“Suzie, it’s half past nine in the morning. Would you please relate to me the consequences of your tête-à-falsidical-tête with Mick Watson? What the gallimaufry is going to occur?”
“We are going to take a look at the most successful of Mick’s ventures. We are going to say ‘Yes, Mick’ whenever the fancy takes us and ‘No, Mick’ in equal measure. Then, when the moment is right, we are going to offer to bring The Castle back to life and take a commission as well as a salary. Things are lost for want of asking, and this one is not going to slip through my fingers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In for a penny...”
I was sixteen in nineteen-sixty, and so was Suzie. We had been together, going out, as we called it, though it meant that we stayed in, for about a year. We were already ‘going steady’ and may have been precocious in our socially-declared status. In hindsight, we were already acting as if we were married, in that we spent almost all evenings together in her parents’ house, greeted visitors together, related to others as a couple and explored our dioecism as often as we possibly could, an activity we called sleeping together, when that was exactly the opposite of what we did. The opportunity never arose during the hours of darkness.
So, if the association cemented prematurely, then this precocious presumption was only continued by an early onset of cracks that soon became fissures. While our friends were huddled together against hoary frost in the bus shelter, discussing who might be dating whom, whether the Mecca was worth the entrance money, or whether the latest song by the Elderlys or Tony Oldman was the best thing since Elvis Presley, Suzie and I sat, watched Inspector Maigret and cutting edge Coronation Street on television while we argued. As our friends ventured an arm across a potential girlfriend’s shoulder, or tolerated for just a split second some nervous hand under-cupping an under-wired, padded breast, we were romping in Suzie’s bedroom while her parents worked late at the shop, and then slagging one another off afterwards for being distant, only being interested in the proverbial, never wanting to go out, or who had bought the last bar of chocolate. We used to take it in turn to adopt each position, pro or con. We were, in other words, playing at being married. That’s when the phone started to ring in the evenings.
At first, Suzie would put it straight down. I knew from the sheepish quiet that suddenly descended that she was saying she would ring back later. After a couple of weeks, however, she would stay on and chat, knowing that I was listening. She said things that were calculated to hurt me, about how she needed more excitement in her life, and how she should make more time to see other people. “Why?” I asked myself in silence. She said it was a girlfriend from school, but I realised early on that it was Mick Watson on the other end.
He was revelling in local stardom at the time because he had just bought himself a new motorbike. I say ‘new’ because that’s the generic term we applied to all change in Kiddington. It was unfamiliar, fleetingly worthy of pause or comment, so it was new. The bike in question was several years old and already well clapped out, a Matchless G3/LS three-fifty, overhead cam with teledraulic suspension. He had bought it with what he had saved from his first year and a half as an apprentice down the pit. Its silencer was shot and it revved so slowly that it sounded like a Gattling gun in slow motion. I remember him riding past a ginnel through a back-to-back terrace on the way from school to the bus stop in Bromaton market. Invisible, but distinctly audible to the left, he sounded like a tank approaching. After what seemed like an age of anticipation via crescendo, he finally burst into a full flurry of ear-piercing roar as he passed in front of the gap between the houses at an andante twenty miles an hour. He had his Matchless and the status it endowed, but the real thing he needed was a piece of tail to seat on the pillion, public evidence of the potency of his motorised pulling power.
I was a bit like that myself, in that I had been used to giving Suzie an adrenaline-pumping thrill in my clapped out car. I had an old Morris in the field that used to be my granddad’s allotment. It wasn’t a Bullnose original, being nineteen thirties vintage, but Bullnose is what I called it. I used to spend all of my free time - all the time apart from either Suzie or work - doing it up with bits and pieces I foraged from the scrappy on the way to Gagstone. I never got it to full working order, however, and of course I was too young to take it onto the road, but occasionally I could get up the revs and slide it around the field.
But Mick’s machine was calculated to impress the skirt. It was a throbbing member between his legs. And the initial target of his calculated ploy was Suzie Mullins, the petite, slight, beautiful ball of potential status that lived in a big house half way to Punslet. And that’s why the phone started to ring.
She made no secret of the fact that she was flattered by his interest. And she seemed both keen and able to flaunt that interest publicly, because she knew she could fall back on me if it went wrong. He was older than me, bigger and, because he was already drawing a full weekly packet, richer. And now he had a motorbike. And he dressed in leathers. And he went dancing at weekends, even paying a twelve-year-old lad sixpence to hold a place for him at the front of the queue outside the Mecca so he could spend more time at home cementing his Elvis quiff into exactly the right shape. He always was generous when he thought he could get what he wanted and, I knew from personal experience, he could turn ruthless if his initial tactic failed.
It took about a month, running up to Christmas, for Mick Watson to explore, suggest, instigate and then effect his intended change in Suzie’s life, a change that would wrest her from my spheres towards his own. And then it took him less than ten weeks to almost kill her.
