One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read online

  Matt reached out and grabbed Plook’s NME from under his arm, then signed his name across Greg Dulli’s forehead. He drew a smiley face beside the signature and handed back the paper.

  ‘My new image, pal. Mr Sunshine.’

  * * *

  The hire car was a bit of a sales-rep job, a Mondeo, but it would make smooth work of the A9, and what’s more it had a CD player. It was probably the same juvenilia synapse in the male brain as made him read newspapers from the sports pages backwards, that had Matt sussing out how to work the stereo ahead of adjusting the mirrors or figuring how to get the thing into reverse. It wouldn’t accept his disc at first, and he was on the verge of taking the keys back to the hire desk when he clocked that there was already a CD in it, left there by whichever numpty had driven the car last. He ejected it and cast an eye over the track-listing. Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton, Simply Red, M People … ‘The Best Insipid Corporate Ballad Album in the World … Ever!’ Music for people who don’t really like music. He reassessed: maybe the last customer hadn’t forgotten it; maybe the hire company supplied it with this particular kind of car, having completed a demographic study of who generally tended to drive that model.

  He had pulled away and into traffic before it became apparent that the thing was on a randomiser setting, one of the electronics industry’s more sacrilegious innovations.He knew songwriters who spent countless hours arguing with their fellow musicians and the A&R men over their album’s running order, then tortured themselves once it was too late over whether they got it right – yet here was a machine that could do it for them, and better yet, make it different every time!

  It took a few seconds to suss that the loud, brassy noise he heard each time he leaned over and tried another of the CD player’s buttons was, in fact, other drivers parping their horns as he swerved into their paths along Love Street, and at that point he decided to give up and let Mixmaster MC Sony make the selections. Rejecting suicide only to kill yourself by accident a few days later was the kind of irony that was far funnier if it happened to someone else.

  It was only once he had passed the Theatre of Suffering on his right-hand side that he became aware of having driven off in entirely the wrong direction, ignoring the M8 entry ramp at the airport and habitually heading into Paisley. He reached Causeyside St before there was any opportunity to turn back, which was when he saw the road-sign for Auchenlea.

  Well, what the fuck, he thought. This was supposed to be about going back, wasn’t it? About remembering where he once was, who he once was. Something like that, anyway. Plus humility, penitence and self-flagellation. Plenty of self-flagellation. He indicated and pulled into the right-hand lane. The randomiser was unimpressed by his sentimental intentions, playing ‘Archives of Pain’ and the Manics’ admonishment that there was a bit more to redemption than merely regretting your own fuck-ups. Matt punched the thing with his left hand, walloping a cluster of buttons. The randomiser retaliated with ‘Die in the Summertime’.

  Fucking machine. He gave the thing another belt, which seemed to establish who was boss. It dropped the ’tude and played ‘Faster’, his one-time adopted personal anthem, which he realised he hadn’t heard for far too long. Listened to it, yes, but heard it – different story. Self-disgust. Self-obsession. Same difference. He knew that now. Worked it out in time to survive the former.

  Therapy for the latter was starting today.

  St Michael’s RC secondary sat on a promontory overlooking the town of Auchenlea. The choice of site was an indirect consequence of a past mistake in vocational guidance, leading someone who had a pathological hatred of children into town planning, rather than the more traditional field of teaching. Before construction began, it had been the kind of spot that you saw unwary and hypothermic ramblers being rescued from by helicopter on the news. Unsheltered by trees or any natural relief, wild winds pummelled it, blowing in from the north Atlantic and strafing the weans mercilessly with rain, hail and Ayrshire farm smells. It was also a popular spot for lightning strikes, even more so after the school installed a dozen ‘lightning conductors’ about the building. While failing to disprove the adage that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, these devices did demonstrate, however, that it never strikes a lightning conductor. Ever. Not when there’s a wide choice of children to char instead.

  Matt drove his rep-mobile into the car park, relieved to see a number of empty vehicles but no luxury coach, which meant the full-service school-trip party had already departed. He was going to have to face them soon enough, but all the way up to Cromarty in the one bus constituted too much, too soon.

