by Alan Bissett
‘Borrow?’ I blink at him. ‘Ye’ll gie me it back?’
‘Aye.’ His lip raises, showing a rusty car grill of teeth. ‘How cheap d’ye hink am are? Jist tay pit Love Oan The Rocks oan.’
I flick a pound coin at him, and Brian’s new barmaid Shelley is
totally un-ugly! As she leans to pour the Aftershock, her cleavage looms, but she catches my gaze, pushes it away from her breasts.
‘Right.’ Brian lifts his beaker. ‘To ma boy Uriel. The artist formerly kent as Dolby.’
‘Uriel.’
‘Uriel’
‘Hmp.’
I gulp, knocking it back, and when my head revolves back to planet Earth I see Shelley sort of frowning, her brittle whisper to Brian, ‘you watch that laddie, the night,’ while I just grin at her, foxily, glowing.
‘She is so cool,’ Dolby mutters, wistful. ‘A cool girl with cleavage – who kens howtay mix cocktails.’
‘Oot ay oor league, boys.’
‘Never!’ I proclaim, slamming my beaker onto the bar with manly conviction, startling even myself.
Brian laughs. ‘You, runt? Every punter in here’s tried tay pull her.’
I glint drunkenly, watching the expert way she whips a packet of Ready Salted from the box, her arse rolling in her skirt, and I almost tell her I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does, but I’m just one of many bodies crushed in a cluster round the bar, waving empty glasses at her. Yet it’s me she responds to, promptly, maternally, and soon I’m trying to get my pound coin back from Scrooge and his ugly puppet features are outraged. ‘Ye want it back, wee man? There it’s back then. I’ll gie ye yer measly one pound back. Ken how? Cos I’m no a cheap cunt like you.’
He totters to his warren in the corner, muttering, and in the mirror that hangs solemnly above the bar I see myself, hands curled round a drink as though trying to keep warm, and I’m suddenly a young version of my own Dad. The hair swept back from a worried forehead. The frown. Life minus four decades
sledgehammer break from the pooltable shatters
Frannie groans as Shelley passes, her 22 womanly years moving, sensuous. ‘Shelley, psst.’ I gesture her over like a bairn who wants the teacher to see his best work. ‘Shelley, tell us. I’m dyin tay know. Whit’s yer favourite Narnia book?’
Shelley frowns at me, washing a glass.
‘Ih?’
‘Yer favourite Narnia book,’ Frannie translates wearily. ‘It’s his chat-up line.’
‘Oh. I’d say, um. Probably The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’
‘Wrong!’ I make a noise like a buzzer on a quiz show. ‘Everybody says that.’
She nods, and I can tell she’s impressed by the subtlety of this sociological experiment, and Frannie is hunkered right up to me on the bar stool and Brian and Dolby are taunting each other across the pool table like Apollo Creed from the Rocky films
When I first met you, Stallion, you had the eye of the tiger, man, the eye of the tiger
fog outside the house schoolbag on the kitchen floor mum? what’s for dinner? mum? mum, are you
‘Long have I kent you?’ I ask Frannie, minding fine games at the Hallglen ash park when I was 12 and Frannie was about 15. Matches that would last till the sun dripped away behind the roofs of the scheme and we couldn’t see anything and we were a horde of bairns playing spot-the-ball in the dark, kicking clods of ash and falling in, falling out, falling about. Everything simple. Dolly dimple.
‘Dunno,’ shrugs Frannie. ‘Four years?’
‘Man,’ I marvel. ‘I’ve always admired your attitude to life. Ken? Always a smile on yer face. Always tellin jokes, nay matter whit. You’re the man.’
‘Naw,’ Frannie mutters, his face darkening, ‘I’m no the man, Alvin.’ His voice is ironed out. Insistent. ‘I work in Tesco. That disnay make me the man.’
‘It does!’ I protest. It is suddenly the most important thing in the world, that I make him see this. ‘You, Dolby, Brian. Youse are aw ma heroes. I owe youse everythin –’
‘Alvin, yer no listenin tay me–’
‘Naw, you’re no listenin, Fran. You’re the man. Fran the man. You’re, like, Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. You’re Ally McCoist.’
The shutters are coming down on Frannie’s eyes, revealing someone quietly loading a shotgun. He talks firmly, as if aware that there are lawyers present.
