Sam was continuing in his thick whisper: ‘I’d better relay your mum’s words to my father, hadn’t I? And then we can get out of this place, can’t we? It’s a tip!’
Wasn’t that an invitation of sorts? Pete watched him go into the changing room, and talk briefly with Trevor Price. The fleet of candles illuminated them, so ludicrously unalike: Trevor was stout, Sam lean, Trevor florid, Sam sallow, Trevor bald, Sam long-haired. Pete had never much cared for the garrulous, pompous older man with his habit of holding forth to captive customers, and had never made his wanting to get away asap from him secret whenever he had to buy school uniform or sports clothes at his store. Odd to feel flattered now by the over-tures of his son.
On his return Sam kept up his curdled whisper: ‘No need for us to traipse all the way back down the corridor, you know, Peter. There’s a door out into the car park just here, I’ve been using it all day, in my forced capacity as errand-boy.’ And so there was!
Sam worked its long metal lever, and released the pair of them into the slapping coldness of the night air.
God, what a blessed relief to receive those slaps! It’d been such claustrophobia sitting in the Assembly Hall through the tedious, unfunny opera, on a chair hostile to bum, balls and thighs – and then, to cap all that, to witness Mum’s attentions to her partner! All right, all right, he wasn’t a partner of that kind! At least not provably!
‘Well,’ Sam had edged up close to him again as they took stock of a yard quite remarkable in its darkness: scarcely a light on anywhere nearby, the Priory at its back not flood-lit as normal, street lamps, by government decree, shining at forty per cent of their strength. The parked cars here, thought Pete, looked like so many rows of turtles which might crawl away into further deep shadow.
‘Well! To think I’m actually standing beside one of the Lugg Valley’s few celebrities: Mr Peter Kempsey in the flesh. How did you enjoy that little Yuletide entertainment we’ve just endured?’
Pete couldn’t do better than: ‘And how did Mr Sam Price enjoy it?’
Sam gave another of his snort-laughs: ‘Whatever fool do you take me for, man? It was a load of shit, was it not?’
‘Can’t disagree,’ Pete said.
‘Speaking of shit, do you fancy any? We’ve got enough time and…’ he gestured ahead of them, ‘plenty of space. What with Mr Merchant’s gory ailment and all the TLC your true Florence Nightingale of a mum is giving him, not to mention my Old Man’s tendency to hold forth at the drop of a hat, the Lugg Valley Players won’t be leaving their makeshift Green Room yet. We’ll have the car park to ourselves, and can be “out of sight” in more ways than one!’
‘Meaning?’ asked Pete.
‘Come off it, man, you know what I mean full well.’ Sam’s deep-brown eyes glowed like little gig-lamps in the dark. ‘I’ve got the stuff right here, on my person,’ Sam was assuring him, ‘don’t like to be without for too long. But the two of us should not skulk here so near the main building. Despite the prevailing murk, we can be pried on by any townsfolk of Titipu who emerge. Let’s find ourselves some remote nook or cranny where we can safely get stoned if we want.’
Pete did not get stoned. But he inhaled that evening far more deeply than he’d previously done. How could he not when the spliff was being handed him by someone so ‘sophisticated’? Soon a welcome warmth was easing an unresisted way through his whole body, separating the basic or profoundest part of him from all the surface irritations and discomfort of the evening so far. Beyond him little fleeces of vapour rose in the chilly air from between stationary cars to float over brick walls and beyond, where they sought out larger vapours hanging over the town’s water-meadows. Watching these gave Pete a pleasant sense of being anchored, and anchored in company appetisingly different from anybody else’s in his life. The corner the two youths chose to occupy was blocked off by Lee T. Webster, Electrician’s parked van.
‘So this is something of a red-letter day for me, Peter, meeting you,’ Sam told him, ‘I need to talk to guys with brains, you see, otherwise I’d perish here in my parents’ house, wouldn’t I? And how could I do better than talk to your brainy self. Assuming I’m up to it!’ Pete, suspicious he was being sent up, noted the asymmetry of Sam’s oval face, mouth crooked on the right-hand side, one eye possibly a tiny fraction of an inch lower than the other.
