Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

‘Of course,’ I say, and the others nod – they all like Nana. But I’m not sure what sort of help we could provide at a funeral. I hope we don’t have to be pallbearers – it’s hard not to imagine the most awful of accidents. I hate talking about it. The thought of Nana’s death is always with me. I try and get on with life as best as I can but whatever I do, it’s always there, lurking in a corner, ready to ambush me when I’m least prepared for it. Now Mick asks me to jot my number on the inside of his outsize Rizla packet and says he’ll be in touch when the time comes.

  I don’t want to think about this business of the funeral, not until I have to, anyway. I distract myself with another trawl through the re-ordered record bins while Diesel helps Mick to shut up the shop. Soon, the three of us are slouching past the Wheatsheaf, where Diesel stops and says that the best place to talk on a hot day like this would be in a pub garden, with four ice-cold pints of Kronenbourg.

  ‘We won’t get served in there,’ Clive says. I think it’s the pair of ceramic lions guarding the Victorian pub’s marbled entrance that’s putting him off. That and the enormous, pony-tailed wrestler who’s mopping the bar top as he watches three probably underage youths loitering in his car park.

  ‘Course we will,’ Diesel says, uncertainly.

  Clive and I walk straight through the pub and out into the pub garden at the rear, choosing a table where we can see and hear Diesel at the bar. Diesel looks very small in front of this goliath of the beer trade. I hadn’t realised his voice was so high either until I hear him squeak, ‘Can I have three pints of lager, please?’ Perhaps he’s wearing tight underpants.

  The landlord, on the other hand, has his bass turned all the way up, with enough volume to reach drinkers down the end of the garden.

  ‘Of course you can, sunshine,’ he says. After pausing for dramatic effect, possibly, he booms out, ‘ID?’

  People at nearby tables stop talking and listen. I can see Diesel shifting uncomfortably in his trainers.

  ‘Did I say lager?’ he says at last, slapping his head. ‘I meant lager shandy. Three pints please.’

  ‘ID?’ the landlord says, again.

  Diesel makes a big pantomime out of checking his pockets, slapping his sides, and probably rolling his eyes. ‘I’d forget my head,’ he’s saying. ‘Must have left it at home.’

  The girls at the next table, who can only be months older than us, have started sniggering.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ the landlord says, loudly. ‘We’ve forgotten our ID, have we? What are we going to do now?’ I think he’s playing to the crowd, who are now openly laughing.

  Diesel must have heard it, because very clearly and rather crossly, he says, ‘I’ll have three pints of your finest lager shandy – and as soon as you like, please.’ Which seems to interest the crowd. But it’s gone so quiet now that everyone in the garden can hear him add, in a much quieter voice, ‘Without the lager, please.’

  ‘What is the point,’ Diesel is saying, as we extract the pink and yellow cocktail umbrellas and bright red plastic straws with which the landlord has rather humorously decorated our glasses of lemonade. ‘What is the point, I’m saying, of exams, when I’ll be going straight out to work anyway? No uni-pigging-versity for me, now.’

  ‘You weren’t going anyway,’ Clive reminds him.

  ‘I’ll be at Magic Mick’s until I die, now,’ Diesel is saying. ‘Or at least until he does.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, Clive, try and keep up,’ Diesel says. ‘Because Lauren’s going to have the kid, isn’t she? And there’s nothing I can do to stop her.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Clive says.

  ‘No, fuck me,’ Diesel says. ‘She won’t even talk about losing it. Last week when I had that black eye?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I didn’t walk into a cupboard door.’

  We act surprised. ‘So what happened?’ Clive asks.

  ‘I gave her a leaflet about terminating pregnancies,’ Diesel says.

  ‘Fuck,’ Clive says.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask.

  ‘What can I do? You tell me?’ Diesel says. ‘I’m fucked.’

  ‘Fuck,’ we say.

  I can imagine what he’s seeing: the future with all the best years edited out. He can’t go off travelling with a kid, won’t be joining us on any road trip. He won’t even be able to go to pubs and clubs unless he can find a babysitter. And he probably won’t be able to afford it anyway. It’ll be nights in with the telly while we’re off at festivals or going to gigs. And, of course, he’s going to miss out entirely on The Shagging Years.

