The boy done good

"I need a haircut"

"What at five-thirty in the morning?" I said, glancing at the clock and deciding I was definitely still asleep. I pulled the quilt over my head and tried to remember where I was in a particularly vivid dream.

"Mum!"

Big Fecker hasn't got up this early for at least twelve years, it couldn't be him.

"MUM, please, I need a haircut"

Haircuts usually mean trying to impress a girl, a party of immense proportions or a very special ocas......oh yes....I remember......today is the day.

"Have you slept at all?" I asked, crawling from my bed.

"No, not really. Every time I fell asleep it woke me up again".

I looked at his worried face. It was time for a haircut.

"Do you think I'll get any of them" he said as I hacked at his mop (hacking is good btw, no tidy heads for BF).

There were no words, we had gone over and over his worries. His last year at school had been a rocky road, with beer and women burning a hole in his brain more than a Reichstag Fire. Regret had come later, along with two months of fighting to finish coursework and revising things that he didn't seem to have a clue about. It was a swinging pendulum, it could go either way.

I sat in the school car park, alternately praying to a handy God and singing a tuneless song to keep my face from collapsing. Like many kids Big Fecker has had to experience life in order to learn, I just hoped that he had learnt early enough!

I saw him running through the gates, waving the dreaded brown envelope in the air.

"MUM, I got 'em, I got the fucking lot."

Oh shit, now we've got to get through college!!