by Alan Bissett
calls the doctor. I feel tiny and huge in the corner of the room, watching him, watching the nation start to yawn and stretch on television. A Royal Variety performance. A bomb going off somewhere in Ireland. Brad Pitt. Jennifer Aniston. My teeth chitter like ice cubes in a drink. I am fucked. Exhausted. It’s over, I repeat to myself. It’s all over. I’m dying. Dad’s eyebrows furrow, the phone gripped in his palm, his mouth not moving in time with the words, ‘No, he doesn’t take drugs. There is paracetamol in the house, but … well, he’s been under a lot of stress recently with his exams, and there’s been some family trouble,’ and I start singing, badly, aware of how badly I’m singing God Bless Hookey Street, the end-credits theme from Only Fools and Horses, and Dad glances at me, repeats his urgency to the doctor. He starts to get me dressed and I try to stop myself laughing, hopping into the legs of my jeans, my chest cold and burning and exposed, then I’m in the back of a taxi, Dad asking me questions, and I’m trying to answer them but the causeway between my mouth and my brain is too wide and all that comes out is, ‘I’m fine, Dad. I’m actually fine. Dad. Stay with me. I feel terrible,’ and the stars are silvery and wintry, making me think I’m ascending, like ET. My back hurts. My joints move like they’re full of broken glass. Words dissolving on my tongue. The doctor feels my head and frowns, ‘No drugs at all?’ and I sing now the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse, and laugh, but he doesn’t seem to find it funny. No, not at all. A woman haunting the fringes of my vision. A vase of white flowers, the heads drained and tired like people at the end of a long, traumatic day in which their lives had felt ill-fitting. One of the nurses looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, a babe, and how annoying that she has to see me like this, as she withdraws the blood slowly, carefully, from my pendulous arm and I try to explain to her that I’m not a junkie or anything, I just have a head like a zeppelin on fire and the ghost of a wedding dress pulsing at the corner of my eye telling me something about misery and the wind and I turn to look but it is
gone
Rain falling against the window. Hospital radio playing the Foo Fighters. Those two things just not going together at all.
This is the infirmary where I was born. Falkirk Royal. Being here again makes me feel tiny, acorn-small. Nurses coming and going and doctors coming and going and me smiling like the professional patient.
While I’m here, I read the whole of Moby Dick, the only book lying around the ward, which is totally boring, since the whale doesn’t appear until the second last chapter. Eight hundred pages of talking about the whale and no fucking whale. There’s a message there, which is probably crucial to life or something, but I’m just too tired to figure it out.
I feel like I’ve been running for a long, long time.
My head feels compressed with the relationship between Barrett-era Floyd and Parklife-era Blur (more similar than critics realise, I could go into this), my body numb to everything but my own inadequacy, and that long, awful walk after we jettisoned Belinda.
Mum has been drifting at the end of the corridor, glancing in my direction. Her smile is weak and sad. When Derek and Dad arrive it is a family reunion of sorts. The faces are drizzly and faded, like a photo left out in the rain.
‘Looking good, Billy Ray,’ Derek says.
‘Feeling good Lewis,’ I manage.
There is hand patting from Dad.
The Lads turn up just as Ahab spots the fucking whale!
I like Brian’s new puffa jacket. Frannie is wearing a Rangers baseball cap. Dolby is dressed like Chris Martin from Coldplay. They look more like boyracers than they ever have. They warm the room as soon as they enter it, and to ease things along – me, the still centre of their swirling banter – Frannie and Brian start slagging Dolby. Uriel, what the fuck was he thinking about, what a woofter. But he grimaces, holds his hands up. ‘I’ll come clean, boys. I’ve changed ma name back tay Martin.’
‘Whit?’ we all gasp. ‘Why?’
‘Naybody ever called me Uriel,’ he shrugs. ‘It wis a silly idea in the first place.’
