by Mike Gayle
‘Yes?’
‘Are you her?’
‘I might be. Who’s this?’
Suddenly I wasn’t sure it was her.
‘It’s Matt Beckford, an old schoolfriend of hers—’
‘Matt!’ she exclaimed. ‘Matt Beckford! It’s me, Bev. I didn’t have the faintest clue who it was. I thought for a minute you were some sort of dodgy debt collector trying to get me for some misdemeanour of my youth.’
‘Got a lot of debts, have we?’
‘The odd unpaid credit card,’ said Bev. ‘Or two. It’s all debt left over from my globe-trotting days. Anyway, I think they’ve all blacklisted me now.’ She laughed.’But that’s okay, I just use Jimmy’s.’
‘And Jimmy is?’
‘My bloke – or, more accurately, my husband, as of three months ago.’
‘Congrats.’
‘Never mind congrats, fella. What on earth made you decide to call me at three thirty on a Sunday afternoon after . . .’ she worked it out ‘ . . . nearly six years of no see or hear – not that I’m not pleasantly surprised, of course.’
‘Well, to cut a long story shortish, I’ve been living in New York and I’ve just been transferred to Sydney and I’m here at home in Brum for a while – and, well, I was out for Gershwin’s birthday—’
‘You still see Gershwin? How is he?’
‘He’s fine. Zoë and he have a little girl now, Charlotte. She’s four, I think . . . Anyway, we were out for a drink – in the Kings Arms, as it happens – celebrating the young man’s thirtieth when we bumped into Ginny and, well, we all got talking and, well, I just wanted to see how everyone is. That’s all. I just wanted to see if you’re . . . okay.’
‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ said Bev, thoughtfully.’Better than okay, in fact, and all the better for hearing from you.’
Over the next twenty minutes or so Bev filled me in with what she’d been up to since I’d last seen her. At the age of twenty-five she had decided after six years’ travelling that it might be advisable to get a career on the go. She had worked as everything from a bee-keeper in Australia to the nanny of the child of the Malaysian answer to Cher. She returned to England and settled in Sheffield, where after several training courses she began teaching at an adult-education college and met her husband Jimmy, also a teacher. They fell in love, got married and bought a two-bedroomed cottage in a small village on the outskirts of Sheffield and were now reasonably happy after some bad news at the early part of the previous year. Bev had been to hospital for tests relating to stomach pains she’d been having. The doctors had sorted out the problem but in the process discovered it would be unlikely that she would ever have children. She told me all of this quite matter-of-factly, I suppose because she’d known so long that it had ceased to upset her. I just took it as yet further evidence of how strange life becomes the older we got.
‘You should come up and stay with us before you go to Australia,’ said Bev, as we wound up the call. ‘I’m not just saying that. I really mean it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and then we swapped addresses and promised to keep in touch.
thirty-nine
Katrina Smith
(Then: the girl most likely to end up working for a glossy women’s magazine. Now: lifestyle editor of the Staffordshire Evening Herald.)
At school Katrina was the sort of girl who was never without a boyfriend. At various points early on in her dating career she had been involved with me (a week and a half when we were fifteen), Gershwin (two and a bit months when we were fourteen), Pete (one Thunderbird-fuelled night of snogging at Katie Lloyd’s sixteenth birthday party), and Elliot (a month and a half just before our mock exams). She was pretty in an attention-grabbing sort of way but insecure – hence her addiction to relationships.
Interestingly I remember once discussing with the boys how curious it was that, in all the time we’d known her, Katrina had never been dumped by a bloke. At first we thought it was because she was lucky but as Elliot (whom she’d dumped to go out with Adam Warner) pointed out – rather astutely, I thought, for a sixteen-year-old boy – the real reason she never got dumped was that she always made the careful precaution of only ever going out with boys who were that tiny bit less attractive than any male should have been in her natural field of vision. As soon as he’d said it we knew it made sense. Katrina’s tactics were perfect. If she only chose men who were grateful to have such a fantastic-looking girlfriend, they’d never take her for granted and would always worship her like a princess. This isn’t to say that Katrina was a scheming bitch, she wasn’t – she was smart, funny and a good friend. It was only when you were her boyfriend that the claws came out.
