by Alan Bissett
She’s the shape of a cigarette
emptiness breathed, as barren as the Somme. Everybody finishing their cola and limeade and orange skoosh, slyly smirking at the opposition, wary of big Ronnie Melville standing like an implacable god, overlooking from a high window, eyes picking out sinners the way a hawk hunts mice. But then the bell rang and
She’s the shake of a tambourine
a hundred bottles whistled into the air, spinning, aerobatic, leaving defiant grins behind. The beauty of the sight, like birds in flight, an aerial display – poised, hanging, buoyed on the momentum from teenage muscles – that same kinetic force I feel in the pit of my gut as Belinda transports us to where we can be heroes, just for one day.
I’m in fifth year. I’ve been searching for Private Ryan in this war for that long, stopped really caring about finding him now, stopped caring about punny-ekkies just for swinging on my chair, brand name clothes I can’t afford to wear, being chair in the Debating Society, editor of the school yearbook, or even listening to the hash-heads yak stonedly about Bob Marley, OK Computer, Trainspotting, and
She’s the colour of a magazine
stopped caring about quadratic equations and French past-participles and whoever Scotland’s First Minister is and the only thing I can find any sort of enthusiasm for is disappearing from the babble into an eternal dream where
She’s in fashion
she moves through the rarified air, hair bright as sunlight. She takes her seat beneath the Midsummer Night’s Dream poster. Words in delicate script above her head, Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace. Her hand tanned and smooth. She leans. Her bag: Prada. Her throat, speckled and lightly undulating as she swallows. Her phone: Nokia. It plays the love song from Titanic. I imagine her asleep, moaning softly, her hand folded back on her forehead, eyelashes like thin pencil marks. Mrs Gibson is reading to us from The Great Gastby. Outside, a bee bats against the illusion of the glass, and Tyra’s eyes flick over at mine, then away. A pen works lazily between her fingers. I write, and in some way it is a communion: They. Cannot. Touch. Her.
me, Frannie, Dolby and Brian in Rosie’s, laughing and ordering girls off a menu. Dolby’s finger runs down the list and he muses, ‘Hmm, I’ll have the redhead. Lightly bronzed and easy on the feminism,’ and Brian goes, ‘Excellent choice,’ and the waiter turns to me, for some reason angry, and barks
What foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams!
Mrs Gibson skelps me on the head with her book and I jerk awake. The whole class is laughing, but Mrs Gibson’s alright about it, so I mumble something about cough medicine, Miss, um, makes you drowsy. She lets me off, like a guardian angel/fairy godmother/Good Witch of the North. I glance over at Tyra, blushing. Mrs Gibson starts talking about the theme of ‘Desire and the American Dream’ in The Great Gatsby, somehow seeming to know fine that I was out til one in the morning, cruising car parks talking about Schwarzenegger films with the Lads and I don’t care what Brian says, Predator is a much better movie than Terminator.
Tyra’s eyes swim with amusement. Me and her are two of the oldest in our year: my birthday’s in March, hers is in April, which I think means mentally we’re both more mature. She’ll be one of the first in our year to pass her driving test, get a Mazda from her parents, start driving it to school with the window down and Sixties songs playing. I used to sit beside her in Computing Studies and she would have to lend me a pen every week, which usually had her initials on it. Maybe she’s attracted to me because I’m obviously, y’know, a bit of rough.
Mrs Gibson scratches something on the board about symbolism, roses meaning blood/love. Connor Livingstone, meanwhile, is staring at me, imperious and cool. Wealth oozes from him. He does not fall asleep in class. He does not cruise round car parks. He doesn’t have a single spot. Since his first year at Falkirk High School he’s been getting private tuition three nights a week, his future assured in the paid-millions-to-move-millions-around industry. His neck suggests rugby and when he speaks, his accent glides all the way down from Windsor Road. Probably reading Tolstoy while I was watching E.T. Still, when Mrs Gibson asks a question and Connor’s hand shoots up like an excited toddler’s, it’s me she turns to.
‘Now that you’re awake, Mr Allison, how would you summarise Gatsby’s character?’
I pause, aware of the eyes of Connor, Tyra, the whole class. I pat my pen against my mouth, look catalogue-model Connor up and down and say, ‘He’s fake. He’s all surface.’
