Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  I cycled on, and after a mile of plantation the road passed through a small, scrappy copse, Murder Wood, and here I turned off, wobbled along a woodchip path, stashed my bike and, crouching low like a commando, followed another path down to the shore of Fallow Pond, a semi-industrial reservoir, fetid and stagnant, its surface silver-black like pewter and more likely to be broken by a lifeless human hand than the leaping of a trout. Last summer, as an end-of-school dare we’d watched as Harper’s older brother tried to swim through the viscous water, staggering out almost immediately, eyes red and weeping, skin as glossy as an otter and coated with a tar-like substance that no amount of soap could remove. Now, in the summer evening light, a single heron stood guard, shoulders hunched like a cartoon gangster, one leg embedded in the muck. I crouched on the bank in a swarm of gnats, listening out for human noise, then stood and opened my bag. As the first glass hit the water the heron sucked its leg from the swamp and flapped away. Another followed, and another. My aim was consistent, and I imagined a pyramid forming of flutes and tumblers and goblets and snifters, slowly blanketed by the black pulp of rotting wood and, below that, the skeletons of mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers. I imagined far-future archaeologists wondering at the find – so many identical glasses, how did they get here? – and failing to hypothesise a worried teenage boy standing alone with a stack of scratch cards tucked into his underwear.

  Four lager glasses remained. I’d give them as a gift. Harper was having mates round to the den and we were going to get absolutely slaughtered.

  Cinnamon

  Round the ring road, through the retail park to the north side, where the Harpers’ house stood in the centre of a plot of churned land, scattered with building materials and vehicles. I laid my bike on the forecourt in amongst the 4x4s, the quad bikes, the timber and bricks and Transit vans and Mrs Harper’s little Mazda run-around.

  ‘Oi-oi,’ said Martin, opening the door, beer in hand, ‘the master criminal.’ He pulled me into an embrace, then held me at arm’s length. ‘You’re sure you weren’t followed? Here –’ Banknotes, rolled into a tight tube, were tucked into my hand. ‘I gave you fifty because I love you,’ and he held my head between his hands like a squeezebox and, squeezing, kissed the top. ‘Petrol. You need to wash your hair. Come on, the boys are in the den.’

  Tubs of white emulsion and sacks of plaster lined the hallway, and in the vast living room on our left a TV, miraculously flat, hung like an Old Master next to the wall-length tropical fish tank. Jaded, chic Mrs Harper lounged in an archipelago of modular white leather like Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface. In our regular polls of sexiest mum, Mrs Harper was the undisputed winner, a source of complicated pride for her son. ‘Evening, Mrs Harper,’ I said in my nice-young-man voice.

  ‘I’ve told you, Charlie, call me Alison!’

  ‘Don’t call her Alison,’ said Harper, ‘it’s weird.’

  ‘Got these for you, Alison!’ I said, producing the four lager glasses that I’d spared from the swamp, and Harper groaned and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Thank you, Charlie, they’re exquisite.’

  ‘It’s just shit from the garage,’ said Harper. ‘They explode if you put ice in them.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Alison.

  ‘It is true,’ I said, ‘but it is quite rare. Just don’t hold the glass near your face longer than you have to.’ Alison laughed and I felt sophisticated and worldly-wise.

  ‘Put them on the side there, charming boy,’ said Alison.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll chuck ’em out later,’ said Harper, jabbing me in the ribs to propel me down the hallway. ‘Pack it in, you pervert.’

  ‘But she really likes me.’

  ‘She gave birth to me, you freak.’

  ‘I love you, Alison!’ I whispered back down the hall and we clambered over breeze-blocks for the extension to the extension that was currently underway. Mr Harper had built the house with his own hands, or the hands of his workers, altering and expanding the floor plan as casually as if it were made of Lego, and we pushed through hanging plastic sheets, through the new double garage and down into an earthly paradise.

  The concept of Harper’s ‘den’ had been lifted from American movies, and kitted out to that blueprint: a large, low space with a pool table, a drum kit, electric guitars, weights and a rowing machine, another huge flat-screen TV, a dizzying entertainment library of video cassettes and DVDs, PlayStation games, vinyl and CDs, a complete run of Maxim and a fridge, the famous self-stocking fridge with its limitless Pot Noodles and Mars Bars. No natural light or air penetrated the den. Instead testosterone was pumped through vents, or so it sometimes seemed, because here was Lloyd, laughing hysterically as he smothered Fox with a beanbag while a can of lager glugged onto the old underlay that carpeted the concrete.

