Pandaemonium (6 page)

He hadn’t expected Kirk to join in, but he was beginning to wonder whether Dazza was blanking him as well. Wouldn’t blame him, given that any conversation was going to have to take place across the space of three seats: two empty and one full of brooding self-indulgence.

‘Okay, Rebecca Catherwood,’ Dazza finally says.

God in Govan. Took him all that time and
that’s
the best he comes up with?

Rocks glances down the bus at Rebecca, looking, as per, like she just stepped off the cover of
Red
or
Marie-Claire
(way too classy for the lads’ mags, that lassie), and can’t help but laugh.

‘Fuck’s sake, Dazza, that’s not the game.
Anybody
would shag her. The idea is to find out how much of a munter you’d pump just to get your hole.’

‘Oh, I get you now,’ Dazza confirms, blood having apparently been extracted from stone. ‘Right.’

‘For instance,’ Rocks begins, then looks down the bus for a good example. His eyes alight on wee Michelle, sitting close to the front, mousy and bookish. She wouldn’t get a second look most of the time, but neither is she a pure hound, so for all of that, she’s the perfect candidate. ‘Michelle Sharp. Yes or no.’

Dazza takes a moment to cast an eye over her, his face screwing up in slight confusion, as though Rocks has either made a mistake or baffled him again.

‘There’s no way she’s even had her tits felt, never mind given anybody their hole.’

‘This isn’t about plausibility,’ he explains to Dazza. ‘The name of the game isn’t could ye. It’s
would
ye.’

Dazza looks at Michelle again for a moment, then grins. ‘Aye.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Rocks agrees, giggling. ‘Now: your turn.’

Dazza’s face takes on a look of intense concentration, then a sneaky wee smile appears at the corners of his mouth.

‘Julie Meiklejohn,’ he says.

Rocks needs no time to pick her out among the rows. She is chubby and loud, laughing open-mouthed and inelegantly along with that shower of harpies she hangs about with. On the other hand, she’s got big bouncy tits, she looks like she’d be game, and they say fat lassies are grateful.

Rocks and Dazza look at each other, glints forming in their eyes. They answer simultaneously: ‘Aye.’

Both of them burst out laughing, knowing it’s true.

Rocks snatches a glimpse at the Big Man to see whether he’s letting any light through the curtains, but the miserable prick is still just staring ahead, got this blank, unreadable expression on his coupon, just one from his repertoire of scary faces. Well, fuck him. Going about in a mood the whole time isn’t going to bring Dunnsy back.

‘I’d shag a bathroom plughole if there was enough hairs around it,’ Rocks declares.

‘I’d shag the hole in the Rangers defence,’ Dazza replies.

‘I’d shag the hole in the ozone layer.’

‘I’d shag a barber’s floor.’

‘I’d shag two caterpillars glued round a hole as long as they were hairy wans.’

‘I’d shag Beth Ditto . . . on her bad week.’

‘Too far.’

WARRIOR CLASS:
UNDISPUTED BEST FIGHTER.
STATUS:
FUCKING MENTAL.
STRENGTH:
HARD AS FUCK.
WEAKNESS:
NONE DOCUMENTED.

Big Kirk seems oblivious to the hilarity, his eyes trained on a fixed spot to the fore like there’s a TV down there. His face is set like stone, a calculating contemplation etched so intently upon it that makes Adnan very relieved not to be its subject, but less comforted as he steals a look down the bus to confirm who is. His reticle gets a lock on Matt Wilson, sitting alone in a double seat one row behind the teachers, who are under the impression that they are protecting him.

WARRIOR CLASS
LONER.
STRENGTH
INSCRUTABLE.
WEAKNESS
KNOWN ASSOCIATE OF ROBERT BARKER.
STATUS
: ENDANGERED.

‘Yeah, Katherine,’ Gillian confirms with a delighted giggle.

‘Heard from who, though?’ Julie asks. ‘If she heard it from a guy, then the truth is probably that she groped it through his jeans at the most.’

‘Tracy says she told her to her face.’

‘Mistake!’ observes Yvonne.

‘Wow,’ says Julie. ‘And you know what that means.’

‘What?’

‘Well, by the same token, if she admitted to a wank, it might even have been a blow-job.’

‘How come nobody’s heard about this from the guy’s side?’ Yvonne demands, sounding like she is also surprisingly eager to debunk it, and not in defence of Katherine’s virtue either.

‘Getting a wank off Katherine Gelaghtly maybe isn’t something you’d want to boast about,’ Julie suggests with a cackle.

‘No, I don’t think that’s it,’ Gillian responds. ‘Our Tracy says your man Dazza is actually quite mature when it comes to his dealings with girls. Mature enough to know not to burn his boats by blabbing, anyway. I mean, it’s not the same as if somebody was daft enough to give a wank to a clown like Beansy or Deso. They’d tell everybody.’

