Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  ‘Thanks, Frankie,’ he said.

  I stood with my back against the wall as Cal made himself comfortable in my usual seat. I couldn’t see his face but I could tell by his ebullient chatter that he was enjoying himself, commenting on an urban landscape that was familiar to me but which he had never seen quite like that before. When I did turn to face him he was sitting very comfortably. I noticed this because I was becoming increasingly aware of my own discomfort when I sat up there. The window was not as cosy as it once had been. It was becoming cramped, forcing my back into unnatural positions. I had begun to worry that I would finish up like Auntie Anne, a walking set-square.

  ‘Do you want to come to my house?’ Cal asked.

  Cal lived less than a quarter of a mile away from me, in the big houses next to the park that gave our suburb its name but, because the railway line was in the way and you had to go all the way up to the footbridge, it seemed much further. The house was bigger than the one I live in now and it impressed me then as if it were a palace. I knew that there were big houses on the other side of the track but until then ‘big’ was just a word. The roads - you couldn’t call them streets - were wider and a different colour, pinky-brown with a gravel finish not like our black asphalt. You couldn’t see half the houses because they stood at the end of their drives, obscured by hedges and thick white walls. Sometimes the chimneys were all you could see. They were red like great Lego bricks or tall and square as sentries. Approaching Cal’s giant front door, their path like an unfinished road, I felt much as I had felt climbing the spiral staircase that morning.

  ‘My Mum will make orange juice,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not real orange juice, of course, it’s a concentrate, a powder.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Cal’s mum. I hadn’t realised there’d be a Mum, hadn’t realised there’d be people. I wondered if they’d be as big as the house. Proportionately. I couldn’t imagine Cal with a mother. I couldn’t imagine anything as my heart sank slowly in my throat like a depth charge.

  I followed Cal up the steps to the front door. The steps seemed like cliffs. He pushed the heavy door open and his mother was standing there. I saw stockinged legs like the housekeeper in Tom And Jerry but instead of slippers, stilettos. My eyes turned away from my own feet and upwards. She was wearing a peach dress. I stumbled over the final step. ‘Hello, Mrs. Carter,’ I said, my outstretched hand clutching at the hem of her dress as I fell to the richly-carpeted floor.

  ‘Mother,’ said Cal, bestriding my prostrate form, ‘this is Frankie that I’ve been telling you about. I don’t think he’s feeling very well. He wants to sit down.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a chair be more comfortable?’ said Mrs Carter, smiling at us both.

  Cal took me up to his bedroom. He was looking at me in a curious way. ‘I’ll show you where I go when I’m not well,’ he smiled. ‘Or even when I am.’

  Inside, tables and cabinets were everywhere covered with books, models, games and odds and ends like conkers and marbles. His Subbuteo teams were lined across a shelf as if they were meeting the Queen before the cup final. Posters obscured the wall paper - maps of the UK, the world and the stars in the northern hemisphere, diagrams of the the human body and photographs of Apollo 8. But it wasn’t a child’s sense of order - even Aunty Anne would have had to concede that Cal’s room was tidy - it was like a museum. Items were labelled with relevant information. Found near Bognor it said on an unusually shaped piece of gnarled driftwood. Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar when it was already 40 years old. Now at dry dock in Portsmouth it said on an Airfix model of The Victory.

  ‘My Mum says I’m a bit of a hoarder, he said following my awestruck gaze as it crept around the room.

  He opened the door of a massive wardrobe. The largest piece of furniture in his bedroom by far, it was really tall and ran virtually the length of one wall. It was made from a dark wood ornately carved with gargoyle-like heads for door handles. Inside, the wardrobe contained not shirts and trousers, shoes and underwear but a beanbag, a tiny bed-side table and sundry nicknacks. Cal had decked the interior out like a little room, a den. The back and sides were decorated with multicoloured printed fabrics and posters. He gestured towards the beanbag and I sat down. Then from beneath one of the drapes he produced a fishing stool which he put up and sat on himself. In the corner was a small cardboard box lined with polystyrene tiles. From it Cal removed two cans of Coca-Cola and handed me one. I’d never had a whole can of Coke to myself - I usually had to share with my father.

