tiny back. The poodle seemed to relax, perhaps now sensing that her life was not after all in danger. Finally, trampling plates and sandwiches underfoot, Dooly awkwardly walked his hind legs a few steps closer to his fore and, visibly excited – in the pink, you might say – he began, albeit sheepishly (needs must when the devil drives, decorum takes a back seat), to turn a once pleasant picnic into a rather beastly affair.
‘AH HA HA!’ roared Tony, pointing. ‘FUCKIN CHECK HIM OUT, MAN! HE’S SHAGGIN MID-AIR! YOU COULD DRIVE A FUCKIN BUS THROUGH THERE!’
The couple were irate. The guy slapped and pushed and kicked and shouted as much as his discomfort would allow (Dooly paid no attention), while the language that spewed from the mouth of the girl was hardly befitting a lady of her standing (Dooly never missed a stroke). A furious invective of ‘cunts’, ‘fucks’ and ‘bastards’ – replacing what in times past would have been cries of ‘You brute! You brute!’ – brought Dooly’s towering performance to the laughter-filled attention of the whole park (he neither rose to nor shrank from the occasion). And it was all set to music.
I’ve been up, I’ve been down
I’ve been a fool, I’ve been a clown
‘DOES CHANTELLE WANT SOME?’ shouted Tony in a mock babyish voice. ‘DOES CHANTELLE WANT SOME? AH HAHA!’
Billy ambled embarrassedly over and, quietly mumbling his apologies, dragged Dooly away.
‘What’s wrong with your face?’ asked Tony on his returm. ‘It was just a fuckin laugh, man! Serves the cunts right! Come on, we’ll go along this way. I’ll show you where I used to sniff glue.’
7
The path turned and sloped up towards the houses. Continuing straight ahead Tony led them onto a narrow dirt track that snaked between knee-high grass, reeds and rushes along the very edge of the riverbank. At broad, scooping swipes of his hand clouds of midges dispersed, before reforming behind them. Dooly, in the middle, sniffed searchingly from side to side at dock leaves and ferns and the bases of trees.
The thick branch of a sycamore barred the entrance to a secluded bower. It jutted straight out across the path from low on the trunk, angled upwards at an elbow and bifurcated. Its leaves fanned out and swooped back towards the river, the foremost dipping their tips in the cool, khaki water. A discarded shopping trolley lay submerged on its side and green riverweed, clinging to its rusting frame, streamed out current-wise. Tony motioned Billy to stop, took half a step backwards, leaning back slightly too, strode forcefully forward and leapt up onto the branch, dropping down at the other side. A triangle of startled ducklings skimming out across the water from beneath the bank sent Dooly into a frenzy. Billy calmed him and ducked under.
The bower was airy and shaded, almost tranquil. The dual carriageway bridge was only partially visible through the dark foliage of the trees, and the houses were completely hidden behind a spinney of young firs growing at the top of a grassy slope. A little further on, the end of a grey concrete drainage pipe, that ran underground down from the houses, lay in a fissure and stuck out from the bank, and the soothing, natural sound of water flowing into water for once replaced the harsh, harried sound of the cars. The grass at their feet was littered with pinecones and needles, dried husks and the decaying remnants of last year’s leaves.
‘Fuckin hell,’ said Tony, glancing around him and kicking lightly at a circle of charred stones, the boundary wall of a cold, black campfire. ‘I’ve not been here for ages. It’s changed a bit. Nobody ever used to come here. Just us. In fact, back then hardly anybody used to come down to the river at all. It was just a fuckin wasteland. This was before they tried to turn it into a fuckin holiday resort with all the picnic benches and shite. That tar path was just mud. You’d maybe get the odd dog walker or that but they would never dare to venture along this far. And these fir trees weren’t here either. They must’ve planted them to make it look a wee bit more scenic from the houses. That was all just jaggies and weeds.’
He back-rolled an empty buckfast bottle up onto his instep and flicked it high and long. Its green glass glimmered and flashed through slender, shifting sunbeams as it arced its way twisting and spinning towards the drainage pipe. He sat himself down on the grass slope, remembering.
‘Oh, man!’ he said. ‘The halucinations you used to get down here!’
Billy, realising that this could take a while, also sat down, on a large moss covered boulder, and stared resignedly at a lone cluster of bluebells growing at the edge of the firs:
‘Their bowed heads glowed in soft focus… Their luminous heads glowed in soft focus… Their lustreless heads, humbly bowed, luminously glowed in…’
Dooly lay in the grass at his feet, quick panting. He yawned a great drawbridge yawn that curled his tongue, strained his eyes and rose in pitch to a squeak, then resumed panting.