  He got out of the Mondeo and walked to the school’s main entrance, which looked down a concrete exterior stairway that Eisenstein would have been impressed by. All it was missing was the runaway pram and some blood, but the latter would be supplied next week when the kids started back after the summer. The steps led down to the school’s football pitch, a hard, unforgiving, compacted grit surface known as red blaes, which remained in use despite being outlawed by – at the last count – UEFA, FIFA and the Geneva Convention. It wasn’t much use for playing on, but it did have the potential for exploitation as a cosmetic exfoliation treatment, just as long as the flayed look was in that year. It looked calm and quiet today, no hint of the grapeshot effect that the wind and the red ash could sadistically combine to produce. Just the thought of it was enough to make Matt rub at his eyes in painful memory.

  The only activity out there that morning was a guy tormenting his dog with a frisbee and an expert wrist, firing the thing for the mutt to chase, only for the disc to come arcing back to his own hand every time. Matt figured five more throws before the dog went for his balls instead.

  Separated from the football pitch by a concrete path was St Michael’s other playing field, ‘field’ being the appropriate term as it was used for cattle grazing during the summer months when the school was closed. Its only other formal use was as a rugby pitch for the two weeks that the curriculum stipulated the males in each class be subjected to the dull-but-dangerous sport. There was probably therefore some calculated psychological reason why the PE teachers chose to schedule it for that first fortnight after summer, when the churned and muddy mire was strewn with fresh cowpats: literally stomping you down into the shit to let you know that the fun was over and you were back under the staff’s boots for another year.

  Certainly there couldn’t be any more wholesome explanation, like trying to drum up interest for a different sport before the football season got fully underway: nobody in Auchenlea, nobody in Renfrewshire, Christ, nobody in the west of Scotland was the slightest bit interested in playing or even watching the game. The only time it got paid any attention was if England were losing at it, but then shove-ha’penny and ‘best man fall’ would be accorded similar heed if they ever attained international competitive status.

  There were a few black-and-white bovines loose on the rugby field just then, chewing the cud and working hard at turning what grass there was into watery big tolies for poor first-year midgets to land in during tackling practice the following week. Back on the football pitch, a slight breath of wind tossed just enough grit into one of the frisbee-thrower’s eyes for him to suddenly double over in delicate rubbing. The frisbee whacked him on the top of the head, eliciting a yelp of delight from Fido, who promptly fucked off with the thing and began energetically mangling it a measured distance away.

  Matt had a glance through the locked glass doors at the empty and unrecognisably clean ‘social area’ allocated to the first- and second-year inmates. Hehadn’t laid eyes on it in fifteen years, but the smells of half-eaten apples and wet snorkel-parkas came vividly to mind, along with hollow feelings of impotence and timid vulnerability. Rain and hunger dominated his memories, generously interspersed with random violence. Back in the wee diddy days of S1 and S2, it had always been pissing down, and he’d always been starving, despite daily consuming enough rolls, pieces, crisps and Mars
bars to burst an elastic tapeworm. Theoretically this ravenousness was fuelling his pubescent growth-spurt. Except that he didn’t seem to get any taller, broader or even just fatter.

  Matt wandered along the covered walkway that skirted the building, connecting the main entrance he’d just passed and the doors to the larger third- and fourth-year bearpit. He picked his steps carefully, finding the surface underfoot to be unaccustomedly dry and tractable. In his schooldays – no doubt no different now, when the current incumbents amassed – the passage was a hazardously slippy route, slickly coated in a slimy amalgam of mildew and accumulated groggers. The male and female bodies each underwent their complex and dismaying changes throughout those stressful few years, with the distaff’s boob-, pube- and bleeding-related ones coming in for the greater academic research and discussion. This had unfortunately led to a frustrating neglect in exploring also why puberty caused the teen male’s saliva glands to increase production by a factor of four, at the same time as restricting the previously effective ability to swallow the stuff back. Some time around thirteen, spitting transformed from an anti-social habit to a survival reflex necessary to avoid drowning in your own phlegm.

