Flick (2 page)

Gav sniggers. “Did she say anything about me?”

Fuck. Gav's got this big thing about Nikki. According to Troy, he used to sit behind her in maths class and lick her hair. The image of Gav's jittery, stringy body wanking, rabbitlike, to Nikki appears in my mind whenever he asks me about her, so I try to avoid his questions as often as possible. Urgh.

“I don't know. I didn't really talk to her that much.”

“How's your brother?” Troy asks me, with a smirk at Gav. Gav mouths, “Fuck off,” back.

“Yeah, he's good, he got promoted at the steelworks.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He's a supervisor. He doesn't drive the forklifts and that now, he watches other people do it.”

My brother, Tommo, is married to Nikki, another reason why I find the above image fucking sick. Tommo was in Gav's year as well. They're both twenty-three and they couldn't be more different. Tommo's massive (muscle-wise, not fat, like), serious and dependable and a little bit fascist. In many ways the perfect big brother. He doesn't do drugs, has shit taste in music and married Nikki two years ago. They live in their own semi, in a better estate than ours. Oh yeah, Tommo's moving up in the world all right, but he won't move far. He'll never leave here, which means he'll be in steel his whole life and his children'll have the same gray, malnourished look all the kids who live next to the works do. Our line of coast looks deceptively like paradise if you look one way, at the slightly better sandstone town houses of Ness, and the pier, and the cliffs. If you look the other way, past the toddlers playing in the shallows, swallowing pints of water as they learn to swim, you can see the waste from those gloomy, gray towers gushing out and bursting over the sea like smoke erupting from a volcano. I've got a half sister as well, Dad's from a little dalliance before he met Mum. She's twenty-nine now, and we don't see her much. She turned into just as much of a slut as her mother and lives in a flat above a chippie in Sandford. Sandford's our nearest city. It's soulless, the center having been bombed to shit in World War II and rebuilt in crappy 1960s gray block buildings that look like a series of prisons but actually contain shops; it's mildly dangerous; and it's about an hour away by car. I don't know what my sister does, besides get abortions. Teagan, her name is. Tee to her mates.

“FLICK!”

“What?”

“I asked you a question, man, where were you?” Gav giggles like a thirteen-year-old.

“I don't . . .” I frown. I've no clue. I admit I was off on one.

Gav leans in, Troy's on the wheel. “D'you think Nikki would?”

“
Jesus
, Gav!”

“What? You can't blame a man for asking!”

“She's my sister-in-law!”

“Yeah, so you know her! What d'you think?”

“I, I don't, I . . .” I give up, 'cause what difference will it make what I tell him? He'll still get wasted next time he sees her and tell her, “I love you, Nikki,” with a big dope-eyed smile. “I don't know, Gav, maybe. Ask her yourself.”

“Wicked! I will!”

“Uh-huh.” My head's starting to tighten. We bump on the pavement and off again.

“Oi! You'll wreck me tires!” Gav frowns at Troy as we drop down to road level, ash from his joint floating about the car.

“All right!” says Troy, in a heavy Clyde County tongue. “It's just so's I know I've parked properly, close to the curb as it said int' driving test.”

“Giz that.” I lean over and take one last long drag, holding the joint in Gav's hand.

He gives me a cheeky wink. “Yeah, you get that down you, my son.”

I nod him thanks and back out my door, bumping it shut. Gav rolls down his window as I walk up the drive.

“See you, gorgeous!”

“Shut the fuck up.” I grin back. “You'll wake me mam!”

And I'm in the door, up the stairs, on the bed, dead.

EDUCATION AGGRAVATION

As always, the week passes by with little event. It's the run-up to our GCSEs, the exams everyone takes in England when they're sixteen and finishing “compulsory” school, although basically you have to carry on 'til you're eighteen and do A levels, unless you want to be unemployed or work in the chippie. I'm supposed to be taking ten GCSE subjects this summer, eleven if they don't bump me down from the top maths set, but nothing seems to have changed in terms of workload or pressure and I'm not bothered enough to ask why. In fact, I'm worryingly not bothered. Or rather, I would be worried, but it's the very fact that I'm so not worried in any way that is so worrying (or should be, if that makes sense). So we go to classes and hang around the lockers and make the effort as far as we know how. Stuff happens and none of it means much. I get a B on a maths test and fail a technology one. We get a lesson on what we want to do with our lives, and no one knows, so they tell us our options, which doesn't take long. There's never any point in remembering this kind of week, so I spend most of my time in one of the music practice rooms with Ash and her best mate, Daisy, swigging vodka and orange from a Volvic bottle and pissing about on the drums. It's easy to skive class in the music rooms because they're soundproof and no one but us really uses them, so Ash and I use them to get drunk in and flirt to our hearts' content, which I enjoy safe in the knowledge that nothing is ever going to happen between us. Usually I also spend a lot of time laughing at my own jokes while Ash paints her nails and complains about all the older boyfriends who've screwed her over, or not screwed her, or screwed her in a particularly strange fashion, like the guy who said he wanted to carry her black babies and then followed her about until she threatened to smash his face in with her wakeboard.