  I don’t want to say what I’m going to say, as I quite like Lauren. She’s gabby but she’s got a good heart. I’ve seen her helping new kids on their first day at school and I’ve not heard her backstabbing her mates like most of the girls do. But she should have been on the pill, shouldn’t she? She can’t just rob our mate of the best years of his life, all because of a five-minute fumble in the park. So I’m probably only voicing what Clive is thinking too, when I say, ‘So why don’t you tell her to do one?’

  ‘It’s not just me, is it?’ Diesel says. ‘There’s Mum, who’s over the moon about it, can’t wait to be a grandmother at thirty nine. And her parents, who aren’t exactly thrilled with the news but who I think will fucking kill me if I don’t go through with it.’

  ‘With what?’ Clive says.

  ‘Marriage. Kids. Work. Home. The whole train set.’

  ‘As if,’ Clive says.

  ‘Well, couldn’t you do one?’ I say. ‘Just go somewhere they don’t know you and start over again?’

  ‘I haven’t started here yet,’ Diesel says. ‘Where would I go? What would I do?’

  ‘What about going to stay with your Uncle Lol?’ Clive suggests.

  ‘He’s in Leicester,’ Diesel says.

  ‘Leicester’s not so bad,’ I say.

  ‘The prison is,’ Diesel says.

  We sit in silence while we ponder the enormity of Diesel’s fate. We’ve had pregnancies at school before, but it’s always been the ones you’d expect it to happen to. Weird when they turn up at school with their carrycots to show them off. They don’t look so happy when I see them in town, pushing strollers and watching their mates getting ready to go out. I saw some girls pointing out Lauren’s swollen belly in the common room and I so nearly said something. I wish I had; it shouldn’t happen to someone as well meaning as Lauren. It shouldn’t happen to Diesel, either.

  ‘There must be something you can do, mate,’ Clive says.

  ‘This is your life,’ I tell him. ‘And sometimes you just have to do the wrong thing. Say, “Sorry, Mum, no big wedding, no grandchild with your name”. And then you’ll just have to man-up to her lot. You have to leave her, Diesel.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. Disconsolately is the word I want here.

  ‘Why not?’ Clive and I say, together.

  Diesel’s staring into the future like he’s watching the carpenters building his gallows.

  ‘I love her, don’t I?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ we chorus.

  We don’t ask him about having a party at his.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hey Girl, Don’t Bother Me

  Mum has been talking to Russell Crowe again. I’ve caught her at it before, when Dad was at work and I should have been at school, but wasn’t. If she thinks we’re out, she doesn’t bother to close the door to her sewing room, where she spends an increasing amount of her spare time. The sewing room is really the box room, the sort of room which will either be filled with junk or get turned into someone’s office or games station. Dad’s office is his shed. His personal space is the garden, which no one uses much as it seems almost too manicured and perfect to spoil by actually walking on. Plus, it’s overshadowed, literally, by the fence which Dad added the high trellis to recently, to block out any sign of the small mountain of metal which is growing daily in Roger Dyson’s garden-cum-scrapyard.

&nbs
p; In her sewing room, Mum’s got an antique sewing table and a newish sewing machine, an old wardrobe, an upholstered chair with broken springs, a stack of cardboard boxes mostly containing bits of material, and, I discovered, a five year diary, which she keeps in the drawer of the table and whose flimsy lock I’ve often been tempted to pick so I could find out what goes on in her mind. (It’s funny how your parents remain mysteries to you). I’m thinking, does she still love Dad? Did she ever love Dad? Where does she find her pleasure these days? Does she still have hopes for the future, or is this it? I’m thinking of what she might write in that diary when I have finally told Dad that GD and Nana are not his parents and how this will affect her, because GD is certain that it will. But I’m forgetting the other thing she keeps in her room, which stands in the corner by her desk and is called Russell Crowe.

