Boyracers (25 page)

gone

Rain falling against the window. Hospital radio playing the Foo Fighters. Those two things just not going together at all.

This is the infirmary where I was born. Falkirk Royal. Being here again makes me feel tiny, acorn-small. Nurses coming and going and doctors coming and going and me smiling like the professional patient.

While I’m here, I read the whole of Moby Dick, the only book lying around the ward, which is totally boring, since the whale doesn’t appear until the second last chapter. Eight hundred pages of talking about the whale and no fucking whale. There’s a message there, which is probably crucial to life or something, but I’m just too tired to figure it out.

I feel like I’ve been running for a long, long time.

My head feels compressed with the relationship between Barrett-era Floyd and Parklife-era Blur (more similar than critics realise, I could go into this), my body numb to everything but my own inadequacy, and that long, awful walk after we jettisoned Belinda.

Mum has been drifting at the end of the corridor, glancing in my direction. Her smile is weak and sad. When Derek and Dad arrive it is a family reunion of sorts. The faces are drizzly and faded, like a photo left out in the rain.

‘Looking good, Billy Ray,’ Derek says.

‘Feeling good Lewis,’ I manage.

There is hand patting from Dad.

The Lads turn up just as Ahab spots the fucking whale!

I like Brian’s new puffa jacket. Frannie is wearing a Rangers baseball cap. Dolby is dressed like Chris Martin from Coldplay. They look more like boyracers than they ever have. They warm the room as soon as they enter it, and to ease things along – me, the still centre of their swirling banter – Frannie and Brian start slagging Dolby. Uriel, what the fuck
was he thinking about, what a woofter. But he grimaces, holds his hands up. ‘I’ll come clean, boys. I’ve changed ma name back tay Martin.’

‘Whit?’ we all gasp. ‘Why?’

‘Naybody ever called me Uriel,’ he shrugs. ‘It wis a silly idea in the first place.’

We shake our heads, tutting, and nobody mentions the coincidence of it, that Uriel died with Belinda. And Dolby, trying to laugh along, but out of sorts, mourning, looks like it’s a double suicide he won’t recover from. Some tragic part of him out there on the road with Belinda forever, fluttering his wings.

They shuffle about the room, checking out the nurses’ arses as they pass in the corridor. None of them ask, but I want to tell them anyway. I raise myself up in bed, finger the new Radiohead CD, Amnesiac, which Dolby has bought me, which has a weird cover, then put it down and say:

‘I know yer aw wonderin whit happened tay me. But I’m … no really sure. This last year, I’ve been fightin against somethin, somethin horrible. There’s been things gon on inside me that I don’t understand at aw. I even thought about–’ the sheets are scrunched up in my fist, ‘– but, ehm, I didnay. And I want yese tay know that if it wisnay fir youse guys, I wouldnay be here. I want yese to know that. I wid have–’

I pause, it’s rising.

‘But I didnay dae it. I’m here. We made it. The four ay us. Tay the end.’

Frannie turns and faces the wall. Dolby looks at the floor and murmurs, ‘The new Radiohead album’s awright. No as good as Kid A.’

Brian coughs, and when his voice emerges it is new and certain, ringing out.

‘Next year for California, boys. Next year it’ll happen. For sure.’

and I realise that I haven’t said these things at all, just thought I had

and that now I never will

and that’s that

The summer has wound down like an old clock. The mornings are tinged with a bright, sharp cold. Dolby and Brian’s twentieth birthdays came and went. We did nothing special to celebrate them.

Dad helps pack the car. There’s a battered typewriter he’s fished from the loft for my essays, plenty socks and underwear, the copies of Kerouac and Kelman and rubbish critical books with names like In Defence of Realism which Mrs Gibson gave me, shining with pride, when I told her I’d made it onto the English degree course at Stirling University. Her notes in the margins, her pencilled thoughts forever adrift in the world. I open one at random and find a line which says

and in my pockets I have a dozen photographs to stick on the walls of my new room: the Lads in jubilant poses, me and Derek sharing
cocktails
on the back slabs, Dad glancing over the top of the Daily Record in his old Clash t-shirt, and

Mum.

We heave the stuff out from the house – me, Derek, Dad, the Lads – grunting and joking like workers, like men. Afterwards we stand about, sort of chatting pointlessly. When I ask what they’ve been up to recently, Brian shrugs.

