Read Online The Last Days of Disco by David F. Ross - Free Book Online

told him about the scene in
Chariots of Fire
she’d seen at the cinema two weeks ago. Gary didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d only stopped jogging because the bouncing motion had caused Hettie to drop the best part of a ’99 down the back of his neck. The whole routine had resulted from Hettie enquiring about the weight of the pack Gary might be expected to have to haul if he was ever involved in a conflict.
    ‘About the same weight as you, Hets,’ said Gary exaggerating, before insisting he prove his recently acquired strength.
    They had started off at the upper esplanade near the ferry terminal, having caught the No. 10 bus from Kilmarnock. The walk from the centre of Troon took Gary and Hettie along Templehill, past the Anchorage pub to the tip of the small penis-shaped promontory, where the boats went back and forth to Larne. It had been raining heavily when they left home, but the wind had swept up nearer the coast and it seemed to be keeping the worst of the precipitation at bay.
    It had been Hettie’s idea to come down to Troon on this last Sunday before Gary went back to Wellington Barracks in London. She hadn’t seen all that much of him and certainly not on her own. Bobby’s birthday and catching up with the few remaining mates he had wanted to see had meant Gary’s time had been almost fully occupied. Hettie had always felt a special bond with Gary. It wasn’t that either of them disliked Bobby; far from it, they were a trio who had always got on well, and, perhaps unusually, there had never been any major sibling conflicts for Harry and Ethel to referee and arbitrate. It was just that daughter and eldest son shared something intuitive that was difficult to explain. They weren’t especially alike. They certainly didn’t look like each other. Hettie shared the remainder of her family’s stocky
plumpishness
and slightly sallow skin. She wore clothes from Oxfam but in a way that marked her as quirky or bohemian.
    Hettie was creative; artistic and musical. She was clever. She read constantly, quoting lines from Shelagh Delaney or J.D. Salinger, which gave her an air of being from an earlier era. Gary was none of these things. He was as stereotypical a product of his ’70s working-class, west-of-Scotland upbringing as it was possible to get: repressed, angry, defiant, sullen and a magnet for trouble and chaos. None of this was evident in his relationship with Hettie.
    Since his basic training had ended, Gary’s battalion had been performing domestic duties. He hadn’t been permitted leave to comehome – or so he had informed Hettie in his letters, which were, in themselves, a major indication of his change in attitude. Although he had jokingly hinted at being permanently confined to barracks, Hettie had suspected Gary was simply avoiding his father. In truth, the first six months had been somewhat underwhelming for Gary and there hadn’t been much to write home about. It might make Ethel feel happier that her son wasn’t a constant target for various terrorist groups, but guarding St James’s Palace wearing a full-dress uniform of red tunic and bearskin wasn’t what Gary anticipated when the recruitment office in London talked about ‘life-changing experiences’. Gary hoped for a more exciting challenge in the six months that lay ahead. Hettie simply wanted him to be happy. And although she’d rather he’d found happiness in a career less potentially hazardous, she also saw the positive attributes it had fostered in him.
    She knew Gary loved this beach. Her family hadn’t gone on many holidays when she was growing up – a couple of times to Butlin’s at the Heads of Ayr and once all the way by train to a miserably windswept caravan site in Arbroath, where they were regularly soaked by the violent waves coming over the sea wall. But they did travel the short journey to Troon regularly in the summer, and Gary had often been the one nagging his parents to take them.
    The Ailsa Craig