Boyracers (16 page)

Dolby’s calm, listening to this, but I know he’s sweating. A small lump expands in his throat. Brian, Frannie, two hundred miles away, and a platoon of Englishmen about to get us back for Braveheart.

Then Dolby surprises even me. He takes out his own phone and starts dialling.

‘Brian? Aye? Listen, how far away are ye? Well, we’re just doon at the beach and there’s a wee noddy sittin oan the bonnet, willnay move.’ He glances up at me, then away. ‘Doon in a couple ay seconds? An ye’ll bring the whole team? Cool.’ He snaps closed the phone, turns round and gazes out to sea as if studying it for a photograph.

The ned looks at the back of Dolby’s head, then at me.

‘You erda the S-Burn Posse?’ he asks. ‘Craziest fookin gang in North England.’

‘That right?’ I nod, as if he was telling me about some mark he’d managed in a science test at school.

‘Be ere any second. Any second nah.’

Dolby leans over to me, speaking just loud enough for the boy to hear, ‘Brian bring that stanley blade doon wi him?’

‘Um. I think so.’

Dolby nods. The ned’s hand strays to the phone inside his jacket. Dolby reaches for his, and the boy draws his hand back, slow. They stare at each other like gunslingers.

Headlights.

At the far end of the car park a motor swings into view. ‘Yer dead naah,’ the weapon says, ‘S-Burn Posse.’

Dolby walks towards the car, raising his hand. It stops. Too dark to see in, but me and the nedboy try anyway. The far window is rolled down and Dolby leans in to speak to the driver. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he points in our direction. Two silhouetted heads in the back seat turn to the ned.

But he’s gone. A vacant space on Belinda’s bonnet where his mardy arse was.

The car pulls away, slipping out of the other side of the car park and onto the main road. Dolby trots back to Belinda and glances at me across the roof.

‘Directions,’ he says, and we

exhale

On the pier, we breathe in the salt air and try to calm down. Dolby grins/sighs/laughs. The adrenaline has washed away, leaving my insides a desolate shore. The sky meeting the sea before us in a
seamless
black accident and there are gunshot stars and lights from the boats and cold rolling off the sea in waves and the sound of slopping water and my virginity floats on the surface like a discarded polythene bag. Everything mesmerisingly bleak.

‘How ye gettin on studying for yer exams?’

‘Shite.’

‘Who’s yer teachers again?’

‘Harry Kari for Geography–’

‘I had him. Mad bastard.’

‘Deansy for French, Picairn for Biology, Gibson for English.’

‘Gibson? There’s a wifey who wants tay change the world.’

‘Ye reckon?’

‘Aye. Shame she’ll wake up in twenty years and realise she made fuck-all difference.’

Dolby stops. Spits. Watches it fall spit-kilometres.

We stare down into the water, vast, black as dreams. His words ripple in the empty air

When I was wee, I was terrifed of swimming, could always imagine this massive prehistoric shark, Megaladon, roaming the pool,
waiting
to swallow me whole, Poundstretchers trunks and all. That beast grins beneath the surface now, tail beating the deep. Its mouth stretches as wide as a cavern, my arms spread as I leap and fall, the wind wrapping my face, the brittle sea collapsing under my weight, the waters rolling over my head. Endless. Comforting as death …

‘Alvin?’

‘Whit?’

‘Ye gettin a feelin like ye want tay jump in?’

‘Aye.’

A beat.

‘Want tay head ho–’

‘Aye.’

and so we smuggle ourselves back to Scotland under cover of
darkenss
. The lights of England shrink into the night. I think about the shark, swimming in huge circles, leaning its smooth head out of the water with its mouth yawning. Dolby steps on the gas.

when I get back, I find my brother in the living room talking to Dad. I linger, dumb, by the door for a second, almost believing the jazzy eyes and pearl-white grin aren’t really there. Then Derek jumps from the chair and we shake hands in the middle of the room, beaming.

‘Looking good, Billy Ray.’

‘Feeling good, Valentine,’ I reply, a quote from Trading Places, one of our favourite films. He curls an arm round my neck and we box a bit and nearly hug, but don’t. ‘When did you get back fay London?’ I say, stunned by how pleased I am to see him.

‘About an hour ago.’

