Derek just shrugs, rustling through the Daily Record

‘Upstairs,’ he says eventually.

‘Have ye had a fight?’

He doesn’t answer.

Our garden was slabbed with concrete in 1989. This was Dad’s idea, meant he didn’t have to cut the grass and pull the weeds every summer. Now the paving is cracked and cock-eyed, lying at slants as if an earthquake’s hit. Weeds creep through the gaps like bits of broccoli between teeth.

I pull up a seat next to Derek, noticing Dad’s slippers parked at the side.

‘Does yer boss no want ye back at work soon?’ I ask, pretending not to be concerned at all. ‘Ye’ve been back here three weeks.’

‘Long holiday,’ he says tonelessly.

‘Whit about yer rent?’ I continue. My family aren’t the greatest communicators, but I can guess their moods from only half-glances, since their faces pretty much, unfortunately, match mine.

‘Taken care of,’ he mumbles, clawing at his beard the way Dad does, the fingers hooked and inquisitive and quietly scratching out: Get. Tay. Fuck.

I snap, snatching his paper. ‘Gonnay talk tay me, fir chrissakes?’

Derek calmly removes his shades. His eyes are blazing. He leans over to me. ‘Our Dad,’ he whispers, ‘is going insane.’

Upstairs, Dad is face-down on the bed, spread like a starfish, surrounded by photographs. Dozens of them.

‘Dad?’ I say, and he makes a surprised noise, turning around. His eyes are mild, red and ringed. He wipes at them manfully.

‘Sorry son,’ he whispers. An effort to smile. ‘Just me an yer brother havin words, that’s aw. He sometimes disnay ken when tay leave
somethin
be.’

I nod, looking down at him.

Dad sighs and picks up the photos, an out-of-tune orchestra of faces.

‘God, how did things get so fucked up?’ And he gives a short laugh, scratching at his beard just like Derek.

‘Dad?’

He looks up.

‘Dad, dinnay go the same way as Mum. If ye do, I will hate ye. I will hate ye completely. And there’ll be nay way back fay it.’

He holds my gaze, and it grows so icy and still that I feel the slightest motion from either of us will smash it to bits. He opens his mouth to reply, but I say, ‘Do you understand?’ and then leave

to disappear in Belinda with the Lads, Frannie keen to head out to Cally Park, ‘tay check if the flowers are in bloom – nyuk nyuk!’ his sex drive emerging like a bee from the winter, so we stop at Haddows for
Bacardi Breezers (where Dolby is asked for ID, haha) then cruise into the slow swarm of Callendar Park, relaxing our patter.

We get out and start walking. The Bacardi Breezers make ringing clinks as the sun flits across our faces. We climb the fence to the
playground
and lark about on the swings, pushing each other down the chutes. I feel like a kid. It’s great.

A quartet of girls strolls past.

‘Hey,’ Frannie whispers, ‘mind they girls I gave ma number tay?’

Wendy has clocked me, is smiling wickedly.

‘Well, we made a wee arrangement …’

I wander over, trying to subdue a grin.

‘Are you Ally Ferguson?’ she gasps. ‘Can I have your autograph?’

‘Very funny,’ I retort. ‘Whaur did they dredge you up fay?’

She tuts, adopting Wounded Look #6. ‘Never forget I’ve seen your willy, pal.’

They burgle our Bacardi Breezers, we colonise their ghetto blaster. It’s all dance music, worse luck, save for one tape which is Brown Eyed Girl recorded twelve times (what is it with girls and that song?) and there’s an easy feel to proceedings, vaguely expectant. The Lads are acting like Roman emperors being fed grapes by concubines, the girls preen like flowers contested by bumblebees. Each side thinks the other is doing all the running. Pointless chat fizzes like lemonade. Chilled-as-fuck lemonade.

‘Whit song will be the first dance at yer wedding?’ one of the girls asks, running her hand along the grass.

‘In the Army Now by Status Quo,’ Brian replies.

‘Jump by Van Halen,’ says Dolby.

The girls tut and ask them to think of their wives. Frannie does so. ‘Wow, she’s fuckin gorgeous.’

I just laze, getting drunk, watching a kid watching a beetle, thinking and thinking about the Stirling University prospectus which plopped on my doormat this morning.

‘We Don’t Need Another Hero by Tina Turner?’

‘Hello, Hello, We are the Billy Boys?’

‘The theme tune fay Only Fools an Horses?’

