Jam Tops, the Fonz and the Pursuit of Cool

by Kris Lillyman

  Nevertheless, Daisy broke up from school without getting to see Steve Cool. As far as she knew, he was out of her life for good and she would never get to see his wonderful black quiffed head (or the rest of him for that matter) ever again.

  She felt totally bereft.

  ***

  ‘Look out for Look-in’ sung the advert on the massive twenty-four inch screen of the brand new Grundig colour TV set that Daisy was admiring in the window of Radio Rentals the following Saturday morning, which was officially the first day of the school holidays. And she made a mental note to do just that - look out for Look-in, that is. Look-in seemed like exactly the sort of young, trendy magazine she needed to give her some clue about how to look and how to dress other than the Hair-beared, ginger-nutted, specky-freckling, God Squadder look she was currently modelling. It also had TV listings and features on the latest shows that Daisy really wanted to know about.

  Inside it’s pages she hoped to find out at last what a Worzel Gummidge was and why a Magpie had it’s own TV show. Also, whether or not she should be wary of The Phantom Flan Flinger. Furthermore, had she got a Follyfoot and if so, what should she do about it?

  Without the benefit of a telly in the Flynn household it had been very difficult to deduce these things - so Look-in was manna from heaven, tailor-made to suit her every need.

  As Daisy dragged herself away from the mother of all TV sets in the Radio Rentals window and moved on up the street, she walked straight into a solid gold robot that had just clunked awkwardly out of the shop next door, seemingly without any peripheral vision in it’s shiny metal head (which looked exactly like an upside down, family-sized tin of Quality Street that had been sprayed gold by someone not at all used to using spray paint, in fact, on closer inspection, the whole ‘robot’ looked more than a little ‘Heath Robinson’ with parts made from tea trays, cricketing shin-pads, a jock-strap, and a colander as well as several rolls of tin foil all spray painted gold by the same amateur sprayer).

  “Ooh, sorry,” Daisy said, not really knowing the best way to address the robot as it slowly clanged around to face her, it’s arms and legs stiff and unbendable. “Didn’t see you there!”

  “That’s okay,” said the robot, finally making it all the way around to face Daisy who immediately saw that it was not a robot at all but Trevor Savoury from school, who she sat behind in Maths. When she saw that it was Trevor, everything suddenly made sense. Firstly, because he was famous for dressing up in odd outfits (his mufti day appearances were the stuff of legend) and secondly, because Daisy had heard nothing on the news about an invasion of badly sprayed robots with a propensity for cricket.

  “Oh, hi! Trevor,” she said, “Didn’t recognise you for a moment. I like your outfit”.

  “C-3po” said Trevor.

  But the Star Wars reference was completely lost on Daisy and for a moment she was flummoxed. What she thought he’d said was “See three pea owes” which just didn’t seem to make any sense at all. Then, looking passed him, Daisy noticed Trevor had just come out of a music shop and realised that he must have been saying he’d “Seen three pianos”.

  “Oh, have you?” She said, “That’s lovely. Did you see them in the shop, were they nice?” She was inadvertently speaking to him as an indulgent mother would to a toddler, or more accurately as a psychiatric nurse might speak to a deranged, babbling simpleton, “Did they play nice tunes?”

  Now it was Trevor’s turn to look flummoxed. He hadn’t got a clue what she was on about, what shop? He hadn’t even mentioned a shop. And as for a tune, well he certainly hadn’t heard anything and he was starting to think the only tunes she was hearing were bloody Looney Toons!

  What was it with girls and why did they have to be so weird?

  Nevertheless, Daisy persevered, “I love your robot outfit by the way - it’s very, erm… shiny.” She also wanted to say ‘and a bit runny’ but thought better of it.

  Trevor, however, decided the best way forward was to ignore all mention of the shop and just said, rather pointedly, “Not robot. Protocol droid.”

  “Oh,” said Daisy, although Trevor might as well have been speaking Chinese as she hadn’t understood a word.

  “Yeah, well anyway, bye!” Said Trevor, already making a hasty (actually very slow, very stiff) getaway.

  “Yeah, bye!” Daisy said after him. As she made to move off, she looked up at the dingy, dark music shop that Trevor had just come out of and thought about the ‘three pianos’ he had just mentioned, which had clearly impressed him. So she decided to go in and take a look for herself.

  ***

  Gordy had already made a fairly good start on ‘The Cool List’ and had been somewhat successful in incorporating some of the items into his new, much cooler, lifestyle - although not necessarily in the order he had written them down.

  For example, the first item he managed to tick off was Number 8. ‘Strutting’. Everywhere he walked now was accompanied by a pronounced ‘jarring’ of the shoulders, a rhythmic swing of the hips, an almost imperceptible limp and the song Stayin’ Alive playing on ‘loop’ in his head. He thought it was all going incredibly well until a well-meaning passer-by rushed to his aid to try and prevent him from swallowing his own tongue - labouring, as they were, under the mistaken impression that Gordy was having an epileptic fit. However, apart from that minor set-back, he had pretty much got strutting down pat.

  The next item on the list that he had mastered was Number 12 ‘Talking Jive’. Although this hadn’t gone down too well with his nan, who didn’t appreciate Gordy calling Nicholas Parsons a ‘badass motherfucker’ for giving away a car on Sale of the Century. But aside from that he was liberally peppering conversations with phrases like ‘shiiiiiit!’ (which was just a very prolonged version of the word ‘shit’ - usually said after being told something surprising) and ‘can you dig it’ (when asking if someone understood what he was saying - which, sadly, his nan rarely did nowadays. Shiiiiiit!

  The third item was actually Number 5. on the list and a real easy one; ‘White socks’. Gordy had simply raided Izzie’s wardrobe (Izzie, short for Isobel, being his little sister - the ten-year old pain in Gordy’s fourteen-year-old butt - and his brother, Kev’s, sixteen-year-old butt for that matter). From her wardrobe he had liberated several pairs of her knee length white school socks, which would do until he could buy some of his own (although they were a bit girlie, not too mention tight and possibly stopping the blood circulation in his toes - which certainly helped with putting the ‘limp’ element into his ‘strut’). But for now, the ‘socks box’ was ticked.

  The fourth and final item he had so far mastered was Number 2. ‘Sunglasses’. Although ‘mastered’ was not exactly true. In all honesty, Gordy was struggling with this one. To start with it didn’t help that he wore spectacles.

  In order to wear sunglasses, he had to take his specs off and that just made his eyesight a whole lot worse. Furthermore, wearing sunglasses outside in the daylight, even on a fairly dull day, was one thing but wearing them at night or indoors or, even worse, wearing them indoors at night was entirely another. He had already broken his dad’s second best pair (Alan Brewer, Gordy’s dad, was something of a ‘James Bond’ enthusiast and owned several pairs of ‘Bondesque’ type sunglasses. Among them were a pair of retro black plastic Ray-Bans - all very sixties, from the Goldfinger era and a pair of chrome aviators with holes drilled through the arms, which screamed ‘Elvis: The Burger Years’ which were decidedly more Live and Let Die). It was the aviators that Gordy had broken by walking into a telegraph pole on the way back from Trevor’s a few nights earlier (there was no moon that night and certainly no sun but Gordy had worn the glasses anyway) needless to say, his dad had not discovered this yet and Gordy thought it best not to tell him for fear of finding himself on the wrong end of yet another ‘disappointed face’ and possibly a huge telling off.

  Anyway, Gordy was wear
ing his dad’s very dark sunglasses (as well as a pair of Izzie’s rather girlie white socks) as he sat minding the store of ‘Bailey’s Bandstand’ feeling only slightly less blind than the blind bloke out of Peters and Lee. In fact, had he been stuck down a mineshaft, wearing a blindfold during a total eclipse of the sun with his eyes shut, then he would only be slightly less blind than he was sitting in that very dark, very dull shop. But he was convinced that he looked cool, so he kept the sunglasses on.

  So when the little bell tinkled above the door when it opened, Gordy couldn’t see who had entered, indeed, he could only barely see a fleeting blur of daylight beyond the door before it quickly closed again.

  “Hello?” Gordy said, with some trepidation, this being his third Saturday in the job without so much as a whiff of a customer - unless you counted Trevor who had been in every Saturday (modelling a different costume each time) and his mum and nan (who had been in twice) as a whiff, which he didn’t (well, in his nan’s case, maybe the term ‘whiff’ was justified, especially if she hadn’t yet used the bus station loos!). But anyway, other than those three he hadn’t yet served one customer.

