Human Punk

by John King

  –I used to go see QPR play when I was working in Ealing, Luke says. I was renting a room in Acton, so it wasn’t far.

  The crowd isn’t bad, and Hayes have brought a load with them. I tell Luke how Millwall played here in the FA Cup, and I came with his dad. We were standing behind one of the goals, and Millwall came straight across the pitch at the Slough boys, chased some of the kids up trees. One of our mates, Billy Clement, got bricked outside the social club. Slough had a go back but this was Millwall after all. I tell him how the ground used to be over the other side of Slough and double as a greyhound stadium. There’s a Co-op there now. When Chelsea won the Cup Winners Cup in 1971 they played Slough right after they came back from Athens. Eleven thousand turned up, and Dad took me and his dad along. We were little boys and the crowd seemed huge. Dave came as well. You wouldn’t get that now. Money fucks up everything it touches.

  We don’t bother going in the social club after, end up in a pub just off the high street. We sit in the corner, me with a pint of Guinness, Luke with lager. I should buy him some food, but a drink seems better.

  –You remember Mum, don’t you. Linda Wilson?

  I tell him yes, that she was a nice girl, even though I don’t really, just a glimpse at a party. She could’ve told Smiles she’d had the kid instead of lying to him, saying she’d had an abortion when she hadn’t. It might’ve helped as well, given him something more personal to think about. Maybe she was going to tell him later, but heard things had gone pear-shaped, but I don’t see how she could. We didn’t even know he was going off his head ourselves, and we were his mates. Maybe she wanted to keep things simple, didn’t want him around. I try to remember what Smiles said, what he thought about her having an abortion, but it’s too long ago now. Things are hazy, memories lost, and suddenly there’s another truth coming along and taking over from the old truth. At first this does my head in, but then it makes me laugh. Nothing is solid. History is another invention, same as the microchip.

  –It wasn’t Mum’s fault she put me in care, you know. She was a kid when she got pregnant. Her mum and dad gave her a lot of grief, traditional Catholics more worried about what the priest would say than their child and grandson. She stayed with her auntie for a while, till I was born, then ran away and ended up squatting in Finsbury Park. She gave me up a year later, so I’d be looked after properly. It was the money. She was young and didn’t have any. Later on she moved to Brighton, found a job in a hotel, tried to get me back, but it took her time to convince them that me living with her was better than being alone in an orphanage, the thick cunts. She got me back when I was nine. If she was a problem child, I was worse, a proper little hooligan nicking cars and joyriding, getting in fights because I was unhappy, ram-raiding shops so she didn’t know what to do with me. Eight fucking years in care. But she never gave me away again.

  I look away.

  –She found a job in one of the big hotels on the seafront, like I said. It was hard for her and I caused a lot of trouble. When you’re in a home you want attention. You’re on your own, with nobody to love you, and I played up so no one would adopt me, and when I was back with Mum I kept on. But it worked out alright in the end. Least I wasn’t killed, like her God-loving parents wanted. They bow down for Christ but don’t mind an abortion to keep up appearances. They’re fucking rubbish. Ron was good to me, always seemed to understand. It’s only when you get older you realise what’s going on, why you do the things you do.

  He picks up my pint glass and goes to the bar. I look at him standing there and try to think what it must’ve been like, and it’s the worst sort of irony, seeing how we nicknamed Gary after the Sunny Smiles photos he went around selling, how he felt sorry for babies given up when they were born, without a family, stuck in an institution. Maybe he was seeing into the future, turning time on its head somehow, or maybe it was because of his mum killing herself in the bath. It’s mental that his own son ends up in the same sort of place, a face in a book full of baby mugshots. Maybe Luke’s face was in one of those books. He comes back and I sit and watch the head of my pint tighten up.

  –Cheers, and he raises his glass, seems alright.

  It’s a quiet boozer this, tucked out of sight, the sort of place you can settle in and have a long, relaxing session. Quality beer and enough room to breathe, no packed bar and tinny house music. Time to think.

  –Fuck them anyway, Luke says. If people don’t like you, then why should you worry about them? I don’t believe all that stuff about letting people off the hook, forgiving and forgetting. It’s fine to forget, but why bother forgiving. Fuck them. Mum’s staunch as far as her mum and dad go. Never mind anyway.

  There’s an edge there, the result of being on his own, and it shows what being alone really means, a different story when you don’t have a choice in the matter. He eyes up two girls who come in the pub, order and then sit in the opposite corner. A soul singer croons in the background. People come and go.

  –You should visit us in Brighton. See if Mum recognises you. They must have record fairs down there worth going to, and there’s got to be somewhere you could DJ.

  We’re quiet for a while.

  –Thing is, you learn quickly when you’re on your own. You get treated different when you’re in care. It was shit, but I learnt a lot. I could blame Mum, I suppose, but I don’t. Just wouldn’t want it to happen to anyone else. You get through the bad things earlier, causing trouble and that, and at least Mum came back for me. That doesn’t happen to a lot of kids and it lasts them their whole lives. They could be fifty or sixty years old and still wondering what went wrong, why they were given up. You have to sort it out. I think back, can’t pretend I don’t. If I had nobody it would be much worse, and I was always putting off coming down here because there’s nothing I can do to make things alright with Dad. I’ll never know him, and he never even knew I existed. Imagine that. Never knew my name or what I looked like.

  I lift my glass and wonder about the women through the years, the one-night stands, the girls you never see again. For some reason I think of this Russian woman I got off with once. She was called Rika and ran my carriage on the Trans-Siberian Express. She was beautiful, but it was never going anywhere. She might’ve ended up pregnant and I’d never know. I remember she wanted to leave Russia and go live in New York. Maybe she’ll end up with that bloke from Swindon, and he’ll meet a son I never knew I had. I know it’s not going to happen like that, I’m just thinking about what Luke’s saying.

  –You have all these dreams when you’re a kid, and the thing is they can come true if you want. You come out of care either strong or weak, and I came out strong. My gran and dad killed themselves, but I’ve got my mum’s blood in me. She’s strong as well. It was just she was young and there was nobody to help her. She was under pressure, no support, nowhere to live, no money. Simple as that.

  Luke’s sharp, much more together than I was at his age. It depends how you look at things, whether you blame the priests and politicians, or the people who believe what they’re told. It has to be a bit of both really, but the thing is you’re always going to blame someone at a local level, because it’s easier and the others are out of range. I think about the blokes who chucked us off the bridge and how they believed what they read in the papers. Who’s to blame? Again, both of them, but the journalists walk away whistling. There’s no comeback. Wells and the others got off as well, while I never went after them because I honestly believe they were sorry for what happened. But it’s in the past and I don’t say anything about it to Luke. There’s no point.

  Luke sees posters for a fair and wants to go, says he never went when he was a kid. He seems a bit old to be lording it in a bumper car, larging it in the house of horrors, but he’s serious, dead keen, and seeing as he’s off tomorrow I go with him. The organs are rolling when we arrive, pumping out choirboy chimes that roar up and merge with the latest chart-toppers, teenybopper anthems and a free-enterprise version of girl power. Thick insul
ated cable stretches behind the stalls, the steady hum of an industrial generator backing up the screeching vocals. Stroppy kids hang around the dodgems, doing their best to look hard as love songs blare out, gypsy boys eyeing up the girls as a gang of cocky young hooligans eyeball the gypsies, who casually shift their gaze and eyeball a dressed-up Asian mob. Only the gypsies are out of school and you have to laugh, specially remembering what we must’ve looked like when we were young, doing the same thing, posing at the fairground, all bower boots and clicking hands.

