Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

• PROLOGUE.
  
• things to do in stavanger when you’re dead.
  
• sending a message to the man.
  
• MONDAY, SEPTEMBER FIRST.
  
• we’ve got hostiles.
  
• WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER THIRD.
  
• real life (trade mark.)
  
• dead man wanking.
  
• THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER SECOND.
  
• a cautionary tale against sensible decisions.
  
• the best days of your life.
  
• interesting times.
  
• apprehension.
  
• deus nigellus ex machina.
  
• dogging it: the downside.
  
• FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER FIFTH.
  
• musical differences
  
• the place of many bampots.
  
• lobbing clogs into the loom.
  
• survivors’ mutual counselling group.
  
• target acquired.
  
• what great oafs from little arseholes grow.
  
• SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER SIXTH.
  
• opposing force.
  
• third‐
  degree Burns.
  
• team deathmatch:
  leet good guys [LGG] v terrorist llamas [TL].
  
• attaboy, clarence.
  
• burnbrae academy: the sage wisdom of wee murph.
  
• one last rock’n’roll song: synchronicity II.
  

SSCs. Death was too good for them.

Seriously.

These fuckers deserved to live forever. The sleepwalking suburban slave classes in their Wimpey mock‐
Tudor penal colonies. A jail that needed no walls because the inmates had been brainwashed into believing they wanted to be there. Incarceration by aspiration, all the time mindlessly propagating and self‐
replicating, passing on their submissive DNA to the next generation of glazed‐
eyed prisoners.

And every day they’d get up and pray that emancipation never came: ‘Dear Lord, protect us from uniqueness. Grant unto us eternal conformity, and deliver us from distinction. Amen.’

There was one up his arse right then, flashing the headlights on his MX3, the bloke’s eyes widening and nostrils flaring in time with the admonitory illuminations. An absolute fanny. Risking his life in an attempt to overtake before the crawler lane ends, so he’ll be one car – one car – up the queue when he reaches the traffic lights. And what did that tell you about the life he was risking?

Exactly.

Suburban Sad Cunts. This was the real reason for road rage. It wasn’t a symptom of growing traffic congestion (though it shared the single car‐
usage factor), it was that this was the closest they got to defiance, the last ghostly remnant of the will to assert some identity. It was the only time they got to express any sense of self: when they were behind that wheel, on their own, jostling for position with the rest of the faceless. Overtake the guy in the bigger, newer, shinier car, and it made you forget all the other, truer ways in which he was leaving you to eat his dust. Someone gets in your way, holds you back, and you transfer all your frustrations to him because it reminds you of just how many obstacles there are between where you are now and where you want to be. The car in front is your lack of self‐
confidence, bequest of your over‐
protective mother. The car in front is your fear of confrontation, inherited from your cowed and broken father. The car in front is the school you didn’t go to, the golf club you didn’t join, the Lodge you don’t belong to. The car in front is your wife and kids and the risks you can’t take because you’ve got responsibilities.

But the most tragic part is that you need the car in front, you need the obstacle, because it prevents you from confronting the fact that you don’t know where you want to be. You’d be lost beyond the penal colony. It’s scary out there.

You wouldn’t fit in.

That was why billions were spent every year advertising near‐
identical vehicles as a totem of personal taste and discernment. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Vauxhall, Rover, each with their hatchback, their coupe, their saloon, each model barely distinguishable from its competitor by anything more than the badge. The ads featured lantern‐
jawed beefcakes rescuing children, battling sharks, shagging like heroes, anything to keep your attention off the actual car. “The new Vauxhall. Its headlights are shaped slightly different from the Nissan. Because you’re slightly different.” Maybe not, eh?

But then that was where the four‐
by‐
fours and sports models came in. Guys driving off‐
roaders to the fucking video shop; the only time the thing was actually off the road was when it was in the driveway outside their Gyproc and plywood ‘dream home’, or when it was in the workshop after you took a bend at more than forty and rediscovered your respect for aerodynamics over sheer bulk. Sometimes there was a Dependants Carrier for the wife, or maybe just a four‐
door saloon, salary dictating. So you saved and strived and kissed ass to pay for that MRII or CRX or GTI, to hold on to some pitiful fantasy of your enduring virility. You might have the wife, the mortgage, the weans, and the in‐
laws round for dinner every Sunday, but part of you would never be tamed. Another slice of Viennetta, anyone?

This was the reason that no matter how steep the petrol price hikes, however many park‐
and‐
ride schemes were subsidised, urban traffic congestion was never going to diminish. In that journey to and from work, that half an hour you were at the controls of your thunderous road‐
beast (going the same speed as the 2CV in front), you were able to live a pitiful little dream of yourself.

We would never car‐
pool. The SSC would rather sit in tailbacks every day, waiting for that brief moment when he can put the foot down and pretend he’s going somewhere important, somewhere he wants to go, and fast. That power surge borrowed from the engine, the feel of the steering wheel in his hands, and Bryan Adams on the stereo. In that moment, he’s cool as fuck: he’s a secret agent, a maverick detective, an assassin, a terrorist. As opposed to an insurance adjuster.