On the Tuesday following my chat with Bev, I decided that Katrina would be the next of my old friends I’d try to get hold of. Although she was kind of an ex-girlfriend she had actually been more Ginny’s friend than mine, so it wasn’t any wonder that we’d lost contact. The last time I’d spoken to her was a year after Gershwin’s wedding, when a few of us had met up for Elliot’s house-warming and to celebrate him getting a new job. Then she’d told me she was temporarily shacked up with her latest boyfriend, Greg, in East London, while she looked for a flat of her own. I rooted around in my bedroom and managed to find an old address book with Greg’s number in it. Three phone calls later I traced Katrina via her East London ex-boyfriend, to another ex-boyfriend in Leeds, to a more recent ex-boyfriend in Stoke, who explained that she’d moved out a while ago but was still living in the area and gave me her number.
‘Hello?’
‘Er, hi . . . Can I speak to Katrina Smith?’
There was a long pause. ‘Who’s this?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ I said, teasing her. ‘That would take all the fun out of guessing.’
‘Is it Dave?’
‘No.’
‘Paul?’
‘Wrong again.’
She paused. ‘It’s not Greg, is it?’
‘Not even warm,’ I replied. ‘Okay, I’ll give you a clue. I once had the misfortune to see your mother naked—’
‘Matt Beckford!’ she shrieked.
I knew that story would jog her memory. We were eighteen and it was three o’clock in the morning. I’d lost my house keys and was too scared to wake up my folks by ringing the front-door bell. Katrina said I could crash on her mum and dad’s sofa but didn’t bother informing her parents. First thing next morning I got up to go to the loo and was met by Katrina’s mum sans clothing on her journey to the bathroom for her morning shower. I screamed. She screamed. It was hideously embarrassing for all concerned.
‘I can’t believe it!’ Katrina shrieked again. ‘I thought you were one of my old ex-boyfriends for a second.’
‘Ex-boyfriend? Which one?’
‘Any of them. You were lucky. I was only indulging your guessing games long enough to find my attack alarm in my handbag so I could blast it down the phone!’
Though my call covered the ins and outs of both our lives, it was Katrina’s ins and outs that were by far the more interesting of the two. She told me she was working on the Staffordshire Evening Herald and I asked her what the lifestyle editor’s job entailed. She said, ‘Cheesy fashion, cheesy restaurants, cheesy diet advice and anything else the mighty cheeses of the puff PR industry can churn out. Everything the modern woman doesn’t need to know.’
‘I take it you don’t like it?’ I asked.
‘Hate it. Absolutely hate it,’ she said, laughing. ‘By the time I was thirty I was supposed to be working for Vogue. Not just working for them either, I was supposed to be the editor.’
‘Is it too late, then?’ I asked, displaying my ignorance of the world of fashion magazines.
‘Only by about ten years,’ said Katrina. ‘You know, my big mistake was going to university. I should’vebeen one of those fantastically talented teenage journalists – a wunderkind. At nineteen I could’ve had my big break and by now it would be “Hello, Ms Katrina Vogue.”’ She paused, b
riefly, before continuing what was clearly one of her favourite rants. ‘I’ve got this theory that university impedes your development. I didn’t learn anything at Leeds that would’ve prepared me for the role I was destined for as editor of Vogue. That’s three years wasted. Three years! If I hadn’t spent all that time fannying around in lecture halls I’d be twenty-seven now instead of thirty! Maybe then there’d still be a chance.’
‘Does that mean I’d be twenty-six?’
‘You’re not thirty yet?’
‘March the thirty-first. You can send me a card.’
‘Never mind the card, Matt. Worry about the days you’ve got left in your twenties and savour them because, believe me, it’s all downhill from here.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Bet you didn’t expect me to be this mad, did you?’
‘Not really,’ I replied, ‘but it’s comforting not to be the only one.’
