The Leipzig Affair

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

Chris. My old pal. I hadn’t thought about him in years. Hadn’t let myself. Now it all came out. I suppose Sally knew that would happen. That was the idea behind her writing ploy.

“Chris was a good friend of mine,” I told her at our next session. “Yup,” I added, filling the silence as she presumably knew I would, “Known him since I was five.”

“Was a good friend?” Sally asked, clasping the clipboard to her chest.

“Yeah,” I said. “Haven’t seen him in a while.” Then, knowing that I was playing right into her hands but unable to stop myself: “I don’t believe all this crap about everything being rooted in your childhood. That’s just … crap.” God, I was Mr Articulate today. “He was a pal. That’s all there is to say.”

I scowled at her then looked away. When was the last time I’d seen Chris? When I first moved to London to take up the job at Liebermann Brothers he used to visit me every couple of months. Then he got married and he came down less. Then he had kids. And then … Well, I suppose he got a bit fed up with me after the hospital incident.

Sally sat back in her chair and smiled her counsellor smile. She’d touched a nerve and she knew it. Good session, she was probably thinking. Well done me.

*

I met Chris on my first day at primary school, and we became instant firm friends. He sought me out. I never knew why. We were chalk and cheese. He was Mr Popularity; I was your archetypal ginger-no-friends. He was tall and good-looking with curly black hair; I was wee and specky with thick glasses to correct a lazy eye. I was embarrassingly clever and painfully shy. Chris was clever too, but his smarts fell off him like rain off a cagoule, whereas mine stuck to me like dog s**t.

Chris was exotic; I wasn’t. His family lived in a bought house on the outskirts of town. We lived in a rabbit hutch rented off the council. Their house had a room lined with books called ‘the study’ and a spare bedroom for guests. There were fruit trees in the garden and a patio where the family had their tea in good weather. His mother was off Italian. She wore her glossy black hair piled high on her head and had full, red-painted lips. In the summer, Chris’s family went to the Amalfi coast and Capri, returning copper-coloured. His three wee sisters were precocious and bonny, destined to break many a heart.

My mum was from the windswept Isle of Harris. Her hair was permed in tight curls, and she wore tweed skirts and sensible shoes. I loved the holidays we took at my grandparents’ house in Geocrab, but they didn’t have the glamour of Capri – especially in the retelling. My big sister, Shona, was lumpen, ugly and dull.

But none of it mattered, because I was Chris’s best pal. That protected me from the slagging and name calling that would otherwise have been my due. Then, when we were twelve, a terrible thing happened. Mr O’Driscoll sent Chris to St Ignatius’ College, an independent Catholic secondary school in Glasgow. I knew, of course, that the O’Driscolls were Catholics. My dad, a dyed-in-the-wool Rangers man, had sniffed that out straight away. But I hadn’t expected this. Mr O’Driscoll had always been against separate schools. “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,” said my dad. “The old man says I’ll get better marks there,” said Chris.

And so I had to face the secondary school in Motherwell alone. The first year was a nightmare. With my ally out of the picture, I got picked on. My glasses got smashed. My school blazer got dunked in a vat of Copydex. I had my head kicked in more than once. All the wee neds from Calderhill Primary School had been dying to have a go at me for years. Now there was no more “Hands off the wee man, sparko” from Chris, they could do me over and make themselves look big. If Chris had been there it wouldn’t have happened. But he wasn’t. He was at St Ignatius’ College, where they wrote ‘AMDG’ on every piece of school work, short for Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam: ‘To the Greater Glory of God’. As I trudged the two miles to school every morning, I thought of Chris being driven into Glasgow in his dad’s sleek maroon Jaguar with cream leather seats. Mr O’Driscoll had once let me sit in the driver’s seat and play with the controls. The engine made a thrilling, throaty roar when I pushed down on the accelerator.

My mum said I’d lose touch with Chris when he went to St Ignatius’: “It’s a different world.” She was trying to soften the blow, but I hated her for it. And she was wrong. We still met up at weekends and in the holidays and did the same things we’d always done. Mucked about by Legbrannock Burn. Built fires on the waste ground across from the chippy. Pissed up the walls in the underpass and ran away.

Often we hung out with boys from my school who ordinarily wouldn’t have given me the time of day. They were all impressed by Chris. If any other boy had been sent to a school where they wrote ‘To the Greater Glory of God’ on their jotters it would’ve been social death. But it made no difference to Chris. He wore his new situation lightly, like he did everything. When he was around, my life was transformed. I stopped being the wee freaky guy with specs and a hideous flesh-coloured eye patch and became Big Chris’s Pal. Not only did nobody dare touch me when Chris was there, his charisma rubbed off on me, floating down on to my shoulders like angel dust. Suddenly, my jokes were funny. The fact that I was clever and knew things wasn’t pathetic. It was actually quite cool.

