by Carol Morley
*
I took up smoking again for something to do. I was fourteen and getting no closer to finding out what I wanted to do with my life and, more importantly, why Dad had gone and ended his, or what a proper dad really was. Not one dad or stepdad I had met was suitable material to study for one reason or another. In fact, most of the time they were hardly around, or I was hardly around them, and that made it more difficult. I had taken to studying men with children wherever I went, watching them from a distance, trying to work out what was going on, but I wasn’t really getting anywhere.
I’d run out of cigarettes, and Mum, who was what she termed a ‘very occasional’ smoker, didn’t have any, so I rummaged around the flat, down the side of the settee and in the kitchen drawer, and found enough change to buy a packet of ten No.6 from the machine outside the sweet shop.
I traipsed to the park, sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette right down to the filter, so I felt the scorch of it on my fingers. An old lady sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It seemed like a sign from God that she was interested in my future. I thought very hard about what the best solution could be. I needed money to look after Mum and I needed space to figure out all the things that needed figuring out and I needed to spread the word, not of religion, but of something.
‘A pop star.’
The lady nodded and didn’t seem taken aback – another sign, I reckoned.
‘Have you heard of The Hollies?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ I said, though I hadn’t.
‘My son was in them,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘They had Top 40 hits.’
Her pale blue eyes twinkled. Was she my guardian angel? God must have sent her to keep me on course. What were the chances of meeting the mother of a pop star in the park? God worked in mysterious ways. It was true.
‘What does your father do?’ she asked.
I was suspicious. She should have known this if she was a real angel. Then her eyes narrowed and I immediately felt under scrutiny, and that maybe she was just testing me.
‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. How awful… He must have been young to die.’
This was true. He was a lot younger than she was.
‘Do you mind if I ask how he died?’
My stomach knotted and I nearly told her the truth, then I almost told her that he died of cancer, but at the last minute changed my mind.
‘In a car crash.’
‘How terrible,’ she said, tightening the knot of her headscarf.
It would have been so much easier if Dad had died in a crash like Marc Bolan. People could understand that. It was an accident, not a choice. But instead Dad had wanted to die, which was really embarrassing.
The old lady looked as though she was going to ask me something else.
‘I’m sorry. Got to dash,’ I said.
*
When I got home, I told Mum that I had met the mother of one of The Hollies.
‘Fancy that,’ she said hopefully. ‘You never can tell.’
Even if she was not my angel, I wondered whether meeting the old woman was a sign that being a pop star truly was my destiny and decided that it probably was.
I put aside the reality that I couldn’t sing and reminded myself that punk had proved that you didn’t have to be able to sing well to be in a group, you just needed to have something to say. I wasn’t sure exactly that I had anything to say but was hoping it would come to me.
My look for being in a band consisted of a purple net skirt, a faded lace cardigan and a shiny black overcoat, all bought from The Spastics Society, the best charity shop in town. I tied a strip of black net around my head and flared the net over my face like the veil on an old-fashioned pillbox hat. I wore black satin ballet shoes with leather soles, which were a bit of a hazard when it rained, but were worth it as they completed the overall impression of what I thought I should look like as a lead singer.
After perfecting my image I put an advert in the window of Rhythm Corner.
Girl singer (14 years old) – likes Joy Division/Siouxie and the Banshees/The Slits/The Raincoats/Au Pairs/Magazine/Crispy Ambulance/listening to John Peel – looking for people with own gear to form band.
Linda said she would be my number one fan and I wondered if that would mean she would let me kiss her. Thoughts of kissing her had begun to dance around in my mind. Drac wanted to be in the band but didn’t want to be a backing singer and didn’t have an instrument, so said that she would be a number one fan as well.
Gus and Chris joined first. They were both eighteen and worked together in a local warehouse. Gus was a big fan of David Bowie and looked quite like him, only with acne. Chris looked older than he was, as his hair was thinning on top – a family curse, he told me with a melancholic stare. He bought a drum machine for the band as he said we didn’t need the hassle of a drummer, they would only throw sticks and tantrums. Perry was my age and the last to join. He had a Korg synthesiser and his shaved hair was emphasised by the long portion over his face that he referred to as his ‘post-modernist fringe’.
We spent ages trying to come up with a name for our band. I had read a short story by Ray Bradbury called The Playground. It was about a father who was so worried about what his child would go through at school that he swapped places with his own son, exchanging his mind with his son’s mind. We decided to use the title, although we carried on debating for hours over whether we should keep The in the title. In the end we decided that just Playground sounded better.
For some reason I developed an urge to see Chris and Gus kiss. When I asked them to neck in front of me they refused.
‘We’re not bent,’ Gus said.
‘We’re not even bi,’ added Chris.
‘It’s totally Bowie and Bolan,’ I said.
That convinced them. They kissed while I shouted directions.
*
Linda said the youth leader at her club was a big fan of Joy Division and would let Playground rehearse at the club for free. Twice a week we practised, and Linda and Drac would sometimes come along and watch. I tried to gauge how good our songs were by their reactions. I hoped Linda was falling in love with me now that I was a lead singer, but she was so nice to everybody it was hard to tell.
