Boy Who Made It Rain by Brian Conaghan

soul and spirit. Chasing something that was unattainable. The poor bastard. Selling factory to factory, shop to shop, door to door, man to man, day to day, year to year is enough to break the strongest of men. My dad, like Willy, was broken. At least Willy had the gumption to have himself an affair, get some fun along the way before his downfall. Dad, on the other hand, was weak willed, let people walk all over him, allowed himself to be given orders, to be undermined and humiliated by recent sharp-suited graduates with no sense of anything other than themselves. I fucking hated those graduates. But what a state to get into nevertheless; the poor, pathetic bastard. If ever there was a motivation to learn from your parents’ mistakes... One thing for sure, none of those graduates were breaking their balls selling for their feed, no, they were too busy sucking the devil’s cock in order to fatten their wallets. None of those graduates were half the man my dad was. None of those graduates were going to Glasgow.

Glasgow
    You don’t get the feel of anything from the back seat of a car. The back seat symbolises the least important person in the car. And us driving to Scotland symbolised the least important person in dad’s company. There was no conversation to be had because the music, which was just barely discernible in the front, blared in the back. It happens in cheap cars. Therefore we didn’t get beyond the ‘can you turn that down a bit, please?’ level of conversation. Reading was out of the question in case I projected vomit over the back of mum’s brand spanking new demi-wave. I’m a bad traveller. Everything just whizzed past in series of greys, greens and whites. I fixed my eyes on a dead fly stuck to the window; the car was filthy. It could have been worse, that fly could have been me. I was alive and raring to go.
    The M6 was as far North as I had ever been in England. For some reason I could tell it was the north I was travelling through. You hear stories about the divide, usually perpetrated by the south’s snobbery about the north, but I have to say the further north I travelled the duller it got. Forty, or even twenty years ago the sky would have been dark from the furnaces, the chimneys, the work, now it was just grey from rain clouds. Zooming up the M6, towards Scotland, even the sheep looked to have an air of resignation about them: a foreboding sense of what was north of that border. They knew, they had sheep family in Scotland. And then the sign: Welcome to Scotland approached us. Or, rather, we approached it. We gave a collective cheer, more out of ritual than joy. Then we all reverted into the recesses of our minds and secretly, I’ll bet, thought: Christ Almighty! I did anyway. As soon as we entered Scotland, or left England, (whatever way you want to look at it) the signs for Glasgow came thick and fast.
    It took about an hour for us to escape rural Scotland. After which there was no doubt that we were within touching distance of Glasgow. High-rise flats could be seen far in the distance, like monolithic military men standing to attention, closely watching our every move. Protecting us as we advanced, overseeing our every movement, maybe. The welcome was intimidating. I wondered how many people were crammed into this place. What clever architectural mind was behind such atrocities? What illicit activities go on in and around these colossal concrete structures? What life flies by inside the tiny boxes that formed them? This was a proper city with proper city fixtures. It was a million miles from Eastbourne. It smelt different, felt colder. In the back of that car it seemed like a million miles away from us too. As we took in our new surroundings not one word was uttered between us. Bloody Hell’s Fire…Oh, God Save Us…Shit couldn’t exactly be heard but it was tangibly floating around the car nonetheless. Until mum broke it.
    â€˜Well, here we