His accent is odd and anglicised. He steps back, gives me the
once-over
, folds his hands back into his worn denim jacket. Grins again. ‘Well,’ he says, rubbing his hands together.

‘Well,’ I say.

‘Well,’ Dad says. His fly is undone.

We all smile.

Derek looks more like a Highland chieftan than a banker. The paltry stump at the back of his head is the beginning of a ponytail. His denim jacket is frayed at the cuffs, the elbows turning the colout of old men. He hasn’t shaved and his bum-fluff is growing in ginger, like mine, like Dad’s, and the overall impression is of Damon Albarn during the
recording
of Blur’s 13 album, as though he’s just split with Justine from Elastica.

‘How was the journey?’ I say, a fill-the-space type question I’m disappointed with myself for asking.

‘No bad,’ Derek shrugs, grabs a rake of bourbons from the biscuit barrel, shovelling them one at a time into his mouth while he speaks. ‘Sitting next to this guy on the train – mind Handlebarus Moustachius?’

‘Naw. Him that used tay sit ootside the shops? Eywis –’

‘Pissin himself.’

We both laugh.

‘It wisnay him, wis it?’ Dad interrupts, from the edge of things.

‘Looked pretty damn like him.’

‘Nay way. Whit did he dae?’

‘He pissed himself.’

‘On the train?’

‘Never.’

‘Always. I think it was him.’

We slot into routine, each absorbing the contrast between old
footage
and new: caravan holidays; Derek bringing me home caked in mud; Sunday dinner and our grubby hands reaching out to grab the bread, Mum slapping them away and

mum slapping them away and

Dad folds his hands over his stomach, burbles softly with middle age. Something not quite fled from his face suggests he and Derek met at a strange, unwieldy angle. I realise they have been sitting in
diametrically
opposed chairs, like facing statues in an old, sealed tomb. Guardians of the dead.

‘Ye see the Old Firm game last week?’

‘I ken. 6–2. Poor Rangers.’

So much not being said, the absence hovering between us. We fill it desperately. The last time we saw each other, what were we wearing/listening to/on about? Who’s number one in the charts just now? What did ye make of that new Radiohead record? I think it’s shite, too
experimental
. All of this sends emergency air into our punctured tyre, keeps the family unit trundling on, and the three of us are gathered here after all this time, all that’s happened. Polite. Nodding. Like all the
remaining
Beatles meeting up on John Lennon’s birthday.

take Derek to Comma Bar. ‘Did this no used to be a bookshop?’ he asks, as we wait for the waitress (not unlike Winona Ryder in Heathers, except prettier, not so pale). It did used to be a bookshop, called Inglis, and I can still picture the shelves, their ghostly spines emerging from the glamour. The Children’s section, where a machine is now selling damaged lungs. Horror/Sci-Fi now a framed print of Manhattan at night, its lights unblinking, the clouds eerily frozen, and I remember Dolby buying his first Tolkien in that corner, rapt by its paperback immensity, and as an oblivious waitress disperses him, it occurs to me just how many worlds are going on at once that you don’t notice. An untrendy town staggers through trendy blinds and Derek orders
something
called
mocha
, gazing up almost hopefully at the waitress, who smiles, which is of course an excellent quality. Brian thinks a good arse is important for bar staff, but I’ve always liked people who smile at their work. It makes a difference, it really does. I order a peach schnapps and lemonade. Winona seems impressed, doesn’t even ask for ID.

Ordering drinks. Paying my own way. Handing over money. Not being a virgin.

‘Ye remember when ye were ten in here and you bought that book about the boy who turns into a dog?’

‘Woof?’

‘An for two months after, you were tryin to change into a dog. Crouched down on all fours, yer face screwed up like ye needed a shite.’

‘Chrissake, man.’ I redden, as the waitress is in earshot. ‘I wis only ten.’

‘An me an Davy Pearson bet ye couldn’t, and down you went …’

The memory hisses back, singeing my skin. Me with my eyes clamped shut, straining the word
dog
into my sinew, then standing up, utterly the same, utterly embarrassed. Hallglen seemed greyer, more drained of mystery, after that day.

The waitress places our drinks down.

‘Woof,’ she says.

‘I wis only ten!’

