Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (45 page)

But while she and Ray were getting along like best buddies, her patience with Simon was fast wearing thin. Ray recognised the symptoms because he’d been there too. The disaffection happened by degrees, and in Rina’s case the process seemed to be happening at an accelerated pace. First came fascination, which Simon underwent frequently and promiscuously among those who took his interest. Next came the charm, as he made you realise that his interest in you was more enduring than in the others, because you were something more than them: a counterpart who gave as good as you got; who had as much to say (and as much wit to say it) as he did. The problems arrived at the third stage, when Simon started to feel threatened. He wanted you to go on being that interesting and witty person, but on his terms, an adjunct, not an equal. That was when he gave you a name, to tell you ‘this is who you are’.

Rina had been less bothered by the naming than Ray, but no less resistant of Simon’s attempts to contain her. That was why he kept buggering off to talk to other people. He wanted the best of both worlds: Rina on his arm (and in his bed), without her stealing the limelight, without her diverting attention from him.

‘I think part of him wants back to the daft lassies who’ll just worship him, but another part of him knows I’m worth more than them, and doesn’t want to give me up,’ was how she put it.

Despite their growing friendship, Ray would have to own up to a certain culpability in diverting Simon’s attention from Rina, now that he’d had his ‘interesting person’ status renewed, and this was massively exacerbated when they came up with a new shared project. Ray would later put the museum thing down to a certain nihilism instilled by all that final‐
year, second‐
term psychosis, but in truth it was merely another instance of late‐
night drinking spawning an idea so intoxicating that the next morning failed to sober them of it.

Simon, being dedicatedly apolitical, was the last person to be motivated in his deeds by the desire to make a ‘statement’, and regarded what they were planning as a kind of situationist artwork. Ray did have a degree of genuine anger over the university’s decision to splash out thousands on a new security system for a museum that nobody had ever tried breaking into anyway, but was mainly driven, after the idea had become planted in his head, by the ‘because it’s there’ factor. To that he might add the ‘why does a dog lick his balls’ factor: once he realised he could do it, there seemed little reason not to. Consequences didn’t enter into it. For one thing, ending up in jail would save him from sitting his finals, but even that was barely worth a thought. Consequences only happened to those who got caught, and he, like every other crook in history, wasn’t planning to be.

They told no‐
one, well aware that a juicy titbit mouthed at Kelvingrove Underground station could make it to the other side of the Hillhead campus before you did. The plan, indeed the whole notion, spawned from a chance remark Ray made to Simon as they discussed the university’s latest profligacy. The previous term had witnessed the announcement of a six‐
figure outlay to have the main building and its landmark steeple (The Tower of Guilt, as it was known among students, particularly those with essays due) sandblasted back to its original white. This was an extravagance compounded by it being the architect’s original intention that the stone should gather soot and render his creation black. Now, despite bare shelves in parts of the library, they wanted to shell out on a computerised security system which, as Ray fatefully put it, ‘I could disable with a Commodore Amiga and a nine‐
hundred baud modem’.

Contrary to popular misunderstanding, much computer hacking does not require technical expertise or a facility with arcane pieces of machine code (though both of these do help), but is based around the simple device of sussing other people’s passwords and then negotiating the system from there. Mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, children’s birthdays … People are either too lazy to think of something securely esoteric or too scared that they’ll forget what it was; and that’s now, when the world revolves around PCs. In Glasgow back in the late Eighties, it was shooting fish in a barrel.

‘It’s just a question of finding the point of least resistance,’ Ray explained to Simon.

