by BRM Stewart
Through my haze of good food and lots of alcohol, I tried to work out if that afternoon could have had anything to do with this, and thought that it was too much of a coincidence if it hadn’t. My mind raced through possibilities, but a cold certainty descended on me: this man’s colleagues, or clients, had discovered their data had been compromised, and that he had become a liability, and they had killed him.
I knew this because of my previous experiences with gangsters. It’s how they work. The crack in my life had opened up, the fault line that led all the way back to an August Saturday in Glasgow, a lifetime ago.
Chapter 3
Glasgow – twenty five years before
The phrase ‘the day when everything changed’ is much over-used these days, but for me, and for Davey Collins, there really was such a day – a mild, unusually dry August day in Glasgow.
It began with breakfast at around eleven o’clock. I’d had a shower, and found my grey trousers and the short-sleeved white shirt with my name-tag, unwashed from the Saturday before but useable. With a heavy heart I went downstairs to face mum’s on-going anger.
She was frosty-faced as she paused from doing the washing-up to watch me get a bowl of cereal. The letter from the exam board that listed my failures, one line at a time, still lay accusingly by the kitchen sink. We’d been through the recriminations several times a day since Tuesday, as she realised that all the times I’d said I was doing homework with Davey up in my room, or over at his house a couple of streets away, we were really just reading computer magazines or coaxing second-hand machines back into life, writing programs to make them do tricks, playing games on them. I’d weathered the storm, miserable because I knew she was right. She’d only once said how disappointed my dad would have been, had he lived to see this day, and that hurt deeply. She never mentioned my brilliant little brother Peter, who had died of a brain tumour aged nine, but we both knew she was thinking it. ‘You’re clever, Martin – why are you throwing it all away?’ And every time after the outburst, she’d leave the room in tears.
Now we’d moved into a new phase. The recriminations had stopped, though a cold glance from her was enough to remind me of everything she’d said. Now she was beginning to get angry – angry that I didn’t give her anything towards the rent, or do any cooking or cleaning, angry that she was carrying the weight of running the little council house on her own shoulders. She was looking older and more tired day by day before my eyes. But it was too soon for me to try to make amends; I needed to ride out this angry phase. Somehow, I would make it up to her, I promised myself that. Inside, I knew it was all true what she’d said, though she hadn’t said it as succinctly as I now thought it: my life was fucked.
I finished my cereal, and she grabbed the bowl, not letting me wash up myself.
‘Are you off out tonight?’ she asked, her back to me.
‘Ah – yeah, probably. I’ll go round to Davey’s, maybe goin’ out later. I’ll be home for tea after work first, but.’
‘Good of you.’
I stood for a moment, doing nothing, listening to her silent anger and feeling the well of my own disappointment at myself. Then I just grabbed my old anorak and went out to walk down to the bus stop on Drumchapel Road, past the kids playing football in the street, the old cars – one of which hadn’t moved in weeks – the scabby front lawns, rotting fences and a dead spacehopper, groups of men of all ages standing around, nothing to do. I said hi to them on the way past, seeing my future life in their empty eyes – ‘Hey, Martin, want to get us one of them fancy fuckin’ stereos frae Dixons?’ ‘Aye, sure.’ It wasn’t a bad area – I never found it threatening – but every day there seemed to be more people just hanging around, more empty cider bottles in gardens, more hypodermic needles and broken glass by the primary school.
Once on the bus, I relaxed a bit. She’d get over it. I’d try to get more hours at Dixons, or at another shop. I agreed with her: I couldn’t go on like this, but I didn’t know what other options I had. I looked out at the streets of the council estates, and then the nice private bungalows with men out tending their gardens or washing their cars. On Maryhill Road I saw a young couple walking with arms round each other down the busy street, laughing and stopping to kiss and hug: she was a young blonde girl, he was tall and good-looking, well-groomed. They had it all, I had nothing. My life was completely shit. But I had no one to blame, not really.
