Boyracers (5 page)

I can do this.

‘To Tyra Mackenzie,’ Dolby toasts, and we each raise our cans – Sprite, Irn-Bru, Cherry Coke – making a metallic clink and a ripple of laughter. Already I envisage us in Smiths, like captains of industry,
puffing cigars and reminiscing about the time when the bold Alvin won the heart of Falkirk’s finest 16 year-old, and Brian will arrest my shoulder with a huge palm and boom, ‘Bloody good show, old chap,’ and then they will

Boot me from the car and drive off.

Oh shit.

I look up and down the street, inhale fumes of money. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, these fumes will waft through Hallglen, and we stand on our tiptoes and sniff and dream and build patios, knock walls through, in imitaton of the gods. Even the grass seems different here. The grass in Hallglen is drunk. Clean windows. Cars smooth and sleek, parked as evenly as dinner-mats. Belinda looks like she’s slept with half the town, the Lads making rude gestures through her fly-encrusted windscreen.

Before me, the house of Tyra Mackenzie.

Open the gate. It doesn’t even squeak. Walk forwards, firm and deliberate, and be very very sexy. The front door. The way she’ll run her hand through her hair. The way she’ll link her arm with mine. Everyone in the school envious (it does taste good) as we kiss like stars touching, my exaltation to the top ranks of Falkirk High, the Lads applauding, hanging on my every description of her lightly bobbing breasts and in my head I’m a smirking Cruiser and the door opens and I get sudden inspiration and sing

The woman’s mouth purses into an odd shape. Ivory-white knuckles clutch the door and she stares. I stutter, shutting down like machinery, and say

and say

‘Um … I’m from the Save the Kids … Trust.’

She smiles, her eyes shiny. Her lips go ooh and she reaches for her purse, scrabbles at some coins. I glance round, desperate for an escape route, refusing to believe that I let Ally McCoist’s old shirt number into the decision-making process. ‘So nice of young men to be involved with charity,’ she’s saying, ‘not like these louts who tear up and down this street blasting that awful music.’ As she looks for change I glance at the car, where the Lads are flicking their tongues at me, Exorcist-style.

‘Indeed,’ I croak, holding out my hand to accept her change, ‘it’s very rewarding.’

The lady’s nodding thoughtfully, but I’m trying to see beyond her into Tyra’s house.

‘I hope to go to Sudesh, I mean Sudan, to um.’

The hallway has a terracotta floor. Plants. I can see the names Duke Ellington and Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker behind framed glass. Her Dad must be a boxing fan.

‘To what?’

‘Sorry?’

The woman is smiling beatifically at me. ‘You’re going to Sudan to what?’

‘To feed the world.’

But it’s not her lightly puzzled reaction to this which makes me stiffen, makes my arse-cheeks clench. ‘Who is it, Mum?’ Tyra calls from the top of the stairs. I reach to accept the offered change, but must’ve done it too fast, cos her hand draws back and she switches, in a second, from middle-class citizen helping out the needy to
midde-class
citizen being ripped off by scum.

‘Sorry, could I just ask for some ID?’

A sick feeling expands in my stomach as Tyra approaches.

‘You see, bogus operators have been known to prey in this stretch.’ The woman laughs patiently/not patiently at all. ‘You do have identification?’

I fumble in my pocket, my eyes sliding up past Tyra’s waist, her neck, to her eyes. ‘Alvin?’

‘Hey, Tyra.’

‘What are you doing here?’ She raises a quizzical eyebrow.

Her mother turns to her. ‘You know this young man?’

Tyra nods. She nods the way she writes, blinks, breathes, walks, as though every movement is the page of a magazine being turned by a breeze. ‘Of course I know him. He’s in my English class.’

The way she says English. Like clear, clean water. The mother looks back at me, faintly grim. I am no longer some passing chancer. My germs are in daily proximity to her daughter. She glares the way Brian would glare at a Celtic fan standing outside Ibrox for no reason. I offer a cute expression that tries to say, ‘lil ole me,’ but I’d be as well chatting up a squaddie with the line, ‘Say, what’s your favourite Narnia book?’

‘You’re collecting for charity?’ Tyra asks, and I can’t look at her without thinking of Timotei shampoo ads.

‘Yes,’ I smile, frozen, ‘for the Save the Kids foundation.’

‘Trust,’ her mother corrects me.