Mrs Gibson cocks her head. The class waits for her reaction, pens poised. Then she scrawls in huge letters on the board THE SURFACE IS FANTASY and everyone writes it down. Even Tyra! She floats some respect my way, as cladding falls in pieces from my heart and I scribble
How I wish
How I wish you were here
then draw the cover of Dark Side of the Moon on my jotter. I am a thin ray of light, refracted through Tyra. Mrs Gibson starts prowling between desks, the novel open in one hand, the other trailing like a silk scarf through the room, and whenever she reads from Gatsby she bristles with magic. She should be carrying a wand. Derek confessed once that she was the only reason he ever went to English.
The heat of the classroom. Tyra’s reflection in the window. Mrs Gibson’s mouth making the words
We were content to let their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness – but there was Jordan beside me
Belinda, the Lads
who, unlike Daisy, was too wise to ever carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge
the places we might go, the girls we might meet, the patter
her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulders and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring presence of her hand,
hope Dolby’s bought the new Radiohead album
and so we drove onwards
Brian owes me a fiver
through the cooling twilight
might buy a chinky
towards
the sky, fast, lit like a huge dragonfly, the road out of Falkirk before us and Radio 1 doing Ibiza, Sara Cox addressing the glorious San Antonio sun setting over the sea (which would be ruined, for me, by some pixie-like presenter sticking a microphone in my face to ask if I was ‘avin it laaaaaaaahge’ but there you go) and each time she shouts the word ‘Abeefa!’ ravers go apeshit in the background, and there’s this joke that Frannie’s telling us:
‘A Rangers fan dies and goes to heaven, right, and the archangel Gabriel is pointin out aw the Ibrox legends. Scot Symon, Davie Cooper, Willie Waddell, Ally McCoist. Wait a minute, the guy goes, Coisty’s no deid! Naw, says Gabriel. That’s God. He just thinks he’s Ally McCoist.’
Seems to me the joke says as much about the teller, with Frannie boy giving it his best/worst Super Ally charm tonight. There’s one god here. He’s in the mood, and not just for dancing, and while I try to tell Dolby about falling asleep in class, Mrs Gibson skelping me awake, Connor Livingstone sniggering at me, and all about Tyra’s chest, again, Frannie keeps leaning out of the window and whistling at girls and blowing them kisses. ‘Hey, hen! D’ye think I look like Han Solo? Dae ye? Whit? Aye, same back!’
Brian is on a shift at Smith’s. Our chances of finding any lassies are limited without him. The Franster is trying far too hard to compensate for the Mann’s absence, hoping to prove to disinterested Bainsford scrubbers that tonight he’s a star, and sure enough he soon gives up and starts singing, for no reason, Sweet Caroline to every girl he sees, at the top of his voice, til one of them – perhaps called Caroline – waves, making Frannie yell, ‘Heddy haw!’ and Dolby beam with shame and laugh and screech into the tarmac as the lights turn
Red.
Men stumbling from the Big Bar. The most imaginative pub name in Scotland. It has a big bar. The old guys croak and groan, crossing in front of us. A line of brown tweed drapes our vision for a while. The three of us watch and are
appalled. There was one night when Dolby, Brian and Frannie found all their dads in Smiths at the same time. They were sitting there at the bar, by chance cos they don’t really know each other that well, anyway, the Lads joined them, and they discussed the football, music, the telly, all the shite we talk, except sitting there before us like that, they told me later, they had a vision of their future. The horror of it. They walked out of the pub as though they’d just been given six weeks to live by the doctor. I bet Falkirk never seemed so dead and wasted and dustbin lid as it did that day.
Derek in London. The Vegas-like vista from his window. The beautiful, intelligent Cosmo models in every lift, in every restaurant, while We. Are parked. Outside the Big Bar.
Frannie turns to me. His eyes are clear and hard. He jabs a finger at the pensioners. ‘I swear that’ll never be me. Shoot me if that’s ever me.’
Dolby’s fingers make a gun shape and he shoots him, like Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs.
Amber light. Blockbuster video on our right hand side. Tom Hanks grinning away (I’ve been told I look like him) (and the wee swot from the Breakfast Club) becomes elongated as – green light – Dolby starts to gather speed and unfold away from the old guys who yell at the noise from our getaway across central Scotland, making Frannie shout, ‘Fuckchoo man!’ like Al Pacino in Scarface/Carlito’s Way as we hit the open road, a snake attacking a rat, fangs glinting, the old guys trailing behind us like grey skin cos We. Are. The. Fucking. Future.
