All we ever wanted, Johnny and me, was to be in a band. We didn’t want to grow up and not growing up and being in a band was as close as you could get to being the same thing, said Johnny’s dad. Don’t grow up, he said. He said growing up was the worst thing that ever happened to him, the only joy he feels is in those moments when he recaptures his youth, when the missus whips out the old sexy undies or when he sits with us and has a few cans and plays a couple of games of fifa and we’re behind him and he’s concentrating on something and can hear us talking but can’t make out exactly what we’re saying and there’s music playing and we don’t sound like us, we sound like his pals when he was younger and he can feel them there with him. He used to go on these rants and it was like he was in a trance then he’d snap out of it and get embarrassed and take it out on Johnny. His dad was a music historian. Amateur of course. But amateurs are the best at what they do. Fuck a professional, a professional rock and roller, turning up and playing Johnny Cash covers at weddings wearing boot cut jeans and cowboy boots cutting about the West End of Glasgow calling cunts amigo. Johnny’s dad knew it all. He used to tell us all the shit he’d read, but always ended up on the subject of Jerry Dammers helping to bring down apartheid in South Africa. That was his favourite subject.

But dad, said Johnny. D’ye not think Jerry Dammers was a bit of a dictator?

This was something he said every time to his dad and his dad bit every time. It was like a comedy routine more than a real argument, like they were programmed to say these exact words with the exact same cadence any time they saw me. I used to wonder whether they were real. I used to think I had another life. I was a psychopath that they put in this remote village in the Highlands to keep away from society because they couldn’t kill me because of my potential. So I was stuck here with no one for miles other than a father and son called Johnny and Johnny and this old vegetable who I called Gran, but was she even really my Gran. I don’t remember my mum or my dad. I only know Johnny, Johnny, Gran, Jerry Dammers (Dictator / Revolutionary / Keyboardist) and have this vague notion of the power of rock and roll. Then it’s just hills. It’s not beautiful, it’s fucking boring.

We need to start a band, said Johnny.

I mean what the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Naw? Should I just go and sit and stare at hills for another seventeen fucking year? It’s not beautiful, it’s fucking boring.

So is that an aye, said Johnny.

Aye it’s a fucking aye, I said.

Good. Can you sing?

Naw. Can you?

Naw. Play any instruments?

Naw. You?

Naw.

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Rudy Civello is a writer from Glasgow. He has been published in Expat Press, Don’t Submit, Commercially Viable, Some Words, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Loser and more. He is on twitter @rudycivello