Tony went on talking.
‘We would lie here all day and night with fuckin glue bags stuck to our faces. Get ourselves into a right fuckin mess. But I’m tellin you, man, you used to see some mad stuff! I’ve seen fuckin UFOs...fuckin zombies...pterodactyls flyin over the trees, gravestones poppin up out of the ground. I’ve even seen the devil, man, risin up out of the river right in front of me. A mate of mine at the time swore it was fuckin Santa Claus but to me it was the devil. I could see his horns and everythin, man, as clear as I can fuckin see you! There was no tellin what might happen. You couldn’t control it. It controlled you. See that tree there?’
‘…Their lustreless heads, “bowed in humble guise”, glowed in soft focus, yet with an almost ultra-violet…’
‘HO! See that fuckin tree there?’
Billy looked over his shoulder. An old alder grew at a steep angle out over the water.
‘I ended up up that one time,’ Tony went on. ‘Totally fuckin fucked, man! And I fell off it into the river. Go and see what I could’ve fell onto. I could’ve fuckin killed myself!’
Billy again looked over his shoulder, and nodded.
‘Go and see!’ urged Tony. ‘Look over the edge.’
‘It’s all right, said Billy. I’ll take your word for it.’
‘You’re not still in the huff are you?’
‘I never was in the huff.’
‘So go and fuckin see what I could’ve fell onto.’
‘Boulders.’
‘What?’
‘Is it boulders?’
‘Go and fuckin see!’
Reluctantly, Billy raised himself, and Dooly sprang alertly to his side. He sauntered over to the tree and took a perfunctory look beneath it. Boulders.
‘I could’ve fuckin killed myself,’ continued Tony. ‘Luckily for me it’d been rainin and the river was up.’
Something moving in the grass, stirred by a gentle breeze, caught Dooly’s eye and Billy allowed himself to be pulled towards it. Tony lay back with his hands clasped behind his head, talking to the sky.
‘Every cunt had to wade in and drag me out. They all thought I was dead. Point is, I knew fuck all about any of it! Not-a-fuckin-clue what was goin on! As far as I was concerned I was on this gorgeous wee desert island the whole time. I can still see it now: me sittin on the golden sand, under a palm tree, waves lappin at my feet, tropical sunshine, the lot... Ho! Are you even fuckin listenin to me?’
He had sat back up.
‘Aye I’m listenin,’ said Billy. ‘I’m just tryin to... Dooly!’
Dooly had seized his prey, an old polythene bag, and was chewing on it playfully. Flicking his head up and to the side he continually altered his grip on it, growling and snarling and keeping it just out of Billy’s reach. Then, dropping it for the taking, he would stand waiting, poised, and Billy would try to grab it before it was quickly snatched up and chewed on some more.
Tony again began to speak then paused, staring wistfully into the middle distance, digging deep for the words, the exact words, that would precisely convey to Billy what he had felt in those days: veracity, authenticity, validity; the absolute certainty that there was nowhere else you would rather
be and nothing else you would rather be doing; rebelliousness, escape, the thrill of notoriety; how the ‘real’ world had not existed for him then, and how he’d scorned, from the lofty heights of his self-imposed exemption from it, the petty pleasures and concerns that absorbed the public at large.
Without adjusting his gaze he forlornly shook his head.
‘They were the best fuckin days of my life!’ he said.
‘So, what did you stop for?’
‘I had to get a fuckin job, didn’t I? And anyway, as usual, cunts ruined it by tryin to cash in. Shops started sellin glue sniffin kits and it made the news. The police clamped right down. It was becomin near impossible to buy glue anywhere. WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! Don’t throw that away!’
Billy had eventually wrestled the polythene bag from Dooly. It was shrivelled looking and opaque, its bottom half yellowish and stiff. He was holding it high out of the rearing dog’s reach, about to hurl it into the river.
Tony rose quickly and took it from him.
‘Ha ha!’ he laughed. ‘A fuckin glue bag!’
And as he held it, this replica of a relic from a bygone age, as he held it reverently by the corner and stared at it proudly, as though it were something born of him, was that a defiant note in his voice as he said ‘this town’ll never change’, alike in tone and sentiment to ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’.
He tossed it over his shoulder.
‘Come on,’ he