Dade Simpson

David (Dade) Simpson had been one of my best mates at school. But he hadn’t started that way. He’d challenged me to fight on our first days at the new school, but we never got around to scrapping. He looked Italian with his jet-black hair and tawny skin, but he ran like a penguin and wasn’t good at football. I was the one that always laughed first and longest at his daft jokes. He got them from his eldest brother Joe, who was working. He’d another brother in the year above us. I’m not sure what his family situation was, or whether he had a dad—if you know what I mean—or there was something wrong with his mum. He knew as little about my family as I did about his. I’d look at his face and it was never the same joke twice and we’d fall against each other chuckling.

He was in my registration class, but I still hung about with my old classmates from St Stephen’s, Dougie Kirland and at break times, another boy that lived not far from me in Parkhall, wee Kevie Whorisky. Dade was from Whitecrook, and he stuck with his mates, and that was the natural order of things.  

Dougie had a girlfriend from Primary school Jill and he’d felt her fanny, because he told us. And he was probably riding her for all I knew, while I was stuck with Wendy the Wanking machine taking turns wanking me and the rest of the boys off in disused coal cellars, around the back of the huts, and wherever else we could finger her. I figured it was my hair, which was humpback with a cow’s lick. No proper girl would look at me, without laughing and my face going that way as if somebody had started to strangle me and then just walked away because I was so ridiculous.

Dougie Kirkland and Kevie Whorisky had proper hair they could train it to go in straight lines and perform like a dog and do anything but bark. And they’d the sharp clothes. Samba training shoes and the latest Levi jacket and denims. It was no surprise that girls chased after them. But they didn’t rub my oversized nose in it. We were mates, after all.

Our school has a gravel hockey pitch outside the PE block. It wasn’t big enough for eleven-a-side football matches. We trekked up in a group together past the jannie’s house, and beyond the chain-link fence where I used to catch a bus home. Past the corner shop and around to Dean Street which a three football parks, one of which was gravel, a running track and rugby park. Sometimes we changed at the Dean Street changing rooms, and other times we changed in the school changing rooms and clacked up towards the park in our football boots, the aluminium studs making us three inches taller.   

We  carried our sport’s kit in plastic bags. Dade and me and Dougie and Kevie and another Whitecrook boy, Yub. I wasn’t sure why they called him Yub, he was as taller than me with an outsized adult laugh. We’d taken a shortcut up the cobbled lane that ran beside the railway lines. Dougie shoved me in the back, and when I turned around, he tried to stick the head on me. But I was too quick. I grabbed him by the back of his perfect hair and pulled his head down, but instead of booting him in the face, I let him up and shoved him against the wall.

Dade was fighting with Yub, and he too was getting the better of him. Dougie attacked me again. I grabbed his hair again and pulled his head down.

‘We’re mates,’ I shouted.

I waited to see if wee Kevie was going to jump in. I knew it wouldn’t be on my side, but he didn’t.

Dade and me hung back and let them get ahead of us. We were both panting, red faced and out of breath. I wasn’t hurt and neither was he. They’d set us up. We got on alright after that, but I knew I couldn’t trust them.

When we left school Dougie got a job as an apprentice carpet fitter. And there was that quite satisfaction when I met him years later and he was bald. Wee Kevie, Dade and me couldn’t get work and applied to join the RAF. Dade’s brother was already in it. None of us were academic and couldn’t spell cannon fodder. We had to sit a test. That didn’t bother me, I quite liked test, because you were just playing and it didn’t really matter.

Wee Kevie, ground crew.

Dade, spray painter, shot-blaster.

I got to be the kind of air-craft controller with no sense of direction that couldn’t find his car in Asda carpark. I got to be middle-class. I got to be the guy that landed planes all over Europe and set them up for air strikes on the Soviet Union. But the interview process didn’t go that well. I didn’t say ‘Fuck the Queen and up the ‘Ra’, but I did mention ‘the police were a necessary evil’. The Soviet Union was safe. My part in its downfall was over.

Dade Simpson still had all his hair the next time I saw him limping into my local pub. Fat as fuck.  I was in bald-denial school. We’d a lot of catching up to do, after we’d shook hands.

He told me about his accident while working in Germany. The compensation claim. The fat cheque that he was due at any moment. How he was setting up along the road, in the pub I used to drink in, The Horse and Barge, just in to check out the competition.

‘Geez a loan of fifty quid,’ he said.

I trawled through my pockets, I’d three tenners and some change. ‘I’ve only got thirty quid,’ I said.

‘That’ll dae,’ he said.

You know how the story ends. RIP my friend.