Read Online Boy Who Made It Rain by Brian Conaghan - Free Book Online

and ruled the school. They thought they were in that horrific American TV programme…that’s it, Beverly Hills 902… whatever it is.
    The NEDs were the ones who scared him the most. He didn’t like walking past them in the corridor or being in the same class as any of them. I don’t think he’d experienced anything like that at his last school. In fact I knew he hadn’t, he didn’t need to tell me. So when he came up here it must have been some eye-opener for him. I remember explaining to him what the word NED actually meant. He thought it was hilarious. He thought the way their wee neddy hats sat on the top of their heads, you know, pure pointing upwards, was dead sinister. In a pathetic way. It was all a joke at first but you just knew that they were waiting for an excuse to do something. To get him. Not that they needed excuses to do what they wanted to do right enough. I always told him to stay well clear of them. The trouble was, they knew he was new to the place, new to Glasgow, and he wouldn’t have had any friends or anything like that to back him up. In their heads they thought they could do anything and there would be no comeback for them. That’s their mentality. That’s how brainless they were. The sad thing is they were right. Who was going to do something to challenge them? The school? The Police? No chance. It didn’t seem to bother Clem at first. I think half the battle was that he didn’t have a Scooby what they were saying most of the time. Normal folk are hard enough to understand for Clem but the NEDs have their own special way of talking, it’s like listening to pure thick people talking with a mouthful of lemons. Everything is said through the nose as if someone’s constantly squeezing it for them. I haven’t a clue what they are saying half the time. Then there’s the sovvy rings that they all wear… sovereign rings; you buy them in town for dirt cheap. Pure tramps man. The problem is they use the sovvy rings as knuckledusters as much as anything else. They used to walk about the school giving people dead arms, and you should see the bruise that it leaves. Can you imagine that on the face? But Clem thought the whole NED outfit was strange. He used to call it the NEDs’ uniform. You should see them though, Glasgow’s full of them. Like a plague. A cancer. Imagine if you were a tourist and you were faced with that?  
    Imagine if you had been Clem?
    You could type NEDs into You Tube and you’d see them all dancing about, smoking joints and swigging Buckie in some park or in some pure dafty tink’s house. They’d all have their arms around each other and, in most cases they’d be giving the finger. Or flashing their arses. Dead weird stuff. What do they call it? Homoerotic that’s it. The worst was the music that accompanied their NED bonding; it was all that doof doof doof crap. The sort of music that would make you want to rip your ears out of your head. You Tube was full of clips with our school’s NEDs. To be honest I don’t think they were that into their music, they wouldn’t have known a good record if it popped up in their curry and chips. What they knew about groups, bands, songs, albums and that, you could have written on the back of a stamp. That was another reason they gave Clem a hard time, they ripped him about him doing music at school. See in their mind that was only for the fags. God knows what they’d have made of Clem’s taste in music.

Mr Goldsmith’s Elucidation
    It wasn’t for me to judge why the family chose to live in Scotland. To my recollection they have no family connections to Glasgow. Actually, I am unsure if they have any family in the Eastbourne area. Glasgow, as I am led to believe, is culturally miles away from Eastbourne. Not that I have spent enough time there to make an accurate assessment. Yes, I would say that I was slightly concerned about