‘Runt,’ Frannie says, turning to me, ‘there’s a night in Smith’s comin up. You gonnay start getting pished wi the Lads soon?’
I’m well aware that I still have no idea at all what it must be like being drunk, or having sex – or being drunk and having sex – the booze-soaked fumbles which everyone at school seems so icky about by Monday. ‘Ye dinnay look at the mantelpiece when ye’re stokin the fire,’ is Frannie’s fat-girl escape clause. I’m in absolutely no hurry, but Frannie, for some reason, won’t let it lie, as though my virginity somehow emasculates him. I imagine the night in Smith’s: me strapped to a seat, as super-lager is poured down my throat, before being made to sing Hello Hello, We are the Billy Boys, like in some grotesque Clockwork Orange experiment.
mum stumbling across a road in a pissy Scottish town somewhere. Paisley, Penicuik, Perth
‘Nup,’ I tell Frannie, ‘I will not be gettin pished wi the Lads.’
‘No even Bacardi Breezers?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Toddlers can sink Bacardi Breezers, Alvin,’ Frannie sighs. ‘Dolby, tell him, he listens tay you. Although fuck knows how, cos ye talk shite.’
Dolby grimaces as though being told a favourite son is gay – which I’m not – and I resent his tone a bit when he says, ‘Are ye sayin ye’ll never drink?’
‘Never,’ I insist.
‘Never?’
‘Never!’
‘Ye can never say never.’
‘Never never never! There, I said it three times.’
‘Why?’
No. I’m not going to tell them about Mum. I mean, they’re aware, but they don’t know anything. But one day I might tell Dolby about the sound of that first glug of vodka, the slurredly maternal words, the day she went missing, and I came home from school to find
But I’m not telling Brian or Frannie. They’d just say, ‘Get a grip and get on wi yer life,’ the undercurrent being exactly what Frannie tells me now: ‘Alvin, you truly are a poof.’
‘Whatever, man.’
Belinda rolls on. The world rolls under her. I’m not a poof. I just don’t shag. I don’t see any immediate reason. Still seems like something to me elephants should do, not people, so I just pick up the copy of FHM in the back seat, which lies next to Autotrader (Dolby has ringed a Renault Megane), flick through moodily, scan the interview with the actress Denise Richards posing naked with a serpent beneath the words Eden Better Than The Real Thing and the Lads start pissing themselves at a vision of me wandering the pub, gassed on shandy, beerily asking girls what their favourite books are, but I don’t care, so instead Dolby tries to bring me back in by talking about the new Clive Barker novel as Belinda floats across a
rise
into Laurieston, and Frannie has already covered his face with the Rangers News and Dolby thinks the book is (but I know it isn’t) a sequel to Weaveworld.
‘How did the boy Barker write Weaveworld?’ Dolby gasps. ‘Imagine havin brought somethin like that intay the world. Imagine bein like Jakey Rowlin, or the guys that did the Matrix.’
‘I totally agree,’ I say, totally agreeing, even although Dolby pronounced it ma-trix rather than may-trix. ‘Why dae anythin unless it’s a masterpiece? Why live if ye dinnay wantay change the world wi yer thoughts?’
‘If ye’re gonnay record an album, make it Dark Side of the Moon.’
‘If ye’re gonnay write a book, write Weaveworld.’
‘If ye’re gonnay talk shite,’ says Frannie, ‘it should be the finest quality shite. Fuck are yese on aboot?’
‘Listen,’ I say, suddenly passionate, ‘we should dae somethin. Us. We should make a film … or form a band … or drive roon America … or gotay university.’
‘University?’ coughs Frannie. ‘Fuck that.’
Our future is emblazoned across the sky. Weakness is not permitted, pain is discarded like litter at the roadside, as we speed forth speed forth speed forth and multiply, kings of our own world, and nobody is listening to me.
Oh.
‘Has anyone seen the size ay Brian’s nipples?’ goes Frannie.
‘I have,’ says Dolby. ‘Huge.’
‘Like plates!’
They are very much the nipples of a pregnant woman, and don’t go at all with the highly Mannly look, and soon we’re singing a verse of Born To Run like cats injected with steroids by a student who missed the class on injection procedure and so doubled the dose, and as Frannie opens the sunroof to belt out the chorus, Dolby asks me, ‘The name Uriel. Whit d’ye thinkay it?’
‘Eh?’ I say. ‘As in the archangel? Out of Weaveworld?’
