The Last Days of Disco Read online

  ‘Aw, fuckin’ thanks, man!’ grunted Joey, mucky water dripping from his hands.

  ‘Can ah help ye?’ A gruff, elderly voice could be heard but – unlike the howling and barking – it wasn’t apparent where it was coming from. Bobby rotated 180 degrees and back, but still couldn’t see the source.

  ‘Hey you twa! Who ye lookin’ fur?’ The voice seemed to be coming from a higher level. Bobby looked up towards the farmhouse itself. Joey was leaning against the gate, one foot up, trying to scrape large sods of mud from his distressed suede boots.

  ‘Hullo. Ma name’s Bobby Cassidy. Is Doug about? I’m here to buy some disco lights aff him.’ Bobby called out towards the source of the voice even though he still couldn’t see its owner.

  ‘Yer lookin’ fur Hairy Doug.’ The intonation suggested more than one Doug worked on the farm. The voice paused then continued. ‘He’s ower ther, in the blue shed. Dunno if he’s in though.’

  ‘Cheers … em … mate,’ said Bobby, before whispering, ‘wherever the fuck y’are!’

  Bobby and Joey walked gingerly across the deep ripples of mud towards the shed. For Joey, it was very much a case of the horse having bolted, as everything from his shins down couldn’t have got any filthier. Bobby had been more careful and, having worn black Doc Marten lace-up boots, was much more prepared for the conditions.

  Hairy Doug’s blue corrugated iron shed was the most distant building from the main house. A few old horse troughs had to be navigated before Joey spotted a path that reached a different gate from the one they’d just clambered over. The whole area in front of the building had that bomb-blast appearance of places in the Lebanon, from which that Kate Adie regularly reported. Bits of engines lay rusting next to an oven; piles of dense grey-concrete blocks rested on numerous fragments of broken glass. Isolated bricks were strewn around and – as cliché dictated – an armless, boss-eyed Tiny Tears doll stared up at them, like a miniature Marty Feldman.

  The rain intensified. Joey spotted a door. It was clad in the same furrowed material as the rest of the building and was, as a consequence, easy to miss. Beyond it, and almost totally concealed by a clump of overgrown shrubbery, was a small inset pane of dirty, cobwebbed glass. There was no door handle, nor obvious mechanism for alerting anyone inside. As Bobby approached the door, the tinny sound of ‘Since You Been Gone’ could be heard. This prompted him to push back the heavy bushes and step up on a few bricks to peek through the glass.

  ‘Joey … Joe!’ he whispered, barely audible. ‘Fuckin’ hell, Joe. That must be him. He’s in there havin’ a wank!’

  ‘Honestly? Fuckin’ pervert! Is there anybody else wi’ him? Joey spoke even more quietly than Bobby, for fear of Hairy Doug coming outside with the ‘Biggest Cock in Scotland’ still in his hand.

  ‘Naw. He’s goin’ mental wi’ it in there hisself. Tell ye whit though, yer pal Jeff wisnae exaggeratin’. That thing’s the length ae a fuckin’ javelin. He’s got hands like Sepp Maier an’ there’s still mer cock showin’ than covered up. When he shoots, its gauny be like Mount Etna eruptin’.’ For the first time since they got off the bus, Joey was struggling to contain his laughter. ‘On ye go … Get in there!’

  ‘Shift ower an’ gies a look then,’ whispered Joey.

  ‘Aye. Watch yer feet,’ warned Bobby, both of them still speaking in whispered tones. Bobby’s extra few inches in height permitted him a view without having to stand on the top level of bricks. He felt they looked a bit unsteady. Joey needed this extra elevation, but before he could see in through the glass, the highest row gave way and he crashed into the adjacent bush. Bobby jumped to attention and positioned himself in front of the door seconds before it opened. The python was back in its basket, but the lid remained off. Hairy Doug’s filthy jeans had been pulled up quickly, but, apparently unknown to its handler, the business end was still visible. From his vantage point at the bottom of the makeshift steps, Bobby realised that he was almost exactly at eye-level with the ‘Biggest Cock in Scotland’.

