Little Bang, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Author’s Note
A Note On Inclusive Language
Historical Context
Reading Group Questions
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
New Year’s Eve 2017
Sid
How many people get to turn sixteen on New Year’s Eve?
Mel would say, “Well, statistically speaking…” and then she’d work it out and give me an actual number, and I’d say, “Not the point, Mel. Not the fucking point.”
Point is, not many. And how many will be turning sixteen at three minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve? Maybe just me. I know I was born at three minutes to midnight because Lucille reminds me every year. She sighs, shakes her head at me and says, “For the sake of three minutes…” Apparently whoever gives birth to the first baby of the new year gets their picture in the Belfast Telegraph and she was hoping 2002 would be her year. Brought make-up to the hospital and everything. I think she imagines her 2002 baby, the one born three minutes later, the one she was supposed to have, would have been born with a smile on his gob and a golden light round his head. Newsworthy from birth.
Instead, for the sake of three minutes, she got me.
If you ask me, those three minutes were the best decision I ever made. Because my birthday is always a party. A global bender. And tonight I get to turn sixteen on the biggest night of the year, instead of tomorrow, when everyone’s hungover and wishing they hadn’t promised to join a gym.
“You are going out, aren’t you, Sid?” Lucille looks warily at me in the mirror doors of her wardrobes.
I glance warily back at the karaoke machine in the corner of her bedroom. “Definitely.”
“Not that you’re not welcome to stay,” she says, unconvincingly, tugging a comb through the damp peroxide frizz over her undershave. “But I’m giving Amy and Jenny your room. If you arrive back here before morning, you’ll be sharing with me.”
I repress the image of sharing a bed with my mother and her satin pyjama shorts. Shudder. No way I’m spending tonight at a karaoke party with a load of old people asking what I want to do at university, then looking pityingly at Lucille when I say I’m not going to university – I’m starting a band. The pity isn’t about my education. It’s because Lucille has been counting the days until I move out for sixteen years now.
If I’d wanted to go to a crap house party there are a dozen around here I could have crashed, but they’ll all be exactly the same as being in school because they’ll all feature exactly the same people. Tonight isn’t about same. In years to come people will ask what I did for my sixteenth, and I don’t want to have to make stuff up. Tonight has to be special.
“Where are you going then?” Lucille shouts over the roar of the drier.
“House party at Mac’s. Dev’s picking me up.”
She lets go of the comb, mid-stroke, and it hangs there like an antenna. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like that crowd. And I don’t like you tearing around in cars with people who haven’t been driving very long. When did Dev pass his test?”
“Wednesday?”
“What?!”
“But he’s been driving for ages. That was the fifth time he’s done his test.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You always end up in trouble when you’re with that lot.”
“Not always.” I take my lighter out and flick it on and off, on and off. She tuts but she hasn’t time to lecture me about smoking tonight.
“Being brought home in a police car three times is three times too many, Sid.”
“It’s not like I was lifted for robbing houses. You just act really hammered on the walk home and they stop and give you a lift. It’s like a really cheap taxi service.”
“I swear, Sid, if I get a call from the police tonight—”
“You won’t!”
“Or the neighbours.”
“Lucille.”
“Or the hospital! I mean it, I’m not coming to get you.”
“Wow, thanks. I’ll die quietly by myself then.” I reach out a melodramatic arm and say, “If we never meet again, it’s been … interesting knowing you, Lucille.”
She just starts spraying a whole tin of hairspray at herself while I try not to choke.
“Why don’t you go into Belfast? They’re doing fireworks at midnight.”
“Fireworks are for old people at weddings.”
“I suppose there’ll be alcohol at this party?”
“There will be when I get there.” I kick the rucksack at my feet and it clinks.
She snaps off the drier. “Sid!”
I laugh, enjoying this. I could tell Lucille I’m going to an orgy in a crack den and she wouldn’t stop me. Not tonight. I’d like to see her face if I said I wasn’t going out.
“Stop stressing, Lucille. It’s all cheap shit. Probably doesn’t have half the alcohol content of your posh champagne.” She buys the posh stuff to show off to her mates. Goes nicely with her big house and her big car. Unlike me. I am the embarrassing bottle of Buckfast in the wine cellar of her life.
She sets down her brush, dabs something unnaturally shiny on her lips and steps back from the mirror. “How do I look?”
She’s wearing too much make-up. And too much jewellery. And her hair’s too stiff and her jeans are too tight. The longer she’s been single, the more she overdoes the wardrobe. It’s been six months since her last boyfriend (Call-Me-Steve Steve), and being single on New Year’s Eve has tipped her right over into desperado territory. To be fair, I can sympathize. Being single on New Year’s Eve is tragic, which is why I went all out on my own clothes tonight.
“You look great!” I tell her. “Very 2018.”
She glances over my slashed jeans and DMs, my lucky Ramones T-shirt and half-shaved head, and doesn’t return the compliment. “Take a jumper,” is all she says.
I grab my bag and guitar. Outside, I hear a car horn and muffled singing.
