‘I don’t know why he’s written to me. I didn’t like him at that party because he said we were weird.’
‘Well, we’re not weird,’ said Mummy, ‘and I think it would be fun for you to go to the match if you want to. After all, there will be lots of other people to talk to if Merry-Curl is irritating.’
So I went, driven by Imogen’s father, and cocooned in smug importance because I alone among the party had been invited by a boy. Imogen’s brother was also playing in the match, and her father was wearing an old school tie in honour of the occasion.
‘How long have you been going out with James?’ Imogen probed as we swooped silently towards the school in the comfortable, expensive-smelling car.
‘I’m not going out with James. I’ve only met him once and I can hardly remember what he looks like.’
I was not looking forward to seeing Merry-Curl again, but I hoped that there would be other, more glamorous boys there. Perhaps even one like Byron.
I saw thee weep – the big bright tear
Came o’er that eye of blue;
And then methought it did appear
A violet dropping dew:
I saw thee smile – the sapphire’s blaze
Beside thee ceased to shine;
It could not match the living rays
That fill’d that glance of thine.
I pretended that this poem was written for me, and spent the morning before the match looking in the mirror trying to be a weeping violet. Not a success. The school playing-field did nothing to feed my hopes of finding love. Anoraks abounded, grey nylon, black nylon with yellow stripes, fawn and navy blue, inert and hanging limp from puny shoulders. It had not occurred to me to discover what game was being played, and I noted gloomily that it was rugger. I was not interested in rugger. Despair filled my lungs and throat at the prospect of standing on the touchline all afternoon.
I saw Amelia Letson and, relieved to find a diversion from the pitch, I smiled and waved. She ran over, eyes sparkling. ‘Gosh, it’s so nice to see you,’ she gushed. ‘I’m with my cousin Tom. He broke his collar-bone at a point-to-point yesterday.’ Standing back from Amelia’s cluster of friends was a tall, dark-haired boy. He wore a sling on one arm and was staring at his feet. His face was pale. He was not wearing an anorak. He was almost Byronic.
‘Does he ride racehorses?’ I was impressed.
‘Yes, he wants to be a jockey. We’re going to the café in town, Tom doesn’t like rugby,’ and she scuttled off again.
The match continued. The players turned blue with cold and black with mud as they raced pointlessly up and down the pitch. I sulked, avoiding Merry-Curl’s smiling glances in our direction. I wanted to be in the café with Amelia and Tom, fascinating Tom with my blazing sapphire smile and impressing him with my knowledge of horses. It was not to be. Imogen’s brother Edward was kicked in the groin and carried off the pitch, white-faced and whimpering. Imogen’s father, stony with rage, muttered, ‘Appalling bad sports, the lot of them,’ and bundled his agonized son into the car. ‘Come on, girls, we’re going home,’ he shouted. Imogen and I apprehensively edged into the front seat together so that her brother could recline in the back. We did not dare look over at him, afraid of what we might see. I knew from fighting with my own brothers that a blow to the groin was male torture, and my inability to imagine it made it embarrassing and sordid, a maimed initiation into manhood. Imogen’s father dropped me at the bottom of our drive. I slammed the car door behind me, vowing never to attend a match of any description again. A point-to-point would be much more romantic.
Chapter 39
April 1989
Flook and I hitch-hiked to Norfolk for Easter. He was working as a set-painter for a small theatre and didn’t have enough money for the train fare, and I had sold my Ford Cortina to two Rastafarians for twenty-five pounds. I told them I was selling it because a lot of its undercarriage had fallen off going round Hammersmith roundabout and I had not dared stop to collect it. They didn’t care. They jumped into the car, tied a pair of crocheted red, yellow and green baby bootees to the mirror and screeched off. I bought some Easter eggs with the money and went to meet Flook at Redbridge tube station.
Flook was there already, sitting cross-legged on the bonnet of a big black car, drumming his fingers on his knees. Behind him, Redbridge roundabout was a quagmire of muddy pools where construction work had ceased for the holiday. Flook’s leather jacket with the reclining busty blonde he had painted on the back stood like a dwarf behind the car, held upright by its own stiff folds. A red baseball cap rested jauntily on the collar. Flook jumped down when he saw me. ‘Va Va, we’ve got a lift home.’ He gestured to the car. ‘I bumped into Jim last night, and he’s driving back to Norfolk.’
