You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  I gained access to The Megastructure through what must have been a back exit, though in Cumbernauld I imagine it’s often hard to tell. At any rate, a large square hole in the concrete wall brought me into a lofty hangar, harshly illuminated by fluorescent tubes as long as flagpoles, stuck to a ceiling that resembled a gigantic ice-cube tray. The cheerfully hideous orange and brown decor I remembered from Gregory’s Girl was no more – sorry, Thomas – hidden beneath white tiling tagged here and there with a desultory wodge of tinsel, giving the cavernous, unpeopled space the feel of a municipal swimming pool drained for Christmas. It was the least seductive retail environment I had ever entered – no idle claim given the amount of time I’d recently been spending in pound shops. I’d read that generous swathes of the centre were untenanted, foresworn by retailers, leisure service operators and all those employers who were expected to cram its half-mile storeys with their offices. One news report had called the place ‘largely abandoned’, which seemed a horribly bleak assessment of such a dominant edifice – the heart and soul of a town that still ranked as the eighth largest in Scotland. But apart from a chip shop by the concrete mouth I’d walked in through (‘Last pickled eggs before Hades’), everything was closed, and there was no way to know which shutters had clanked down at 5.30 p.m., and which in 1983. Even in Gregory’s Girl the place had looked sorry for itself, a forsaken, strip-lit facility with all the vibrant glamour of a factory-sized Wimpy Bar in 1970s Bratislava. The locals didn’t like it then, and with every year that passed they liked it even less. For three decades Cumbernauld’s authorities tinkered with its ambience, forever picking the wrong wrongs to right, and then not righting them anyway. ‘Is it the soul-crushing expanses of bare concrete? I bet it is. There you go – we’ve painted some of them beige. No? Right, how about the whole dour and alienating wind-tunnel rabbit-warren thing with all the pedestrian walkways? I mean, we can’t actually do anything about that, but I was thinking it might help if we named them after Scottish rivers. Spey Walk, Tweed Way – see, it feels more homely already! What’s that? OK, though I have to say I’m unfamiliar with the River Ballbag. Is it that one in Methil?’

  To appreciate the full might of the Babylon Zoo-scale delusion that has clouded the judgement of Cumbernauld’s administrators over the years, let us consider just two things. A: the full-length storey of deluxe accommodation laid atop The Megastructure, in the sincere expectation that high-flying executives, Formula 1 racing drivers, Simon Bates and the like would be fighting over the keys to a penthouse apartment on the eighth floor of a North Lanarkshire shopping centre straddling a dual carriageway. B: the new branch of Woolworths that opened there in 2007.

  Feeling rather uncomfortable I pressed on into the clinically illuminated emptiness, accompanied only by the distant clatter of security gates being wound down, and a ratcheting fear that I might somehow find myself being pulled into The Megastructure’s death spiral. The white tiles began to close in around me: the bunkers became hallways, then corridors. An approaching echo built into the sound of hard, confident footsteps, and by the time they were upon me I was preparing to explain myself to a man in a lab coat with an ID pass round his neck, holding a tray of glowing petri dishes or a beagle with three heads. In fact it was a security guard, who politely made me aware that the centre was now closed, and that the only exit still open was the one up by the chip shop. It took me twenty minutes to find my way back.

  I tramped round The Megastructure’s outdoor perimeter, on what soon became a very keen quest for somewhere to sit down and eat. Clinging to my journey’s defining principles I nobly ignored the huge and radiant signs erected by Messrs McDonald, King, Sanders and Hut, beckoning through a gap between stairwells, or across a dark copse of upturned shopping trolleys. I only stopped ignoring them having tracked down and ruled out every other option: namely, a takeaway-only Chinese restaurant atop The Megastructure’s car park. That really was it. In half an hour I didn’t even walk past a single pub, which in the centre of Scotland’s eighth largest town seemed an outrage against logic. Globalised dunce-fuel it would have to be.