Dolby has a thing about archangels. He’s not religious. He just has a thing about archangels. Frannie has a thing about Rangers, Brian has a thing about Clint Eastwood, Dolby has a thing about archangels. His bedroom’s a weird sight, I tell you: Playboy bunnies, Pulp Fiction, South Park, and a huge print of Gabriel bearing the words Let There Be Light. Dolby was furious when Frannie drew a speech bubble on it that said, ‘Naw that’s God. He just likes tay pretend he’s Ally McCoist.’
‘As in the archangel out of Weaveworld.’
‘I think Raphael’s a cooler name.’
‘And aw the other Ninja Turtles,’ tuts Frannie, who has given up trying to fiddle with the sunroof. Angels, alternate worlds, things that go bump in the night: not Frannie’s scene. His idea of Fantasy fiction would be a bed, a line of Tesco’s checkout girls, and a Rangers Greats DVD playing in the corner, the crowd roaring his every move.
‘Uriel,’ Dolby raptures, trying out the name. ‘Uriel.’
‘Sounds like a fuckin washin-powder,’ Frannie grunts.
‘Cos,’ Dolby says, lowering the music volume, ‘I’m thinkin ay changin ma name. By deed poll likes.’
Silence in the car. Blur singing
Come on come on come on
Get through it
and there’s a slight bump as Belinda flattens the corpse of a cat. Frannie say, ‘Ye’re changin yer name tay Uriel?’
‘Forget it.’
‘Or Persil? Or Daz?’ The corners of Frannie’s mouth rise.
‘I kent you widnay understand, ya dull fuck,’ Dolby broods. ‘I just happen tay like it.’
‘Uriel,’ he sniggers. ‘Or whit about Muriel? Or Urinal?’ and I can see him in the queue for Rosie’s already: ‘Alright ladies, have ye met ma mate Urinal. Ach don’t mind him, he’s always pished.’
This isn’t as unexpected to me as it is to Frannie. We’ll be browsing the Fantasy section of a bo
okshop, when Dolby will turn and say, ‘D’ye no think that if ye had red eyes the women would totally love it?’ or be paying for petrol in some rural backwater and he’ll whisper, ‘These places often have strong werewolf legends,’ and look about, actually wanting something to spring from the bushes to bite and transform him, and it’s a lot to do with why I like him, to be honest.
Who doesn’t have that wish?
mum and dad screaming at each other. Derek ushering me upstairs to watch Spider-Man cartoons. Dad’s voice. Did ye drink it? That’s aw I wantay ken. Did ye fuckin drink it? The Manthattan skyline, the web-slinging, the air soaring
‘Aye awright, Frannie,’ Dolby’s muttering, his skin starting to hiss, before turning to me. ‘Anyway, Alvin, this Connor Livinstone bastard. Whit’s happenin wi him?’
I tell them about Connor’s club of rich acolytes, his smirk, how he claims to have tried charlie (‘Charlie who?’), his working mother (Strathclyde University), his working father (Chartered Accountant), his entirely, as it happens, working fucking family. Frannie pauses to consider this, before going all Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs. ‘Whatchoo wanna do,’ he says, ‘is break that sonofabitch in two.’
‘Seriously,’ I say, ‘what am I gonnay do?’
‘Seriously?’ says Dolby.
‘Aye.’
The car screeches to a halt outside Tyra Mackenzie’s house. Her door has frosted glass panels. Marigolds, tulips, roses. The number 9 in brass.
‘Ally McCoist’s old shirt number,’ Frannie breathes, ‘it’s a sign.’
Dad met Mum at a punk venue. I still can’t get used to the idea of a punk venue having ever existed in Falkirk. The way Dad tells it, the motorways of Scotland were packed with safety-pinned youths trying desperately to get to Falkirk to see the Drunk Fuckpigs or something. He once told me and Derek the story, out of the blue, on a beach in Irvine or Girvan or somewhere: how he saw her for the first time, wearing her New York Dolls t-shirt. I mean, boys, no even the Pistols or the Clash? The New York Dolls! He sighed. Classy. The waves crashed against the sea in doomed battalions. A child’s name was dissolved by the tide. It was getting cold. Me and Derek glancing at each other. There wis this ither guy getting ready tay talktay her, and he could see me thinkin the same thing, so the two ay us went for her at the same time. Some skinheid battered intay the poor fella, so I reached her first. He beamed proudly. It sounded like something out of Back to the Future to me. Just think, boys, he said, and then came the chilling part. If it wisnay for that youse might no be here.