A friend of a friend of the youth club leader, apparently a father of twin daughters, became our manager and we got our first gig. It was in the back room of a pub in Macclesfield, a few miles outside of Stockport. Ian Curtis came from Macclesfield, so we decided to dedicate the night to him.
‘You’re going to be stars!’ our manager raved.
‘Dead right,’ I said.
There was a raised platform in the corner for our equipment. I had to imagine Linda and Drac were there, as they had to stay at home because their mums wouldn’t let them come to Mac on a school night. I unfolded my music stand and rested two small dolls and the book Amelia Jane Again by Enid Blyton on it. Various types and ages of men holding dripping pints of beer swarmed in, grumbling about the fifty pence entry fee, and I wondered how many of them had kids at home and why none of them had brought their wives along.
Our manager gave us the thumbs up and we began. Our songs were dark and gothic, they were about vivisection and lost youth. I hoped I was going to come across as a mix of Siouxsie Sioux, Iggy Pop and Ian Curtis, not that any of the old men in the audience would have a clue who they were. I gripped my microphone and began to sing:
‘And the pain in their eyes
And the fear on their breath
And the tears and the cries
As they suffer till death.’
The song ended after a frenzy of guitar. Some of the men laughed but I ignored them. One day they would be sorry. I closed my eyes and launched into the next song.
‘An old woman walking down on the beach
A regular haunt in her younger days
She picks up a doll that lies dis
carded and torn
Look at the love in its eyes
Look at the love in its eyes.’
When we finished our set, I leant close to the microphone. My lips buzzed as a fierce feedback sliced the room.
‘Thank you Macclesfield – home to the late, great Ian Curtis!’ I said.
A man sidled up to me and handed me a beer mat. I was about to find a pen so I could sign my autograph when he said it was some new lyrics that he’d written for me. I turned over the mat and read: An atom bomb is on its way / and we will end up dead today. The man sniggered and I smiled sardonically in return.
While the others sorted out the equipment, I went to find our manager for a review of our performance. He was outside with his girlfriend. As I got closer, his girlfriend shooed me away with a wild flap of her hands, so I hung back. Our manager began to shout garbled words. I observed him with interest. Soon he was sobbing. It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry. I had never seen Dad cry, or Rob, or Granddad. Our manager stamped his feet and wailed, and I wondered if his children – his two daughters – had ever seen him this way. His eyes passed over me like he had never seen me before, and then he was sprinting up the road, followed by his girlfriend, never to be seen again.
I imagined that what I had seen was nowhere near what a nervous breakdown would look like, though I decided that people that had breakdowns did cry. I tried to think of tears running down Dad’s face. Had he cried in that car before he killed himself? It was so hard to summon up tears sliding down his cheeks but I didn’t really want to imagine them either. I didn’t like it when people cried and I was glad that I hadn’t cried since I was a kid.
We never got the five pounds or the lift home our manager had promised. Gus had to phone his dad to come and pick us up, and when his father arrived he seemed almost pleased that it hadn’t gone well for Gus or the band. He told us that we’d never get anywhere if we didn’t cover popular songs. All that time we’d spent over the name of the band and all the songs came to nothing. Gus left the band that night and the group ground to a halt without his guitar melodies, and never performed again.
summer nights
‘Just think, me and you on holiday together,’ I said to Linda. ‘It’ll be a right laugh!’
The youth club leader had organised a week in a holiday apartment in Devon, free of charge. Linda was upset that Drac couldn’t come, as her mum and the tongue-and-groove boyfriend had made other plans, but she did think it was a lovely idea when I mentioned we might get our own bedroom to share, just the two of us. What I didn’t say was that I was also hoping that we could share a bed.
My stomach flipped with the possibility. Linking arms with Linda was the best feeling in the world and the next step was to feel her whole body against mine.
Before the holiday, Mum told me that we were moving out of the flat. As I packed my new swimming costume, a towel, a change of clothes, two pairs of socks, two pairs of knickers, my washbag and dictionary, Mum explained that I was to telephone my sister when I got back and that she would pass on details of our new place.
‘There’s nowhere lined up at the minute, but there will be. You go and enjoy yourself.’
Mum didn’t realise that I had other things on my mind than where I was going to be living. I couldn’t stop thinking about Linda and what it would be like to kiss her.
The journey to Devon was endless. My fantasy of a minibus with pairs of padded seats was replaced with the reality of a windowless converted van with hard, wooden benches screwed to either side. Ten girls were squeezed into the airless back, cut off from the youth club leader and her boyfriend, who was driving, by a partition of grubby white-painted steel. I had imagined I would be sitting next to Linda and pretending we were a band on tour, but because she was so popular I didn’t even get to squash beside her.
A girl was sick into a carrier bag and the sweet cloying smell fixed itself into the lining of my nose. I didn’t care about any of the others. I disliked one girl in particular who became judge and jury on what we looked like when we dozed off. She declared me the worst-looking sleeper because my mouth hung open as I slept. I was horrified that Linda had seen me like that and made sure I didn’t fall asleep again on the journey.