  But it’s one thing to sight a golden arch, or a pizza wearing a red hat, or Rolf Harris in a bootlace tie – quite another, on foot and in Cumbernauld, to make your way to the establishment beneath it. I followed a walkway that pointed directly at the good Colonel’s goatee, only to find it suddenly veering away and depositing me back at The Megastructure. A duplicitous little stub of pavement promised pedestrian access to a drive-through McDonald’s, then abruptly opened into a wall of speeding traffic: Ronald sat impregnable inside his dual-carriageway moat. At one point I got to within two lanes of a Burger King, but the roadside vegetation was spiny, dense and flush up to the kerb, demanding a combination of talents I wasn’t sure I could currently muster: strength, speed, precision and a readiness to order fast food in shredded trousers. And so, hungry and defeated, I allowed Cumbernauld to take me where it would. With my dispirited gaze on the puddled ground I trudged up car-park ramps, over boggy landscaped hillocks, across footbridges bookended with spiralled walkways. At length, by the foot of a concrete flight of steps signposted ‘Stairs to Phase 4’, I stumbled out of the lonely gloom and found myself engulfed by noise and light and everyone in Cumbernauld. A while later, swaying slightly and with a plastic-bagged Scotch pie knocking against my knees, I emerged from the largest Tesco in all Caledonia.

  Chapter Nine

  IT WAS A greasy, grey morning and I greeted it with an expression to match. I’d taken a taxi back from Tesco, my dwindling mental and physical resources swiftly drained by the many repetitions of ‘the Red Deer Inn’ that had proved necessary to prevent the driver dropping me off at ‘the railway station’ (his first and third guesses) or ‘the radio station’ (his second and fourth). Enfeebled, ravenous and suddenly quite keen to make a terrible mess of his back seat, I’d unsheathed my pastry en route. My word, it was bad: a sawn-off suet drainpipe blocked with clumps of congealed haggis, smelling like it had been baked in an old lady’s handbag. I had no condiments on hand with which to pimp my pie, but to forestall coma I forced half of it down.

  The other half looked at me now from the bedside table, dented and sallow and leaching transfats into the wood-effect melamine veneer, a demi-pie reminder of the truly terrible crap I’d been running on for long days. I recalled that the Japanese, who eat very little in the way of dairy produce, find that Westerners reek of sour milk; it was only a matter of time, and probably not much of it, before my pores started to excrete some strange and ghastly new odour. Would my family disown the batter-sweating bridie-breath who was coming home for Christmas? After showering myself free of clinging bits of pastry and bypass I proceeded directly to the Red Deer Inn’s breakfast buffet and ate five bananas.

  Back in the room and packing up, it became apparent that reserves of usable clothing were running dangerously low. Almost automatically I threw a few socks and pants into the sink, cranked the taps on and with a seasoned king-of-the-road flourish squirted in a sachet of bath gel. When this failed to procure the requisite billows of froth, I retrieved the sachet from the bin and read its labelling with dismay: Moisturising body lotion. Smoothes and nourishes skin; mires wet pants in slime. My intention had been to quit Cumbernauld forthwith, but as I draped my viscous underwear across Craig’s rear seat and parcel shelf, I sensed the imperative of a visit to a local launderette.

  I drove off into the cellular housing units confident one would turn up, fairly certain a launderette had featured in Gregory’s Girl, and adamantly unwilling to ask a local eight times and receive directions to Auchtermuchty badminton club. Even in grumbling drizzle it seemed inevitable that daylight would improve Cumbernauld. The landscaping certainly looked a lot better now that I wasn’t having to conquer it on foot. All the smoothly sculpted vales and whalebacks I remembered from Magnus’s film were now neatly embellished with forty-year-old trees and shrubs, no doubt each having matured exactly as their creators projected. I later
read that students of landscape architecture are drawn to Cumbernauld from all over the world, to see how it should be done. And also that they’re distantly outnumbered by their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, who come here to see how it shouldn’t.

  ‘Every four hundred homes are served by a corner shop,’ Magnus had smoothly intoned, as birds twittered and pigtailed schoolgirls in Start-rites played hopscotch on newly laid cobbles. ‘A little local store – in this case, a converted farmhouse.’ With a few cellular housing units under my belt, it was clear that pledge had been lost somewhere along the way. Puttering around the cul-de-sacs of dank, dun-coloured terraces and apartment blocks, I had yet to encounter any sort of shop, let alone one that might have seen previous rural service.

