Boy Who Made It Rain by Brian Conaghan Read Free Book Online

with anything. Everybody has always got an opinion about me and making up pure porkies, they should just ask me outright and I’ll tell them straight... You can do anything you want, I’m still no telling you about any of that stuff. All this has got nothing to do with me by the way, so I can walk if I want.
    They spent all the time with each other, even at lunchtime. Me and Rosie used to go up to the chippy at lunchtime, buy a roll n chips, smoke a fag, drink a can of Irn Bru . Everyday without fail, even when it was pure lashing down. Then Clem came on the scene and all of a sudden she was into going to that salad place down the precinct instead. It was up to her if she wanted to eat that Hollywood size-zero scran, it’s not as if I was going to fall out with her coz of it. What was I going to do about it? You just have to accept that that’s part of life. She was in mad love. So was he. At least, I think he was. If he wasn’t he was a brilliant liar then, wasn’t he? And the thing is all this stuff makes me think that’s exactly what he was, a brilliant liar. Rosie was my friend for yonks and I can’t remember one lie she told me.
    Confide? What does that mean? Aye, me and Rosie used to talk about everything. I’d tell her all my news and she’d tell me all hers. No, I didn’t tell her all the details, some things you don’t need to know, right? Aye, I’m sure she did the same. But that’s not lying, is it? They are totally different. I asked her if she loved Clem and she told me all this guff about love being hard to define and that it was too abstract to even try to understand it. I had to ask her what abstract meant. Anyway the fact is she was talking utter mince. So I asked her again, ‘do you love him, or not?’ Then she said that she did. When I asked her if Clem loved her she prattled on about love being abstract again, but eventually she said that, even though he hadn’t said it to her face, she thought that he did. If that was good enough for Rosie…it was good enough for me too. Rosie had her head screwed on about all that stuff. I mean you should hear some of the girls in our year talking about how they’re pure in love with some guys after just one snog. They haven’t a Scooby what love’s all about. I’m not saying I do either, but I don’t go about saying, ‘oh, I’m pure in love with so and so’ or ‘I pure love so and so to death’ after one conversation on Bebo.
    Friends stick together, don’t they? I knew that he was going to go back down to where he was from after his exams. Rosie told me he wanted to go to some uni down there, in some place I’d never heard of. I’m not great with my geography. I didn’t know what he wanted to study, probably law or doctoring. I knew that when he went back down south that’s when Rosie would need me around again, wouldn’t it? That’s when she’d need me more. And I’d be there for her coz that’s what friends are for. I’d be there for her always.
    When they were together it’s not as if she pure blanked me or anything, it’s just that I didn’t see her as much as I used to. Only at school and the odd time when she stayed back to do some extra art. We still had a howl though. I’d no idea that she was thinking of going to England to study. She didn’t tell me that. I always thought that she wanted to go to uni up here and study art or design, or something creative like that. That’s what she told me anyway. But she didn’t tell me that she’d applied to some uni down there. Where was it again? That’s right, Brighton. Sounds alright actually. Couldn’t be doing with that accent though. Can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to be around that twenty-four seven. Do your absolute nut in, so it would. The funny thing is, see if it was a guy at our school,