THE NARRATIVE ARC

Rebels in Search of a Cause

We were seeking our own doors of perception, and momentarily found each other

It was the late ’60s and my boyfriend Danny possessed most of the attributes I considered desirable in a beau: long hair; broody good looks; and a penchant for sex, drugs, and rock and roll; and me.

All of which allowed me to project onto him a romantic, Byronic, bad-boy appeal, because hey, at 16, who doesn’t crave that?

We met in a less-than-romantic setting, the Moorings, a pub down by Aberdeen harbor, frequented by the flotsam and jetsam of the local scene — mods, hippies, rockers, trawlermen, and assorted 16-year-old schoolgirls such as ourselves pretending we were 18, the drinking age.

I had seen Danny around. His friend Tony, another louche longhair, was going out with Rhona, who was at school with me. One Saturday night in the Moorings, he beckoned me over.

He wiggled his eyebrows and fixed his dark, moody eyes on me.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Do you like William Blake?” he said.

I melted.

We soon became a couple — of sorts — given that we both lived with our parents on council estates at the opposite ends of town. While I was still at school, Danny worked in the fish, gutting the innards and hacking the heads off lemon sole, halibut, and herring in one of the fish houses down by the docks. But I was convinced one day he’d do something great, and there was something between us that wouldn’t go away. I loved how most nights he came home from work, took a bath, doused himself in Brut aftershave, put on his good suit, and, thus transformed, would sally forth to meet me.

Rebelling was de rigueur in Britain back then. Danny’s political leanings showed up early on when he gifted me a poster of seven heads in silhouette with the letters “The Chicago Seven” written underneath. He said they were on trial for rioting and protesting the Vietnam War. I’d never heard of them, but I stuck the poster up on my bedroom wall and began bleating on to anyone who would listen about The Chicago Seven, thinking it made me sound sophisticated and informed. “What, you don’t know who Abbie Hoffman is?”

One Saturday night, after the pubs had closed at 10 pm, six of us, complete with carry-outs of beer, got the last bus over to the house Danny shared with his parents. Once in his bedroom, Danny blasted the Stones on his record player. Before long, his mother, a terrifying ogre of a woman, opened the door and yelled at her son to turn it down.

As if on cue, Danny shouted back, “I can’t do anything in this house. I hate you.”

“While yer in this house, ye’ll dae as yer telt,” she responded.

More screaming ensued before Danny announced he was leaving home and began packing a suitcase. The rest of us sat about watching and drinking beer. Once packed, we trooped out and got a taxi over to his friend Tony, who also lived with his parents. Tony’s parents were more laid-back and forgiving than Danny’s, though, and said he could move in until he found somewhere else. After that, we carried on our Saturday night parties at their house instead.

Danny introduced me to smoking hash at the flat of an older, more sophisticated couple. I watched fascinated as they demonstrated the ritual of rolling a joint. It started with an album cover, on which they placed five Rizla cigarette papers, stuck together. They tore the end of a cigarette packet to form a roach, moistened one side of a cigarette and dumped the tobacco into the cigarette papers. Then they struck a match and crumbled one end of the lump of hash—Leb red or Afghani black—and sprinkled it into the tobacco. After it was expertly rolled up, they lit one end of the joint and inhaled deeply. When it was passed to me I followed suit, before proceeding to cough my guts out.

Despite the coughing, the resulting high made me feel intensely alive, intensely funny, and in possession of pearls of wisdom previously denied to me. Giggling nonstop, I managed to trip down a flight of stairs as we were leaving the flat and landed on my back like a beetle. Yes, this was the life, I thought, giggling away, unfazed.

Shortly afterwards, Danny informed me he was leaving his job and moving to London.

“There’s nothing for me here. Come with me. Come with me and have my child,” he said.

I looked at him as if he were mad. “Have my child!”

I knew what happened to girls at school who had love children, they ended up living with their mums on social security.

“I’ve got my Highers to sit!” I said.

“Don’t complicate things,” he said.

“You’re off your head.”

“I’m going.”

“Go then. See if I care,” I said.

As Danny stomped off, it dawned on me that he and I wanted different things. Going to London and having a baby was hardly the kind of rebelling I had in mind.

In the end, he got as far as “borrowing” his boss’s fish lorry and driving it just outside Aberdeen, where the police caught him. A school friend and I went to see him sentenced. We sat at the back of the court and tittered until the judge ordered us to be quiet or he’d have us removed. Danny got two years’ probation.

We drifted apart after that. I sat my Highers, took a gap year during which I went to Morocco before going to college in Edinburgh. By that time, coincidentally, Danny was also attending a different college in Edinburgh, one for adults without any academic qualifications. Maybe he would go on to do great things after all, I wondered. He’d also gone on to have the child he wanted. They weren’t married, but he lived with the mother when he was in Aberdeen.

Despite that tiny fact, we met up again in a pub in Edinburgh and spent the weekend together. Maybe there was still something between us that wouldn’t go away. It was hard to resist those broody good looks, I told myself.

The following week was my birthday. Danny sent me an innocuous, boring card with a ship at sea on its cover. Inside he’d written: “I know this card isn’t really suitable, but it was all the shop had.” How sweet i thought.

“Never seek to tell thy love, love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move, Silently, invisibly — William Blake.”

And we both knew we should never saw each other again.

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