Boyracers (9 page)

and hands him a cartoon of a guy dressed as a bat. Frannie continually replays

this scene, mesmerised, freezing on the frame of the sarcastic colleague. ‘It is him,’ he gestures. ‘Look.’

‘Who!’ goes Brian.

‘Ye ken Rodney fay Only Fools and Horses?’

‘That’s no him.’

‘Obviously. Ye ken his girlfriend Cassandra?’

‘That’s no her either.’

‘Ye ken Cassandra’s Dad? That’s the guy that plays him.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘It is, look.’

‘Frannie, aye,’ goes Brian, ‘Tim Burton’s puttin the gither the cast
ay Batman and he’s like, “Hey, any of you guys seen Only Fools and Horses? Y’know the guy who plays Cassandra’s Dad?”’

‘Ya bastards, I’ll prove it.’

Frannie skips to the end credits, his face scrunched with
determination
. He traces his finger down the cast list until, right at the bottom, he finds

‘How much?’ he demands, palm open.

‘Frannie, come ontay–’

‘How much?’

Brian responds firmly. His eyes narrow on an irresistible bet. ‘I’ll bet ye the bottle ay Macallan in that cabinet, there is nay way Cassadra’s Dad ootay Only Fools and Horses is in Batman.’

‘Bottle ay Macallan?’ Frannie’s eyebrows raise as he is challenged to a duel. ‘Nice whisky that.’ Straight away he’s cracking open an Only Fools and Horses video, forwarding Rodney and Del Boy and Uncle Albert and Cassandra and Cassandra’s Dad, who jerk about like androids, until the credits roll up and he stands poised at the telly

then he’s whooping and leaping about the room, punching his fist in the air. I have never seen him so happy, which is some feat, since he’s not exactly known for his sullen approach to life, and me, Brian and Dolby just look at each other, shaking our heads. ‘That has made ma year,’ Frannie goes, plucking the Macallan from Brian’s fist. ‘Denis Lill. That has made ma year.’

He pours the whisky. I decline a glass, content to watch rolling hills and heather and ancient claymores strike victory round their mouths. Frannie closes his eyes, blissful.

he’s got a new phone for Christmas which seems to keep wanting to play us Never Had a Dream Come True by S Club 7 and the first time he gets a text on it we’re in the middle of the Howgate centre on Boxing Day, just outside Argos (which has two frankly gorgeous lawnmowers in the window) and Dolby’s jacket beeps. We pause our argument over which one is the sexiest – ‘surely the Flymo’ – Dolby taking the phone from his pocket, eyes wide, as though about to discover the location of secret spy plans. Heavenly white tiles surround us, reflecting light which shafts like knives from the glass ceiling, and Boxing Day shoppers are roaming, dazed as lab rats, the four of us crowded round this miniscule machine to read the words

‘Wow.’

‘Looks cool.’

We watch this message glow, each impish pixel another small step for technology, one giant leap in the lives of four piss-poor Playstation players, and grannies, who probably marvelled at the invention of the tin-opener, stare incomprehendingly and

later, with Frannie, on the way to watch the Rangers game in Smith’s

later, with Brian, selecting a late Christmas present for his gran

later, with Dolby, browsing for comics in Forbidden Planet in Glasgow

until it gets to the stage that, as we’re taking Belinda back out to greet the new year, they’re actually sending texts from the front seat to the back. I see Brian smirk like a kid with a whoopee cushion, punching secretively at his phone

to which Frannie replies, chuckling, and before long Belinda is a roving arena of techno warriors, sponsored by Siemens, O2, Nokia, and Brian is moaning, ‘put a fuckin smile on yer face, Alvin.’ He fingers the new tattoo on his bicep, the Stars and Stripes, which beams his Californian dream. If any of us should’ve been born yank it’s Brian, Cruiser-loving barman bastard that he is. He’ll fit right in over there. ‘Just havin a wee laugh eh.’

‘Hilarious,’ I brood. Frannie, beside himself with glee, shows me the text he’s typing, which rhymes Brian Mann with frying pan.

‘Get yersel a mobile and join in then, ya miserable–’

‘Take that fuckin baseball cap aff!’ Dolby interrupts him, furious. ‘Ye’ll gie us some bad name, you.’

‘Aye, whatever.’

