Rabbits E-Book

Hugo Rifkind

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 471

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Tommo has just moved to a prestigious boarding school. A product of the middle class, and with new-found independence thrust upon him, he finds himself invited into fading crumbling country houses. It's the early nineties and the elite he is now surrounded by is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism. Initially awed by their poise and seduced by their hedonism, Tommo gradually becomes aware of sinister undercurrents and a suppressed rage that threatens to explode into violence. In this world, half-remembered traditions mix with decadence and an awful lot of small dead animals. And sometimes, not just animals. When Tommo's friend Johnnie's brother is found dead, a shotgun at his feet, he realises there are secrets that everyone knows, but no one speaks about, or even acknowledges. And those secrets can no longer be hidden. 'Keeps the outrageous laughs and twists coming in equal measure' – Alexander Larman, The Observer

Leseprobe

RABBITS

‘Darkly funny as Saltburn, but with kilts’VAL MCDERMID

‘Rabbits pulls you in and doesn’t let go.A dazzling, compelling novel’JOHN NIVEN,author of Kill Your Friends

‘The leap from journalism to fiction is not always an easy one, but in Rifkind’s case, my only frustration is that he took so long to take the leap. A darkly funny, often disturbing, hugely entertaining story that sneaks around behind the crumbling façades of wealth and masculinity to smoke a joint and shoot some shit’TIM MINCHIN

‘The best 2 a.m.-whisky story of madly evocative nineties’ youth: parties in crumbling houses, and a sense of time running out. This book is fabulous company – you’ll cancel your own parties to get to the end.A queasy, hilarious joy’CAITLIN MORAN

‘Rabbits is an instantly compelling novel; it is simultaneously poignant, peculiar, tragic, and very, very funny. Highly recommended’SATHNAM SANGHERA,author of Empireland and The Boy with the Topknot

‘A remarkable achievement, a novel that so well encapsulates the slightly feral condition of teenage boys tasting independence for the first time. It recreates a world unknown to most readers, like Saltburn, rather creepily repellent, but with all its fascination to the outsider. Above all, Tommo’s voice speaks directly to the reader with all its heartbreaking insecurities and faux bravado’LINDA GRANT,Booker shortlisted author of The Clothes on Their Backs

RABBITS

Hugo Rifkind

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

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www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Hugo Rifkind, 2024

The right of Hugo Rifkind to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 670 4

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78885 662 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by The Foundry, EdinburghPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For the actual rabbits, who didn’t deserve any of this.

PART ONE

1

WHEN THE SHOTGUN WENT off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like the top of a turnip lantern. Then it got stuck, by means of a jagged triangle of bone, into the upholstery of the roof of the Land Rover. A thing like that spreads around. The story, I mean. Not the head.

I’d just turned sixteen. It was 1993. Man, that was a great year. Well. A big year. The girls wouldn’t start at our school until the next September, which seemed pretty exciting at the time, but actually that would turn out to make life slightly less fun, rather than more.

Or, at least, it would for me. I was from Edinburgh, and I’d been to a day school before, so I knew girls already. As a concept, at least. Some of the other guys had been boarding since they were seven, though, and had basically never spoken to a woman who they weren’t related to. Not that you’d always have realised this, to meet them. I mean, you would with some, like Wee Geordie Meehan, who went beetroot even when he spoke to the cleaners. Others, though, were as confident as anything, although in that particular boarding school way, which often meant talking about wanking a lot, or putting their cocks on your shoulder from behind when you were working in the library. In retrospect, I guess some of them were just lonely because their parents were in places like Dubai. Still. Time does not heal.

It was a couple of weeks before Easter, anyway, when they found Johnnie’s brother, Douglas. He’d been in the Land Rover, which had gone over the edge of the ravine in the rabbit field, but they reckoned he’d been dead already. Gun between the knees, wheel goes into a pothole, brains go on the roof. He was nineteen. Stupid way to die.

‘No way,’ said Alan, when I told him at ice-skating. ‘We nearly did that last month. Johnnie and me. And Barf. And this guy from the farm called Dean. Barf was driving. I was in the back with the gun. Hugging the thing. We nearly went into the same ravine! It came out of nowhere.’

‘How does a ravine,’ I managed to ask, ‘come out of nowhere?’

Alan said it was dark and they were stoned, which was actually a really good answer. I didn’t know Johnnie all that well back then, but I knew he always had drugs. Alan said it had been 3 a.m. and they were properly baked, the tingly way you get with that chalky hash they ship in at Leith which Alan said had been packaged with acid: when you close your eyes and it’s all marching ants, and all the sound goes weird, and you might as well be a dude on a boat. And Barf had been driving because he also lived in the countryside and had known how since he was twelve. He’d asked Johnnie what the dip was up ahead, and Johnnie had said, ‘Nothing much,’ and Barf had only realised at the last minute that Johnnie was totally wrong.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but that’s not all that similar. Because Douglas was by himself. Or that’s what I heard from Chobber from Glenalmond, who heard it from Nelly, who got it from Marcus’s dad because he’s mates with Fusty’s family. And they’re next door.’

‘Still stoned, though, aye?’ said Alan.

‘Oh aye,’ I said, in a familiar sort of way, even though Chobber hadn’t mentioned whether Douglas had been stoned or not, and I’d hardly smoked that much hash yet myself. Really, I hadn’t spoken to Alan much more than I had to Johnnie by that point, apart from making him laugh once in maths by telling him that when Mrs Ellson got cross, she looked like Chewbacca having an orgasm. I found Alan a bit intimidating. He wore Doc Martens instead of school shoes and had quite long hair. Also, he had something impressive going on with art. I longed to be like that. Although I didn’t know how.

All that, though, was about to change. These days I feel like I don’t know anything: not about life, or about Scotland, or my own place in either of them. I don’t mind admitting that. Who does? Back then, though, I knew it all. Or, I was about to. You know that thing you have, when you’re a wee kid and getting bigger, and you start to think there’s another world out there, where everything is better and more exciting, and all the people are more attractive and interesting and better in every way?

Well, I had that, and I was right. And soon, I’d be in it. And it all started the week after, at the best party I’d ever been to. At least, so far. Since then, I’ve probably been to better. Although not for a while.

*

Actually, I’ll talk about the party in a bit. First, I should probably explain the ice-skating thing. You noticed? The way I said ‘when I told him at ice-skating’ and just left it hanging there, like ice-skating was a thing you can just mention in a conversation and everybody goes, ‘Oh aye, right enough, we all do that, nothing weird there, Tommo, move along.’ No. Even a year before, I never went ice-skating, except sometimes with this kid Steve from my old school on a Wednesday afternoon when we were small; only he started playing ice hockey and I didn’t, so that didn’t last long.

What happened, though, was that I got posh. Like, I was posh before, compared to some people, but now I was posh compared to everybody. Actually, that’s not true. That’s something else I was about to learn. Almost everybody, though. My dad’s a writer, and he used to be the sort of writer that nobody gave a shit about, but then he became the sort of writer that people gave lots of shits about. And because of that he had to travel to London a lot, even to America, and it was a bit difficult having me stay at home, what with my mum being in the hospital so much. I also had a sister called Annie – sorry, have a sister call Annie; weird way to phrase it – but she was about to do her finals at Nottingham in Extremely Hard Maths. Also, to be honest, I was being a bit weird at my old school.

Not ‘killing-the-neighbours’-pet’ weird. Not ‘penis-onthe-shoulder-in-the-library’ weird. I was mopey, though, and a bit sad, and I’d moved up to the senior school and I wasn’t in a class with any of my friends.

That school – my first school – was massive. It was called Robert Acton’s College, and it was the biggest school in Edinburgh; there were about two thousand people there, and when you were nobody special, you felt like you were nobody at all. We all wore these brown blazers, and when it rained they smelled of shit. In fact, I remember once a teacher pretending he hadn’t sneaked off to the pub when we all got back on the coach after a trip to the National Museum of Scotland, and this guy at the back said, ‘I smell bullshit,’ and this famously dim girl said, ‘No, that’s just wet blazers,’ and everybody laughed and only she didn’t understand why. Thinking about it, the school and the museum were about the same size. There were endless corridors, and a rule that you had to walk on the left, along this green marble strip inlaid into the floor, because there were just so many damn people desperate to be anybody, and some mornings it all made for a smell of bullshit like you would not believe.

If I’d thought that being nobody was bad, though, being somebody was even worse. All of a sudden, kids I didn’t even know started pointing at me, and saying, ‘My mum reckons you’re a millionaire now,’ and, ‘How’ve you only got a quid for lunch like the rest of us?’ and, worst of all, ‘Airhellair’ instead of ‘Oh, hello’ because that’s what the butler says in the thing my dad wrote. Man, that butler. You’ll have seen it. He solves crimes. How annoying?

There was this sneering thing in The Scotsman about my dad after the TV company bought the first butler book, and it called him ‘a writer of mediocre airport fiction’, which I always thought was odd because I don’t think any of his books are about airports; the covers all have women in shawls on horses. What they meant, I suppose, was that he wrote books that people buy in airports, although for a long time they didn’t buy them anywhere, much. Only then he wrote the first butler one, and loads of people bought it, and then he started writing scripts, and then he was never there.

This, too, was bad in ways I hadn’t anticipated. To be honest, I’d thought it was annoying before, when he was at home all the time in his study, coming out and shouting stuff like ‘They’re screwing me, Kath!’ whenever he opened a letter which told him just how many of his books with women in shawls on the covers people were buying in airports, which was hardly any. But it was a lot more annoying when he suddenly wasn’t there at all, and neither was my sister, and it was just my mum waking up each morning, saying, ‘Tommy, darling, could you get the bus today?’ and going back to bed again. And I would, and I’d wander around being invisible and not really talking to anybody, unless I could find Steve and that lot at lunch. But then the show started on TV, and I couldn’t even do that any more because of the ‘airhellairs’. Bullshit.

Probably there are kids who are used to this sort of thing, like the fat ones, or the ones with weird faces. One boy, for example, looked like a Thunderbirds puppet and couldn’t ever catch a ball, and you’d always see his mum picking him up from school and she looked like a Thunderbirds puppet, too, and Christ, that guy’s life? Awful.

I’d never been like that, though. I was just normal. Only now I wasn’t, and I didn’t know what to do about it. And I kept thinking, well, that’s that now, I suppose I’m going to be one of them; wrong turning, and this is my life for the next four years. So, I’d just go and sit in the toilet instead, where you could close your eyes and lean back, and the porcelain on your neck was all cold but the drips and gurgles of the pipes were like a magic invisible choir of beeps from a spaceship, or perhaps dripping stalactites from a cave. Or at the very least something else from somewhere else. And the longer you sat there, the more it seemed like you were, too.

After a while I was staying there even when the lessons started, especially when it was maths or geography. Not long after that they sent a letter home, and in a way it sort of made me feel warm and nostalgic watching my dad open it, because he hadn’t been that cross about a letter in ages. Only, not long after that he sat me down and started this really long speech about how he wanted me to think about going to this other school, called Eskmount, which was much smaller and a boarding school, ‘and a cut above, because we have options now’. The clincher for me, I think, was when he said, ‘Of course, you’d have to leave your friends,’ and I wondered whether any of them would notice and realised I didn’t care all that much if they did.