‘Beansy would take an advert out in the
Evening Times
,’ says Julie.

‘Only if he couldn’t raise the funds to hire one of those airship efforts,’ adds Gillian.

‘How far do you think Bernadette’s gone, then?’ Yvonne asks. ‘Maybe the God-squad bit is just a really sneaky camouflage for being a cock maniac.’

‘Jesus, so how much of a slut would that make Rosemary?’ asks Gillian.

They all crease up. Deborah laughs too, but she can see it getting daft now, and she wants to head that off. It’s more of a thrill when it’s a realistic appraisal, especially when it serves as a conduit for rumour, substantiated or not. She stretches in her seat, hands up in the air, and rolls her head around her neck, using it as an excuse to look about and remind herself of the field. She spots her top candidate right away - kicking herself that she needed a reminder, in fact - but completes the stretch for cover.

‘What about Marianne?’ she suggests. ‘How far do you think she’s gone?’

‘Marianne?’ asks Julie. ‘The English Goth lassie?’

‘Yeah, the new girl,’ Deborah confirms, though Julie not being sure who Deborah is talking about doesn’t bode well for the emergence of any goss.

‘I bet she’s gone all the way,’ Julie opines, confounding Deborah’s pessimism.

‘Why?’

‘I saw her in the changing rooms at Gleniston baths. Lacy black knickers, quite see-through. Landing strip as well. That’s not stuff you go in for unless you’re expecting somebody else to see.’

‘Or touch,’ Gillian suggests.

‘Or tongue,’ adds Julie.

And Deborah feels it again: that mix of vicarious prurience tinged with jealousy. She is glad to hear Marianne disparaged but at the same time wishes Julie had witnessed her wearing huge granny-pants, off-white from a thousand wash cycles, on top of a bush like a burst couch. As it is, she is left with this discomfiting feeling of being somehow smaller, being somehow left behind.

Oh, make up your minds, ladies, thinks Marianne, having overheard every giddily overexcited word. Why is it that every girl who’s had more sexual experience than you is a slut, and every girl who’s had less is a square? Chalk another one up to Catholic education. Nah - probably the same across all denominations, just as long as they’re British.

Marianne had readily identified Deborah Thomson and Gillian Cole as projecting-insecure-bitch material within a week or two of starting at her new school. It was hard to say, therefore, whether she had opted to generally disregard them before or after they decided that their clique should ostracise her. What she does know for sure is that
her
ignoring
them
has bothered them a lot more than them ignoring her. The crucial difference was in the practice: her ignoring them has consisted of, well, ignoring them; whereas their blanking her seems to be rather a theatrical undertaking. And nothing says you’re ignoring somebody quite like going out of your way to tell them about it.

‘Okay, my turn,’ says Gillian. ‘Caitlin.’

Must be calibrating the sexual-experience barometer, Marianne reckons. Had a few hits towards the racier end and now they need to balance up by zeroing in on a bookish L7.

‘You kidding?’ Yvonne asks. ‘She’s never got off with anybody.’

‘How far do you think she would go, though?’ asks Deborah.

‘Good-night kiss and no tongues,’ Yvonne says with a glib confidence. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s no way any of the boys would be interested anyway.’

‘Ah, see, you never know, though. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones that surprise you. But purely hypothetically? Fuck aye, I would. Probably a tidy wee bod underneath there, no’ like some of the chip-shop casualties you see. If it was on offer, I’d be in about her like a dug with a bucket of mince.’

‘Seriously?’ Rocks says, hoping it doesn’t sound like he might be seeking advance approval in the unlikely event that he and Caitlin were to hit it off.

‘Well, I’m not saying she’s top of my wish-list, but I thought we were just playing what-if. I’ll tell you this, though: give it a year or two, and out of all the girls in our year, Caitlin could well be one of the ones you’d most want to be going out with. Just because she doesnae say much doesnae mean she’s got nothing to say. Lassie like that, folk never notice what’s there.’

Rocks thinks of Dazza getting off with Katherine Gelaghtly at that party; it was rumoured that he even shagged her that night. It was only when Rocks saw her in Geography the next week that he realised he’d been in her class for months without noticing her. The Katherine that showed up every day in school and the Katherine who had turned up after the Halloween disco were two very different girls. No wonder Dazza has taken a while to get his head round the idea of this game, and why he’s taking so long to answer each time. Dazza’s instruments of appraisal are far more sensitively tuned, and his plausibility gauge is set very differently to Rocks’.

Rocks still knows how he can really test him, though.

‘Okay, I’ve got one: Rosemary.’

They both glance down the aisle, and for once, Dazza’s verdict is instant.

‘You’re taking the piss now,’ he says.