  ‘Oi, leave it out!’ Harper was by some way the most prosperous, middle-class person we knew, his father the Conservatory King, which made Harper the Conservatory Prince, yet he maintained a cockney accent with the discipline of the most committed method actor. We all did, dialling it up or down depending on the circumstances. In the den, we went full barrow-boy. ‘Oi-oi! Stop trying to suck each other off and say hello. Nobody’s here.’

  Nobody was another nickname. Surnames were acceptable but nicknames were far more prevalent, a system as complex, ritualised and intricate as anything from the court of the Sun King. Harper had it lucky: because of his noble lineage, demeanour and good looks he was The Prince, and the lustrous, feathery black hair that he flicked perpetually from his eyes made him Head and Shoulders or Tim, short for Timotei. He sometimes wore a necklace made of dusty white, pink and orange coral and this made him Candy or Beach Boy. Fox, inevitably, was Fucks, but he’d once drunkenly confessed to breaking into the golf course and lowering his penis into one of the holes ‘to see what it felt like’ and this confession had turned him into Tiger Woods, or Hole in One or Royal Troon or Lawnshagger or Groundskeeper Willie. A famous lunchtime incident of bad breath had turned Lloyd into Bin-Breath or just Bins, his prominent nose made him Can-Opener or Monkey Wrench or Monkey, his short curly hair made him Bubbles, but all of these were just the starting point for great spiralling flights of abuse that could last for many hours.

  ‘Pack it in, Monkey!’ said Harper.

  ‘He started it!’ said Lloyd. ‘Eyeing me up like I was one of his fancy golf courses …’

  ‘What’s that smell?’ shouted Fox from under the beanbag.

  ‘Like I was Royal St Andrews …’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Is it bin day? Has someone put the bins out?’

  ‘I’m not your caddy, Fox,’ said Lloyd, pressing down with his knee.

  ‘Pack it in!’ said The Prince.

  ‘Your hair looks gorgeous tonight,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who does your hair, Prince-y?’

  ‘Same girl who does your perm, Bubbles, now get off him!’

  ‘Leave him alone!’ I said.

  ‘Who said that?’ said Lloyd. ‘Is there someone there? I hear voices.’

  ‘I hear maracas,’ said Fox. ‘Who’s playing the maracas?’

  ‘Nobody’s playing the maracas,’ said The Prince.

  Nobody, Mr No One, Invisible Man, and there were others. I’d mentioned once that I was named after one of my father’s favourite jazz musicians, Charles Mingus, and this had been corrupted to Charlie Minge, then Curly Minge, then just Minge. Council was another, because I lived on The Library estate, and Bunkie or The Convict, because I still slept in a bunk bed, though this was not to be deployed in the early stage of battle. ‘Council’, too, was something to be earned.

  ‘Council’s here,’ said Lloyd. ‘He’s really excited to see a house with an upstairs.’

  ‘My house has got an upstairs, Lloyd.’

  ‘Top bunk doesn’t count as an upstairs,’ said Lloyd, and this brought a sharp inhalation from the others. Lloyd had a tendency to take things too far. I had a photo of us on Bonfire Night, taken with a long exposure during my photography
phase, and while Harper is using his sparkler to draw a love heart, and while Fox is writing his name, Lloyd is scrawling ‘fuck you’ in the night air. That’s how I always thought of him, as the kind of kid who uses a firework to write ‘fuck you’, who hides the stone in the snowball.

  Now I had no choice but to pile on top, taking care to grind the point of my elbow into Lloyd’s shoulder, and then The Prince jumped on top of me, using the pool table to maximise impact, and we groaned and dug fingers deep into each other’s armpits and screamed and laughed until we couldn’t breathe. We were all aware of the theory that boys matured more slowly than girls, and contested it loudly, yet here we were: Exhibit A.

