Deleted Excerpt One

Here's the first in a series of "deleted excerpts" which are in fact, more like afterthoughts. This one would have belonged in Chapter One, page 12:

...Then there was the time that Ritzy, Shane and I were trudging down Springvale Road on the way to one of our nightly deposit bottle-salvaging expeditions. It was a chilly winter's evening, and we were all wearing matching grey, knee-length overcoats, a fashion item that I had recently introduced to our little group. In the early '80's the knee-length overcoat, dirty mac or "flasher coat" as the mocking straights liked to call them, were worn by pasty, depressive young men in bedsits across the length and breadth of England, having been popularised by miserabilist bands such as The Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths. But, as ever, my source of copycat inspiration had come from Bowie, who bizarrely, had worn one in the arid desert heat of New Mexico in my favourite movie "The Man Who Fell To Earth".
So anyway, we were all walking single-file along the road, when I suddenly suggested, 'Hey, wouldn't it be a hoot if we all simultaneously flash the next car that drives past'? Seconds later we heard the steady hum of a vehicle coming up fast behind us, and on the count of three we all turned around, thrust our hands deeply into our pockets, leaned back, and laughing uproariously, waggled our overcoats at the startled motorist.
We were not literally flashing him of course, as we were all fully clothed underneath the oversized coats. A fact that was lost on the three plain-clothed officers in the unmarked police car who failed to see the funny side of our little prank when they pulled over to the side of the road to give us a proper telling off.