We shake our heads, tutting, and nobody mentions the coincidence of it, that Uriel died with Belinda. And Dolby, trying to laugh along, but out of sorts, mourning, looks like it’s a double suicide he won’t recover from. Some tragic part of him out there on the road with Belinda forever, fluttering his wings.
They shuffle about the room, checking out the nurses’ arses as they pass in the corridor. None of them ask, but I want to tell them anyway. I raise myself up in bed, finger the new Radiohead CD, Amnesiac, which Dolby has bought me, which has a weird cover, then put it down and say:
‘I know yer aw wonderin whit happened tay me. But I’m … no really sure. This last year, I’ve been fightin against somethin, somethin horrible. There’s been things gon on inside me that I don’t understand at aw. I even thought about–’ the sheets are scrunched up in my fist, ‘– but, ehm, I didnay. And I want yese tay know that if it wisnay fir youse guys, I wouldnay be here. I want yese to know that. I wid have–’
I pause, it’s rising.
‘But I didnay dae it. I’m here. We made it. The four ay us. Tay the end.’
Frannie turns and faces the wall. Dolby looks at the floor and murmurs, ‘The new Radiohead album’s awright. No as good as Kid A.’
Brian coughs, and when his voice emerges it is new and certain, ringing out.
‘Next year for California, boys. Next year it’ll happen. For sure.’
and I realise that I haven’t said these things at all, just thought I had
and that now I never will
and that’s that
The summer has wound down like an old clock. The mornings are tinged with a bright, sharp cold. Dolby and Brian’s twentieth birthdays came and went. We did nothing special to celebrate them.
Dad helps pack the car. There’s a battered typewriter he’s fished from the loft for my essays, plenty socks and underwear, the copies of Kerouac and Kelman and rubbish critical books with names like In Defence of Realism which Mrs Gibson gave me, shining with pride, when I told her I’d made it onto the English degree course at Stirling University. Her notes in the margins, her pencilled thoughts forever adrift in the world. I open one at random and find a line which says
as if there could ever be any such things as true stories
and in my pockets I have a dozen photographs to stick on the walls of my new room: the Lads in jubilant poses, me and Derek sharing cocktails on the back slabs, Dad glancing over the top of the Daily Record in his old Clash t-shirt, and
Mum.
We heave the stuff out from the house – me, Derek, Dad, the Lads – grunting and joking like workers, like men. Afterwards we stand about, sort of chatting pointlessly. When I ask what they’ve been up to recently, Brian shrugs.
Through a heat-blanketed summer, I’ve met with them rarely. Since we’ve no car, our reasons for meeting up are few, though there’s been the odd drunken phone call, boasting about some shag (not many of those, actually) or raving about some film. Generally, I’ve been relieved when Frannie’s said, ‘Does your phone dae this?’ and the receiver’s clicked down. Mostly, I’ve stayed in with Dad, listened to the clock’s tick and the birds’ chirpy nonsense, read books for my new course, watched The Godfather Parts I and II (never III).
‘Got everythin?’ Dad asks, closing the boot.
‘Aye. Ready to heddy.’
We all stand silently, absorbing the moment. Cars shoot past on the main road. Our hands are in our pockets. It’s as if we’ve just been introduced to each other and are desperately forming excuses to escape.
‘Oh,’ Dolby says, reaching into his jacket. ‘Before I forget. We got ye a present for yer new room.’ He hands me the plastic Han Solo from Belinda’s dashboard. I stare at it, its wee arms and legs askew, blasting an invisible Greedo.
‘Before we left her,’ he says, ‘I managed tay salvage Han.’
‘An this,’ Brian beams, handing me a can of Irn-Bru. ‘Fir the back seat ay ye
r first car.’
‘Front seat,’ I remind him. Never did work that one out.
We shake hands. Each of them wishes me well, promises to come up to Stirling to visit. Brian asks me to set aside any tasty nursing students. The wind whistles the approach of winter and we huddle our hands further into our pockets, and standing there with them, I feel older, almost the same age as them.