‘Trust,’ I smile. ‘I’m going to Saddam.’

‘Sudan.’

‘Sudan.’

‘That’s good.’

We all nod. My forehead goes up then down. The absence of sudden killer meteorites in Falkirk is a fresh concern to me.

‘I’m still waiting for identification,’ her mother says.

‘Oh, Mum,’ Tyra moans, ‘it’s just Alvin Allison.’ She addresses me. ‘Isn’t it? It’s just you.’

I arrange my face, aiming for Esquire magazine but coming across more like Razzle. The ‘just’ has just done things to me. I am not Alvin Allison, I am ‘just’ Alvin Allison, threatless and mystery-less. My manhood is severed with one quick ‘just’.

‘I can vouch for him, Mum, don’t embarrass me. I think it’s great what you’re doing for charity, Alvin. Not many of the boys at our school have that much heart.’

Oh, if you only knew.

‘Look.’ The mother is regretting her harshness. ‘I am sorry. It’s just that one has to be careful. I’ve seen people casing this property.’

‘Well,’ I say, changing the subject at the speed of light, ‘really must go. You know how it is, Tyra. Lots of disadvantaged babies to feed.’

clamber back into Belinda, which is playing Suede, who can only get played when Brian’s not here cos he thinks they’re poofs, even though, according to Brian, anyone with a lisp or a limp is a poof. Frannie and Dolby are having a sigh-filled chat about Frannie’s parents, their frowns gone once gear is shifted into and Belinda is coaxed towards a nearby chinky where we put Tyra’s mother’s money towards sweet and sour pork with fried rice and make contented eating sounds, pausing to stare through rainy windows. Frannie’s parents.

What I tell the Lads about Tyra isn’t what happened. That’s why they’re quietly eating instead of driving me to a tattooist to have me
branded with the word Pussy. I tell them I asked Tyra to come to the pictures with me. ‘Which film?’ Dolby asks.

‘Meet the Parents.’

I tell them that she seemed flattered to be asked, but that it was a big decision for her and that she was going to have to think about it. Frannie puts his hand on my shoulder, nods his pride, and says, ‘Alvin, you are almost a Lad.’

Wish now that I had asked her. But at least it gets them off my case, I will not be called a poof, and in a few days I’ll probably believe that I performed some kind of feat of derring-do. What actually happened was that after Tyra’s mother left us to it I asked her if she’d ever read any of Stephen King’s short stories. She replied that she hadn’t had that particular pleasure. Did she want to borrow my copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at all? No. Okay. Well. Our reporter made his excuses and left.

I once thought I’d do the son-ly thing and ask my Dad’s advice about women.

‘Dinnay worry,’ he’d said, ‘ye’ve plenty time tay play the field. I didnay meet yer Mum til I was about, whit, 17.’

I’m 16.

The sun is going down and tomorrow it will come up.

I study the Lads, wondering how my life/opinions/hair will have changed by the time I reach 19. Dolby’s phone beeps, the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He answers it, talks to someone called Darren about whirlpool stuff. The cape of night begins smothering the town. Dolby shuts his phone, restlessly engages the engine, pulls away
from the lay-by where my Sudan/Sudesh/Saddam trip has been devoured and we debate which members of Queen we would be if were Queen. Frannie is Freddie Mercury, Brian is Roger Taylor, Dolby is Brian May, I’m the one that nobody remembers and

That night I dream I’m in The Blair Witch Project.

My vision is dark, shaky, low-budget. Me, Dolby, Fran, Brian Mann, camped in the Callendar Woods with bottles of Becks for rations. Friannie’s wielding his camera, going, ‘Pout, baby, pout’, and it’s an outrageous laugh. But then there’s this moaning sound, and the wind rises, and the leaves start blinking across the forest floor. The lads point to the space behind my shoulder, and Frannie drops the camera. It whirs in the still, damp leaves. I turn and

‘Dad!’ I roar, turning over in bed and sealing the Sex Pistols from my ears. ‘Keep it doon, for fucksakes!’

