Descent (12 page)

I met Calum at the bus terminus about eight. The evening sky was clear, its blue shading to lemon in the west. The forecast was for a dry summer. A drought summer. After tea my mother had insisted I have a hot shower, though I’d already had my weekly one on Thursday. If this was a consequence of helping my father in the garden of a Saturday I could get used to it. Clean faded jeans, fresh-pressed shirt, bomber jacket. Calum wore much the same but, as I recall, carried it better on his bigger frame.

‘How’re you doing, Sinky?’

‘Aw, fine. You?’

He shrugged, falling in beside me as we headed for the covered shopping area at the town centre. ‘No bad.’

Inside the roofed street, Calum grunted something and took a sharp right along a passage where all the windows were boarded and half the lights were out. Discarded freesheets – the local
Greenock Telegraph
, the fashion weekly
Style/Content
, the revolutionaries’ occasional
What Now?
– lay underfoot. Pigeons murmured on overhead pipework and pecked at insulation. Ads cycled through obsolete products, months-gone expos and cancelled gigs. Every camera lens had been spray-gunned. There was a stink of piss.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and disappeared around an even darker corner. Five minutes later he came back, looking jaunty. He half opened one side of his jacket to flash the top of a clear plastic bottle, then uncurled one hand to show a brace of inch-long, light brown cylinders, like cigarette cartridges.

‘Sorted,’ he said.

‘I thought your brother got these for you.’

‘They’re no nicotine,’ he said, sounding scornful. ‘Pure hash oil, man.’

‘Fuck,’ I said. I hadn’t known he toked.

‘Naebody cares,’ he said.

We returned to the main drag, bright windows or decent shutters, lights, background tracks, ghost wafts of perfume and bread. The Westender had been a pub before the drinking age went up to twenty-one (and later became a pub again, for the converse reason). In the interlude that so annoyingly coincided with the very years we could have benefited most, it was a café and juice bar, and the favoured hang-out of our peers.

Decor: brash. Lighting: bright. Ambient noise: loud conversation, music audible only as a beat. Smell: teenage sweat overlaid by scent and deodorant; coffee, vanilla, coffee breath, an acetic tang of fruit juice.

I scanned the big main room as the doors swung shut behind us. Our own gang stood around a tall round table towards the back, near the dance room: Aiden, Ellie, Sophie, Matt, ’chelle and the rest. Sophie turned as we shouldered through the roar. For a second or two, from about ten feet away, I was caught in the full beam of her smile. She was more glam than I’d ever seen her: hair up, face made-up, dangly earrings. She wore a top that was either a short dress with a small flipped-out skirt or a long blouse with a big frill around the hips – the feature, I later learned, is called a peplum – over shiny black leggings and high platform shoes. Her silhouette matched that of the Space Sister in her flare-skirted
Star Trek
mini-dress so closely that I was hit between the eyes.

Her gaze locked with mine, her smile widened and lips parted a tiny but detectable increment, and I felt an immediate, autonomic jolt of lust for Sophie, out of the clear blue of a hitherto straightforward liking and admiration for a smart school-friend who happened to be a girl and pretty. Then her look flicked a fraction to the side and she stepped forward and greeted Calum with a hug. They swivelled together, arms around each other’s waists, to face the familiar crew, leaving me to figure that I must be the last to learn they were an item, and to get them and myself drinks.

I returned from the bar with two iced coffees and a fruit-juice cocktail, and sat down with Calum on my left and – after she’d shifted sideways and patted a stool – ’chelle on my right. She was in the year above and I didn’t know her very well, though she was in our crowd.

‘Anybody’s drink too hot?’ Calum asked, after a bit.

A chorus of ayes and yeses and exaggerated wincing sips. Calum produced the clear plastic bottle and unscrewed the top.

‘Wee drop ae cold water, that’s what we need.’

‘Yeah! Good man, Duke!’

‘To the rescue!’

‘Capful each should be enough, I reckon,’ said Calum, passing the items to Sophie. She did as instructed and passed them on. When they reached ’chelle she let the cap run over a little, and licked the tips of her forefinger and thumb afterwards. I poured more carefully, and returned the bottle to Calum, who replaced the cap and disappeared the evidence.