“So who’ll be there?” she says, following me up the hall.
I shrug and call back, “The usual. Dev, Nev, Mac, Big Murph, Wee Murph, Deckchair, Happy Zac—”
“Do any of your friends have proper names?”
“The girls do.”
“There’ll be girls?” She seems more surprised than worried. But actually there will be girls. Mel, for completely random example, promised she’d be there.
“Not that girl with the nipple piercing?” Lucille says, before muttering, “I can’t believe she showed me that.”
“Nah, not her.”
“Good.”
“This girl has two nipple piercings.”
She just cuts me a look.
Actually Lucille would faint if she saw Mel, who doesn’t even have her ears pierced. And the booze isn’t all for me. And I’m definitely smoking less these days. Dev passed his test a month ago, I won’t be at Mac’s, and I won’t be wandering the streets plastered in the wee hours of the morning. I’ll be up Carnclare Hill seeing the New Year in with the smartest, quietest girl in school and a bird’s-eye view of every firework in Belfast. But I’m not telling Lucille that. It would make her too happy.
She cuffs me lightly round the head. “Just watch yourself. And happy birthday.”
“Thanks!” I’m halfway out the door, rucksack clinking. “See you next year!”
Mel
Firstly, we must understand that the word “firstly” has no intrinsic meaning. How we experience time is a product of our psychology, not a property of time itself.
Isaac Newton believed that time flows uniformly in one direction, like a river. But Einstein suggests that past, present and future are more like islands in a lake that we can hop between. Einstein’s time doesn’t “flow”; it just “is”…
Except, trying to write in a corner of our overcrowded living room while Smug Nigel tells us about his youth outreach work with “troubled teens”, it feels like it just isn’t. Time has fled, left the building. We’ve been sucked into a black hole of high-density cringe and
the clocks
have
stopped.
“You have to engage them on their own turf,” he’s saying. “Be part of the gang. Some of these kids are wandering the streets at all hours, carrying knives, neglected at home. It would break your heart. They’re basically being raised by the internet.” He waves his phone at everyone like this is conclusive evidence of something. My aunts, uncles and the cousins who were too young to escape tonight make appropriately scandalized noises over their mini quiches.
“That’s why we felt called to start the Rap for Christ YouTube channel,” he goes on. I feel called to vomit all over my shoes.
“Oh, you should see Nigel’s videos – he’s very talented!” says Mum, who is maybe the only person in the world who really does believe Smug Nigel is very talented. She’s also had one whole glass of sherry already so she’s tipsy.
I can’t concentrate, and it’s nothing to do with the cheesy quasi-religious pop music playing by my ear. It’s not even to do with Smug Nigel, who I’m used to. It’s because it’s eight p.m. on the very last night of the year, and I am at the wrong party.
You better not mess this up, was the last thing Becca texted to me. She knows what a bad liar I am. The girls only agreed to go to this party because Sid asked me, and boys never ask me to parties. They ask if they can copy my homework or borrow my notes. They don’t ask me out.
If he did ask me out? It wasn’t entirely clear. Anyway, Becca said she didn’t trust him – “Sid McKee! Are you mental? Didn’t he punch a cop?” – so the girls were coming too, to be safe. I think, actually, Becca was just curious and didn’t want to spend New Year’s at another one of Ruby and Jools’s Disney Movie Marathons, but if they go all the way up there and I don’t even show up, they’ll never forgive me. My phone is blowing up in my pocket already, but Becca’s only asking where I am and I can’t tell her I haven’t even had the guts to ask if I can go yet.
Dad and I also have an unspoken understanding about Mum, which is that she’s a bit strict but if it’s something important Dad will talk her round. But an all-night outdoor party with Sid’s crowd? I may as well ask for permission to get a tattoo. Of a swear word. On my forehead.
“Only you would be doing homework on New Year’s Eve Mel,” Dad says, loud enough to make everyone turn and look. He’s so transparent it’s actually adorable. “Top of her year in the Christmas exams, weren’t you, love?” The aunts ooh appreciatively and ask what I’m working on, and he swells with pride.
“I’m just making notes. For an essay. About time,” I mumble, blushing. I only brought the notebook down so I could hide behind it.
“Time? As in…” Auntie Cath glances at the mantelpiece clock.
“Oh, no, the nature of time. You know, like how it’s relative?”
Apparently they don’t know. And they look at me like they don’t hold out much hope for the essay if this is the best I can do at explaining. I wish all communication could be done in writing. Or the way me and Dad do it, with grimaces and winks.
“Mel and her theories.” Smug Nigel shakes his head indulgently like I’ve just outlined my ideas on how Santa Claus gets around all the houses in one night.
“It’s not my theory, it’s Einstein’s,” I mutter, and he eyerolls at Mum like Einstein is a mate from school with too much to say for himself.
Mum sighs adoringly at him. Leah and Smug Nigel are living upstairs “temporarily” while Smug Nigel is “between jobs”, but it doesn’t matter that he’s an unemployable eejit; he is “in the church” (he is all over the church), so he can do no wrong.
