Ella and Daisy are too dumb to be hilarious. Josh made the mistake of getting a steady girlfriend in school when nobody else has one. Now he has to be on his best behaviour when Ella’s around and then when she’s not, he tries too hard and it’s embarrassing for all of us who witness it.
My other mates, who really only have guest spots in the group, aren’t in our form. They include Dildo, who is two years older than us and repeating his GCSEs in another form in our year, Danny, who is eighteen and a brickie and a good mate of Dildo’s, and Trixie and Limbo who used to go here but left last year and are now townies, i.e., they hang around in town.
Trixie lives with her thirty-year-old boyfriend in a council flat in the centre of Langrick. It’s a bit of a weird, sad relationship, in that she’s suddenly started taking E and talking about babies, and her boyfriend is clearly an unemployed wanker who can’t find anyone his own age to go out with. He rings her up when she’s hanging out with us to call her a cheating cunt and then talks about getting married the rest of the time. She used to go out with Limbo, but her boyfriend made her delete his number. Limbo still lives with his parents on one of the Osford estates, but spends most of his time in Sandford city on the graze for fresh grass, if you catch my drift.
And then there are the people who aren’t in our gang, but are the supporting characters, shall we say, and since the Langrick-Osford-Ness area isn’t huge and pretty much everyone who lives here grew up here, we all have the same supporting characters in our lives. These include the slightly older role models like Tommo and Nikki and Gav and Tee, although the latter two are reverse-role models, in that they serve as cautionary tales for the rest of us. Then there are the ‘destructive’ supporting characters: the petty drug dealers like the lovable-but-fucked Kyle Craig, a raging film buff with a GSOH and a death wish; the drunks who buy alcohol for us under-aged folk; the small-town pimps who would never think of themselves as pimps but sort of ended up doing a favour for a female friend who needed some cash, where they asked their mates if any of them were horny. Those sort of supporting characters are mild scum, but not the worst. The worst are the villains of the piece, people like Fez, who you just don’t want to mess with. They’ve been in prison and had enough raps on their knuckles to make them bleed. It’s just been for odd bits and bobs so far but you know something serious is just around the corner. They always get questioned by the police, when stuff goes missing, or when people get knifed to death down near the railway line, because they hang out there and because everybody knows if they didn’t have a hand in it, they sure as shit turned a blind eye.
Ash kicks the table to get my attention and I stop gazing out the window and raise an eyebrow at her suggestively, in default Flick-and-Ashley mode.
‘So what happened with the lesbian?’ Ash, clearly jealous, raises pencil-thin eyebrows at me.
‘She muff-dived me,’ I grin back.
‘She fucking didn’t!’ says Daisy, shocked. Me and Mike exchange a look and Mike bursts out laughing.
‘I’d muff-dive her,’ chimes in Jamie. ‘I saw her at Langrick market, Sunday, she was well fit.’
‘Muff-diving is oral, right?’ Daisy asks, high-pitched and confused.
‘What was she doing at Langrick market?’ Me to Jamie.
Mike to Daisy: ‘Yeah, a muff is a minge.’
Jamie to me: ‘I dunno. Buying shit.’
‘What does she look like?’ Josh, leaning around Ella.
Ella, pulling Josh back: ‘What do you care?’
Josh to Ella: ‘Fucking hell, woman.’
Me, faux-coughing: ‘Pussy-whipped.’
‘Did anything happen?’ Mike to me.
‘It will.’ Me, grinning cockily, to Mike.
Mike, laughing, then deadpan, to me: ‘Hey, Will … you’re a cock.’
‘Yes,’ I say proudly. ‘Yes I am.’ We crack up.
‘So is she a lesbian?’ Ash demands loudly, clearly not enjoying the lack of attention.
‘No, she’s not a lesbian,’ I say smugly.
‘Did you get her number?’
‘No, because unlike some people I’m not a manwhore.’
‘Um, incorrect use of the term manwhore, don’t you think?’
I shake my head.
‘Since I’d have to be a man …’
I nod my head.
‘… to be a manwh— oh, I see. Ha ha. Ash is a man. You’re so fucking funny, Will Flicker, what a sophisticated sense of humour.’ Ash spits her lollipop stick at me and it stays on my tie. ‘So basically you didn’t get anywhere with her then.’ The bell rings again and she and Daisy jump off the table and adjust their Wonderbras.
‘My dearest Ashley,’ I say, as we gather up our bags and get ready to leave for first period. ‘I shall have you know that the young woman in question eye-fucked me so sincerely and so intimately that I felt at once very turned on, all of a flutter in my heart, violated – but in a good way – and that she was most definitely, definitively, not a lesbian.’
The gang laugh and Ash rolls her eyes at me as the guys and girls make an even split and we head down the stairs and off to Biology.
‘All of a flutter in my heart?’ Jamie repeats, shaking his head disapprovingly at me. ‘Homo.’
I grin and think of Rainbow, as I’ve been doing dreamily all weekend, perhaps with little information on which to base my feelings, but sincerely all the same. I decided on Sunday, somewhere between the leg of lamb and the sherry trifle at Tommo and Nikki’s house, that I really, really liked her, and not in your basic ‘wahay, she’s fit’ way – which for me, picky as I am, isn’t enough to get me to like anyone. There has to be chemistry and she has to have charm and brains and beauty and, in general thus far, be a figment of my imagination and completely unattainable. Fucking Disney. Back to Rainbow. Yes, I’ll admit, at the moment we met I was pretty far gone, but I’m certain it wasn’t just alcohol that had made her so unbelievably sexy. And surprisingly, it wasn’t her face or body either. I couldn’t get over her eyes. With the lack of light they’d looked black, but I’d felt something in them, like an electricity, like they were wider than everyone else’s. I describe things fucking shit sometimes. I always think it’s the hard nuts that get gooiest over girls though … at least, that’s how I’ll explain it if questioned. Not that I’m a particularly hard nut. Anyway. Where was I? It was basically like Rainbow was more alive than the rest of them. She was clearly switched on in ways we didn’t get in Clyde County, clearly intelligent, clearly a challenge, and now that I’d come down from my drug-fuelled high, I figured there was very little chance she’d want to talk to me. Although I knew I was smart I was flunking my GCSEs, I was pretty spotty from smoking and although I was witty and could entertain my mates I never had anything really interesting to say. I’d thought about stuff. Sometimes I thought about studying politics and cutting out the bullshit and standing up for the underdog – yeah! Girl power! Etcetera. But I didn’t know anything about it. Dad tends to tell me I’m thick, which I hate, then talk for hours without saying anything so I never ask him owt, and Mam’s a bit vague about legal stuff that isn’t to do with NCIS and various other telly shows about crime scene investigation.
So I knew I didn’t have a ghost of a chance with Rainbow, but I wanted to know about her. Curiosity, I guess. What do you get if you mix those eyes with those lips? What is a girl called Rainbow going to be like? Will she like me: a virgin, a twat and a stoner? Ah, fuck it. I’ve got to stop being such a dick.
7
The Art of the Right Amount of Stoned
In the meantime I’ve also got to wait. I don’t see this gorgeous switched-on lass around school and, from what I can gather, she might be older than me, so I take a guess that she’s at the sixth form college in Ness-on-Sea and that I’ll see her out on Friday or Saturday. So I start using a new kind of facewash in preparation for the weekend (you can never say I don’t put in the effort) and get on with watching the days waste away again. It doesn’t take that l
ong. I spend most of it just stoned enough for days to blur into each other but not stoned enough for Mam and Dad to notice (the perfect amount). I was about to dive into a description of the next few days but let’s linger on that thought a little, because of course nothing worth noting is going to happen, and talk about the wonderful life-saving concept of the Right Amount of Stoned.
