“Jesus, Gav!”
“What? You can’t blame a man for asking!”
“She’s my sister-in-law!”
“Yeah, so you know her! What d’you think?”
“I, I don’t, I . . .” I give up, ’cause what difference will it make what I tell him? He’ll still get wasted next time he sees her and tell her, “I love you, Nikki,” with a big dope-eyed smile. “I don’t know, Gav, maybe. Ask her yourself.”
“Wicked! I will!”
“Uh-huh.” My head’s starting to tighten. We bump on the pavement and off again.
“Oi! You’ll wreck me tires!” Gav frowns at Troy as we drop down to road level, ash from his joint floating about the car.
“All right!” says Troy, in a heavy Clyde County tongue. “It’s just so’s I know I’ve parked properly, close to the curb as it said int’ driving test.”
“Giz that.” I lean over and take one last long drag, holding the joint in Gav’s hand.
He gives me a cheeky wink. “Yeah, you get that down you, my son.”
I nod him thanks and back out my door, bumping it shut. Gav rolls down his window as I walk up the drive.
“See you, gorgeous!”
“Shut the fuck up.” I grin back. “You’ll wake me mam!”
And I’m in the door, up the stairs, on the bed, dead.
EDUCATION AGGRAVATION
As always, the week passes by with little event. It’s the run-up to our GCSEs, the exams everyone takes in England when they’re sixteen and finishing “compulsory” school, although basically you have to carry on ’til you’re eighteen and do A levels, unless you want to be unemployed or work in the chippie. I’m supposed to be taking ten GCSE subjects this summer, eleven if they don’t bump me down from the top maths set, but nothing seems to have changed in terms of workload or pressure and I’m not bothered enough to ask why. In fact, I’m worryingly not bothered. Or rather, I would be worried, but it’s the very fact that I’m so not worried in any way that is so worrying (or should be, if that makes sense). So we go to classes and hang around the lockers and make the effort as far as we know how. Stuff happens and none of it means much. I get a B on a maths test and fail a technology one. We get a lesson on what we want to do with our lives, and no one knows, so they tell us our options, which doesn’t take long. There’s never any point in remembering this kind of week, so I spend most of my time in one of the music practice rooms with Ash and her best mate, Daisy, swigging vodka and orange from a Volvic bottle and pissing about on the drums. It’s easy to skive class in the music rooms because they’re soundproof and no one but us really uses them, so Ash and I use them to get drunk in and flirt to our hearts’ content, which I enjoy safe in the knowledge that nothing is ever going to happen between us. Usually I also spend a lot of time laughing at my own jokes while Ash paints her nails and complains about all the older boyfriends who’ve screwed her over, or not screwed her, or screwed her in a particularly strange fashion, like the guy who said he wanted to carry her black babies and then followed her about until she threatened to smash his face in with her wakeboard.
Daisy, far stupider than Ash and not as attractive, tells us the latest stories about her dad. Her dad’s a pervert. Her sister once walked in on him photographing his girlfriend’s pussy on their coffee table and last week Daisy came in one lunchtime unexpected to find her dad asleep on the couch with a rampant rabbit and a rental copy of Bitches in Heat next to him. Ella, another of Ash’s girl gang, of which I am an honorary member, walks in on this last sentence. Ella’s pretty, in a vapid way, and skinny, and talks a lot about how fat she is to anyone who’ll listen.
“Oh, I’ve got that. Hey, there’s a new family moved in next door to mine and it’s a couple of dykes with a gay son and Baz says he’s going to burn their house down and shout ‘gay burn.’ ” She says all this very sweetly and without missing a beat, like one of those dolls where you pull a string in their back and they say set phrases in a dumb-blonde accent. If I could auction Ella off as a novelty amusement on eBay I’d make a fortune. She peers at Ash’s school uniform. Everyone in England has to wear one so I’m stuffed into polyester suit trousers, a shirt engineered to make you sweat more and a tie, while Ash, Daisy and Ella wear the same, but with a pleated gray skirt, which Ash has rolled up to show two tantalizing slivers of bum cheek split by a neon-pink thong.
“That’s a weird skirt,” Ella comments, looking at Ash.
“Why?” Ash says, with a mean grin. “Does it make me look fat?”