We arrived at the holiday apartment, where I claimed the small room with bunk beds for Linda and me. It wasn’t a double bed, but at least it was our own room.
‘Top or bottom?’ Linda asked.
‘You choose,’ I said.
She took the top.
*
I sat down on the beach, took my jelly sandals and socks off, rested my feet in the warm, gritty sand, tilted my face to the sapphire sky and closed my eyes. Sunlight made the back of my eyelids pink and I could see threads of veins. My pulse throbbed in my ears and the sea sounded like passing traffic. I opened my eyes to the brightness. A breeze lifted Linda’s hair around her face. She looked like a lion and everything around me smelt so clean. I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me towards the ocean. We stopped at the edge, where it lapped at our bare feet, and looked at each other.
‘We only live once!’ I said, stepping into the water.
‘I can’t swim, you know,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry, neither can I.’
We held hands and waded in to our waists, letting the waves splash us. Linda laughed, and I could see she had lots of grey metal fillings, which glinted preciously in the sunlight. I licked the briny taste of the sea from my lips. Linda slicked her wet hair back, tight and gleaming on her skull. Fine blond hairs stood up and shone on the nape of her neck. She squinted and held her hand to her forehead to shade the sun from her eyes, which were greener than I had ever seen them.
A fierce wave sent us reeling in squealing terror back to shore. We flung ourselves down on the sand and giggled. The other girls circled us.
‘What yer like!’
Linda’s wet blouse was translucent and her sharp, pink nipples pushed against the material. I tore my gaze away, to her feet, to her long straight toes, wiggling freely in her flip-flops.
Linda helped me to hunt for my missing white ankle sock with the red pompom on the back, part of a brand-new pair bought for the holiday. She treated the search as though it was a treasure hunt. As we passed sandcastles and moats I thought about the car Dad had once built out of wet sand on Margate beach. Big enough to sit in, it had front seats, back seats, a bonnet, a boot, wheels, a bucket steering wheel and a spade gear stick. Somewhere, though maybe it had been lost or burnt, there was a photograph of me in the driver’s seat. My hands were on the wheel, a proud grin on my face. It was not everybody’s dad that could build a car out of sand, that’s what I was thinking as I had posed for the camera, and what I was thinking now. Two unknown boys sat in the back, and beside the car stood a woman, their mother probably, her head crowned by a precarious beehive hairdo.
‘I give up!’ Linda said, cheerfully. ‘It’s gone to sock heaven!’
We joined the other girls and went to the pictures to see the Sex Pistols in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. In the interest of fairness, which is how she put it, Linda sat between two other girls. When Johnny Rotten looked from the screen and said that when you reach twenty-nine and you’ve got two kids all you would end up wanting to do is commit suicide, I wished that Linda was beside me so I could squeeze her hand.
Even though I was desperate to be alone with Linda, we spent our days and nights with the other girls. As a gang, we met skinheads, punks and lads that, according to their mates, didn’t know how to read and were mazed, which seemed to mean mad, although when I looked it up in my dictionary it wasn’t there. Everyone had funny accents and called us ‘maids’. People didn’t say, ‘Where’s that?’ when we told them where we were from, they said, ‘Where’s that to?’ and that didn’t make sense to us. Stockport wasn’t to anywhere, it just was. We decided Devon was truly bizarre and wrote a postcard to John Peel at Radio 1 telling him so, in the hope he’d read it out live on air.
>
At night I thought of Linda sleeping gently above me on the top bunk. I wondered what she would do if I joined her. I was not exactly sure what I would do if I got there, but I knew that I wanted to breathe in her warm, sunny, sandy smell and hold her close. Every night I thought about climbing the wooden rungs and slipping under the covers next to her, but I never did. I always buried my face in the pillow as I tried to sleep, hoping that Linda would never catch me with my mouth hanging open.
On the last night I asked her if we could spend the evening together without the others. She started to say it wasn’t fair to the rest of the girls, but I quickly told her I was depressed and that I needed to be on my own with her and she became gravely serious and nodded.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Tonight’s just for you.’
We walked arm in arm towards the beach and I looked down at my pale arm pressed along the golden sheen of hers.
I wondered if it was the right moment to suggest we share a bed. I was about to ask when two lads, their hair cut millimetres from their scalps, their nails clean and square cut, appeared out of nowhere and ruined the moment. It turned out they were on leave from the army. Even though they weren’t in uniform, they swaggered as though they were and I wanted to shoot them.
Linda sat on the beach with one soldier and I sat with the other. I barely talked but Linda chatted. It killed me to see her like that.
‘Linda,’ I said.
She didn’t hear me.
‘Linda,’ I said, louder.
She broke off her conversation and gave me a puzzled look.
‘Shall we get going?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘We have to meet the others, remember?’
‘No we don’t.’
Why was Linda always so honest? It must have been her Christian outlook. I was about to say that I really needed to have a word with her when her soldier began to kiss her. She let him. I had never seen Linda necking before and it surprised me that she looked so used to it. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer.