“Cass,” says Scotty, “if we were the only guys there, the lassies would dance by themselves.” Martin laughs, wishing it was a joke.
“The wans that think they’re dead grown-up wouldnae look at ye, and the rest wouldnae gie ye a dance because they’re too feart ay the slaggin.”
This is all true, but Martin doesn’t want to agree out loud, as though doing so would break some spell that might yet prove it wrong. It would be great to dance with one of the girls, and surely it isn’t totally out of the question. Not a pure ride like Samantha Gerrity or one of Jojo’s trendy in-crowd, obviously, but there had to be somebody, surely? It didn’t have to mean anything, didn’t have to say they were ‘going with each other’ or imply that he was asking to get off with her. Just a few dances, maybe a decent conversation, a shared smile, some kind of validation that the opposite sex didn’t see him as a complete nonentity.
“Aye, you’re right. Well, we can dance ourselves. Fuck it.”
“Music’ll be shite, though,” says Scotty. “It’ll be all the Human League and that New Romantic synth pish.”
Martin eyes the records and tapes on Scot’s shelf. Plus fa change, he thinks. He remembers parties at St Lizzie’s, Primary Five onwards, everybody bringing their own music, their names etched on the labels and sleeves for claiming them back. There’d usually be about ten copies of the same Abba albums, and in the singles pile a dozen Boney M seven-inches, five of Do Yfl Think I’m Sexy and at least three of Father Abraham and the Smurfs. Scotty and Martin always brought a stack of punk and New Wave stuff that the fucking teachers would never play.
“Not forgetting Saint David,” Martin adds pointedly.
“Who?” asks Cass.
“Bowie,” Scot explains with a smile. “As worshipped by the more sophisticated element in our year.”
“Oh, aye.” Cass nods, catching on. “Tico and Tempo an all that lot. I heard them boastin aboot how they were gettin a kerry-oot the night for later. Headin back tae Tempo’s hoose. I think Jojo Milligan and that lot are goin as well.”
“Aye, I can just see it,” says Scotty. “Aboot a dozen ay them in Coco’s livin room, passin roon wan bottle ay Woodpecker, tryin to convince themselves they’re pished.”
Martin smiles as he hears Scotty call him Coco. Scotty has not once allowed the name Tempo’ or Temps’ to cross his lips, even—no, especially—when addressing the man himself.
“Actually, they don’t need the kerry-oot noo,” Martin suggests. “If you’ve heard them, the real work is done. Cause let’s face it, the important thing to that shower is talkin aboot it rather than drinkin it.”
“Too right,” Cass agrees.
“Aye, big Coco,” Scotty says, shaking his head. “Never been the same since he woke up one mornin an found a hair on his baws.”
§
“The guy had his own private Big Brother house going on here,” Karen says. “Four of them, in fact.”
They’re standing in the bedroom area of Lodge One, surveying their haul of hardware. So far they’ve found a camera behind a wall-mounted two-way mirror facing the double bed, one hidden in the smoke-detector on the ceiling, one peeking neatly through a hole in a black plastic plant pot (complete with plant) and one built into the casing of a (functional) radio⁄CD player; in addition to two more mirror-disguised lenses raggled into the walls in the bathroom, trained on the Jacuzzi and the shower. None of it took much finding; but then the greatest camouflage disguising the cameras was that nobody previously had any cause to look. Nobody other than Eleanor, that is. Martin wonders how much she merely suspected and how much she had found out for sure. What was certain was that if anybody was going to stumble upon this stuff, it would be the cleaner.
“These aren’t cheap webcams or pinhole spy gadgets, either,” Tom observes. “Because they’re built into the walls, or housed in fairly sizeable and camouflaged locations, he hasn’t needed to economise on size or quality. No grainy images or low frame-rates. As good as camcorder footage, easily.”
“And that’s what the broadband is for?” Karen asks. “So he could watch it all from the comfort of his home?”
“Image quality would be too high for streaming video,” Martin says. “My guess is it was being written to the removable hard drive, but he could stream a lo-fi version to his house and effectively direct the recording from there: switch feeds depending on where the action was or what view he preferred.”
