Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

stuck the plastic case in a bin as we made our way along Sauchiehall. It was as if the world had fallen in on itself. Scantily clad girls and brainless guys stood sozzled out of their minds and cursing the air and threatening the doormen of the clubs. The fast-food joints stood under their hellish neon lights, the staff inside shaving the grease-sopping kebab meat and throwing frozen hunks of flesh in the deep-fat fryers. The further we got up the noisier it got. Girls sat, half on the pavement, half on the road, their skirts hitched up their arses, their legs sprawled while the guys walked past leering and smiling at them and grabbing at their crotches and laughing to their friends. One girl at a bus stop was bawling her eyes out and throwing pathetic punches at a man swaying before her, who was pleading “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I felt men’s eyes glaring at me. We stayed on the left side of the street and as we crossed a road a girl was standing in the middle of it. She was swaying slightly from side to side, a guy stood in front of her, she was pretty-looking, her tits were squashed in a tight catsuit-like dress and the guy was groping away at them while she smiled a drunk, vacant smile and rolled her eyes. And to the groper guy’s left two men were sitting in a static car, the engine running, talking to their mate and lusting after his girl as he kept squeezing those tits. And directly across the street, a girl was sitting in a club booth with her back to the window. The guy next to her suddenly stood up and, facing the street, started thrusting his pelvis into the girl’s face. After five or six thrusts the girl obviously couldn’t take it anymore and leapt up and started kissing him. “Wow.” Harry said. “Who said romance was dead.”

We carried on up the street, reaching its end at the M8. Three traffic lights later we reached the other side and were in the West End. It was supposed to be the upmarket part of the city; the classier, cleaner side. We passed more shops and despite them all being closed the lights were shining brightly from inside every one of them. A man trudged by looking just like some of the patients from Sleepyhillock; sallow-faced, his lidded eyes gone with it, his mouth wide open. Zombified. Another guy staggered, and tripped on his heel and almost fell, but regained his balance and kept on. We passed the herbal shop and the organic shop and the health food shop and the Sainsbury’s supermarket, and I looked up to our left at the fancy old houses in the stone cobbled streets that stretched beyond to Park Avenue and then to Kelvingrove Park.

Harry turned right through a sort of housing scheme that I knew was a big student and ethnic area. We came out the other side and waited at the lights and crossed over Dumbarton Road towards Maryhill. A couple of girls came our way, not looking unlike those girls back at the park in Exeter. They both had heels on, but one girl’s were ridiculous, I watched on amazed as she put one foot and one bent knee in front of the other and stalked like a T-Rex, her little arms in front of her to keep her balance.

All the bright lights and fancy buildings with the stone-carved architecture were long behind us now as we got off Maryhill Road towards Possil. The lights got dim and the few bare trees seemed to lurch ominously as we walked on in the darkness. Harry portrayed a confident face, but I could tell by his fleeting eyes that he was on the lookout too. Then the first sighting of what we both were worried about appeared; a pack of five gang kids were striding towards us on our side of the pavement. They walked with a fierce swagger, their eyes red with pent-up frustration. They looked ready for a fight. We both stayed silent and fixed our eyes on our shoes and I hoped they wouldn’t say anything. They passed us, to my great relief.

“AH’LL FUCK’IN STAB THE CUNT!” one of them spat aggressively. But their voices got lower as they walked away and I realised they weren’t talking to us.

I looked up at three high-rise flats.

“He lives in one of them.” Harry said.

“I hope he’s in.”

“He will be, he’s always in at this time.”

We turned left and followed the signs for Possil. More shops appeared, many broken down and with boarded-up windows. Glass scattered the doorways. Graffiti strewed the walls- POSSIL MASSIVE! GONEE STAB YEEZ!

GIRUFFY!

PURE CHAFFIN YA BAS!

Those messages screamed the deprivation and poverty that had stained those kids. And as we came to the slum houses, the little African-style shacks of the High Street shops, and the vile bookies lining the streets to cash-in on the people’s woes, I thought about the mothers that kept giving birth to them in these areas. I clenched my fists, feeling rage. But they don’t know any better, I thought. It’s like Africa. On all the adverts they keep telling us that kids keep being born into total abjection, total dismal poverty, no clean water, no food. So why the fuck do the parents keep breeding?  What chance do you have growing up in this?”

Both of us were tired and we didn’t utter a word to each other as we crossed that road and past the loan shop that had 6 month no interest and a cardboard-cutout suited man smiling from the window, and we cut along a path nearing those high-rise flats. I was grateful the streets were deserted. I’d heard so many things about random people getting knifed here for no reason other than random chance. We crossed by a small, gravel-filled