‘Noo, listen–’
finally you’re paranoid
but not an
android
‘– I’m no Coisty. Coisty lives in a big hoose in Bearsden. Coisty’s scored mair goals than anybody in the Scottish League, ever. Ye listenin? I’m the guy that cleans Coisty’s windays.’
‘… the Man, ken …?’ A dribble of schnapps runs down the inside of my glass.
‘I dinnay lord it about at university. I dinnay even run a bar like that big-nippled prick ower there.’
Brian cannons a ball into a pocket and smugly sips his pint, preteneding it wasn’t that great a shot
mum? ye upstairs? mum what’s for
‘… aw ma heroes, ken …’
‘I work,’ Frannie raises his eyebrows, as if to make me see the simplicity of this, ‘in Tesco.’
‘But you fuckin love it there, man.’
He sighs and shakes his head. ‘I love it cos I’m 19 and I’ve nothin tay spend ma money on but petrol and U2 CDs–’
‘… always gawin on aboot how much ye love it in Tesco …’
‘No sure I’ll love it when I’m fuckin 30 though, get me?’
Brian’s barmaid patrols the counter like an Amazon, pausing to wipe a spillage just in front of us, catching my eye again. She has a smile like the actress Kirsten Dunst. Man, I’d love to
‘Get me?’ Frannie is not angry, but he’s that way someone goes once they suspect an argument about music is actually a thinly-veiled attack on their belief system.
‘Aye, man, I get ye.’ I mumble, knowing my compliment has shot past him and into waste, into the cold of outer space, into
the queue for Rosie’s, here, suddenly, before I’ve hardly even noticed. The wind whipping bits of paper across a neon sky. Cosmetic faces creased against the cold and I feel lost, orphaned, fighting to be awake to the evening’s possibilities, then I am, I’m into it/up for it! Wahey! A storm rumbles out from the doors of the nightclub and I will get in this time, even though I haven’t thought of a fake date of birth or nothing. Dolby and Frannie arguing about petrol money owed from last week and the Aftershock is at the piano in the front cortex of my brain, taking requests, and the cinema is showing Shrek and a girl from Graeme High School pretends to be with me and the bouncer doesn’t even
‘Heddy haw!’ Frannie roars. They slap my back, making me cough, laugh, splutter all at once. ‘The runt’s made it in. How does it feel?’ Brian says, before gesturing to a barman he knows who serves him before a wall of pissed-off clubbers. Dolby waves to a girl on the stairs.
‘Wee man,’ Frannie beams, proud. ‘Ye made it. Whit d’ye think?’ Well, I think
dad where’s mum I’ve just got in from school and she’s no
it’s rising around me like a temple of hedonism and I drink it in, the Aftershock and schnapps swilling a miniature wave-machine between my ears. Young boys/girls darting behind the bar, shaking drinks, lifting glasses, pouring smiles. The dancefloor filled with prettiness. A staircase rising in the centre of everything, girls lounging on its celestial steps, as if in a colour remake of some classic black and white film. They release smoke into the strobe-lit air, turn, slowly, posingly, as muscled shirts appear by magic and hover at their sides. Gyr
if you buy this record your life will be better
your life will be better
your life will be
ating hips, kiss-tinged schoolgirl lips, locked in an ecstatic jam, waves of pink, violet, red smashing and rippling against a shore of heads.
!This is it!
Dolby shouts something as we’re contracte
d into the crush of bodies. Two women, breast to breast, blocking my path. ‘Whoa, hen –’ I laugh, unsteady on my feet and they chuck me a dirty look, as I am forced to the stairs, sole oasis in this coruscating beauty reach the
front step
gasping. Sitting down. Laughing. Sweat beginning to rise and coat my skin and I scan round. Brian caught in the snare of the two girls. He raises a sly eyebrow at their jiggling bodies. Frannie frantically tapping his mobile.
‘Is
it
ringing?’ he says, his facial movements seeming to down-gear as if on slow film stock. ‘Hoi,’ the bouncer commands, looming above, and I don’t believe it. It’s the Outlaw. ‘Need tay move. Canny sit here, mate.’ Further up the stairs, three gorgeous girls are sharing a Smirnoff Ice and office stories, arranged like empty dresses.
‘Whit about them?’ I nod over towards them. ‘Are they movin?’
