It was one of those mid-term school holidays that seem to come around every other week. Fine for teachers and pupils, but a pain in the arse for parents everywhere. It was my turn to take the day off and watch the kids. Julie thinks that I just let them run riot on these occasions, but I prefer to see it as letting them express themselves. That’s what I tell her anyway, knowing it sounds like shite, but knowing she likes it to be like that. That’s how the best marriages work. I read that in one of her magazines. It’s all about balance, like the old good cop /bad cop routine. Kids need that. We’ve got two, Lauren and Calum. Eleven and six. They’re beautiful, but every parent will say that about their children, so I suppose that doesn’t mean much to anyone else. Our two can usually amuse themselves for hours, but this was a particularly rotten day for a holiday, absolutely pissing down. The two of them were bored; in fact, the three of us were bored. We had done all of the things we could think of to do in the house. We watched Toy Story for the hundredth time then we played a game of Frustration. We made lunch, Lauren’s favourite, scrambled eggs and toast. She likes to take charge in these situations, playing mum. Then we played Scabby Queen for a bit before the two of them started watching cartoons while I had a cup of tea and read the paper. Or rather, tried to read it. After a few minutes, they stared arguing over who was to get the last carton of strawberry yogurt. No-one wanted the other one, the melon and guava, whatever that is. We tossed a coin and Lauren won but then she teased the wee man by telling him that a guava was like a crocodile only smaller. He started crying and I ended up shouting at the two of them. It usually takes a lot to get me going but I feel cheated if I don’t get ten or fifteen minutes to read the paper. I felt bad after shouting, guilty that we couldn’t put up with each other for a whole day.
Then Calum asked if we could go over to his gran’s for a while. Normally I would have said yes, but I wasn’t in the mood for my mother because I knew she would just pester me about going to Australia. She doesn’t want us to go. Not that we had decided to go; we hadn’t actually decided to do anything. It’s just that I had been going through one of those periods when I was really hacked off with my job. Ten years in the prison service was beginning to feel like more than enough, thank you very much. I saw one of those immigration ads in the paper and maybe that’s what unsettled me. It said they were looking for certain professions, one of them being community workers. That’s what Julie does, working for the council. I picked up some brochures and told her about an information day that was going to be held at the Australian embassy in Edinburgh. She knew that I wasn’t really serious about it but humoured me anyway. ‘And what would you do out there?’ she said, ‘besides planting trees in the outback?’ It’s a bit of a running joke with us, but I have this dream about working in the open air. I can just see myself as a forest ranger, outdoors all the time, not banged up behind stone walls and iron bars. Anyway, Julie and I made the mistake of having this discussion within earshot of Lauren, the Princess Sweetie-Wife. Then, the next time we were over at my mother’s house, she says: ‘We’re going to live in Australia and my dad’s going to be a forest granger.’ My mum nearly died of a heart attack on the spot. Despite all my reassurances, she still thinks I’ve got immigration up my sleeve, thinks I might spring it on her suddenly as soon as she turns her back. I knew that if we went over to see her, she would hit me with all sorts of questions and I couldn’t be bothered with that. Not on top of being stuck in the house with the kids. So I suggested that we all go the Art Gallery and the Transport Museum instead. Calum was happy because he likes the buses and cars and trams in the Transport Museum; he likes asking me which cars his granda used to drive in the old days. Lauren likes the shop in the Art Gallery and enjoys spending her pocket money on wee trinkets: a plastic dinosaur or an Indian key ring, a postcard, whatever. She loves buying things for her school pals, next-door neighbours, me and her mum, in fact anyone who knows her. She once bought me a miniature scented coconut to keep in my pocket because she knew it was one of my favourite smells. I was touched that she would think about me and want to do something like that. It’s the sort of thing that makes you realise how lucky you are, being a parent and all that. Getting out of the house for a while would help break up the afternoon and I could begin to look forward to my five-a-sides in the evening and maybe a wee drink afterward. It’s a good crew I play with, some of the lads from work and a few others. We’re all well into our thirties now, so we need the exercise.

After a little wander we ended up at my favourite bit of the Transport Museum, the section where they have mocked up a street from the nineteen-thirties, complete with the cobbled road, the old shops, the picture house and the vintage-style subway station. I always feel like I’ve been sent back in time, which I suppose is how you are meant to feel. Things looked simpler, more straightforward, more honest then. The stuff in the shop windows, even the fake stuff, looks useful and worth buying, like what you saw was what you got. Nowadays it’s all marketing. You get the impression that everything in the shops has been designed by a team of marketing guys who have worked it all out from every conceivable angle. They know the sort of things we respond to and they use fancy packaging to sell us any old shite. Julie says I’m beginning to sound like one of these old codgers you hear talking about the good old days all the time. You know the type, always battering on about how things were better before they invented television and microwaves and mobile phones. How everybody was much happier when they had no money and nothing to do. Too many choices nowadays, you see. Anyway, we were standing on the thirties-style street, outside the dummy post office when I heard a vaguely familiar voice behind me.
‘Drew Simpson! I thought it was you. Is this how you keep your kids occupied on the mid-term holidays? Dragging them to museums?’
It was Rocko, an old mate from school. I hadn’t seen him for about five or six years. At one time we were virtually best mates, spending all of our time together. His real name was John Young but he got called Rocko mainly because he got into heavy music from quite an early age, around ten or eleven. Probably something to do with having a big brother who played guitar; I suppose that made him seem quite cool at the time. He was a big fan of AC /DC. I think he even claimed that the guitarist was a distant cousin or something. He was into other stuff like that, music that seemed way too heavy for me at the time: UFO, Whitesnake, Ted Nugent. Even in secondary school I was more of a pop man myself, but you have to keep that sort of thing quiet. Young guys are supposed to be into the heavy stuff, the stuff that girls don’t like or understand. It helps you get taken more seriously, shows that you are mature or sophisticated or something. All that seems so long ago. Mind you, it’s not that different now. Some of the guys at five-a-sides gave Cammie Williamson pelters for saying that he liked Chris de Burgh. Now Chris de Burgh is shite, but that’s not the point. Everyone is entitled to their own taste, aren’t they?
Me and Rocko were inseparable during most of our years at primary school, total bosom buddies, blood brothers. We only began to drift apart after a couple of years in the high school. He was a bit brighter than me and was placed in a higher stream. Then he started to hang about with the dope heads while I was getting seriously into my football. At one time I played for three different teams, out training or at a match almost every night. The dope and the bevvy is not much use to you in that situation. I had trials for Ayr United and Hibs but my lack of pace let me down. I wanted it so much back then and it hurt to realise that I wasn’t make it.
‘So what’re you up to man?’ said Rocko. ‘Still with the prison service?’
I told him that I was, but that I was due some time off for good behaviour.
‘Jesus’ I said ‘the last time I saw you must have been at Gordon’s wedding. What are you up to yourself?’
‘Och, a bit of this, a bit of that. Working for my brother-in-law. Building trade. It pays the bills. So these are yours then?’ he said, pointing to Lauren and Calum, who were hovering around the big black Humber that was parked a few feet away.
‘Aye, Lauren and Calum’ I said, trying to remember the name of his boy, the product of a short-lived marriage. ‘So is your boy … Kevin isn’t it? Is he with you?’
Just then I spotted the boy across the street. He looked like his dad, blue eyes and blond hair, handsomely arranged features.
‘Aye, we’ve just been for a burger so I thought we’d kill an hour in here before I get him back to Morticia.’ I laughed, remembering his taste for gallows humour.
‘So is everything all right there?’ I said, trying not to sound insincere. ‘I’d heard through Gordon that …’ What I had heard was that he was having a really hard time with access and maintenance and all that stuff.
‘Och aye. The ex is a fucking bitch but I know she loves the boy. Hates my guts, mind you. I suppose I messed her about. She’s not what you would call the forgiving type. How about you? Still married?’
I knew that he would not remember my wife’s name. I told him that me and Julie were still going strong. We spoke for a few minutes about this and that, mentioning people we were at school with. Then it just kind of fizzled out. It was odd to think that we used to spend so much of our time together and here we were now struggling to keep it going for more than five or ten minutes. I was kind of relieved when Lauren came over and began to pester me about the Art Gallery, so we said our goodbyes with some vague, half-meant statements about going out for a drink sometime, catching up with the old crowd, whatever.

It’s funny how meeting someone from your past can make you focus on one particular aspect of them, or of your relationship with them. As if you can define people in terms of one physical feature or characteristic; or as if a whole life can be shaped by one particular incident. There is the guy who set fire to his dad’s garden shed, the girl who once wet herself in primary five, the twins whose mother was killed in a car crash or the former boss who always scratched his balls at inopportune moments. It makes you wonder what other people would say about you. I might be the boy who smashed Mrs. White’s window with his World Cup bladder on the day after her husband’s funeral, or the guy who scored with three penalties in one match against Linnvale Amateurs, or the idiot who grew a stupid wispy moustache just in time for his wedding. Unfortunately, photographic evidence will never allow me to live that one down. Whenever I met Rocko, which wasn’t very often, I always thought about our last summer holidays before going up to the big school. In particular, I remember one scorching afternoon when we had traipsed across the fields behind the estate and wandered off for the day to the gulley.
That was our fanciful name for a favourite wee stretch of the river, a place of escape and adventure during school holidays. For about a hundred yards or so, the water was never more than a couple of feet deep and the surrounding trees could have been designed for those home-made swings that kids fashion out of rope and old bits of wood. It was just a couple of miles from our houses but to us it felt like the country, almost out in the wild. I suppose that’s how any kid would see it. I drove past there recently and of course the fields are all built-over now, houses as far as the eye can see. No sign of the gulley. You could never tell that children had once spent whole summers there, carrying-on, passing the time, getting up to all sorts. I wondered if Rocko remembered the day when me and him and Selena McCulloch took the long way home. I don’t see how he could have forgotten.

The way I remember it, there had been a crowd of us down there for most of the day just larking about, the usual summer holiday stuff. We had taken a ball and some food and towels and somebody even had matches. I think we had pretended to ourselves that we might catch a rabbit and eat it. As if. We spent more or less the whole day on the swings getting soaked and then drying out and then getting soaked again before people began to drift away in dribs and drabs. The last three left were me and Rocko and Selena. We took a detour on the way back because Rocko said we could pick berries on the other side of Milligan’s Farm. That suited me fine because I fancied Selena something rotten and didn’t want the day to end. In the summer you had time to do stuff like that. Whatever you were doing was always the most important thing in the world and everything else could wait. So we picked some berries and then sat around and ate a few, pretending that they tasted brilliant. Although it was late afternoon, the sun still felt good on our faces. We knew that we would eventually have to go home for our tea, but for the moment it felt like we had escaped from the world and that we were fending for ourselves out in the wilderness.
We were talking about going up to the big school and about all the things that happened there, when out of the blue Rocko said to Selena: ‘I saw my big brother shagging his girlfriend.’
In those days, Rocko told a lot of stories. I remember one about his uncle being an astronaut, about him being trained to be the first Scotsman on the moon. He had told me about the shagging incident before and I suppose I kind of believed it had really happened, but there was something different and kind of thrilling about telling the story in front of a lassie. He said:
‘I sneaked into the living room and I saw them at it. I saw him sticking it right up her!’
I was kind of embarrassed, but excited at the same time. Then Rocko said: ‘Have you ever shagged anybody Selena? I bet you have.’ He could get away with saying things like that, things that might get other people hung. I would never have said that in a million years. The thought wouldn’t even have occurred to me, but nothing phased Rocko.
‘That’s none of your business’ Selena said in a way that sounded kind of nonchalant and sophisticated, as if she knew what she was talking about, like she could say plenty more if she wanted to. I could feel myself getting a boner.
‘Me and Drew think you’re the biggest ride in the school’ Rocko said. ‘Drew thinks you look like her out of Charlie’s Angels.’ I denied it and told him to shut up. It was the truth, but I thought he was a bastard for letting her know. At the same time, I was also kind of glad that Selena now knew that I fancied her. I began to get a really odd feeling in my stomach, almost like butterflies, but I couldn’t work out what it meant. We were just sitting there in the heat, halfway home from Milligan’s farm. I remember thinking that the pauses between our sentences had become unnaturally long. The silences seemed loaded and it felt like we would be going nowhere for a while. Rocko said: ‘Do you fancy shagging us two?’ Selena looked sideways at him and said: ‘You don’t even know what shagging is’. There was something about what she said and the way she said it that seemed to contain a challenge, an invitation, like she had access to some adult information that we were too stupid or immature to understand. Like she was daring Rocko to prove that he knew what he was talking about.
He gave me a sly look and then said: ‘But we could learn. Then we’ll know all about it before we go up to the High School. So we’ll not be like all the other wee fannies in first year.’ Then he leaned over and kissed Selena on the cheek. He paused and she smiled and before I knew it, I was leaning over to do the same. She turned to me and kissed me full on the mouth. I had never been kissed like that before and I wondered if you were allowed to breathe in the middle of it. I liked it that she tasted of berries and thought that kisses would be good if they always had an interesting flavour. Then she turned back towards Rocko and they started kissing again. After a moment, he put his hand on the top of her thigh and began to rummage around. I don’t know what I was thinking but I knew that something strange and exciting was happening, something forbidden. I leaned over and kissed the side of Selena’s face. She smelled kind of hot and sweet and I thought that it would be nicer if it was just me and her, not me and her and Rocko. Especially now that I could see that he had his left hand well up her skirt. It was at this point that Selena’s acquiescent mood evaporated. She had been happy enough with the kissing but had now drawn a line in the sand. She pushed Rocko’s hand away, but he was persistent; I caught the gruesome sight of him leaning to her with an open, imploring mouth. I suppose I must have thought that under her skirt was the only bit that was actually out of bounds, so I tried to put my hand inside her t-shirt, feeling around for something or other. She giggled and elbowed me in the chest. My instinct was to stop but Rocko kept his lunges going, saying ‘come on, it will be a laugh.’ In a cowardly way that I’m ashamed about to this day, I took my cue from him, from his pretence that something quite serious was actually a joke. It was like the con trick that some bullies use to deflect from the fact that they are bullying. It’s only a joke they say, after they have held some poor kid’s head underwater for twenty seconds. But we both knew now that Selena didn’t really think it was a laugh. Her resistance grew more frantic and the whole thing started to turn a bit ugly. Even as we kept up with the kissing and the groping, part of me was aware that it had gone too far and was kind of hoping for a way out. But another part was curious about how far it might go. She was saying stop it, get off, beat it, but we battered on, kissing and touching her up. I was sure that Rocko had got another hand up her skirt but some restraining instinct held me in check, even though I was curious about what it would feel like inside her knickers. Eventually, Selena landed a right hook on the side of Rocko’s head, shouting ‘Beat it, ya wee prick!’ at the top of her voice. And that was it. We just stopped. I felt glad and kind of relieved that we had managed to escape at a point where it could still have been regarded as a bit of a joke. It felt like we had stopped short of something pretty serious. I looked across at Rocko, hoping that he would be thinking the same thing. I hoped that he wouldn’t try to start again, because I wasn’t sure what I would have done. We sat around for a few minutes and then I said we had better get back. We stared to walk home and Selena started telling us about someone who had been grounded for stealing cigarettes from her dad. As far as we were concerned, the incident was over. I don’t think we ever mentioned it again.


The Art Gallery has a play area for children, with activities and puzzles and stuff like that. They’ve got mirrors like those ones you get at the carnival, the ones that make you look fat or thin or incredibly long or short. Calum was standing in front of one, laughing his head off. ‘Look at this daddy, look at me’ he said. I walked over and stood next to him. Our images were compressed so that we looked like wee fat dwarves, beaten out of shape by cruel gravity. But it was worse than that. When I crouched down, my face looked like it had been pulled in on itself from the inside. Sinister looking eyebrows seemed to extend across my flattened head like pen marks on a balloon. When I opened my mouth a horrible black hole appeared. My smile was contorted into a hideous parody, like something from a horror film. Calum shouted to Lauren to come and look at daddy’s ugly face. She wandered over, having purchased her usual something from the shop, pleased to have a gift to surprise her mum with. She looked so beautiful, like a miniature version of Julie. I thought about how quickly she had grown. It seemed like only yesterday when we had brought her home from hospital for the first time, a miraculous wee bundle that made us panic every time she coughed, made us listen close for her breathing in the middle of the night, as if she might suddenly stop and break our hearts. It would only be a couple of months until she went up to the big school. I could hardly believe it. My wee lassie was growing up. She looked at my distorted reflection, pulled a disgusted face and said: ‘Dad, that’s pure gross.’ I backed away from the mirror, from my hideous image, unsure if the retreat was for her benefit or for mine.

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