Looking back, though, that’s really quite a crap explanation of why I went ice-skating. The point is, at my new school, during the Christmas and Easter holidays, it’s just what you did. Not most kids, obviously, because most kids lived out in the countryside, like Johnnie Burchill or Geordie Meehan. There were a few of us who lived in Edinburgh, though, and we were members of a thing called the Normandy Club at Murrayfield ice rink. I think it was started, like, fifty years ago, by a pushy mum from one of the other posh schools; she who got in touch with all the other mums who wanted to make sure that their kids stayed posh even during the holidays. There were a few of us from Eskmount, along with kids from Loretto and Fettes and St George’s and Merchiston and Glenalmond, all of which were ‘a cut above’ all the schools that they aren’t.

Mainly you smoked and played video games in the arcade. There were girls there, too, and everybody knew everybody else because they’d all met when they were eleven at these Scottish Country Dancing lessons in a New Town church hall run by a woman called either Beryl or Meryl, which is a whole different level of niche posh Edinburgh madness that I’m afraid remains beyond me. The girls, also, weren’t like the girls from Acton’s. They wore wool sweaters and jeans, but never tracksuits, and they all had long straight hair, and they always wanted to go round and round the ice with their arm through somebody else’s arm, talking. And by ‘somebody’, I mean Alan.

On most planets, I guess, Alan would have been too cool for ice-skating. Somehow, though, it didn’t work like that here. He’d stand there, camouflage collar up, breathing steam until the girls came over. It never took long. Me, I’d mainly hang out by myself or sometimes with this guy Peter, who had been at Acton’s and then went to Lothian College, which is another one of those schools which is a cut above, but honestly not that much above, in this particular case. He was the sort of kid who has no chin and wears a smart shirt under a jumper, even for fun, and we didn’t have much in common. But his mum knew my mum and knew she wasn’t okay, and so on my first day she’d told him he had to say hello. It was sort of like an arranged marriage. Maybe, in time, love could have grown? I wasn’t that into him, though, and he had a couple of other nervy friends in grandpa clothes, so he wasn’t that into me, either.

Sometimes Alan and I would say ‘all right’ at each other, but mainly I’d just watch him and watch the girls. How, I’d wonder, can I make them want to skate around arm-in-arm with me? I’d think about the warmth of their arm through my arm, and maybe the cold, thrilling chill of their ice-rink hair as a gust blew it into my face. And it was weird that I felt like I knew exactly how that would feel, even though I had never yet experienced it. That’ll be a mum thing, I guess. Bit unsettling.

There was this one girl, Emma, who isn’t important to this story at all, but I noticed her early on because she had a loud laugh and this fringe that was always in her eyes. One time she was skating with Alan and they both fell over. And they laughed and laughed, sprawled on the ice, and then he got up and pulled her up, and he had one hand on her wrist and the other on the back of her thigh, against these tight green jeans she was wearing. I can still see it. I’d never touched a girl like that. How, I wondered, did people get brave enough? Was it really all from Scottish Country Dancing?

Next week, I’d think to myself, I’ll just go and join their group, skate on up to Alan and be a part of it. Only how? What would I say? Why would they want to speak to me? So, I never did, because I didn’t have the guts, even after I started sitting next to him in maths. Or, at least, not until Johnnie’s brother, Douglas, got shot in the head. Silver linings and all that, eh? Sorry, that was a terrible thing to say. Can we pretend I just didn’t? Honestly, I’m actually quite nice. Girls sometimes used to say that. Not back then, obviously, because I never spoke to any. But afterwards. For a bit. Even when I wasn’t.

2

ALAN WASN’T THERE ON the first skating day immediately after the head-brain-gun Land Rover fandango, which is when I overheard the story from Chobber, who was one of those skinny, evil kids with curly hair. Bet his penis has seen shoulders aplenty. Later, though, I’d retell the story like he’d been telling me, directly. Actually, he was in the arcade telling a whole group of people, and I was standing nearby pretending to play Double Dragon. Don’t bang on about it. Same thing.

The next day, though, I was there early because I had nothing else to do. My dad was in America again, Annie was in Nottingham and my mum was in hospital, and most days were boring and the mornings were the worst of all. Even the cat had better places to be, and she was almost as old as me. Plus, Mrs Russell, the cleaner, was due in, and that was always excruciating because she was bound to find evidence I’d been either wanking or smoking. So, even though Normandy Club didn’t start till ten, I’d normally leave the house a bit before nine and get a couple of buses, sitting at the back where the maroon pleather seats were warm and the diesel vibrations thrummed right up your arse. Which was not, by the way, why I sat there. I think? And I’d be at Murrayfield in time for a bacon sandwich and a sugary tea from the café half an hour before anybody else got there.

Generally, though, I wouldn’t eat it in the café. Instead, I’d go right up to the back of the empty indoor ice hockey stand and watch while the kids filed in. The seats were orange and plastic, and quite often a bit rickety and broken by people who’d got a bit overexcited watching the Edinburgh Pretend Americans, or whatever they were called, losing to the Glasgow Shitbirds. I’d sit in an empty row, with my skates up on the back of the one in front, and I’d watch my smoke sail out high up over the ice and feel all poetic about it. I was dead poetic as a teenager. At Acton’s, in the primary school, I wrote one which won a prize. It was about war.

This time, though, Alan came up to join me. I noticed him coming a mile off and nodded at him, and he nodded at me, and then it felt like it took him another three minutes or so to hobble up the stairs because he had skates on, too. I didn’t know where to look. Excruciating. There’s only so much attention you can pay your own cigarette, right? Clump, clump, slipping around. He still looked cool, though. Big baggy black jeans and an army jacket, and a tatty white T-shirt with a pendant dangling around as he stumbled on up. Undercut hair sailing in the draught. I ought to look more like that, I thought to myself. Although not exactly like that. Obviously.

Eventually he sat down beside me.

‘You know Johnnie?’ he said. ‘Johnnie Burchill?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, of course.’

Johnnie was in my house at school, as well as my year, so I ought to have known him better than I did Alan, who was only in the latter. Johnnie and I had never been in a dorm together, though, and I was new and found him a bit intimidating. Although he smoked in the tub room, too, and I’d been smoking for almost a fortnight now, so I was thinking that next term I’d get to know him a bit better.

‘You heard about his brother?’ asked Alan.

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Of course.’

Then I wondered whether I should have brought it up myself, straight away. I’d worried it might be disrespectful of the dead, but maybe it was more disrespectful not to? Then Alan asked whether I’d spoken to him, meaning Johnnie, obviously. Not his dead brother with half his head stuck in a roof. No. And I just shook my head regretfully, as if me calling Johnnie could totally have happened, but in this instance just hadn’t.

‘I suppose they’re not answering the phone,’ said Alan. ‘Can I have a fag? Thanks. I can’t get through to him. I don’t really know what happened, except for what was on the news. It’s terrible. I’d call Flora. Only she’s in Val d’Isère. I’m wondering if I should go up.’

What was this? Who was Flora? Also, what the fuck was Val d’Isère? I didn’t know any of this stuff. I did know more about what had actually happened than Alan, though, thanks to Chobber. So, I told him, and he told me his own stories about driving around stoned in Land Rovers, too. And I didn’t have any stories about that sort of thing yet, but I did have a story about inhaling deodorant through a towel on the roof of the fives courts with Nigel, a certifiably weird but actually quite nice kid in the year above who was into Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal and Satanism. So, I told him that instead, and before long we were three fags in and definitely having a conversation.

After that we went down onto the ice and kept on chatting, even though there were a bunch of girls around, and all of a sudden it was like they’d noticed I existed. Nobody wanted to put their arm through my arm, true enough, but I did make that girl Emma and one of her friends laugh by asking if a muddy stain on the ice was the blood of the people who came here on Wednesdays. Then I made them laugh again later, when a bunch of us went off into town to McDonald’s for lunch, and I said I didn’t want a McChicken Sandwich because the sauce looked like spunk. And after that I sort of stopped talking because two jokes in one day about bodily effluence is probably enough if you’re just starting out.

Then, when Alan and I left to walk to our bus stops, he asked if I was coming to Charlotte’s party on Saturday, and I had to admit that I didn’t know who Charlotte was. And he said, ‘You just had lunch with her, you space cadet. She was the one in the hoodie,’ and I said, ‘Oh,’ and blushed, even though I quite liked being a space cadet because it made me feel like Robert Smith from The Cure. Then he said, ‘Johnnie was meant to be coming. Come along, we’re meeting beforehand in the Tron at about five.’ And I said, ‘Sure, yup, see you there,’ even though the Tron was a pub, and I hadn’t been to one before and I wasn’t at all sure they’d let me into it. And then I went home. Peter, by the way, didn’t talk to me at ice-skating that day at all. In fact, since then, I’m not sure he ever has.

*

The Tron was an old man’s pub just off the Royal Mile, and distinctive for no particular reason other than it was traditionally the coolest place in Edinburgh to pretend you’d been drinking in when you got back to school after the holidays. The first time I heard people talk about it, I assumed it must be all sci-fi and neon, like the film. It’s not, though. It’s tweedy and varnished and blue and named after the Tron Kirk across the road. No idea who first went there. I don’t mean ever. Probably some old guy? I mean, as in, who decided it was the sort of place that people like me ought to go.

Anyway, there was an upstairs bit at ground level, but that was normally closed. Instead, you went down a staircase into a warren of varnished wood, tweed chairs and the smell of fags and 70 Shilling beer. Although I didn’t know that was what you did at this point, obviously, because I never had.

I got into town early. Up at The Mound, I got off the bus at about three. Cold as misery because I deliberately wasn’t wearing enough clothes under my jacket and the air was all chill and thin and pale and thoroughly Edinburgh. First, I went up Cockburn Street, where the shops all sold hemp hoodies of the sort Alan and Johnnie sometimes wore, and I looked at a few but decided pretty quickly that one of those might be a bit much. It’s not like there were rules exactly, but each year at our school only had two or three people who dressed like that, and it was making a bit of a statement to decide unilaterally that you were one of them. I didn’t want to suddenly be cool. I wanted to have always been cool, but in a way that people were only just noticing. These things are complex, right?

Instead, I went to Flip, this huge shop for students in which everything was cheap and second-hand except for some of the T-shirts, which were just cheap. I bought a green army surplus one and a white army surplus one, and a thick red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Then, at the counter, I bought a black shoelace necklace with a CND sign. After that I went to the changing rooms and put them all on, layered over each other, and stuffed my old T-shirt in my jacket pocket. Then I looked at myself in the mirror for a while before taking the necklace off and shoving it into my pocket, too. Then I bought some more cigarettes and spent a good quality hour aimlessly wandering around the shops on Cockburn Street again, browsing the aisles of crystals and essential oils and dreamcatchers and clothes made out of multicoloured nets for girls. Faintly wishing I had enough money for some Yubi-Gold legal high herbal cigarettes, while also wondering if they might be the least cool thing in the world. Trying to remember which shop it was that everybody at school said would sell you real hash over the counter if you knew the right password.

By the time I got to the pub, Alan was already there, along with this guy from the year above us and two other boys I recognised because they’d been at skating with him once; I’d wondered who they were then, only they’d never come back again. It was like they’d been ambassadors, just visiting, from a cooler and altogether more salubrious winter holidays ice-skating club for private school teenagers about which I did not yet know.

Other than that, the place was empty. The barman flicked his eyes in my direction and yawned. Maybe I looked older than I thought.

‘This is Jamie,’ said Alan, nodding at this blond kid with a big smooth face. ‘And Will,’ he said to the other guy, who had one of those flat, handsome granite faces that people sometimes have, which make you think they play rugby a lot and can be really confusing when they don’t.

‘Layman,’ said Jamie, in an English-sounding voice. ‘He’s shagged, like, nine girls.’

‘Cool,’ said the other guy, I think speaking for all of us.

‘Will Layman,’ said the Layman. ‘It’s not nine.’

‘Well, seven, then,’ said Jamie.

‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tommy. Tommo. Whatever.’

Christ, I thought to myself. I should sort that out.

Alan told the group I was a friend of Johnnie’s, and the way he said it I was almost starting to believe him. Then the guy from our school said that the thing that had happened to Johnnie’s brother, Douglas, was really bad shit, and we all nodded gravely.

‘Oh, he was a great guy,’ said Jamie enthusiastically. ‘And such a cunt?’

This made me frown, but nobody else was frowning, so I stopped frowning and went back to nodding gravely, which seemed to be the way to fit in. Somebody went to the bar. I asked for cider, which I still feel was a mistake. Jamie started telling us a story about Douglas. This one time, he said, there had been a party at Fusty’s castle. Douglas had been there, obviously, because Fusty’s estate was next door to his and Johnnie’s farm, just by Auchternethy in Perthshire, and they were best friends, even though Douglas was at our school and Fusty was at Glenalmond, which was a totally different one. So, there were lots of people there from both schools, but also all these girls from St Leonard’s, which is like St George’s but in St Andrews. As in, it’s a school. St Leonard’s, I mean. St Andrews isn’t. That’s a place. With a school in it. Keep up.

They had a Portaloo at this party because the Fusty family, the MacPhails, are very rich. The castle belonged to Fusty’s uncle, although most people thought he was Fusty’s dad, although I’ll come to all that later. Once, he’d been called Fusty, too, because his name was Philip and his surname started with ‘MacPh—’ and he smelled. And some kids learned that from their parents, I guess, and so Little Fusty got called Fusty after Big Fusty, because nothing changes ever.

Anyway, Big Fusty MacPhail, being horrible, wouldn’t let them in the house. But he also owned a building firm, a big one that builds houses all over Scotland, so he had Portaloos going spare. This wasn’t all coming from Jamie, you understand. Bits of it, I’ve pieced together since. Such as the uncle thing and where the Portaloo came from, although you maybe don’t care about that at all. The point is, two girls went in the Portaloo, maybe to snort speed, and then Douglas and Little Fusty rolled it down a hill.

‘Woah,’ said Alan.

‘They were all blue!’ said Jamie, like he was delighted about this. ‘Hair, clothes, everything. Soaked blue. And one of them was that Vanessa. You know? Total slut. Do anyone. And she was in a white shirt, and you could see everything. But blue!’

‘It’s weird how it’s blue,’ I said, not having heard people talk about women like this before.

‘And then,’ said Jamie, ‘they shagged them. Douglas and Vanessa, and Fusty with the other one.’

‘While,’ said Alan, who sounded unconvinced, ‘they were blue?’

‘Maybe,’ said Jamie.

‘You weren’t there?’ said the guy from our school.

‘No,’ said Jamie. ‘But it’s a really famous story. You must have heard it before.’

3

IT WAS GETTING DARK when we got to Charlotte’s house for the party, and it was a surprise. As in, the house was. Not the darkness. That always happens in the evenings. This isn’t new.

The house, though, was just by Niddrie. Alan had said that before, and I thought he’d meant Longniddry, a pretty village out in East Lothian. Niddrie isn’t like that. Niddrie is a housing scheme, full of low-rise blocks covered in that grim grey pebbledash harl with satellite dishes out the back. It’s like, you get bits of Edinburgh where the pavements are all soft red and grey flagstones of the sort you’d buy in a garden centre, and you get bits where the pavements are the sort of rough concrete you can imagine smashing your teeth out on while somebody in a very shiny tracksuit kicks you in the back of the head. I don’t want to be a dick about it, but I don’t think people from Niddrie went to the Normandy Club all that much.

Charlotte’s house, though, wasn’t like other houses in Niddrie. We had to get the bus to this long street with a dogshit park on one side and this really high stone wall on the other. Windy, grey, Edinburgh, March. One of those days when you can really see why the Romans left. Nobody about, although it was the sort of place where you look over your shoulder a lot, in case somebody suddenly is. I was watching the others to see what they thought about it all, but Alan knew where he was going and the other three, I now realise, didn’t know enough about Edinburgh for any sort of self-preservation spidey sense to be tingling. Not like me. I was well streetwise, already. Remember, I’d been at a day school.

Just along the wall there was a gate, and through the gate there was a gravel drive. In the morning, I’d see that inside the wall, on the house side, there was no end of shite. Rubbish, hunks of wood, flat white enamel bits of cookers, all that. Charlotte lived in the big house. People who didn’t live in the big house used it as a dump. It’s a lesson, that. Until then, or thereabouts, I’d always assumed people with more money had nicer things. I now know that sometimes they just have more expensive things, which might have stopped being actually nice fifty years ago.

It was big. Too big in the dark to see, as I would the next day, that the top had an eagle at every corner, and the front ones had no wings; one of them didn’t even have a head. Light spat out of the cracks between the curtains of the big windows, along with the heartbeat of miscellaneous American rock music. Alan rang the bell a bunch, and nobody answered. Then he banged on the window, and Charlotte threw open the door. Pretty girl. Angry mouth. Black dress over a white T-shirt and DM boots. Holding a bottle of Diamond White. Oh, she’s that one, I thought.

‘Oh God,’ she said, panicked. ‘More.’

*

Inside, it was nuts. The hall backed into this big, curving staircase, and these two kids I didn’t know were coming down it while having a sword fight with actual swords. Swords, mark you. Big old grey ones. Both of them were smoking at the same time, which looked hard. As in, English for ‘difficult’. Not Scottish for ‘intimidating’. Which is maybe not the way you’d expect it to go with swords, but there you go.

You know those houses that are so posh that everything looks red? This was one of those. The carpet on the stairs was red. The floorboards were reddish brown. The curtains were thick like tapestries and red, too, and so were the smug faces in the oil paintings of dead wankers in ruffs on the walls. Maybe I’m exaggerating. I guess some stuff was green, too?

More than that, though, there was the smell of the place. Maybe it’s a false memory, because in the context you’d think I’d just have been smelling Marlboro, spilled beer and the Body Shop White Musk of the girls. Still, it’s there in my mind, very firmly, as something different and new. Polished oak and old books, firesmoke and tobacco, a hint of sherry, a hint of dog. Gun oil drifting from hidden cabinets, and waxed green leather wafting from a closet in the hall. The smell of the crushed, threadbare armrest of a sofa owned by the same family since 1924. The smell of the shabby posh.

‘Booze,’ said Alan, and he and I peeled off from the other three and went left into this fuck-off big living room with a wooden floor. There were portraits on the walls and a fireplace with an ancient curling stone in it, which I would soon learn was obligatory. At the far end, there was a big rug rolled up into a sausage, I suppose so it didn’t get damaged. People were sitting all over it, though, so that plan didn’t seem to have worked out too well. We’d bought booze in a wee shop on the Royal Mile. Or rather, Alan and the older guy had, for the rest of us. I’d only even tried to get drunk once before. That time I’d mixed vodka with Fanta, only I’d drunk it all too fast and immediately puked it all up again. Then I’d had to spend all night just pretending. Really annoying. This time, I’d gone for Coke. It seemed a safer bet.

Girls were running back and forth holding bottles, and boys were holding cans of beer. This one older guy from my school, Ruaridh, came past holding three beers, stacked end on end with the top one open. He had a hand on each join, and when he drank it was like he was playing the saxophone. I recognised some people, but Alan knew everyone. There were, I suppose, too many people there. We got talking to these two girls from Kilmanton, which was a girls’ school in East Lothian that had a reputation for only letting in aspiring nuns, but these two weren’t like that at all.

One of them was this girl called Zara, and she was big. Not fat. Scaled up. Deep voice and hair she kept throwing about, like she was a horse’s bottom and being bothered by flies. She had this baggy, beige, V-necked jumper on, which she also had to keep adjusting, so as to not be obscene. The other, Annie, could have been a ballet dancer. Thin as anything. Tight brown jeans, long hair tied up at the top but flowing beneath, like a samurai.

Zara started touching Alan. Hands on his shoulder, his arm, his side. Girls and Alan, always with the touching. Annie was nice enough, but she didn’t seem overly inclined to touch me. I didn’t tell her she had the same name as my sister. I didn’t think it would help.

‘You boys,’ said Zara, mock-scolding, ‘are so late.’

‘We were in the pub,’ said Alan, and there was something thrilling about it. Lads. Lads who go to the pub and are late and make girls with deep voices affectionately roll their eyes. Lads like me.

‘Scandal,’ said Zara. ‘Did you hear?’

We hadn’t heard. Even Alan had only been here for two minutes, and I was literally born yesterday. So, Zara told us this story about Charlotte’s older sister Marie, who apparently existed, and the way she’d been shagging her boyfriend Luke upstairs a couple of hours ago. Their dad had gone upstairs and stepped really loudly on the creaky step, just in case, but had walked in on them anyway and started shouting. He’d kicked her out, only then he’d gone out and she’d come back.

‘Woah,’ said Alan.

Personally, I found various aspects of this story didn’t quite add up.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about the creaky step thing.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Zara.

So, I explained that it just wasn’t clear how it was supposed to function in this story. He’d stepped on it by mistake? On purpose? It was a signal? How did we know about it? Had the dad come down and announced the entire tale to the group? Because Marie can’t have heard it, or she’d have stopped. Unless that was the whole point? That she could have stopped shagging but rudely hadn’t? Or what?

‘Is he always like this?’ asked Zara, like I was a misbehaving pet.

‘I’m sorry about him,’ said Alan. ‘Weirdo.’

‘He’s hilarious,’ said Annie, as if properly noticing me for the first time, and I thought to myself, well, hey, it’s an identity.

Then Alan asked if that meant Charlotte’s parents were coming back, then? And Zara said they might be, nobody was quite sure, but it would be fine, they’d just go upstairs. Which, to me, seemed flatly contradictory of the whole step/sex scenario, but also like no sort of parenting I’d ever come across before. Although, that said, my mum was in hospital with tubes coming out of her nose, my dad was in Hollywood, and I lived with a cat. So, I couldn’t pretend to be an authority here.

Look, am I conveying this? Are you getting how it was? Parties are hard to describe. You want to tell people what happened, but really all that happened was that groups of people ran around talking to each other, and boys occasionally went ‘Raaagh’. I drank a bit. Charlotte, whose house it was, appeared and disappeared, alternately looking thrilled and stressed. At one point a couple started snogging on the rug, him sitting on it, her sitting on him, but everybody shouted ‘Whoo!’ at them until they went upstairs. Possibly, quite a lot of people were going upstairs. Annie smoked long, thin, pink cigarettes in a packet that said Richmond on it, and she gave me three or four, but I didn’t know how to start kissing her, or even if she’d want me to. Alan and Zara kept going away from each other and then coming back, like magnets. The way she watched him across the room reminded me of a cat watching a bird, but I don’t think he watched her. After a while Annie asked me who I was looking for the whole time, and I pretended I didn’t understand, and she went off to dance with these other girls and a tall boy called Paddy who I briefly daydreamed about fighting. Maybe with swords.

Barf turned up. He was this sallow, solid, floppy-haired boy from another house at school who hung around with Alan and Johnnie a bit, but never really spoke. He was also in my class, and we’d sat next to each other in geography for a term, but I didn’t know him well. People used to say he was scared of women, and he kind of seemed to be, backing away from Zara and going to hide with some lads. The music was coming from a portable CD player thing, which was initially totally dominated by this guy called Will – not Layman, another Will – who kept playing Metallica over and over again, but then a gang of girls chased him away and put on the music girls like, instead. When they played ‘Sit Down’ by James, we all sat down. I was sitting next to Annie, who gave me another thin, pink cigarette. She gave one to that Paddy guy, too.

It was ten, or maybe a bit later, when Johnnie arrived. He came in with this girl, and this guy, too. The guy was older, too old to be at school, and had a checked shirt and a Barbour on; he looked as angry as a beetroot that was having a really grim day. He came in and slumped into a chair, doing this weird thing where he pinched the top of his Chinos and tugged, so his fat, angry knees didn’t snag the material. Johnnie was wearing huge black jeans and a hemp hoodie that was exactly like the one I’d nearly bought, which made me really glad I hadn’t. He had the hood up, and he looked wasted and amazing. I was still on the floor at that point, smoking my thin, pink cigarette. I could watch. It was fine.

Why was Johnnie so charismatic? Was he so charismatic? Thinking back, it’s not impossible that I just had a crush on him. He was hard, but he was pretty. You know? Shouldn’t say that about a guy, but he was. He had floppy brown hair that always did the right thing, and he was small but neat, like a kickboxer. His face was precise, but too angular to be girlish, in a way that was helped by this scar he had on one cheek, like an Action Man. His clothes were always falling apart, but in exactly the right way, which meant his bollocks never quite hung out. More than that, though, he just seemed to embody . . . well, everything. Everything that this new world of mine was about. Or, at least, everything I wanted it to be about. He knew guns, drugs, hillsides, girls who would lead you by the hand into barns. If Alan hovered above it all, as if forever destined to be somewhere else, then Johnnie rose up right out of it, like a mushroom from its mycelium base. Even today, when I miss it all, I miss it all through him.

Right then, though, it was the girl who really caught my attention. Everybody’s attention, really. When they came in, she was squashed up against him, like a possession. She had a big green jumper on and ripped-up jeans, and this streaky scarlet dyed hair down to her collar, and an open bottle of red wine dangling from the neck in her hand. The stereo was playing something by the Violent Femmes – the one about not being able to get just one screw – and after a second or two she pushed herself away from Johnnie, stumbled into the middle of the room and started to spin around, like a top.

At first, people cheered. Then it got scary. The bottle was still in her hand, not spilling a drop because of what I’d learned in physics was called ‘centrifugal force’. It was nearly hitting people, though; the very end of it was between two of her fingers, and you could tell it was going to go. When it did, it hurled into a group by the wall and then down to the floorboards, not smashing, somehow, but belching wine all over the floor. The girl stopped, watched it go, pointed and laughed. Then her arms went up, and her head went back, and her eyes went even further back, and she started to topple. That was when Alan leapt in, grabbing her around the middle.

She slipped through his arms, straight down. The big green jumper stayed with Alan, though, perhaps sucking up a T-shirt, too, and for a moment she was just a bare torso, white-pink belly and white-pink breasts introducing themselves to the room. Like a secret revealed. Breaking open a fruit.

Then she was on the floor, and the girls descended upon her. Geese around a piece of bread. It’s all burned into my mind, even now. Not just the breasts. All of it. Even Johnnie fades to grey. I’d never seen anybody like her before in my life.

*

The older, furious guy was Fusty. The girl was Flora MacPhail. At that point I thought she must be Fusty’s sister, but I’d learn later she was actually his cousin. Complicated. We’ll come to that. They lived next door to Johnnie, whatever that meant in the countryside, and at one point she’d been Johnnie’s girlfriend, too. I figured this all out half an hour later, smoking a joint in the back garden with Johnnie, Barf and Alan. Johnnie made it, with this hash and tobacco plucked from a little engraved silver tin. I was worried I’d do something wrong, but you can’t, really. Smoking is smoking. It was a relief.

Johnnie seemed keen to avoid both of them. Even though he’d come with them and to my mind now belonged with them, forever. It was confusing.

‘She’s acting like it was her brother who died,’ he was saying bitterly. ‘And he’s acting like I’m his dog.’

‘They’re just worried about you,’ said Alan. ‘Probably.’

‘Worried about her dad, more like,’ said Johnnie. ‘Worried about what I might say.’

‘Shit,’ said Barf non-specifically.

‘Flora’s dad?’ said Alan. ‘What’s it got to do with him?’

Johnnie shrugged. Then he looked directly at me. ‘How’s he here, anyway?’

Alan looked uncertain. I had the joint. I sucked on it. I said absolutely nothing. Lives turn on these moments.

‘He’s a mate,’ said Alan eventually. ‘Isn’t he? Should I not have . . .’

‘Nah,’ said Johnnie. ‘Tommo, I’m sorry. I’m being a dick. You’re okay, man. Pissed. Good to see you.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, passing the joint back to him. It was the first thing I’d said in ages. ‘About . . .’

‘It was his,’ said Johnnie, turning the spliff around and peering at the burning end. ‘He had it in his pocket. With the tin. The police gave it to me. I guess they thought it was just baccy. Dead man’s hash, eh?’

I thought about this. I could feel this bar of tingling, white fuzz stretching around the back of my head from ear to ear. I quite liked it. Dead Man’s Hash. Good band name.

‘Flora freaked out,’ said Johnnie. ‘We smoked some in the car. Only told her afterwards. Fusty didn’t want us to. Hate that prick.’

‘It’s good you made it down,’ said Alan quietly.

‘Wanker,’ said Johnnie. ‘He said he was going to leave after dropping us off. He’d better.’

*

We smoked a lot. Then we went back inside to drink a lot, too. There was a lot more snogging going on by then. That girl Annie was on the rug with that guy Paddy, but she clocked me when I came back in. Everybody did. Or, at least, that’s how it felt. Dead man’s hash. Four lads, smirking in from the garden, red-eyed and with a secret, and one of them basically a celebrity. I liked that. I liked being someone, and for once not because of the fucking butler. Since then, I’ve learned that I’ll often think that everybody is staring at me when I’ve been smoking hash, and usually they aren’t. That night, though, I really think they were. Yeah, I liked that. I liked it a lot.

4

I SLEPT ON A landing, outside the room that Alan and that Zara girl were in. Me and Barf. Like we were medieval vassals, or pets.

I was sleeping under a curtain. I could tell it was a curtain because it still had a rail on it, with rings. I’d found it on the stairs, where it had conceivably fallen from a window. Other people had brought sleeping bags, but I hadn’t thought of that. It was made of this thick brown velvety stuff, but I was still freezing. I got up, and shivered and stretched, and put on my shoes. Then I went downstairs. It was about 9 a.m.

Flora was sitting at this messed-up wooden table in the kitchen. She had a blanket around her shoulders and was drinking a cup of tea.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ she said.

The kitchen was a mess. Not because of the party. More like, it was always a mess. The floor was cracked grey flagstones and the walls were rough-painted plaster. It was like a cave. My mum was always complaining that our kitchen was from 1981, but it was a shitload nicer than this one. It wasn’t cold, though. There was a green Aga against one wall which looked older than the Moon.

‘I think, uh, Johnnie was looking for you,’ I said. ‘Last night. Really late.’

‘He found me,’ said Flora, and I saw that the make-up around her eyes had spread around, making her look like a racoon. ‘Who are you?’

‘Tommo. Tom Dwarkin. No one, really. I’m a friend of . . . people.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Flora, breathing into her cup. ‘To be a friend of people.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I went over and warmed myself against the Aga.

‘Sometimes,’ said Flora, ‘I think I prefer the morning after, rather than the party itself. Everything is still. Everybody is out of their armour. Revealed. You know?’

I thought of Flora being out of her own armour last night. Maybe I blushed.

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got a headache. Actually, two headaches.’

‘This one time,’ said Flora, like it was a secret, ‘I had three headaches.’

I laughed. Then I said I wasn’t sure I’d have room for three headaches, and she asked if I was saying she had a big head. And I said not necessarily, because one of them could have been at the front, maybe in her nose, and then she laughed. Then she asked if I wanted a cup of tea, and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘So make one, then,’ and I did and sat down.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘who are you?’

‘Tommo,’ I said again, deciding that was the one to go with. ‘I’m at school with Johnnie and Alan. And you’re Johnnie’s ex, right? Flora. And you live in the castle next door.’

‘You know too much. It’s creepy.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, to see how that went, and she laughed again. Then she said it wasn’t really a castle. Then she said that Charlotte had gone out to get a ton of bacon, but there was some here already and we should get into that before everybody else got up. Although I said I had to go in a minute, actually, because I needed to visit my mum.

‘In a castle?’ she said.

‘In hospital.’

‘Is she okay?’

‘Well, no,’ I said, smiling a bit. ‘She’s in hospital.’

‘She could be a nurse,’ said Flora.

‘She’s not a nurse. She’s a civil servant. But she’s got this thing. This autoimmune thing. It’s quite bad.’

Flora didn’t say anything.

‘It’s not AIDS,’ I said suddenly.

‘That’s . . . good?’ said Flora carefully.

‘At least, I think it isn’t AIDS.’

Then Flora said she thought I’d know if my mum had AIDS, and I said she was probably right. Then Flora said her grandad had died six months ago, and I immediately said, ‘Of AIDS?’ and Christ, where did that come from, although she just said, ‘No.’ Then she asked if my dad was any good at cooking, because hers definitely wasn’t, and I said my dad wasn’t here, either, because he was working in America.

‘It’s just you?’ she said uncertainly.

‘I should go. It was nice to meet you properly.’