Boyracers (26 page)

On the scene, all the talk was about one particular writer starting to pull ahead of the pack: Irvine Welsh. The name seemed to float in and out of the smoke. Long before
Trainspotting
became a film classic, I was energised by the novel, as well as
The Acid House
and
Marabou Stork Nightmares
, which were about a Scotland I recognised, one that wasn’t
the Broons or tartan but which spoke in the natural voice of the
working
-class.
My
voice. I’d presumed before that this kind of writing wasn’t even allowed, given that teachers had always marked my essays with ‘colloquial’ each time an informality crept in. I started sketching stories about some of the guys in Hallglen, the hard guys and shaggers, but the characters would always end up falling into another dimension. Couldn’t keep those pesky alternate worlds out of Hallglen.

My final two years at school were ones of uncertainty about my future, exam stress and acute emotional confusion. I had a bright, creative mind, but was not a diligent student, and the romantic outsider role had become subsumed by that of the adolescent depressive. This was especially acute given I’d stayed on at school to the point where only the university-bound sons and daughters of the middle class remained, all of whom seemed so assured and confident. I liked many of them but I wasn’t one of them, and couldn’t share the faith they had in their own destiny. No one in my family had ever gone to university. I didn’t even know that sentence was a cliché at the time, it was just a fact. Sure, I wanted to be a writer one day but I hadn’t a clue how to go about it. My dilemma was this: should I leave school and get a labouring job in Falkirk, as the Lads had, or head off, terrified, into the unknown? Everything in Hallglen was reassuringly familiar, but I could sense that the Lads all hated their jobs and that this would become my inevitable fate. Life for a working-class teenage boy, furthermore, is tinged with the very real possibility of violence, and I’d started to feel Falkirk
pushing
in at me from all sides, sharply.

Seeing as you’ve just finished
Boyracers
, you’ll recognise this situation. For the record, I really was nicknamed Alvin back then (the Lads already had one Allan and didn’t need another).

In 1993 I
just
scraped my way on to an undergraduate degree course in English at Stirling University. It was only twenty miles from Falkirk but an entirely different world. There I was, fully absorbed by the middle classes, whose voices and mores and codes were quite alien to me, with no Plan B and only the fear of going back to Falkirk to spur me on. I figured that, like Steve Guttenburg’s character in
Police Academy
, I’d just stay until they kicked me out.

I loved it. Of course I did. Just as Steve Guttenburg’s character, once he gives it time, loves the police academy. Four years later, to my shock, I’d achieved a First Class Honours degree in English and Education and my self-confidence was burgeoning, all the insecurities of school banished, and before I knew it, I was out into the real world.

For the first half of 1998, when I was twenty-two, I worked as an English teacher at Elgin Academy in the North East of Scotland. The work was enjoyable but the volume of it crippling. Rejection letters for my stories were coming thick and fast, and I soon realised that if I was to remain a teacher, I would never improve as a writer. For this reason, in the second half of the year, I started a PhD thesis back at Stirling University to give my mind a good workout.

My mind, however, turned out not to be the Goliath I’d presumed it to be and working it out, unfortunately, was among the most disheartening experiences of my life. That’s no comment on the
teaching
staff at Stirling Uni, who’d always conveyed excitement, and were thus exciting (the stars in this regard were David Punter, Rory Watson, Glennis Byron, Jackie Tasioulas, Judy Delin, and Angela and Grahame Smith) but there I was, aged twenty-three, facing three long years stuck in Room 101,
1
lost in a thicket of critical theory, surrounded by people
who were all much, much cleverer than me. I was living on next to no money, working in Waterstone’s every Saturday and Sunday to meet the bills, which, of course, kills a weekend life for someone in their early twenties. I could feel my confidence ebb again. I’d decided I didn’t want to be an academic but I was training myself to be nothing else. The rejection letters were even more plentiful now. As Ray Liotta also says in
Goodfellas
, ‘This was the bad time’.

A survival instinct kicked in. In early 1999 I started attending Stirling Writers Group, who met in the Cowane Centre, to see if I could revive my moribund ambitions. The tutor there, the poet Magi Gibson, saw enough potential to start hot-housing me, and within a few months the group had become a well-functioning unit of strong, ambitious writers, feeding off a shared energy and critiquing each other’s work. We improved rapidly. Above us, Scottish Literature was undergoing a renaissance. The Rebel Inc. generation had come of age:
Trainspotting
’s huge success had meant international exposure for a whole host of Scottish writers. The cultural moment was
palpable
and vibrant. In the library of Stirling University, when I was supposed to be researching my PhD, I went to the Scottish Literature section and devoured James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith, Iain Banks, Des Dillon, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan, Jackie Kay, Alan Spence, William McIlvanney, Ron Butlin and A.L. Kennedy. The range of their experiments, the array of very real Scotlands which they presented, the sense of identity, the force of their language, the truth of their politics – all of it converged with a new momentum I’d started to achieve in my own writing. Under Magi’s tutelage I abandoned fantasy and horror altogether to tell stories about the very thing I’d struggled to get away from: my class.
It released something in me. Things gathered speed. I was suddenly shortlisted for competitions, published in magazines, read out on the radio. I was still only twenty-four. Magi took me on tours of the Scottish live literature scene with her – to the Borders, Aberdeenshire, Glasgow. I became her secret weapon, and I started to enjoy the
experience
of performing, of encapturing an audience from a whole other part of the country and playing about with them. My work grew more verbal, stronger, conscious. I was on the move.