‘I’ll whatever ye. I’m in the hairdressers hearin them gon on about these “boyracers wi their baseball caps” that are menacin Falkirk. I dinnay want lumped in wi losers like that, aw cosay your fuckin heid-gear.’

‘Nothin tay dae wi the speed ye’re daein?’

‘Shut it, runt.’

Frannie presses send, giggling mischievously. Brian feels the message invade his phone, grins, and I don’t want to spoil their fun or nothing but, ‘c’mon, is this no just a case ay wee boys and their wee toys?’

The question goes unanswered. Grim heads shake, despairing of this sole refuser of their redwhiteandblue utopia.

Dodging down into Princes Street, the cinema showing Another Massive Film (the poster has an explosion on it), Rosie’s devouring an endless line of teens, Pinocchios waiting to be made real, the Lads quietly resenting the fact that, cos of me, they’re not in the queue, wishing they could scoot me to the pier in Big, that Tom Hanks film, to make me older and be back in time for last entry.

in the window of a bridal shop for a brief second think I see

‘Mum,’ Frannie yabbers into his phone, ‘tape Big Train for me. Whit? Naw, it’s a sketch show, Mum, it’s no about trains.’

The sky is the colour of lemonade and middle-aged women, the kind we like best, are about. ‘A flash ay bra strap on aulder woman is the sexiest thing in the world,’ Brian muses wistfully, as though he’s a Yorkshireman petting his whippet and praising fond mornings on the moors. The soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula is on the stereo, a track called Vampire Hunters Prelude, which builds with a slow menace totally ruined by Frannie yelping Big Train quotes at his mum. I wish Brian will one day invite us to his ranch in California, cold beers in the fridge and cowboy boots hardening in the noonday sun. I wish it wasn’t so long until the next Clive Barker novel comes out. Dolby ejects Dracula and replaces it with Radiohead, starts plaintively
crooning
to Exit Music (For a Film). Thom Yorke’s sorrow crackles and fizzes with technology as we slide from the town centre down, down, up, across, like video game characters, towards Carronshore suburbia, 
while Frannie’s phone chatter twists and rises into the desolate space above Falkirk.

there’s too much. there’s too much

‘Mobile phones are essential purchases, Alvin.’ Brian turns to me, still simmering at my ‘boys with toys’ comment, the bare-faced cheek of it.

‘Naw, Mum,’ Frannie’s yabbering, ‘just cos Black Books is about a bookshop still doesnay mean Big Train’s about a train.’

‘For emergencies and that,’ says Brian.

I take a deep breath and uncage Mrs Costa’s Modern Studies lesson from that morning, which takes even me by surprise and goes
something
like

‘Fuckin Radiohead,’ Brian tuts, ejecting OK Computer. ‘Just about fuckin greetin here.’ He replaces it with the Best Eighties Album in the World … Ever, starts humming/droning along with Kim Wilde. Songs from before I was born and phones chirping like bio-mechanical birds and texts sprinting towards screens everywhere and Dolby veering us onto a long cool album-cover stretch of Scotland as

the past, present and future slide, merge, exist simultaneously in the furry dice ambience of this car. The sound of the year commencing,
measured in the increments of phone technology, while in the time between U2 releases we grow older

just too much

A mother with two kids walks past. ‘Fwoar,’ goes Brian, ‘the
experience
on that yin.’

‘Ken,’ Dolby says, the only one who was paying attention to my (I personally thought) brave anti-texting stance, ‘Alvin’s got a point.’

‘On tappay his heid.’

‘By next summer,’ he muses holding up his phone with an
opera-critic
frown, ‘when we’re drivin about, this thing’s gonnay be totally auld-fashioned.’

‘Fucksakes,’ Brian moans, ‘ye’re takin the runt’s side? Ye’ll be listenin tay fuckin Suede next.’

accelerating so fast it’s like erasing Scotland from the

smoothing Belinda in, out, streams of traffic, never dropping below seventy, the winter sun a web of light on the windscreen. We overtake a fellow shitty-in-the-city Belinda, which flashes its lights and we flash ours back and the driver, a young guy like us, grins. A connection.

‘Just,’ Dolby explains, ‘I wis readin an article in the Guardia– I mean, the Sun, and it was sayin that in a few years we’ll have phones, like, embedded in oor skulls–’

‘Coooool.’