  ‘Can you shut it?’ I asked, fumbling with the can-opener, stabbing at the tin.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. Attached to the back of each door was a curtain tassel. Cal tugged on both and we were in darkness. There was the flash of a match and my host’s face beaming at me. Candelabra were mounted all around as in a medieval castle. Cal lit each one in turn. The peace was tangible and terrible. I suddenly felt as if I was in a horror film, that I was actually breathing in the shadows around me, inhaling the grey of their shimmer. I thought I was inside a coffin. There was the smell of burning, the ghostly, flickering light. I was aware of Cal but no longer able to see him. The can was ice-cold in my hand.

  As I tried to struggle to my feet the beanbag seemed like a live thing, catching my hand, pulling me back, swallowing my heels. And then I rolled over. The door flew open as I hit it and the next thing I knew, I was lying in Cal’s bedroom at the foot of his bed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He asked, towering over me once again. In his hand was the expired match, black and disintegrating. ‘It’s my camp. What’s the matter, Frankie? Are you afraid of the dark?’

  The can was still in my hand. I hadn’t spilled a drop. ‘No.’ I sat up and took a long drink, my eyes fixed on the Coke. ‘It was great,’ I said, after a bit. ‘I think it was the candles. Isn’t that a bit dangerous? You know, fire.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Cal. ‘But then I am afraid of the dark so it’s the lesser of two evils.’ He touched his can to mine like a toast and started laughing. With both doors open, Cal’s camp looked out of place and ridiculous. The candle light was as meagre in the daylight as the wardrobe’s tiny furnishings.

  ‘You’re in good company, anyway,’ said Cal. ‘Jon didn’t like the wardrobe much either.’

  5

  The family take shelter in a Georgian doorway. They are inappropriately dressed for the sudden sheets of rain. Packamacs and cagoules not seen since last summer and a small transparent brolly decorated with pastel pink and yellow flowers are scant protection when the streets flow like rivers.

  Father swears as he steps in a puddle. Mother is fastening reluctant zips and sealing wayward studs. Son slides along the freshly polished step flowing blood red in the rain. We are family.

  Wendy grabs at Philip, pulling him back beneath the shelter afforded by the pillared arch. The boy’s irritation is replaced with curiosity as he notices the building’s entryphone. He stabs at the bell with an eager finger.

  ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’

  Wendy catches my eye. The umbrella nearly catches hers. ‘Careful sweetheart,’ she says to Rebecca who is battling with the thing. She is smiling at me conspiratorially. ‘What do Jeremy Thorpe and Captain Kirk have in common?’ she asks quietly. This is my family. These are the moments. The perfectly ordinary moments that I once despised and now crave.

  ‘What, Mum. Captain Kirk?’

  On the other side of the road, a man liberally coated in black leather and with a green mohican haircut tackles his own umbrella. He could be stripping down a rifle. Umbrella, black, raising the blood pressure, for the purpose of. The man’s very presence on the streets of the capital would be sufficient to have my father screaming for the return of national service. The canvas inflates and expires like a battle-torn flag. His mohican droops.

  ‘Can’t you… Gordon give it to me,’ says the waif of a woman half-jogging along beside him, her green legg
ings pumping away like frogs legs. Her long dark hair is pasted to her face and black leather jacket.

  ‘It seems to be lifting,’ says Wendy. She’s not referring to their brolly.

  I climb up onto the glossy black railings erected to prevent us trespassing on the block’s concrete forecourt, my feet on the bottom rung. Over the park hovers a hazy hole of clear sky.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say.

  ‘This is the voice of the Mysterons,’ says Philip darkly into the entryphone.

  ‘Pardon?’ replies the entryphone. ‘Is that you, Lord Mowbray?’

  I nod towards the park and the kids shoot ahead, wrestling with their now constricting waterproofs. Philip casts a last look over his shoulder.

  Wendy holds my hand as we pick our way along a puddle-pattered pavement. These are the moments. We are attending our local Country Fayre - a recent addition to the civic life of a borough that hasn’t seen a farm since Doomsday. I wish I was wearing sensible shoes.