  However, working at ‘Bailey’s Bandstand’ was hardly comparable to the Harrod’s New Year Sale so Mr. Bailey, after a brief training session on Gordy’s first Saturday, seemed perfectly happy to leave his new employee in charge.

  As it turned out, Mr. Bailey was an extremely kind and trusting man whose wife was very ill (Gordy didn’t like to ask too much but guessed, from the way his mum and nan spoke, it was something ‘not too good’, which made him feel very sorry for Mr. Bailey). Because of his wife’s illness, Mr. Bailey liked to take Saturdays off to be with her - his interest in the shop having deteriorated at exactly the same rate as her health.

  Needless to say, the already sedentary business had all but ground to a complete halt with customers being rarer than rocking horse poo, which was why Gordy hadn’t served any in three whole Saturdays (customers that is, not rocking horse poo).

  But now was his big chance and as he heard the sound of footsteps approaching the counter he said, “Can I help you?”

  “Hello” said Daisy a bit nervously, recognising Gordy not only from school but also as the boy who had nearly come a cropper in the Pik ‘n’ Mix at Woolworths a few weeks earlier. “I’ve come to see the three pianos.”

  “Sorry?” Said Gordy.

  “The three pianos?” Daisy said, now wondering if this had been an incredibly bad idea. “Trevor said he had seen three pianos.”

  Gordy thought for a long moment. He knew he couldn’t see much through his sunglasses but surely he would have noticed three pianos. “Trevor?” he said. “Trevor Savoury?”

  “Yes. I just ran into him outside, dressed up like a robot. He said, ‘see three pianos,’ so I thought I would. Come in and see them I mean. The pianos.”

  Gordy was still confused and now he needed to see who it was who was talking to him, who obviously knew his best friend, Trevor. Reluctantly he removed the shades and even though the shop was gloomy, he blinked a couple of times to adjust to the slight change in light. Then, embarrassed by his own shortcomings, reached into his pocket and pulled out his very untrendy, very uncool specs and slid them on.

  But where he’d expected to see some doddery old biddy standing before him, another one of those entering ‘God’s Waiting Room’, he saw Daisy Flynn instead, the specky, ginger girl from school who everyone called ‘Hair Bear.’

  “Oh, hello,” he said, squinting at her in the gloom, more than a bit surprised to see someone without a blue rinse and whose skin wasn’t in need of a good iron.

  Daisy smiled, “Hello.”

  “You saw Trevor and he told you to see three pianos?” Gordy asked, just to be doubly sure.

  “Yeah,” she replied, her freckly face now turning a bright shade of scarlet, although thankfully that couldn’t be seen in the darkness of the shop. “I said that I liked his outfit and he said ‘seen three pianos’, at least I’m fairly sure that’s what he said.”

  Then the penny dropped and Gordy started smiling. “I don’t think he said ‘seen three pianos’” he said, trying to suppress a giggle, “I think he said ‘c-3po’”

  “Yes!” Daisy said, also now giggling slightly although not really understanding why. “That is what he said! What does it mean?”

  Gordy was properly laughing now as he spluttered, “C-3po. It’s the name of the robot out of Star Wars - it’s what Trevor was dressed up as today. That’s what he was telling you.”

  Daisy was laughing too. “Star Wars!” She exclaimed. “So nothing to do with pianos then?”

  “No, nothing,” said Gordy, tears rolling down his face.

  “Oh.” Said Daisy, feeling completely silly but laughing along anyway. “Well I suppose that makes much more sense. Sort of.”

  “Yeah,” said Gordy. “It does kind of. You had me wondering there for a minute.”

  “Me too,” Daisy chuckled, “although I was sort of looking forward to seeing the pianos!”

  “Sorry,” said Gordy wiping his eyes and just briefly, for the shortest of short moments, thinking how pretty Daisy looked when she laughed, even with the hideous blue specs and flame red hair.

  “No problem,” Daisy said, still giggling slightly at the silly misunderstanding. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Three weeks,” Gordy said, now feeling a little self-conscious about working in such a dull mausoleum.