‘– and microchips in oor eyes that can make us see in the dark–’

‘That no whit light bulbs are for?’

‘– and tellys that ken the things ye watch and record them for ye.’

‘Ma Mum does that.’

‘Your Mum does everythin,’ Brian quips filthily.

‘Shut it, skank.’

‘I mean,’ Dolby continues, ‘the world’s goin by so fast we can hardly
see it.’ He keeps checking the speedometer, Keanu-refusing to drop below seventy. ‘It’s only a few years ago that fax machines and the CGI special-effects in Jurassic Park were a big deal. Think about this: oor grandchildren will look at us like we’re a fuckin joke.’

The laughter stops.

It’s as though the Vatican have released to him the date the world will end, and he cannot tell anyone, and he has to encode it for us like this. The road becomes a conveyor belt, rolling a million souls towards the void, and Dolby is dumb with the fear of being obselete by next summer. His hands on the wheel: curved, tight, hard. A sort of look in his eyes that reminds me of the sky as night and day merge and things are cold and sluggish.

The four of us here, now, present, correct, as real and vital as the first flash of a phone screen as it’s switched on. But one day we’ll be De Niro at the end of Raging Bull: fat, fucked, perched on the end of the bar in Smith’s, mumbling Brando’s ‘I coulda been a contender’ speech, and as the implications of this start to roll like a boulder through our minds, none of us catch each other’s eyes, in case we see ourselves old and cough-ridden.

We avert our gazes to the window, where magic is thinned into a straight line by the endless course of tyres on tarmac, rushing
monotonously
. Another U2 album is already an illusion on the horizon. Billowing air falls behind us then becomes still again.

I think about Dad’s face when Mum disappeared, how small he looked, in his chair in the corner of the living room, everything he’d done with his life converging in that instant, lost in that instant, but then

Brian farts

‘Aw, you are stinkin.’

and we piss ourselves laughing.

white Fiat Punto, the word GIRLZ printed on the windscreen, draws up alongside us. Dolby beeps the horn once, twice. Frannie is up at the window like a dog when the door goes. A parallel female universe of our own car, four girls giggling behind glass. At the next set of traffic lights, he rolls down his window, gestures for them to do the same. Their Brian complies. Frannie hands her a card with his mobile number on it, and as Dolby pulls away and their car drops back, we see the girls laughing, passing the card round. ‘Now you, runt,’ Brian points out, ‘should be able tay pull at least wannay them babes.’

‘Or?’

‘Or cut yer dick aff and stick it behind yer ear.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Fuck
you
.’

‘Fuck her in the front seat,’ Frannie murmurs, then mouths at them: You talkin to me? You talkin to me?

His phone rings. He answers quickly, ‘Chris Tarrant here from Who Wants to be a Millionaire.’ The Punto behind us fills with mirth. Frannie’s nodding, ‘Aye? Aye? Aye?’ then splutters, ‘They wantay talk tay Alvin.’

‘Heddy haw,’ goes Brian.

‘Whit should I um …’ I stutter, Frannie’s phone landing in my lap like a grenade and I stare at it, terrified, until Dolby explodes.

‘Fuckin talk tay her then, ya dick!’

‘Whit dae I say?’

‘I dunno, anythin. Tell her ye play for Rangers.’

I pick up the phone cautiously, place it to my ear as though it’s
about to bite me (which, since I’ve seen Nightmare on Elm Street, I know it could). ‘Hello?’ I try to control the rise and fall of my chest.

‘Turn around,’ the voice purrs.

Bobbing behind us, girls exist. They are all older than me – about the same age as the Lads – and stunning. The girl in the front seat opens her kisser and we talk for a wee bit, as Frannie and Brian watch me take this Champions League penalty kick. This is what happens when one of us gets a click: he is himself, at that moment, the essence of Lad. I’m so swept away by this thought that when she asks where I work I say, ‘I play for Rangers.’

When next the Punto skids back into view, all four of them are
staring
at me, wide-eyed. ‘Rangers?’ she says. ‘Are ye no a wee bit young?’

My eyes glint at her. ‘If ye’re good enough, ye’re auld enough.’

She scrunches her mouth gamely, drawing nearer to planet Impressed but still not sure she wants to land. ‘Put yer mate back on.’