“Dirty bastard,” Karen says. “That’s absolutely revolting. God, I feel ill. I feel like I need a shower, except I don’t think I’m gaunny feel comfortable in my shower from now on, either. The thought of him sitting there at his monitor…There’s a thought, though: would it record only if he was controlling?”
“There’s an infrared spot on the one we found behind the bedroom mirror,” Tom tells her. “Motion detector. It could well be set to record from that camera by default whenever it’s activated, so he didn’t miss any action while he was out.”
“So there’s a pretty good chance the murders themselves were recorded,” Karen suggests. “And whoever took the hard drive knew that.”
“The shed was still locked when we first came here after the bodies were found,” Tom says. “So it’s possible it could have been removed before the killings, but you never know.”
“Noodsy and Robbie would have had ample access to Colin’s keys,” she says.
“But they may not have been the only ones with a reason to want that hard drive,” Martin points out. “I’ve a feeling Pete McGeechy might have had a passing interest in its contents, too.”
The Politics of Dancing
For ‘disco’, read dining hall with the curtains drawn, though that and some flashing lights were all it took to transform the place. It’s amazing how the same space can have such a different atmosphere, Karen thinks: From the babbling chaos of lunchtime, to the enforced solemnity of a Mass, to the charged excitement of tonight’s gathering. Still smells of chips under all of the above circumstances, but at least tonight it is cut with the scents of over-applied make-up, hair-spray, perfume and after-shave.
And there is excitement; the atmosphere is charged. It was pretty much mandatory all week to predict how shite the disco was going to be, and for maximum effect you really had to suggest how unlikely it was that you would even bother going, but she knew fine none of them would miss it. For one thing, despite a lot of big talk from certain quarters about carry-cuts and house parties, when you’re fourteen or fifteen there isn’t much competition on the average Braeside Friday night social calendar. However, the greatest compulsion to attend was never going to be about music or dancing. It’s about status. It’s about pecking order. It’s about sorting the big girls from the wee lassies, the in from the out. That’s why the atmosphere is charged, as opposed to simply excited. This isn’t a party, for God’s sake. Tonight, this dining hall is the board for a very big game. She’d love to say that those who don’t know they are playing it are likely to have the best time, but she knows this is wrong for two reasons.
One: it is those who come out ahead tonight who will have the best time.
And two: deep down, everybody knows they’re playing it, even those who are aware they are destined to finish bottom. It is a game in which there are no triumphs, only lesser increments of defeat; where the rules are made (and frequently altered) by those already at the top, and never revealed to those beneath.
She had waited outside the building for Ali before going in together. It was more than safety in numbers or mere solidarity, though both of those were undeniable factors. It was about consolidation, maximising the impact of the declaration they were about to make. (There was also the unworthy but inescapable slight fear that the other might back down on their planned dress, but that was moot now.) They both had long coats on, but what was visible above the neck was enough to reassure each other that it was all systems go. They proceeded to the cloakroom to shed their camouflage, then walked downstairs to the dining
hall hand-in-hand, giggling, nervous, excited. And now here they are, just inside the door, taking in the room while the room collectively takes in them.
Karen spots Helen standing near the serving hatch, opening a can of Im-Bru. Karen waves, and Helen just stares back for a confused moment before realising at whom she’s staring. She smiles and trots across. They’d told Helen what they were planning to wear, but Karen understands the double-take. When you’re used to seeing someone in their uniform, it takes a wee minute to register them looking different. Helen was easier to clock because she’s wearing the same jeans and blouse as she did when they all went to the pictures last month. In fact, she wore them to the previous disco, too, and to Michelle’s birthday party: they’re her going-out clothes. Ali has a slightly wider and marginally cooler selection—though she’s eschewing it tonight—simply because she’s had a more recent growth spurt, thus necessitating her mum authorising (and indeed supervising, hence marginally cooler) some new purchases. Helen is still barely taller than she was in First Year, and her fashion options are further handicapped by the fact that when she does grow out of things, they tend to be replaced by whatever no longer fits her big sister Nicola. Karen shared the same paucity of social wardrobe herself until last weekend’s shopping spree, but it wasn’t exactly a big-budget blow-out, and the shops concerned were a lot further along Argyle Street than where the likes of Jojo and her pals get their gear.
