Boyracers (7 page)

But, then again, here’s me in a Meat Loaf t-shirt.

Dolby rests his chin in his hand, tracking her with the precision of a rifle ranger.

‘Think she’s interested?’ I ask hopefully.

‘Hm,’ he muses, narrowing his eyes.

‘I’m bustin your balls!’ Frannie yells, as Brian veers off again into the
gutter. Might as well be the next galaxy, considering how far he is from beating the Franman now, shown by his bullish neck filling with
crimson
, his fingers flexing, as Frannie coaxes more pins to the floor then grins.

I feel damn fine tonight. Watching Frannie and Brian joust is like watching Sammy Davis Jnr beat Lennox Lewis, and I’ve barely thought about the shit going on at home with Dad, or Connor, or Tyra, Derek, or F(uck) Scott Fitzgerald, or my late essays, or my Higher results, or my future disappearing before me. I am actually a long way from caring about these things now. Got my best mates, U2, Belinda parked outside and a road leading to somewhere/anywhere/everywhere. Through a coruscation of neon tubes and MTV adverts (how many kids in Scotland actually snowboard?), the sound of bowling-balls hitting wood, teenage squealing, techno techno techno techno, and Frannie doing DeNiroPacinoBrando, I slink to the toilet. On the way back, I realise I am walking behind the Fila girl. I would very much like to feel a girl.

Pick a part that’s new.

‘Scuse me,’ I cough, tapping her shoulder. She turns and frowns and is meaner-looking than I first thought, sort of like a female vampire in a tracksuit.

‘Whit,’ she says, the bottom note on a piano being struck.

‘See ma mate Dolby over there?’ Think of something cool, funny, Hollywood. ‘He fancies you.’

She looks over. With all the interest of a plate of cold spaghetti watching a lecture, she says, ‘The dickheid?’

‘Eh naw, that’s Frannie.’

She spies Brian and her face lights up. ‘That good-lookin yin?’

‘Naw, no him either.’ Cold spaghetti again. ‘The one sittin doon.’

‘Wi the Spider-Man t-shirt?’

‘Aye, a really cool yin tay.’

She extracts a long piece of gum from her mouth and snaps at it like the crap shark in Jaws: The Revenge. ‘Listen, I’m no meanin tay be cheeky or nothin. But wannay yese is wearin a Spider-Man t-shirt, wannay yese is a dickheid, and wannay yese is eh
you
.’

I look at her. I shrug. ‘So ye comin over or no?’

Brian snorts at my return, and I get the impression his game hasn’t improved. Frannie is performing graceful pirhouettes that culminate in a delicate smash of pins. ‘That wis an awfy long pish for somebody wi such a wee dick.’

I grin smugness back at him. ‘I, mister Brian Mann, have been
chattin
up a
lassie
.’ I say the word as though it will reveal a cave worth’s of treasure to them but

‘Whit’s the score?’ Dolby says.

‘Five one,’ Brian mutters, sending his ball on another lost cause.

‘Heddy haw,’ Frannie goes, punching the air.

‘Did naybody hear me?’ I squeak.

There is a tap on my shoulder and I turn. Facing me is a mug I recognise from the Falkirk Herald ‘Round the Courts’ section. His names is Steven Cotter – Cottsy to his enemies, and there are many – and he has just tapped my shoulder. His head resembles a bowling-ball. He looks like a sports shop doomed to walk the earth, brand names plastering his body like tattoos. ‘Ken wha am ur?’

I nod as though he has a gun at my head.

‘Well, see that lassie ower there?’

I look over the rise of his simian shoulder to the track-suited girl, glaring malevolently, having alerted the rest of the apemen. This is starting to remind me of the Hallglen ritual which begins,
Did you swear at ma laddie
?

‘Aye.’

Cottsy unfolds his spherical biceps and Olympic committees
everywhere
feel a tremor in the force. ‘That’s ma burd.’

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

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

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 mind 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