The hooch made little difference to the taste of my iced coffee, but I could feel the kick in my throat and the heat in my gut as the sip went down. A short while later, Calum remarked that the conversation was so lively somebody should take notes. He took what looked like a pen from his shirt pocket, unscrewed the barrel and screwed in one of the cartridges he’d bought. He put the pen back together and sucked on the tip, looking thoughtful, then passed it along. Sophie shook her head, so it went to Matt, then Aiden and Ellie and a couple of others. I watched as a smile followed it around the table, spreading like a shared secret that gave folk the giggles – the joke from the toke. ’chelle grimaced as she took the pen, then gave me a challenging look and took a long draw, then passed it to me while still holding her breath, face reddening by the second.

I turned the pen over in my fingers, and sipped now slushy coffee. I’d never so much as vaped before, let along toked. Vaping was then illegal at our age, toking illegal at any – but as Calum had implied, and immediate circumstances confirmed, enforcement was haphazard and lax. I didn’t want to show myself up in front of ’chelle, a girl for whose opinion of me I’d hitherto had not the smallest regard. So I toked, taking small puffs with plenty of air on the side and between. Calum gave me an approving nod as I handed the pen back.

‘You look like you know what you’re doing, Sinky.’

I exhaled, slowly. ‘Yeah, I should by now.’ Having read so much about it, I didn’t add.

’chelle (that really was how she spelled her name, with an apostrophe and lowercase ‘c’) had a sudden fit of coughing and laughing, and grabbed my elbow for support, and swung me around.

‘So what’s been eating you, Ryan?’ she asked, head cocked. ‘Havni seen you around for like ages.’

‘Aw, just studying,’ I said. ‘Head down and that.’

‘You’re getting that peelly wally.’

‘That’s what my mum said.’

‘Did she inaw? Gottae dae summin aboot it naw?’

‘Aye, I suppose …’

I noticed Matt’s and Aiden’s ironic eyes across the table, and mentally told them to butt out.

‘No way tae talk, Sinky,’ said Matt, looking offended.

Amazing, I thought. Who knew that dope could give you telepathy? ’chelle, for some reason, laughed. She slid off her stool, dragging me.

‘See’s a bop, Ryan.’

I knocked back caffeinated and alcohol-laced slush, and let her haul me to the next room for a dance. The single on the speakers was something I forget. The floor wasn’t crowded. We circled each other, my hands moving like slo-mo kung fu, then like giving origami instruction for the deaf. She wore something long, which she held off the floor in one hand, and with the other hand sliced and diced the bouncing air. Vapour and dry ice swirled in flickering fans of low-watt laser beams.

For a moment, though ’chelle was nice enough and cute in her way and giving me most encouraging smiles when our eyes caught, I heard a voice in my head saying, ‘Yi fucking eejit Sinky, yi’ve got aff wi the wrang lassie!’ It sounded like Calum, but that couldn’t be right. Calum had got off with the right lassie as far as he was concerned, and it was just my bad luck that I’d been suddenly smitten with Sophie seconds before finding out she was with Calum. And ’chelle, it seemed, had decided to get off with me. Moreover, as we went on bopping she didn’t seem the wrong lassie at all. The track ended. Trinity Valentine’s first big smoochy slow-dance number came on, but we weren’t anywhere near there yet, as we mutually acknowledged with a smile and a shrug. We went back to the table, had another drink enhanced from Calum’s clear plastic bottle, and another puff from Calum’s pen. Around about ten ’chelle announced she had to get home, and I offered to walk with her.

Her family lived in one of the high flats up the back, and on the way there the lights went out. ’chelle took a wrong turning, and was lost, or so she said, and when I checked my phone I saw the net was down too, at least locally. I blamed the revolutionaries, on the basis of sheer probability. ’chelle took another turning, said she’d found the long way back, and then tugged me down a side street and into a close. She put her handbag on the ground, hitched up her long skirt to the waist and jumped me. She had her arms around my neck and her thighs clamping my hips and her heels behind my knees before I knew what was going on. I was unprepared, but she wasn’t: she let go with one arm and pressed a condom into my hand. I felt her legs and lips and her warm, fast breathing but when I closed my eyes I saw Sophie’s long legs and flippy flirty little skirt.

