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bus next to a girl who looks like Carrie Fisher. Skin white as a china doll’s. Hands folded neatly on her lap. I am about to try and talk to her when she leaps to her feet and shouts, ‘Davie, ya fuckin knob ye,’ and throws a Coke can down the bus.
    The Blade Runner soundtrack in my headphones drowns out the hordes. By the time I fish out the postcard which arrived from Derek this morning I’m calm as Buddha. On the front is a red London bus. In one of the windows, Derek has drawn a stick-Alvin, carrying a book of Horror Stories. The bus runs over another stick-figure, spurting ink blood. Stick-Me is smiling merrily at this gruesome death. Derek thinks I’m warped cos I read Stephen King and listen to Dark Side of the Moon. A lot .
    Dear Floyd-loving fuck
    All is well in the big city. London has finally been broken .
    Hoping to grace Hash-Glen sometime soon, but until then give Dad my best and Mrs Gibson reeeespect.
    Big D.
    know that moment in films? When the boat’s bobbing to a shore decked in metal, or the police helicopter descends to the roof of the jungle, or the police van draws up outside the drugs bust. The faces of the men. Mouths doing chewing. Bodies locked on rifles. Eyes steel, as little things itch in the skin then
    GO GO GO
    the bay door opens and they stream out into bombs and bullets and shouts and stabs and glory and death and
    Anyway. See when our school bus rolls up at the gates? That’s what it’s like.
    School’s a war. All these kids from all these different homes all stuffed into uniform, a pen in their hand and a stencil set in their bag, and told to go fight the good fight. The enemy: each other. A common goal: survival. Some are shot on the first day, never to rise again. Some go in and become heroes, immortal in gold leaf on mahogany in the foyer. Dux medal. Their names we shall remember.
    Look from a window onto the quadrangle, with your lesson plans and your union protection and tell me it’s not a war. We arrive in first year, our eyes shining like gems, our new blazers coming down past our arms so we can ‘grow into them’, but by Christmas we’re just doing what we can to stay alive, desperate to think of something funny to say in front of the in-crowd and
    She’s employed where the sun don’t set
    growling at the smallest in the corridor, lest we be growled at ourselves, nipping out during double French to either smoke hash or buy clothes, depending on which part of Falkirk we’re from, and the whole time our whole lives are dependent on every single thing we do in class, every book we (don’t) read, every exam we can(’t) bearsed to turn up to, and there’s politicians on the telly and they’re promising us that soon every single Scot is going to have internet access in their homes. In my second year, a bottle fight erupted in the quad. Plastic bottles, right enough, but hurled with enough force to break the spectacles of any dozy sod caught beneath it. Camelon lined up one side, Hallglen lined up the other. A no man’s land in between where
    She’s the shape of a cigarette
    emptiness breathed, as barren as the Somme. Everybody finishing their cola and limeade and orange skoosh, slyly smirking at the opposition, wary of big Ronnie Melville standing like an implacable god, overlooking from a high window, eyes picking out sinners the way a hawk hunts mice. But then the bell rang and
    She’s the shake of a tambourine
    a hundred bottles whistled into the air, spinning, aerobatic, leaving defiant grins behind. The beauty of the sight, like birds in flight, an aerial display – poised, hanging, buoyed on the momentum from teenage muscles – that same kinetic force I feel in the pit of my gut as Belinda transports us to where we can be heroes, just for one day.
    I’m in fifth year. I’ve been searching for Private Ryan in this war for that long, stopped really caring about finding him now, stopped caring about punny-ekkies just for swinging on my chair, brand name