The night we finished was the end of a world. “Donald Cottee,” Suzie said - she only ever used my full name when she wanted to hurt me - “I want more out of life than I can get with you. Life is what you make of it, and I want something different.” It’s amazing how definitive life can be when you are both pushing seventeen.
I remember thinking at the time that she might have rehearsed the line, based on something we had heard in a film, but I couldn’t place it. All I could muster through the growing shock were two words. “Such as?”
“Do you want an argument or an answer?” she answered, almost like an automaton.
“We’ve practised the first one...” I remember thinking at the time I shouldn’t have picked a fight, but it would have made no difference.
“We’ve been together for a year and I’m bored,” she said, turning away and heading for the back door to show me out. “I’m finishing with you,” she announced to the winter night as she invited and facilitated my exit.
Her mother overheard and came to the door at Suzie’s side as I stepped down onto the driveway and slipped on the frost. She looked upset. She had her arm around Suzie and their hips touched. I think she liked having me around more than Suzie did. “See you at the weekend, Donald,” she said, prompting Suzie to attempt a shoulder-shrugging, impatient disengagement. I can still feel how disbelief wove its way into those mundane words.
I was usually effusive when talking to Mrs Mullins. Most of the time, I couldn’t take my eyes off her chest. She was taller than me and its generous protrusion rested just below the level of my chin. But that evening I couldn’t speak. I tried, but the words stuck in my throat and wouldn’t come out. She knew what was going on and she hated Mick Watson. He was at least a caste below what she had in mind for her daughter.
By the end of the week I had almost become used to the sight of Suzie riding past our house, riding past the school, riding past the playing field where we played touch and pass, announcing via the vast throb of Mick’s member that she was now riding his pillion. She had already adopted the full role, bought a complete set of leathers and a new bone dome with the letter M prominently winged on the top. She had adopted his identity as well as his peninsularity.
But it was the way she sat that upset me. She wasn’t just astride the bike, sh
e was admitting it. She pressed hard up against Mick’s back, her arms clasped at his front and her head inclined against the middle of his back. She must have been utterly captivated, because all I could ever smell anywhere near his leathers was engine oil.
I went to a Christmas party that year. I was so unused to being alone, I had forgotten how to socialise and I sat on the sofa in the living room not speaking. The rest of the three-seater was occupied by a necking couple, who themselves weren’t a fount of conversation. They were so reclined they were almost lying across me as they tried to eat one another. And then Suzie and Mick arrived in their leathers. I will never forget the smile that Suzie welded onto her mouth the moment she saw me. It stayed consciously and calculatedly in place, like the teeth adverts offered by the women on Come Dancing, women who always seemed to face the camera, always played to their assumed audience.
Mick and Suzie chose to dance that night, right in front of where I sat, their leathers creaking above the music. Mick had a bottle of pale ale in one hand and a fag in the other, but still the fakir managed to stroke Suzie’s hair as I looked on. As ever, she was pure poise, the Babycham glass in her left hand never once threatening to spill its fizz onto the shag pile. I tried to offer dignity in rejection, but everyone who passed through the room made a nudging but obvious comment about my continued obsession with the girl that now publicly taunted me.
New Year came and went. There was another party, but the new lovers weren’t invited to that one, because the host had once been beaten up by Mick and the Stokes lads and his parents were strict about his having no more to do with either family. I spoke to a couple of Suzie’s school friends who told me that Suzie and Mick were now hanging around with a group of bikers. Mick’s brother, Geoff, was now old enough to ride and he had already put his L-plates onto a BSA Beezer that Mick had helped to buy. I remember the girls telling me they had all started to go round as a gang, with eight or ten bikes now riding together.
Winter was exceptionally cold that year. There was snow, ice, rain and frost for most of December, right through January, and into February. Almost everything was closed in January, and there were days when the buses didn’t run. Then February came and went and gradually things warmed up. The bikes were out again in force.
It was late in the month that there was a sudden, hard frost. At four o’clock that afternoon I took the bus home from Bromaton and, by the time I reached the bus stop opposite Kiddington Working Men’s Club, only twenty minutes later, the frost was already sparkling thick on the pavements. It was a Friday night, a pay day and the bikers, grounded for so long in the previous month, would definitely be out on the road. I half expected them to be already out and about, parading their throbbing leathers through the village. But it stayed quiet for another hour.
Oakenshaw is not a steep hill; its descent is quite long and steady, meaning that even a BSA Beezer or a clapped out Matchless can get up a good head of speed on the way down. The problem, everyone knew, was a deceptively difficult left hand bend at the bottom where the road has a suggestion of adverse camber. And when it is covered with black ice...
Geoff Watson was killed instantly, so they said. Only he knew. He lost control at the start of the bend and ran head on into a van coming the other way. His body finished up in the middle of the road a good forty yards beyond the impact. He had been showing off his superior speed. Mick’s older but more powerful bike was slower to respond and Geoff had got ahead of his brother on the down slope, a lead that Mick had narrowed to thirty yards by the bottom.