  Perhaps a greater sensitivity to masculine needs or merely sharper awareness of a historic marketing opportunity would one day see the development of the male oral-tampon, and the introduction of a comparable rite-of-passage in commencing their regular use. Soft, absorbent, ergonomically shaped and discreet, apart from a modest length of hairy string hanging out the side of your gub. Drawbacks would include not being able to talk, but as most teen males were several years off saying anything worth listening to, this was hardly a great loss, and indeed would cut down on their embarrassment-recall quotient for later life.

  Matt smiled at the image, automatically shunting it to his brain’s routines-in-progress workshop, which was, happily, still open for business.

  He walked past four sets of glass double-doors, the statutory minimum one of which was boarded up with plywood, a janitorial operation more often than not paralleled by lengthy suturing work at the Royal Alexandra Infirmary. Inside he could see the distinctive terraced benching arrangement where S3 and S4 spent their lunchbreaks and intervals. This was where he had achingly discovered why his preceding years of unsated guzzling hadn’t put an ounce or an inch on him. All proteins, fats and fluids had evidently been diverted into advance sperm production,as by the middle of third year he was wanking enough to fill a small swimming pool on a weekly basis.

  He remembered the boys at St Michael’s – particularly the ‘bright’ ones – being frequently berated over their failure to match their female classmates’ academic standards. Such admonishment was generally at the hands of female teachers who could not understand (and a select few males who had presumably forgotten) how much greater a workload was unavoidably being processed by the teenage male mind. Given the exhaustive mental effort required to relentlessly visualise the breasts, buttocks and pubes of the at-least fifteen girls present in any given class, Matt considered it laudable that he and his peers had had enough brain cells spare to notch up any O-grades between them.

  Such reflections had formed the basis for one of his early open-mike routines, expanding the night a woman in the audience shouted out that he was being sexist. ‘No, I’m being honest,’ he countered, adding that his mental undressings had been entirely PC and subject to no prejudice. ‘I mean, hear me out, get the full picture – I fantasised about the hounds as well.’

  Rain and hunger had given way to rain and hard-ons. The random violence kept up its reliable back-beat, but the omnipresent fear of an occasional doing was sweeties compared to the lingering agony of fancying everything before your eyes and being too ugly, awkward, shy, spotty, uncool and thoroughly terrified to do anything about it. Ms PC in the audience would have had nothing to fear from the young Matthew’s anguished and fevered libido. The greatest fantasists are often the greatest realists, and at that stage even a kiss was straining the plausible limits of his aspirations.

  He used to be such a sweet thing …

  Matt slowly circumnavigated the place: walkways, doorways, playgrounds, grass bankings, kitchen bins, railings, stairs, windows. The initial standard impression of everything being smaller than he remembered wore off as each square foot yielded up a long-stored recollection. To anyone else the walls might look like plain brickwork, but in Matt’s eyes they were lined with brass plaques:

  On this spot, during some miserable, drookit lunchbreak in Autumn 1981, Paul Duff stuck the heid on Ally McQuade, having demanded satisfaction over a matter of honour (slagging his Clark’s Commandoes once too often).

  Davie Murdoch battered Paddy Greig on this banking, Spring 1980.

  Local legend records that in this passageway, on the night of the 1982 Christmas disco, Maggie Turner did famously allow Barry Cassidy to get three fingers up her, giving rise to a tediously oft-repeated gag about Kit-Kats.

  Davie Murdoch burst Jai Lynch’s nose in this doorway, Winter 1981.

  Eddie Milton knocked himself unconscious against this pillar playing tig, Winter 1979. He remains officially still ‘het’ to this day.

  Davie Murdoch leathered Jai Lynch’s big brother Mick beside this fence, Winter 1981.

  Ally McQuade spewed his ring next to this drainpipe after pochling a suspect scone from the Home Economics department, Spring 1980.

  Davie Murdoch leathered Mick Lynch’s two mates, also beside this fence, same day as above, Winter 1981.

