by David Lines
We sat outside on the bench and I sipped my lime and soda (very refreshing) and we watched the starlings as they settled on the telegraph wires. The sun threatened to come out and for a moment, just a moment, I forgot about revision and retakes and choices and decisions and it was just … like the way being on holiday should feel. Two cyclists came into view. Distant dots on the horizon, they reminded me of the entrance which Omar Sharif made on his horse in Lawrence Of Arabia. I pointed it out to Rik and he said he hadn’t seen it because he didn’t like Westerns.
They were laden with kit and as they pulled up in front of us we heard American accents. Those guys were fun. Danny and Jon introduced themselves – they had recently finished a spell in the military and were in England as part of their European cycling holiday which would take them through Spain, France and Italy, as well as Scotland, as they both had ancestors who were married to Robert the Bruce’s cleaning lady, or something like that. We got talking about their amazing bikes which were built out of the same stuff they made the space shuttle from and could withstand temperatures so great they could cycle over the surface of the sun if they wanted to. They were about ten years older than us. I liked them. They were on their way to Whitby, because Danny’s great-great-great-grandmother chopped down some of the trees which they built the bow of The Mayflower with, or so he’d been told. Jon asked me why I’d got such a huge ghetto blaster strapped to my bike, when a Walkman would be better. I told him I’d no idea what he was on about and he got his out – it was so tiny. He strapped it to my shorts, put the little headphones on and pressed play – it was unbearable. It was a band called The Doors and the singer sounded like he didn’t mean a word he was singing. When I asked Jon if Hinge and Bracket supported them he just stared back at me from behind these blue, plastic cycling goggles. I’d never seen anything so ridiculous in my life – he looked like a spaceman.
We cycled on together, the four of us, en route to Whitby. When we arrived, we checked in and Danny made us a drink which NASA sent into space with the shuttle crews, you rehydrated it and it bubbled and fizzed and looked amazingly brightly orange and generally, we told them, tasted like tramp’s piss. Kia-Ora was a hundred times better.
We decided on an early tea at a pub up the road, and Danny went to the bar because next to them, we were looking much younger. We all had beer, because that’s what Danny wanted and he had a cheese ploughman’s because I told him I’d had one and he liked the name.
We’d finished eating, and I was talking about The Jam. They’d never heard of them, and I was trying to explain what they were, how they sounded, when in walked a girl. I can see her now like it was yesterday. She walked up to the bar, ordered half a lager and lime in a broad, New York accent and sat down on a stool. She’d got masses of corkscrew hair that was a rich, reddish blonde and she wore a floaty sarong which revealed long, freckly legs as she crossed and uncrossed them on her stool. Her scoopy-necked t-shirt had a packet of fags tucked under her sleeve and she wore bits of coloured braid tied around her wrists and pretty ankles. She looked arty, and she reminded me of Kate. I made a mental note to send her a postcard the next day. Danny sidled over, said hello and asked her if she’d like to join her fellow Americans for a drink. She did. Her name was Maria, she was an artist and as soon as she sat down the dynamic between us four new friends changed in the bat of just one eyelid.
Her bright, green eyes and wide, white smile had us eating out of the palm of her delicate hand in seconds. Her chest rose and fell tantalisingly as she talked, and as she spoke, she’d touch each of us in turn on the arm. Maria was very sophisticated, older than me and Rik, but younger than Danny and Jon. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She told us that she was staying in a hotel in Whitby because she was here for inspiration to paint coastal scenes for her next exhibition. Apparently, her great-great-uncle used to stop off here and buy his kippers whilst sailing twice around the world on a bread board, or something. That was the first time I saw the presence of a single woman come between friends. I remember being jealous of the power which she held, the power to make people like her.
After half an hour me and Rik were feeling decidedly left out of things, so we got out of there and left the three of them to it. The atmosphere had turned nastily competitive between the four of us and I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t the competition, it was the feeling I got that it would end in tears. I made some excuse about having to phone home and Rik came with me. We went and sat in the pub next door, played some pool and stuck some Jam on the jukebox. I didn’t feel bad about leaving, it was cool just being alone with Rik again.