  It always started with lager, which we drank through a straw because ‘the oxygen makes it stronger’. If spirits were available, the can might then be topped up with vodka or gin and aspirin, which was rumoured to make it more potent and prevent the hangover. Some years earlier, an ambitious young food technician had managed to combine the buzz of alcohol with the mouth-puckering sweetness of the soft drink, in mouthwash blue, stop-light red or tree-frog green, but these were for special occasions. Drugs were a source of debate – Lloyd and Fox were keen but I thought only of the mallet and the cauliflower. God knows, wasn’t the chemistry of the Lewis brain precarious enough? The Prince, like his father, was puritanical about drugs, thinking them hippy-ish and soft. Drunkenness, on the other hand, was larky and boys-y, and anything up to the point of hospitalisation was sanctioned.

  But we also put great effort into pushing at the limits of what alcohol could achieve, and sometimes Harper’s den took on the earnest air of a research laboratory. We snorted booze or slammed it, mixed it or chugged it down at maximum speed to get the highs associated with drugs, and when that didn’t work, we raided the kitchen cupboards in search of drugs that weren’t drugs. Nutmeg, the gateway spice, if crumbled and smoked in industrial enough quantities, supposedly had a shamanic effect. Or was that cinnamon, or oregano? The dried pith of an unripe banana? We forced down a bunch of them, dense and waxy, draped the skins on radiators overnight, then gathered the next evening to smoke it silently and earnestly through The Matrix in a sweet, low-hanging fog. Perhaps the bananas were too ripe or not ripe enough, because nothing ever happened and I now wonder why we didn’t just do drugs. It would have been so much easier and cheaper than acquiring all that pith and cinnamon.

  Instead we stuck with lager and straws, and played on the PlayStation, laughing and turning on each other like dogs in the park, and it was fun, I suppose. But I sometimes found myself trying to imagine a world in which friendship was expressed in some other way than belching in each other’s faces. I had no doubt that we were fond of each other, even loved each other, and I had my own personal reasons to feel loyal and grateful to Harper, who, during some of the recent disasters, had gone out of his way to look after me without appearing to do so.

  But we always succumbed to the tyranny of banter, and a further tension came from what I suppose might be called ‘group dynamics’. Since the third year I’d considered Harper to be my best friend, and privately thought of the other two as our sidekicks, just as the other two thought of Harper as their best friend, the other two as sidekicks, and this jostling for favour gave a steel edge to every scuffle, particularly with Lloyd, mates despite not liking each other. Could I tell them about Fran? The Shakespeare thing made it tricky, and I’d either have to lie or present it as a joke, a scam on my part. I might feasibly be able to tell Harper, if I got him alone, but perhaps the harder question was could I imagine Fran in this room with my friends? It seemed unlikely, especially now that Harper was standing in the doorway with a bottle of vodka, a carton of juice and a strange, wheel-shaped object: twenty-four glass spice jars, Schwartz brand, hung by their necks from a notched wooden turntable. Harper gave the wheel a spin.

  ‘Gentlemen – it’s time.’

  Time to play Spice Roulette, the Herb Hunter. Solemnly, we took our places in the circle, each with a teaspoon in hand, Fox the first to spin the rack, closing his eyes and muttering a prayer as the wheel slowed and slowed and came to a halt and he took the bottle nearest to hand and read the label.

  ‘Marjoram!’

  One of the Italians, nice easy one to start; only parsley was more bland. He filled his spoon with the ancient, dusty flakes and we slapped the floor and cheered as he clamped the whole thing in his mouth, grimacing and chewing and then rinsing his mouth with the vodka and orange. ‘Just like pizza,’ he shrugged. My turn next and I watched the wheel click past tarragon, past basil, coriander, thyme, dill, chives, before coming to a stop at …

  ‘White peppercorns!’

  ‘Noooooo!’

  And there was no escape as Harper tapped the little pellets out, taking care to pile them high in the spoon. The slapping on the floor began, the cheering and then they were in my mouth, gritty but not unpleasant, and I began to crunch and say, ‘No big deal,’ until 1, 2, 3, each crunched seed released an acrid vapour that scalded the insides of my nostrils and made my eyes stream with hot, viscous tears that temporarily blinded me, my mouth puckered so tight that I could barely gulp down the vodka and orange, which had no taste now, my mouth anaesthetised, blood pumping in my ears, and the music louder …

  … and now I’m laughing and choking at the same time, throat burning as the gritty slurry makes its way down, some of it finding a home in the folds of my oesophagus. I cannot swallow or breathe or feel my tongue and Lloyd’s pointing and laughing harder than the rest, and I make a note that I’ll get back at Lloyd later.