‘Who’s Jim?’ I whispered as Flook piled my bags into the boot.
‘Haven’t you met him? He’s an old friend of mine. He’s been away, all over the world, for the last few years. It’s great to see him again.’
We got into the car. A man with curling black hair sat behind the steering wheel. His face was long, his jaw square, and across one cheek a glaring scar burned deep into his flesh. He grinned. ‘You look like a Lincoln,’ he said. ‘I know all your brothers, and you look just like them.’ His accent was Irish, and he talked fast.
‘Jim’s from Belfast.’ Flook was rummaging to find a tape in the glove compartment. He turned the machine on, and I could only say ‘Thank you for the lift’ before the car filled with frantic music for the rest of the journey.
We reached Mildney at tea-time. Brodie was there already; his band had played a gig in Cambridge the night before, and they had dropped him off at the station. He and Poppy were drinking tea in the kitchen. Dan and Dad, both leaning on walking-sticks, joined them. Mum crouched on all fours in front of the Aga, a knife in her hand, levering small black meteorites from the oven. ‘My God,’ said Flook as we entered, ‘I think Mum’s been trying to cook.’
‘Shut up.’ Mum’s voice was muffled as she delved deeper into the oven. ‘It’s the Hot Cross Buns. They were meant for tea yesterday, but I forgot them.’ Jim bent to catch a bun which was hurtling towards a sleeping cat. ‘It’s hot!’ Mum shrieked, but Jim grasped the sooty ball and threw it out into the yard. ‘I’ve got asbestos hands,’ he grinned.
‘Who is this man of iron?’ Dad demanded, and Jim was introduced after embracing Dan and Brodie.
‘It’s been a while since I saw this bunch,’ he said to Dad, ‘but I’ve been thinking about them a lot. Flook gave me a book of yours, and I took a picture of it for you.’
Jim pulled a photograph from his inside pocket. We crowded round him to see. It was a beach. Long yellow sands stretched towards a still grey sea. A rifle, its butt buried, stood tall where the waves broke. Slung in the belt, facing us, was a book and from its clean dust-jacket Dad’s portrait stared out.
‘A Kalashnikov.’ Brodie’s voice shook with almost religious awe.
‘And Dad’s Collected Poems,’ said Dan, amazed. ‘What are they doing with that gun?’
‘It’s in Kurdistan,’ said Jim. ‘I was there with the rebels three weeks ago. I thought Patrick might like it, from all the stories you lot told me about him.’
Dad pulled the picture from beneath Dan’s nose. ‘Let me see. Why, it’s charming. Jim, my dear boy, I see you have a sense of humour. I must frame this.’ Dad rose, gripping his walking-stick. He pocketed the photograph. ‘This is mine’ – he curled his lips in a monstrous snarl – ‘and if I catch you boys trying to steal it there will be hell to pay.’
Flook turned to Jim. ‘Dad’s really pleased. But can you explain what exactly you’ve been doing for the past two years?’
Sipping tea and refusing proffered cigarettes, Jim told us how he had taken food, blankets and money out to Kurdistan. Moved by the rebels’ plight, he had stayed, his Foreign Legion training standing him in good stead during the fighting.
Poppy and I, listening from our perch on the Aga rail, looked a
t one another, astonished. ‘He’s like Robin Hood,’ Poppy whispered. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’
Dad came back into the kitchen. He paused in the doorway, struggling for breath. ‘Jim, I should like to have a drink with you. Look under that hat on the shelf.’
Jim lifted the black fur dome and pulled out a bottle. Brodie whistled low. ‘You are in favour,’ he whispered. ‘Dad never shares his champagne with anyone.’
Dad winked at Jim. ‘My children are too barbaric for this ambrosia. Let us drink to Peace.’
Jim stayed a day or two, then left for his own cottage a few miles away. Often when I rang after that weekend, Dad was out driving with Jim, or sitting talking in the playroom with him. Jim delighted in surprising Dad with outings and plans. By summer the dogs had given up barking at his car, and Dad had started Jim on a plan to build a dam across the river.
Chapter 40
Brodie and Flook were locked in the cloakroom. I banged on the door to be let in and found them shaving the sides of Brodie’s head. The basin was grey with foam and hair and Brodie’s scalp looked like a newly-plucked chicken, pink and bald with a furry strip bristling down the centre.
‘My God,’ I gasped, ‘Mummy will kill you.’
