Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (2 page)

‘… Silver City FM, bringing you a wee kick in the Balearics there, ha ha ha, with the magnificent EGF. It’s just coming up to eight forty‐
nine on May the twenty‐
sixth, here in Europe’s Oil Capital, where the temperature is eleven‐
point‐
five degrees …’

Europe’s Oil Capital. Honestly. The first time he heard the expression, he’d assumed it was a bit of self‐
deprecatory humour. That was before he learned that there was no such thing as self‐
deprecatory humour in Aberdeen, particularly when it came to the town’s utterly unfounded conceit of itself. It was a provincial fishing port that had struck it astronomically lucky with the discovery of North Sea oil, and the result was comparable to a country bumpkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion wasn’t that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not before time, either. Nor did the billions ploughed into the area’s economy stop them whining about every penny of Scottish public money that got spent anywhere south of the Stracathro motorway service station.

He didn’t imagine the locals had first asked anyone else in the European oil industry whether they concurred before conferring this status upon their home town, but working in marketing he at least understood the necessity of such misleading promotion in face of the less glamorous truth. ‘Scotland’s Fourth City’ wasn’t exactly a winning slogan, especially considering that there was a dizzyingly steep drop‐
off after the first two, and it still put them behind the ungodly shit‐
hole that was Dundee.

The also self‐
conferred nickname ‘Silver City’ was another over‐
reaching feat of turd‐
polishing euphemism. It was grey. Everything was grey. There was just no getting away from it. The buildings were all – all – made of granite and the sky was covered in a thick layer of permacloud. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver, then shite wasn’t brown, it was coppertone. It was grey, as in dull, as in dreary, as in chromatically challenged. It was grey, grey, grey. And the only thing greyer than the city itself was the fucking natives. A couple of quotes to illustrate.

‘An Aberdonian would pick a shilling from a dunghill with his teeth.’ Paul Theroux.

‘There’s nae folk sae fine as them that bide by Don and Dee.’ Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Apposite as the former might be, it was actually the latter that offered a deeper insight, though not quite in the way the author intended. To understand, you first had to take a wild stab at what part of the globe you thought Grassic Gibbon might hail from. Then having miraculously plucked that one out of the ether, you might begin to develop a picture of a people who either didn’t get around much, or wilfully failed to absorb anything if and when they did. How else could they remain ignorant of the existence of even the most basic foreign customs, such as smiling?

Living in Aberdeen had taught him the difference between the parochial and the truly insular. The parochial was defined by a naive, even innocent ignorance of the world beyond its borders. The truly insular knew fine there was a world outside, they just didnae fuckin’ like it, and had nae fuckin’ need for it!

Living in Aberdeen had also taught him that as you only got one shot at life, it was way too precious to waste living in Aberdeen. The inescapable nature of this truth had only fully dawned on him when he realised that his life here had become just that: inescapable. It was the kind of place you only went to in the first instance because you assumed you wouldn’t be there for long; you’d bide your time, serve your sentence and get back to civilisation at the first opportunity. But what you hadn’t foreseen was that that opportunity might never come, and in the meantime circumstances could wrap themselves around you like the coils of a snake.

So if you only got one shot, what were you meant to do when you found yourself doomed to spend it here? Surrender and join the SSCs? Aye, right. Find some form of compensatory vice, like fucking your way around the neighbourhood’s housequines on your flexi‐
time midweek days off? He’d tried. It grew tired very quickly, mainly due to the brain‐
deadening quality of their post‐
coital conversation. Five minutes after they came, some Pavlovian trigger mechanism invariably caused them to start wittering on about their progeny. That was if they weren’t already kicking you out of bed because they had to go and collect the little bastards from nursery or wherever. You could kid yourself on that it was making you feel good, but to be honest you might as well take up golf. It was just your choice of recreation in the prison’s exercise yard.

What did that leave? How about buying a fucking lottery ticket, and joining the acolytes of Britain’s saddest new religion? It was also Britain’s biggest, and no wonder, because unlike all the others, it was the only one that offered you a second shot in this life rather than the next. And yes, you could get a second shot, theoretically. Only one rule of life was truly hard and fast: the same one that demanded you make the most of it, and mocked you for your efforts from the wheel of its Espace.