So, following, and with Suzie riding blind behind him, hunched up at his back, he saw his brother skid, correct, wobble to the wrong side of the road and immediately die as the looming threat of oncoming headlights suddenly materialised. Mick, of course, also lost control, but in his case it was more of a reaction to what he saw than a result of excess speed or error. But the bike slid away, leaving Mick and Suzie bouncing across the road surface.
Mick instinctively gave a push to the bike, he told the police later, and rolled along the road. He broke his arm, but not badly. Suzie’s flight was tangential, coming off the corner and into the ditch where her horizontal progress was halted by the hedgerow. Contact with the ground ripped her leathers, their thin softness always more for looks than protection, and contact with a hawthorn trunk donated an open compound fracture of her upper left arm. Now in those days, I always associated break with separation and fracture with cracking, so when I was told the news by an hysterical neighbour of the Watsons a couple of hours later, I initially thought that Suzie’s injuries might be minor. But when I spoke the next day to the ambulance lads who brought her in, I began to understand how serious it was. When they described a deep wound that had almost severed her left arm with bone shards sticking through what was left, I cried.
She was in hospital for six weeks. She had two operations to mend and pin the bone and then they built a weighted scaffold on which she had to rest her arm twenty-four hours a day, never moving her body, save for a bed wash from the nurses.
She missed Geoff’s funeral, but I bought a card for her and she sent it via me rather than her mother, assuming correctly that she would have delivered it to the bin. Mrs Mullins didn’t go, but I was at the service, as was Mick, of course, his arm still in an enormous and multiple-autographed plaster cast. He got angry with the vicar and had an argument at the end because the cinereous sackbut[12] had used his sermon about Geoff’s life to criticise parents who let their children do irresponsible things like buy motorbikes and ride them recklessly.
I visited Suzie every day she spent in hospital. I was doing my apprenticeship as an electrician in a company by the canal in Bromaton, a place that supplied the mining industry’s machinery. I used to finish at half past four, so I could walk into town and then up the hill to the hospital and be there ready for visiting to start. I never left until the end at eight o’clock. Mr and Mrs Mullins came after closing time and gave me a lift home every day. Yes, I was selfish. It was my way of moving back into a space I was sure they would demand vacated. It was during those weeks, however, that I began to feel completely at ease with them, perhaps more at ease than I did with my own parents.
Suzie, of course, could see what I was up to, and I got the impression from just a couple of days after the accident that she was willing to play along. She was convinced she would be disfigured for life, but the doctors, nurses, everyone told her that the cuts on her face would heal without scars, which they duly did. What did not heal was Suzie’s image of herself as a desirable, perfect proto-woman. She knew that the whole of her upper left arm would be a smear of shining red scar, a blemish she would thus have to hide from the world.
Thus her self-image was to remain disfigured for ever and there began in that hospital ward a lifetime’s devotion to coping with her changed status. She was no longer the perfect product, and re-admitting me into the equation was probably an expression of her resignation to salvage the best out of disaster.
It was in the Mullins’s car on the way home one night about a week after the accident that I realised that the ground rules had changed. I asked Mrs Mullins if she was going to Geoff’s funeral, but she didn’t answer. What she did say after a deeply thoughtful pause, words that set my pulse racing, was, “We’ll be going abroad again this year, Donald. Will you come with us?”
12 Greying trombone - ed
Nine
Phil Matthews picked us up... - Don and Suzie visit Paradise in a Porsche. They find their eyes suddenly opened.
Phil Matthews picked us up just after one. He drove unnoticed right up alongside our van, despite the fact that Suzie had spent most of the morning squinting under the half curtains along the parked rows of mobile homes, anticipating the arrival of a vehicle she couldn’t possibly recognise because she had never seen it before.
When it eventually and silently stalked our pitch, I was in the
toilet, while Suzie was peeling an orange and had momentarily dedicated both gaze and concentration to fruit. Both acts seemed to fill Rosie, our Sundance, with noise when suddenly a claxon sounded as loud as any ocean-going liner pulling alongside. It was multi-toned, deep and sustained, so loud it rattled the side of the van.
Suzie opened the door and, by the time I appeared, still readjusting my trousers, to the rear, all I heard was Phil’s answer to Suzie’s unknown question. “It belongs to the boss. He told me to pick you up and take you to Paradise.”
“Just travelling in that will do,” said Suzie, wide-eyed, almost slavering at the prospect. It was black, very big and black, nay enormous and black, with tinted widows and an eye-dazzle of gleaming chrome extras. I’d been looking at it for the best part of a minute, gob-smacked before I realised that it was still ticking over, silently. We were surely worshipping it, this Porsche Cayenne Turbo, four-wheel drive, nought to sixty in under five seconds, five litres under the hood, a hundred and seventy miles an hour at top whack, a force of nature rather than precision engineering, says its maker, fifteen miles to the gallon, says its owner, perfect for running the kids to Eton. The thick-set shaved head of Phil Matthews poked out of the driver’s window as he said, “Are you ready? If not, I’ll come back in half an hour.”
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 8