Runaway by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page A

‘We know who you are, ya smart bastard. Yer fuckin’ deid!’
    Good enough reason on its own, I suppose, to get out of town, though that wouldn’t happen for another six weeks or so.
    With the voices of the gang boys receding into the night, Jenny turned to me and surprised me by touching my face with tender fingers. And on an impulse I kissed her. Just a brief, sweet kiss on the lips, but it cemented something between us.
    We made our way, then, down through the garden in the darkness, creeping around the side of the bungalow at street level, and out through the front gate into Nethervale Avenue. It was another ten minutes before I got Jenny home. Or almost. We met her father striding down the street in his coat and hat, intent on walking all the way to Clarkston if he had to, to find his little girl.
    ‘My dad,’ she whispered when we first saw him approaching, and I dropped her hand fast.
    His face looked as if it had been chiselled out of ice straight from the deep freeze. He glared at me and took Jenny’s hand.
    ‘The dance got broken up by a gang, and Jack brought me home,’ she said.
    But he didn’t seem grateful. ‘There’ll be no more dances,’ he said. His eyes fell on me once more. ‘And you’ll not be seeing Jack again, either.’
    The way he said my name, it was almost like he’d spat away a bad taste from his mouth. He turned and pulled her with him back along the street. She cast an apologetic glance over her shoulder, and I turned wearily to make the perilous journey home, sticking to the darker side streets, and hiding in gardens if I saw anyone or heard voices. I wouldn’t have survived a second encounter with the Busby Cumbie.
    III
     
    There is nothing more desirous, somehow, than the forbidden fruit. It always tastes so much sweeter. And so Jenny and I became secretly inseparable. Secret, that is, from her folks. She came to all our gigs, or at least the ones from which she could get home at the time appointed by her father.
    When the group wasn’t playing we would go to the pictures, usually the Toledo at Muirend, a faux-Moorish palace in the suburban heartland of industrial Glasgow. It’s not there any more. Demolished, apart from the Moorish facade, and turned into flats. We saw the Cliff Richard film Summer Holiday , and maybe that’s something else that put the idea of running away into my head. Then the John Wayne movie Hatari . I was almost glad it was so bad. It was a good excuse to spend most of it necking in the back row.
    I guess we were both still virgins then, although I was desperate to remedy that situation as soon as possible. But I wasn’t welcome at Jenny’s house, and there was no chance of it happening at mine. I didn’t have a car, and the back of the group van was not a very appealing prospect, especially on a cold winter’s night. And besides, I wasn’t sure how far Jenny would go, and I wasn’t confident enough to push it. Until the night of the school dance.
    The Shuffle was booked to play that night, and it was exciting for us – the first time we had played at a school dance for an audience of our peers. The hall was huge. Used for assemblies and indoor games, and school plays performed at regular intervals by a particularly active drama club. And, of course, school dances, which were usually old-fashioned affairs with the ‘Dashing White Sergeant’ and ‘Drops of Brandy’.
    Jeff had already left school by then. Failing all but one of his ‘O’ Grades, he had quit at the end of the fourth year and got himself a job as a trainee car salesman with Anderson’s of Newton Mearns, a big sprawling Rootes dealership that sat on the south-west corner of Mearns Cross. It was Jeff who owned the group van, a beat-up old Commer, and drove us to all our gigs. By way of compensation he did none of the gear humping, and before and after bookings he sat up in the front of the van, smoking, while we loaded and unloaded.
    The rest of us had gone back for a fifth