GLASGOW

We always meet in the woods behind Hyndland station on a Friday evening to get drunk, even if it’s pissing down. It’s tradition and, Glaswegian weather or not, we stick to it like religion. A close-knit cult of five: three boys, two girls. No ceremony or idolatry to it, but a fair amount of confession and quite a bit of – unintentional – prostrating. There’s only one rule: drink until you can’t see the woods, can’t see the trees.

It’s on a mild night at the end of January, a few weeks into 2011, that Ewan brings Maddie along to even out the gender balance. Six of us now: three boys, three girls. He’s always had a roving eye for the ladies, Ewan, and it’s roved further afield since he left school last summer to get himself a full-time job at a shoe shop. This is the first time he’s brought someone along to be inducted into our weekly meet at the woods, though; the first time any of us has brought someone along. These aren’t fairytale woods, and if you’re looking for a fairytale romance then you’re better off going to the cinema in town, the café up at Broomhill Cross, or the pub down on Dumbarton Road that doesn’t ask for ID.

‘Nice to meet you all,’ Maddie says softly, bringing a hand up to give a wee wave.

‘Did you wear heels up that path?’ Teagan says. ‘That’s honestly absolutely mental. You’re lucky you didn’t break your leg.’

‘Ewan gave me a piggy-back.’

Ewan gives the rest of us a wink.

To get to the woods you have to walk up a stony path, on a steep incline, to the side of a hut with ‘Night & Day Security’ on a sign above it. The shop, nestled underneath the railway bridge, used to sell alarm systems, but it was broken into so many times that the owner tired of the irony and closed down. The path itself is neglected and overgrown: roots show through to trip you, thorny bushes pluck at your clothes, and the ground cracks and oozes moisture. At the top of the hill the path disappears into bogland, which sucks your trainers from your feet and sends splatters like stitching up the inside legs of your jeans. Only the wooden planks, thrown down in the worst of the wet weather, will lead you safely across to the fallen tree-trunk where everyone sits to drink.

‘Look what I brought.’ Ewan unfolds his jacket to reveal a litre bottle of vodka. ‘It’s going to be some night, guys.’

‘Where the fuck did you get that from?’ I ask.

‘This one – ’ Ewan nods over at Maddie, who’s crinkling her nose as Gemma spreads a ripped plastic bag out across the damp bark and indicates for her to take a seat with all the flourish of a maître d’ at a high-end restaurant ‘ – can pass for eighteen at the corner shop down beyond the university.’

‘You serious?’ Cammy looks over at Maddie in admiration. ‘Fuck me, that’s good. No more need to beg students to jump in for us or steal an inch from our parents’ bottles, then?’

Ewan nods. ‘I think the Paki in there might have a thing for her, to be honest.’

‘Ewan!’ Maddie’s voice is sharp but, as I sit myself down on the opposite end of the fallen tree, I’m not sure which part of Ewan’s comment she’s censuring. Whatever the race of the shopkeeper, I can certainly see why he might have a crush on Maddie. Oval-faced, with blonde hair cropped close and brown eyes that linger for a moment rather than flitting off as most people’s do, she’s pretty, certainly, but thoughtfullooking with it. The kind of girl you’d notice in a bookshop rather than in a nightclub.

It’s Teagan who begins the interrogation, once the cap has been twisted and the bottle begins to be passed from hand to hand.

‘What school do you go to, Maddie?’

‘Cleveden Secondary.’

‘What age are you?’

‘You doing your Highers?’

‘Yes. Maths, English, biology, modern studies and drama.’

A pause. Teagan only did four, and she’s resitting one of those this year. Gemma takes up the baton.

‘How did you meet Ewan?’

‘At a concert,’ she says. ‘Though I had to drop my ticket three times before he finally noticed and picked it up for me. You need to give these lads plenty of opportunities to prove themselves gentlemen, you know.’

‘You like him, then?’ Gemma asks, smiling.

‘How much?’