I have to leave them. But every second heartbeat is a scream to stay.
‘Aw the best.’
‘Heddy haw.’
‘See ye in the Hotel California.’
Just before I go, the mobile in Frannie’s pocket beeps (the theme from The Magnificent Seven) and he draws it out to check his text message.
‘Alvin, it’s for you,’ he smirks, passing me the phone.
‘For me?’
‘She still has ma number …’
Sorry I missed Ally Fergusons last match
Give me a text sometime? Wendy.x
‘How dae I text her back?’ I panic, fiddling with the buttons. ‘Whit dae I–’
‘Well, ye’ll need tay get a phone then.’
‘Ye canny be a student if ye’ve no got a mobile phone,’ Dolby points out.
‘Fuck naw,’ says Brian. ‘How else are we gonnay get near they wee posh tarts?’
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I will.’
I move towards the car slowly. Things feel a bit like the end of The Breakfast Club. Simple Minds should be playing Don’t You Forget About Me in the background, highlighting the excellent crapness of the moment. As I clamber into the front seat, Derek shuts the door behind me. He seems to want to say something, struggling with it.
‘Looking good Billy Ra–’ he says, but I cut him off.
‘If there is anythin oot there,’ I say, ‘I’ll find it.’
He smiles, ruffling my hair, and it’s such a corny gesture, like something a brother would do.
It’s time.
Me and Dad pull away, and they’re all in a line, everyone I’ve ever cared about, waving, smiling, flicking me the Vs, and as the car gathers speed, it’s too painful to watch them disappear behind me, so I don’t.
Ahead, the sun glows pink/orange/lime, like Bacardi Breezers, like a champagne supernova in the sky, and all the last songs on albums and all the closing scenes from films merge then part on a motorway in my mind, and everything under the sun is in tune, as I fiddle with the radio, settling on some crackling Highland channel with its comforting hills, heather and lochs and
you’ll tak the high road
an i’ll tak the low road
an i’ll be in scotland afore ye
and the Lads and me watching drunken Rangers matches, and I think about Wendy’s text. I’m not sure that it matters if I text her back or not, but I really think I will. I’m buying a mobile phone. This decision is made. I stand Han Solo up on the dashboard and he carries the world on tiny shoulders.
Dad says, ‘Did I ever tell ye I saw Elvis Costello at the Maniqui?’
He winks, and there’s a grin there that I thought had died from his face quite some time ago.
‘Naw, ye’ve never telt me that, Dad,’ I smile.
ROLL CREDITS. VOICEOVER. We are a generation who awoke to find all gods dead, all wars fought, only delusions to believe in, hope for, which we spend our whole lives racing towards, bright, shimmering on the horizon, but then
We glance back. And the way we’ve come has gone. And we didn’t stop, breathe, absorb any of it. It all zapped past. Like Grand Prix adverts. Like a sitcom double bill.
where me and ma true love
will never meet again
on the bonny bonny banks of Loch Lomond
planet Earth, scorched with the touch of the sun, its rays appearing/disappearing/appearing again and happiness becomes – is – attainable. It isn’t this, but I know it’s coming, making me chase it, frantic, like a greyhound after a rabbit, and who knows, maybe I’ve shot past without even noticing, but till the day when all makes sense there is this. This feeling.
‘You and Derek are awright, Dad? I ask. ‘I mean, yer on the right track? Stirling’s no far away if ye want tay–’
‘We’ll be fine, son,’ he says, squeezing my hand. ‘Ye’re brother’s goat that carer’s allowance. He’s gonnay stay for a while. We’ll take care of each other.’
