by Alan Bissett
I nod again and smile sort of weakly, and wonder if I should say something like, ‘and a fine burd she is too.’
From behind me I hear, ‘I’ve won the bet, man, pey up,’ and, ‘Like fuck ye won the bet. Ye let Dolby take yer third shot, which means ye didnay beat me on yer ain,’ and, ‘But Dolby didnay hit anythin, ya cheatin bas.’
I cannot hear, ‘Look! Alvin’s in trouble! We must intervene!’
Cottsy gives me the once-over and I actually shiver. His last appearance in Round the Courts was for an attack at the bowling-alley in Stirling. With an actual bowling-ball. ‘Cos she says you tried tay feel her up, ya wee bastard.’
The franniest reply would be, ‘Aye, I wis measurin her for a spare tyre on ma jeep.’ A retort which would be very brian mann would be a smack to his ape-like face. But I have no frannerian or mannesque qualities, and so the response is, ‘Is that right?’
‘Ye’re a cunty-bawed wee snivellin knob.’
The steel in Cottsy’s voice and the threat taking off its jacket in his eyes and the way he’s positioning himself. Inwardly, I throw my hand over my mouth and scream. Outwardly, I just keep saying, ‘Is that right?’
Ice threading through my veins, visions of Dad and Derek and the Lads weeping over my grave and swearing a pact that Alvin’s death must be avenged, and so I keep saying, ‘Is that right? Is that right? Is that right?’ until he grabs me and roars, ‘Aye it is fuckin right!’ and when next I open my eyes I see
Brian and Cottsy in a whirlwind of fists
a host of Camelon neds leaping barriers, reaching into pockets
Frannie gasping
the tracksuited vampire screaming, ‘You’ll get faaakin stabbed!’ a fist heading straight for my face and
in the car afterwards we’re totally fleeing, Frannie on the phone, raving to some unseen pal, the streetlight sliding up towards the top of the windscreen, and Dolby’s hands are on the wheel as he laughs, glances in the rear-view mirror at Brian, who’s as bloody as the cover of American Psycho, but grinning wildly. ‘Christ we got hammered,’ Dolby sniggers, and Brian stares at the streets, lights. ‘It’s no so bad,’ he murmurs. He sounds almost wistful, as if inhaling the scent from a window-box in Kensington. He licks blood from his upper lip and an image flashes back of him and Cottsy locked in warfare, like Gandalf and the Balrog, a storm erupting around them. The tyres screech as we turn corners, waving at girls as Dolby plays the Jurassic Park soundtrack to calm us and on the windscreen Falkirk geometries turn, sharpen. Dinosaurs clothed in orchestral music, Rangers shirts made bloody, our guardian angels crowding the car, pleading, ‘For godsakes don’t do this again,’ and Lady Macbeth Brian keeps turning his hands, fascinated by them, how red they are. ‘It’s really no so bad,’ he whispers to the passing night.
on the way to the hospital we stop and talk to some girls. They are dolled-up and hunting aimlessly for a party. Everyone, it seems, is hunting aimlessly for a party. One of them leans into the window and whistles at the state of Brian. ‘Jesus christ, whit happened tay you?’
‘Paintin,’ he mutters, still delirious with adrenaline.
The least damaged of the four of us (me) arranges to meet the girls after we finish at the infirmary, but they won’t show, and we’re not really bothered, so instead we take hold of the road like vikings, singing Eye of the Tiger, as the fight becomes fabricated into mythical status, retold with ever-more incredible details. Brian emerges with Cottsy, two of his mates and a security guard trying to wrestle his heaving form, and we convinve ourselves that the girls were attracted to our masculine glamour, even though we fought like water-balloons, but it’s only when we start singing
I love rock n roll
so put another dime in the jukebox baby
that I realise this is one of the best nights of my life.
‘Thing is,’ says Frannie, ‘how the fuck did it aw start?’