  It was an average-sized door opening, but it still struggled to contain Doug’s massive frame. He was well named; there was little skin on his face that was not covered by unruly, lengthy dark hair. It hung down over his eyebrows and rose up from an almost comedy ZZ Top beard to a level above his nose. The figure-of-eight patch of oily skin around his eyes resembled a ski mask. Everything else was stereotypical rocker – armless, ripped leather biker’s waistie over dirty denim jacket over black, torn Grateful Dead T-shirt. Silver skeleton-head buckle belt holding up oil-stained, faded blue jeans – zip still wide open; python coiled. Biker boots of a size that nursery-rhyme families could’ve lived in. Fortunately, Bobby detected no hint – or shame – that the Hairy behemoth in front of him was aware he’d been caught masturbating to a soft-rock Rainbow song. So he opened with the only thing he could think of.

  ‘You must be Hairy Doug. Ah’m Bobby. Ah phoned ye earlier?’

  ‘Aye, lad. Come in.’ He looked down at Joey, who was pulling himself free of the thorny overgrown bushes. ‘Is yer pal all right? Hairy Doug smiled warmly and extended the hand that had only minutes earlier been wrangling his own rope. Bobby tentatively and weakly shook the hand. It was warm, and a bit moist. Sweat, Bobby hoped.

  Clearly one for the understatement, Doug offered, ‘Sorry. Place is a wee bit of a mess.’

  Bobby couldn’t place the accent. It seemed to be a bizarre mix of many identifiable regional dialects, such as Cockney, Cornish and the Doric. Looking around his war zone, it was apparent that Hairy Doug was no believer in putting down roots. His place – with the Army-style fold-up camp bed in one corner – had a look of an environment that could be evacuated in minutes, if the wrong people came calling. It was cramped with the same sort of debris that was out in the yard, only there was far more of it, and forced into a much smaller area. Shelves of oil cans, car batteries, and paint tins; a small TV set with a coat hanger aerial teetered on a old Edwardian-style coach-built pram. A large woodwork bench sat in the middle of the room, causing Joey to look twice at the door and ponder whether the shell of the structure had been built after the bench had been bolted to the shed’s concrete floor.

  ‘Just grab a seat, lads,’ said Hairy Doug as he went over to a small stove that was concealed behind a sheet hanging from a line strung across the width. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Eh, no for me mate,’ said Bobby. Joey had found somewhere to perch, although he jumped back up from the newspaper-covered stool, believing that something living had just moved when he’d sat on it.

  ‘How did you get my name, agin?’ said Doug, his previous cheeriness now replaced by a more serious, lets-get-down-to-business tone.

  Joey felt that he should take this one. ‘Eh … Jeff McGarry gied me your name. Said ye hired out mobile disco gear and lights, an’ that.’

  ‘Ah. OK. The boy McGarry. Is he your mate?’

  ‘Naw, no really. Ah’ve kent his family for a while but …’

  ‘Likes the cows, does that boy. A bit too much, I think,’ said Doug, interrupting Joey.

  Bobby knew a bit about Jeff’s story. It had become part of Ayrshire folklore in recent years. Almost three years before, a Kilmarnock Standard report, hidden away on an inside page, had told of rustling at McAdam Farm, near Kilmaurs. Four young men, three of them brothers and the fourth a cousin, had stolen a prize-winning cow from a barn in the middle of the night. Amazingly, they’d managed to walk it about three miles back to a vacant, boarded-up council house in Onthank, with the purpose of killing it and selling the meat. The premise was born in Hollywood. Fifteen-year-old ringleader Jeff had come up with the idea after seeing an eye-wateringly gory scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The gang had managed to get the petrified beast into a ground-floor bathroom, although, by all accounts, squeezing its girth through the two doors to get it there was a major exercise in patience.

  Jeff hadn’t thought the plan through properly, so when it came time to fire up the electric hedgecutters that were
playing the role of chainsaw and look into those big brown eyes, none of the rustlers had the bottle. They also couldn’t get it into the bathtub, from where the blood might have been more easily disposed. They spent the night in there, getting drunk in the hope that courage would be plucked up, but the moment had passed. The McGarrys felt the best plan of action was to disappear over the back gardens, leaving the cow in the bathroom for someone else to find.