The conversation after that became slightly more sedate. I told her about the world of software design, my life in New York and splitting up with Elaine, and in return I got all her details. When I’d spoken to her at Gershwin’s wedding she’d been doing bits of freelance work for magazines, had actually written a few pieces for Cosmopolitan and The Face, but with a huge rent bill to pay and the sheer cost of living in London, she had applied for a junior reporter’s job on the South Staffordshire Chronicle. It was only meant to be a temporary measure – six months tops – just to get her out of debt, but a year later she was still there and couldn’t face the thought of going back to London to start all over again. So she stayed where she was and eventually was head-hunted by the Staffordshire Evening Herald, for half decent but far from fabulous money.
On the love front she was a little more coy. Reading between the lines, it appeared that she had finally allowed herself to fall in love with someone as attractive, if not more so, as herself. He was called Stephen and she hadn’t fallen in love so much as crashed uncontrollably. Everything had been fine for the eighteen months they were together until one day he had told her that he wasn’t ready to have a serious relationship. I was just about to make some sympathetic noises when she added, ‘This is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’ She finished off by telling me that she’d been single for a year and that, career prospects apart, it had been the best year of her life. I was so surprised by that that I just said, ‘Cool.’ Then I gave her my mum and dad’s telephone number and said I’d see her soon.
forty
Pete Sweeney
(Then, the boy most likely to fill up all available brain space with Star Wars trivia. Now, proprietor of Comic Dreams and Movie Memorabilia, Manchester.)
Of all of the friends I was getting in touch with, Pete was the one I wanted to see most. He had always been one of the most laid-back people you could imagine meeting. My favourite Pete story, perhaps the one that best sums him up, happened when we were sixteen, and at the top of the King’s Heath Comprehensive food chain. Throughout our entire school careers we’d been waiting for the day when it would snow and we’d have our chance to be kings of the playground in the Great Snowball Fight. (It was an old school tradition: on the first day it snowed the older boys – it was always the boys – took it upon themselves to terrorise the lower school with snowballs.) When it snowed, the responsibility of terrorising sent us wild and, I’m afraid, we became totally power-crazed. Led by Pete, we sent wave after wave of raiding parties to the lower-school playground. It was fantastic: hundreds of kids ran screaming for cover, and we buried anyone we caught under a foot of snow. It was then that the event occurred after which that day became known as White Wednesday. Furious that hordes of lower-school kids were running for cover across the hallowed patch of grass outside the staffroom window, our headmaster, Mr Charles, came outside to reprimand the entire playground. Just as he was coming to the end of his big speech about how the upper school should be setting a better example, Pete threw a Terminator – a hand-crafted pure ice snowball he’d been sculpting for over twenty minutes – which smacked Mr Charles right on the back of his head. It was a classic moment, the Kennedy assassination set in snow. The playground population, some six hundred kids, inhaled sharply with shock. Mr Charles went purple with rage and threatened to put everyone in detention unless the culprit came forward.
Everyone expected Pete to take his punishment like a man, but he hid like the rest of us – an action which I truly admired. A true coward would have caved in to peer-group pressure but Pete didn’t, although he knew that the punishment meted out by the teachers would be nothing compared to those from his fellow students. I remember asking him after school, as we were being chased by a mob seeking vengeance for their lost leisure time, why he’d thrown the snowball at Mr Charles in the first place. Echoing the words of Sir Edmund Hillary after he had climbed Everest, Pete replied simply, ‘Because he was there.’
I got hold of Pete via his sister. Although he was slightly dumbfounded to hear from me after all this time we spoke on the phone for ages. The rumours about him getting married were true and he had a little boy, Joe, who was now three. What I didn’t know was that he and his wife Amy had split up after eighteen months and divorced two years later. On a lighter note, Pete had however managed to fulfil at least one of his ambitions. As a kid he’d been obsessed with comics and sci-fi films and now, at the age of thirty, he was the proud owner of his own shop: Comic Dreams and Movie Memorabilia, in Chorlton, Manchester and he insisted that I came up and visited him.
‘Beckford!’ yelled Pete, when I entered the shop.
‘Sweeney!’ I yelled back, in typically blokey fashion, and headed straight for him at the cash desk.
‘You fat old loser!’ he said, coming out from behind the till to meet me. We shook hands enthusiastically.
