Tombstoning by Tombstoning (epub)

Tombstoning by Tombstoning (epub)

Author:Tombstoning (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141926575
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2009-11-14T00:00:00+00:00


The week dragged grudgingly towards Friday, and as it did something started to creep into David’s mind. That name that seemed to keep popping up at odd moments in Arbroath finally lodged itself in his subconscious, then slowly floated up to the surface of his thoughts – Neil Cargill. He gradually started thinking more and more about Neil, mentally picking at the scab of his childhood memories of the two of them – the four of them including Colin and Gary – and how their lives had been together back in the 80s. It seemed like an entirely different universe, the 1980s. People were still worried about nuclear bombs and the cold war, for fuck’s sake, so it really was a different universe. Not that any of the four of them had been worried about that sort of thing. Most of the time all they worried about was which girl they were going to try and get off with, or where they’d get enough money to get drunk at the weekend. That was life in a small town, David thought: they were like goldfish swimming in their own tiny bowl, minuscule attention spans and flapping mouths agog, while outside the bowl a whole world was getting on with wars, love, death, famine, politics, all the stupidly important shit that teenagers everywhere resolutely ignored, never mind those in a dead-end former fishing town flung half way up the east coast. In eighteen years of childhood, David could remember visiting Edinburgh and Glasgow on only a few occasions for a gig or football match. It wasn’t that these places were impossible to get to – both were a couple of hours on the train or bus. The nearest city, half an hour down the coast road, was Dundee, seen as something of a seething metropolis by the vast majority of Arbroath residents. The fact that it was seen as a culture-free joke of a city by the rest of Scotland spoke volumes for how far adrift Arbroath and the people in it were from the larger scheme of things in Scotland, and beyond into Europe and the rest of world.

David almost couldn’t believe he was the same human being now as that teenage boy who went drunkenly skinny-dipping at Elliot Beach, made petrol bombs on the High Common and unearthed other kids’ porn stashes from the railway embankment. It seemed impossibly distant. Not that he was exactly worldly-wise now; he hadn’t been trekking around the globe like Nicola had. They said that travel broadens the mind – well, he had only had to travel the length of Fife to Edinburgh to get plenty of broadening. Having said that, the people he met at uni were invariably like him, small-town kids with wide eyes, pretending they weren’t impressed to be walking around the cobbled Old Town where a thousand years of mischief had taken place. He had gravitated towards people of his own kind, people with the same outlook on life, the same



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.