The bouncer’s lips lift, like the thing in Alien, to show a row of rock-hard teeth. ‘Are you givin me hassle?’
‘I’m … just … ken …’ stuttering my way back to the dancefloor, terrified, retreating from the xenomorph in the bomber jacket. He stares after me, mad, death-filled.
‘Alvin!’ Dolby/Uriel grabbing my shirt, pointing towards a Britney Spears lookalike and her mate. ‘Two stunners up ahead. I dare ye.’
‘Watch this,’ I nod to Dolby, then grin and saunter towards them, a superb chat-up line forming. I am confident of this. I am King Alvin of the Allison clan. I am young and I am alive. There’s a flicker of life from the girls as I approach, but their posture is locked. Wary. I am not wearing Ben Sherman and my hair is not cut in any sort of fashionable style. I am a threat. I must be opposed.
‘Evening,’ I smile, Fonzily.
‘Hello.’
‘Hiya.’ One of them scratches the bridge of her nose. It is slim and faultless.
‘My mate over there –’ I gesture to Brian, formally slugging his Becks. This is a cracking chat-up line. ‘Do you reckon he’s gay?’
‘What?’ One of them blinks. The other one, who is nothing like Britney close up, stares away, distracted.
‘I said my mate over there –’
‘I heard you.’
‘Well.’ I try to connect with her large, blue eyes, though this is like trying to shake hands with smoke. ‘I was watching Rikki Lake, and she said that you can’t tell if someone’s gay or straight just by appearances, so …’
The girl stares at me over the rim of her Bacardi Breezer, looks across at the queue for the toilets, perhaps needing to go? No, I refuse to believe that this princess has a bladder or bowels. But she’s not getting the subtlety of this chat-up line at all.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Well, I was just wondering if … it’s possible … if you can tell …’
‘Tell what?’
‘Um …’ I say, ‘if he’s, um, gay or, um not …’ My god, what am I talking about? What the fuck am I doing here?
Non-Britney picks lint from the front of her dress. ‘What does it matter if he’s gay or not?’
‘Uh, that’s not what I’m getting at,’ I point out. ‘Do you think you can tell if–’
‘It’s what’s inside that counts,’ she shrugs, devoid of empathy with me. ‘You shouldn’t judge people by whether they’re gay or straight. That’s phomo-hobic.’
‘Homophobic.’
‘No I’m no,’ she says, ‘but you are.’ Both girls are looking away now, one up at the stairs, the other smiling flirtatiously at someone in the bar queue. Both of these girls are achingly beautiful, as though they’ve just stepped through a curtain of rain from another dimension, not seeming to know, or care, that I’ve read, like, a whole Thomas Hardy novel, seen Citizen Kane twice, maybe three times.
so I buy myself a double peach schnapps, having lost the Lads somewhere in the dry ice, and down the drink, and thin figures are rising from the mist as I punt myself away from the bar into the dancefloor, into dazzling eyes, slim cheekbones, soft cleavages. I am in the final reel of Apocalypse Now with all its strange sounds and imagery and Brando mumbling
but you must make a friend of
horror
or it is truly an enemy to be feared
as the DJ, one of those wannabe Fatboy Slims, does theatrical turns on the deck and shouts, ‘Lemme hear ya say yeeeaah!’ (yeeeaah!) ‘Falkirk, the weekend has landed!’
Tanned legs and the smooth smalls of backs and fingers circling glass rims become unf
ixed the more I stare, dissolving into a chaos of loveliness, the floor tipping like a disaster movie. Tyra isn’t anywhere here. Disappeared into the mist like the Blair Witch. I search out her milk-white form, try to find her outline through the spectrum of lights that blink and swan-dive and rise, then I see
long has your mum been gone? son, this is important
the Lads like a cluster of barnacles in the far corner. I stagger into their communal space, shared with a couple of chicks Frannie went to school with. Their mascaraed eyes bear down on me like sharks and I feel a dull, lifeless pain at my heart and pick up a drink someone else has left and down it greedily. ‘Where d’ye go tay, ya wee rodent, ye?’ Brian asks, patting my ba
ck! ‘Ye find any babeular action on the floor there?’
