Boyracers

by Alan Bissett

  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.

  We’re the kids

  We’re the kids

  We’re the kids in America

  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.’

  Franman haggling, loving the fact that a car full of girls is following us, as though we’re the Beatles. Brian telling Dolby about neds he’s had to turf out of Smith’s. He suspects Cottsy has been sending boys in to noise him up, and one night we’re going to get the call for back-up. This is Dolby’s worry. He and Brian go back the longest of the four of us. They met in Primary 4, after Dolby let Brian have his Optimus Prime at the weekends. These days, half the fights Brian gets into are because Gentleman Dolby, the people’s friend, will offer to hold the door open for the girlfriend of the wrong guy, or cheerily ask some Barlinnie turk what his favourite Queen song is. It’s like that bit in Casino, when Joe Pesci wades in to defend De Niro

  While I was wondering why the guy was saying what he was saying, Nicky just hit him. No matter how big the other guy is, Nicky’ll take him on.

  and I know Dolby could never have fucked off to university and left Brian, even though, if Brian goes to California, it’ll be the end of the four of us, so if I win the lottery I’ll buy Dolby a big widescreen telly and he can watch Gladiator and the X-Men and Star Trek all day and I’ll get Frannie a seat in the director’s box at Ibrox and and I’ll phone them up from the States, where I’m chilling with Brian and young blonde California girls.

  Frannie snaps closed the phone. The Punto veers away. ‘Fucksake,’ I say, ‘whit’s happenin?’

  He rubs his chin, inspecting me the way a scientist inspects rainwater. ‘I hope ye’ve brought yer shaggin shoes, wee man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cos they wantay meet ye at Callendar Park. Ten minutes.’

  door swings out like a pod cracking open in a sci-fi movie. Dolby steps intrepidly out first, looks at Callander Park as though it’s undiscovered country, holsters his phone. The sky lowering itself onto the ground awkwardly like a fat man going to bed. My heart is making the sound of a rabbit calling for help theywantmetheywantmetheywantme but not the me with hair that looks like a squirrel’s slept in it and a dick that could be used for fishbait. No. They want the me that plays for Rangers. I don’t have hair that plays for Rangers. I certainly don’t have a dick that plays for Rangers.

  Dolby sits on the grass and plucks a flower and lies back and places it over his face. The sun flicks red and yellow paint at the skyline. The winter air. Dolby blows and the flower spins into the air gracefully and he says, ‘I have given a name to my pain–’

  ‘– it is Batman,’ I finish for him and we both cackle, as if this is the funniest joke in the world ever, ‘Good auld Denis Lill.’

  Brian the Mann’s gazing round Cally Park, restless. What’s on that craggy mind of his? The trimmed, tourist-brochure grass? The high flats, where his dad used to stay before he joined the Forces, before he left him on his own in Falkirk, alone except for us? The laughing, colourful mouths of the flowers? Cally is Falkirk’s very own, itty-bitty Central Park, and Brian strides across it as though he’s in the wild west. If he smoked, I’m sure, Martin Scorsese would use him in films. If Martin Scorsese was in Baxter’s Wynd and fancied a pint or the racing results, that is. Brian hurls a five-pence piece at a nearby tree. It hits without leaving a mark.

  Frannie does his his hair in Belinda’s wing mirror, saying, ‘I ask you to kill Superman and you can’t even do that one simple thing?’ before lulling into silence again. There is an unspoken sense of girls about to be on the scene. Dolby picking flowers, Brian gazing into the Sergio Leone distance, Frannie flexing his repertoire until Brian growls, ‘Fuck off wi the impressions, dick.’

  I do my hair in the other mirror, mimicking Frannie’s movements. They seem to work for him. My bovine face peers at me, awkward, as if I’m somehow not who my reflection expected. Sometimes, way across the horizon of a decade or so, I imagine myself as a phoenix, risen: a film star working the room, slipping tenners into the hands of waiters, my movements smooth, immaculate hands reaching out to touch me but

  No mistake, right now I’m the ashes.

  ‘Sure they said Callendar Park?’ I ask Frannie across the roof of the car.

  ‘Sure.’ He wets his fingers and flattens a bit of hair, squinting.

  ‘No Dollar Park?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Or Callendar Square?’

  ‘Stop shitein yersel,’ Brian humphs, reaching into the pocket of his jeans and tossing me a small packet. Drugs? Brian? Drugs! The man who threw two Boag widos out of Dolby’s sister’s seventeenth for taking ekkies and trying to sneak rave onto the stereo? But the word Durex speckles the packet.

  ‘Fuck’s this for?’

  They all look at me sharply. ‘Fuck ye think it’s for?’ Brian laughs. ‘Skimmin across the loch?’

  ‘I’m no gonnay need this.’

  ‘Ridin bare-back?’

  ‘I’m no shaggin any ay them.’

  Brian strides over, puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘Wee man. I ken ye’re no shaggin any ay them. But there is that tiny, million tay one chance that wannay them might fancy yer miniscule tadger.’