I grin involuntarily, then cover it as Ella makes an odd half-sick half-snot noise. Ash thinks Ella’s a bitch because her face is less manly than Ash’s.
“Fuck you, Flick.”
“Tactless but true.” We smile heartlessly at each other and I beat out a little rhythm on the drum kit. (A shit Session Pro with plastic skins, screws missing on the toms and the bass drum kicked through. Its condition and quality say everything about our school you would ever need to know.) “What’s this family like then?”
“I told you. Two dykes and a gay son. And one daughter but I didn’t meet her. She was apparently talking about coming out on Friday though. One of the dykes said so.”
Ash grunts. Very attractive. “She’s not coming to mine.”
Typical. We live in a place that’s so backward most English people don’t know where it is. Obviously it’s not surprising, considering this, that if someone’s gay they get slaughtered, but I don’t see the fuss myself. Everyone’s a little bit gay. Ash lezzes up every weekend to get the perverts at the bar to buy her drinks. She’s a classy bird, that Ash.
Ella blinks dazedly at us. “The girl’s called Rainbow.”
“RAINBOW?”
Miss Clark, the music teacher, sixty-plus and a spinster, smells of piss, literally your walking stereotype, sticks her head in the door at this point (nosy bitch) and whines over our laughter.
“Can we stop this noise?”
She’s drowned out by Ash bursting out with another shout of “RAINBOW!!” at which I drunkenly giggle.
“Get out, pleeease!”
“All right, all right, we’re leaving.” I grab Ash’s hand and we head for the back field, behind the pavilion. Time for a spliff.
KICKING THE BUCKET
Smoke rises around my face and I’m drifting away on it, dreaming in colors, floating on feathers. A hot pulsing wave moves up through my body, beating in my groin, warming my stomach, caressing my chest like the finely manicured hands of a high-class hooker (or so I imagine). I feel it pushing from inside my face on my cheeks and the back of my eyes, numbing my features, clouding my expression and finally, flawlessly, curling deliciously and airily around my brain (or lack thereof). I giggle indulgently, hornily, and smoke shoots up past my eyes to the ceiling, billowing out my mouth. It’s called having a bucket, and by participating in this equally social and antisocial act we, the participants, are deemed “bucketheads.” It involves pulling an empty two-liter cola bottle slowly out of a bucket of water, while cooking up pot on a piece of minutely punctured foil gripped to the bottleneck. The smoke is drawn into the bottle, the foil removed, and the designated buckethead quickly exhales, puts their lips to the opening and inhales the entire contents of the bottle. It is the most efficient way to smoke pot, but apparently not widely done (although everyone I know has tried it). But let me rewind my meandering musings and set the scene.
Ash, Daisy, Jamie, Danny, Trixie, Limbo and three goths I don’t know are sat round this bucket in Ash’s flat in the center of town, as if the bucket was a campfire and we were scouts making s’mores. Jamie I’ve known since we were in nappies, and Danny, Limbo and Ash come from Osford, so we all grew up playing together out on the waste, a stretch of woodland-cum-rubbish-dump, where we made our dens out of old washing machines and chicken wire, and now here we are together, again, still, giggling in a dark, dank den of a living room. It’s sick and it’s reassuring and it’s sad and it’s pathetic how life repeats
itself. We haven’t changed since we were eight, but as reality emerges before us, hope fades away, and we search for greater highs and deeper lows to escape boredom and deny our inevitable acquiescence to the monotony of life. That’s the pot turning me into Socrates, or similar. Who am I kidding. I’m disgusting. I giggle and choke on it, a bitter lump in my throat. I squeeze up my face tight and stay dead still.
Ash sleepily expels smoke from her mouth. I catch her cherry-flavored lip gloss on the air. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” I relax my face. “Nothing.”
An hour later the guys, including myself, leave in better spirits to a wicked night out. Ash and the girls stay behind to wait for Ella, Josh and a lass called Sally that I once got off with. To my shame she is now fat, and a chav.
WHAT KIND OF FUCKING STUPID NAME IS “RAINBOW”?