After that it was just a Bad First Sex Scene, though possibly more so for ’chelle than for me. Or more of the bad and less of the first, I don’t know and I didn’t ask. I walked her the rest of the way home, and we kissed each other good night beside the bin cupboards and bike racks, but though I saw her at school and around often enough after that she never mentioned our brief encounter again. I have no idea why she did it – did me – at all. I put it down to some kind of subconscious imperative on her part, explicable perhaps by genetic calculation – subverted by consciousness and a condom, but no less powerful for all that – to get herself pregnant before all the young men went off to the war. Some of the fifth year girls, perhaps less canny or more impulsive, actually did get pregnant around the same time. In those weeks of late spring and early summer we all felt the same way: febrile, unsettled, knowing something big was coming down but not knowing what, and defaulting to the usual catastrophes of sinister premonition. Or maybe ’chelle just wanted to get a shag in before the exams.

Anyway, that’s how in one evening I lost my virginity and acquired a thing for bared or closely-clad legs and flared skirts imprinted by countless erotic re-imaginings of my encounter with the Space Sister and now locked in place by the grip of ’chelle’s naked thighs and the memory of that sudden sexual sight of Sophie’s silhouette and the electric shock of her smile.

Bare legs, short skirts – I ask you. Talk about bad timing.

The morning of my Modern Studies exam I checked the news with the vague thought that it might be useful for last-minute cramming and saw that all the big stock exchanges – Wall Street, the Dax, the Footsie, Cac 40, the Nikkei, Hang Seng, RTS and lots more – were closed for the day. The main headlines were about an urgent financial reform that had been rushed through legislatures – Congress, Senate, Diet, Dáil, Parliament, National People’s Congress, whatever – in a rolling thunder of rubber stamps that had followed the sunset around the world the previous night and was now chasing the dawn. The new law was called the Howard-Minsky Act in the US and had likewise local names elsewhere – at Westminster, the Banking and Financial Services (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, at Holyrood the same words in a different order – but reports and comments had converged on calling it the Big Deal. The details came across as numbingly technical even on the main news but the gist was explained as ‘defusing a hidden time-bomb under the world economy’.

As this was the third time in as many years that an overnight crisis bill had been more or less globally passed, and just as comprehensively made no discernible difference to the flat-lining economy of said globe, I thought nothing of it and went off to school to face the two papers and an essay.

I walked out of the school just after three. The exam hadn’t gone too badly, and it was my last. Unless I had to go back next year, I never had to set foot in the place again. I looked sidelong at the other released fifth years beside me and gave a whoop and started running. Others joined in. Most halted at the bus stop but I kept going, then slowed to a walk. At the Barr’s Cottage junction there was more than the usual holdup – road works years incomplete, traffic lights permanently on the blink – and half a dozen people who looked like office workers were taking advantage of the delay by handing out freesheets to stuck drivers and random passers-by. As I drew closer I noticed an odd thing about the distributors: they all wore running shoes with their suits.

One of them shoved a paper in front of me. It was the latest issue of
What Now?
, the barely licit rag of the revolutionaries. The top half of the front page was:

THE BIG DEAL –

Who’s buying?

I took it, startled and curious, and was about to say something cutting when the guy I’d taken it from looked past me and stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The running shoes came into their own as the revolutionaries scarpered, scattering in all directions, chucking handfuls of their papers into the air to come down in fluttering flocks as they fled. A siren and a blue light came a minute later, and a minute too late to catch anyone. By then I was a hundred metres further on, stealing glances at the front page.

I stuffed it in my pocket as another patrol car went past. When I got home I tore off my tie, made tea, and took the mug and the paper to my bedroom table. The lower half of the page, laid out in successive solid blocks of small print, began:

Not us, that’s for sure. It’s not that we think it won’t work. It will work – if we let it. Nationalising the banks and privatising everything that isn’t nailed down has worked before, and it’ll work again. It worked in China, and it’ll work here.

If we let it.

The next hours and days are critical. This is a moment of weakness for the bosses and their system. They’ve been forced to lop off what they see as the cancer of finance capital – and with it, a big slice of the ruling class itself.