Through a heat-blanketed summer, I’ve met with them rarely. Since we’ve no car, our reasons for meeting up are few, though
there’s been the odd drunken phone call, boasting about some shag (not many of those, actually) or raving about some film. Generally, I’ve been relieved when Frannie’s said, ‘Does your phone dae this?’ and the receiver’s clicked down. Mostly, I’ve stayed in with Dad, listened to the clock’s tick and the birds’ chirpy nonsense, read books for my new course, watched The Godfather Parts I and II (never III).

‘Got everythin?’ Dad asks, closing the boot.

‘Aye. Ready to heddy.’

We all stand silently, absorbing the moment. Cars shoot past on the main road. Our hands are in our pockets. It’s as if we’ve just been
introduced
to each other and are desperately forming excuses to escape.

‘Oh,’ Dolby says, reaching into his jacket. ‘Before I forget. We got ye a present for yer new room.’ He hands me the plastic Han Solo from Belinda’s dashboard. I stare at it, its wee arms and legs askew, blasting an invisible Greedo.

‘Before we left her,’ he says, ‘I managed tay salvage Han.’

‘An this,’ Brian beams, handing me a can of Irn-Bru. ‘Fir the back seat ay yer first car.’

‘Front seat,’ I remind him. Never did work that one out.

We shake hands. Each of them wishes me well, promises to come up to Stirling to visit. Brian asks me to set aside any tasty nursing students. The wind whistles the approach of winter and we huddle our hands further into our pockets, and standing there with them, I feel older, almost the same age as them.

I have to leave them. But every second heartbeat is a scream to stay.

‘Aw the best.’

‘Heddy haw.’

‘See ye in the Hotel California.’

Just before I go, the mobile in Frannie’s pocket beeps (the theme from
The Magnificent Seven) and he draws it out to check his text message.

‘Alvin, it’s for you,’ he smirks, passing me the phone.

‘For me?’

‘She still has ma number …’

‘How dae I text her back?’ I panic, fiddling with the buttons. ‘Whit dae I–’

‘Well, ye’ll need tay get a phone then.’

‘Ye canny be a student if ye’ve no got a mobile phone,’ Dolby points out.

‘Fuck naw,’ says Brian. ‘How else are we gonnay get near they wee posh tarts?’

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I will.’

I move towards the car slowly. Things feel a bit like the end of The Breakfast Club. Simple Minds should be playing Don’t You Forget About Me in the background, highlighting the excellent crapness of the moment. As I clamber into the front seat, Derek shuts the door behind me. He seems to want to say something, struggling with it.

‘Looking good Billy Ra–’ he says, but I cut him off.

‘If there is anythin oot there,’ I say, ‘I’ll find it.’

He smiles, ruffling my hair, and it’s such a corny gesture, like
something
a brother would do.

It’s time.

Me and Dad pull away, and they’re all in a line, everyone I’ve ever cared about, waving, smiling, flicking me the Vs, and as the car gathers speed, it’s too painful to watch them disappear behind me, so I don’t.

Ahead, the sun glows pink/orange/lime, like Bacardi Breezers, like a champagne supernova in the sky, and all the last songs on albums and all the closing scenes from films merge then part on a motorway in my mind, and everything under the sun is in tune, as I fiddle with the radio, settling on some crackling Highland channel with its comforting hills, heather and lochs and

and the Lads and me watching drunken Rangers matches, and I think about Wendy’s text. I’m not sure that it matters if I text her back or not, but I really think I will. I’m buying a mobile phone. This decision is made. I stand Han Solo up on the dashboard and he carries the world on tiny shoulders.

Dad says, ‘Did I ever tell ye I saw Elvis Costello at the Maniqui?’

He winks, and there’s a grin there that I thought had died from his face quite some time ago.

‘Naw, ye’ve never telt me that, Dad,’ I smile.

ROLL CREDITS. VOICEOVER. We are a generation who awoke to find all gods dead, all wars fought, only delusions to believe in, hope for, which we spend our whole lives racing towards, bright,
shimmering
on the horizon, but then

We glance back. And the way we’ve come has gone. And we didn’t stop, breathe, absorb any of it. It all zapped past. Like Grand Prix adverts. Like a sitcom double bill.

planet Earth, scorched with the touch of the sun, its rays appearing/disappearing/appearing again and happiness becomes –
is
– attainable. It isn’t
this
, but I know it’s coming, making me chase it, frantic, like a greyhound after a rabbit, and who knows, maybe I’ve shot past without even noticing, but till the day when all makes sense there is this. This feeling.