Helen came along with them too, and offered lots of encouragement as they unearthed their dark gems amid the secondhand jumble, but Ali and Karen couldn’t persuade her to buy anything herself. Karen suspected this was principally because Helen didn’t have much more than the train fare home in her pocket, things being very tight in their house since her dad was made redundant. However, the explanation she offered in rejecting various suggested items, indeed in rejecting the look the other two were attempting to achieve, was that ‘it just wouldn’t be me’. And Karen loved her for that. She was right. It wouldn’t have been her, and the dining hall right then was wall-to-wall with people trying to be something they were not because they were too scared to be themselves.
You should have seen them all at the same disco this time last year. There was some inexplicable fad for burgundy: burgundy skirts, burgundy trousers, burgundy shirts, burgundy cardigans, burgundy tank tops (!), burgundy jumpers. Girls and boys, dozens of them, all head-to-toe in multiple layers of the same colour. It was kind of an out-of-school uniform.
This year there is more diversity among the in-crowd, but there is a shared denominator about their attire, and that is size. It’s always big to be in, but these days it’s very in to be big. Skirts are long and baggy, their material thick and heavy. Blouses billow, nothing clings. Big shoes are in, too; big, mind, not high, the clumpier the better. Hair is big too, shaggy perms spilling down past padded shoulders. They all talk about Bowie and the New Romantics, but their template appears to be the lassie from the Thompson Twins.
There’s a whole host of them on the dance floor, territorially occupying a wide space near the DJ. Jojo, Caroline, Margaret-Anne, Linda, Angela, all that lot. Tony Hughes, Colin Temple and Matthew Cannon are dancing in the same group. It’s hard to tell whether any of them are dancing specifically in a pair, but there’s a showy confidence about their intermingling. They’re really going for it, too, because Let’s Dance is playing; not merely a song but a sacrament. And if something comes on that they disapprove of, they’ll make just as enthusiastic a display of vacating the dance floor, en masse.
The dance floor is standing up to it well, Karen thinks, looking at Jojo and Margaret-Anne’s less-than-delicate footwork. It’s been pretty fortuitous for them that they have sprouted and become the in-crowd at a time when this look is in. Not so long ago, the trendy get-up was ra-ra skirts above the knee and wee, tight cut-off tops that showed your belly-button. Those long blouses hide a multitude of deep-fried sins. Jojo is nothing like as plump since she stretched in height, but she’s still not the daintiest of creatures, and it’s hard to imagine her ruling the roost among the trendy crowd if she was squeezing herself into a boob-tube and miniskirt.
But Karen remembers she’s got the horse before the cart. The trendy crowd make the rules in this game. They are the ones who decide what is cool, whether it be clothes, music or people. So they’re not wearing big clothes because big clothes are in. Big clothes are in because they are wearing them.
§
Martin, Scot and Cass are having a rerr terr, dancing together, getting off on that energy rush you get from good music played really loud. Martin hasn’t quite broken sweat but he wants to, wants to give it laldy until he has to sit down, breathless and laughing. Truth be told, you couldn’t really call it dancing, as much of the time they’re just birling and bouncing in a circle with their arms round one another’s shoulders. Have to make the most of it while the music’s good, before the DJ puts on more Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran and the mature-and-sophisticated mob come strutting their stuff again. It’s funny watching them bail out, actually, the demonstrable, grimacing distaste with which they evacuate the dance floor before anybody can make the mistake of thinking they could possibly like certain songs. Their fire-drill haste when it’s anything by Madness is particularly hilarious, the Nutty Boys and their frivolity being the absolute antithesis of the dispassionate image they want to project, as proven by Madness being the one band that gets the likes of Noodsy, Robbie, GG and the JJs pinballing around the dance floor.