‘Pete , not Peter,’ he stalled, ‘I’m never Peter to friends. Never!’
‘Keep cool, friend, not a matter of life and death surely! But I’ll be kind enough to comply. So tell me, Pete, doesn’t it feel strange treading the streets, going in and out of public buildings, riding trains and buses with the common herd, all the time knowing you’re the cleverest person the region has to offer?’
For all his bravura on the programme Pete did not consider himself this. People might think he did, but he didn’t. Paradoxically his two radio victories had made him doubt his intelligence more than at any other stage of his life. ‘Only the cleverest among volunteers,’ he corrected.
‘But I heard your June performance, man. Wow! Three times wow! And I was actually present in the audience for your first show, yeah, right there,’ he jerked his thumb behind him, to the school buildings, ‘back in September ’72. My Old Man felt we ought to do our local support bit, and so he dragged me along. Those tests you told us all about – they must be quite something.’
‘True, true… but,’ said Pete, marvelling that Sam had remembered this, ‘but… but…’
He was being given an opportunity, he suddenly saw, by this brazen young man who was arousing his spirit and his flesh in about equal measure, to put right his relationship with Leominster, with the region, the country, the world, with his parents, his brothers, himself. Get himself on a decent, realistic footing with all that. These ‘buts’ could mark a tentative beginning of his doing this…
‘But what, man? It’s a fucking fact, as I see it.’
‘It could just be a happy coincidence that the things I shine at are what those two American shrinks value most. That’s what my parents believe, I know. They don’t say so outright, but it’s obvious. Mum’s always loyal to her old college friend who gave me the tests, but I’m pretty sure she agrees with my Dad who thinks…’ painful to get the next words out, but Sam’s presence, and the spliff, stimulated – or relaxed – him into managing them, ‘who thinks I’m not even as clever as my two younger brothers.’ He shivered, not with cold nor dope, but from feeling afresh this injustice, this mistake in computation. He looked round him, before going on with what he now had to confess to this new friend of only minutes’ duration.
‘I’ve got myself up shit creek in all this High Flyers business, Sam.’
And after daring his deepest and sweetest inhalation of the evening, Pete described his deception. ‘So there it is, the BBC is expecting me to participate on January 31, while my parents think I did as they wanted, and declined.’
Sam gave out a low hoot of conspiratorial interest. ‘Well, they’re lopping your balls off, aren’t they? And you can’t have that! Parents! Mine were determined I went to a swank public school, to prove how much dough they’d accumulated over the years, and chose Darnton,’ he spat out the name in hatred, ‘and I couldn’t be doing with life there. It may have traditions that go back a thousand years and have ace connections with the law and the church and the army, even with the pearly gates themselves, but it wasn’t for me. And I told ’em so enough times, and others told ’em too, but did the fuckers listen? Did they hell! So in the end I was forced to see to my own removal, wasn’t I?’
By now Sam was standing even closer to Pete than before. So much so that, leaning against the meeting of two brick walls as they were, it felt as though they were lying upright together, two mates side by side in some natural outdoor bed, in an intimacy that intended to go further than just the exchange of youth’s miseries. ‘Now listen, Pete, you’ve fucking well got to act on your own behalf, just as I did. And I know just how.’ His eyes had a ferv
id, almost hysteric sparkle. ‘You’re going to write straightaway, this very evening when you get back to your abode, to Bob Whats-his-name. You will tell him to address any and every communication to Mr Peter Kempsey c/o Price, The Tall House, Bargates, Leominster, Hereford-and-Worcester. You will explain you’re staying with us while your parents are away. I’m now living at home – going to a crammer’s in Hereford in the New Year so I can take my A Levels in the summer – and I’ll get downstairs to the morning post before anybody else does. But to be on the safe side, I’ll spin Mother and the Old Man some tale – oh, that I’ve agreed to enter some competition in your name because – well, are you eighteen yet, Pete?’
‘Not till January 7,’ said Pete, now a-bubble with an elation he couldn’t name. Behind those stammered ‘buts’ of a few minutes ago had been the longing to extricate himself from his brain-box status – and his apparent need to live up to it in his own community (as well as to a nationwide audience). But now, with the aid Sam was proposing he passionately wanted to vindicate it. And bugger the whole lot who doubted him.
‘Well, I turned eighteen in September. So there we go, my friend. Parfait! Perfetto! I’ve entered the competition because I’m eighteen whereas you are not. Obviously I’ll let you know the split-second anything comes from the BBC. How d’ you feel about it?’
‘Sounds pretty watertight! Yes, I’m up for it!’ Anyway hadn’t he a moral duty to take part in the January 31 special edition? Bob Thurlow might well have decided on this extra edition of his show primarily to give a further opportunity to Peter Kempsey whose brilliant earlier performances he so admired. What other course was there for him but subterfuge?
Or rather, more subterfuge.
‘This spliff’s been great, hasn’t it? Made us a friendship,’ said Sam. And if it were physically possible for him to inch further towards him without the two of them actually melting into one another, he did just this. Patchouli and the caressing fumes of dope engulfed Pete, banishing the car park’s plague-wraiths of night mist – and with them his martyr’s humiliations. ‘Something to be pleased about, huh?’ That lopsided grin of his widened. ‘Oh, and another point! Don’t tell your parents a goddam thing till the actual date.’ He articulated the next words in a loud whisper right into Pete’s left ear-hole. ‘ Not till January 31 itself!’
Pete said, ‘Christ, you’ve thought it all out in no time! I reckon you’re a bigger High Flyer than I am, Sam.’ He couldn’t pay anyone a greater compliment.
Their talk went onto more general things, and every sentence seemed to Pete confirmation of Sam’s own reading of their situation: yes, the shared joint had made them a friendship. They only stopped when there was an irruption of torches into the gloom of the yard followed by the voices of their carriers. The cast of The Mikado and their helpers were finally leaving the school premises from the side door that Sam had revealed to Pete, a ragged aural army of chatter, laughter, hums from the ridiculous show, and best wishes for the festive season. Sam put a finger to his lips, and the two of them remained in their corner so motionless that even Lee T. Webster, Electrician did not see them as he came and drove his van away… Here was Trevor Price himself, self-importantly swinging his arms, as if he truly were Emperor of Japan. And now – Pete’s mouth emptied of saliva at the sight – came Mum and Oliver Merchant. Considering the intense and varied proximity the pair had enjoyed all evening, their present movements were remarkably circumspect, not to say chaste. Mum walked independently, holding her bouquet of freesias-and-roses like a torch, as Pete himself had done earlier. Did he feel a little disappointment as well as relief at this? Did he want to get in Dad’s good books at last, as his filial defender?
Sam was saying, ‘Coast clear now, thank the Lord! I’d invite you back to mine, but the Old Man will have arrived in Bargates before us, and he’ll be wanting to gas on and on about the triumph of the show.’ Not half he won’t, agreed Pete inwardly. ‘He wouldn’t let us just sneak off to my snug by ourselves. I’ll walk with you as far as yours instead. Where is it exactly that you live?’
Great that Sam, so early on in their knowing each other, was volunteering to behave like any other mate. Yet Sam’s last question, and the tone in which he’d spoken it, was annoying. He’d implied that wherever Pete lived it would be socially inferior to the Prices’ Bargates house. And Pete Kempsey felt inferior to absolutely nobody… But, the two new friends made their way through the Priory churchyard and across the Priory Green, in a Leominster never so dark since World War Two.
They made plans to meet in a coffee bar this coming Thursday, December 27 (when, as Sam said, ‘this farce of a festival will be over’). Pete cast, as often when out after dark, many a glance up at the strong sandstone tower of Leominster’s Priory Church of St Peter and St Paul, almost willing its protection.
Etnam Street now; Pete could already discern the form of the Christmas tree in the front bay-window of Woodgarth. ‘The Old Man’s getting me a car first week of New Year so I can drive myself to my studies,’ Sam was proclaiming, ‘so you see… opportunity knocks for us, Peter – Pete, I apologise! We can go places together, have another spliff or three, listen to some good music.’