“WHAT kind of FUCKING STUPID name is ‘Rainbow’?” The club is packed and it’s three a.m. before we spill out onto the promenade. As usual I’m holding forth in the spotlight, the others blinded by my winning combination of sex appeal, humor, and overbearing cockiness (because I’m now twatted). There’s the shouting of drunk lasses, there’s fighting skinheads and there’s the sea less than fifty yards away, the waves crashing over each other wildly as if in a rush to join in with the party and compete with the noise. All the while Will Flicker, known as Flick, acts the jester, and tonight he’s in fucking top form, the King of Scorn, all the lesser mortals crowding around him admiringly to laugh at his witty comments and cheap jibes. What a cock.
“Yeah!” Ella chimes in, acting blond (not a big stretch for Ella). “Imagine saying, ‘Hi, I’m Rainbow.’ ”
“ ‘Let me take you to my pot of gold.’ ” I make another blinding crack. “I bet her boyfriend’s a leprechaun.” Mike snorts alcopops out of his nose and I nudge him and whisper loudly. “The height makes him perfect for easy-access muff-diving.”
“BAhahahaha.” Jamie chokes on his cigarette smoke. “And his ginger beard tickles in a really good way on my woohoo!”
Ella giggles. “And his little green clothes make him really easy to coordinate with.”
Back to me “for something funnier but more obscene” (and I actually say that out loud): “I only appear if it’s very . . . WET . . . indeed.” Oh yes, every daft prick there laughs, much louder than they did for Jamie or Ella. Too easy. I’m too good, that’s why.
A voice from behind me adds to our banter. “Yeah, she must be a right whore!”
“All right! Calm down, that’s taking it too far.” I turn and find myself right in the face of a girl about my age, one of the late-night slags probably, but there’s a fullness to her lips and a light in her eyes, which I think are gently mocking me although I’m not sure yet why, implying better health. Her hair is scruffy, a dark frieze about her face, her makeup light and her complexion pale, not orange like Ash and the others. “Who are you then? You out with Ashley?” I say, expecting a quick answer, gearing myself up for a bit of banter.
“You first.” Her directness blindsides me. The right corner of her mouth grins, daringly, proudly. I stop moving with my Beck’s halfway to my mouth. Cheeky bitch. Sexy too. I almost blush but manage to wait for about three seconds, then give her an oh-you-want-to-play-games look (slightly suggestive, with a backwards movement of the head, followed by a slight nod forward—damn smooth). I then cock my head in a substitute shrug, say, “Will Flicker”—pause—“but everyone calls me Flick,” then grin and take a swig. Champion.
I’m feeling on top of the world, cock of the walk, and somewhere in the reaches of my mind I hear a lone sober thought quietly wonder if I could be very, very drunk. Not just superficially and amusingly drunk, but deeply, and importantly, drunk. But the thought is fleeting. I continue.
“And you?” I shoot her a questioning, Brad Pitt–from–Fight Club I’m-so-hot look. The thought becomes a disdainful voice: Maybe you should calm down. I ignore it, focused instead on what I’ve now realized is a very attractive lass, who my whisky-sodden and stoned brain believes without doubt will be getting off with me under the pier by closing time. Oh yes. Her smile stretches, her full ripe lips part like a tantalizing femme fatale’s and involuntarily I imagine them on the tip of my dick. She grins, showing her teeth.
“My name . . .”
“Yes, baby?” Baby. Chuh. I’m pulling out all the stops.
“Is Rainbow.”
The voice from the back of my mind slams into my frontal lobe, deadpan, and loud in my ear: TIT.
THE MORNING AFTER
I wake up wishing I wasn’t waking up. It’s light and someone in the house has got the radio on loud, playing that song about getting all the girls. Tommo, my brother, older and wiser and yet somehow with much poorer taste in music, must be over for his regular Saturday morning visit. It’s something he’s done for a few years now, since he and Nikki moved into their own place, and I think it’s somehow tied in to his image of being a “real man,” coming round to give his wee shortie mam a hug and slap Dad mate-ily on the back, then drink beer and cook a fry-up. It’s like one day he was a normal teenager, then the next he became this responsible, I-don’t-ever-cry, talk-in-monosyllables “bloke” and now I can only ever have a conversation with him about football or doing up his house. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice, but there’s only so much leaning against the kitchen counter and sighing I can do before I get bored, lose concentration and fall over.