‘She won’t notice if I wear a hat. D’you think it’s good?’
I thought it was horrible. His face looked older, the bones protruding naked where once they had been softened by hair. The solid curve of his cranium was at once thuggish and heartbreakingly vulnerable. ‘It’s brilliant,’ I said stoutly, ‘but I don’t think you’ll get away with it at school.’
‘Well, they like short back and sides, don’t they?’ He scraped the razor delicately behind one ear. The tiny, crispy rasp of steel against lathered skin made me shudder, and I left them, closing the door carefully so that Poppy and Dan didn’t go in and see. I was cross. Brodie had never before done anything significant without telling me, and he hadn’t even needed my help. I knew that he and Flook had discovered punk; I had helped cover one of Daddy’s old jackets in safety pins and padlocks, but it had seemed more like an extension of our childhood dressing-up than a new existence.
I lay on the playroom floor and picked up Poppy’s Cindy doll. Her glassy blue eyes and froth of blonde hair reminded me of Imogen, and I dressed her from the little pile of clothes Poppy had left beside her. But clad, Cindy looked too bawdy to be Imogen. Her jutting plastic bosom strained at the sensible white shirt I had chosen for her, and her legs stretched on and on. Irritated, I undressed her again and covered her in a white sheet. Poppy might like to operate on her.
Brodie emerged from the cloakroom, insouciant in a red and white woolly hat; I forbore to draw attention to it. ‘Will you come and see Spear of Destiny tonight?’ he asked, binding red strips of fabric torn from Mummy’s old nightie around the sleeve of his dark-green cavalry officer’s jacket. Spear of Destiny was Brodie’s favourite band. They took their name and many of their lyrics from the Red Indian mythology which was his obsession, and he had a collection of their records and press cuttings stacked in his bedroom. I was very pleased to be asked, relieved not to be entirely excluded from Brodie’s life.
Flook wanted to come too, but Mummy wouldn’t let him. ‘You’re not old enough. You’re only thirteen; no one will believe you are eighteen, and then all three of you will be barred.’
Flook was livid. ‘Brodie only knows about Spear of Destiny because I gave him their record for his birthday.’ He scowled, arms folded, rigid with dignity and the desire to be included. Daddy came in. Flook turned away, eyes warped with tears.
‘My love, you have years of this sort of thing ahead of you. Va Va and Brodie never went when they were thirteen. It is dangerous.’
Dan shouted from the playroom, ‘Come and help me fix my rollerskates.’
Flook trembled; snakelike and treacherous, Brodie and I left. Half-way down the drive, Brodie removed the woolly hat and replaced it with an old top hat decorated with bird skulls and rabbit bones. He had taken to boiling up the remains of creatures killed by the cats until the bones bobbed clean white in the saucepan. He laid them out to dry on the back of the Aga before sewing them on to his clothes. Mummy thought it was grotesque.
‘I think he’s got psychopathic tendencies,’ she whispered to me. ‘What shall I do?’
Daddy dismissed her worry with a wave of his hand. ‘He is adorning himself like an Indian brave. It’s marvellous, Eleanor. Don’t bitch him up.’
Mummy sighed and swept a tiny foreleg into the rubbish. ‘I suppose he’ll grow out of it,’ she said.
Merry-Curl had telephoned asking me to go out for a drink with him, so I persuaded him that he too would like to see Spear of Destiny, and he was to pick us up from the bottom of the drive. ‘Why didn’t you ask him to come to the house?’ asked Brodie, as we waited in the mild spring dusk.
‘I don’t know. I was embarrassed, I suppose.’
‘By him or by us?’
I reddened and did not answer. I was worried that Merry-Curl would be wearing the blazer and cravat he had favoured in his photograph, but he was sporting a perfectly acceptable leather jacket. Brodie became quite enthusiastic.
‘Will you swap your jacket for a Royal Fusiliers one?’ he asked hopefully, leaning forward between the two front seats.
Merry-Curl was a lot better than I remembered, and although my heart now belonged to the world of steeplechasers, I was prepared to be friends with him. He seemed more relaxed and older than he had at Imogen’s party.
‘I’m sorry you had to leave the match,’ he said, ‘It was a good game.’
‘Yes, it looked great.’ I turned round with narrowed eyes to scowl at Brodie sniggering in the back. ‘Actually, I don’t really understand rugby,’ I admitted, desperate because Brodie’s laughter was audible even though I had pinched him, and Merry-Curl was looking hurt.