  Someone else did find it almost two days later. The smell and the incessant moo-ing had been traced by a neighbouring Columbo to the empty house. He’d had a look around earlier, but had assumed the noises were a practical joke – as opposed to a cow having taken up rent-free residence in the nearby house. The local police caught up with the gang without too much investigation. One of them had left a list of potential carnivorous customers – and their phone numbers – on the top of the cistern. It was entitled ‘Jeff’s Coo Meat’.

  Bobby was staggered to discover that, following his time in a Young Offenders’ Institute, Jeff had been offered a chance at rehabilitation with a job. On this farm. And surrounded by cows.

  There was a pause as Doug sipped his tea from a metal cup. Bobby broke the short silence.

  ‘So whit is it that you dae on the farm?’

  ‘Oh, not much really. Mr and Mrs Wallace let me stay here and work from the shed if I fix the tractor engines for them. I’m away a lot of the time … roadying for bands mostly. Black Sabbath, AC/DC, The Clash y’know.’ This last entry seemed a bit out of kilter, but Doug went on to explain that you didn’t have to like their music to take their money. Joey had a feeling that Heatwave Disco’s motto might ultimately be the same as Hairy Doug’s.

  ‘So what do you need then?’ asked Doug.

  ‘Well, we’re just startin’ out so … basically everythin’,’ replied Bobby, sensing that Doug might be a man who could be trusted not to take advantage of a couple of virgins. ‘We’ve got a few bookings,’ Bobby lied. ‘Mobile disco pairties … so decks, speakers and a few lights tae start wi’, ah’d have thought.’

  ‘Come on through here.’ Hairy Doug flicked a switch and three industrial fluorescent strip lights came on. They helped illuminate a cluttered path to a previously unseen second door in the far corner of the room.

  Walking through the door was like entering Narnia. The contrast between the chaos of Doug’s ‘front room’ and his private store was breathtaking. Rows of Marshall PA columns were stacked neatly in one corner. Four double-decked turntable units were laid out in an immaculate row on the central table, alongside a large group of sound mixers. Hundreds of feet of cables were hanging on hooks with labels reading ‘5ft’, ‘10ft’, ‘15ft’ and ‘20ft and over’ stuck to the white-painted block wall about them.

  At the far end of the room were boxes of lights. Many purloined from Hairy Doug’s time on the road. There were spots on bars, long, twisting rope lights, cabinets of various shapes and sizes, major Super-Trouper field lights, disco balls, strobe lights, and blacklights and smoke machines; all stacked so neatly it was as if Hairy Doug had just divorced Mary Poppins and she’d been granted custody of the sound and light store.

  ‘So, I can hire you the basic package. Deck, sound-to-light mixer, base cabinets and speakers. How does that sound? If you want to make a real go of it, you bring them back and we talk price for buying.’ Even before asking, Bobby knew this first gig wasn’t going to make them rich.

  ‘Yeah. OK,’ said Bobby. ‘How much for aw that?’

  ‘Forty quid, lads – 24-hour hire,’ replied Hairy Doug. ‘When d’you want the gear for?’

  ‘The gig’s on the seventeenth. Tail end of next week,’ said Bobby.

  ‘No problem. Fifty per cent deposit up front, OK?’ Hairy Doug moved over to a desk and picked up a small diary. He opened it up and Joey was able to glimpse that there were no other names or bookings in the few pages flicked over to get to the seventeenth of February.

  They left shortly afterwards, way down in profit, but childishly excited and contented. A couple of clowns celebrating their deal with Hairy Doug – hefty of frame and of price, and accepted as the owner of one of the ‘Biggest Cocks in Scotland’. Jeff McGarry couldn’t possibly have seen them all.

  A WALK ON THE BEACH WITH A SOLDIER

  11TH FEBRUARY 1982: 2:14PM

  Hettie – only her birth certificate and the odd doctor’s letter used her given name of Heather – was undeniably impressed by her brother’s stamina. He’d left home almost two years earlier and she couldn’t recall him being particularly energetic before. She did remember his idleness being the stimulus for many of the arguments between Gary and their dad, though, leading to his leaving. When he’d initially come back, Hettie had barely recognised him. He appeared much taller, definitely leaner and – with his hair buzzcut short – infinitely more attractive than the emaciated slob of old.