  “Wow! That’s really cool, I wish I worked here with all these records, I’d never be bored”. The word ‘cool’ was quite common parlance in the Flynn household, what with her parents being hippies and all (almost every sentence had the word ‘cool’ in it and almost invariably ended in the word ‘man’, as in, ‘that’s cool, man’). Everything was cool to the Flynn’s. The cat was cool, a cup of tea was cool, God was, of course, particularly cool - even the postman was cool when in fact he was really just a fat, lazy git who couldn’t be arsed to wait after ringing the doorbell with a parcel to be signed for. He would just ring once, hang around for two seconds then bugger off which meant either Glynn or Lynn would have to jump into the Bible-bus and drive down to the depot especially to pick it up! But even that was ‘cool’ in the Flynn household. Although definitely not cool in the way Gordy interpreted it.

  However, music was very cool - in the way Gordy interpreted it - in the Flynn house and Glynn and Lynn had a massive record collection. In fact, when in Africa, music was the one thing, other than all her friends in the village, that kept Daisy company. She would listen to her parents records for hours (actually the records themselves were stored in England in several large boxes in Daisy’s grandma’s garage but Glynn and Lynn had taken a couple of cassette cases full of C60 and C120 tapes to Africa with them that were chock-a-block full of recordings of their eclectic mix of supersonic sounds), which she listened to on a portable tape recorder.

  When she wasn’t listening to tapes she was listening to her trusty transistor radio - tuning it in to any station that played music - African and English stations but also American stations too. Rock ‘n’ roll, Jazz, Soul, Folk, Funk, Blues, Reggae, Rock, she listened to anything and loved it all. So working in Bailey’s Bandstand would be her idea of absolute heaven.

  Daisy didn’t know it yet, but her extensive music knowledge and wide variety of musical tastes was about to make her very, very cool indeed - not in the same way as a the cat or a cup of tea or even God, but in Gordy’s way. The way that was Number 6 on ‘The Cool List’ - the way Gordy wanted so desperately to be.

  “Really?” Gordy said (secretly very impressed that Daisy had used the word ‘cool’ as an opening gambit, and clearly so naturally, so unforced - unlike him who was trying to awkwardly crowbar it into sentences at every given opportunity and just sounding like an uncool tit who was trying to use the word ‘cool’ to sound cool). “What, you’d
like to work in this place?”

  “Yeah, of course, why not?” Daisy replied. “I mean just look at all these great records. They’re just so cool”.

  There. She’d said it again, making it seem so simple. Why couldn’t he do that?

  “Erm, yeah”. He said. “I suppose they are” (he actually had no idea). “Um, which ones in particular?” In his whole three weeks at the shop Gordy hadn’t so much as looked in the record boxes, assuming them all to contain his nan’s favourites like Mantovani, Jim Reeves, Val Doonican, Mario Lanza and Bing Crosby and other such artists that appealed only to people on a pension.

  “Well, there’s The Who, for a start”, Daisy said, just casually peering into the box closest to her.

  “The who?” Gordy asked.

  “Yeah,” said Daisy, not realising he’d asked a question. “They’re brilliant. Oh, and Pink Floyd and Led Zep” she went on, now looking round in earnest, “Wow! And Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding and The Stones!”

  Gordy wasn’t a complete moron, he’d of course heard of The Rolling Stones - he even knew the lead singer was Mick Jagger. He’d heard of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin too (who hadn’t?). But the others - Curtis Whatsisname and Otis Thingamajig he really didn’t know.

  But Daisy still hadn’t finished, she was like a kid in a candy store as she pointed with increasing delight at the names she recognised from her parents’ collection and those long African nights listening to her radio under the sheets, underneath the mosquito net. “Nina Simone - ooh, I love her, The Beach Boys - they’re brilliant!” Gordy had heard of these too, mainly due to their 20 Golden Greats being advertised repeatedly on the telly).

  “Bob Dylan - great, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles - they’re really good, love a bit of Motown, ELO - hmmm, not bad but not really my thing, The Mamas and The Papas - they’re Mum and Dad’s absolute favourites. Elvis, naturally, The Ramones - love them, Bill Haley and The Comets, okay, but a bit old, The Kinks...” She could have gone on for hours before Gordy butted in.