  As we enter the park it becomes clear that we are just one of several parties of rain-ravaged stragglers tramping across the sodden grass, all heading towards an as yet uncertain central point. I can hear the sounds of the fairground. I can smell the flavours of a hundred fast food stands. I can see marquees, a gymkhana and three vintage traction engines. Damp pilgrims, we could indeed be going to a medieval fayre to sell our sheep, children and home-made mead. There’s something medieval about us. Perhaps, there’s something medieval about this whole business. I remember coming to a function this big in this park once before. I came back from France specially for it. The People’s March for Jobs. There are no Socialist Worker Party banners this time. There’s a range of drapes and throws hand woven in Mali instead, pots and figurines and waistcoats and little wooden plaques decorated with names like Charlotte, Rachel and Rebecca.

  ‘There they are,’ my daughter turns and shouts. ‘Our school steel band.’

  Wendy laughs. Our eyes meet. The mud squelches beneath our feet. ‘This is all rather…’

  ‘Yeh, ’ I say. ‘1983 and all that.’

  In 1983, Wendy and I returned home. It started with Jon sending us a postcard. It was blank except for a little red sticker in the corner. Where Will You Be On October 22? it asked. Then he called. Told us it was to be CND’s biggest demonstration yet and he’d got me booked to play. One of the smart boys, Jon. How could I refuse? When I’d come back for the People’s March I was alone. Stood staring at the stage willing reluctant tears down my face. We’d been to so many of these things together that Cal’s absence was stark in a way that it never could be in Barbès or Pigalle. It made me realise I had to play. I had to get up on a stage by myself. Jon gave me the chance.

  They say we were half a million strong that day and me, I was that tiny little figure on a distant stage with the out-of-tune guitar. I didn’t know then, as I emerged onto the scaffold platform and rose above the crowd - the wind and the waving arms and the rolling ocean of faces taking my breath away - that this was the high water mark. A last hurrah. The super soaraway free-market funtastical eighties were upon us like rapists - the decade I really made it big.

  Things have changed since the heady demo days when The Clash or Steel Pulse, Elvis Costello or The Go-Karts capped the politics with a punky reggae party for the radical. Things seem blunter now, lacking definition. We shrugged our shoulders when Thatcher won the 1979 election, took a deep drag and passed the joint on, but the future somehow seemed clearer. Now I can think about Jim Callaghan and almost get nostalgic. With our slight pictures of history, we took progress as read. ‘Callaghan’s cracking’ Cal sang in ‘Rotten In Denmark’ little realising what would crawl out of the rifts and rents.

  Look at Philip, in the queue for a hot dog already. Look at Rebecca, waving at her friends and singing along with their steel drum version of ‘We Can Work It Out’. Steel drums are such happy instruments. Look around, this is a nice family occasion and I am lucky to be sharing it with mine. Lucky but those years nag like a wasp. The anarchists are accountants, the Marxists prefer Spencer, the girls in tactfully torn T-shirts and bright tight jeans run personnel departments. The greens are blue and the reds just a little rosy round the cheeks.

  ‘Did they have beer guts in the seventies?’ I ask, looking around. The Beer Tent is promising a three hour ‘happy hour’.

  Wendy smiles. ‘Julian did but then he was a bit ahead of his time.’

  I squeeze her hand – small in mine but not petite or in any way weak. I admire Wendy, respect her resilience, as much as I love her. She breaks free, opening her money belt to drop a handful of coins into a bucket. The collector offers her a Save Our Woodland sticker in the same design as his white sweatshirt.

  Ahead of us, the assembly are limbering down from the downpour. The sun is threatening. Jackets come off. Umbrellas retreat. There is the obligatory feedback from the PA system, a sound which reminds me with a tug of Cal. His easy politics contrasted so appealingly with my family’s confusion of prejudices. Rebecca’s music teacher is up on the stage now, leading the applause for the band, taking a modest shuffle of a bow. He’s a big black guy - someone who obviously knows something about music and earns a pittance for it. How very different from the life of our own dear rock star. Wendy is back at my side. We tighten our grip on each other’s hand. From the smattering of applause for Rebecca’s classmates, a cheer erupts. Heads look up and roar as a familiar haircut strides onto the stage. It’s a TV weathergirl with a grin so broad you can see her flossed teeth from here.

  ‘Not that old slapper,’ says Rebecca.