  Circling yet another roundabout I caught a smeary glimpse of The Megastructure, at this distance a dead ringer for the kilometre-long aluminium smelting plant that dominates the western approach to Reykjavik. Before it stood the glass-fronted rectangular solid that was the über-Tesco, and just up the road lay an only slightly smaller new Asda.

  The brave-new-world Megastructure hadn’t been rejected because the citizens of Cumbernauld found it hideous and soul-destroying, even though it most emphatically was. When it comes to shopping, I don’t think people really care that much about environment or ambience. Let’s face it, cultivating the seductive retail appeal of an automotive parts warehouse hasn’t done places like Aldi and Lidl any harm. Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it’s just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges. No, The Megastructure failed because, ironically, it was too parochial – an enormous place filled with tiny retail units. At some point in my malnourished wanderings the previous night I’d found a store locator map, and noted that nearly all its surviving tenants were running the sort of businesses you’d expect to see on a small-town high street: T. McClean, chemists; Dunipace, Brown, solicitors; R. & J. McClachlan, optician’s. Everything else had been swept away by what Cumbernauldians tended to describe online as ‘the best news we’ve had in years’ or even ‘the only good things about Cumbernauld’: that new Tesco and its neighbouring Asda.

  It’s tempting to conclude that Cumbernauld’s planners were endeavouring to humanise the town’s most brutal, crushing edifice by cramming it with homely little enterprises, local shops for local people. But actually that’s just how shopping was back then: a chore made bearable by social interaction, a gossip over the corner-shop till, or a chat about bi-focals with nice Mr McClachlan at the optician’s. Geoffrey Copcutt presciently anticipated a future in which shopping would take place in huge buildings accessed by motor car. His only failure, if you can call it that, was neglecting to predict the extraordinary march of mass consumerism that would elevate shopping to an end in itself, a leisure activity played out in ever more anonymous, ever huger retail theme parks like Tesco Extra. I had, with my own tired eyes, seen grown Cumbernauldian males taking turns to play Guitar Hero in the electrical aisle: glazed and slouchy, they had clearly been hanging around there for hours. The sad truth is that though we’re forever bemoaning the decline of local retailers and the loss of Britain’s high-street community spirit, that decline is nobody’s fault but our own. However much we might like to picture ourselves wheeling tartan sholleys past bow-fronted shops and exchanging cheery waves with butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, the fact is that when offered a soulless, corporate, 40-billion-square-foot one-stop alternative, we grab it with both sweaty hands. And in doing so, we’ve effectively privatised town planning, shooing away the earnest if occasionally deluded public servants who once did the job, and allowing commercial developers to fashion our urban landscape to their cynical, self-serving whim. Superstores were once stuck out by the ring roads, but now we’re letting them annex our town centres. I say ‘we’, but my wife – a diehard local shopper who gets Christmas cards from every candlestick maker in W4 – seems fairly certain it’s all my fault.

  Distantly wondering if Tesco Extra plumbed in any of its washing machines, I U-turned and dog-legged from one discouraging, shopless housing unit to the next. It was hardly hopscotch weather, but on a Saturday morning there wasn’t a single kid out in the streets, and barely a parent either. Cumbernauld’s domestic hibernation seemed almost heroic when you considered the horrid little houses its citizens had shut themselves up in, with their fungal blooms and mossy door frames, the poky windows that looked across ranks of lock-up garages made of soggy cardboard. It was another Craigworld centrespread: I nipped out with the camera and snapped a few moody portraits.

  Though not in a way Magnus might have foreseen or desired, Cumbernauld was indeed a Town for Tomorrow. Completing the process that other towns had merely begun, it was now ahead of the sociological curve as a place that had completely and utterly eschewed any communal focus, whose insular downtime revolved around driving to the twenty-four-hour misanthro-mart or staying in to watch Britain’s Got Biscuits and Police, Camera, Nudism.