Pete said: ‘Great. Let’s do that!’ Then, ‘ good music,’ he thought, and ‘Do you like Jerry García by any chance?’ he asked as casually as he could, and avoiding the very name ‘Grateful Dead’.
Sam snorted out: ‘Jerry García? Why, the man is quite simply a genius.’
‘But when the great “Pig-pen” died earlier this year…’ began Pete, to test his new friend further.
‘The whole world seemed to come to a fucking end,’ said Sam with a loud, sad, self-conscious sigh, ‘but then the Dead’s new album, released in October…’
‘Wake of the Flood,’ put in Pete hastily, in case Sam might think he didn’t know.
‘Turned out their best yet!’ both boys said in unison.
Satisfied with such likemindedness Sam made as if to walk away, towards his house in Bargates, on the west side of Leominster’s town centre. Then he clearly had a change of mind and swung round back to Pete. ‘Do you want to hear something that happened to me shortly before I left Darnton? Do you know what Darnton even looks like?’ he asked.
And though Sam’s tone of voice here unpleasantly resembled that in which he’d asked where Pete lived, the reply had to be: ‘’Fraid I don’t.’
‘It’s an old foundation and the School House actually dates from the sixteenth century, but most of it’s Victorian Imperialist stuff run along medieval lines. Darnton town’s pretty dismal, at least I think so, but countryside round it isn’t bad. Ordinary fields, grazing pastures, little woods – typical Midlands. And it was out in the country there that I had my big experience.’
Bigger than being on High Flyers, I’ll warrant, thought Pete.
‘It was the last Wednesday in September. I’d just had my eighteenth birthday, and, by way of celebrating it, a little sermon from my Housemaster about not putting my shoulder to the wheel work-wise. I was really glad, I don’t mind admitting, to be out on my own, on a long run. I’ve always enjoyed long runs, other people can get on my nerves so I like the solitude you can have on them. “How can I put up with another year of Darnton?” I asked myself, and Pete, I’m ninety per cent sure I spoke the words aloud. I’d come almost to the end of one field, and raised my head to look at the shape and size of the next one, and there, Pete, it was…
‘In the sky, about sixty or seventy yards off. Resting on the air just a little higher than the tallest trees nearby! Circular object, two feet across. Joined to one end was a box shaped like one of those old magic lanterns, and this box was pointing right down at me. “Whatever are you? Have you come to my call?” I shouted out, “I need your help!” And before you ask, no, NO, I hadn’t been smoking a fucking thing. I may have been known at Darnton as the Spliff King, but I promise you I hadn’t been near one all day. And do you know what happened next, Pete?’
How
could he? Pete was a-tremble with anticipation.
‘This weird object moved so that the box part of it jigged up and down. It was like it was acknowledging what I’d just shouted out, and assuring me of something. Of my own powers, I guess.
It must have stayed there nodding in mid-air at least a minute and a half. And then the entire contraption…’
‘Burst into flame?’ from Pete who felt as if he might do so himself, with the thrill of this anecdote.
‘No, it disappeared. Melted into the golden afternoon. This may be hard to believe, Pete, but I wasn’t afraid in the very least. You see, I felt I was part of its experience rather than t’other way about. Wherever it had vanished to, it was taking a little section of my own self with it. Understand? Now, Mr High Flyer Kempsey, what do you make of that? What do you think it was that I saw that last Wednesday in September?’
What could the mesmerised Pete reply but: ‘A UFO?’
‘You’ve said it, man, you’ve fucking said it!’
‘I used myself,’ said Pete, recollecting hours of boyhood reading, ‘to be pretty interested in them.’
‘Interested nothing!’ said Sam, ‘I’ve fucking seen one! And it’s a pity more of us don’t. We need UFOs in this goddam rotten world of ours. Happy Christmas!’
And with that Sam gave his friend a half-mocking salute, and then began walking up Etnam Street with big strides which – of all things – reminded Pete of Mr Trevor Price of Price’s Menswear, as he made his way importantly about the town…
‘Happy Christmas?’ Hadn’t the Prime Minister himself declared: ‘We shall have a harder Christmas than we have had since the War’?
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