‘You and Derek are awright, Dad? I ask. ‘I mean, yer on the right track? Stirling’s no far away if ye want tay–’

‘We’ll be fine, son,’ he says, squeezing my hand. ‘Ye’re brother’s goat that carer’s allowance. He’s gonnay stay for a while. We’ll take care of each other.’ 

The road stretching out ahead. Cars firing towards mystery
destinations
. Those simple words, ‘We’ll take care of each other,’ and what they mean, what they do, and the world, I’ve decided, is a good place to be, still fascinating. I have not exhausted its possibilities. It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, and above all else it’s this I realise, suddenly, like an epiphany, like the sun glowing through the clouds or the heady feeling we had in Belinda, racing through all those nights together,
together
, so I roll down my window, turn up the music, then just roar something triumphant at the sign rushing past which says

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING FALKIRK

If you’ve just finished this book, you might have guessed that I was a big Stephen King fan when I was younger. His novels and stories alone, replete with good old Americans battling some supernatural threat, were thrilling enough (or most of them anyway, as I’ve never felt the need to go back to
Rose Madder
), but what I also loved were King’s introductory essays to his books, in which he’d explain, face to face, how he came to be a writer, how he typed away in a trailer, he and his wife doing about six jobs between them, a baby on the way, how his wife fished his abandoned manuscript
Carrie
out of the bin and made him look at it again. The rest, as they say, is bloody, ghost-ravaged, nightmarish history. King would be telling you this, with all the
down-home
straightness of someone sliding a pint down the bar to you. It all had this glow about it. Yet what difference did it make how the books came to be written? Why do we care about the particular context a novel came to exist in, whether it’s Orwell holed up on Jura with
tuberculosis
, feverish with
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, or the furore surrounding the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s
American Psycho
? Sometimes, say, with Ted Hughes’s
Birthday Letters
, the artwork and the real life are so enmeshed that either only makes half as much sense without the other.

Now, I’m not Stephen King, and I’m certainly not Orwell, Ellis or Hughes, but even your friendly neighbourhood Falkirk novelist has been asked often enough at readings variations on the following: ‘How did you become a writer?’ ‘Who were your influences’ ‘Is your work
autobiographical?’ ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ (all-time
classic
, as any writer will tell you) and even the cracker: ‘How did someone from a housing scheme manage to write a book?’ That one always makes me smile. So I’m well aware that people do sometimes like to see behind the veil, to see what the Wizard of Oz looks like, even if like Dorothy, they’re frequently disappointed to find that we’re made up of the same boring bits and bobs as everyone else.

I figured I’d save us a wee bit of time in future and give answers to them all at once, and the Afterword to the Tenth Anniversary edition of my first published novel feels like the most obvious place to indulge that, since we’ve been talking to each other anyway, you and I. So if those questions mean anything at all to you, you’ll get the answers here. If not – if you want to believe in the Wizard of Oz, don’t like hearing writers prattle on about their ‘struggle’, or just hate people with pop-culture Tourettes – then move along, please. These aren’t the droids you’re
looking
for. Seriously, the next sentence alone will be enough to put you off.

To paraphrase Ray Liotta’s opening shot in
Goodfellas
, ‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a writer.’

My family – who, it’s worth saying, are nothing like Alvin’s in this novel – still have no idea where it came from. Neither of my parents were avid readers, my siblings haven’t turned out to be, and the few books I can remember lying around our house were mainly my mum’s
Flowers in the Attic
series and my dad’s books about the Glasgow razor gangs. I was drawn to their copies of Peter Benchley’s
Jaws
and the novelisation of
King Kong
, because they were the only ‘grown-up’ books in the house which had actual monsters in them. These books had a feel and smell which I can loosely describe as adult: the paper was
thicker, grainier than I was used to, the type was tiny and there was so much of it. Worst of all – no pictures! Nonetheless, when I was maybe seven or eight, I tried to read
Jaws
. My mind strained at the length of the sentences and I couldn’t hold on to their sense for very long, but neither could I remove from my head the eerie image in that opening line: ‘The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.’

The hugeness of that fish in my mind. Death itself.

Ours, like almost every other working-class family’s in Scotland, was very much a household of quiz shows, soap operas, murder
mysteries
, football, horse racing, Sixties hits, the Corries and Kenny Rogers. My mum claims she initially bought me books because they were cheaper than toys, and was pleased when I took up with them, as they kept me very quiet. Importantly, built into every schoolday at Hallglen Primary for seven years was half an hour of the teacher reading stories to us. Roald Dahl,
The Chronicles of Narnia
, the Famous Five and
Charlotte’s Web
cast a spell which kept us silently glowing with
excitement
each day at three o’clock. They were the only times when our class, in all its variation, felt united.

