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Tam Meecham says, Don’t even fuckin’ think about it. But Jamie Macdonald’s a clever fucking midfielder even though he fights like a bull with a wasp lodged somewhere between rectum and spleen, and he laughs in Tam’s spotty ginger long-jawed mule face, ha fucking ha ha, and barrels left when he’s shoving his shoulders right, ball on outside foot, five-minutes-ago blood proudly bannering still from his nose. A brief scuffle and he’s past, and the ball hits the best part of the Jerviston Arms’ back wall with a right auld bang, and Tam howls.
- Roy fucking Aitken, eh?
- Ach, away, Jamie, fucking cheating cunt bastard, my laces are fucking undone-
- Roy fucking Aitken. Only Jamie would be pleased about being Roy fucking Aitken. Jamie’s passion for Roy the fucking Bear Aitken is akin to the love and adoration he has for his gran, only with more jessie prosewank about the indomitable fucking spirit and Jesus Christ that one off the back of a Davie Provan assist in the 1979 Old Firm Derby, the singular greatest day wee Jamie has witnessed yet. His stomach’s all aglow just thinking of it, and Tam sees it in his stupid grin and calls him a lovesick poof.
It’s raining a little, Motherwell sludge day. Tam glances up when the back door of the Jerviston rattles and it’s the landlady Bet telling them wearily to fuck off, again, for the love of God, lads, it’s a grey auld baltic Sunday and Parkhead’s frozen solid, surely. Jamie bloodies his sleeve with wiping his nose and grins reassuringly at her; she gives him a wrinkled old look and bangs the door shut muttering about hooligans. They go, main road bound, fingering thin lady’s-brand fags Tam’s stolen off his mum, who’s rumoured to be a bit posh. Jamie’s bleeding happily all over the cradled football and Tam trips three times over his laces, which he can’t be fucked to do up, and Jesus they haven’t got a light which isn’t an annoyance so much as a devastating blow to their seventeen-year-old egos.
Tam ducks into the next pub down, Jamie following reluctant. His hair’s gone absolutely fucking bonkers now the rain’s just glanced at it, and there could be people inside; he worries about these things, though more the bit of weight he's starting to put on, in what he thinks of as his exceptionally old age.
There are – drugged up punks playing darts, i fucking ronic. They’re all a few years older, and the bartender’s giving them evils running the same rotten rag over the same glasses, and Jamie’s impressed as he always is with punks by their studs and rolled-up sleeves and THE SEX PISTOLS and SHAM 69 stencilled on their sleeves, their good proper collared shirts which he’d wear to mass ripped and pinned like there’s a fucking alchemic science to it. Tam gets a light from one who looks like he’s drowned, purple bruised gaze, hair slicked back, green eyes snapping round from the telly to focus and glow like bad electricity. Jamie watches him sniff and snap a lazy light and put it to Tam’s fag, close.
He looks like a shark out of water, on edge, Jamie decides. How a shark would look if it was human and could breathe air, just. Jamie’s seen a shark once, at the aquarium in North Queensferry out with his best auntie in the summer holidays – if they stop swimming, he remembers, big hulking things, they die.
The news blares, the punks break up the pool with a clackaclack, and the shark slides him a calculating look. They go again. It's proper raining now.
- You know that lot?
- Eh? Oh, that’s Malcolm Tucker – my mam knows his. Only Protestant in Gorbals what supports Celtic. Mam reckons he’ll be dead in a few years, wi’ the rest of them.
- Aye, Jamie says, absently, good honest Catholic boy still, and drops the ball into the street for them to chase between the lorries.