Next morning, at breakfast, we saw Danny and Jon. They were laughing to themselves and looking very pleased and when I asked them if they’d had a good night they said that they most certainly did and winked at each other.
That night was the last night of our trip. We were going to be staying in the ancient, walled City of York. We swapped addresses with Danny and Jon and promised to keep in touch. Jon said that they might go to York because his cousin’s wife’s great-great-grandfather once baked Richard III some scones there, and he accidentally burnt them and at the moment Richard bit into one, someone shot him in the eye with an arrow and he turned him into a pillar of salt, or something like that.
The sunshine was not nearly so bright that day, and the breeze which came with the gathering clouds was a bitter one. We cycled straight into the centre of York and got to a baker’s where we bought sausage rolls, sarnies, vanilla slices and refreshing drinks. We took them down to the river, the mighty River Ouse which cleaves its way through the heart of the place, and sat next to it on the steps. There were hundreds of tourists out on the water, and we watched a Viking longboat cruise past with a full crew of re-enactment types aboard, getting ready for some good old rape and pillage.
We fed the ducks and talked about what we were going to do when we’d got through sixth form. Rik talked about a life in brewing – or in banking which his dad could arrange. I told him that I wanted to be a writer and he almost choked on his Um Bongo. This was a moment not without intimacy, drenched in years of bristling friendship, and I did not want it to end. But that moment did feel like the beginning of the end of something. Overhead, the sky blackened a little and with it came goose pimples up and down my spine and my neck and my thin, willowy arms.
We resolved to make it a last night to remember, and agreed on trying to get into a club once the pubs shut. I bought a postcard for Kate, told her I’d had a great little holiday, went to a mind-blowing Jam gig and that I couldn’t wait to see her when I got home. I stuck a first class stamp on it and slipped it into a postbox. It was freshly painted, and I got a red splodge on my fingernail. It looked pretty so I let it dry. It was like a receipt for the card for Kate.
We had tea, chicken supreme that was far from supreme, and then we did our hair, got changed and then went out for our final drinking session of our short break. We walked through the funny little snick-leways and ginnels, up and down the cobbled Shambles and then we found a funky-looking wine bar hidden away, called Oscar’s. It had a tiled terrace, and we sat outside on it in our shades, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and trying to look cool.
We talked about our trip and agreed it’d been brilliant. We said that at some point in the future we’d go on a scootering holiday – to another country. We talked about Maria, the American artist, and wondered whether or not American girls did it differently to English girls. As neither of us had actually done it then, we spoke with some authority, obviously, and concluded that they must do. Especially Californians. Because they’re all blonde.
We ended up in a club called the Underground. It said on the sign outside that it used to be an ancient debtor’s gaol, and the steps down to it were steep, wet and winding. The walls were dark and it was deliciously seedy. Lots of students in there, as well as a good smattering of slightly older people, plenty in their twenties who looked like they went out to work.
I was struc
k by the number of single girls, out for the night in groups. It was a good place, apart from the DJ, who played far too much Duran and Spandau for my liking. I got a rum and Coke and walked up to the booth and asked him for some Jam. He said no problem and then only went and played vile Haircut One Hundred’s ‘Love Plus One’. I loathed Haircut One Hundred.
I still do, come to think of it.
I spent the next half-hour plucking up courage to go over and talk to an attractive pair of girls in their ra-ra skirts. They looked like they were in their early twenties. One of them was the spitting image of Kim Wilde. I asked if I could buy her a drink and she only went and said yes. You could have knocked me down with her feather boa.