  Russell Crowe arrived when Dad’s department store was having a facelift and a lot of old junk found its way onto the skips around the back. Russell had gone from being a mannequin dressed in the latest fashions and carefully posed in one of the plate-glass windows, to a naked dummy sharing a skip with a gang of condemned standard lamps, a broken down sofa and some old office chairs. Mum was doing a lot of sewing at that time, running up summer dresses she never wore and making me shirts which I never wore. She’d mentioned her need for a dressmaker’s dummy and Dad must have thought it would save a few quid if he took the mannequin from the skip and made her a present of it.

  She called it Russell and carried it up to her sewing room. I thought Dad had done a decent thing at the time. I didn’t know it was no earthly good to her, not as a dressmaker’s dummy, anyway. But Russell did turn out to have other uses. The next clothes she made were fitted around Russell’s frame in much the same way she would have used a dressmaker’s dummy. The difference was that once fitted, they stayed where they were. I soon caught on that she was making clothes only for the mannequin, whom I would see in her sewing room fitted out with a new suit of clothes every few weeks. He became as well dressed as Mum’s sewing skills allowed. She bought a number of wigs from the fancy dress shop and styled them to suit his look.

  One day he would be sporting a two-piece suit, worn with one of Dad’s old shirts and a new tie, which I suspect Mum had bought for “him”, as she referred to the doll, and a brown mullet. The next time he would be wearing a floral print shirt, made from the old living room curtains and a blond pageboy hairstyle. Eventually, he had a suit of clothes and wigs and even facial hair for every occasion and Russell was as likely to be stood at her side as she read her True Crime magazines at her desk, dressed in a smart but casual ensemble of V-necked jumper, white tee shirt and charcoal slacks as he was in a formal dinner jacket and black tie. Soon, Russell’s wardrobe was filling the wooden version by the door. Mum laughed off any questions about Russell, saying he was helping her improve her understanding of clothes design and didn’t we all need a hobby?

  Recently, though, she’s stopped all pretence of making clothes. Russell’s clothes now come from Oxfam and Help the Aged. She spends whole days trailing around the charity shops and it’s hard to know what to say when she drags me in one of these places, holds up a purple polo shirt and asks me much too loudly whether I think it will suit Russell Crowe? The whole episode has been weird and until recently, I’ve not known what was at the bottom of it.

  Then I heard her talking to someone upstairs on the day I came back early from school, having blagged a study afternoon. At first I thought she was on the phone, but the sewing room hasn’t got an extension and Mum hasn’t got a mobile. It sounded like she was having an enjoyable chat with someone, though. She sounded much brighter, livelier than she usually is with Dad. Curious, I went halfway up the stairs to eavesdrop.

  ‘One day,’ she was saying, ‘I’ll have that shop, I really will, and it’ll sell the nicest flowers in town. I can arrange them beautifully, you know, much better than they do at Flower Power, though I do say so myself. We’ll start small, just a corner shop somewhere, but we’ll grow, you know, just like the flowers. And we’ll blossom, Russell. Violet’s will be the place to go for cut flowers and potted perennials for all occasions. And you, Russell, when you’re not making your films, you’ll help out in the shop, won’t you? And we’ll live above the shop in a lovely flat, just you and me and the dogs and the waterbed.’

  There’s been other stuff, involving the waterbed, which I won’t detail here because I’m too busy trying to delete it from my own memory. But at the bottom of all this is the inescapable conclusion that Mum is not only dissatisfied, but she’s lonely too – lonely in the midst of her own family. When I heard that, I slipped back down the stairs and let myself quietly out the back door. It’s been a sad revelation and one that I know I won’t be able to do anything about. I can’t talk to Dad and tell him. He wouldn’t have a clue what to do either, and I don’t know how he would receive the news that he has rivals for her affections, even if they are an international film star and a plastic mannequin, both called Russell Crowe.

  I am amazed that I made such an impression on Teresa Davenport. The other day, in the common room, she was hanging on my every word, lapping it all up. Clearly, I’m more of a ladies’ man than my past history has led me to believe. It’s true that I haven’t been spectacularly successful with women up to this point, but bearing in mind what a hit I was with Teresa, I’m persuaded that when it comes to girls, I’ve just made some wrong choices.

