Glasgow is the dream

One of my favourite moments in cinema occurs in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999). A boy from Glasgow’s slums is playing on a half-built housing estate. From a kitchen window he sees a golden cornfield. He climbs over the sill and runs towards it. The camera pushes through the window in pursuit. Then we are in the field with him, watching as he tumbles joyfully in the corn. He seems never to have experienced nature before. After all the film has shown us – dirt, poverty, death, rats – we share his exhilaration totally.

Ratcatcher came to mind on a number of occasions as I read Tom Newlands’s debut novel, Only Here, Only Now. The book begins in 1994. It is the second day of the school holidays. In a depressed former mining town in Fife, fourteen-year-old Cora Mowat wishes she were somewhere else: “I’d spent almost every minute of my life here, at the edge of Muircross. It was a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget”. Abbotscraig would be progress – Cora and her “mam”, who is a wheelchair user, are on a waiting list for a council house there. “But I’m not stopping at Abbotscraig”, she says. Glasgow is the dream.

Returning home from the park, Cora finds a coming-of-age trope in wait. Her mam has got herself a man – Gunner. “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. Just the one eye.” Cora is wary: the last boyfriend “drank raw eggs out my plastic Deep Sea World pint cup”. But Gunner seems different. He “had spoke to me like he was my pal. He had used one of the worst swear words in front of me”. He has also bought Cora a brand-new pair of Asics trainers; it amazes her that “they hadn’t belonged to anyone else”.

Over the four years that we follow her Cora encounters many coming-of-age tropes. There is the first boyfriend. There is the school dance. There is the unlikely friendship with the weird kid. And there are exhilarating moments of escape à la Ratcatcher – including a literal one when she and her boyfriend shake off their pursuers in a car chase. But at the heart of things is the relationship with Gunner. By turns harmonious, fractious, loving and distant with each other, this compelling odd couple inject the novel with humour and pathos.

Another of Cora’s challenges is her ADHD. She has great difficulty concentrating at school: “In most subjects, information went in my brain like drizzle going through a cobweb”. She is full of pent-up energy: “There was tingling round my skull. Techno in my ribcage”. But as with so many children of that era – Newlands was one of them – her symptoms go undiagnosed. (An afterword informs us that, in 1990, only forty children in the UK were receiving medical treatment for ADHD, and that it wasn’t until 2000 that the condition was recognized by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.) Her teachers’ view is that she simply isn’t trying hard enough.

With school a write-off, Cora sees only three ways out of Fife: “promises off men, the council, the bingo winnings”. Pinning her hopes on the first of these, she gets involved with a local thug, Fulton Gillespie. Though she immediately has the measure of him – “He had one of those pill-dealer faces … [and] was a heart-squasher for sure” – she seems not to care. He has money, muscle and eyes on the future: he is a ticket out.

Newlands’s Fife is a hopeless place, full of crime, addiction and not much else. “When the pits went they’d have been as well dynamiting the whole heap”, says Fulton’s drug-lord grandfather. The place’s stymieing of Cora is encoded in her language. When she reaches for a metaphor the only ones available are those close at hand: “Her hair was the colour of Lucozade in the sun”; “I felt all smooth and sugary inside, like after downing room-temperature Yazoo”.

The novel’s title speaks to this sense of limitation: the here and now is all Cora knows. Likewise, it speaks to the very specific setting of Scotland in the 1990s. But it also invites reflection on our own here and now – on the UK’s current culture of food banks, toxic masculinity and ableism. Cora Mowats are still being let down.

George Cochrane is a writer and editor based in Newcastle

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