  I repeat something they’ve all heard before, tapping the condom into his shirt pocket. ‘Sorry, Brian, I am savin masel.
’

  ‘For who?’

  In my mind she’s a belly-dancer, shimmying up to me in her Falkirk High blazer, a veil and nothing else. One of her breasts peeks out from behind a prefect stripe. ‘Tyra,’ I reply defiantly, ‘I am savin masel for Tyra Mackenzie.’

  Brian covers his face with his hands. ‘Alvin,’ he implores, ‘if a girl asks ye tay shag her it’s considered extremely impolite tay say no.’

  ‘Peer pressure.’

  ‘Alvin, son, you are the only virgin we ken.’

  ‘Nay mingers for me,’ I emote, waving a Shakespearean finger, ‘when this shagger starts it will be with the finest creation on god’s earth.’

  ‘Tyra’s probably gettin a ride at the backay the Martell right now,’ Frannie adds. ‘Brian’s probably shagged her already.’

  ‘I probably have,’ goes Brian.

  ‘Aye,’ laughs Frannie, ‘Although he canny get it up unless he’s surrounded by binbags.’

  ‘Ha,’ goes Brian, ‘listen tay mister While U Wait. Just up against the Corn Flakes boxes, Elaine, ma shift starts in five minutes.’

  I sit down on the grass next to Dolby. He is tinkering with a daisy chain. Someone has turned the thermostat on the day right down without telling the sun, and birds everwhere frantically clipe. We can see our breath. We look out at the swing park, where wanes climb things and throw balls and there is laughter, light as party balloons. All of this is ahead of them. Their mothers scattered across the park, the useless flapping of their coats, the opaque tragedy of their eyes. I want to tell Dolby everything, right now. I want to take my pain in a lump sum and dump it here on the grass, so we can poke it with a stick and humiliate it. Instead I say, ‘Whit about that new Clive Barker book?’

  ‘Aye,’ he replies, ‘shite.’ He shrugs and starts to chew the end of the daisy chain, making it ragged.

  ‘Brian, ye shagged Snaggletooth oot the backay Laurie’s, ye shagged Chewbacca oot the backay Storm.’

  ‘Ya liar, I never went near Chewbacca. You shagged Chewbacca.’

  ‘Right enough,’ muses Dolby, ‘didnay see oor books in WH Smith when I was buyin his.’ We put our hands behind our heads. In the sky, a cloud shaped like an angel glides past in slow-motion. Parts of its wings detach and drift away.

  ‘Chewbacca? Fay Shieldhill?’

  The angel fragments. A mouth forms in its head as it screams at being pulled to pieces. There is vast, vague terror in the sky. I can’t get out of my mind that night I sat in front of the police – one bar of the fire on – and they asked if Mum had anywhere to go, anywhere she might want to run to. The policeman leaning in close, the smell of grown up: ‘Now tell me honestly, son. Yer Dad disnay needtay know. Did yer Dad ever hit yer Mum? Did he? Cos him hittin yer Mum’s whit might’ve made her run away.’

  The sound of Brian and Frannie arguing is almost as calming, reassuring, as the singing of the birds, and I can’t imagine not being with them. They are as intrinsic to life as fresh air, pollen, chlorophyll. My sullen, slow rot. My mind running to stand still. My casual slide into freakishness.

  ‘Should you no be studyin for yer Higher prelims?’ Dolby asks.

  ‘Aye,’ I shrug, ‘but fuck it eh.’

  Dolby does not respond, at least not with the, ‘aye, fuck it, live it up while ye’re young,’ that I’m expecting. He grunts despondently, the angel is blown to bits, its mouth expanding, corrupted by sky, until its face is filled with a single, silent wail.

  ‘Dae ye think Brian’ll really gotay America?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer. He’s glancing up, listening, getting to his feet like Richard Dreyfuss spotting the shark coming at them in Jaws.

  ‘Oh boys,’ he interrupts Brian and Frannie, who’re disputing which of them has slept with the most Catholics. ‘Oh boys. Looks like they’ve come for their feeding.’

  The girls in the front seat of the Punto do not resemble anything from Jaws. Or Star Wars. At all. We watch them like castaways struck dumb by an approaching ship. Frannie starts singing under his breath

  fun

  girls

  wanna have

  fun

  girls

  Slam. Slam. Slam. Brunette. Blonde. Brunette. One of them lands a pack of Smirnoff Ice on the bonnet. Another adjusts her hair. The third draws on her fag, sizing us up like a pretty inmate. The Lads stand.

  ‘Awright,’ says the smoker.

  ‘Awright.’

  ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Hello.’

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘Youse the boyracers then?’

  ‘No,’ Dolby growls, whipping the baseball cap from my head, ‘we are not.’