The right amount of stoned defies physics. The right amount of stoned allows you to be in two places at the same time. The true genius of it is that it makes paying attention whether in class or at home feel like zoning out. And the majority of stoners don’t know about it. They are fools, they giggle too much and get away with too little. It’s like the quiet rebellion of the A-grade student who is such a genius that actually they need to do no work to get the As. You know them. You’re probably jealous of them and bitch a little bit, maybe start a rumour that they’re gay or lost their virginity in a car or something. Ash did. Anyway. The student that consistently gets As can rebel as much as they like. They can be rude, they can swear, they can flip a teacher off (and they have the time to do all these things because they did their work in the first five minutes of a fifty-minute lesson), but because they get straight As they can never be expelled. It looks too harsh, particularly because they come to school to be educated and according to the laws of the curriculum they are great at it. They called your mum a cunt, but they are, technically, the best student in your class. A tricky situation for a teacher. For the stoner who perfects the perfect amount of stoned, the situation is the same. When they ask you questions, you can answer. Your work may be shite, but it is done. Hence, the punishment can never be so severe. If you are doped up to your eyeballs, however, they can spot you and turf you out faster than you can slur, ‘No I’m not stoned, errr, it’s … it’s … I’ve had a stroke!’ (true story).
Last summer I was not into drugs. In any way. I thought they were Bad News. Ash had started hitting the bong by then, thanks to various older sexual friends, but Mike and me spent most of our time playing video games, swapping music, surfing and not going out with girls we liked. In the innocent light of youth, we were healthy, idealistic idiots, and we thought we were right, and that Ash and Jamie, who had by the end of the summer succumbed to Ash’s peer-pressuring and become a stoner, were twats.
But there is something about going back to school, that anyone who has ever been to school can relate to, that gets you down. And I mean so far down you feel like you won’t be able to come up. So we go back in the September, and the first week is okay, because there’s not that much work and yes you have five deadlines for massive holiday projects but you did them in detention in the summer term anyway, so you hand them in and get a new coat and generally piss about. Play football at lunch. I don’t do that much any more either. Then it gets to October and there’s that nice frosty feeling on your nose and you hang out at the park and the girls you get off with round the back of the town hall taste of chips and hot chocolate and that’s all good too. But then the days start to drag and when you wake up in the morning it’s so fucking cold. And you start to have to hand in work you haven’t done. You have fifteen different classes and they each give you ‘just half hour a week’, and excuse me for being sarcastic, but it all adds up. People start turning sixteen and your birthday is in August, so it doesn’t happen for you, which makes you a baby. And still unable to buy smokes. Your fingers cramp up and you actually hurt from the cold when you go outside at lunch and break, but you have to, unless you hide in the toilets or the woodwork room or hang about a radiator intimidating people away, because them’s the rules, kids! But then of course you hang about those radiators and tell prefects to knob off and you get lunchtime dits (detentions), which is actually a plus because it means you’re in a warm classroom while everyone else freezes their knacks off on the field. And then comes the advantage of knowing the Right Amount.
January arrives and you realise you have nothing to look forward to. Even Easter is balls, because this is England, so it’s still fucking cold and all you get at Easter is chocolate, which you can shake out of the vending machine next to the Maths block anyway. So you end up getting drunk in the lunch hour to pass the time. Then you go behind the pavilion, which is a little hut at the end of the field, and you meet Dildo, who is a friend of yours, and he’s sitting with Andrew Bell, who isn’t a friend of yours, but appears amicable enough as he passes you his spliff and makes a space for you on the grass next to him. You take a drag. You shrug. There isn’t much to this. You’re there for ten minutes, in which time you smoke about half a joint on your own. You start to giggle. You think, oh I get it, so you reach for another drag.
But then Andrew’s hand stops you.
‘No, mate.’ Your eyes meet, like lovers. ‘No.’ And he pulls your ear to his lips, and he lets you in on the secret, on the Art of the Right Amount of Stoned.
