Boyracers (15 page)

Derek puts her to bed before Dad gets in. He takes the stovies off the ring and makes me oven chips. And when I go up to see her, she is staring slackly into the middle of the room. There is a beaded chain of saliva, like a dewy web, connecting her mouth to the pillow. She doesn’t seem to hear me when I try to say sorry. And everything is black and
white and angular, because that’s what is in that year, but I wish I could remember the colour of her eyes.

Dolby slams his hand onto the horn one last time, making me pull on my trainers, grab my bag, breathing hard, and run down to

the surf, and two men in waders trying to haul a small boat. It bobs and pulls against them, an unruly child that wants to stay out longer. Forcibly manacled to a tractor, it is dragged home, shamefaced, across the length of the beach.

Two girls carry surfboards towards the water, blonde hair waving in a sea breeze. They skim the boards nose-first onto the spume, then charge into the cold like foals. In the foam and dip of the grey waves, they darken, wetten, shine. Their eyes press into the saline creases, as they ride, and fall, and rise to ride again.

Small boys digging plots on the tideline. The muscles of their faces are determined. They dig, flicking the sand behind them into the sea, which creeps silently and fills the hole again. The boys dig and flick, strenuous, the centre of the earth beckoning, the sea inching and
swallowing
up their world, but they must keep at it, keep it at bay.

Further up the beach: the ritual of the upturned bucket. Other
children
burying their mothers in a dress rehearsal of death. The old folks, nosing mournfully towards the real thing.

This isn’t a holiday, I think. It’s Saving Private Ryan.

‘Braw drive. Lovely wee beach. Plenty young yins! Nice pubs. Away doon. Enjoy yersels fir god’s sake, ya miserable–’

We’d been lurching towards boredom in Falkirk. The same roads. The same conversations. There’s only so many times you can smirk about the size of Brian’s nipples. I’ve been unable to think about anything but the recent, tragic loss of my virginity to Shelley the Barmaid, the fact
that when Tyra Mackenzie gets around to doing it with me, I’ll already be spoiled goods. So me and Dolby chucked a couple of sleeping bags into the back of Belinda (as well as a pile of practice exam papers, York Notes, Torrance’s Higher Biology, just in case I get the inclination/fear) and after we drove past Tyra’s house (so I could look, yearningly, at the light from her bedroom window), we took off to one of my Dad’s old pit stops in his days before Mum. Saltburn-by-the-sea, North East England.

It was like running away from home. Putting the foot on the accelerator and following Belinda’s nose and the spirit of adventure. The surging
landscape
, the pulse of road signs past the window. The second we pulled away from Hallglen, the patter and the laughter jet-planed, the sun crashing against the windscreen, Dolby starting to insist that I call him Uriel (still can’t believe he went through with it) and Scotland mutating into strange regions – every time we say the name Hawick, we pretend we’re dragging phlegm – over the border to Angleterre and the window rolled down and Bat Out Of Hell roaring fantastically, triumphantly uncool and

we arrive to find this. Grim England.

The window-wipers sweedge wearily before a beach.

‘Whit d’ye want tay dae?’ says Dolby.

‘Dunno. Whatever.’

‘Could go for a swally?’

‘Heddy haw.’

We exit the car and head along the promenade. The sand skitters across the shop-fronts like insects. We’re both thinking the same thing:
we could have been this bored just staying in Falkirk. We could’ve sat one more night in Brian’s living room, Frannie listing the minutiae of his daily routine in Tesco, Brian tour-guiding us through his favourite Bruce Lee scenes. We could’ve drank the money we’ve forked out on petrol, or gambled it, Kenny Rogers warning

the two surfers have tired of wrestling the elements, jogging to their car across the beach. They begin to strip, chilly, behind the cover of a car door, and we both try to transmute the metal into glass. Then, so suddenly it’s funny, one of them hoists the leg of a shop dummy onto her shoulder and carries it to the boot.

‘Hey,’ Dolby shouts, friendly, ‘sorry tay hear about the accident!’

‘Up yours,’ she replies, as her friend wheels her chair out from behind the car.

‘Aw, eh, I didnay mean …’

In the Ship Inn later, I’m still giggling.

Dolby moodily sucks his pint and frowns, that I’m-no-happy-
wi-you
frown he could have copyrighted after Frannie snogged his sister once at the Maniqui.

‘I dinnay want the Lads hearin aboot that,’ he warns, pointing. ‘I mean it. It wisnay funny.’

‘It wisnay funny wan bit,’ I agree, trying to gag my splutters, knowing Brian and Frannie will think it’s Christmas Day when I tell them.

Dolby, you see, until he changed his name to Uriel (which the Lads have embraced with the same enthusiasm as they did Celtic’s 3–1 defeat by Caley Thistle), was notoriously difficult to slag. I have crap hair. Frannie has a love of Tesco bordering on the obsessive. Brian has nipples like satellite dishes. Dolby? Has the same name as a sound system. Hilarious.

But that ‘up yours’ is going to stick to him like shit and he knows it.

‘Mocking the afflicted’s nay laughing matter, man.’

‘Aye, awright,’ he mutters, ripping up a beermat, ‘wido.’

Our accents have attracted attention. England neds. Funny
differences
between the neds here and the ones in Scotland, they’re all blond, for a start (probably a remnant of a Nordic invasion they’re desperate to take out on somebody) and they don’t have that crewcut so beloved of the Scottish ned. They don’t growl, either, or ask if you’ve ‘got a fuckin problem’. They just stare. Like menacing fish.

I ignore them, listen to some crap old Sixties song on the jukebox, my gaze roaming the decor of the inn for distraction, learning that Saltburn used to be a smuggling haven. Mocked-up Wanted posters and sepia newspaper cuttings warn us to be on the lookout for strangers. Well, we won’t be smuggling anything in, me old mateys, but we might just leave with the hearts of some of your local wenches. I’m even more ecstatic to learn that the King of Smugglers, their very own local hero, was a Scot. A poster recounts a pitched battle on this very beach front between Scots bandits and King George’s tax men. For once, we won.

Heddy, and indeed, haw.

Dolby is blethering away about Prontaprint Lisa, as he did the whole way down. We couldn’t leave Falkirk until he’d cruised past her shop twice (once catching her – gasp – photocopying). Plain looking lassie if you ask me, but she’s lit Dolby’s fire. No doubt Brian the Mann’s right in his prophecy that she’ll join Dolby’s bulging club of Lassie Pals, these
being the ones he invites out to listen patiently to their problems, before dropping them off at their door resolutely unkissed, untouched.

‘Gettin a peck on the cheek an bein called a nice guy at the end ay the night?’ Brian usually sneers, thumping his Rangers badge and slurping a Stella. ‘Whaur’s the fun in that?’

I have to interrupt Dolby’s rhapsody to point out the impending ned trouble we have, urging him not to look round, which he does, then snorts with such Brian Mann contempt that I have to check I’ve come on holiday with the correct Lad.

‘Them? Weapons? They’re wee fuckin laddies, Alvin.’

He laughs, but indulges me, draining his pint. I finish my peach schnapps and lemonade, and we head out to judge the local talent contest. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare, however, and no heddy haws are uttered the entire way to the chip shop, where, unbeknownst to us, a third En-ger-land encounters awaits.

‘Whatsit called, mate?’

The guy sticking his hand behind his ear theatrically, leaning across the hiss and fizz of the batter.

‘Irn-Bru,’ Dolby repeats, keeping his annoyance in check,
drumming
his fingers on the sauce-stained counter and contemplating, I can see, the wisdom of the whole trip.

The guy shakes his head, his assistant giggling behind her hand. ‘Sorry mate, don’t know him. Live round here, does he?’

‘Gies a can ay fuckin Tango, then.’

Outside, two girls sit hunched on a wall like frogs, straws jutting out at odd angles from their mouths. Thick jackets, thick stares. They look us over, snigger, and in such a situation Brian would be asking them what the fuck they’re laughing at, Frannie would be dashing over to offer them a chip. Either way, problem nullified. But me and Dolby trundle on, moodily, picking at our soggy haddock as our enthusiasm
for Saltburn, for life, for the space-time continuum itself, unspools. Their taunts follow us, like extras from one of Brian’s Clint Eastwood movies, eyeing the new gunslingers in town and croaking, ‘ay, Greengo.’

‘Wankers!’

Dolby’s fists clench the newsprint. He turns, sees what I see: the animals that were lurking behind the facade of this seaside town have reared out into the dusk. The genus that hunt in packs and use Childline as a defence policy. I count one, two, four, seven beady eyes blinking like Midwich Cuckoos.

‘Whaur’s Brian Mann when you need him?’ Dolby mutters, retreating quietly as more of them emerge from the shadows, following, yelping.

‘Hey, jocks.’