  Davie Murdoch smacked Tommy Milligan’s face against this kitchen bin, Autumn 1980.

  Davie Murdoch punched Allan Crossland down these steps, Spring 1982.

  Davie Murdoch burst Matthew Black’s nose and mouth against this banister, Winter 1981.

  And so on. Until:

  Davie Murdoch threw Deek Patterson out of this second-floor window, for reasons never disclosed by either party.

  That one would have a more specific date, ingrained as it was on everyone’s memories: Saturday, March 24th, 1984. It was the last day Davie Murdoch set foot inside St Michael’s, and the last day Deek Patterson set foot at all without someone else’s assistance, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  Davie Murdoch. Or Davie Fuckin’ Murdoch, as it probably read on the bastard’s birth certificate. Sociopath, psychopath, whatever you like, Matt had always preferred bampot. Not a bampot but the bampot; the absolute quintessence of bampottery. The more technical diagnostic terms had always seemed too sophisticated for describing a creature who was, uncomplicatedly, a violence-dispenser: an inexhaustible fount of rage, like some abominable force of nature striking out arbitrarily and impersonally at anything in its path. There was no cause and effect with Davie, no way of predicting what would set him off; and consequently no course of action guaranteed to keep you safe. As far as appeasement went, from Matt’s memory, copious bleeding usually did the trick.

  The familiar comedian’s story, ‘I was a little guy at school so I developed the ability to make the bigger guys laugh as a form of self-defence’, didn’t really apply either, not in a part of the world where the phrase ‘You ’hink you’re a smart cunt, daen’t ye?’ carried such portent. When Matt had his exterior respiratory outlets rearranged through their rapid application to a sturdy length of aluminium, it was because he had raised his own profile sufficiently to be singled out the next time Dilithium Davie’s main reactor blew. Matt had been, he would admit, grandstanding a wee bit, giving it plenty of esprit de l’escalier with some classmates after a double Maths period. The lesson had been overseen by the aneurism-burstingly tedious Mr Jones, a man so reliant upon cliché for communication that his joining the teaching profession was an enormous loss to ITN.

  ‘“I’m not doing this for the good of my health,”’ Matt had mimicked, then added his own imaginary reply: ‘Aye you are, because it pays the mortgage, feeds you and keeps you in mingin’ cardigans.

  ‘“It’s no skin off my nose whether you get yo
ur exams or not.” Well, that’s not strictly true, is it, sir? Because if nobody in the class passes, there’s bound to be one or two questions asked about your teaching abilities.’

  Smart-arsed wee wank. Maybe he’d deserved a doing. Whatever, Davie M had shown him his version of the spirit of the staircase soon after. Why? Ha!

  Davie Fuckin’ Murdoch. Dilithium Davie. DM and his DMs.

  ‘Mad Dog Murdoch’ the tabloids had called him, straining their imaginative capacities to come up with a hackneyed moniker that no-one had previously referred to the bloke by in his life. (And therein lay another grudge Matt held against him: the bastard had notched up more press in his time than he had.)

  Upon incarceration, Davie gradually developed into a model prisoner. Unfortunately, his model appeared to have been Jimmy Boyle. His record of violence involving screws and fellow inmates earned him years more time, widespread notoriety, a slew of vilifying headlines, and ultimately a place in the Barlinnie Special Unit. This last was a unique penal innovation that seemed to function by sheer force of paradox, as it seemed hard to think of a crazier idea than taking the most violent men in Scotland and giving them chisels, craft knives and flammable liquids.

  The tabloids might have seethed with condemnation of his previous conduct, but it was the sin he committed in there for which they would never forgive him: he reformed. Took the Jimmy Boyle thing the whole way: discovery of artistic talent, Gandhi-grade renunciation of violence, marriage to award-winning American documentary-maker who’d been allowed access to the Bar-L to make a film for PBS. Far as Matt had read, he now lived with the wife and weans in New York state, his paintings paying the bills and keeping them in society invites while he spent his days working at some sort of parolees’ outreach centre.