Ewan doesn’t try to shield her from it, or even seem too bothered about her answers. He’s more interested in the vodka than the vodka-buyer. Soon enough the bottle is going between me and Ewan only, with the girls moving on to a bottle of white wine that Gemma pinched from a family party and Cammy complaining loudly about the crème de menthe he’s siphoned off from his gran’s supply but sipping away at it nonetheless.

‘You know Ewan’s a bum, right?’ Teagan asks.

‘How d’you mean?’ Maddie replies.

‘Well, he’s left school and he smokes dope more or less constantly and – ’

‘I have a full-time wage,’ Ewan interrupts. ‘Which is more than any of you have.’

‘And he’s my manager,’ I back him up.

‘And I’m his manager,’ Ewan agrees, taking the bottle from me.

‘Manager for what?’ Maddie asks.

‘I’m a singer,’ I say, with a shy smile that the vodka stretches into a smirk. ‘Singer-songwriter. I have a couple of songs up online, if you search Rab Dillon. D-I-L-L – ’

‘Are they any good?’

‘They’re mostly covers.’

I could tell her that I’ve changed the simple strum of the Nick Drake song to what my Uncle Brendan calls ‘pinch and tickle’ fingerpicking to make it my own, or how I changed the melody on the chorus of the Tom Waits song. Instead, I settle for a slight shrug that I hope will mark me out as a modest musical genius.

‘Here, Dildo.’ Ewan pushes the vodka bottle against my chest. ‘Let’s have a competition: who can down the most.’

‘Right.’ I accept the bottle, and the challenge, without question.

‘Stupid fucking alpha males,’ Teagan mutters.

‘Stupid fucking – ’

I don’t hear the end of Ewan’s reply because I’ve raised the bottle to my lips and I’m grimacing down as much of the vodka as I can. Cammy doesn’t help matters by thumping me on the back, supposedly in encouragement, so that the backwash bubbles up into the bottle. Stopping, I hold it out to Ewan, who repeats the process, except he uses a flailing arm to stop Cammy from helping him out. Three or four passes later, the bottle is empty. I win, by volume, in that I drank from the bottom of the red label down to the dregs, but it’s Ewan who finishes it off, throws the empty bottle into the weeds at the side and holds his hand out for Maddie. They rise, then, to go off and find somewhere quiet. There are catcalls and wolf-whistles from us all but, while Ewan turns around to give us a wink, Maddie pays us no heed and just keeps walking.

As soon as they’ve been swallowed by the bushes, the debrief begins.

‘Bit up herself, don’t you think?’ Teagan says.

‘She’s quiet, is all.’ Gemma replies.

‘I’d fuck her.’

‘What? You saw the eyes on her – blowjob eyes, those.’

‘You’d fuck that tree if it had a hole small enough for your cock,’ I say.

‘What the hell are blowjob eyes, Cammy?’ Teagan asks.

‘Big wide eyes that stare up at me, all innocent, even when she’s got my cock – which is a perfectly respectable size, by the way – in her mouth.’

‘You watch too much porn, Cammy – far too much.’

‘Even still,’ he says. ‘I’d give her a face like a painter’s radio.’

‘What do you think, Rab?’ Gemma asks, cutting off Teagan’s disgusted squeal.

‘She’s not bad. Seems nice enough.’

‘He’s gay for Ewan, though,’ Teagan says. ‘So he’s not worth asking.’

‘What I’d not give for a go on those tits, anyway.’ Cammy concludes. ‘As Tea says, I watch a lot of porn, and those are the nicest tits I’ve ever seen.’

Within the hour, I’m in a position to confirm Cammy’s observation. I don’t intend to catch sight of Maddie’s right breast, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, but when I go stumbling off into the undergrowth for a piss there’s this rustling to my left and, as I start my stream, I squint over towards the movement and noise and see skin through the leaves. A perfect curve, pert and pale, with goose-pimples that are being smoothed by Ewan’s clutching, dirt-streaked hand. Turning mid-stream, I take a step to the side and peer to make out the pink dimple of the nipple. Then, cock in hand, I find my eyes travelling up to meet Maddie’s gaze. Over Ewan’s shoulder, she stares steadily across at me. A second passes; two, three. We watch one another, each in a compromised position, before I start to scrabble with my fly and belt buckle, covering myself and turning away. Maddie, for her part, makes no effort to hide her exposed breast or to alert Ewan to the fact that his best mate is peeping at them through the trees with his dick in his hand. Instead, with her eyes still fixed on me, she lets out a moaning gasp that carries across to me on the breeze.