Daisy, far stupider than Ash and not as attractive, tells us the latest stories about her dad. Her dad's a pervert. Her sister once walked in on him photographing his girlfriend's pussy on their coffee table and last week Daisy came in one lunchtime unexpected to find her dad asleep on the couch with a rampant rabbit and a rental copy of
Bitches in Heat
next to him. Ella, another of Ash's girl gang, of which I am an honorary member, walks in on this last sentence. Ella's pretty, in a vapid way, and skinny, and talks a lot about how fat she is to anyone who'll listen.

“Oh, I've got that. Hey, there's a new family moved in next door to mine and it's a couple of dykes with a gay son and Baz says he's going to burn their house down and shout ‘gay burn.' ” She says all this very sweetly and without missing a beat, like one of those dolls where you pull a string in their back and they say set phrases in a dumb-blonde accent. If I could auction Ella off as a novelty amusement on eBay I'd make a fortune. She peers at Ash's school uniform. Everyone in England has to wear one so I'm stuffed into polyester suit trousers, a shirt engineered to make your sweat more and a tie, while Ash, Daisy and Ella wear the same, but with a pleated gray skirt, which Ash has rolled up to show two tantalizing slivers of bum cheek split by a neon-pink thong.

“That's a weird skirt.”

“Why?” Ash says, with a mean grin. “Does it make me look fat?”

I grin involuntarily, then cover it as Ella makes an odd half-sick half-snot noise. Ash thinks Ella's a bitch because her face is less manly than Ash's.

“Fuck you, Flick.”

“Tactless but true.” We smile heartlessly at each other and I beat out a little rhythm on the drum kit. (A shit Session Pro with plastic skins, screws missing on the toms and the bass drum kicked through. Its condition and quality say everything about our school you would ever need to know.) “What's this family like then?”

“I told you. Two dykes and a gay son. And one daughter but I didn't meet her. She was apparently talking about coming out on Friday though. One of the dykes said so.”

Ash grunts. Very attractive. “She's not coming to mine.”

Typical. We live in a place that's so backward most English people don't know where it is. Obviously it's not surprising, considering this, that if someone's gay they get slaughtered, but I don't see the fuss myself. Everyone's a little bit gay. Ash lezzes up every weekend to get the perverts at the bar to buy her drinks. She's a classy bird, that Ash.

Ella blinks dazedly at us. “The girl's called Rainbow.”

“RAINBOW?”

Miss Clark, the music teacher, sixty-plus and a spinster, smells of piss, literally your walking stereotype, sticks her head in the door at this point (nosy bitch) and whines over our laughter.

“Can we
stop
this
noise
?”

She's drowned out by Ash bursting out with another shout of “RAINBOW!!” at which I drunkenly giggle.

“Get
out
,
pleeease
!”

“All right, all right, we're leaving.” I grab Ash's hand and we head for the back field, behind the pavilion. Time for a spliff.

KICKING THE BUCKET

Smoke rises around my face and I'm drifting away on it, dreaming in colors, floating on feathers. A hot pulsing wave moves up through my body, beating in my groin, warming my stomach, caressing my chest like the finely manicured hands of a high-class hooker (or so I imagine). I feel it pushing from inside my face on my cheeks and the back of my eyes, numbing my features, clouding my expression and finally, flawlessly, curling deliciously and airily around my brain (or lack thereof). I giggle indulgently, hornily, and smoke shoots up past my eyes to the ceiling, billowing out my mouth. It's called having a bucket, and by participating in this equally social and antisocial act we, the participants, are deemed “bucketheads.” It involves pulling an empty two-liter cola bottle slowly out of a bucket of water, while cooking up pot on a piece of minutely punctured foil gripped to the bottleneck. The smoke is drawn into the bottle, the foil removed, and the designated buckethead quickly exhales, puts their lips to the opening and inhales the entire contents of the bottle. It is the most efficient way to smoke pot, but apparently not widely done (although everyone I know has tried it). But let me rewind my meandering musings and set the scene.