When I turn for a Breezer, Wendy is looking at me, her gaze heavy and true. Something clicks, a sort of tripwire deep in a primal place. Something shared and silent.

‘Comin for a walk?’ she says quickly.

We hold hands. Because of the trembling, I find I’m talking about Madonna albums louder than I should be. The ghetto blaster drones at Wendy’s side.

‘Let me get this straight,’ she says. ‘Ye’ve never listened tay Ray of Light?’

‘Is it better than Like A Prayer?’

‘Miles!’

‘I dunno,’ I shrug, ‘Like A Prayer’s quite a standard.’

‘
Quite a standard
,’ she repeats, posh.

‘Less ay your cheek.’

She leads me into a shady bower, dappled with leaves and a quiet cool. I wave away a wasp. We sit, and she plays Ray of Light, lecturing me on its merits like a teacher, then she turns, puts her hand in my hair, and the weight of our eye contact drags us further down. ‘Put your body close to my mind,’ she murmurs. Or something. Her words seem to melt in the heat as she leans, kisses the space under my chin, and soon we are

uncurling. Breathing. Our bodies, slightly slick, slide against each other. Birds are jabbering tiny sounds in the air and the sunlight is real and Wendy lies on top of me, her chin in her hand.

‘Enjoy that?’

I nod thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, it was good. Had a nice beat to it. I reckon it is better than Like A Prayer.’

She pauses.

‘The sex, you idiot, not the album.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Um–’

She slaps me on the head, then does up her bra with an expertise which had totally eluded me ten minutes ago. She turns. Her back stretches, pocked here and there with tiny sticks, and I home in on the fine, red hairs which wisp at the base of her neck, the faint rouge tint in her skin, the tiny, bright mouths of sunlight which open in the green canopy above us. The scent of chlorophyll and sex. The distant, lazy drum of insect wings. The world seems to glisten with life, colour, choices. I think I’m in love.

Probably just hungry.

‘Ken, Alvin,’ Wendy muses, studying my face, ‘you’re actually no that bad lookin.’

‘No that bad?’ I repeat, aghast. ‘Fuck’s that supposed tay mean?’

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Another couple ay years, fill oot a bit, decent
haircut
. You could be quite a catch.’

My skin is starting to redden. I look away, doing up buttons. ‘Aye … well …’

I reach for a Coke and take a heavy, nonchalant slurp. Wendy stares at me, horrified.

‘There was a wasp on the lip ay that can.’

Movement inside my mouth. A dull buzz. I freeze.

‘Spit!’ she urges.

A small body grazing the inside of my cheek. ‘Spit!’ she yells. ‘Now!’ and I spray the Coke from my mouth, panicked. The wasp lies fighting in a dark brown puddle, its stinger punching the air like a sewing needle. I stamp it to mush, howling and covering my mouth.

‘Ye ken whit wid have happened if ye’d swall–’

‘I ken,’ I interrupt, raising my hand, ‘I ken.’

Walking back to camp, we’re laughing, but my nerves feel like they’ve been laced with acid. One wee sting and I would have been a goner.

Wendy asks if that was my first time.

‘Naw,’ I say. ‘Well, aye. There was this false alarm before.’

‘Ye mean like a pregnancy scare?’

‘Naw. I thought I’d lost my virginity.’

‘Aw,’ she says: then, ‘that’s an alarm?’

We talk, daftly enough, about the Broons. I confess to her my secret fantasy for Maggie, she confesses hers for Joe.

‘That waist!’ I gasp.

‘Those muscles!’ Wendy marvels.

She asks what my favourite film is and I say Jaws, and she says – get this, nearly ruining the whole moment –

‘Which one?’

‘Whit d’ye mean, which one? There is only one.’

‘No there’s no. There’s four Jaws movies.’

‘Naw,’ I stress. ‘There is only one Jaws movie.’

She punches my arm – I let her, though she’s clearly no Jaws purist – and it’s fun and the world has a new and sudden brightness, but that wasp. Its tiny sting sliding into the walls of my throat. My throat
swelling
, choking. The closeness of death. The sharks, the giant sharks.

Wendy is pondering the shadows we cast, long and scrawled, in front of us, and then she is smiling at me.

‘You’ve got a look,’ she says. She has gorgeous eyelashes.

‘A look? Like, whit sortay look?’

‘Ye look–’ she cocks her head, ‘hungry.’

‘I am hungry. I huvnay eaten since breakfast.’

‘That’s no whit I mean. Ye look like ye
want
somethin.’

‘Have I no just had it?’