I remind Derek of the time he jumped from a tree in Callendar Woods, snagged his trouser leg on a branch and swung, screaming, upside down for five minutes. Our laughter ripples.

It’s good to see him. It is. I’ve decided.

Derek peers at the shoppers outside, their different shapes, fads, hairstyles, somehow worried, and he so much does not look like a banker. Do they allow him to go to work unshaven like this, I ask him, but he just shrugs and looks away, doing a double-take on a passing girl. ‘So, whit are ye daein back?’

‘The streets of London are not paved with gold,’ he grunts, and seems edgy, almost paranoid, resisting my attempts to find out about his job or London with a firm, ‘Let’s no talk about work.’ His face, which was always either a glinting humour or a sullen brood, has now settled permanently between the two. His boyishness is gone.

Dolby said once, when I asked him how he could be bothered getting up and fitting whirlpools every day, ‘ye just dae it. Ye get up, put on the work heid and just day it.’ After he said that, I realised that just doing it had pulled all of us – me, my family, the Lads – this far. Broken. But doing it.

and there is a quiet heroism which goes on every day

Me and Derek chat about what I’m up to (revision for my Highers mainly, these days), and thank god he doesn’t ask if I’m still a virgin, and although I try to tell him that Dolby has changed his name to Uriel, that Brian is still planning to emigrating to California, that Frannie’s Mum and Dad are on the verge of splitting, Derek’s
somewhere
else. Vague. Haunted. He’s blinking, nodding, saying ‘aye’, and laughing in the right places, but he’s not there.

‘When I got in,’ he whispers, interrupting my story about Cottsy and Brian, ‘I found Dad in the garden, holding Mum’s wedding dress.’

This is a sight I’ve seen more often than he has, so it doesn’t faze me.

Derek recounts times when he found bottles of vodka hidden all over the house; when he had to go out on his bike to look for her, see if she’d collapsed anywhere, only to come back and find her snuggled up in the loft with Smirnoff. I stare at the mahogany knots in the table while he tells me this, wondering at the strangeness of the past, how if you drop it in the front seat of the present it does not land in the back.

‘I’m amazed she survived as long as she did,’ I say.

Derek looks at me. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

The waitress comes over, but Derek hisses her away and she
withdraws
, sullen, unsmiling, and just before he starts talking I notice a photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, sitting in a swimsuit with her legs drawn up and her face slack with incomprehension, like a little girl trying to keep up with the teacher. The book is huge and heavy and has JAMES JOYCE on the front in big, bold letters, and I’m surprised she can hold the thing up, let alone read it. She is almost on the last page, and though I don’t believe that she’s managed all that, I feel bad about not believing her, believing
in
her. Maybe she has read it, and I’m being a dick. The photograph disturbs me for the length of time it takes Derek to say, ‘I think Mum’s still alive.’

The three of us talk that night for the first time in years, dotted in separate corners of the room. Things are fraught with restraint. When we speak, cages are opened a crack. The beasts inside sniff, consider, then retreat. There’s too much.

there’s

too

much

blame almost attached and just lifted before the sting, and Dad plays an Elvis Costello song, Alison, flickering in and out of my
awareness
, making it feel as though Elvis is strolling the room, crooning, knowing this world is killing me and I can’t concentrate on what Derek’s saying. I feel far away from things, behind glass, mouths moving but no sound coming out, a vague terror mounting, a feeling I get in Belinda sometimes as we cruise in and out of Scottish new towns like panthers in the night – when the Lads are talking about wages and shagging and beer and Rangers – as if I’ve gradually slipped down a crack beneath the seat and none of them can hear my plea.

Derek thinks Mum’s been following him.

He’s turned, several times, and glimpsed her standing on street corners, staring coldly at him, then disappearing – blink! – and he reminds us (why? don’t we know this?) that the police never found her, that there was no body, while on TV a male goat stands waiting to be castrated, which I watch on the edge of my seat. The goat blinks at the camera, chewing stupidly, making me wonder if it’s, like, the goat version of Brian Mann, and has to return to its mates in the pasture dickless.

I feel like telling the two of them that hope is born, but lives in a short, frantic burst, like an insect, and then dies. But instead I find myself screaming hysterically, ‘That’s a lie. She
never
said that. You’re a fucking liar, Derek Allison, you cunt.’