  Her eyes flick between us, as if selecting a victim, the whole thing like a re-enactment of that cellar scene from Pulp Fiction. I keep waiting for one of the Lads to say something, anything. Brian to ask where their brothers drink. Frannie to do his Ali G impression. Dolby to say, ‘We’re called Trekkers, not Trekkies.’ But they just stare, arms stiff by their sides, like three Gregorys on a planet of girls. ‘Whit wannay yese plays for Rangers?’

  ‘Him,’ they all say, their gazes swinging round to me, and I am thrust forwards, looked up and down, summed up and chewed over with bubblegum.

  ‘He disnay play for Rangers!’ one of them hoots, breaking into the Smirnoff Ice. ‘Ho, son, whit’s yer name?’

  I scramble my mind for the most hunlike name I can think of. ‘Ally,’ I stutter, ‘Ferguson.’

  ‘Ally Ferguson? Wendy, you ever hearday an Ally Ferguson?’

  Wendy steps out from the car. Rangers shirt. ‘Ally Ferguson?’ she muses. ‘Whit position dae ye play?’

  ‘Centre right. Back. Forward.’

  ‘He’s in the reserves,’ Brian adds hurriedly, and doesn’t need to groan for me to know that he’s groaning.

  ‘Aw,’ Wendy smiles, ‘Ally Ferguson? I mind. Did you no come on as a sub against Motherwell last season?’

  ‘Aye, that’s me.’

  ‘Scored two goals?’

  ‘Probably.’

  Wendy nods. ‘Pleased tay meet ye, Super Sub.’

  we are spreading out into the park, the girls clinking Smirnoff Ice and blowing smoke genies, as the water from the loch laps against the bank, as the bare trees spread branches, as the world revolves through space in slow motion and I think

  Girls!

  Halfway round the loch, I drop back. Wendy drops back with me. She offers me a Smirnoff Ice, but I shake my head. ‘I dinnay drink.’ She offers me a fag. ‘I certainly dinnay smoke.’

  ‘Ye don’t drink, ye don’t smoke,’ she tuts. ‘Whit do ye do?’

  She winks.

  Eventually she says, ‘Look at your mates.’ The alcohol has relaxed them from their C3-PO stiffness. Slaggings are batting back and forth. Anecdotes. Nothing seems forced about it. The girls look on, amused, injecting the banter with stories of their own. Sometimes we think we’re the only group of mates in existence, sealed in the world of Belinda, breathing an atmosphere of our own in-jokes, then we meet these girls

  fun

  wanna have fun

  girls

  with their over versions of Dolby, Brian, Frannie, Belinda, their own running arguments, their own favourite films, albums, books, parking places, seats in McDonalds, phone brands, a history we’ve crashed against by accident, and this is how it works, meeting lassies, and it’s easier than I thought it’d be.

  ‘Lassies are just like guys really eh,’ I say to Wendy.

  ‘Except they’re lassies.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I’ve got bigger tits than you.’

  ‘Aye.’ I cough, trying not to look at them. ‘So how did youse four meet?’

  Wendy crosses her arms over her chest. Really suits that Rangers top. I like the way she keeps folding a wee twist of her hair past her ear. ‘Well, me and Lindsey used tay hang about at Graeme High the gether. Caroline knew Lindsey through the karate. Sarah met Lindsey eftir shaggin her boyfriend. They had a fight about it likes
, until baith realised it was the boyfriend that was the dick, ken?’

  ‘Em, aye. Whit a dick.’

  ‘Wan night, for some reason, we aw ended up at the same hen party the gither. So here we are now.’

  ‘Heddy haw.’

  ‘Heddy whit?’

  Frannie laughing up ahead, the sound like bucks fizz over a barbecue at a mate’s house. One of the girls is creasing herself, Dolby is covering his face, pretending to be embarrassed, and Brian has heard it all before. We’ve all heard it all before. But Frannie has this infectious laugh. None of the four of us, I realise, are bad guys. A wave of affection rolls across me and I fade, viewing the scene from a distance, as though I’ve sent someone else out to speak on my behalf, a cooler person than me

  now tell me honestly, son, yer dad doesnay needtay ken

  ‘So when did you join Rangers?’

  ‘Last season.’

  ‘Do ye think Tore Andre Flo is worth £12million?’

  ‘Oh, without question.’

  ‘Gies a drinkay yer Cherry Coke.’ She takes the can and slurps greedily, a single bead trickling from the side of her mouth. She finishes the can. ‘Cheers,’ she gasps, forearm raking across her mouth. ‘Did I catch you lookin at ma tits there?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Just as well.’

  She holds my gaze.

  We’ve reached the other side of the loch, where it’s still, and you could believe for a second that Callendar Park has been plucked out of a holiday brochure. At the other side are the swings, rowing boats, climbing frames, all the places you make for when you’re a bairn. Over here feels like a different realm entirely. Like Eden after the apple was bitten.

  ‘I am Brian Mann and I don’t care,’ Frannie sings, ‘I love the Rangers and I’ve got chest hair.’

  ‘Frannie, you are one Tesco’s-lovin scumbag knob.’

  ‘Hiy. I do not love Tesco’s.’