‘You . . .’ I looked him up and down, trying to find a suitable insult, but I couldn’t find one. He had lost even more of his hair than Gershwin had – but even I considered that a joke too far. Otherwise he looked in good shape. In the end I had to resort to, ‘You sixties reject!’ At the age of fifteen Pete had decided that he was going to become a Mod, and here we were, fifteen years later, and he still dressed in exactly the same style: Levi’s denim jacket, black polo neck, beige Levi’s white tab cords and, of course, his beloved desert boots.
‘You must be on to your hundredth pair of those,’ I said, pointing at his footwear.
‘More like two hundredth.’ He grinned widely. ‘Journey up all right?’ he asked, returning to the till to serve a customer.
‘Uneventful, really,’ I replied. ‘Never mind all that, though, how are you?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Could be worse. Still, the store looks great.’
I looked around it for the first time. I was surrounded by multiple rows of science fiction and fantasy magazines, comics, books, posters, videos and action figures.
‘This is all yours?’
He nodded enthusiastically. ‘I’ll show you the new Star Wars stuff, man. I nearly cried when it came in last week.’ He noticed a few more customers lingering at the desk. ‘Hang on a sec.’ He peered over one of the racks of comics and a young guy with a goatee beard and a baseball cap suddenly appeared from the other side. ‘Billy,’ said Pete, ‘this is my mate, Matt Beckford.’ Billy nodded sullenly. ‘Matt and I have known each other for . . .’ He added it up ‘ . . . seventeen years. Precisely the same amount of time you’ve been alive. We’re off up to the flat for a fag and a coffee. Mind the shop and don’t be cheeky.’
Billy shuffled behind the till. I followed Pete through a door that had a piece of A4 paper stuck to it with the words ‘Keep out – that means YOU!’ scrawled on it in marker pen, and up some stairs to his flat.
‘Welcome to my abode,’ he said.
When Pete said that he was divorced and lived in a flat over his own shop I must admit I’d imagined the worst but what I saw in front of me was bloke heaven. There might not have been the eighties-style black leather and chrome everywhere the way I’d a
lways imagined the perfect bachelor pad to contain, but there was some highly collectable sixties furniture, a state-of-the-art widescreen TV and a hi-fi separates system with speakers the size of small children. Aside from those items, the flat was largely filled with stuff from the shop – film and comic posters, a host of action figures (everything from Star Wars to James Bond), and his record, CD and video collection, which spanned two walls making the living room look more like a library.
‘So,’ I said, as Pete brought in some coffee, ‘you’ve got a lot of videos.’
‘It’s nice to have them out,’ said Pete, looking over at his collection contentedly. ‘The whole lot was in the loft when Amy and I were together.’ He gestured to a huge sofa by the window. ‘Have a seat, mate.’
‘Yeah, in a second. I just want to check out your videos. I don’t think I’ve ever seen half of these.’
This was the greatest compliment I could have paid him, or for that matter any of my male friends: sometimes recognition by our peers of a seemingly pointless achievement is all we have to live for. I scanned the titles, which read like an A–Z of the last fifty years of TV sci-fi history. He had entire series of The Prisoner, Star Trek, Babylon Five, Star Trek – The Next Generation and Blake’s Seven, but outnumbering them all was his Dr Who collection. ‘I’ve got every single episode ever,’ he said, as I lingered by an episode entitled ‘Dr Who and the Cybermen’. ‘Took me a long time but it was worth it.’
‘Every single episode?’
‘Well . . . nearly. There’s a couple missing – but the BBC in their wisdom wiped the tapes. I couldn’t stand having gaps, though, so I made boxes for them.’
‘You made boxes for videotapes of programmes that don’t exist?’
He looked down sheepishly. ‘Don’t ask me why. It made me feel better.’
When I left Pete’s six hours and several bottles of Budweiser later, I felt good about life, and a whole lot better about turning thirty. Katrina, Bev and Pete might have had their ups and downs but they were okay. Granted, life had been a little rough on Pete, with his divorce, but he seemed happy enough now. With Ginny and Gershwin we were all okay. I don’t know why but I convinced myself that if my oldest friends were okay I’d be okay too – I could handle whatever life threw at me. At least, that’s what I thought then. What I didn’t know, as I made my way back from Manchester to Birmingham on the train, was that our friend Elliot had died.