Davey Collins and I had been well known at school as being very clever but total under-achievers; we’d have been called ultra-geeks if that expression had been used then. We hung around together all the time, so that we were regularly accused of being poofs, which was unfair – we hadn’t had sex of any kind, with anybody. We spent our time with comics, electronics, science fiction, and cult TV shows and films that nobody else liked, and cassette recordings of unknown bands, taken off the radio because we couldn’t afford to buy records. We didn’t listen to the news: when the bright kids at school raged about ‘that bitch’ Thatcher being re-elected and the continuing destruction of the working classes that was leading to the social problems in council estates like ours, we shrugged and went back to analysing listings of computer programs.
We read about computers avidly, and Davey managed to get his hands on a BBC Micro and a Commodore 64 that people were practically giving away because they were old and broken; he had fixed them. I was more interested in programming, and would spend hours typing in programs for magazines, and writing my own. Our guide and mentor was Mr Jackson, a crap maths teacher who had started teaching computing instead, which he was also crap at; but he let us hang around his room and gave us free reign, never seriously asking where we should be instead of with him (‘Study period, Mr Jackson.’). He let us learn, and seemed to enjoy learning along with us while hating and despising the other kids. In school we had an Apple II, a couple of BBC Micros, and a class set of Sinclair Spectrums, half of which didn’t work at any one given time. We were aware that the world was moving over to faceless, beige IBM clones; they didn’t interest us, but we read everything, absorbing it all.
By fifth year we were pretty much spending our whole time in the computing department, and other teachers had stopped marking us absent because they assumed we’d left school. We learned a huge amount about computers and software. We’d got good passes in our exams at the end of fourth year, and managed to persuade ourselves that our natural ability would see us through our Highers. That letter, by the kitchen sink, was the cruel evidence that we had been wrong. It seemed obvious after the event that not attending classes meant that you didn’t learn anything about those subjects, and wouldn’t pass the exam. We didn’t even pass the computing exam, because I skipped half the syllabus there – all the hardware stuff – and Davey skimped on the software side; both narrow fails, but fails nonetheless.
We’d gone into school the day after the results came out because my mum and Davey’s dad said we had to, and we suffered the derision and the ‘I told you so’ routine and the sarcasm, and vowed we’d never go back. I continued with the Saturday job in Dixons, gained because I was vaguely presentable and could talk to people. But Davey was unemployable: his long hair was always greasy, he had very bad acne, and he couldn’t hold eye contact with anyone for more than a moment.
That Saturday afternoon, Charlie Talbot swaggered into Dixons to look around the stereos and the big TVs. He was my age, but centuries cooler, more confident; high cheekbones and long, fine, blond hair, always with girls hanging round him as he had a cigarette outside the school at breaks, the staff never challenging him - almost as if they were half-afraid of him. The story was that he’d been expelled from two schools, including a private one. Nobody knew what his dad did for a living, nor whether he had a mother.
Somehow, he seemed to quite like me, but I treated him with extreme caution. Soon after he’d arrived at our school, a couple of the local neds had grabbed him at home time and roughed him up gently. I’d hung back with Davey – neither of us inc
lined to interfere, partly because it didn’t look like a serious roughing up, mostly because we were scared – but went up to him afterwards to check if he was OK. They’d said they wanted some money tomorrow off him, or they’d duff him up more, he told us.
The next day after school, I’d been surprised to see Charlie head out of the school gates with his normal confident swagger, and cross the road towards the neds, who nodded and smiled, perhaps expecting a handover of some cash and a regular income. Davey and I watched, mystified. But two men emerged from a car parked close by – small, wiry, badly dressed men, who grabbed the kids and punched them to the ground. Charlie got to the spot and started kicking the bodies squealing there, only stopping when the two men suggested he lay off. One of them bent and said some words, grabbing a fistful of hair until he seemed satisfied with the response he got.
Charlie recognised me in Dixons of course. ‘Hey, man – how you doing?’
We made small talk, discussed a couple of stereos, and then, as he was about to leave, he said: ‘Hey – want to come to the party tonight?’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘Great.’ He turned to go.