We got talking, and it turned out that her and her mate Alison were both recently officially single and out for the night to celebrate their divorces which had just come through. I told her again that she looked like Kim Wilde and she told me that everyone said that. She was wearing so much lip gloss I could see my reflection in her lips. Kim’s real name was Trace, and she said that her two children now lived in Florida with her ex-husband. She told me that she missed them so much, thought of them every day. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘they’re the kids in America, then.’ Suddenly she got something in her eye and ran off to the loo. I was kicking myself. Why did I try to be clever when I was clearly an idiot? I could have been well in there …
We had a few more drinks and then the DJ played ‘Malice’ for me. There was no sign of Kim/Trace and we got up and had a dance, which was basically me and Rik leaping around and pretending to play guitar like Paul, surrounded by loads of girls dancing around their handbags. At exactly the right moment I executed a perfect scissor-kick just after the bass break, but sadly ruined it by colliding with a pretty Claire Grogan-type dancing next to me. Her and the contents of her handbag spilled out over the floor and Rik and I decided to call it a night and sloped off in search of a kebab.
I was up half that night with violent food poisoning. The next morning I was excused duties due to illness, and it was down to Rik to clean the toilets. I didn’t envy him. Not for one moment did I envy him. I could actually hear him weeping in there.
Rik didn’t speak to me for the rest of that morning. We got our kit together without saying a word, we packed with pursed lips and set off for home in silence. It was an ill wind which blew us back to Garforth and that wasn’t just down to the previous night’s lamb and pitta bread combo. We hardly even spoke cycling back, and after an hour the rain clouds came together to black out what little light was left in the sad and seething sky. Overhead, the gods rumbled their disdain, and in the far distance lightning forks flicked through the charcoal sky to make the hairs on my neck stand up and twitch and twist like one thousand volts ran through each and every one. The air was heavy with resentment. It was going to take a storm of biblical proportions to clear the air that sad and sorry day.
All the way home we were buzzed by cars and thunking great juggernauts, motorcycles and even a small posse of parka’d-up scooterists buzzed us on the Tadcaster slip road. I could feel a migraine building behind my right eye and my neck had begun to grow numb. Breathing had become difficult. When we were almost home, Rik peeled off as he wanted to call in and have a cup of tea for ten minutes with his gran who lived around the corner. He’d promised his parents he would, he said.
I waved goodbye and carried on on my own. I wasn’t feeling at all good, now. My tongue felt too big for my mouth and my throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. I needed a drink. I stopped at a newsagent’s about a mile from home, slung the bike down and headed straight for the fridge.
I grabbed the first can I could, tore open the ring pull and as I glugged the drink down, my eyes fell onto the magazine rack. My heart turned black. I was in a dream, I had to be dreaming …
The drink went down like I was swallowing a fistful of hatpins and my skull felt like someone had brought down a shovel on the back of it. I had to steady myself against the news-stand. My eyes, my brain, my soul, they simply could not comprehend the headline that I was reading. The front page of the NME read: ‘Paul Weller Splits The Jam’. Blood gushed from my nostrils and both my legs gave way, as if viciously kicked from behind. Mist swirled in front of my eyes and as I went down, my head bounced back off the floor. My world, effectively, had drawn to a terrible, wretched close.
I came to in the storeroom of the shop with a bruise on my forehead the size of a football and the first thing that I saw was a mad hag wafting smelling salts under my nose. She was the spitting image of Fagin and had the devil’s breath to match. I can smell it today, just writing this.
I paid for that copy of the NME with coins stained red with my own wet blood. Sitting outside the shop on the wall, I tried to read the article. I read it and reread it yet still it made no sense to me. I’d just seen them! How could he do this to me? I couldn’t take in what the paper said, the words were just a jumbled mess in front of me. I was feeling sicker and sicker, I couldn’t have felt any more ill but I had to get home. Cycling wasn’t an option, I just leant on the bike and, slumped over the crossbar, I half pushed the bike home.