But those precious second shots came to a paltry few, fewer even than the fourteen‐
million‐
to‐
one lottery winners, most of whom were far too dull to do anything remotely interesting with their new resources. Once they’d returned from the mandatory Caribbean cruise and bought the Ferrari, the motor launch and the new pad in a part of town where the neighbours will treat them like shite off their shoes, what next? Consumerist nirvana? Come on, there was only so much gear you could buy at Argos. Twenty mill could buy you a whole new life, but only if you knew where to shop. Otherwise you were just buying a bigger cell. Truly reaping the potential reward was a little more complicated than picking up a giant greenback from a B-list celeb and a tart in a bikini.

To get a second shot, he now knew – even if you were shackled here in the mock‐
Tudor gulag – you didn’t need to win the lottery. What it took was the will to walk away. Quit whining, quit bitching, just quit.

Walk away. As simple, and as difficult, as that.

Leave everything behind.

Making the realisation was the hard part; taking the decision. Then from the other side of the resolution, it all looked laughably easy.

Leave your partner. No problem. Already done, in fact. The people they’d each once been had blown town years ago. Scratch that; the person he’d once been had been lost in transit during the move to the Silver City. How did the song go? If you love somebody, set them free. He didn’t love Alison, but he owed her that much at least. It wasn’t just himself he’d be granting a second shot.

Leave your job. Are you kidding? What incentive was there – or had there ever been – to stick with that? Oh yeah, of course: security. As in maximum.

These chains only held you as long as you clung to them.

The machine spat out a parking ticket and raised its barrier as he pulled the cardboard chit through the open window. He dropped it on to the passenger seat and drove slowly forward, joining the automotive satellites in their outward‐
spiralling shallow orbit, making wider and wider circuits as they were forced on each pass to seek a space that bit further out from the terminal building. They’d spend five minutes, maybe more, doing that to save themselves an extra twenty seconds’ walk. Right enough, most of them probably had a whole briefcase to carry. Or perhaps they thought they were more vulnerable to being picked off by predators if they appeared to be straggling outside the pack.

The parking ticket was the first thing that caught his eye as he killed the engine. ‘Do not leave in car,’ it said. It was one of many instructions that no longer applied to him. He popped it in his pocket all the same. There was no room for decadent gestures. This life had to be lived as normal and by all of its petty little rules right up until his connecting flight took off from Stavanger. The only concession right now was that he was wearing a polo‐
neck instead of a shirt and tie, necessary to cover up the change of clothes he had on beneath. He didn’t want anyone to notice him leave, so when he walked away, he would already be a different person.

He still had the mandatory jacket and trousers too, but had picked something that would plausibly go with the polo‐
neck, affecting that ‘business traveller dressing as casually as he dares but still wanting everyone to know he’s a business traveller’ look. It had to be one of the great equalising points against the female inequality grievance list that they had an endless variety of business garb to choose from, but guys were stuck with – let’s be honest – minor variations on the monochrome theme of ‘grey suit’. That there could be so much snobbery over the labels, styles and cuts was fucking laughable, but it was perhaps understandable (if pathetic) that any evidence of distinctiveness should be so seized upon. After all, there were probably angler‐
fish that were considered particularly unattractive by their peers, even though the entire species looked like Anne Widdecombe after a heavy night.

The worst of it was that he seemed to be in a minority in this sense of sartorial frustration. To the SSCs it was like a security blanket. They felt naked and exposed in anything else, and by God, they thought they looked good. The ties around their necks might be partially restricting their respiratory function, but it was also a comforting sensation, the pressure of a paternal hand reassuring them that their status was ratified and visible: they were suit‐
wearers, they had a suit‐
wearing career in a suit‐
wearing profession, and nobody, nobody was going to mistake them for faceless nonentities, oh no.

