little people.

Jim and me went down the short-cut cause he’d a knife and he wanted to show it to me properly. It wasn’t a flick-knife, or a throwing knife, that thwacked into wood or somebody’s body when you threw it. Neil Armstrong would have had to bring one of them from the moon, or you’d need to go to France and smuggle them into the country for that. It wasn’t even a Bowie knife that got sold in Tausney’s Sports shop, with a razor edge blade for stabbing, or fishing even. His knife was just the ordinary kind, propped up with a cardboard backing and held in place by two red elastic bands in packs of twelve in Johnny Graham’s shop window and sold to the discriminating whittler for twenty-seven pence. On his doorstep Jim flashed the mosaic green handle, covered in hard-wearing plastic, of the clasp knife to me out of the side of his denim pocket. He knew I’d be insanely jealous.

We sheltered from the smirry rain underneath the branches of the trees, and broken fences that marked off the gardens of the snobby houses from the grass slope of the dump. A thrush whistled some kind of long-short warning and there was a flash of camouflage brown flightless feathers. A beady-eyed sparrow hopped two-footed away from us into the musty-wood smelling darkness. We’d our Parker hoods up. Mine was common green, his damp bluish, two trimmed fake- fur face igloos, in our excitement butting against each other. He unclasped the silver of the blade and ran it up and down his thumb to show how sharp the edge was. I held my breath until it was my shot. The blade was folded back into the handle before I was allowed to touch it. I wiped my hands on my denims, but I tried and I tried couldn’t unpick the blade as my nails were down to the quick.

‘Gi’me.’ Jim held the palm of his curled hand out, adult contempt in his voice.

I used my canine teeth to get purchase and tasted metal before locking the blade open with my fingers. I held out the blade towards him, stab, stab, stabbing. Retreating, he took a step backwards, standing on a decrepit black branch that cracked brittle. He stumbled like a drunk. Pacified, I’d showed him, I could have killed him if I wanted to. I knew proper etiquette for returning recalcitrant knives from the telly version of The Three Musketeers; the tip of the blade pointed towards me, in the prescribed manner, and the handle of the knife presented to him. He ran it up and down his thumb again, staring at me, to see if it had lost any of its sharpness. Satisfied it hadn’t, he stabbed it into a waist height horizontal board of the fence nearest us a few times. Every stab wound into the board showed how much he begrudged giving me a shot of his knife. He started carving out Jim loves and the first letter was a L. I sniggered, leaning against the fencepost, trying to work out who it would be. Jim went to a different school and he said he’d gone with a few birds and felt their fanny, so it could have been anybody, or somebody he plum made up. But when he finished and looked at me with gloating eyes, the knife in his hand and an upturned curl to his lip I knew who it was.

‘Gee me the knife.’ There was something in my voice. He scrambled to hand it over right away.

Down the funnel of his hood, his snuffling cold a background noise to the picking and pecking of slanted soft wormwood, he scrutinised me carving on the board above Jim loves LH: JoD loves LH.

‘You fancy her as well?’ He shrugged and something in the way his blue-grey eyes narrowed and lips puckered into a snigger showed he knew-- I fancied her, but he didn’t care, cause he fancied her too.

But I eyeballed him to let him know I fancied her more. LH, of course, was impossibly old. Glamour-puss fifteen. She went to the High School at the top of our street and, like mouse detectives always sniffing about for extra bits of info, we worked out she lived in the white scheme behind Clydebank High, but on the borders of a different country to us. We’d first seen her at the at The Tenant’s Hall’s discos.

The Tenant’s Hall was a long single story shed that stood back on the slope of a hill, neutral territory between the boys from Parkhall shops and those that lived nearer to Dalmuir. Old people haunted it, but once a week, on a Thursday night, they ran a disco and let in young blood. It cost five pence to get in and they sold crisps and juice, but it stunk of fag smoke and booze and somebody was always being sick in the toilets. Cammy, Jim and me sharked about the chairs pushed to the back of the hall, in groups of two or three, and checked out the other guys to see if they wanted to start anything. The older boys would be there as well. We didn’t want to miss anything if they started a fight when they nipped out for a fag.

Sometime we were pushed sideways and onto the dance floor by a rush of bodies. ‘Chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheep’ rocked the place. My strategy was to tap any girl I know from our school on the shoulder to dance, especially the ones with bad skin, or too many teeth, cause they didn’t think you’d fancy them. Sometimes talking to them between the blare of beats wasn’t as difficult as scratching that bit of the back you could never get to with your fingernails. The prettier ones, with fluffed up hair around their faces, worked out early, how to look straight through you as if they don’t know you, but if their platform shoes shuffled sideways you’d got their attention. Most songs were timed like an egg race. Boy dancers were mummified and staggered backwards and forwards. Girls danced together, on platform heels, holding each other up, like a chain link fence. My wrist flopped about, for added extravagance, only when I forgot myself and got caught up in the chirpy-chirp hysteria. Boys, like Alfie Murray, hips swayed and held their hands up in prayer. They’d perfected the art of looking over their partner’s shoulder and never at her, in case she thought you fancied her. That kind of extravagance was ok, for them, but I needed to practice making sure my feet didn’t touch the girl’s. Dancing was like jousting with our jackets off and wide-winged shirt collars splayed open. Girls gave you the brush off by a hair flick, shuffling thirty degrees back towards their pals were strutting and turning their backs on you.

LH was different because most of the older girls turned you down for a dance. Her charcoal hair sheltered a cheeky face and her green eyes locked into you. Red platform shoes, brown and yellow tube socks and a leopard-skin, halter- neck top would have looked stupid on an older woman, but on her they were the business. Best of all she would dance a moonie with you.

Moonies were the DJ’s way of telling everybody to go home. ‘Puppy-love’ when the lights were turned down and everything went into slow-mo with the projected lights swirling around the walls was my favourite. My head locked under LH’s chin and into her musky cleavage. She pulled me into her perfumed world and waltzed me about the dance floor and into Donny Osmond world. Jim would be waiting for the next dance. It was impossible to get more than one dance with her. At the end of the night when she sat side-saddle in Gary Park’s lap and kissed him, in full view, even that felt right. He was the best fighter and football player and she was just being herself. I didn’t know at the time that I’d be betrayed by Jim fancying her too.