Lockdown Day 24: Wednesday 15th April, 2020

  I took her arm and we walked the other way towards Charing Cross. Slowly. Not once looking behind. Not wanting to draw any attention. Gradually picking up speed. Anticipating the dreaded arm on the shoulder, the ‘Come here son, you’re lifted.’ Trying to look natural, feeling as if a spotlight hovered above us, she slipped her arm around my waist and pulled me close, dropping her head onto my shoulder. I rested my cheek on her hair for a moment, swimming in an ocean of patchouli oil and peppermint I tried to breathe deeply to slow my streaking heart. It wasn’t until we reached the Third Eye Centre and ducked into the doorway that we sneaked a peek. There was no-one following.

  “Your friends are nuts” I said almost trembling.

  “My friends? You went to school with them.”

  I shrugged. Thommo was a good few years older but his brother was still at school so I’d catch up on the news through the week. A fresh rush of adrenalin kicked in, full blast. We’d made it. Fight and flight. We were away. Live to fight another day, victory pints to be sunk.

  “Where do you want to go now?” I asked, afraid the night was over, scared that Saturday Glasgow had once more screwed things up for me, afraid I’d never get this chance again. A chance I never dreamed of, never expected, never saw coming but now couldn’t bear to pass on.

  “I think I want to go here.” she whispered in my ear while wrapping her arms around me, pulling me close and surfing her lips across mine. I melted in her arms. My knees stopped trembling.

  We met up with a pick’n’mix assortment of Angela’s friends that snug night in His Nibs, though not my senseless posse, none beyond the pale, quiet sensible folk from my periphery. Serenaded darkly in the downstairs lounge as shades of Miles Davis flitted across the night, the acid washed over us. We vaguely acknowledged others, the chatter and patter, smoking and joking, but we were lost in ourselves, in the immediate intense togetherness, as she tripped through my consciousness, a fragile accomplice to my sapphire soul.

  We reached Knightswood much, much later that night as I walked her home after throwing-out time, night’s tranquil tendrils enmeshing our acid calm, staccatoed infrequently by the odd drunk, occasional scuffle or scream in the distance. We were tripping madly, wild emotions storming through our shared psyche, laughing at the marshmallow sky, dazzled by a fluorescent Glasgow that existed only in these autumn moments, skipping through a psychedelic dream of a world that didn’t exist beyond our heads. The rumble of the occasional night buses scuttling home along Great Western Road in the otherwise silence, past the school and on into the wilds of Drumchapel and Clydebank reminded us of the late hour as we climbed the hill to the park.

  We soaked into a still, secluded spot on the shallow slope away from the path and lay on the warm grass, the lush solitude comforting our tripping souls. The sky was alive with a thousand stellar surprises, wishing stars falling cruelly, planets strewn sharply in the twinkling firmament, a revealed god’s genesis coalescing spiralling galaxies. Silver sliver moonbeams illuminated our acid amour as I wrote her name across that sky in stars. Eventually, morning came, a smile upon her face. We were on a sailing ship to nowhere, cresting psychedelic waves as night’s passing birthed the dawn in an amber aurora of angels and acid.

  Angel shifted gently as her heavenly breath wisped across my supplicant chest, “We could get arrested for that.”

  I giggled sheepishly, “No, you could get arrested for that. I’m only fifteen.”

  She tensed. Seemed startled. Rose to speak. Caught herself. Regained her composure. Tensed again.

  “Fifteen! You’re kidding me! You can’t be fifteen.”

I was a bit shocked at her surprise. 

“Fifteen? How can you be just fifteen? Tell me you’re kidding me.”

  “I’m kidding you.”

  “I’m serious. You can’t be fifteen. You are shitting me, aren’t you? Tell me you’re not fifteen.”

  “OK, I’m not fifteen.”

  She rolled away and propped herself on cherubic elbows, “Stop lying to me.”

  “You told me to.”

  She stared straight at me, through me, into me “How can you be just fifteen? Your mates are my age, except Kit, who’s a bit younger but still cool.”

  “Well I’m just a wee bit younger than Kit and every bit as cool.”

  I was panicking. My age had never crossed my mind. It didn’t worry me. Why would it? It’s my age. I had assumed she knew, as she had known so much else about me.

  “So when Kit said you went to his school but weren’t in his year, he didn’t mean you were older than him?”

  “I’m in the year below.”

  “Shit. Trick. Oh Trick.” she sighed.

  “I’m sixteen next month.”

  “Sixteen! That’s still too young to go to the pub. Still too young to drive. Still too young to see an X-rated movie. You’re a kid. You’re too young to go to the pub…

 What am I going to do? I tell everyone I’ve met the man of my dreams and it turns out he’s a baby. I’ll never live this down.”

  “You’re not that much older.”

  “I’m nineteen. Nineteen!”

  “I can live with that. You’ll be able to get me a carry out from the offie when I forget my fake id.”

  She threw me a look that would have frozen hell over in an instant, “This is serious! Stop making jokes about it.”

  I never did know when to keep my mouth shut.

  She shook her head and gazed wildly around the hillside for inspiration or something, then turned back, staring harshly across at me. Her look softened as we drifted in that gentle half-light.

  I tried to diffuse the situation “So what’s four years between friends?”

  “Between friends, two Olympic games. Between us, more than a quarter of your life.

Fifteen?”

  She shook her head and pondered her imponderable. “How do you do it? Kit said you were great at getting into scrapes without trying. I see what he meant now. And what do your parents think about you staying out all night? What kind of family do you come from? I mean, who lets a fifteen year old stay out all night?”

  I had told my folks I was staying at Dave’s out Barlanark way so they hadn’t expected me home, but it annoyed me when she implied they didn’t care. They’d have killed me if they knew what I was up to. “Hey, you’re beginning to sound like my mum.”

  “Now I sound like your mum? It just gets worse!

Well if I sound just like your mum it’s because you sound like a petulant little fifteen year old.” she paused, “Which is exactly what you are!”

  She scrabbled to her feet to storm off across the grassy slope. As she slipped on the glistening dew blanketing the hillside, I caught her and pulled her close.

  She kissed me gently. “Oh God. You’re only fifteen.”