The Amateurs Read Online Free Page A

administration a few days after his seventeenth birthday.
    He returned an increasing number of ‘Mornings’ and two ‘Happy birthdays!’ (Big Sue from Accounts, wee Marion from Export) as he passed through the grey warren of cubicles towards his desk. There had been a moment, a long time ago, a year or two after he’d been here, when he’d thought about quitting. About going to college, or the uni, to study…something. But Pauline hadn’t been keen. Three or four years as a penniless student? What was the point of that exactly?
    With a sigh he sat down and began rearranging the piles on his desk: pink, yellow and green forms, bills of lading, customs documentation, invoices to be assigned purchase order numbers, the huge amount of paperwork that was created whenever a forklift truck rolled out of the factory below and was freighted somewhere in the world. He nudged his mouse and his screen lit up–his screen saver was a photograph of the famous eighteenth at St Andrews, the Swilcan Bridge a jut of grey stone in a sea of green grass. The clock in the corner of the screen told him it was 9.13, but before he got to work on the PO numbers he looked out of the window.
    The office overlooked the scarred brick wall of an old warehousing building, unused since the late 1980s. At the far corner of the wall, low down, faded but still clearly visible, someone had used silver spray paint to daub a five-foot-high matchstick man. Or rather, matchstick woman, for the figure hadtwo gigantic, misshapen breasts jutting from its frame. The nipples–clearly an afterthought, or possibly rushed by the approach of a nightwatchman–were just quick dashes. A demented tangle of hair covered the pubic region. Next to her, crudely sprayed in the same silver paint and still perfectly legible despite several attempts to remove it, was the legend:
     
    TEGS BEGS AND HAIRY FEGS
     
    Sixteen years and it was still a rare day that it did not make Gary Irvine smile: the fact that someone among the youth of Ardgirvan, their veins fizzing with Merrydown or Buckfast, their synapses popping and expanding with glue or hashish, had so felt the biting need to share their love of tits, bums and hairy fannies with the rest of the population that they were forced to come here under cover of darkness and create their enduring masterpiece. He smiled, his reaction reminding him of one of Stevie’s sayings–‘Never trust a man who can’t raise a smile at the sight of a crudely drawn cock and balls.’ Yes, Gary smiled, but it sometimes troubled him that he’d been smiling at it for sixteen years now.
     
    A couple of hundred miles to the south the lorry climbed the off-ramp to Knutsford services. On a wooden pallet deep in the vehicle’s bowels the gleaming white Spaxons rolled backwards in their cardboard sleeves.

4
    C ATHY I RVINE NERVOUSLY FLATTENED HER NAPKIN ON the table and wondered if it was too soon to go back outside for another cigarette. Bloody smoking ban. Cathy had never been a political woman–when she saw Braveheart she briefly regretted not voting SNP back in ’78–but the smoking ban had definitely radicalised her. ‘This is jist how Hitler started,’ she told Gary shortly after the ban came in, her finger jabbing the kitchen counter for emphasis.
    She tried to look as though she was thinking about something important and, in doing so, she actually did start thinking about something important. For Cathy that usually meant thinking about her eldest son. Lee. That boy. Two hundred pounds he’d borrowed last week. Three hundred the month before. Loans he had to pay off. Said he’d pay her back soon, that he had some job coming up. But doing what? If he…she’d talk to Gary about it, see what he said.
    Cathy didn’t like being in restaurants by herself. Scary. Especially somewhere like the Pepper Pot, Ardgirvan’sswankiest Italian. Well, Ardgirvan’s only Italian. Their father, Cathy thought dreamily, her mind sepia-tinted by half a