What never occurred to him was that, if they existed, the secret agent, the maverick detective, the assassin and the terrorist would actually be driving some nondescript Suburban-
Sad-
Cunt-
mobile, because they needed to blend in. Sure, maybe they drove something flashier on their days off, but you could bet it wasn’t a fucking Mazda. And you could bet they weren’t fantasising about being a family‐
man wage‐
serf while they burned rubber.

The SSC’s fantasies are uniform and predictable because he has no imagination. He needs advertising to do his imagining for him. That’s why, bereft of independent opinion or any informed sense of judgement, he thinks Denise Richards is sexy, that Sony make good hi‐
fi equipment and that drinking Becks makes him cooler than the bloke standing next to him with a pint of heavy. That’s why he thinks he looks like a different guy driving the family six‐
seater than at the controls of his overpriced (and paradoxically worth every penny) ego‐
chariot. He thinks assassins and terrorists tool around in sports cars, and if you asked him what kind of motor Death would drive, (after you’d told him a hearse was too literal) he’d probably describe the vehicle of his ultimate fantasies, styled, of course, in black. A Lamborghini Countach or Ferrari Testarossa, or maybe some minor variation on the Batmobile; a sleek, powerful, dark and incomparably macho machine.

And he’d be wrong. Miles out.

Death would drive an Espace.

He’d drive an SSC family slave‐
wagon just to underline that the life He was taking wasn’t worth living anyway; with plenty of seats in the back for the next generation when their turn came.

He was on the dual carriageway now, five minutes away from the airport at any other time of the week, but ten today, it being Monday morning. What better day for a new beginning than the start of the working week, the day that would for everyone else usher in yet another 104-hour vigil as they prayed for the deliverance of Friday night.

However, every new beginning was also an end, every rebirth first required a death. It would be respectful, even decorous (not to mention fun) to contemplate this life he was about to leave behind, this life that had so few hours left to run. With that thought, he reached to the stereo and popped out the cassette, then stabbed at the pre‐
set channels until he found the local commercial station. Might as well have the appropriately dismal soundtrack. A grim smile crept across his face as he recognised the song currently playing, the new chart‐
topping single by EGF. It was the standard homogenous Euro‐
dance number, another near‐
identical slice off this endless turd that was being shat out of the Low Countries via the Mediterranean teen‐
copulation colonies.

EGF. It stood for Eindhoven Groove Factory. Seriously. There had been a time, not so long ago, when if you had any ambitions for a career in the music biz, being from continental Europe was something you had to keep quiet, unless you were Einstürzende Neubauten and quite clearly too mental to care. It was commercial and credibility suicide. You just couldn’t be from Europe and expect to sell records in the UK or US, the two biggest music markets.

The Scandinavians were inexplicably tolerated, benefitting perhaps from a cultural exemption that owed a little to geography and a lot to a natural preponderance of strapping blondes. From Abba to The Cardigans, via Roxette and Ace of Bass, it had never hurt the album sales to have a frontwoman who was blonde with legs all the way up to her head. At least you had to give the Scans credit for having sussed that this was the only recipe viable for export. All points south, however, they continued to labour under the misapprehension that their sub‐
Eurovision drivel would be interpreted in Blighty as something other than an act of international aggression. Hence, very little made it through quarantine at Dover. The occasional specimen was imported for zoological curiosity value, or more accurately to fuel our innate sense of musical superiority, such as Rock Me Amadeus or The Final Countdown.

There were those who believed the third Antichrist of Nostradamus’s prophecies was, in fact, the European Union, and certainly something Satanic had been loosed around the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in the early Nineties. How else could you explain the fact that the British public subsequently started buying records from the same forsaken region as had been found irrefutibly guilty of Live is Life and the ongoing catalogue of atrocities that was The Scorpions? What other explanation could be given for the traditional hard‐
working, hard‐
drinking four‐
piece being usurped as the pre‐
eminent group blueprint by two or three Evian‐
drinking spotty tossers playing synths in their mum’s garage somewhere in the Benelux?

The latest (culminatory, as far as he was concerned) infestation was EGF, and their inescapably ubiquitous (it’s really big in the clubs!) ‘song’, Ibiza Devil Groove.

There was never much to differentiate the work of any particular bunch of these mindless fuckers from that of their peers, but EGF had nonetheless managed the unlikely feat of truly distinguishing themselves in his eyes and ears. They had done this through their choice of which obligatory past standard to sample from (in lieu of spending two minutes coming up with a hook, or even a lyric). Not for them an old Andy Summers riff or Topper Headon beat; Eindhoven’s finest had built the summer’s biggest smash around the chorus of Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman.

Rock and fucking roll.

He turned up the volume for maximum effect. It felt like the last day of school before the summer holidays in those odd classes where the teacher didn’t let things slide: you could perversely luxuriate in the tedium of a double Maths lesson, immersing yourself in what you wouldn’t have to put up with tomorrow.

He couldn’t kid himself, mind you, that where he was going there’d be any escape from Ibiza Devil Groove. Christ, even if he topped himself he probably wouldn’t escape it; the old Sparks track It’s Number One All Over Heaven sprang to mind, and there was no doubt EGF was number one all over Hell. However, what he would be escaping was …