Little boys who aren’t good at football or fighting have to find
self-worth
in their own imaginations, and so mine was concerned chiefly with writing and drawing. A
Beano
-style comic strip about my
mischievous
little cousin Scott was a hit with my extended family. I’d imitate
Oor Wullie
and
The Broons
, my first attempt to write in Scots, and design choose-your-own-adventure novels like the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I wrote a whole series of superhero comics based on me and my friends, with myself as the ninja-like Biscuit Boy, who could mentally control digestives. Writing stories was something I did whenever we were given free play in class, or when rain meant we couldn’t go outside. It was the thing I did when
I went home. It was what I was praised most for by teachers. In Primary Three I won first prize as part of the school’s Robert Burns celebration, with a recital of J.K. Annand’s ‘The Crocodile’, which I can still remember word for word to this day. A writer, I’d decided, was what I was going to
be
.

In Primary Six I had my first ever encounter with another writer. We met like two lizards with florid throat displays. The top brains of our year group were placed in a composite class with some Primary Sevens, who generally wouldn’t talk to us, so of course exuded a faint glamour. One day, our teacher, Alison Shanks, set us the task of coming up with a ghost story, which naturally I threw myself into, concocting a tale about a spooky river which flowed up the side of a mountain. Mrs Shanks read it to the class, who clapped approval, before she read out a story by Lindsay Gardner, a Primary Seven. It was about a girl home alone, whose doorbell was rung again and again by a man selling jade figurines. We held our breath each time the girl went back to the door. It was atmospheric, ambiguous, creepy and stylish. I didn’t know what the hell a ‘jade
figurine
’ was but it sounded great! When the teacher had finished, when the story released us, the class went wild, whooping and cheering. Lindsay blushed and looked at her desk, and I regarded for the first time someone who was better at me than the thing I was best at. Since I can’t find her on Amazon, I like to think that Lindsay – my first ‘influence’ – is now writing superb murder mysteries under a pseudonym.

Let’s make no bones about this, at Falkirk High School I was geeky. The very things that make you stand out in a good way at primary school – intellect, imagination – make you stand out in a bad way at secondary school. The conformity, the sudden obsession with who to be seen with and what clothes to wear, is crushing to the spirit of those who can’t keep up. This was terrible for my self-esteem but great for
my writing, and I cast myself in the role of the romantic outsider, cut adrift from society, as revenge for upbraidings on the football pitch.
Yes
, I have read
Catcher in the Rye
.

In Fourth Year I wrote a story called ‘The End of the World’, a short, simple piece produced very quickly that used only dialogue and sparse description. It was about two five year-old children, Marshall and Jenny, sitting on a wall at a swing park. Jenny looks up to Marshall because he’s a few months older, but Marshall abuses this privilege, trying to impress her with a fib about how he’s visited ‘the end of the world’ which lies beyond the line where the sky and the ground meet. It has monsters and lions, he tells her, and a man called Arthur Haveabanana, who gives you a banana. Excited, she begs him to take her, but he refuses, for her own safety, not wanting to tell her that the real reason they can’t go is because he’s not allowed to cross the road. ‘Another time,’ says Jenny, before they run back to the house. ‘Yes,’ sighs Marshall, ‘another time.’

The story seemed to me, at fourteen, a little juvenile, and was
written
as an experiment, a sideshow to the epic, Tolkien-esque novel I was planning in my head. My English teacher, Georgina Young, however, loved it, and read it out to the whole class. They listened and kept listening, then at the end went wild the way my Primary Six class had for Lindsay Gardner’s jade figurines. I can still remember them all looking at me for the first time as though I wasn’t a nothing any more. I wanted to feel that again, and again, and again, but couldn’t quite understand why this particular story had enjoyed such an effect. So I went back to writing about vampires.

Now that I look back on ‘The End of the World’, with two decades’ worth of experience, I can recognise certain elements that weren’t in my horror stories: realistic dialogue (for two five-year-olds anyway), characters properly differentiated from each other, a power dynamic in
flux, the lack of genre clichés, an organic twist in the plot, and an atmosphere of sadness that avoided being maudlin. Mrs Young told me that she’d started to read it out to all of her classes, even the Fifth and Sixth Years – mainstream success! – but the school environment can take back as quickly as it gives and before long my head was back under the parapet.