It’s about half an hour later that she emerges from the bushes and comes to sit next to me on the fallen log. Teagan and Gemma have gone off to the chip shop to get themselves a fritter roll and flirt with the young Italian who works the fish fryer, and Cammy is trying drunkenly to climb a tree, swaying and snapping branches as he goes, but I have found myself unable to move. Either the vodka or the woodland sexshow, or both, have left me solitary, silent, and rooted to the uprooted tree-trunk.

‘Where’s Ewan?’ I ask.

‘He went off to pee or find someone or something.’ Maddie waves vaguely in the direction of the trees. Her hair is matted and mussed from lying on the ground and she has a smudge of dirt beneath her right eye but, to my eyes, she looks as if she’s been carefully made-up, modelled for a calendar shoot – cavewoman, maybe – with her white woollen jumper off one shoulder and the denim of her jeans camouflaged with a thin layer of dirt, twigs and leaves. ‘He’s very drunk,’ she concludes.

‘Right.’ I nod, meet her gaze, then remember the last time we locked eyes and look away. There’s silence for a spell, until Maddie reaches into her pocket and brings out a packet of cigarettes.

‘You smoke?’

I nod and take one. Then I root in my jacket for a lighter and lean across to light hers. She cups my hand until it catches, her breath shallow, and, as her eyes come up to meet mine, all I can think about is Cammy’s earlier comment – blowjob eyes.

‘We didn’t do anything, you know,’ she says, after a drag.

‘What do I care?’

‘Just… we didn’t do anything. Other than a fumble in the jungle.’ She lets out a giggle at that, only a trickle of laughter. ‘Fumble in the jungle sounds dirtier than I meant.’

‘You like him?’ I ask.

A shrug, again.

I look about myself, at the few stray strands of grass sprouting through the mud, at the plastic bottle that held Cammy’s crème de menthe, the empty white wine bottle that has rolled over to rest against a bent and broken sapling and the torn plastic bag, curled by the breeze, which Maddie sat on earlier. To the side of this litter, trampled by a careless foot, is a single snowdrop with its white bloom bowed towards the ground. I rise and lurch across to it, leaning over to pluck it free. ‘For you,’ I say, clumsily presenting it to Maddie.

‘Thank you,’ she says, wasting no time in pinching the bloom free from the stem and placing the white flower in behind her ear, tucked into a fold of blonde hair. ‘They were my granny’s favourite flowers.’

‘Is that right?’

Smoke rises from our fingers as the cigarettes slowly smoke themselves.

‘What do you sing about?’ Maddie asks.

‘This and that,’ I reply. ‘It’s mostly covers, like I say.’

‘What do you write about, though, when you do write?’

‘Whatever comes to mind.’

She nods. ‘Are you any good?’

‘My Uncle Brendan taught me to play.’

‘Right. And are you any good?’

Brendan, my uncle on my mother’s side, wanted to be a folk singer in the mould of Ewan MacColl or Dougie MacLean. So in his teenage years he taught himself to play guitar and patiently waited for the pitching squeal of his voice to settle. It never did. He bided his time again, until myself and my cousin Gerard were old enough. Gerard never showed an interest, but I liked some of the American stuff he passed on to us. And the invented names for the techniques – like ‘pick and jab’ for hammer-on. Over the years I’ve learnt enough to leave me, at the very least, campfire-ready.

‘I play an acoustic set on a Saturday night at a coffee shop up along Great Western Road,’ I say eventually, rather than answering directly.

‘Oh.’ She takes a drag. ‘I’ll need to come and see you.’

‘That would be good, aye.’