“Hey, listen to this,” Chris would say. “Listen to the wee man.” He’d nudge me. “Go on. Tell them.”

I’d tell them whatever it was I’d found out about whatever it was – the Roman legions, Rommel’s North Africa Campaign, dinosaurs, the s*x life of plants – and they’d listen. When I was done, Chris would say, “Amazing, eh? That’s dead cool, man.” They’d all nod.

Later, things changed for me at school. We got streamed and I had a wee quiet pal called Donald Black whom I sat beside in maths and English. He understood about my eye patch because his sister had one. I no longer spent intervals and lunchtimes alone. I hung out with Blackie and a couple of other loser, swotty types. Later still, my eye was fixed and I got normal glasses, then contact lenses. I grew taller, started to do sport and filled out. One day when Ian Bagley called me a poof and put his foot out to trip me up in the corridor, I turned round and stuck one on him. There was a satisfying crack as my fist connected with his nose. It started to bleed and he ran away squealing.

No one ever came after me again. The dark days were over. I didn’t need Chris in quite the way I had before. But I needed him in other ways. His house was a sanctuary for me, an escape from home. The happiest days of my childhood were spent at the O’Driscolls’ house. I saw things there I’d never seen before. Whole coffee beans, which Mrs O’Driscoll turned into a bitter, intoxicating liquid that bore no resemblance to the instant coffee at home. Real oil paintings where you could see the brush strokes in the paint. A married couple who liked each other. I watched mesmerised as Mr O’Driscoll came up behind his wife in the kitchen, ran his hands over her hips, kissed her on the neck and called her pet names like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’. He said things to her – “You’re looking lovely today, Isabella” or “What’s for tea, gorgeous woman?” – that thrilled and embarrassed me in equal measure.

It seemed to me that Mr and Mrs O’Driscoll almost certainly had s*x. If my parents had ever had s*x it must have been a grim affair. My father was a sour man who bullied his wife, ignored his daughter and despised his son for being clever. He worked at the steelworks and thought that any man who didn’t wear a boiler suit to work was a pansy. The men he worked with all wanted their sons to do well and get out of Calderhill. Not my dad. The better I did at school, the less he liked it. I grew to hate him, and although my mum was an altogether gentler soul, a soft-spoken book lover who doted on her only son, she didn’t stand up to him, and so I came to despise her too.

I went to the O’Driscolls’ to forget, but as I got older and spent more time there, something else happened. Chris started to need me as much as I needed him. He was clever but not as clever as me and he didn’t have the application. I helped him with his homework, and my visits became important. Mrs O’Driscoll brought us coffee and cakes and shooed her girls away from Chris’s room. Mr O’Driscoll made sure to pop his head round the door and say, “How’s it going, Bobbie? How’s the old brainbox today.” The O’Driscolls became my second family. When I was made Dux of my school, it was Chris’s parents who made a fuss, not my own. Mr O’Driscoll shook my hand and said, “You’ll go far, Bobbie,” then produced two tickets for the first game of the season at Celtic Park. Mrs O’Driscoll hugged me and gave me a card containing a £10 book token. At home very little was said, though my mum slipped me a five pound note when my dad was out and said, “I’m very proud of you, son.”

When it came time to go to university, I was worried rather than excited because I knew my time with the O’Driscolls was coming to an end. The private school and Mr O’Driscoll’s money made a difference now. Chris did English ‘A’ levels at St Ignatius’, sat the Oxbridge exams and got a place to read chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford. Mrs O’Driscoll threw a party for him, and it wasn’t long before I realised how out of place I was in Chris’s new world. I pronounced ‘Magdalen’ as it’s spelt and Gerard Kelly, Chris’s friend from St Ignatius’ College, roared with laughter.

“Bloody stupid way to say it if you ask me,” said Mr O’Driscoll, slinging a comradely arm round my shoulders. But I minded that I’d got it wrong.

That summer, Chris and I went on a road trip to France, bankrolled by Mr O’Driscoll. It was my first trip abroad – the best thing ever. We slept in the open, smoked Gauloises, tried dope for the first time and eventually got laid. But the whole time I was aware that it wasn’t just a holiday; it was the end of something.

I needed a replacement for Chris. I found it with Aloïse, a thin, nut-brown girl who hung out with us for a few days in Antibes and relieved me of my virginity. I came inside her in seconds. I was in a frenzy, clawing at her small breasts till she slapped my hand away. It was blissful but perhaps not quite as blissful as the feeling of control I’d had earlier the same evening when I’d got properly drunk for the first time. Now that was special. I cracked jokes and people laughed. I smiled at girls, and they smiled back. All my cares fell away, and I didn’t need Chris for angel dust to fall on my shoulders. I’d found a new best friend.