‘Where is it?’
‘My place.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right. Where’s that?’
He looked puzzled. ‘You never been there?’ I shook my head, and he gave me the address – in Bearsden, only a couple of miles and a golf course from where I lived, but socially light years away. ‘Bring that weird pal of yours – should be a laugh.’
An hour after he’d left, Andrew Russell came in, and looked slightly bemused to see me. ‘You working here, Martin?’ He was smaller than me, slightly chubby, with glasses and massive tightly-curled long hair.
He realised his question had been pretty stupid when I pointed to my name badge. He ummed and erred and then asked: ‘How did the exams go?’
‘Crap,’ I said. ‘Failed them all. How about you?’
He shuffled his feet awkwardly. ‘Five As.’
‘Well done. Sixth year and then off to Uni?’
He nodded, his limp hair bobbing. ‘Maths and stats. Glasgow.’
‘Well done,’ I said again, and watched the life I could maybe have had walk out onto Sauchiehall Street, feet dragging.
*
That evening Davey and I eked out a couple of cans of lager at his house while trading across the galaxy in Elite on the BBC Micro and a tiny colour TV Davey had rescued from the roadside beside a bin and fixed. Then his dad got home, so we ducked out from his baleful stare and went to the local pub. They never IDed anyone because they needed all the customers they could get: there was little profit in unemployed men who front-loaded with home-brew or supermarket cider or fortified wine and then nursed a pint and a packet of ten fags for the whole evening, making conversation out of a day spent doing nothing.
Davey and I talked about the very hard time we were getting over the exam results and the lack of prospects, but mainly we spoke of computer games which we’d never be able to buy, but which I had become good at pirating if I could get a copy. The idea of hiking across to Bearsden had been discussed and dismissed, but after a second pint we both tacitly agreed that we didn’t want to go home and couldn’t afford to drink here any more, so we went. To Charlie Talbot’s party in Bearsden, to change our lives.
The house was in a quiet, narrow cul de sac near the golf course. It didn’t look overwhelmingly posh from the outside, apart from the black Mercedes-Benz in the drive. Charlie answered the door and greeted us enthusiastically, pulling us into the darkness and the noise of the thudding synthetic synthesiser beat, and the sweaty heave of bodies. ’Fuckin’ brilliant night, man,’ he shouted at us. ‘Where have you been?’
We stood in the hallway and tried to take in our surroundings: wooden floors, a glimpse into a front room containing leather chairs and wooden furniture and a huge TV, while elsewhere came the very loud hammering beat of some disco rubbish.
He dragged us through to the kitchen, which looked like it came out of Tomorrow’s World with silver and metal surfaces and machines, and he thrust a can of Tennent’s lager into each of our grateful hands. We prised them open and drank. He seemed not to have noticed that we hadn’t brought a carry-out ourselves, but we could now pretend we’d just set it down amongst all the other drink. We didn’t feel too out of place at first, until we took a good look around and noticed what people were wearing.
Charlie himself was dressed up like he was auditioning for a stint as a camp Pharaoh – he did the silly desert shuffling walk, and I looked blankly at him. Davey and I were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, as ever. As I slugged the lager, I looked around at the other bodies in the huge kitchen – and through the sun lounge to the patio outside – and realised everyone was dressed up in various stupid ways: a couple of guys in sharp suits with girls in short black dresses and 40’s make-up, somebody carrying a sledgehammer (which, luckily, seemed to be fake), somebody with an outrageous mane of blonde hair. Davey and I looked at each other, realising that everyone else was in on something. We were out of place after all, and there was that moment where we thought we ought to just finish the can and bail out, back to our own world, which was normal and understandable. It was the sensible, right thing to do.
‘Another can?’
Fuck it, we’d give it a go, till the drink ran out. What else were we going to do? ‘Just going to the bog first – where is it?’ I put my freshly opened can down.