‘Och aye the noo, MacTavish.’

‘Where’s your haggis?’

We thrust our hands into our pockets, upping the tempo, no idea where we’re going, ducking from street to side-street, each empty,
dust-blown
. A chill blustering off the sea, howling, dropping, and the beach-blond weapons laugh and close the distance.

‘Belinda?’ Dolby mutters, glancing back.

‘Heddy,’ I agree. ‘Haw.’

We make for the beach-front, speeding up, vaulting walls, cursing my Dad, but when I look back to see how close the raised knives are they’ve

Gone.

The street hangs, patient. A shopkeeper pulls the grate down over his store, stares warily. His quaint Saltburn-by-the-sea shop taunts us with granny ornaments, when truncheons and black masks are more the sort of thing I’m thinking tourists are likely to need. Seagulls wheel above us. Slivers of adrenaline thread through my veins.

‘Hey,’ I whisper. ‘is this no like that scene in Jaws?’

‘Whit?’

‘Ken – when the shark disappears under the water, an everybody’s holdin their breath, waitin for it tay smash oot fay the sea …’

Dolby stares at me. ‘Fuck are ye talking about?’

‘I dinnay ken. I feel a bit light-heided.’ I swallow. ‘Are we gonnay get battered
again
?’

‘Shut up.’

The beach-front is deserted. The Somme veterans trying to sunbathe in the drizzle have died, or given up, along with the one-legged source of Dolby’s shame. Only sea ghosts are out now, writhing in the moonbeams.

‘Beaches are terrifyin places at night, eh?’

Dolby doesn’t reply, picking up the pace of his strides.

I’m glancing at the brood of waves, which bring to mind another scene from Jaws, the one I remember being glued to, wide-eyed, in front of my Auntie Marlene’s TV. The girl’s nude, phosphorescent form
enveloped
by waves. She rubs the sea into her hair, smiles, calls, ‘Come on into the water!’

‘Hey. D’ye ken Bram Stoker wrote Dracula twenty miles from here? Place called Whitby.’

‘Aye.’

Dolby grunts again, picking the cold fish from the newspaper then dumping it back in its puddle of vinegar.

‘And Queen once played in that pub we were in earlier?’

The sand hops across the salt-encrusted concrete, in and out of the thin gaps. The sea hisses like one of the relaxation tapes my Mum was given by the AA.

‘Aye.’

Dolby scrunches the newspaper, chucks it grimly across the car park, then peers through the darkness, eyes pinched, troubled.

‘And did ye ken Saltburn was where the vibrator was invented?’

‘Aye.’

‘Ya liar. I’m making aw this up.’

‘Shush the now, Alvin.’

I squint, trying to make sense of the grey shapes, blurry without my contact lenses. Belinda’s still waiting at the far end of the beach, coldly wondering when we’re coming back

except

Perched on the bonnet, his fag-tip glowing lke a firefly on a stalk, sits a local ned. Arms folded. He sees us coming and smiles, almost charming. I don’t believe it, the stereo’s playing, which means the little bastard has managed to get into the

‘Owya doing, lads?’ the cheeky fucker’s beaming, off on some James Dean fantasy I’m looking forward to seeing Uriel, avenging angel, end for him.

‘Awright,’ Dolby replies, and gestures. ‘Want to get off the car, mate?’

The ned frowns, peers down at Belinda’s scratch-work, then shrugs, careless and free as a wean in a playpen. ‘Nah, not rilly.’

Dolby nods, checking automatically for the boy’s backup. We can see up the length of the beach, and like I say, just ghosts.

‘Fuckin move it,’ Dolby growls, my heart starting to pound with fight-nerves. ‘We’re wantin away fay this shit hick toon.’

The wee boy – about 14 we’re talking here – raises his eyebrows and places his palms on his cheeks. ‘Ooooh,’ he says, like a camp
game-show
host.

‘Whit’s your name, pal?’

He explodes. ‘Andy-fookin-Pandy’s my name. You keep yer mouth shoot, yer fookin jock bastid.’

Dolby retreats a step, wondering, as I am, what’s making this
underage
knob so cocky. He soon supplies the answer, calmly taking his
phone from his puffa jacket. Punches numbers. The song playing inside the car says

‘Jez? Gaz? Yeah, they’re back at the car. Givin me plenty hassle too. Fink they’re summat out of Trainspotting, this pair, Scots gits. D’yer wanna send a squad round, sort em aht?’