  A little girl passes us and bumps into the fortune teller’s sign, Sheri charging five pounds a session, drops her goldfish on the ground, and it’s bad luck all the way as the bag splits and the water vanishes, the fish gasping for air, sucking plastic into its face and flapping its tail. The girl screams and her dad steps forward, picks the goldfish up and pulls the plastic off. He takes it back to the stall with his daughter jumping up to see what’s happening. The gills pulse and the tail speeds up as the fish panics, suffocating on fresh air laced with candyfloss, and maybe it’s having flashbacks, seeing more than Sheri in her deluxe caravan with its freshly-painted Romany trimmings. The girl on the stall drops the fish in a bowl where it floats for a few seconds, another fish sniffing its scales, and in seconds they’re swimming in circles together, charging back up. The stallholder gives the girl another fish and she wipes her tears away, shows off her gums in a big toothy smile, her old man ruffling blonde hair, glad he doesn’t have to try and explain what death means, all that stuff about heaven and hell he hasn’t worked out for himself.

  –That was a lucky escape, Luke says, moving on, excited same as a child, wanting everything at the same time.

  Fairs always seemed expensive when we were kids, and going with Mum and Dad, me and Jilly were allowed two goes on the stalls and two rides, one extra if we really played up. Most of the time we were walking around listening to the sounds and watching the lights, smelling the smells, letting the atmosphere flood over us and take control, the rough edges I found later at punk gigs and football matches, all the fun of the carnival. And all the time Dad must’ve been digging deep. No one wants to let their kids down, even if it’s a struggle, pushing themselves and trying to do the right thing. Luke’s a big kid going around the stalls, the same con as an amusement arcade, and me and his dad used to spend a bomb shoving pennies in the slot, specially when we were at the seaside, waiting for the copper mountain to come tumbling down. Luke has a couple of goes on the rifle range, loading up and popping off shots, tries the darts, thinks about the goldfish but decides he doesn’t need a pet, ends up on the coconut shy where he wins a plastic gun. He sticks it in his belt and walks around like Jesse James himself, a top gunslinger.

  –Just need some water and I’ll be off on the rampage.

  We have a go on the big wheel and the machine cranks up, a spinning time capsule that lifts us into the evening sky which is dark and cold, the lights stretching out around us, the motorway on our left, a line of flickering red and solid white, Windsor Castle in the distance, a dark block of stone on the horizon, the Queen in her counting house and the squaddies in their garrison, counting out her gold as they polish up their leather brogues for a night on the piss, same as the stallholders juggling silver and copper, touting for business, and we begin to pick up speed, a small wiry man at the controls, and everything starts melting together, thousands of light bulbs losing their power, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers brushed away by the breeze, the motion of the machine blurring shapes, little kids holding on to the hands of their mums and dads scared in case they get lost in the crowd, drop their goldfish, excited by the noise and sound, adults scared in case the paedophiles shift off the front pages and steal their babies, carry them away same as gypsies were supposed to do in the old days, and this machine is in top-notch condition, moving faster now so the fine points of the stalls, caravans, cars, trucks, people are lost, and the reds and greens, blues and yellows, oranges and lemons turn to a swaying wash of white light, and each time we pass the man at the controls his face melts a little bit more till there’s nothing left, just a smear of wax, and the images crash in on themselves as the wind chaps our faces, styles fading, leaving the same old essentials of life, and nothing’s changed that much, Smiles next to me shouting his head off, and the big wheel is in a better state than when we were kids and it broke down, the slow-motion replay speeded up, and everything is faster and more fused these days, the hard edges have been blunted yet there’s a sharpness in here somewhere, the big wheel a high-tech helter-skelter ride, mashing up our brains along the way, and I turn sideways and see Smiles’s skull straining the flesh, bone pushing against the surface, high in the sky with popping eyes, keeping away from water, and the screams of the girls in front cut through the air, bring me back as the sickness simmers in my gut holding on now as the speed of the machine blows any thoughts away, waiting for the ride to end, Smiles shouting something next to me, laughing, the machine peaking, billions of snazzy camera angles and special effects, photos taught to lie, airbrushing the past and future, two-second time spans for children’s television, technology taking control, appearance over content, glitzy lights and easy convenience, nothing but profit, profit, profit, the slick workings of the machine, designer lives and designer politics, and our time is up, the wheel slowing down, a queue of eager people waiting, the bulbs forming up and the man’s face falling back together, Luke laughing as we stop and wait our turn, the music clear and the smells sharp, looking at stalls, caravans, cars, lorries, people, the hum of the generators, moving forward, loading and unloading, the bar released as we get off and a happy couple take our place.

