Children of Albion Rovers Read online

  Contents

  TEAM TALK

  Pop Life BY GORDON LEGGE

  After the Vision BY ALAN WARNER

  The Brown Pint of Courage BY JAMES MEEK

  Submission BY PAUL REEKIE

  The Dilating Pupil BY LAURA HIRD

  The Rosewell Incident BY IRVINE WELSH

  THE LINE UP

  IRVINE WELSH: Author of Trainspotting, The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares and Ecstasy. All critically acclaimed best-sellers. Trainspotting has been turned into an award-winning movie and box office smash. Welsh was described by The Face as the ‘poet laureate of the chemical generation’.

  ALAN WARNER: Author of award-winning Oban rave novel Morvern Callar, which is currently being adapted into a major movie by the BBC, and more recently a second novel, These Demented Lands.

  GORDON LEGGE: Author of two novels and an SAC award-winning collection of short stories, In Between Talking about the Football. Inspired many of the new wave of Scottish writers to start writing with his first novel The Shoe. Described as ‘pop writer extraordinaire’.

  JAMES MEEK: Author of two novels, McFarlane Boils the Sea and Drivetime and an SAC award-winning collection of short stories, Last Orders.

  LAURA HIRD: Short fiction previously published in literary magazines like Rebel inc., Chapman, Cencrastus, Verbal, etc. Her first full collection, Nail and other stories, is to be published in Autumn ’97 by Rebel inc.

  PAUL REEKIE: Writer whose live performances have become legendary. Author of one poetry collection, Zap, You’re Pregnant. His poem ‘Caesar’s Mushroom’ was featured at the front of Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House.

  Children of Albion Rovers

  TEAM TALK

  PICKING A TEAM is never easy. Different managers have different criteria. The late great Jock Stein would put it all down to pub arithmetic. And for him everything turned out sweet as a nut. Genius is not about doing the simple things well but the complex things simply. When John Lambie took over the managerial reins at Falkirk you could see the truth stripped bare. He learnt the hard way. Previously, he’d invested heavily – although not financially – in workaday journeymen during his spell at Partick Thistle. Honest jobbers with steel toe-caps. Yet at Brockville the formula cracked. Stars in their eyes. Copycat criminals. There was much guilt at the wake. Napoleon, geeing up his troops on the eve of battle, once remarked: morale is to the physical as four is to one. He was right. But that was his Waterloo. John Lambie could’ve learnt a bit more between hairdos.

  I have my own methods, a minister once said to me. I think he was a Methodist. Well I too have my own methods. It’s no use just signing star strikers. That’s a recipe for disaster. I’ve learnt from the Souness years that you have to build from the back. Chris Woods and Terry Butcher. That’s when the tide turned. I’ve never admired Graeme Souness more than when he left the celebrations of a Rangers victory over arch-rivals Celtic – on April 1st 1990 – to go to an Anti-Poll Tax concert at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. He watched the proceedings with his wife from a seat in the balcony. See? Build from the back. Every time.

  To this end I’ve selected an international keeper and a class A defender – both of whom I have total faith in. Irvine Welsh – a keeper of the faith. And Alan Warner – a defender of the faith. They are the smooth and charismatic spinal column of the team. They’ve learnt how to cope with the pressure – and the vagaries of the press – producing performances the fans just rave about. The world is at their feet and they know how to pass.

  There is much running about to be done in midfield and a wide expanse of the pitch has to be covered. A cool eye for situations is prerequisite. This position needs more than just realism. Midfield needs imagination and pop mobility. The ability to fly at will. Selflessly. Players who sparkle. Like Johnny Doyle. You know the sort. What’s that? Gordon Legge and James Meek you say? Sorted. Proven track records at every level. They come recommended and are adaptable to both Premier Division and Tennent’s Sixes.

  Up front, if we’re going to have any impact on the new league set-up, we’re going to need fresh legs. Strikers whose tricks and feints haven’t been studied in depth by the efficient but essentially Night Nurse opposition. The Andy Ritchies and George Bests rather than the Linekeresque bores. Forwards who don’t pollute the beautiful game with their predictable technique. Aye. Fuck the dullards with a Gerry McNee boner. Laura Hird and the boy Reekie are on from the start.

  So that’s it. The Children of Albion Rovers FC. Bodies honed to the very peak of fitness by years of substantial training. Shirts on their backs. Trophy room bare. But this team is Going Places! Ooh aah.

  Kevinacchio Vilhelmsonya

  (Continental-Style Coach)

  Pop Life

  GORDON LEGGE

  IT ALL STEMMED from their problems. With Martin it was money, with Ray it was women and with Hilly it was … well, it was always a wee bit more complicated with Hilly.

  See Hilly was the sort of bloke that would take offence; and that was about the size of it. All that was needed was for somebody to say something, something commonplace, something you’d hear any day of the week, and next thing Hilly would be heading for the door, slating the others for being nothing so much as ‘spoilt bastards’.

  That was what had gone wrong the last time, the last time the three of them had got together.