We arrived at West Runton, a straggling seaside town where the golf course dropped straight over the cliffs and into the sea. In the heart of the town the façade of a gabled house loomed over bungalows, elaborate pediments throwing wild shadows across the boarded-up windows. Sprayed graffiti sprawled drunkenly, bawling barbarous messages at passers-by. ‘Fuck the Queen’ and ‘God is doing time’ blazed in our headlights as Merry-Curl parked the car. Behind the Queen Anne ruin a concrete building squatted; the dance-hall in which bands played to heaving audiences of punks and skinheads every weekend.
We walked to the ticket office past two green-haired boys wearing studded dog collars who sat hunched, breathing into crumpled plastic bags. I jumped as one keeled over in our path. He lay, back arched like an acrobat, eyes half closed, skin sticky with a sheen of sweat. Inside, the stage loomed dark across a floor empty except for a few plastic glasses. Shadowy movements in the gloom and the flare of matches illuminating pale, black-eyed faces were the only suggestions of an audience. The band plunged on to the stage. The floor swarmed. Forward they came, jostling leather-clad punks, hair in fiery crests or soaped in slimy spikes which trickled a sluggish wake down their backs. Faces smeared with kohl and pierced with safety-pins, lips wet and red, were turned up to the singer as he screamed his first song, almost swallowing the microphone.
From the other side of the room a roaring mass of bald, pasty figures stomped towards the stage. Their denim uniform flapped filthy, wounds in the fabric sewn together with raw red stitching and scarred by lumpy plastic tubes. The two waves surged towards the three of us, still and small by the stage. Brodie climbed on to a chair, unperturbed by the thrashing flesh around him. Merry-Curl left us to get a drink, and I relaxed a little and watched the band, enjoying the sensation of loud music vibrating through me. Someone pushed me, then someone else. I looked round and was terrified. I was some distance away from Brodie, and the punks were falling back in a swooping line like a drawn curtain. Brodie was beached on his chair and a steady cord of skinheads advanced towards him, led by a stout, short man. The man’s brow gleamed where it was studded wit
h metal squares; he scuttled forward, bent low like Quasimodo, mouth open in a silent roar, arms spread wide, waving half a smashed bottle in wild arcs. The band stopped playing, and the singer yelled into his microphone. ‘Stop. What the hell is going on here?’ No one took any notice. Dropping their instruments, the band tiptoed off the stage. The skinhead line fragmented and roared towards the punks. Brodie remained isolated and still on his chair, white-faced, arms stiff at his side, a martyr preparing to be burned at the stake. I expected every second that he would fall, drown in the heaving human sea, but he didn’t. Somehow I was at the edge of the crowd, which slowed for a moment as people thrust their way through the door and burst out into the street. I ran back to Brodie through the empty hall. All the skinheads had gone. We were alone in the vast room, listening to muted shouts and screams and the approaching wail of police cars.
‘Do you think the band will come on again?’ Brodie smiled lopsidedly.
Merry-Curl came back. ‘What’s happened? Why has everyone gone?’ He balanced our drinks on the edge of the stage. ‘What have I missed?’
‘I think we’d better go.’ I was suddenly heavy with exhaustion and relief.
At home, Daddy and Flook were painting a fort for Dan. Flook, sleeves rolled back to his elbows, his face daubed with green and silver paint, had forgotten his anger. Daddy shook his head and looked intently at us as Brodie and I, with occasional interruptions from Merry-Curl, told of our adventure. The last wisps of fear evaporated like morning mist as we sat in the playroom drinking tea. Daddy dipped a warring knight in his tin of gold paint. ‘Well, my loves, you were lucky, very lucky. But tell me, did you enjoy the music?’
Brodie’s face lit up and he leaned forward over the table, poised to list its many virtues. Merry-Curl and I retreated to the kitchen where Mummy sat reading. The last of Honey’s puppies, a handsome buck whom we had named T-Shirt Smith because his white front legs protruded from his soft black torso like arms from a T-shirt, became vivacious in the presence of Merry-Curl. ‘I’d love a dog,’ said Merry-Curl, stroking T-Shirt into frenzies of delight by tickling his ears. Emboldened by his evening’s experiences, Merry-Curl was expansive. ‘My parents would go mad if I told them about the fight,’ he said to me. ‘Your family is really cool.’
Come and Tell Me Some Lies Page 11