the IQ test

BBC 4 that’s what I’ve been reduced to. Something about history. Something about Karl Marx. Half dozing, I’m not really watching it. The credits come up at the end and I see his name, Professor Bobby Pitt, Consultant to the Open University. ‘Fuck right off,’ I splutter.

‘Whit?’ she says, sitting on the couch, legs tucked under her, checking messages on her IPhone. Always on her phone.

‘Boaby Pitt. Arsehole.’  

‘You know him.’

‘Aye,’ I say. ‘Knew him very well. Taught him everything he knows.’

‘Well, he’ll no’ know no’ very much then.’ She’s scrunches up her face. Light from the screen a torch on her double chins. Taps in some gobbledygook and looks pleased with herself. Waits for the online world to pick up her genius and, out there, someone answer it with their own beep. Kills time, dark strabismic eye wandering from the light, sighing through her nose and asking a question. ‘How’d you know him, then?’

‘We went to Uni together.’ I take the last slug of my can, shake it to make sure it’s finished, before I nip off to bed.’

Her voice goes up the scales. ‘You never told me you went to Uni.’

‘You never asked.’

***

I’m sitting in the back row of an echoing lecture hall at registration in which you’re scared to whisper. We’ve made it to the big time. I’m going to study sociology. I’m not really sure what it is, but the big thing is I’m at University. Mum genuflects when she says University. Well, she doesn’t actually genuflect, but she drops her eyes and lowers her voice, and there’s a gap in her breathing, as if it was something holy. Boaby Pitt is sitting in the front row. I didn’t know his name then, of course, but even sitting down he stood out. Everyone else was shiny and as new looking as Barbie and Ken, modelling their new outfits.  He’s crumbled as red socks in laundry, his hair a brown tangle a Van de Graaff generator couldn’t sort and I swear I can smell him. The Americans are invading Vietnam and using something called Agent Orange, which wipes out all known plant life, Boaby is using it as deodorant.

The other students are polite about it, but their eyes are watering. They’re wilting. They are not going to make it. They’re paying attention to the guy at the front, Dr Burnett, who claps his hands a couple of times. Sharp and clear. He was wearing a ceremonial gown with the colours of the University of Glasgow.  Heads popping like champagne corks, nodding in agreement, even though he hadn’t yet said anything.  

***

‘Alright dogbreath.’ That was the first thing Boaby Pitt said to me. He tugged off his damp smelling duffle and folded himself into the seat beside me. A gap. One chair wide between me and the other ten students, ten pairs of shiny shoes, in our study circle. A faint whiff of Patchouli, Dr Clarke faced us, his back to his desk, scattered with piles of papers, journals and books. Tonsured, with lank brown hair spilling dandruff down his checked shirt, our tutor adopted the ascetic mad-monk approach to academia. One fawn corduroy leg straddled the other, clutching his thin blue polyester ankle socks at the kneecap, fawn desert boots, he mumbled into his beard.  Reaching down, he sipped cold coffee from a cracked red mug at his feet. He leant forward as he spoke, taking us into his confidence.  Sniping about not taking anything at face value. Figure out what the question is, or even it is a question, before you answer. Pens scribbled over lined paper,  at each measured pronouncement.  We were meant to be studying philosophy. Boaby was from Easterhouse and as his eyes slide over mine as the tutorial droned on without us. He grinned, gap toothed. He’d got my measure, I didn’t have a store bought A4 pad, I’d an unlined school jotter with a blue cover inked in doodles of guillotines and hung man. Neck sore from skulking down in case I was asked a question by our tutor.  I was sliding a pencil into the top of my Doc Martens to scratch my foot without unlacing them. As we gathered our stuff together and filed out into the corridor I turned to Boaby and said, ‘That’s a fuckin smart duck, that.’

Boaby laughed, teeth stained as a urinal in a working-man’s club. ‘Did you say duck?’

A good looking girl with ash-blonde hair nudged past us and we both stopped talking, stopped breathing, stopped being, as we followed her progress along the corridor.

‘I meant dude.’

Boaby was a good mimic and his tone flat lined to that of the vague English accent of Dr Clarke. ‘You do know there’s a difference between dude and duck. Don’t you?’

‘Fuck off, ya roaster,’ I said.    

***

Uni was a breeze. You didn’t have to go to lectures. You didn’t have to go to tutorials. You did have to put the odd essay in about the stuff you weren’t reading. And you had exams at the end of the year, but that was what re-sits were for, to give you something to do during the summer when you were signing on. Tony the Bull told us that. He was in second year, so he knew the score. He was called Tony the Bull because he’d wrapped a tea-towel around his head and charged the bar in the Union, where you got cheap drink, and knocked himself out. He said he couldn’t figure where he’d gotten the tea towel from, and that worried him.

After the Union shuts we fall off the end of the world. Wind and rain behind us.  We follow the full width of the pavement on Dunbarton Road. Staggering two steps forwards and one sideways in a skittering gait. The hulks of brownstone tenements with their blackend close mouths keeping us straight. Boaby begun the opening bars of  The Soldier’s Song as we pass The Rosevale bar.

‘Shut, the fuck up,’ said Tony dragging him by the arm of his denim jacket, tucking him in close to his body like the blade on a penknife to silence him. ‘You’ll get us killed.’ But the pubs already closed, and we get past without any bother.   

‘Fuck the orange bastards,’I start bawling. ‘And God bless the Pope.’  

The hill at Apsley Street had us catching our breath. The lights of the chippy window across the road reminded me that I’ve not had anything to eat since a bit of burnt toast that morning and I was starving.

Tony must have been thinking the same thing. ‘It’s closed,’ he said, heading up towards his flat.

‘We’ll chap the door.’ Boaby’s weejuns weaved onto the slick cobbled road, without us, and he cuts a diagonal towards the lights of commerce. ‘They’ll maybe let us in.’

By the time we catch up with him his forehead is pressed against the plate glass like Orpheus hoping for the best and expecting the worst. I tap him on the shoulder. ‘C’mon, pal, it’s been closed for ages’. But he takes no notice.

‘How did you not tell me,’ Boaby moaned.

‘We did,’ I said.

‘No, you never,’ he said, raring up.

‘We’ve no got any money anyway,’ said Tony. ‘Not a sausage.’

Boaby spun round. ‘Now’s no the time to start talkin sense.’ And he staggered back across the road and stood outside the close mouth of the tenement Tony had a flat in and threw up a map of Madagascar on the wall.