  ‘Can we go to the Cartoon Plus tent, Mum?’ asks Philip.

  So while our kids get their fix of animated American propaganda, we wander around the craft village. There’s a CD stall. At first I can’t find my own stuff but when I do I’m pleased to find that I still qualify for a separate plastic divider of my own with Frankie Dane printed on it. Surreptitiously I move a couple of copies of Phoenix to the front of the row. I buy some of the product by artists that Jonathan has mentioned to me. Wendy, clutching an offcut of material that will ‘make a lovely curtain’ laughs and remarks once again how I never play any of the albums that I already have. She says the money would be better off going to a good cause. I say that my sense of worth in myself and my life is a good cause. Wendy looks at me with her get over it look. But it’s short - it’s always short - and it transmutes into a smile. A moment later Philip reappears asking if he can have the new Lacto Bacto and The Psychedelic Yoghurt Potz CD. Rebecca asks if Philip has any taste at all in his spotty juvenile head.

  A beautiful day but it weighs upon me, it’s pleasantness too much to bear. These are wonderful moments, simple moments that I can never enjoy. They are even harder for me to record here than the past because as I write I think perhaps they’re right, those conjurers of cliché. You have to move on. You can never go back. Alone with that littleness between the ears, I am terrified that they might be right.

  6

  By the time girls and examinations replaced football and football as our principal subjects of conversation, only Cal ever sat on the window ledge at the station. Only he could fit. I assume Cal welcomed these discursive developments. He never knew a great deal about football anyway, nor was he particularly interested in it.

  At that time, standing around on street corners was not yet popular enough to be considered a sign of delinquency so every schoolday at four o’clock, Cal was to be found in his window seat. I was always there too, usually leaning against the wall of the station or squatting beside it, my chewing gum replaced by a cigarette. Not quite at Cal’s feet but closer to him than anyone else. We were the self-styled smart boys, grammar school intellects with longer than regulation hair and there were five of us.

  Terry Chambers managed to appear both gaunt and slightly overweight at the same time. His black plimsolls - the cheesy descendants of the ones that had served him
so well in playground football - smelled like a sewer and he had a mind to match. Terry would shift his weight from leg to leg, swaying as he slandered each of us in turn, our sisters and our mothers with tales of all manner of sordid sexual activity.

  Charlie Ball was about my height and had a receding hairline by the age of 16. For this reason, he would become the one who always went to the bar. His brow furrowed, his hand jerking automatically to brush back a nonexistent fringe, Charlie would try to keep a jumping bean of a cigarette behind his ear while calculating our collective debt on a barmat. He rarely made a fuss about it and so was rarely paid.

  Jonathan Waters always stood slightly apart from the rest of us, perhaps on the edge of the road, still juggling a tennis ball even as the mock O-levels came, went and gave way to the real thing. He fancied himself as an actor.

  Cal was a midget, Charlie was bald and Terry was a pervert but basically I liked those guys. I wasn’t so sure about Jonathan Waters. Had he not been one of us, one of the smart lads, I would have hated him. Jonathan, you see, had humiliated me.

  It was during a drama lesson. My second week in the top class. Cal was off sick and as kids scurried across the hall for partners Jonathan, like me, seemed to be surrounded by an invisible forcefield rendering him unapproachable. Jon still had his prep school badge on one blazer pocket and the Beech Park Grammar badge on the other so he looked different, aloof, like a general or something, perhaps that was why. Or perhaps it was the fact that in drama lessons he took after his father, the leading light in the local amateur dramatic society. For one production, Anthony Waters had enjoyed 18 credits in the programme (one of which was for ‘human skull provided by’). Jon and I were left looking around despairingly for a genie to rescue us before forming a reluctant pair.

  We were told to mime - mime something that was important to us and try to guess each other’s. Jonathan mimed ‘I’m going skiing at Christmas’. Over-eager hands tearing beribboned wrapping paper; eyes beaming like a delighted child (or an axe-wielding maniac); ski-poles and a slalom wiggle of the backside; the sequences punctuated by bouts of pointing at himself. It wasn’t difficult to guess what it was. It was difficult for me to guess why exactly it was important. I wasn’t wholly sure I knew what it was. What did you do on a skiing holiday? Did you have to live in an igloo, for example?