Still, it’s nice that he cares. It’d be great if he waited ’til at least midday to care though; fuck the early morning. I groan. I try to drift off but it’s too loud, so I shout from my mattress on the floor (I feng shui’d my six-foot-short child’s bed out to the garbage last year, when the headboard started to give me neck ache).
“Shut the fuck up!” No one replies and the music continues. I’m indignant. How dare he? Twat. I bet he’s doing it on purpose to get me up. It’s fucking Saturday and it’s only . . . I’m squinting at the clock . . . eleven thirty.
“Ohhhhhhhhh.”
My brain shuts off for another half hour and the next thing I’m aware of is being rock hard. I roll over onto my back and start pulling at my dick. I’m still fairly unconscious at this point and last night just hasn’t entered my head yet. As far as I know, I went back to Ash’s, listened to her cry, pissed the night away and walked home like every Friday, but as I wank, images start appearing in my mind. Parted red lips, tits peering from a ruffled top, darkly suggestive eyes, soft chocolate-colored hair flicking into my face, and as I come I remember: “Rainbow-oh-oh-OHHHHH.”
A few seconds pass in which I realize the radio is now off. I hear footsteps on the stairs and suddenly my door flies open and Tommo enters, deadpan as ever. “Oi, Will—our Nikki’s made baguettes, so come down and get one if you want. Nice wang.” He turns to go.
I pull my duvet cover over myself. “Thanks, Tommo.”
QUESTIONS
Monday comes and I kick through the school gates as the bell for registration stops ringing. Our year has 120 people in it, and we’re split into four forms. My form room is at the top of a stone staircase, past the library and the radiators, where a year eight who fancies me waits every morning for an eye-fuck. Today I wink at her and she smiles, picks up her bag and skips happily away down the stairs, presumably to her own form’s registration. I must make her constantly late. Luckily Dr. Stiles, or Timothy as I like to call him, doesn’t give a shit if I’m late or not, so I walk in to the sound of him mumbling my name in the register, clap him on the shoulder and shout, “Here,” in a confident, suave, twatty way. I then sit casually on a desk in the front row, where the rest of the gang instantly lean in asking me about Rainbow and drown out names beginning M to W (there are no names that start X, Y or Z).
My group of mates is ten strong, or at least we always refer to ourselves as “the ten of us” even when we count nine or eleven, and most of us are in my form, 11S (S for Stiles). I chose to sit us in the front row becaus
e at the time it seemed hysterically ironic; now it’s just habit. I think you get away with more in the front row. Keep your enemies close, I say. So we sit, me on the desk, Jamie on his chair next to me, Mike knelt on his, Ash and Daisy further along the row both sucking Chupa Chups, and Ella sat on her boyfriend Josh’s lap behind them, everybody leaning in to hear what I have to say.
It’s a tough call to say who is the second funniest in the group after myself, but points for being in equal parts inventive and crude as fuck go to Jamie, who once wrote his own theme tune, titled “Deepthroatin’ Jimbo,” and sang it so often that a form two years below us learnt the whole thing, and then was kept in over lunch for busting out the second verse, which is all about necrophilia, during a History lesson. Despite what some people might think about this, girls actually love it. He regularly texts me to let me know he can’t hang out because he’s “up to his neck in snatch.”
Ash does have her moments, though Mike is Jamie’s main contender, having one of those senses of humor where you just don’t think the person is going to be funny until they come out with a blinder. Mike looks too shy and too ginger to be hot shit in the laughs department, but he’s a loyal and trustworthy mate who will quietly slip in something so hilarious you actually pee a little bit. “Spotting humor” we call it, although if it’s really epic, Jamie refers to it as “skid-mark humor.” Mike and me have been growing apart lately though. He doesn’t really do drugs. He doesn’t protest or anything gay like that. He just doesn’t show up when we make a plan to smoke up, which is always awkward the next day, like I know I’m being avoided but I’m not sure how to feel about it because I kind of agree with him that me doing them is genuinely fucking stupid.
Ella and Daisy are too dumb to be hilarious. Josh made the mistake of getting a steady girlfriend in school when nobody else has one. Now he has to be on his best behavior when Ella’s around and then when she’s not, he tries too hard and it’s embarrassing for all of us who witness it.
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