‘No that. Naw, somethin bigger than that.’

‘Hm. So, whit exactly dae I want?’

Wendy winks.

‘Whit’s comin tay ye.’ Her hand snakes round my waist and stays there. ‘Ye want whit’s comin tay ye.’

and we split. Det

ach. Our fingers lingering. She fades across the green like a sunbeam as I bob back to the car with a helium grin. The grass makes a rustling noise and I am impressed, just convinced of nature’s talent as a
performing
artist, the potential for life to outdo itself just when you’d given up on it.

and that night, drunkenly happy, that state in which things bubble and pop with life and you wonder how anything could ever be bad again, Derek and me go wandering round Hallglen. Terrain sharp with
memories
. Its labyrinthine streets. Its ancient satellite dishes, like barnacles on a sunken ship. The lock-ups we used to smash footballs against and the places where we made dens or played hide-and-seek and the doors we chapped and ran away from, shouting, booting garbage down the street.

I’m glad he’s home.

But I still don’t know why he’s home.

The wind creeps between the houses. The boarded-up shell of one gutted by fire. I tell him about Wendy (but not her touch, not her
scent, not her voice), and he nods, impressed but doesn’t tell me about a single girl he met in London. We wander into a swing park where we both used to play, now desolate.

‘Imagine you wiping your dick on your t-shirt,’ he tuts.

‘Whit else could I use?’

‘The last of the great romantics,’ Derek snorts and nudges an empty vodka bottle with his boot. Then he picks it up, weighs it, and hurls it against a nearby wall.

The smash rings round the scheme.

‘I found her here once,’ Derek gestures to the climbing frames, which rear against the dark like dinosaur skeletons. ‘She was lying unconscious. Weans had put dog shit on her chest.’

I sit in one of the swings, rocking gently. The chain makes a comforting, nautical creak.

‘Derek, why did ye come hame?’

He glances at me, then away, his eyes white marbles in the dark. He starts rolling a piece of the vodka bottle with his boot. ‘She is alive, Alvin.’

He climbs onto the wee wall, gazes round at the unblinking lights of a place he once lived in, but never called home. Derek is the only one of us who followed his dream to see where it would lead. And where it led was straight back here. I swing despondently, my feet making random pushes against the rubber slab. The glass shards of the vodka bottle lie waiting for a kid’s foot, so I sweep them to the wall. Then I climb up, stand next to Derek, listen to the howl of dogs’ separated souls, while in the swing park phantom children laugh.

‘She’s out there somewhere. I can feel her.’

My older brother – who always took care of me, who always knew exactly what he was doing, why he was doing it, or so it seemed to me – grown up into an unwound ball of string, and I can’t help but think:

Weren’t we promised something?

Sitting in our primary schools (little chairs, little tables), listening open-mouthed to the magic sounds made by the teacher, we could see something, just past her shoulder, out there beyond the playground: a rough-draft of the world, an artist’s impression. But it looked
wonderful
. Something true. Something good. Something to run towards.

‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Derek murmurs, hopping down from the wall, wrapping his arms around himself as

we soar in and out of the badlands and Brian makes slurping noises with his Irn-Bru while music from gleaming vehicles veers close then away and Frannie, hollering, obscene with laugher, ignores the crap rap music on Belinda’s stereo (Asian Pub Foundation?) to pose the
question
, ‘So, if Batman wis a pop star, who wid he be?’

which is a tricky one, since you have to think about Batman’s
iceberg-cool
image and it’s pointless comparing him to, say, Robert Plant, the two just don’t go together, silly even to consider it, and we pass a sign saying DON’T FALL ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL and I can’t believe how many beautiful women Frannie has ignored tonight – forty-something trolley dollies with their Mrs Robinson maturity on show, carrying
shopping
bags, parked at traffic lights – he’s totally possessed with the Batman question, and he should be, it’s an important one, crucial, and I can’t stop thinking that it’s been seven years since the last Floyd album/tour (do they do weddings and ceilidhs for Richard Branson and Bill Gates now?) and Dolby is fighting with Brian to try and get some of the Irn-Bru but Brian’s pulling it away, teasing him, bringing it closer, pulling it away, cackling, and the sky is mottled red-pink, the clouds ridged and quilted like
herringbone
, and the Scotland game hisses on the radio (they’re drawing 1–1!) and England were beaten 1–0 by Germany and this holds deep, almost mystical significance for everyone (Dolby gives the loudest cheer and he doesn’t even like football) and I answer the Batman question: