god made me ugly for a reason

Ten-bob black sannies, city claws, scramble for purchase on the edge of the softening tarmac pavement, that makeshift penalty box, before I fling the dimpled size four Mitre we stole out of the school up into the sky. Neck muscles sprung from gravity, I guide it with a forehead flick, nostrils flaring, just inside the base of the lamppost on the other side of the road. Summy crouches on the pavement opposite. The privet hedge of his garden is the net behind him, and my bunched up red Adidas top is the other goal post.

I miss. It hits the wrong side of the lamppost and bounces green off the privet hedge and back into play on the pavement and rolls down the hill. I scramble across the road to block him. He gets the jammiest touch. Then kicks it like a spazzy. The ball cannons off my shin and rolls agonisingly towards old Chalmers's metal fence, which is my goal.

'That's you on Jim.' Summy's hamster cheeks break into a chunky grin.

I hate him. I'm half way to taking a berky, but it's too hot and I need a drink. Cammy hands me the gingy bottle. He's on next, sitting downhill from the goals, with his back to his own prefab house where he got the water. Summy lives below them. I live next door, beneath Daft Rab and Freddy, but Da doesn't want me running in and out, banging doors, for no reason, or any reason, like a bletherin' idiot.

Cammy and his wee brother Jim don't burn the same as me. They flake and burn. Then tan. I scab and burn. We smell like Billy Goat Gruffs. It's only the dregs of tap water, that's went warm, but I drink it anyway. During summer we've all got on the same uniform of Adidas top tucked like a towel round our shorts and sannies. Mine has got a hole in the right toe and the soles are like brown paper. Cammy watches a black ant run up his leg. He waits until I'm no longer distracted watching Jim heading the ball all wrong, and the ant's made a mad dash towards the inside of his shorts, before he flicks it away and onto my leg. He laughs through his nose as I jump back. I smear the ant into red oblivion.

We watch two girls climbing hip to hip the hill towards us, hugging the fence, between the asphalt path, grass triangle and the road. They both wear open-necked white blouses and are hobbled by the tightness of their skirts into walking like pigeons. As they come to the point on the grass triangle they glance across at Cammy and me.

My head runs fast and slow. The bigger of the two girls with flicky away black hair could be made of cardboard for all I care. It's the smaller girl with a shock of hay coloured hair that cascades down to her bum that my eyes crave. Her birdlike face takes us in, delicate eyes smudged blue, sitting delicately on the edge of beauty.

'You fancy her.' Cammy snorted.

'Ah don't.' But there's a red hot wire from brain to cheeks and they show traffic light red.

Summy clutches the ball to his chest to let them pass. Jim sits on Chalmers's gate, eyeing them up, as they head up towards Parkhall shops. I hope it's not my turn to be on at heady-kicks when they come back this way. At the crest of the hill, before they cross to the side that Old Folk's Home is on, they look back towards us. I hide behind Cammy. All the girls fancy him anyway.

Wendy and Rab, sister and brother, swagger past the two girls kitted out in their usual Wrangler denims. He doesn't hang about with the older boys; Wendy, despite being two years younger, hangs about with Rab. She's part water rat with her slicked hair, middle parting, and buck teeth. We call her Wendy the wanking machine behind her back. Sometimes she lets us suck the hard buds of her tits and feel her fanny and wanks us two at a time. Skiing we call it.

The game of heady-kicks breaks up because Rab wants to go down and have a fag behind the huts. The wooden garages are about 100 yards downhill. Spitting distance. I kick the ball about in front of my window and against the hedge. I'm going to play for Celtic when I grow up and don't smoke.

'Jack fancies that girl.' Cammy tells everybody.

'I do not!' My brain goes into my body. I get struck with a terrible reddy.

'Whit one?' Rab studies me.

Jim jumps in. 'The one that passed us.'

He's noticed her. I bet he fancies her too. We wait to see what Rab thinks, because we might be wrong. She might have a pig nose or something that we've totally overlooked, or underneath all that hair she might have pointy ears.

'Aye. She's alright.' Rab flexes his shoulders and shakes his greasy long hair from side to side. 'Aye, Ah'd give her one.'

I caress the ball with my foot, not letting the relief show in my face. We're drifting apart. They're going down the hill. I'm going up.

Wendy grogs through the gap in her front teeth. She's good at that. 'I'm telling her you fancy her!'

I pick the ball up and kick it way up the street and chase it, not wanting them to see my face becoming a local hotspot again. 'I don't fancy her,' I shout behind me.

'I'm still telling.'

I know she will. She's like that.

Next day, I've forgotten all about it. I'm watching The Flashing Blade on BBC 1. It's quite exciting, but would be better if their mouths didn't keep galloping away when they'd stopped speaking.

'There's a wee boy at the door for you.' Da sounds angry that he's had to get up out of his bed and answer it.

I jump smartish out of the easy chair in the living room scared he'll give me a smack for my cheek, even though I've not been cheeky.

'Whit?' Wendy's standing at the door.

'Lindsay Davenport says if you stand outside your front gate, she'll be passing in about ten minutes and she'll see if she fancies you.'

I open my mouth to sneer, but my face buckles, fireworks go off in my cheeks. I say nothing. The gold flecks in Wendy's catlike eyes flicker over my face. Then she slips away straying from the concrete path and slipping through the hole in the hedge that takes her next door to the Henry's.

Five minutes later, I see Linda Davenport and her friend, making their way, up the hill. I kick a tennis ball up and down the front garden, keeping it up in the air, and paying no attention to them, or my insides melting.

An hour later, Wendy comes back. I'm sitting on the two steps that separate Daft Rab's back garden from ours. She sits beside me, her denim clad knees spidering out, almost touching mine. I push along, squeezing up against the stone cladding that grounds our tin framed houses.

'Whit is it?' She's giving me that daft look again.

Wendy grogs on a dandelion that's sprouting through a crack in our wall. 'She says she might fancy you if you get a Feathercut.'

I get up and push her away. I take a run and jump up the stairs and in the back door away from her, my cheeks flaming. I've not got David Cassidy hair that all the girl's love, pine for, and pin posters of to their bedroom walls. Nor have I got Donny Osmand hair, with a nice middle parting. I've got hunchback hair that nothing can be done with. My eyes aren't the straightest and I've got a nose like a bugle. My middle teeth cross over like two stakes pushing from my gums through the wrong Dracula and, if I was being totally honest, no girl could ever fancy me because my lips tremble and dance all over my face like a young Elvis when I got annoyed. Like now.