The point of least resistance, in this case, was called Wullie Ferguson, the university museum’s thick and bad‐
tempered nightwatchman, because any security system – computerised or not – was only as effective as the stupidest person who had to operate it. Auld Wullie was known to every student who’d ever raised his or her voice after midnight within a half‐
mile radius of the museum, barrelling from his office like a ruddy‐
faced cannonball at the slightest provocation and threatening expulsion as a ready sanction, like he was one step down from the university chancellor. The only time he was known to have a smile on his face was after Rangers victories, and it needed no solicitation for him to inform you that he was an Ibrox season‐
ticket holder. Using the aforementioned Amiga and primitive modem – one you still had to clamp the telephone receiver to – Ray successfully gained full access privileges on his first test run, the remote computer rejecting ‘Rangers’, ‘Loyal’ and ‘1690’ before opening its doors to ‘Souness’.

Gaining physical entry to the premises was achieved using the less technological method of starting a fire in a nearby skip and waiting for Auld Wullie to go into Red Adair mode, at which point Ray and Simon snuck into the building via his office.

It was plausibly rumoured that Wullie spent much of the night asleep once the unions were closed and there were no drunk undergraduates to shout at, knowing from decades of experience that this was an adequate level of vigilance in a place nobody had ever attempted to steal from. Ray and Simon therefore waited close to his door until they heard snoring, then set about their fun. In a measured, poignant and well‐
thought‐
out demonstration to highlight the university’s inappropriate financial priorities, they rearranged all of the stuffed animals so that they looked like they were shagging each other, then carefully removed several paintings from the walls and replaced them with photocopies of that poster showing the tennis player scratching her arse.

Danger: criminal masterminds at work.

Exaggeration built the legend. By the end of the week, it was the Egyptian mummies that were shagging each other and the burglars had rearranged the whale bones into a cage, inside which they had imprisoned a bound and blindfolded Wullie Ferguson.

The adrenaline rush of carrying it out was, Ray had to admit, even greater than that of being onstage with The Arguments, but the aftermath was far less pleasurable. After a gig, he could feel the excitement for days, and enjoyed reconstructing moments in his head, wishing he could remember every second. After the museum, it was dread that lasted for days, and as he reconstructed his deeds, he was wishing he could remember more clearly where they might have left clues.

They hadn’t, though. Not ones that the university or the local polis could read anyway. Dire pronouncements of punishment were made, like that was going to make them want to own up, but the more the uni authorities stamped their feet, the more stupid they looked and the more clever the burglars. Eventually they learned to quit digging, realising that the best thing to do was ignore it, write it off – students will be students – and let interest fade. As a result, the story had all but died down when the polis suddenly showed up at Ray’s flat to huckle him; by which time he was so used to the idea of having got away with it that when they asked for him by name, he thought something awful must have happened to his parents.

The polis, to their credit, were a lot more down‐
to‐
earth about it than the uni, as represented by the vice chancellor, who was practically chewing the reception desk at Partick cop shop. They saw it for what it was: a student prank. No thefts, no breakages, no vandalism, and the only harm was to a few egos. This was, of course, after they had scared the shit out of the pair of them by giving them third‐
degree interviews, an overnight stay in the cells and generally treating them like they were a menace to society.

The president of the Student Rep Council – fortuitously a fan of The Arguments – intervened to stay the university’s hand, threatening demonstrations if it carried out its stated desire to expel the pair of them. The vice chancellor was made to see sense over how he’d be digging himself back into his previous hole if he martyred the culprits so close to their finals, but he still insisted charges be brought, so Ray and Simon got their day in court, their stern admonishment and their names in the files.

They had to appear together in the dock, which was the last time they ever spoke. The case didn’t come up until during the Easter holidays, and by that time their relationship was irredeemably poisoned by words and events that could not be unsaid or undone.

The police had no evidence other than their easily elicited confessions, so the only way they could have found out was if someone had grassed. Ray reckoned that if Simon had told anybody, it would have been Rina, but she swore the first she knew about it was when the arrests were made. This left only one possible culprit, who was as shamelessly prepared to spill his guts to Ray as he had been to the cops.

‘Come on, they were gaunny find out anyway.’

‘No, they quite obviously weren’t.’

‘The suspense was killin’ you, Larry. Admit it. I did us both a favour, got it over with. We’ve got exams to worry about, without that hangin’ over us.’