‘Ewan can take me.’

I look down at my cigarette, half-smoked, and then grind it out against the rough bark. Throwing the butt down to join the discarded snowdrop stem in the mud, I stand and stretch. ‘Where is Ewan anyway?’ I ask.

‘You already asked that.’

‘I know, but I wonder what’s keeping him.’

‘You worried he’s neglecting me?’

‘Will I go and find him?’

She shrugs. Again.

‘I should go and find him,’ I say, and set off into the scrub. Using my leading arm as a blunt machete, with branches whipping back at me, I clear a path through the trees. I follow the same route as I did half an hour ago, making for the spot I’d last seen Ewan. With Maddie.

She intrigues me. There’s a self-possession about her, a quiet assurance that seems entirely at odds with the bitchy narcissism of Teagan or the eager-to-please friendliness of Gemma. Maddie seems to know her mind, seems unashamed at being seen half-naked by a near-stranger and unabashed by the fact that he was holding his cock at the time. She’s unfazed by being brought by Ewan to meet us all, and unconcerned whether we like or loathe her. She’s un – she’s anti – she’s – fuck –

At first, when my foot hits something solid among the foliage I feel a lurch in my stomach. When I crouch over and see that it’s a denim-clad leg, I briefly have a panic that I’ve stumbled across a body in the woods. Maybe it’s a homeless guy who’s wandered off in search of some shelter, or a murder victim dumped out in the wilderness. Reaching out a hand, expecting the corpse to be cold and stiff, I find that it’s warm and that it stirs to my touch. With a groan, it rolls over on to its back and shows its face.

It’s Ewan, there’s no doubt. I recognise his clothes, his trainers and the majority of his features. It’s hard to make out his face, though, because in his drunken state he’s chosen to lie, face-down, on a bed of nettles. His cheeks and forehead are reddened and swelling, the skin beginning to blister.

‘Ewan, mate.’ I shake him. ‘You OK?’

‘Eee-fff-kkk.’

‘Your face, mate – that must hurt to buggery.’

‘You’re blootered, aren’t you?’

‘You want me to just leave you be?’

A contortion of the head – might be a nod – is enough to send me on my way, back to the fallen tree and Maddie. Before I leave, though, I take Ewan by the feet and drag him clear of the nettles so that he can twist and turn in his sleep without it doing him any harm. I do think about going searching for some dock leaves, to maybe make Ewan a pillow of sorts, but I decide I’ve done enough. After all, I’ve had just as much to drink as Ewan; I’ve just had the good sense not to let it get me off my face. The swelling will go down of its own accord after a day or two. It’ll hurt like hell in the meantime, without a doubt, but it’ll do no long-term damage.

‘Did you find him?’ Maddie asks, as I fight my way through the enchanted forest back to my fair maiden (fuck, vodka taking hold) – through the bushes to the fallen tree.

‘I think he must’ve gone out the back way,’ I sniff. ‘Maybe went off home to sleep it off.’

‘Did you see him? Did he tell you that?’ It’s the first time Maddie’s self-assurance seems to crack – the first time she seems genuinely worried. Her forehead creases and she bites at her bottom lip.

‘He’s wrecked, Maddie, that’s all it is.’

She nods. Clearing her throat, she stands, failing to notice that the movement causes the snowdrop to be dislodged from her hair and fall to the ground.

‘You fancy going to the off-licence and getting some beers?’ she asks. ‘I’m not nearly drunk enough yet.’

‘A woman af-after my own heart,’ I reply, grinning.

She holds out her arm for me and I take it, the vodka-glow smoothing out any guilt I might otherwise have felt. I should be worried about Cammy, up in his tree, watching proceedings, or about meeting the girls on their way back from the chip shop and having to explain why I’m arm in arm with Maddie. I certainly should be sparing a thought for Ewan, lying on the pine-needle mattress of the woods with his face bubbling and distorting. As it is, though, all I can think, all I can focus on, is the likelihood that, when we get to the wooden boards laid out across the bogland, Maddie will ask me for a piggy-back.