But nobody knows, and I’m not going to say anything, and in Belinda we zap through Falkirk like a laser-beam, listening to Guns n Roses and Tubular Bells, the dimly-lit streets reeling and shifting with ballet-dancer grace to the sound of LA metal and the theme from The Exorcist and images appear and pop like soap-bubbles, as Frannie and Dolby argue about whether or not B&Q is a better shop than Texas unti Brian kicks sand on the fire, describing the recent Rangers win in a voice that excludes all others, but planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do as Dolby’s Adidas-clad foot stabs Belinda’s accelerator and a rumble shudders up from her bonnet and Falkirk swoops behind us, the Blockbuster window screaming and the smiles of Denzel Washington, Madonna, Kate Winslet are like fly-posters whipped from walls by our passing and that feeling hits the four of us as Guns n Roses sing take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty and Frannie yelps, ‘Heddy haw!’ and it doesn’t get any better than this, life as one fast rush of Top of the Pops, shops, the beep of Dolby’s phone as he searches for a map of somewhere, anywhere, we can go and the cells of my body are alive, singing, sharp as blades of grass
fifth gear
as Brian goes, ‘the Cruiser’s best movie?’ and titles bat about the car A Few Good Men Jerry Maguire Cocktail Born on the Fourth of July The Colour of Money Interview with the Vampire but nobody says Top Gun til I say, ‘nobody said Top Gun,’ and Frannie starts to tell us about every single girl in Tesco’s he ever dreamed about shaggi
The pauses are fleeting.
Life lived at breathless jet pace, but then you get older.
The rests are more frequent.
Longer.
The wallpaper becomes bearable.
Until you come back from the fridge.
Sit down in front of the TV.
Realise your day is one long continuous pause.
The world sounds like the hiss of TV interference.
The air is exhausted, breathed too often.
You’ve either forgotten how to move, or you can’t be bothered, so you just stay there, hunting for your life down the back of the sofa, not sure when you saw it last.
One time I found a photo of my parents up the loft. Sometime after Mum left/before Derek left. What was I looking for? Old Spider-Man annuals? Doesn’t matter. The torch sweeping the ghost-crowded air. That thick pile smell, like breaking into an Egyptian tomb. Dust passing into my lungs. Teddy bears and an old video recorder and cookery books and battery-less cars and carless batteries and sealed shoe-boxes and a veteran, one-eyed Action Man.
amazing how one small shoebox can hold so much history, can be grave-robbed with so little fuss
Me in a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles t-shirt, grinning at the spectacle of a Scottish summer. Mum holding Derek, a squealing piglet in her arms. What is she wearing! Dad watching me crawl across a sheepskin rug which is still in our living room to this day. But they didn’t/couldn’t/I wouldn’t let them seem real, those people, trapped in the flash of the past. They had far too much hope in their faces for me to admit them into this cut-and-thrust present. They had to have – surely? please? – become extinct somewhere between then and now, with their crawling babies and butterfly smiles and what-is-she-wearing summer days dissolved to dust, floating like tiny astronauts in the loft, ground control to Major Tom.
It was a lost time.
It taught me something, that photograph. It made memory seem useless and sentimental, a thing which evolution has failed to breed from us. Then I found a picture of Mum and Dad before we were born and, jesus, when Dad lists the roll-call of bands he saw, somehow … I dunno … I always see him then the way he is now, unshaven, in his slippers, nodding appreciatively along to the Jam, while punk erupts around him. But there he was, caught in the stark blink of the camera, with a sneer, a ripped t-shirt and
mum
She looks a bit like Debbie Harry, eyes piercing out of the picture like blue daggers, danger and glamour flicked with her middle finger. The next year they had Derek, four years later they had me, and somewhere along the way Mum lost her mi
nd and stumbled into the fog to find it, and I sprang
down from the loft
padded into a simmering living-room, Derek swearing to Dad he was going, he was sick of this house, he’d go as far as London if he had to, Dad growing roots into that armchair of his, staring at his rebellious son. His frown hung heavy at each corner, laden with toast crumbs, and he groaned like a coffin closing. Derek made some last resort, stabbed the TV off with the same spite that had spat from Dad’s own teenage face in the photo. He whirled his jacket onto his shoulders and stamped towards the front door, where a car filled with booze and boys waited to spring him out of there. Door slammed.
I sat down. Dad scratched his chin. Alvin, he said eventually, as if someone had had to wind a key on his back for him to do it.
Aye?
Put the telly back on, son, wid ye?
I trekked the icy wastes of the room, and just as I bent to touch the button of the television, Dad’s slump was reflected in the blank face of the screen, then there was a quick crackle of electricity and
the cover for the new U2 album looms like the mothership at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as me and Frannie rush to the window of Virgin, pressing our faces against it, toddler-amazed, and everyone in Falkirk High Street stares, concerned, like we’re a couple of esaped Jack Nicholsons and someone should really call Nurse Ratched, but they don’t understand. The world is about to be put right! All hatred, famine, war, sorrow, eradicated in one interstellar burst!
