Ideas for stories jump into my head every day. The vast majority of them never come to anything. I scrawl them on scraps of paper that inevitably end up scrumpled at the bottom of the bin; or trap them inside word-processing documents (a series of short, disjointed semi-sentences that won’t even make sense to me when I come to review them a few days down the line, much less a few months). Most end up buried – fading and crumbling – in the graveyard of my memory.

I’ve carried the brief outline I’m about to share with you – one of many of thousands of proto-stories that will probably never come to fruition – inside my mind for years. I think it’s lingered there because the themes and emotions thrown up by the story still resonate with me, but also because the message – or plea – at the heart of the story only becomes more relevant as the years pass by.

I wonder if this is the first time that somebody has ever critically evaluated one of their own stories that doesn’t actually exist because they could never be arsed writing it in the first place.

Anyway, without any further ado, here’s the essence of my never-was-story:

When Will I be famous?

A man auditions for The X Factor, or some fictionalised variant of the show. He can’t sing, but he can certainly entertain you, if laughing at the afflicted is your idea of a good time, which historically it has been – and still is – for the vast majority of people who watch televised talent shows.

He’s auditioning at a time in TV talent-show history when a contestant’s first meeting with the judges took place in a small room without an audience, and not in a packed theatre as happens now. Besides the camera crew, the only people in the room with the contestant are three judges, a panel which comprises a woman and two men.

The contestant starts to sing, a haunting ballad (haunted entirely by him). There’s something both earnest and disturbed about the way he moves his body in time to the music, and the force with which he pours his passion into the song. The look of rapture on his face suggests he believes himself to be in possession of the voice of an angel, when in reality the timbre of his voice is a closer fit with a hoarse old dog howling at the moon.

The two male judges almost fall from their seats laughing. The camera crew is laughing, too. The female judge struggles to banish her own laughter from her lips and thoughts, and finally manages to maintain an air of respect and kindness. While the most famous of the judges – the story’s Simon Cowell proxy – waves his hands for the performance to cease, and issues an emphatic ‘no’, the female judge says ‘yes’, an act that is motivated either by misplaced compassion or a desire to irritate not-Simon. The other male judge says no, and the contestant is rejected. He locks eyes with the female judge and smiles through the tears that are forming in his eyes.

He becomes a celebrity in his town and its surrounding areas, and is booked to appear in pubs, clubs and gig venues. Local and regional newspapers interview him, or run small pieces on him. He’s so swept up by the attention and his new pseudo-celebrity status that he doesn’t realise he’s being transformed more and more into a bizarre novelty, a laughing stock: a lightning rod for the town’s anger and cruelty, and a scapegoat for its shame. He isn’t savvy, or smart, or articulate. He’s powerless to divert the course of his fame; he doesn’t want to let go of it, even when it starts to hurt.

At the end of the story he stands on a small stage in-front of a crowd of drunken revellers in some smoky city pub, grasping the microphone uncertainly in his hand, a hand that’s now shaking. He now realises that he – and his song – mean nothing to these people. This time when he sings there’s no passion or conviction in his voice. He can hear the laughter spitting from their lips, see the disdain and arrogance shining in their eyes. He tries to push on to the end of the song, but the tears well up in his eyes with such great weight he feels like his head might capsize. His voice quivers, falters and dies. Worse than their laughter, they’re now ignoring him. He’s alone up there on the stage, frightened and confused.

He sees, in his mind’s eye, the soft, apologetic smile on the lips of the sympathetic judge. He goes back further, back to his childhood. He remembers cowering under his covers as a young boy, scared and helpless, listening to his father beating his mother with his belt in the other room. He remembers the screams. The cracking and the yelling. Then the front door slamming. Then his mother would shuffle into his bedroom, eyes heavy and hollow, and slide under the covers next to him, forgetting herself, forgetting her own pain and fear. All she wanted to do was make him feel better. Happy. Safe. She soaks up his tears and strokes his head until he closes his eyes and falls asleep in her arms, all the while singing a lullaby.

The same lullaby he’d one day sing on stage.

He takes a gun from his jacket, puts it to his head, and squeezes the trigger.

The irony is, he now gets the fame – and more than that, the acceptance – that he craved. People are kind about him. They cry for him.

And then they forget him again.

I can’t help but think about that story-that-never-was every time I think about Denise Ferry from Coatbridge, the woman who rose to notoriety on the back of an on-line video – since gone viral – of her singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’ at her mother’s graveside burial. She’s now making appearances in nightclubs and pubs across Scotland singing that same song, once a tribute to her mother, now a loud drunken chant down the local disco. Watch a video of any of her recent ‘performances’. Look at the smile that keeps creeping on to her face. She thinks she’s made it. She thinks people love her. She doesn’t understand that she’s in the process of being chewed up and spat out.

I laughed when I first watched the video of Denise singing at her mother’s funeral. It was so unlike any funeral I’ve ever seen or been to: bleak and bizarre and strange and funny and sad and gallus, all at once, and somehow also uniquely Coatbridgian. All of the ingredients that make up the video, from Denise’s over-sized suit and her giant aviator shades; to the cowed and weary man silently smoking behind her; to the choice of song itself, combine to create one of the weirdest and most discordant viral home movies I’ve ever watched. It’s like Rab C Nesbitt meets Twin Peaks.

I’m not laughing now. While it’s undoubtedly ghoulish to use your own mother’s funeral as a launch-pad for ‘fame’, it’s downright deplorable to exploit a deeply damaged woman’s desire to be noticed in order to fatten your pockets. Giving people what they want isn’t always the right thing to do. Because…

Well.

Because people are cunts.