‘Aye, now I just have to worry about goin’ into the job market with a criminal record on my CV.’

‘Don’t be daft. It was just a bit of fun. They’re hardly gaunny throw the book at us.’

‘They werenae gaunny throw anythin’ at us when they didnae fuckin’ know we did it.’

‘Fuck’s sake, man, chill out. This way we all get a laugh about it. We can tell folk the whole story at last.’

‘That’s why you grassed us up? So you could act the big man?’

‘Come on, it must have been killin’ you as well.’

‘Away an’ lie in your pish.’

‘Ach, Larry, don’t be such a big wean.’

‘Aye, sure, cheers for the advice, Simon. An’ here’s some for you. If you ever plan on a life o’ crime, learn to fuckin’ button it, eh?’

Ray needed a shoulder to cry – or at least whine – on, so was as pleased as he was surprised when Rina phoned that night and asked him to meet for a drink. It wasn’t just a friendly show of solidarity, more an expressed need for mutual support. She and Simon had had a huge argument too: the subject had been the same, prompted by her multilevel disapproval of what he had done, but this was really just a route into a whole mass of other angers that had been building up.

They met in a pub close to her flat, a spit‐
and‐
sawdust joint where they could be sure Simon would never enter because it was unlikely to contain anyone worth impressing. The conversation began about him, naturally, but by the end of the first pint had moved on to them talking about themselves and then about each other. It was good, really good, the kind of intimacy that makes you feel you’re building the foundations of a truly special friendship. Ray was sure it was going to be one of those nights that went on until chucking‐
out time, so was a little deflated when, after a second drink, Rina suddenly reached for her bag – and it wasn’t her shout.

‘I’ve got a nice bottle of wine back at the flat. Do you want to head round there instead?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, equally relieved and delighted that the evening wasn’t coming to an end. And at that point he was still daft enough to think wine was all they were going back for.

Ray had reached the stage where he had started to regard his stubbornly enduring virginity as a kind of Mephistophelean trade‐
off. If he had been told on that dreich first Monday he turned up to matriculate that by the middle of fourth year he’d still not have had sex but would have had an indie‐
chart hit single, he’d probably have taken the deal. Sooner or later, everybody (just about) got to have sex, even people like Norman Tebbit. That was why man invented alcohol. But not everybody got to be in an indie rock band, even if only for a few months. Problem was, those months were now over, and during them he had been extremely disappointed to find that one side of the deal didn’t have an unavoidable effect on the other. He was in a rock band, for fuck’s sake. People in rock bands had sex. People in rock bands couldn’t help having sex. All the girls in their immediate orbit should have instantly turned into adult sophisticates with hang‐
up‐
free carnal appetites.

Maybe some of them already were, but if so they never got off with Ray. He had always managed to locate and home in on the ones who shared his own immature self‐
image, meaning they were cringingly uncomfortable with their developing sexuality, while Ray was hardly the confident and experienced type who could put them at ease and lay them down by the fireside, baby. It wasn’t just the physical side of his relationships that had consequently proven unsatisfactory. He had, in effect, paired up with a series of girlfriends who were too much like himself, and between them they had multiplied their common problems and insecurities rather than helped each other cancel them out. It therefore didn’t take long for them to recognise in each other the things they liked least about themselves, and that would be all she wrote.

Always being the runt of the litter at school, Ray had never been in with the in‐
crowd, and while he was independent enough not to be like those who compromised themselves in often demeaning ways to gain entry, he still carried a few scars to his self‐
esteem. That was perhaps one of the reasons he was so tolerant of Simon. No crowd was as ‘in’ as his, and Ray had found himself an integral part of it. With Rina, though, he had at last begun to see how he looked through someone else’s eyes, and not found himself staring at a wide‐
eyed, over‐
eager, twenty‐
one‐
year‐
old teenager, but someone she wanted to talk to. Someone she wanted to spend time with.