It was a quiet wee triumph, though. A step.

Round about then, what it meant to be a teenager really kicked in. In May of 1990 I met Allan, Moonie and Toby, who were a good three years older than me and had all left school. We lived near each other in Hallglen, a scheme in Falkirk built in the mid-Seventies, set on a hill, where each box of a house is of the same white pebbledash as the next. You can see it clearly from the window of the Edinburgh–Glasgow train, just before Falkirk High station. ‘The Lads’, as they called
themselves
, took me under their wing, in the pitying, brotherly way that older teens sometimes do. As thanks for this patronage, I worshipped them. They all had jobs and disposable income, they drank alcohol, and they’d had actual sex with actual girls, all unknown concepts to me. I listened to their stories about work and fights and club nights with rapt fascination. Each evening, at six on the dot (after
Neighbours
), I’d change out of my school clothes and charge straight down to Toby’s, and we’d hang about in his bedroom or Allan’s living room and spend our time on a general ripping of the pish, to a soundtrack of
classic
rock, maybe a Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarznegger film to round the night off.

Then Toby passed his driving test, bought a car, and suddenly the whole of Scotland was open to us.

I remember those nights as being some of the most exciting of my life, even if, as youngest, I was the designated runt. Everything moved
so fast. There was something new to see every day. We were loyal and we believed in each other. Together, our world felt limitless. Moonie introduced me to
The Simpsons
and David Bowie; Allan to Subbuteo and spaghetti westerns; Toby to Pink Floyd and Clive Barker, who became my first obsessive literary crush and who dictated my
subsequent
reading of Stephen King, Thomas Harris, H.P. Lovecraft, James Herbert and Edgar Allan Poe. The inside of my head grew strange and dark, all sorts of ghosts and madmen drifting through its purple drapes. I started to dress all in black and grow my hair long and think of myself as a creature of the night. If you are a teenage boy in this stage at the moment, my message is this: don’t worry, you’re going to be fine, but only once you realise that women aren’t the enemy, Jim Morrison’s poetry is rubbish, and that colours are nothing to be scared of.

In Fifth and Sixth Year my writing started to move, thanks to two hugely influential English teachers, Eileen Gibson and Mollie Skehal, who believed in young people, encouraged free thinking and offered the sort of purely literary pleasure which most kids avoid because ‘it’s boring’. I was no exception, and resisted what they called Good Books, but a great teacher can unlock any text for anyone, and this is how I was introduced to Arthur Miller, Norman MacCaig, Thomas Hardy, Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks are also due to Georgina Young for Shakespeare, John Graham for Chaucer (and Joyce Lidgertwood for telling me in First Year that I was ‘being silly’ for putting a used condom into a story just because Stevie Miller had dared me to). What came at me from all of these writers, as my mind was trained in how to read and talk about Good Books, was a sense of
realism
, of the natural complexity and drama of human emotion. No demons were to be found except those of a character’s own making. This, in its own way, made things more exciting because I could sense
more truth about the world being presented to me. The danger the characters were in was more human, more tangible.

But I still liked things with fangs.

In 1993, in my final year of school, a supply teacher called Alison Armstrong, herself an eminently published writer of short stories, formed a Creative Writing group with Mollie Skehal. Our Sixth Year English class jumped on it, and, sensing my appetite for writing, Alison gave me a copy of
Rebel Inc
. magazine, published in Edinburgh by Kevin Williamson and featuring stories by then-unknowns Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Duncan McLean and Laura Hird. The cover showed Malcolm X holding a rifle. The stories all had swearing in them and were set in Scotland. This was a brew of a different order, dirty and provocative. I had absolutely no reference points for this kind of thing. Two of the writers in
Rebel Inc
, Gordon Legge and Shug Hanlan, were even from the Falkirk area. Alison encouraged me along to a poetry and pints night upstairs in Behind the Wall, where the main reader was the poet Janet Paisley. She lived in the village right next to Hallglen! A real poet! Alison introduced me to people by saying, ‘keep an eye out for this boy in the future’, which felt like huge praise to my shy
seventeen-year
-old self. She took me to an open mic night in Edinburgh – Edinburgh! – and I stepped onstage just the once, just to see what it felt like, told a joke about a guy going into a shop to ask for a wasp then sat back down to amused applause, a brief whiff of affirmation, before the actual poets went back to the mic.