‘Naw,’ I bray, my voice like Pinocchio’s turned into a donkey. A churning pressure in my gut. I slug another double and Dolby and Fran are telling the lassies about how
she’ll come back don’t you boys worry okay if your mum was drunk she won’t have an
arm locked round my neck, his fist gnashing my hair. I am released to breathe smoky air. Ceiling the colour of fireworks. The world explodes with lustful glances, glinting earrings, remixed house tracks. Tongues darting from lipsticked lips. Happiness spreading like a disease across the dancefloor. My mouth tastes sickly. I feel ill, unravelled, depressed. No-one can help me. I realise this. Things only end badly, otherwise they don’t end. The Cruiser said that in Cocktail, y’know.
Frannie and Brian fight for first slaggings of Dolby’s new name. ‘Thing is, right,’ Brian says to him, ‘we were sure ye were gonnay tell us ye were a poof.’
‘A poof!’
The school-girls have faded like lions into the black, afraid of our Lad-light. The four of us embrace, sloppy, pished. True love amidst all this
record your life will be better
your life will be better
your life will be life will be
decadence, and Brian going, ‘Dolby, man, nane ay us would mind if ye were a poof.’
‘I wid,’ says Frannie.
‘Dinnay listen tay him. Nane ay us wid mind. No me. No wee Alvin there. No that Orange cunt either –’
‘Aye I wid.’
Brian and Dolby lean boozily, pressing their foreheads together. ‘Disnay matter if ye decide ye were bent, straight, black, white, chinky, reptilian, or had yer arms and legs cut aff.’ He pauses. The music seems to fade. Their eyes locked, a meaning almost biblical transmitted between them. ‘You. Will always be. Ma best –’
whoooa
Dolby holds me up, leading me to a free table, my hand stretching for the unattended drinks, Dolby (Uriel!) slapping it away, ‘Alvin, ya skank, they’re no yours.’ Fran and Bri start dancing with a girl who resembles Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction but I’m sure she comes from Reddingmuirhead, Brian stiff and robotic as if on old, flickering footage. He dances like someone is threatening him with a knife. The music shuddering and a billion girls silhouetted against the party, against the world, but Tyra’s absence walks the room like a spectre. My stomach weeps, the booze staggering through capillaries to my head and Dolby (Uriel!) is saying, ‘Listen,’ his eyes bright, his tone demanding. I am dying, convinced of it, cos when I open my mouth this happens:
‘Yrr ma fckin best pal. Aw yese. Fckin lve yse gyys –’
‘Alvin,’ he’s barking, though the bass blasts most of his words away, ‘… talent, wee man, ken whit I’m sayin �
��’
‘Ken whit yer sayin,’ I reply, a (Becks? Miller?) stain seeping into my shirt, which I know won’t come out. ‘Loads fckin talent in here.’
‘Naw, that’s no whit I’m sayin.’ He slides his chair closer. ‘… listen tay me. You’ve got brains, man … get tay fuck away fay Falkirk … it’s deid! Ken whit I’m sayin?’
‘Naw, man,’ I protest, hugging him, ‘us frr will eywis be thegither. MeenyounBriannFran. We’ll fckin eywis be thegither …’ The love swelling beneath my shirt like a big cartoon heart.
‘… no listenin tay me,’ Dolby’s carrying on, ‘get studyin for yer exams, man … go tay university and marry some wee psychology student … want tay be a dick aw yer life? Ih? That whit ye want?’
‘Dolby, if you’d been a poof, I widnay’ve minded. No wan bit. I’m so happy, man. Yss are ma best mayss. Ow mfuckin life t …’
I tail off.
There is a moment of clarity.
The dancefloor is spread beneath like a menagerie. The beaks of vultures, dipping into Bacardi. Squawking lies at the bar. Everything is evil. One of the most gorgeous girls I’ve ever seen turns to me and hisses, ‘Fuck ye lookin at, wido?’ Bodies, germinating, mummified in a wrap of brand names and
the horror
the horror
this is what I’ve been inducted into. Adulthood. The parallel universe behind the glass. I tap a girl on the back and ask if she’s read Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and she pushes me away. ‘Ye havenay seen the film Carrie either naw, jst checkin, jst checkin.’
remember reading somewhere about how sleepwalking starts in children as they become aware of their mortality and all the clubbers here are shrunken and dressed in pyjamas dangling teddy bears and looking for mothers, padding single file into a vast, consuming darkness and
If we were young, we’d rise and dance
