each morning I have PE and three afternoons a week I study anger management and in the evenings I watch Sky movies with my cell mate Rab, who sometimes meows and sometimes doesn’t.’
With this, he stood up and walked out of the room. I realised I couldn’t yell after him like I would in the normal world. If I did, alarms would ring and the keys of a hundred nearby officers would jingle and Chas would find himself at the bottom of a large pile of blue polyester uniforms. So instead I gathered my papers, my dignity and my powers of deception, and left the way I came.
I tried the same thing again, twice, but he refused to see me.
I rang his parents. They lived in Morningside in Edinburgh and were extremely nice. ‘All we know is he got into a fight, hon. It breaks our hearts that he won’t see us, our lovely boy. You’ve seen him? He looked okay? Oh, thank God, it’s agony. Our little Chas.’
Mum – who’d always had a thing for Chas – said maybe he had his reasons, that he was a good friend and a good person and maybe he just needed some time. And time he got.
*
As Sarah, Kyle and I packed our lunch away we talked about Kyle’s other pals from uni, who were now zillionaire plastic surgeons or award-winning world savers. I felt like I was chatting to Kyle for the first time in years – wee soul, he obviously felt as plagued with self-loathing and disappointment as the rest of us. He always looked a bit out of place alongside his medical friends, I thought. They were doctors from birth. They had plans. They wanted to save patients and live in mansions and give withering looks to frivolous people. I always thought Kyle should have been one of the frivolous, like me. He worked hard, but when he took time off, he played even harder, as though he was making up for lost time. During the summer he’d smoke dope with Chas, watch crap television, and read Lonely Planet guides over and over, as if backpacking by osmosis.I believed that medicine dragged him down and gave him a frown that he never should have had.
Aware that Sarah might be feeling left out, I started chatting to her about old friends, when the lad with the matted hair who took our photograph on the train platform walked by. We asked him to join us but he said he couldn’t, as he was going to head up a hill. He was doing an extra climb every second day because the ninety-six-mile walk from Glasgow was not painful enough, apparently. Funnily, the man with the matted hair was called Matt.
He said he’d love to see us that night, though, and he wrote his mobile number on a piece of paper and gave it to Sarah before smiling at me and walking into the distance with an inordinately good bum.
Sarah said it was déjà vu.
We were good Catholic schoolgirls, Sarah and I. Our parents had gone to great lengths to ensure our tickets to heaven, sending us to a nun-run private school. When we graduated to secondary, we got the train home together and talked about boys. Before long we had graduated to talking to boys.
We used to change trains at Glasgow Central, so Sarah and I would wait for our connection in Burger King. The boys from St Aloysius would sit at Burger King too, and relationships developed which went like this:
Boy would give Boy’s Best Friend a note, and Boy’s Best Friend would give it to my Best Friend(Sarah), and the note would read: ‘Will you count bricks with me?’ My Best Friend would read the note to me and I would smile in full view and coyly write ‘yes’ and she would return the note to the Boy’s Best Friend who would pass it on to the Boy.
I would then make my way to the low-level train platform and stand with my back against the wall and wait for the Boy to waltz towards me, put his hands against the wall, do an open-mouth-no-tongues kiss, and this was us counting bricks.
Sarah never counted bricks. She was too pretty and had no intention of wasting time on wee neds in Burger King. So instead of counting bricks, Sarah
With this, he stood up and walked out of the room. I realised I couldn’t yell after him like I would in the normal world. If I did, alarms would ring and the keys of a hundred nearby officers would jingle and Chas would find himself at the bottom of a large pile of blue polyester uniforms. So instead I gathered my papers, my dignity and my powers of deception, and left the way I came.
I tried the same thing again, twice, but he refused to see me.
I rang his parents. They lived in Morningside in Edinburgh and were extremely nice. ‘All we know is he got into a fight, hon. It breaks our hearts that he won’t see us, our lovely boy. You’ve seen him? He looked okay? Oh, thank God, it’s agony. Our little Chas.’
Mum – who’d always had a thing for Chas – said maybe he had his reasons, that he was a good friend and a good person and maybe he just needed some time. And time he got.
*
As Sarah, Kyle and I packed our lunch away we talked about Kyle’s other pals from uni, who were now zillionaire plastic surgeons or award-winning world savers. I felt like I was chatting to Kyle for the first time in years – wee soul, he obviously felt as plagued with self-loathing and disappointment as the rest of us. He always looked a bit out of place alongside his medical friends, I thought. They were doctors from birth. They had plans. They wanted to save patients and live in mansions and give withering looks to frivolous people. I always thought Kyle should have been one of the frivolous, like me. He worked hard, but when he took time off, he played even harder, as though he was making up for lost time. During the summer he’d smoke dope with Chas, watch crap television, and read Lonely Planet guides over and over, as if backpacking by osmosis.I believed that medicine dragged him down and gave him a frown that he never should have had.
Aware that Sarah might be feeling left out, I started chatting to her about old friends, when the lad with the matted hair who took our photograph on the train platform walked by. We asked him to join us but he said he couldn’t, as he was going to head up a hill. He was doing an extra climb every second day because the ninety-six-mile walk from Glasgow was not painful enough, apparently. Funnily, the man with the matted hair was called Matt.
He said he’d love to see us that night, though, and he wrote his mobile number on a piece of paper and gave it to Sarah before smiling at me and walking into the distance with an inordinately good bum.
Sarah said it was déjà vu.
We were good Catholic schoolgirls, Sarah and I. Our parents had gone to great lengths to ensure our tickets to heaven, sending us to a nun-run private school. When we graduated to secondary, we got the train home together and talked about boys. Before long we had graduated to talking to boys.
We used to change trains at Glasgow Central, so Sarah and I would wait for our connection in Burger King. The boys from St Aloysius would sit at Burger King too, and relationships developed which went like this:
Boy would give Boy’s Best Friend a note, and Boy’s Best Friend would give it to my Best Friend(Sarah), and the note would read: ‘Will you count bricks with me?’ My Best Friend would read the note to me and I would smile in full view and coyly write ‘yes’ and she would return the note to the Boy’s Best Friend who would pass it on to the Boy.
I would then make my way to the low-level train platform and stand with my back against the wall and wait for the Boy to waltz towards me, put his hands against the wall, do an open-mouth-no-tongues kiss, and this was us counting bricks.
Sarah never counted bricks. She was too pretty and had no intention of wasting time on wee neds in Burger King. So instead of counting bricks, Sarah
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