  He’d been carrying her on his back for almost twenty-five minutes. For the first ten of those, Gary had been jogging; bare feet tracking deep footprints in the wet sand of Troon beach. Hettie told him about the scene in Chariots of Fire she’d seen at the cinema two weeks ago. Gary didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d only stopped jogging because the bouncing motion had caused Hettie to drop the best part of a ’99 down the back of his neck. The whole routine had resulted from Hettie enquiring about the weight of the pack Gary might be expected to have to haul if he was ever involved in a conflict.

  ‘About the same weight as you, Hets,’ said Gary exaggerating, before insisting he prove his recently acquired strength.

  They had started off at the upper esplanade near the ferry terminal, having caught the No. 10 bus from Kilmarnock. The walk from the centre of Troon took Gary and Hettie along Templehill, past the Anchorage pub to the tip of the small penis-shaped promontory, where the boats went back and forth to Larne. It had been raining heavily when they left home, but the wind had swept up nearer the coast and it seemed to be keeping the worst of the precipitation at bay.

  It had been Hettie’s idea to come down to Troon on this last Sunday before Gary went back to Wellington Barracks in London. She hadn’t seen all that much of him and certainly not on her own. Bobby’s birthday and catching up with the few remaining mates he had wanted to see had meant Gary’s time had been almost fully occupied. Hettie had always felt a special bond with Gary. It wasn’t that either of them disliked Bobby; far from it, they were a trio who had always got on well, and, perhaps unusually, there had never been any major sibling conflicts for Harry and Ethel to referee and arbitrate. It was just that daughter and eldest son shared something intuitive that was difficult to explain. They weren’t especially alike. They certainly didn’t look like each other. Hettie shared the remainder of her family’s stocky plumpishness and slightly sallow skin. She wore clothes from Oxfam but in a way that marked her as quirky or bohemian.

  Hettie was creative; artistic and musical. She was clever. She read constantly, quoting lines from Shelagh Delaney or J.D. Salinger, which gave her an air of being from an earlier era. Gary was none of these things. He was as stereotypical a product of his ’70s working-class, west-of-Scotland upbringing as it was possible to get: repressed, angry, defiant, sullen and a magnet for trouble and chaos. None of this was evident in his relationship with Hettie.

  Since his basic training had ended, Gary’s battalion had been performing domestic duties. He hadn’t been permitted leave to come home – or so he had informed Hettie in his letters, which were, in themselves, a major indication of his change in attitude. Although he had jokingly hinted at being permanently confined to barracks, Hettie had suspected Gary was simply avoiding his father. In truth, the first six months had been somewhat underwhelming for Gary and there hadn’t been much to write home about. It might make Ethel feel happier that her son wasn’t a constant target for various terrorist groups, but guarding St James’s Palace wearing a full-dress uniform of red tunic and bearskin wasn’t what Gary anticipated when the recruitment office in Londo
n talked about ‘life-changing experiences’. Gary hoped for a more exciting challenge in the six months that lay ahead. Hettie simply wanted him to be happy. And although she’d rather he’d found happiness in a career less potentially hazardous, she also saw the positive attributes it had fostered in him.

  She knew Gary loved this beach. Her family hadn’t gone on many holidays when she was growing up – a couple of times to Butlin’s at the Heads of Ayr and once all the way by train to a miserably windswept caravan site in Arbroath, where they were regularly soaked by the violent waves coming over the sea wall. But they did travel the short journey to Troon regularly in the summer, and Gary had often been the one nagging his parents to take them.

  The Ailsa Craig had always fascinated Gary, and he found it the most bizarre thing to contemplate: a volcanic plug, perfectly framed between the Heads of Ayr and the slopes of Arran’s southernmost edge, which didn’t seem to correspond to the local geography. It seemed to him that it should be up near Mull or Skye, with violent waves making it almost impossible to access. Instead it just sat there, in relative isolation, in generally calm waters, easy to get to … but why would anyone bother? When relations with Harry were at their most strained, Gary would come here and clear his overheated brain by imagining himself living there. Alone, except for the gannets and gulls. He figured that an enforced isolation was a far more attractive option than living in a pressurised environment alongside a disinterested father with whom he could no longer make any connections. He loved that view; imagining it to look wildly different from the side that faced the northern tip of Ulster.