Sleep deprivation. Didn’t they use that to torture witches? The Blair Witch? What? My dream lingers then fades, pulsing into the distance. From downstairs, I hear what sounds like crying, but could be the whine of the back door as it’s opened. If it’s Dad, I’m not going to him, not after his last performance after watching a Trisha special, ‘When Did You See Them Last?’ Pull open my eyes. Stuff accumulated on my bedside drawers like a trash mountain or an art project. Darth Vader alarm clock. A shark’s tooth in a wee plastic cube. Change from the fags I bought for Dad last night, which he smoked nervously all the way through, of all things, The Runaway Bride. A copy of Stephen King’s Misery, its spine cracked and veined. The poems of W.B. Yeats. Things fall apart, the centre does not
hold, yeah whatever. A biography of Billy Connolly that Brian keeps demanding back, even though I borrowed it from Frannie. The sound of crying from downstairs again and Scotland’s brillllliant the Big Yin grins.

on the bus to school I realise I haven’t done my English essay again, though there are reasons for this: mainly Dolby paying for fish suppers all round, which we sucked up greedily in Belinda, parked round the back of the Howgate Centre. Derek has sent me another postcard, his handwriting shaky, which I am reading, listening to the soundtrack to E.T. (really good and not as slushy as it sounds in the film) and a Third Year at the back throws a ball of paper which bounces off my head and I turn and give my best Brian Mann glare, but the motley bunch of gremlins just laugh, all teeth and acne, so I move to the front of the top deck where Falkirk feels flattened beneath my power.

We pass the Royal Infirmary, where I was born. The bus passes this place every day and every day I’m reminded of my own
unremarkable
position in the world. Nurses come and go, unaware that I was carried there 16 years ago, and surely – perhaps? possibly? – I am worth more than this?

I must be.

Does Dolby know the release date for the first Lord of the Rings film, since this will alleviate our disappointment that James Cameron never did get round to making Spider-Man, a disappointment which gets heavier

and heavier

and heavier

Kids on the bus are screaming, stamping, rioting, laquered gently by the music from E.T. Second Year boys throw punches to the sound of Eliot’s flying bike. Falkirk passes by on its way to work, its pavements grey, its buildings sunless, but its air filled for the moment with strings
rising towards the sky, and I reckon the world could be this easy to put right. Can’t we just plug it into the soundtrack of happy movies and the homeless will find homes, gunmen will pause on triggers, warring spouses will hold hands and go to the window to see the moon eclipsed by the silhouette of a bike?

the squeak of magic-marker down the window of the bus (Keebo is GAY!!!!), joints being lit on the back seat, and I am surrounded by bubbles in a lava pool. They suppurate, burst, without saying anything, and I want to rise out of my own ordinariness, do
something
in this world, be alive, vibrant, real, but I remember how huge that atlas looked, the one that Dad placed in front of me when I was wee, the size of all those countries with fantastical names compared to our totesy tiny one, and I am Magneto in the X-Men! And I can make the bus levitate and freak everyone out! Girls’ mouths twist out of pretty shape, boys as frightened as mice in a storm, all of Falkirk trembling before me as I bombard Connor Livingstone with paper clips and Tyra pleads for me to stop, and I show mercy, which she thinks is totally cool, cos I don’t have to do anything of the sort. We’ll have coffee back at her place. To show her I’m still just a man.

bus passess a woman in a bus shelter. The rain drizzles down the plastic. From here she looks a bit like Mum, but also a bit like Sissy Spacek in Carrie

approaching Mrs Gibson’s desk, the walk of shame. Presently, no excuses are forming for why my essay isn’t in, since I’d hoped she
wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t give us the speech about how important our Higher results are, how crucial they’ll be for university admission, etc. I don’t belong at university, surrounded by fifteen hundred Connor Livingstones. Brian’s voice growls from my memory like a rip-cord, what he and Dolby did instead of homework: ‘dog it and go fuckin fishin.’

The rest of the class files out. Essays are left on the corner of the table. Tyra places hers down, slings her pink bag onto her shoulder, makes quick eye-contact with me before Bono starts singing All I Want Is You. I plan to follow her, explain my appearance at her door last night, but Mrs Gibson’s voice fixes me in place. ‘Mr Allison, where is your essay?’

‘Miss?’

She is leafing through the manuscripts, secretary cool. ‘I don’t see your homework here. Have you handed it in?’

‘Um …’ I drift to the pile and pretend to help her look for it, making Mutley noises, but when I see the essay on top – word-
processed
and headed © Connor J Livingston – I step back, disassociating myself from the whole system. ‘Naw, miss, I havenay done it.’