  Another spin and now The Prince. ‘Chives, chives, chives,’ he mutters, ‘make it chives,’ and perhaps it’s the vodka but the word ‘chives’ seems hysterically funny to me now, ‘chives, chives, chives’ but instead he gets … nutmeg, a mellow, regal spice, which he taps from the bottle into his hand, tosses into the air and catches like a peanut, crunching away, all smiles until he grimaces suddenly, sticks out his tongue, which is covered in mashed cork, and so he also gulps and gulps at the vodka until it’s gone.

  And now it’s Lloyd’s turn. ‘Come on, come on, come on …’ he mutters, hoping for parsley, praying for mint …

  ‘Saffron! Yesss.’

  We boo and jeer, because there’s something so insipid about saffron. ‘Saffron’s gay,’ says Fox as Lloyd places two or three red strands on his tongue and shrugs.

  We play another round, drinking all the time. Fox gets another easy one, cumin. ‘Smells like armpits,’ he says and swallows it down. I get mint, which tastes of a greasy Sunday lunch and sucks all the moisture from my mouth, and I drain another glass of vodka and orange, mostly vodka thanks to Harper, who in turn gets cardamom, weird one, not unpleasant, the taste of the curry house. Could kill a curry now. Lloyd’s turn. Am pretty drunk so even watching the spinning rack makes me dizzy. It slows, the tension builds, we slap the floor, ‘Oooooooooh,’ and then hysteria, we’re all on our backs laughing because …

  ‘Cinnamon. Bastard cinnamon.’

  Cinnamon is the monster, the killer, the anthrax of the spice rack and so Harper is careful to fill the spoon to overflowing and hand it solemnly to Lloyd, who looks at it with the concentration of a martial artist about to punch through a breeze-block. He centres himself, breathes in through his nose, breathes out in a series of short puffs. The spoon is in his hand …

  … then in his mouth, and he turns the spoon over and withdraws it without breaking the seal, eyes wide, both hands on the top of his head, lips pouting. The seconds stretch and for a moment it seems that he might make it. But then his mouth explodes open as if blasted from the inside and a great cloud of red dust billows forth and we laugh more than we have ever laughed before, holding our stomachs, rolling on the floor and pointing as the brick dust fills the room, and he’s coughing and choking and spluttering for water, at which point we grab all the glasses and bottles, dodging out of the way as he doubles over, spluttering. I’ve a bottle of water in my hand and he gasps, ‘Gi
ve me that!’

  I hold the water high above my head.

  ‘Give it here!’ and Lloyd throws himself at me, grabbing me around the waist, pushing me back onto the pool table so that I can feel the balls grinding into my spine, and it’s harder to laugh now because I’m coughing too, but I continue laughing even as the powder coats my face and stings my eyes, and I manage to keep the bottle upright, holding it out of reach and now Lloyd, red-faced, billowing smoke from both nostrils like a cartoon bull, is jabbing at my ribs with quick short punches and I try to push his hands away. ‘Ow! All right, here you go!’ and I offer the bottle so he can clear his throat.

  But the moment for peace offerings has gone. I drop the bottle and use that hand to push at Lloyd’s face but he keeps jabbing away, and I’m alarmed by his expression, like my dad’s when he gets angry, and suddenly a pool ball is in my hand, heavy and smooth and satisfying, my knee is somehow up in Lloyd’s chest and I heave and push him right across the room and in the same moment sit, pull back my arm and arch my wrist and hurl the pool ball at his head.

  Too many evenings ended like this. It seemed that we could only stop by going too far.

  In this instance, the ball hit plasterboard with a great hollow thud and, just for a moment, stayed nestling in its new indentation before dropping quietly to the floor. Cinnamon dust hung in the air like the smoke from a revolver. I looked round, grinning, to see my three best friends crouched, covering their heads, silent until Lloyd spoke.

  ‘Fucking hell, Lewis, you psycho—’

  ‘I wasn’t aiming at you!’

  ‘Yes, you were! You could have killed me!’

  ‘Whoa!’ Fox stood at the wall, testing the depth of the hole with his finger. ‘Look at that! Jesus, Lewis!’