Ash, Daisy, Jamie, Danny, Trixie, Limbo and three goths I don't know are sat round this bucket in Ash's flat in the center of town, as if the bucket was a campfire and we were scouts making s'mores. Jamie I've known since we were in nappies, and Danny, Limbo and Ash come from Osford, so we all grew up playing together out on the waste, a stretch of woodland-cum-rubbish-dump, where we made our dens out of old washing machines and chicken wire, and now here we are together, again, still, giggling in a dark, dank den of a living room. It's sick and it's reassuring and it's sad and it's pathetic how life repeats itself. We haven't changed since we were eight, but as reality emerges before us, hope fades away, and we search for greater highs and deeper lows to escape boredom and deny our inevitable acquiescence to the monotony of life. That's the pot turning me into Socrates, or similar. Who am I kidding. I'm disgusting. I giggle and choke on it, a bitter lump in my throat. I squeeze up my face tight and stay dead still.

Ash sleepily expels smoke from her mouth. I catch her cherry-flavored lip gloss on the air. “What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” I relax my face. “Nothing.”

An hour later the guys, including myself, leave in better spirits to a wicked night out. Ash and the girls stay behind to wait for Ella, Josh and a lass called Sally that I once got off with. To my shame she is now fat, and a chav.

WHAT KIND OF FUCKING STUPID NAME IS “RAINBOW”

“WHAT kind of FUCKING STUPID name is ‘Rainbow'?” The club is packed and it's three a.m. before we spill out onto the promenade. As usual I'm holding forth in the spotlight, the others blinded by my winning combination of sex appeal, humor, and overbearing cockiness (because I'm now twatted). There's the shouting of drunk lasses, there's fighting skinheads and there's the sea less than fifty yards away, the waves crashing over each other wildly as if in a rush to join in with the party and compete with the noise. All the while Will Flicker, known as Flick, acts the jester, and tonight he's in fucking top form, the King of Scorn, all the lesser mortals crowding around him admiringly to laugh at his witty comments and cheap jibes. What a cock.

“Yeah!” Ella chimes in, acting blond (not a big stretch for Ella). “Imagine saying, ‘Hi, I'm
Rainbow
.' ”

“ ‘Let me take you to my pot of gold.' ” I make another blinding crack. “I bet her boyfriend's a leprechaun.” Mike snorts alcopops out of his nose and I nudge him and whisper loudly. “The height makes him perfect for easy-access muff-diving.”

“BAhahahaha.” Jamie chokes on his cigarette smoke. “And his ginger beard tickles in a really good way on my woohoo!”

Ella giggles. “And his little green clothes make him really easy to coordinate with.”

Back to me “for something funnier but more obscene” (and I actually say that out loud): “I only appear if it's very . . . WET . . . indeed.” Oh yes, every daft prick there laughs, much louder than they did for Jamie or Ella. Too easy. I'm too good, that's why.

A voice from behind me adds to our banter. “Yeah, she must be a right whore!”

“All right! Calm down, that's taking it too far.” I turn and find myself right in the face of a girl about my age, one of the late-night slags probably, but there's a fullness to her lips and a light in her eyes, which I think are gently mocking me although I'm not sure yet why, implying better health. Her hair is scruffy, a dark frieze about her face, her makeup light and her complexion pale, not orange like Ash and the others. “Who are you then? You out with Ashley?” I say, expecting a quick answer, gearing myself up for a bit of banter.

“You first.” Her directness blindsides me. The right corner of her mouth grins, daringly, proudly. I stop moving with my Beck's halfway to my mouth. Cheeky bitch. Sexy too. I almost blush but manage to wait for about three seconds, then give her an oh-you-want-to-play-games look (slightly suggestive, with a backwards movement of the head, followed by a slight nod forward—damn smooth). I then cock my head in a substitute shrug, say, “Will Flicker”—pause—“but everyone calls me Flick,” then grin and take a swig. Champion.

I'm feeling on top of the world, cock of the walk, and somewhere in the reaches of my mind I hear a lone sober thought quietly wonder if I could be very, very drunk. Not just superficially and amusingly drunk, but deeply, and importantly, drunk. But the thought is fleeting. I continue.

“And you?” I shoot her a questioning, Brad Pitt–from–
Fight Club
I'm-so-hot look. The thought becomes a disdainful voice:
Maybe you should calm down
. I ignore it, focused instead on what I've now realized is a very attractive lass, who my whisky-sodden and stoned brain believes without doubt will be getting off with me under the pier by closing time. Oh yes. Her smile stretches, her full ripe lips part like a tantalizing femme fatale's and involuntarily I imagine them on the tip of my dick. She grins, showing her teeth.

“My name . . .”

“Yes, baby?” Baby. Chuh. I'm pulling out all the stops.

“Is Rainbow.”

The voice from the back of my mind slams into my frontal lobe, deadpan, and loud in my ear:
TIT
.