  They’d been round at Ray’s one night when Martin, as he always did, started going on about his latest financial crisis. In the course of this, Martin had happened to come away with the one about how the more you earn, the more you spend. Hilly made a joke of it at first. The joke being that if Martin had a million pounds in his pocket, then chances were the million pounds would disappear before Martin reached the end of whichever street it was Martin happened to be walking on – with nothing to show for it, no recollection of what he’d done with it. But then Ray went and made the mistake of agreeing with Martin, saying that once you reached a certain level of income you never seemed to be noticeably that much better off. That was enough for Hilly. He did his ‘spoilt bastards’ routine and stormed off.

  It was a good six months before Hilly had anything more to do with either of the other two. Six months in which Hilly was seen to hang around with the Kelsey’s or the Kerr’s, usually pissed or stoned, always laughing his head off.

  Hilly was like that. When he was in a bad mood, he went out, he became more visible.

  Ray, on the other hand, was the exact opposite, when Ray was in a bad mood, he kept himself to himself.

  For years Ray had put up with the others going on about their successes and their conquests as far as women were concerned. Every so often all this would get to Ray; and, every so often, it would be Ray’s turn to slip out of the scheme of things.

  Because he never really knew what he wanted from them, Ray was hopeless with women. Honestly, it was like watching a body trying to eat who didn’t realize the food was supposed to enter via the mouth. Hilly and Martin told him as much. There was even a time when they figured it was as well to tell the truth as anything: and told Ray that no woman they knew actually liked him. But before they’d had the chance to develop that, to talk it through to an extent that may actually have been of some kind of benefit, Ray made his excuses and left. He never blew up or anything, that wasn’t his style, he just, as Hilly put it, turned out the lights. Subsequently, the only times you’d ever catch sight of Ray were out late at night, out jogging, weights strapped to his wrists and ankles.

  Back when they were younger, Martin had been the first to leave school. At a time when everybody they knew was signing on, Martin was changing jobs at the rate of one a month: dishwasher, labourer, that kind of thing. Even so, Martin was always short of
money, always asking for loans. To his credit, he did pay back; but he was never the one to turn up at your doorstep and say, ‘Here’s that money I owe you.’ No, Martin had to be hunted down, and you had to embarrass yourself by asking for what you were rightfully owed. Likewise, it wasn’t unusual to be out with Martin, and for some complete stranger to come over and demand money from him. Such instances rattled Ray and Hilly. Consequently, Martin would get slagged to bits, be made to feel really rotten, to such an extent that it would prompt Martin’s hiatus. Martin, though, didn’t storm off like Hilly, or turn in on himself like Ray. No, what Martin did was to run away. Martin fucked off. He would somehow manage to borrow twenty quid off somebody or other, then disappear off to the city, or away down south, or, on two notable occasions, over to the continent.

  But it wasn’t just the borrowing Martin did: Martin sold things. One time that was really annoying was when Martin sold his Bowie collection. He hadn’t even sold it to a collector, just some dud at a record fair for about a tenth of what it was worth. All he’d got in return had amounted to little more than a good night out. But that wasn’t the point, the money wasn’t the point, the point was you didn’t sell your records.

  For it was records that had brought them together in the first place. At school, they’d noticed the same names scrawled on each other’s bags, books and desks. From there they’d got to talking. Soon, they were exchanging records and making up tapes for each other. It wasn’t long before the three new friends were spending all their free time sat in front of each other’s speakers, appraising their own collections, investigating their brothers’ and sisters’; talking about nothing other than records.

  Whilst everybody else of their generation seemed content to spend Saturday mornings hanging round up the town, giving it the best bored teenager routine, Martin, Ray and Hilly treated Saturday mornings as though they were on a no-frills, top-secret assignment. They’d head up the town, straight to the record shop, browse for exactly twenty minutes, make their purchases, then head straight back home.

  It was a truly amazing time; discovering all this great music, getting overwhelmed by it. And the great thing was it wasn’t a case of one liking this, the other liking that – what one thought the others were thinking, what one said the others agreed with. In as much as they ever could be the same, they were the same: they dressed the same; they did the same things; they were all in the same boat as regards money, women and opinions.

  Then, just as they were getting their interviews with the careers advisory woman, punk rock happened.

  Initially, it was great. More great records. Records, in fact, that were even better than a lot of the stuff they’d been listening to. It was a discovery again. Only this time round, it was a discovery they could call their own. This time, they weren’t out hunting for records; this time, they were waiting for records.

  Yet while Martin, Ray and Hilly were equally keen to embrace the new, they responded to it in completely different ways. For Martin it meant party, it meant always going out, having to try everything: every drug; every fashion; every possibility. Performance was what attracted Ray, being on stage – the forlorn hope being that women were only just waiting to fling themselves at the feet of the local axe-hero. For Hilly it became as important to state what he didn’t like as much as to state what he did like. So while Martin would be all excited, looking for a party, looking for the action, going, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ Ray would be thinking about his band, and, being a bit unsure, would waffle on something about, ‘Don’t know. Supposed to maybe be a gig in a couple of months. All depends, though …’ Hilly, on the other hand, God bless him, was never too bothered with having to think about things. Hilly just started every second sentence with the then trademark words, the italicized ‘I hate …’

  And there you had it, the three friends: the hedonist, the hopeful and the hostile. Whenever Ray landed a gig the situation would transpire that Martin wouldn’t turn up because he hadn’t the money, while Hilly wouldn’t turn up cause he thought the band were crap.