The road stretching out ahead. Cars firing towards mystery destinations. Those simple words, ‘We’ll take care of each other,’ and what they mean, what they do, and the world, I’ve decided, is a good place to be, still fascinating. I have not exhausted its possibilities. It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, and above all else it’s this I realise, suddenly, like an epiphany, like the sun glowing through the clouds or the heady feeling we had in Belinda, racing through all those nights together, together, so I roll down my window, turn up the music, then just roar something triumphant at the sign rushing past which says
YOU ARE NOW LEAVING FALKIRK
Boyracers: Resprayed
If you’ve just finished this book, you might have guessed that I was a big Stephen King fan when I was younger. His novels and stories alone, replete with good old Americans battling some supernatural threat, were thrilling enough (or most of them anyway, as I’ve never felt the need to go back to Rose Madder), but what I also loved were King’s introductory essays to his books, in which he’d explain, face to face, how he came to be a writer, how he typed away in a trailer, he and his wife doing about six jobs between them, a baby on the way, how his wife fished his abandoned manuscript Carrie out of the bin and made him look at it again. The rest, as they say, is bloody, ghost-ravaged, nightmarish history. King would be telling you this, with all the down-home straightness of someone sliding a pint down the bar to you. It all had this glow about it. Yet what difference did it make how the books came to be written? Why do we care about the particular context a novel came to exist in, whether it’s Orwell holed up on Jura with tuberculosis, feverish with Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the furore surrounding the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho? Sometimes, say, with Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, the artwork and the real life are so enmeshed that either only makes half as much sense without the other.
Now, I’m not Stephen King, and I’m certainly not Orwell, Ellis or Hughes, but even your friendly neighbourhood Falkirk novelist has been asked often enough at readings variations on the following: ‘How did you become a writer?’ ‘Who were your influences’ ‘Is your work autobiographical?’ ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ (all-time classic, as any writer will tell you) and even the cracker: ‘How did someone from a housing scheme manage to write a book?’ That one always makes me smile. So I’m well aware that people do sometimes like to see behind the veil, to see what the Wizard of Oz looks like, even if like Dorothy, they’re frequently disappointed to find that we’re made up of the same boring bits and bobs as everyone else.
I figured I’d save us a wee bit of time in future and give answers to them all at once, and the Afterword to the Tenth Anniversary edition of my first published novel feels like the most obvious place to indulge that, since we’ve been talking to each other anyway, you and I. So if those questions mean anything at all to you, you’ll get the answers here. If not – if you want to believe in the Wizard of Oz, don’t like hearing writers prattle on about their ‘struggle’, or just hate people with pop-culture Tourettes – then move along, please. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Seriously, the next sentence alone will be enough to put you off.
To paraphrase Ray Liotta’s opening shot in Goodfellas, ‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a writer.’
My family – who, it’s worth saying, are nothing like Alvin’s in this novel – still have no idea where it came from. Neither of my parents were avid readers, my siblings haven’t turned out to be, and the few books I can remember lying around our house were mainly my mum’s Flowers in the Attic series and my dad’s books about the Glasgow razor gangs. I was draw
n to their copies of Peter Benchley’s Jaws and the novelisation of King Kong, because they were the only ‘grown-up’ books in the house which had actual monsters in them. These books had a feel and smell which I can loosely describe as adult: the paper was thicker, grainier than I was used to, the type was tiny and there was so much of it. Worst of all – no pictures! Nonetheless, when I was maybe seven or eight, I tried to read Jaws. My mind strained at the length of the sentences and I couldn’t hold on to their sense for very long, but neither could I remove from my head the eerie image in that opening line: ‘The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.’
The hugeness of that fish in my mind. Death itself.
Ours, like almost every other working-class family’s in Scotland, was very much a household of quiz shows, soap operas, murder mysteries, football, horse racing, Sixties hits, the Corries and Kenny Rogers. My mum claims she initially bought me books because they were cheaper than toys, and was pleased when I took up with them, as they kept me very quiet. Importantly, built into every schoolday at Hallglen Primary for seven years was half an hour of the teacher reading stories to us. Roald Dahl, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Famous Five and Charlotte’s Web cast a spell which kept us silently glowing with excitement each day at three o’clock. They were the only times when our class, in all its variation, felt united.