Charlie led me out of the kitchen and shoved me through a heavy wooden door into the most exotic toilet I’d ever seen in my life. Tiles and towels, and little bowls of soaps and other stuff. There was a shower and a huge antique loo that I felt I might just fall into.
Afterwards, I went back through to the kitchen. There were loads of couples and small groups, chatting and shouting and screaming with laughter, but no sign of Charlie or Davey. There was a girl standing by the spot where I’d set down my can, on the sort of island unit where the cooker was. I hesitated and then said hi to her and indicated that she was blocking the way to my beer. She looked up at me and blinked, and then seemed to come to her senses and gave a wide smile, showing even, perfect white teeth: ‘Sorry!’ She turned and handed me my can. ‘I’m Fiona.’ The smile stirred something inside me.
I gulped. ‘Martin.’ Her smile widened. She continued to look at my face.
In those days, girls at my school didn’t really do computers, so I was seldom in their company. I was 17, and not only a virgin but with simply no experience whatsoever of interacting with girls socially or in any other way. I appreciated pretty girls, and had sexual desires, but had never sought out any kind of relationship that might have led somewhere. And girls didn’t exactly seek me out either. I was shabby and untidy and poor. I was the opposite of Charlie. I was away at the end of a spectrum of desirability as far as girls were concerned. I had nothing to offer them. I would never be that guy on Maryhill Road with the gorgeous blonde on his arm.
So, I had never experienced someone like Fiona looking at me. I didn’t know what she was thinking, didn’t know what she wanted. I hadn’t a clue what to do.
She was quite small, and very dark – short dark hair and dark, loose clothes, with loads of mascara, her skin tanned. She looked quite attractive – so why was she looking at me? – and her accent was fairly cultured, not like mine. She was holding a glass of red wine like she was accustomed to doing such a thing.
‘Who are you dressed as?’ she asked me.
‘I’m dressed as Martin.’ She laughed, and I had a strange feeling inside. ‘How about you?’ Gosh, I was having a conversation with a girl!
‘I’ve come dressed as Fiona.’
We nodded, and then we both laughed, genuinely and loudly, together. It was an exhilarating moment.
‘So what do you do, Martin?’
Ah, here we go. I took a long drink from my can, and she drank from her glass of red wine. I made a decision just to talk to her, openly and honestly, no bu
llshit. ‘I’ve just left school, nothing planned. Hoping to do something with computers, but I’m not sure how to get into it. I’m really good with computers.’ More lager. Oh god, this sounded dull even to me. ‘We kind of pissed around at school – apart from the computer stuff, which I mentioned – so I haven’t passed any exams, so Uni is a bit out of the question.’ She nodded sympathetically. All of that came out in a bit of a rush, but I could now pose the next question: ‘How about you?’
She took a long time to think about that. I gave a frown of concentration and folded my arms. ‘I’ve just finished first year at art college.’
Ah, so she was at least a year older than me, and cleverer, as well as being classier. And attractive. The tiny spark that had ignited – the idea that we might somehow hit it off – died.
‘Don’t think I’ve passed, so not sure what I’ll do after the summer.’
I nodded wisely. ‘What options do you have?’
‘Probably just go round Europe. My dad lives in Italy, so I might just make my way out there. Play the sympathy card, maybe get some cash off him.’
God, she was seriously out of my league; they could make a movie of her life, already. ‘Your parents divorced?’ I guessed. She nodded. ‘My dad’s dead,’ I heard myself say.
‘Oh dear.’ Genuine concern passed across her face. ‘What happened?’
‘Cancer – a few years ago. He smoked like a chimney, so...’ I realised I hadn’t thought properly about him for some time, not even when mum had used him as a weapon in the failed-exam arguments. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I could feel myself welling up, and I couldn’t speak.
‘Hey.’ She took a step towards me, and put her arms round me and her head on my shoulder.
This was a new experience for me, and I didn’t know what to do. Unfortunately, my penis knew exactly how to react to the close proximity of an attractive young woman, and I had to ease her away from me. I guessed from her lack of outrage that she was probably well-used to getting that reaction from boys who held her tight.