  Responses that not surprisingly got right royally on Ray’s nerves.

  Not that Ray was ever the one to talk, mind, not when it came to getting on folks’ nerves, anyway.

  Thing was, Ray would always be leeching around in the hope of meeting up with women. He spent a small fortune treating Martin, going to this pub, that club, chasing parties here, heading round there. Not that it ever achieved the desired purpose. Martin was so restless, such a party animal, that by the time they got served somewhere, or got accepted somewhere, Martin would be on about where they would be going next, where they could be going that was better. Come the early hours of the morning, when everyone else was heading home, Martin and Ray would still be stopping off at the cash machines, stocking up for that elusive good time.

  Ray was also into pestering Hilly to go out. A mission which was as doomed as any mission ever could be. See Hilly was never much of a mixer. Hilly’s idea of a good night out was to sit in the same seats of the same pub with the same faces he always sat with, talking about the same things he always talked about. When Hilly was in company he didn’t care for, he said so; when Hilly was in a place he didn’t care for, he left.

  Over the years things went on like this. The three friends got on with their lives but, increasingly, struggled to get on with each other. Martin married a rich man’s daughter, Hilly married a lassie who lived three doors away, Ray never married. Ray could, however, lay claim to being the most well off, seeing as how he became an administrator for the region’s education services. Martin worked for the health board in a self-advocacy project while Hilly earned his crust with a family-run removal firm.

  Despite the changes that entered their lives, and the fact that, by this time, they were hardly ever seeing anything of one another, Martin, Ray and Hilly continued to share a bond that came from them spending so much time together when they were growing up. When two of them bumped into each other, they invariably spent most of their time talking about the third – often to the exclusion of even talking about themselves.

  On those rare occasions when the three did get together, it was only a matter of time before they broached the subjects they never liked to talk about, only a matter of time before one of them upped and opted for the early bath.

  Even though the others were never in the slightest bit interested, Martin would always contrive to go on about his money problems. He didn’t get much sympathy. The fact that Martin never had anything to show for all this money that mysteriously disappeared was too much for Hilly. The fact that Martin admitted to nicking money from his wife, and denying money to his wife, was enough to send Ray off.

  Ray was by far and away the wealthiest of the three. Ray knew this, and didn’t like it one little bit. The others never intended it as such, but whenever Martin went on about the ease with which Ray accumulated his wealth, or when Hilly went on about what he saw as the pointless possessions Ray had a habit of acquiring for himself, Ray felt they might as well have been having a go at his failure with women – he was rich because he was alone.

  But while Martin and Ray at least admitted to having problems, Hilly never would. There was nothing wrong with Hilly. If folk couldn’t handle a few home truths then that was their problem. These self-styled ‘home-truths’ covered everything from the mildly embarrassing right through to the downright ignorant. The mildly embarrassing was when Hilly was in the home of somebody he considered middle class. In such circumstances, Hilly would always make a point of pilfering something, usually from the drinks cabinet, occasionally from the bathroom, but always something expensive, always something that would be missed. The downright ignorant side of Hilly showed with his penchant for having a go at Martin and Ray, and folk close to Martin and Ray. Hilly was a bit of a wind-up merchant, where nothing was ever practical, everything was a matter of principle. As long as Hilly was having a good time he wasn’t the one to care. Martin and Ray couldn’t stand it.
It would always end up that one of the three would up and leave.

  Then, following the ‘the more you earn, the more you spend’ incident, two whole years passed without the three of them being together. They only ever saw each other in the passing, down the town or going to the games. As for getting together, arranging something; well, they didn’t really see the point. It was as though they’d gone through a bitter divorce; they associated each other with their problems and that was that. The memories just seemed to be bad memories.

  As time wore on, though, it was the normally self-assured Hilly who came to realise just how much he missed the other two. Hilly had no fervour for socialising or meeting new folk. Hilly had such a dislike of most folk, anyway, that it was pointless him even contemplating going out and finding new mates. Sure, he got on with the folk at his work and with his family but somehow, something, was missing.

  And Hilly knew what it was. His two friends. Martin and Ray. Hilly wanted to see them again. Properly. He wanted the three of them all to get on with each other.

  Hilly thought about it, about how they were all doing away fine on their own but how they couldn’t get on when they were together. It was then Hilly had an idea, the same idea he always had. When things weren’t working out, then you went back to the way things were when they did work out.

  Hilly contacted Martin and Ray. He told them how they should all meet round at Ray’s on the first Tuesday of the following month. The idea being that they would only talk about records. Seeing as how that was what had brought them together in their youth, there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to be the case. They would bring along their new purchases, play them and talk about them. On no account were they to talk about anything other than records.