  –I wouldn’t mind going on that again, Luke says, thinking. I’ve always wanted to have a ride on the big wheel.

  He can go on his own next time. I see Sarah standing by a stall, teddy bears and plastic jars of sweets stuck on square wooden blocks. She’s on her own, lobbing hoops and missing the prizes. I wink at Luke and go up behind her, grab her round the waist and lift her into the air. She screams and tries to turn round. I let her go.

  –Fucking hell, she says.

  Laughs when she sees it’s me.

  –You said fuck, this kid pipes up, a little boy standing in front of her so I couldn’t see him. Don’t say that word.

  Sarah’s gone red in the face.

  –This is Jimmy. My son.

  The kid leans against his mum, shy, wearing an England shirt and trainers with these monsters on the side. I think of Chris’s boy Darren who wears the same shirt, knows his language as well, both with their heads shaved, number two crops in a skinhead nation. The Undertones song ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ flashes into my head, but this Jimmy is okay, there won’t be any ambulances for Sarah’s little boy.

  –Say hello to Joe.

  He squirms into her legs.

  –Go on, say hello.

  –Hello.

  He’s shy and looks up at his mum. I introduce Luke.

  –Hello, Luke. Say hello to Luke.

  –Hello, Luke. Mum, I want to have another go on the hoops.

  –I told you one. It costs too much. We’re going home in a minute. I told you when we came in so don’t argue or you won’t come again. If you’re good I’ll buy you some chips.

  This is when it’s nice to have money in your pocket. I pay for the kid to have another go, try and get in with him while I can. I give him a hand with the hoops and win a bottle of sweets. We walk over to the counter and buy some chips. I ask the bloke serving to fill the salt properly. We stand out of the way, chatting about nothing special. Seeing Sarah with her boy is strange, but it only adds to her. Makes her stronger. The kid doesn’t say much, concentrates on his food. We leave together, me and Luke stopping for a drink, Sarah off home with Jimmy.

  The pub’s busy, but not packed, and I order two pints of lager, sit with Luke in a corner and tell him how me and his dad got stuck on top of the big wheel, how Smiles was swinging back and forward in the chair,
trying to scare me. It seems like yesterday. Everyone says that, but it’s true.

  –You had a laugh anyway, Luke says, emptying his pint.

  It’s true, we did have a laugh together. Before things went wrong, but I keep that to myself. No point raking up bad memories. Part of me wants to go into it, but the sensible thing is to talk about the future, so I ask what Brighton’s like these days. Haven’t been for years, and I tell him how me and Smiles went down and slept in a boat on the beach, and I bet it’s a lot different to the days when the mods and rockers went on the rampage, the skinhead beanos when we were kids. I talk and he drinks.

  –You’re a bit slow, he says at last, taking the piss now. What do you want? Same again?

  Luke goes to the bar, and I glance around the pub, passing the time, jump when I spot Dave sitting on a bar stool talking to Micky Todd, who gets up and leaves. Dave turns and looks straight at me as if he’s picked up on a radar message. He orders himself a drink, cutting across Luke who’s next up. I see Luke shake his head at the pissed cunt with the slicked-back hair, Made In Slough tints, lets it go like you do when you’re on your first pint of the night and the other bloke’s mullered.

  –Didn’t see you come in, Dave says, sitting down next to me.

  He’s out of his tree, and his nose is going to blow up one of these days, the tubes worn down by the amount of charlie he’s sticking up there. Can’t say anything to the man when he’s in this state, just have to grin and bear it. It’s Sunday night and Dave’s roasting.

  –Thing is, Dave says, all these cunts think they’re the bollocks when it comes to anything that might be a bit naughty, and what I reckon is so fucking what. I mean, you look at that bird serving behind the bar. Nice tits, big smile, but the whole time she’s creaming a nice profit on the price of a pint, and she’s eyeballing me when I’m buying something off Micky to tide me over. It’s three pence more for a pint of lager in here compared to down the road. That does my fucking head in.