Leah distracts everyone by offering them finger food. She knows I hate being the centre of attention.
I’ve always relied on my sister being the sane one in the family. She used to make me cool playlists and give me her old make-up. But then she married Smug Nigel and they started “trying for a baby” and she’s been getting steadily crazier ever since. All she talks about is special foods, and special exercises, and special vitamins that boost fertility. Sometimes I feel like suggesting she try sex. But then I look at Smug Nigel in his polo neck and chinos. I think I’d be pinning my hopes on the vitamins too.
Whether the future is Newton’s river or Einstein’s island, the important thing, according to Heisenberg, father of quantum theory, is that absolutely nothing about it can be predicted.
Heisenberg hadn’t met my parents.
I score that last line out.
It’s not that my family have no interest in the science of time. “When” is a concept they are fully on board with. When you do your A levels, when you apply for medicine, when you go to university in Belfast, when you marry Matt and buy a bungalow in the next street and have three kids and take over from Leah at the Sunday school… Mum and Dad are committed Newtonians who think Einstein could have done with a haircut, and they’ll definitely expect me to stay here with them and celebrate the New Year by watching it flow past in one sensible direction.
I try to imagine Sid’s party. Sid isn’t a Newtonian or an Einsteinian. Sid is a quantum unknown. A tachyon, a quark, a hypothetical particle that may or may not even exist and can’t ever be predicted. In quantum terms, absolutely anything could happen at Sid’s party.
The idea of that makes me feel itchy in my own skin, like my very atoms are ready to split into something unstable.
Sid
Cos it was just my place
But now it’s the place
I come to think about your face
And…
Something about space? Christ. Lyrics have never been my strong point.
How do you put someone like Mel into words? How do you say they’ve filled your head with such huge thoughts you need to be outdoors to think them? I want to say she’s a mild-mannered tsunami, but the only thing that rhymes with “tsunami” is “salami”, and that’s not going anywhere good.
I really do come up Carnclare Hill to think about her. It’s important to have a place to think. Most people have their bedrooms, but Lucille barges into my room and cleans it so often it doesn’t even smell like me, it smells like Mr Sheen. She redecorates without telling me. I stick up posters of Code Orange and Counterparts and she covers them with pastel paintings of waterfalls. When you get your own place, Sid, you can disfigure it however you like.
So Carnclare Hill is my place. Gets me out of the house, which is fine with both me and Lucille. I’m too scruffy for her wine-tasting group and too gobby for her Women Entrepreneurs meetings. And God forbid one of her dates should see me and think she’s old enough to have a teenage kid. A couple of months ago Constable Oliver found me boking in a hedge and brought me home and we walked into the middle of an Ann Summers party in our living room. I had to move a box of sex toys to sit down, and all Lucille’s mates thought we were the strippers and tried to get off with Oliver, until he threatened to arrest them.
I take a swig from the plastic bottle of cheap cider being passed around and watch my own reflection in the car windows as we flash in and out under streetlights. The burn of the booze spreading through my chest is like the feeling I get when I think about Mel. I imagine telling her she’s intoxicating.
The buzz in my head
The buzz in my skin
From the things that you said
The way you leaned in…
Jesus, the lads would burst something.
There are six of us and two guitars in Dev’s ancient Ford Fiesta, and by the time we arrive and do the twenty-minute walk up the hill, the others are already there, playing Knocked Loose on Big Murph’s phone. Whatever Lucille may think, I do have female mates. But apparently none of them were up for spending New Year’s listening to punk and metalcore in the rain, so only the lads have turned up.
The hill isn’t big or impressive. It has a hem of housing estates, and disused quarry pockets have been gouged from its sides. But at the very top there’s just fields, a group of boulders perfect for sitting on and a view of the whole of Belfast and Belfast Lough. On a good day, you can see the coast of Scotland to the north, and the Mourne Mountains to the south, at the border with Ireland, with Northern Ireland squeezed in between them. Three countries in one view.
But tonight the Lough is a pool of black ink and Belfast city centre is lit up like a game of tail-light snakes and apartment-block ladders. There’s a hushed feeling, like we’re all waiting for something to happen.
“Tell me again why we’re outdoors in the middle of winter?” Zac tugs his hat down over his face.
“Tell me again why we’re spending New Year’s Eve with the school nuns?” Dev mutters.
“Sid’s hoping they’re the Sisters of Mercy-Shags,” Mac says, and they all piss themselves.
“I bet they don’t even drink. Probably have to be home by ten.”
“Yeah, cos you lot are so edgy.” I give them the finger and laugh it off. Jesus, what if this was a terrible idea? I like Mel – I really like Mel – but what if her mates are just weird? And what will they make of my mates? I’ve been working my balls off for weeks to impress her. What if she turns up tonight and sees the sad bottles of cheap cider, the badly rolled joints, the slurred arguments about guitar pedals? What if all she sees is a bunch of wasters sitting in a muddy field because we’re not really welcome anywhere else? What if she sees right through me?