I half opened the back door to the house and collapsed through it onto the kitchen floor. Mum rushed up to me and scraped me into her arms. ‘My poor boy!’ I couldn’t speak. I was in and out of reality, spinning between consciousness and unconsciousness and through the blur of steaming saucepans Mum took my hand. ‘Here you are! Welcome home!’ I managed, just managed, to get my words out. ‘It’s The Jam – they’ve split up.’ And with that, I passed out again.
Looking back, I’m sure that the horrific news impacted on my illness. I had glandular fever, and it was a terrible, terrible case of it. I am convinced that my body went into shock at the break-up, even though I still didn’t believe it. There had to be a mistake, there had to be. My fever meant that I could not speak – if I could have done, I’d have phoned the NME to check that the story was straight. The Jam had been not just my band, but my way of life and as I lay in my festering bed for two long months, sucking on ice cubes, I could see no reason ever to leave it again.
One day, in the boiling heat of my fever when I was clearly delirious, I almost lost my life. As I tossed and writhed in my bed, images of The Jam at Bridlington, Paul staring down at me from my bedroom wall, the exam results slip, Dad’s face, Rik’s face, Kate’s face, swam in front of me, all laughing at me at once, like I was staring down some sickly kaleidoscope. It all became too much and I had to get out of the bed, out of the room, out of the house. I had no idea what I was doing, stumbling blindly about my room, thrashing out at the faces, covering my ears to drown out the taunting laughter. I crashed onto the landing and into Chris and Phil’s room yet still they pursued me. Air. I needed air. I flung open the big double window and stuck my head out of it and gulped down the freshness which stung my lungs and down came a mist, a thick, swirling fog inside my mind. I hated Paul Weller more than anyone, then. He could piss off in a bin liner for all that I cared that day. I felt cheated, The Jam were my suit of armour – they gave me strength and focus and now he’d done it, he’d gone and spoiled everything. He said that he wanted them to mean something, to finish with dignity and that was all very well and good but what about me? If he was going to end it, then so was I.
The cool breeze brought me to my senses. If the wind hadn’t picked up I doubt if I’d be telling this tale today. Maybe I’d been sleepwalking, maybe I meant to do it, I don’t know, but I suddenly found myself standing, naked, on the window ledge. The sweat dripped down my forehead, onto my nose and onto my prick and very carefully, very frightened, I climbed back inside the room. In the garden below, I saw the cat watching me whilst he licked his paws.
As the days went by the fever passed, and I found the strength to wash my hair again. I simply still could not get over what Paul had done. What the fuck was he going to do with the rest of his life? He was only twenty-four for Christ’s sake. If he hated being in The Jam that mu
ch, why not take a really long holiday and come back to it fresh? His dad must have been furious with him – after all, he’d put him out of a job as well as Bruce and Rick.
My dad tried to make things better for me. We were sitting in the garden, talking and smoking. It was my first cigarette since I’d got better and the first couple of drags on it sent me dizzy. ‘I know how upset you must be, lad. What with your band splitting up and having to do your exams again.’
‘Do you?’
‘I think so. I also think I’ve got something which might help. If you want.’
‘What, Dad?’
‘Two words: Frank Sinatra …’
Dear God. ‘What about the fat crook?’
‘He might just fill the gap for you, you know. He’s a very talented singer and I’ve always liked him. I thought if you gave him a real listen you would, too. He might not be so … much of a disruptive influence, he might help you revise for your resits.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take Frank on board.’
‘Good lad. Now, let’s go inside and watch Last Of The Summer Wine. It’s starting in a bit.’
‘All right, Dad. I’ll follow you in when I’ve finished this smoke.’
Give me strength, I thought.
I did follow Dad inside, but not to watch the codgers dicking around in the Dales. I walked up the stairs to my room and took a long hard look around it. I sat down in the middle of the bed and crossed my legs and I stared at the four walls and everywhere I looked, Paul’s face stared right back at me. I went down to the kitchen, got a black bag and then I took down every poster, every picture, every interview, every poem I ever wrote but never sent and I filled the bag till it was fit to burst.