All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
‘Ye ken whit this means?’ Frannie grins.
‘Whit?’
‘There’s a new U2 album oot.’
‘So there is!’
An Asian man in the High Street strolls despondently with a sandwich-board that says LOOKING FOR ANSWERS? but we’re too excited to pay him attention. We nod at each other, satisfied, workers just completed construction of the Forth Bridge, the sweat and the grime soaking out from our blue collars, God smiling down at our Protestant work ethic and delivering this boon, this glinting jewel on a velvet cushion. The amount of living we have compressed into these days before the new U2 album, the way time has been stretched by desire. Last night, Saving Private Ryan seemed to last for about ten hours, and all the way through, instead of feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself for not dying in a horrible war, I could only picture me and Fran with big headphones clamped to our ears, chilling to the new U2 album like superstar DJs and
‘Fucksakes,’ Brian sighed, shaking his head at the telly. His own dad was in the army, Brian barely saw him, and now they don’t talk. This is why he has the house to himself usually, with all its lonely family-less space. Onscreen, a soldier hunted for his missing arm on the grey beach, a wall of rain on the horizon sweeping closer. The soft fall of pain. Someone shot through the skull and
Me and Frannie pogoing with 40,000 nutters to Pride (In the Name of Love), Frannie ignoring the Irish tricolour flags, Dolby’s there! He’s pretending that he doesn’t think Bono’s a knob and has even learned the words to everything on Achtung Baby and
‘Aw them lives lost.’ Brian’s eyes became misty. He wiped at them manfully, dignified, and I wondered when the last time he spoke to his dad was. Bodies littering the beach, the surf a light crimson colour, lapping like a stray dog at a scrap of bare meat and
Soon Bono calls me up onstage during With or Without You for a slow dance and I’m cuddled into him and even though he’s been performing for two hours he’s not sweaty and
‘If I was a religious man I’d say a prayer for them boys,’ said Brian, sort of talking to himself, distant, humble and
We slide towards the derelict car-park like sharks.
Across the horizon, lights in a row mean parents with children, watching telly, maybe Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The industrial estate in Middlefield has concrete walls spidery with lichen, vacant windows. Idlewild are singing Actually It’s Darkness on Radio 1, but Dolby cuts them off as we turn the corner, making Belinda a vacuum, making the noise from the car-park bubble and spit to life. Laughter, young and male, honed on garage forecourts. Motors revving like dogs on leashes. Music, dance mostly, but bursts here and there of Shania Twayne from a pink Fiat Punto, Coldplay, Limp Bizkit. My blood drums along. Brian going, ‘So my Uncle Tam oot in California says I can join him any time I like. Just needtay get ma visa. California boys, eh?’
‘California girls!’ Frannie nyuk-nyuks.
Light sluicing from the cars up one side. Silver metalwork with a rainbow flip. A girl answering her phone, her silhouette knife-thin against the headlights. A tower of Reebok checks his texts. Phones ringing everywhere, a seizure of bleeping, drug deals spiralling into the air above us.
As we cruise up the line, Brian points at the boys, ‘Fiat Uno … Ford Fiesta … Golf …’
As we cruise up the line, Frannie points at the girls, ‘Rancor Monster … Snaggletooth … Hammerhead …’
Two guys place loose change on the roof of a Vauxhall Corsa. The bass throbs and the coins dance, a miniature rave. ‘The guy’s name wis Shiny,’ Dolby’s muttering, as we smooth past a gang of girls. They are lionesses spotting a wildlife photographer. ‘Met him on a chatroom last night.’
‘Shiny?’ Frannie says. ‘Sortay fuckin name’s that?’
‘Sortay fuckin name’s Frannie?’
Chatroom, I’m thinking. Internet, I’m thinking. First killings by internet cult, I’m thinking.
Tyra Mackenzie was wearing a salmon-pink blouse today with a silver chain, her skin lightly freckled like eggshell.
There’s a tap at the window. Some dude gestures for us to roll it down. He casts an eye over our dashboard – for woofer speakers? strobe lights? – and snorts to see it bare. ‘You Shiny?’ Dolby asks him, guarded.
When he smiles his front teeth jut out like a rodent’s. ‘Why?’ he yips. ‘Whit d’ye want?’
‘Just telt tay ask for Shiny.’
His teeth nibble at his bottom lip. ‘Aw, you the chatroom boy? Uriel?’ Frannie glances at me, smirking. ‘Nay bother, pal.’ Our host breaks into a grin. ‘I’m Shiny. Just makin sure ye’re no the pigs, ken?’
‘Of course,’ Dolby manages nervously, ‘em … whaur do we go then?’
Shiny’s smile is bringing on nightmares. It seems to eat into the sides of his face. He’s dressed head to toe in Adidas, his hair slicked back as though he’s just climbed out from a toilet. He catches my eye, sees my discomfort, and his grin burrows further into his cheeks. Then he’s rubbing his hands. ‘Got yer readies there, gents?’
We fish in our pockets for a couple of quid, Brian grumbling like an old colonel, which we hand to Dolby, which he hands to Shiny, which Shiny pockets in one of those bags that hang at your belly, the kind used by those guys at the waltzers who shout, ‘scream if you wanna go faster!’
‘Just drive up there, mate. Watch the races if ye want. Wait yer turn for the burnout.’
Dolby nods.
‘Burnout?’ says Frannie, as we are coralled to the head of the car-park, past – I don’t believe it – a van selling Mr Whippy ice-cream. ‘Fuck’s a burnout?’
‘Just think it sounds gid,’ Dolby mumbles, turning the wheel smoothly, treating Belinda like she’s a girl he wants to keep sweet, as though their relationship hangs in the balance. We park behind a purple Mazda, two neds dropping bottles and chart hits from the window, elbows (Nike) leaning nonchalantly. There we wait, listening to Primal Scream, not talking, watching the cars purr in and out, creating a secret language with their engines, windows rolled down, banter and fags lit, a sudden laugh like a firework, someone boasting, not caring who hears, ‘I’ve written aff three motors and a mountain bike,’ as a girl with a clipboard – neat hair, like a secretary – asks if we want to put our names down for a race.
‘Um,’ I say, ‘I’ve no brought ma trainers.’
‘Shut up,’ she tuts savagely.
‘It’s awright, hen,’ Dolby says, ‘we’ll just watch.’
The Lads glare at me, mortified.
after a while, in which Frannie bores us with another Tesco’s story, motors start gathering in the middle of the car-park and the air tightens. There are whistles and catcalls. Expectation. ‘Shiny was tellin me the things they get uptay,’ Dolby’s saying, ‘like recreatin the Grand Prix course every year round Falkirk.’
The secretary girl is holding her hand up.
‘Maistly, they meet up in places like this and–’
The crowd clears. She picks up a flag, holds it aloft, stretching her arm so high her back becomes a drawn bow.
‘– race.’
Two cars appear in a burst, tyres screeching. They jostle, neck and neck, fumes billowing, everyone cheering. They accelerate towards a wall at the far end of the car-park, but the crowd converging behind them block our view. Squealing breaks. We crane our necks.
Light confusion settles to the ground. Girlfriends’ anxious hands flutter at their throats.
Two figures step out from the cars. Applause. Arms wave in the headlights like a strobe show. Friends grab the victor, shaking his hand, patting his back, telling him he’s mad, mad, he’s a mad bastard, but he doesn’t seem quite there for a second. He smiles vaguely, then takes a long unbroken gulp from a can of Miller, throwing back his head, beer pissing from his lips, and something animal is roared at the black sky.
the burnout goes like this: a gang of people stand in front of a car with their hands on the bonnet. The driver pulls the handbrake and starts revving up the engine, gradually increasing pressure on the accelerator. When it hits the floor he drops the clutch, and the wheels spin madly on the spot. Then he releases the handbrake and the crowd scatters like a shoal of fish and everyone laughs. Up to you to get out of the way in time.
Three of these break up the races. One car sacrifices its clutch. The second roars forwards like a tiger, neds slapping the bonnet as it is freed. The third car revs too long and the engine fails, a genie of smoke hissing from it. All the other cars honk horns and flash lights and we watch. The dangerous allure of it. The way girls drift towards the drivers and hang at their sides like ornaments. Low-grade electricity buzzes between us. ‘This is the shout,’ Brian says, charged, ready, and then we’re leaping out of the car to join the crowd, wringing each other’s shoulders, yelping like children and it’s