  For instance, there was this girl I kept seeing outside the YMCA, who once smiled at me and whom I became kind of fixated on for a few weeks, engineering occasions where I’d accidentally-on-purpose bump into her again just to get that same smile. She was totally gorgeous, with long black hair and big, hazel eyes. I guessed she was shy, too, because she never said anything to me. She just smiled and nodded, but even that was enough to send me home deliriously happy.

  I decided that I was in love with her. I picked a name for her, deciding she very probably was called Cordelia (we’d been doing King Lear in Lit). I imagined she was from a modest family, who probably lived in a neatly painted cottage on the edge of town, where her father probably worked as a landscape gardener, while Cordelia’s mother probably spent her days tending her herb and vegetable garden and selling the produce at a roadside stall. Cordelia herself would be a student at the local FE college, studying art and design. I got to know where she liked to hang out, which cafes she used, which parks she walked in.

  I wouldn’t say I stalked her exactly, but if you had taken a picture of her at this time, you might well have spied me somewhere in the background, still working up sufficient courage to go over and say hello to her. Eventually, my longing for her overpowered my cowardice and, seeing her leaving Expresso’s one afternoon, I caught her eye, forced a smile and actually spoke to her. I can’t remember the exact words I used, my heart was pumping so fast and my face was so red I must have looked like a tomato on a stick. But I think I said something like, ‘Forgive me for interrupting your day, but I just had to tell you that I think you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I was wondering if you would like to come with me to see Iron Man at the Odeon tonight?’

  For a moment I was terrified that she wouldn’t reply, just brush past me, outraged that I should have had the temerity even to speak to her. But no, she came closer and she did speak. I’ll never know exactly what she said because it was all in a foreign language, one I couldn’t even identify, much less understand. But whatever it was, there was a lot of it and it was all spoken very quickly. Then my stupid expression must have told her that I wasn’t actually an advanced language student and that I wasn’t making any sense at all of what she was saying. So she slowed right down and in a halting, broken English, she enunciated very carefully, ‘I do not know what it is you talk to me. I know that I see you much a lot, all the days. I am going home to my country today. Goodbye and, oh, yes, how is it that you say? I hope that your spots will clear up.’

  But that was then
and this is now. My talk with Teresa has done wonders for my confidence and when I see Rosalind sitting on the grass by herself, on a mound, which overlooks the sports field, I’m sure that my moment has come. The mound is called ‘The Grassy Knoll’ now, after the school bookie’s favourite in last year’s 400 metres was knobbled by a catapult shot thought to have been fired from this spot. Today, the school’s Olympically-inspired athletes are warming up on the track, shaking themselves down as they stretch their limbs and jog on the spot. Behind them, on the far side of the track, a lone runner moves steadily around the circuit. They all look so dedicated and active, they make me tired just watching them. It’s Wimbledon fortnight too, so chodes who couldn’t ordinarily have aspired to be ball boys are suddenly gripped with ambition and spend their lunchtimes pulling muscles on the tennis courts, while their friends enjoy a laugh at their expense and a crafty fag in the bushes.

  Various people are lolling on The Grassy Knoll, soaking up the late June sunshine with buttons undone and, in one or two cases, bras showing. A few are doing some last minute cramming before the afternoon’s exam, but most are just lying there, poleaxed by the heat. The sun only has to show its face and all the non-uniformed sixth form is in light summer dresses – that’s the girls, mostly – or tee shirts and cargo shorts. Everyone looks summery and everyone has lightened up in both colour and mood. Everyone except Ros, it appears. She sits on her own in a clearing on the Knoll, knees drawn up to her chest and a distant stare on her face.

  In contrast with those around her, she’s dressed all in black, some antique, Victorian-looking dress, which comes right down to her hook-and-eye boots. Her hair is tied up with what looks to me like a bit of a netting, or a veil, maybe, and she’s got black crosses, which my years of watching Antiques Roadshow with Mum tell me are made from jet, hanging from her ears. Her lips are the usual blood red and she’s gone to town with the mascara again. To say she stands out from the crowd hardly does justice to the chasm which yawns between her and her nearest sitters on the Knoll, two year-ten blondes who are practising a synchronised R&B routine which is clearly taxing their combined brain power. ‘Not like that, Chablis,’ one of them is shrieking. ‘It’s right arm over left, hands together and push, ‘ave you gorrit now?’