He and Scot are getting a particular kick from the sheer unexpected delight of the DJ owning, never mind playing, the song that’s on just now. It’s The Cutter, by Echo and the Bunnymen, and their singing along with the lyrics has, he is sure, been approvingly noted by Karen Gillespie, Ali Taylor and Helen Dunn. Perhaps even more surprisingly, it was Helen who went to the DJ and asked for it; certainly it was the first song to come on after Martin spotted her leaning over the turntables to talk to him. He feels slightly ashamed that when he saw her doing so, he was expecting something like Kajagoogoo or Wham!, and angry with himself because it’s precisely the sort of wrong assumption he knows people are likely to make of him.
He’s having a good time, but there’s something gnawing away to prevent his total contentment, something he partly wishes he could just forget about. It’s the girls. They’re everywhere, and they’re all dressed up, hair styled, wearing makeup, wearing perfume. He knows he should just accept it, like Scot says, that guys like him have got no chance, and just concentrate on having fun. They’re having fun, aren’t they? Great fun, yeah. The music, the energy, the singing. Nearly bounced their way through a window when Fields of Fire came on! But he can’t help thinking…I mean, that was a smile—wasn’t it?—from Ali, when she saw that they knew the Echo song. That was definitely a smile, an acknowledgement of something they had in common. See, Scotty? They aren’t completely invisible. They aren’t treated with total disdain. There are some decent lassies out there. Not everybody is like Jojo and that lot, folk who once had the cheek to call him a snob.
Keep the heid, though. There was no point in asking Ali or Karen to dance with him. For one thing, they were both about six inches taller than Martin, which just looked and felt wrong. Even if they had the decency to say yes, it would still be mutually embarrassing: they’d look silly and he’d look like he was being patronised. And more pertinently, he’d never have the nerve, because the pair of them look a class above tonight; not just above him, but above everybody, as far as he’s concerned. They’re wearing ankle-length, long-sleeved black dresses that look like costumes from some Gothic vampire movie. Ali’s is velvet with black frilly cuffs, and Karen’s is made from two layers of material—like a doily tablecloth draped over shiny silk—that reminds him of Auntie Mhairi’s living-room curtains. They’ve both got their hair sticking up like Sylvester the Cat after jamming his fingers in the mains, and they have heavy black make-up around their eyes.
Martin noticed the looks they were g
etting when they made their entrance, the traded smirks and pointed fingers, but thinks jealousy played a part. And if the others weren’t jealous, they ought to have been. The pair of them were about the sexiest thing he had ever seen in the flesh, like two magnificent visitors from a more interesting world whom it was a rare and fleeting treasure to behold. Scotty had made a gag about them—“She’s alive. Alive!”—but that was because Scotty made a gag about everything. It wasn’t that he didn’t think they looked amazing; though, to be frank, Martin didn’t care. If Auld Nick had walked in right then and offered the exchange of getting off with either of them, then the cloven-hoofed bastard would have left very shortly afterwards, one soul to the good.
No, Karen and Ali were only marginally less of a non-starter than bloody Jojo or Samantha Gerrity. But what about Helen? There was definitely eye-contact a couple of times during that last song. Helen is a lot like him, when he thinks about it: condemned as a ‘brainy wan’, overlooked for being behind in the physical-development stakes, and just too bloody friendly and affable to be anything but scorned by the in-crowd. He’d always thought she was quite pretty, but she doesn’t give the impression she sees herself as hot stuff like some he could mention. Certainly not a clothes horse. In fact, if he is being strictly honest, her clothes are arguably even less cool than his. And, okay, he knows he is hardly the pick of what is on offer tonight, but nor is he the worst. Helen Dunih. It’s a thought, isn’t it? He used to walk home with her when he was wee, and they got on fine then, didn’t they? And wouldn’t it be great? All those things he wanted: a girl to dance with, talk to, share a smile. They already had one out of three.
Or is he kidding himself, and cruising for the humiliation of another knock-back that would just ruin the rest of what is otherwise shaping up to be a fun night? Aye, Scotty is probably right. Stop torturing yourself, pal. Accept it.
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