Losing It Read Online Free

than CD prices, but to music lovers who’d never paid for their music, these prices were as far beyond our reach as the magazines on the top shelf at the newsagents had once been. It looked like we’d had a wasted trip and I was seriously pissed off. There was stuff I might have been doing on that Saturday, if GD hadn’t insisted on this pointless expedition. I’d planned to check out the new Chinese remedies shop on the high street, for one thing. Then I wondered if something might yet be salvaged from the day and asked the kid at the counter if they offered student discount.
    ‘What are you after?’
    ‘The 13th Floor Elevators,’ I said.
    The fat kid blew out his cheeks, like a hamster doing Maltesers.
    ‘That’s rubbish, that is,’ he said, finally. ‘I’m not selling you that crap.’
    I must have looked like I hadn’t quite heard him and I wasn’t sure I had. This must be some new kind of sales technique, I was thinking. Tell them they can’t have something and they’ll bite your hand off.
    ‘Look,’ the fat kid, said, casting a glance at the old man, who appeared to be asleep, his wire glasses hanging off his face. ‘It’s very simple. Everything in that room there is shit and everything in this room is sorted. Got it? I’m trying to do you a favour. That room’s for the old farts, mates of Magic Mick over there. Hippies who got themselves so ripped they think it’s still the ’60s. You’ll find everything you should be into right here.’
    Kids, these days.
    ‘I don’t think you understand how this works,’ I said, in my most reasonable tone. Some people need a little patience and the fat kid was clearly one of them. ‘I’m what’s called the customer, I decide what I want and then you sell it to me. With me so far?‘
    But the kid just blew out his cheeks again.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, loudly addressing the man on the stool, hishead drooping on his chest now, a little pool of saliva forming at the corner of his mouth. ‘Can you help me?’
    But the old man had begun to snore.
    ‘Don’t bother,’ the fat kid said. ‘He’s narcoleptic. Now, if you can’t afford the shit in the back and you don’t want anything from my side of the shop, you might as well piss off, yes?’
    Let me say here and now that I’m not a great one for confrontations of any kind. Bad service in a pizza place will still earn the chode who forgot my garlic bread and brought the wrong toppings a small tip. I make it a rule never to complain; things only seem to get worse when you do. But this fat kid had such an attitude problem that I was prepared to make an exception. Maybe it was the long drag across town, the wasted Saturday or just my time of the month. But I sort of lost it.
    I can’t remember what I said, it all came vomiting out. Fragments have resurfaced, though:
my money’s as good as anyone else’s/you’re a music fascist/ overweight twat in an overpriced shop/ of course I have money/ what gives you the right to decide what I can listen to?/ wouldn’t know good music if it bit you in your fat arse/ I don’t care if I do wake him/ it’s not an insult, it’s a statement of fact/I am not a fucking hippy /I couldn’t wake him if I had the Ministry of Sound’s PA system/ I’ll buy what I want/ he’s not dead, is he?/ he looks dead/ what about the student discount?
    Just as I was coming to my senses and realising that calling a fat kid fat isn’t, well, phat, I heard Faruk saying something over my shoulder. It seemed like Faruk and the fat kid already knew each other. The fat kid said something and then Faruk said something else. I can’t remember what. I was too dazed, surprised and all right, ashamed of myself. Then the fat kid spoke. ‘Fuck me, Faruk, you got some funny friends these days. This one’s got a bigger gob on him than me!’
    And so, thanks to GD, I met Dennis Dalziel. Him and Faruk’d been close mates at juniors but they’d lost touch when they went to different upper