All around the car park, they were marching towards the terminal building as though spiritually drawn, suited to a man, briefcase fitted as standard. If you were travelling on business, on company business, the suit would be compulsory, but for these bastards the compulsion was coming from within. It overrode all other considerations, such as practicality. It wasn’t comfortable attire for air travel, where the seat size, leg room and safety belt seemed designed to do roughly the opposite of a Corby Trouser Press, to say nothing of the constant precipitous fear that your in‐
flight meal, drink and tea or coffee (sir?) would end up in your lap. But still there endured this misguided notion that you had to look your best to fly, something that presumably had its roots in the earlier days when only the rich could do it. He remembered family package holidays as a kid, early Seventies, going to Palma or Malaga out of Abbotsinch. His dad told him you could always spot the wee Glasgow guys on their first‐
ever flight, because they looked like they were due in court. They’d wised up by the time they flew home, when they remained equally identifiable by their oversize comedy sombreros and near full‐
thickness bums covering all exposed flesh.

Time, experience and new generations had seen the discount leisure‐
travel look evolve, but it wasn’t any more flattering. He’d always meant to investigate whether Airtours wouldn’t actually let you board the plane unless your entire family were wearing matching shellsuits and had a combined kilogram weight in four figures.

He’d increasingly heard it said that cheap air travel was clogging up the skies, with dire accompanying predictions of an escalating incidence of disaster. The skies were indeed congested, and more so all the time, but as far as he was concerned, the blame shouldn’t be laid at the Reebok‐
clad feet of the wobbling classes; at least there was some purpose to their trips, even if it was merely the opportunity to devour saturated fats in a warmer climate. The true cause of all these near‐
misses and twenty‐
minute holding cycles was all around him right then: pointless, unnecessary business trips.

This was the communications age, the era of video‐
conferencing, virtual exhibition software, emails, web catalogues, and yet every day, from every airport, suited SSCs were hording on to planes to fly to meetings where nothing would be achieved or agreed that couldn’t have been resolved to equal satisfaction through a phone call or even an exchange of letters. They’d say it was about the personal touch, or the value of face‐
to‐
face relations, and while these things were to some extent true, the real purpose was to delude the SSC drones into thinking they were valued and important employees. It was certainly cheaper than raising their salaries, and the tax‐
deductible block bookings probably came with the sweetener of a few first‐
class long‐
hauls for the boss and whichever secretary he was banging.

It broke up the monotony if every few weeks you bunged them off somewhere overnight; made them feel they were on some kind of classified mission with which the firm had entrusted them. It made them more than suited professionals, it made them suited professionals who were so important, they had to fly places. No mere tooling around the sales territory in a Ford Mondeo for them. The vast majority of the time, however, the only practical consequence was to clog up the airports.

The check‐
in area was mobbed and chaotic, as per for Monday morning, with the added joy of a party of Euro‐
teens milling around with that particular gormlessness which only hormone‐
addled post‐
pubescent continentals could truly evince. The air was thick with the smells of Clearasil and damp backpacks. He listened apprehensively to their chatter, trying to get a handle on the language, praying it wasn’t Norwegian. They sounded Italian, possibly Spanish. It was hard to make out which check‐
in desk they were queuing for, so sprawling was their mass, but it was soon evident that they were BA’s problem today, and therefore not his.

He handed over his tickets at the ScanAir desk, where he was greeted with a smile from the girl behind the counter. The namebadge said Inger, which explained the unAberdonian flash of gnashers. Probably worked her ticket in the cabin crew then opted for a ground staff post as soon as she’d snared a well‐
heeled oil exec.

They went through the usual formalities of seat allocation and mutual flirtatiousness, before she got to the mandatory security questions: did you pack this bag yourself, has it been out of your sight, did somebody else ask you to carry anything, is that a surface‐
to‐
air missile in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? The purpose of these exchanges escaped him. You’d definitely have to stay behind after class at terrorism school if that little polite query had you spilling your guts. Maybe it was about reassuring the passenger that all protocols were being followed to ensure their safety; if so, it was likely to have roughly the opposite effect, if that was the measure of their counter‐
terrorist savvy. What did they do if someone actually got through with a gun? Ask him nicely to put it down, crucially remembering to say please?