8
God’s Punchline
The only remotely interesting thing that happens before my next Rainbow encounter is that I have to go see my academic tutor at school, which is worrying since I haven’t really been seeing many of my teachers of late. Ms Casper is, I’d say, late thirties and not great looking for it, and we don’t get on well, because the first time I met her I played my usual flirty charm and she accused me of misogyny and mild sexual harassment (I had to look up the first one after the session but I got the point – she’s not a fan). Today I was scheduled for a meeting at 2pm so when I wandered in at 2.15 with the faint nicotine-y scent on my breath only slightly subdued by four hastily crunched mints, I was prepared for a bollocking. ‘Miss Casper?’
‘It’s MS!’ A shout springs from the corner of the room, but I can’t see her and for a moment my brain thinks, oh my god, she’s dead and this is her ghost. But then no, in reality that would never happen. I imagine my mind glaring at itself. Bell end.
‘What?’
I realise too late I’ve said bell end, out loud, and to the teacher’s arse, as she sits with her back to me, crouched behind her desk. ‘Oh, sorry, nothing, Ms Casper. Can I help?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s the computer. I’m trying to get it to reboot so we can do your application for college.’
I bend down to see the wiring. Nothing seems out of place but there is a reboot button and I shove my chewed pencil into it. The screen starts beeping and I press return. Hey presto, computer rebooted. I can’t believe this woman is a) employed and b) computer illiterate. They should have replaced the teachers when they replaced the system, is my thinking. I type in the codes and password cockily and whack the computer with my forefinger.
‘It’s the Flick that does it.’ Yeah, look at that double entendre. I’m so smart and hot.
‘Right.’ Ms Casper’s bespectacled head pops up from behind the table and she pats her hair and brushes the crumbs off her cardigan. I look about the desk. Hobnobs. I take one and offer her the packet. ‘No thank y— Will, give me those! Sit down!’
I pull up a chair next to her.
‘Now, we still haven’t decided what subjects you’re applying for. We’ve got you down for Ness Sixth Form College?’
‘Yeah, for law.’
‘Right.’ She blows her nose loudly. I move my chair back. ‘Do you want to be a lawyer?’
Was that a hint of sarcasm I detected? I frown.
‘I’m not being sarcastic, Mr Flicker, I believe that’s your territory. I’m simply asking what you want to do so we get you the right A Levels.’
‘Politics.’
‘Okay …’ She stares at the screen for what seems like forever, licks her lips cautiously and presses return.
‘D’you want me to do that?’
‘No, no, that’s okay … This is what school is about … learning …’
‘Miss—’
‘Ms. Now, Will, your report card from last term wasn’t very … good. You know you’ll have to work hard to get high enough GCSE grades to actually get into college? And then when you get there … it’s n
ot like here – you can’t just swan in and out of lessons when you like, they’re very strict.’
‘What? I don’t just—’
‘Oh, Flick – sorry, Will – please don’t, for the want of a better word, bullshit me, I’m not an idiot, even if I don’t appear to be exactly computer-literate … they really should have replaced us with the system, or at least given us training … but I know you’re smart and you can do better than you do but then you don’t, do you? I’m just wondering if college is the right option for you … but there’s really no alternative. If you want to go to university, you have to do A Level examinations at college and for someone as bright as you an apprenticeship is a waste of brains. You certainly don’t want to end up at the steel works—’
‘Hey, hold on, my brother works at the works,’ I object, even though I’ve just discovered new respect for Ms Casper. So many of my teachers think I’m thick and it pisses me off but it does mean I can get away with doing badly and not be hassled about it. They can’t be fucked with you, unless you’re the child of a fellow teacher in which case they have to be or they get complaints. I used to be in Maths and English sets all on my own in primary school, when I was a little kid, ’cause I was so far ahead of the other kids but do any of the teachers here know that? Hell no. So it’s nice to think Ms Casper is aware that I’m smart, even if it does now mean she expects things of me. But I can’t have her undermining a family member. Even the best of the staff never understand about life here. They all come from universities in Lancaster or London and they’re doing their bit for poor people before sodding off to better places. I flip into defender-of-the-people mode. ‘What’s wrong with the works, it’s a good, honest job! Half the people are on the dole round here. If you’re at the works you’re earning a living for your family and working hard for it!’
Flick: A Novel Page 3