  Well, that was that. I flicked Ozzy to life and jabbed in the digits that would lead me to luncheon: G3 8RE, home to a Glasgow takeaway and its speciality, a saveloy swaddled in strips of kebab meat then deep-fried in batter. The ‘stonner’ – thus named in tribute to the local slang term for an erection – weighed in at 3lb and was considered so deleterious to health that its creator limited customers to one per week. ‘Just Say No’, as the cast of Grange Hill now warned me in song, and ad nauseam. I was rather glad to find my ponderings on a stonner’s taste and appearance disrupted by the Vauxhall Corsa that now filled my rear-view mirror, flashing its headlights and moving about the carriageway in an excitable manner.

  I smiled and hoisted a hand of acknowledgement, for it wasn’t the first time that a citizen of Cumbernauld had transmitted their appreciation of Craig’s rarity. Crossing the Red Deer Inn car park an hour or so before I’d noticed an executive in a snappy trenchcoat giving Craig a quizzical once over. ‘First one of those I’ve seen on an R plate,’ he announced when I came up and stuck a key in the boot.

  ‘Well, there’s actually quite a funny story attached to that,’ I began, with an indulgent chuckle, and although at this point he was already walking smartly away across the tarmac, I felt myself warming to Cumbernauld as a place – so far the only place – where oddball native motoring tat was respected, or at least noticed. Why, this Corsa driver seemed exceptionally keen to satisfy his curiosity – so keen, in fact, that he now overtook and drove me right off the road. I bumped up on to the landscaped verge and slithered to a halt a foot from his rear bumper, in the process knocking my MP3 player out of its socket and cutting Zammo off in his quavery prime.

  Who, or what, is a ‘ned’? The Concise Oxford Dictionary speaks of ‘a hooligan or petty criminal, a stupid or loutish boy or man (Scots, informal)’. Dr Rowland Atkinson, lecturer in the department of Urban Studies at Glasgow University, prefers a more informal definition: ‘a young man in a baseball hat who hangs about the streets drinking Buckfast’. But to me, a ned is and shall always be the pinch-faced, tracksuited youth who now stood at Craig’s door, working the handle vigorously and expressing in the most strident terms his desire that I grant him access, denied some micro-seconds earlier by a reflex clatter of elbow on locking knob.

  ‘What are you doin’ taken fucken pictures of my fucken flat?’

  Those callow features seemed so distorted with rage that his own mother might not have recognised him, but his words were as clear as the raindrops beading the glass between us.

  ‘What indeed, young ned, what indeed!’ I replied, throwing open the door with a brilliant smile. ‘Come take your ease beside me, and hear my curious tale. Scotch pie?’

  Just one of the many gambits I now discarded in favour of lowering the window a quarter of an inch and aiming through it a bleat-like noise, part confused denial and part
plea for mercy. Excluding those emitted in response to my children’s appearance in school nativity plays, this might well have been the most pathetic sound I have ever made as an adult. It very shortly plunged down the rankings.

  ‘We’ve got a wee boy in there, so how do I know you’re not one of those fucken perverts?’

  This last word came accessorised with a splendid pair of drawn-out thrumming r’s, though I fear I may not have fully appreciated them at the time. Through a curious osmosis the blood drained from my face and reddened his with the righteous rage of an unhinged vigilante. Sounding like a livestock auctioneer with his pants full of scorpions, I launched into a jabbering saga, which began with my father’s pivotal role in laying out Cumbernauld’s cellular housing units, and didn’t get much further.

  ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I whimpered. ‘I’m a travelling biscuit salesman with three children.’ A tiny part of my brain registered that this pathetic deception had just enjoyed its final outing. The death of a salesman.

  ‘You’re a fucken pervert!’ He dredged up a bolus of phlegm and noisily propelled it at the gap above the window; it struck the door frame and clung there, swinging its tail. ‘Cumbernauld has no neds in the old sense,’ breathed Magnus. ‘Every four hundred homes are served by an integrated cellular ned, a ned that rises from the ground itself.’

  He seemed to have said all he wanted to say, and I’d already said too much. Cautiously I moved an arthritic hand to the gearstick and engaged reverse, then looked over my shoulder to check the verge behind me for baying mobs, wee boys and the like. In doing so I confronted at close quarters two pairs of damp underpants smeared in hand cream, and I may not have been alone in doing so, because at this point the sole of a white training shoe was forcefully applied to Craig’s driver’s-side rear window.