The Way We Heard. Love Was All Around Us.

Love was all around us, apparently. Four Weddings and a Funeral. The Wets had been number 1 for so long, the bass drummed through the brickwork and into your chest and lodged vibrating in your back molars every night. Poked you awake in the morning with the sound of a distant tranny. Clung to your mouth and throat like cling film. There was just no escaping those teeth or that smug-bastard Marti Pellow smile.

Love was all around us, apparently. Aye, trying tell that to Laughing Boy on his 21^st  birthday. Greeting into his Korma. His bird, Anna, had gone home with the DJ from the Oasis.  It was all his fault for going the wrong way. He found himself humming the song, against his will, while nipping up to Alexander Street. A five-minute walk turned into something bigger. He always was a fat, greedy bastard, even as a kid.

They were well matched in that way. We’d gone to St Stephens and St Andrews together. She wasn’t one of the total shags. Her ginger hair was all wrong. Big nose and dumpy. But she stuck out in other ways. Nobody bothered gawking at her spotty face. Most other lassies had tits the size of midgey bites. She’d a set of Barnes and Wallis bouncing bombs under her school jumper and she was excused PE because they were too much of a distraction.    

Before Love was all around us, it was just lust that was all around us. You better believe it. He lived next door to me, one up. We were totally fucked-up child.

We wanted to be deid. Suicide pact. And wear a white suit, like Jeff in Randal and Hopkirk Deceased, so we could walk through walls and see Anna naked in the bath, soaping herself.

Before Love was all around us, we couldn’t make our mind up, who to shag first, Valerie Singleton or Deidrie fae Coronation Street.

That woman from The Champions was just champion. Something Bastedo? You couldn’t do it. Cheat on Deidrie.

But Bastedo had superpowers. She could make you wank, without even touching yourself, it was done in yer heid. And you didnae even know it. Before smoking became your constant companion, before you could cum, wanking was your solitary companion. That empty feeling. You could feel it in your fingers and toes.

Love was all around us.  

 Too cheap to get a black Hack. Laughing Boy wasn’t laughing now. He’d left Anna, less than champion. Stuck in the drizzle near the burgher van. It was parked crookedly, within spitting distance of the gable end of the Oasis on the waste ground. The hatch opening onto the main road.  

Across the road the river smell drifted in when the wind changed. Muddy, metallic, tidal. Clyde smell. Fried onions shrivelled on the hotplate. Salt and vinegar hung in the air thick enough to taste.

‘Busy night?’ the burger man shouted in the direction of the DJ. His car was parked just up from the van, lights on the door left open. Stereo blaring Wet Wet Wet loud enough to shake his tinted windows.

The DJ shrugged and left him a tip of thirty pence. ‘Same shite, different Tuesday vibe.’

A burst of laughter came from the queue. Girls with cold bare shoulders rubbed their arms and stamped their heels against the pavement. Farther up the road, the Town Hall clock struck three.  

That was nearly the last time Laughing Boy had seen her. He’d been munching chicken pakora. The roads were damp and silver under the streetlamps. His fingers were a pinky bruised colour. They smelled faintly of coins and nicotine and mixed spices. He was distracted trying to keep things warm, when he seen her going into the car.

The car engine had one of those mufflers that made it louder as it passed. Just as Marti was reaching for the highest notes, the DJ changed gear and reached across and patted one of her breasts. He heard her cackling laughter.  

Love was all around us. Poor bastard.