All or nothing: it was time to seize my chance. A bored postgrad, I had both the time and the motivation, and was aching again for that freedom and fun I’d felt tearing around Falkirk with my best friends, nothing else to do but talk about bands and chuck film quotes at each other. The point of innocence was disappearing in adulthood. I’d soon be too old to even remember those years with any clarity. Falkirk, a place I’d thought I’d finished with, had decided it had not finished with me. All things needed was a catalyst, a spark, for things to really take flight. That spark was a short story called ‘Boyracers’.

In 2000 Magi and I had started to organise a regular poem and pints night in Stirling called Growwl. It’s worth saying to anyone who laments the absence of a creative scene where they are: make one. We found a venue, the backroom of a bar whose name I can no longer remember, advertised to other writing groups, and were besieged by the initial turnout. Our star reader, the novelist Des Dillon, was someone whose work I very much admired for the way it reflected the energy, and not the deprivation, of working-class life. I wanted to read something that would really impress him. I sat down and wrote a story of perhaps 1,500 words about some of the stuff which Toby, Moonie, Allan and myself had got up to back in the day, gave it the title ‘Boyracers’, and when my time came I stood on a chair and read
the thing aloud with all the belief I could muster. I’ve never forgotten the volume of the reaction. After years of dreaming, it was finally happening, I could sense it:
I was becoming an actual writer
.

Des took the story away and published it in
Cutting Teeth
, a
magazine
he was editing at the time, and both Magi and my then-wife Caroline told me that they suspected there was more material to come, if I just pulled the thread …

And so, buoyed with enough youthful confidence to power a small town, I opened up my memory and
Boyracers
came roaring out with all the force of a debut album by a Northern rock n roll band.

The novel was published by Polygon in September 2001,
coincidentally
the same month my PhD thesis failed. I was twenty-five, the age at which Stephen King had published his first novel,
Carrie
, which pleased me no end.
Boyracers
has never been out of print, a
remarkable
achievement for a release by a first novelist from a Scottish independent publisher. It rode on what was perhaps the last wave of the spirit of Rebel Inc., just before centralised bookselling and the default middle-class setting of British literature made novels about the Scottish working class unfashionable again. That it has reached its tenth anniversary, given these conditions, delights me.

Ten years. Enough for me to come at the book with some objectivity. I was a very young man when I wrote it. I still love its fizziness and charm, but it’s obviously written by someone who had no idea what he was doing. It’s all heart and no shape, all energy and no definition.

So, for this edition, and in order to mesh the story with its imminent sequel,
Pack Men
, I typed the whole thing back out again. I mean, I
retyped
every single sentence
.
2
It seemed like the only logical thing to do in order to understand it again. What occurred was a weird time travel experience, whereby thirty-five-year-old me became twenty-four-
year-old
me being sixteen-year-old me. I liked revisiting these past selves, clothing myself in their naive thoughts, but it was immediately clear that the book had been written and edited too quickly. It had perhaps too much youthful
whoosh
! and
gasp
!, and not enough discipline or craft. Errors of plotting and chronology had slipped through and terrible
decisions
of formatting and punctuation had been made in the name of experimentation. I’m very much in favour of the free play of words on the page, but, as Norman MacCaig once said, ‘The real journey of any writer is towards lucidity.’ For these reasons I have tidied up the prose somewhat in this edition, put it through a car wash. The material itself remains almost exactly the same, but it’s been given a good edit, with a clearer eye than I had then. Think of this as a digitally remastered version, if you like, of that debut album by a Northern rock n roll band.

After all, the world of
Boyracers
is
a digital one. Theirs is, as I’m sure yours was, an attention span battered by MTV, sitcoms, computer games, song lyrics, film quotes and advertising jingles. The story finishes – by coincidence, not by design – the day before 9/11, in Scotland as it was at the start of the new millennium, before the
invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq, before the election of a SNP government in Holyrood, before
Lord of the Rings
and vast superhero franchises, 3D cinema, the financial crash, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the e-reader, George Bush, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the hollowing-out of the public sector (and Scottish football), and the mass
spell cast by the internet. What a huge ten years it has been.
Boyracers
is an artefact from an era when mobile phones, text-messaging and online communication had only
just
come into widespread usage, but in its pages we can see the world speeding up and becoming illusory, less in tangent with real emotion and deep connections between people. The book betrays a sense of trying to hold on to a world that will inevitably flash into the past.

And so it has. The turn of the millennium in Britain was buoyed by an expanding property market, employment, widespread university access, rising living standards, the demise of the Tories (oh, the irony) and Scottish football clubs who could actually compete with the best in Europe. The masters of the universe have since found ways to take it all from us again. Let’s admit it, we fell for their pish. It was a
hallucination
based on financial sector greed, phantom money and insatiable consumerism. It would be impossible to write, for example, a sentence like ‘We are a generation who awoke to find all gods dead, all wars fought’ with a straight face now, given
Boyracers
was published at
virtually
the same moment the planes struck the Twin Towers.

This is why, despite its flaws, I still love this book. It represents good times, that I lived through and created in. It’s not only written by and about a person I’m not any more, but describes a Britain we might not see the likes of again for a while. For sure, it’s going to be a hard winter under modern capitalism, but if there’s any message in
Boyracers
that still comes through, it’s that there’s always a road leading out. We just have to trust ourselves to follow it.

Alan Bissett

March 2011

Thanks again to everyone who was thanked first time around, but especially Thomas Tobias, Victoria Hobbs, Mollie Skehal, Magi Gibson, the members of Stirling Writers Group circa 2000, Caroline Waddell and the late Eileen Gibson.

Thanks for her diligent labour on this edition, and for her insights into the novel then and now, to my partner, Kirstin. You walked these lines with me.

Thanks to Alison Rae, Neville Moir, Jan Rutherford and Vikki O’Reilly at Polygon for their support with this edition.

Heddy Haw