by Juno Dawson
‘That’s not the point,’ I said, sounding decidedly sulky.
‘We need to find the owners.’ Polly was striding back and forth over her rug like the general of her own little army. ‘I wonder if we could convince them not to sell or make sure that whoever they do sell it to keeps it as a crazy-golf course.’
‘As if they’ll listen to us,’ Beasley said. ‘Like, why would they?’
‘They would if we put in an offer.’
‘That’s insane,’ Nico said. ‘I had to borrow money off my mum to get the bus here.’
‘He’s right,’ I added, feeling extra gloomy. Alice did a Saturday-afternoon shift at Starbucks and Beasley did a couple of waiting shifts at one of the hotels on the seafront, but that was seasonal. ‘None of us really has any money, and your parents didn’t want to help. I know my mum and dad wouldn’t want anything to do with it.’
Polly actually growled at us. ‘You are all such *******! Sorry, but why aren’t you fighting this? We have to keep the golf course open. It’s our legacy to Brompton.’ She went on: ‘I don’t know about you, but I would have killed myself years ago if it weren’t for that place. I’m not even kidding; I probably would have. But no matter how **** school was or how ***** my mum was being I always had that place to look forward to. I always thought, “At least I’m going to Fantasyland tonight,” and it kept me going. It kept me alive.’ She took a breath. ‘I know we’re all leaving this dump next year or whenever, but it’s the only good thing about the town and there are people like us in the years below. Like that amazing goth girl in Year 10, or the trans girl in Year 8 or that skinny guy who’s always by himself in Year 9. We have to keep it open for them.’
Well, I don’t know about you, but I got a little tear in my eye.
Nico relented. ‘What can we do?’ Polly had recruited him to the cause.
‘We do what we do. We fight.’
We are the Petition Generation. We get angry and we noisily voice opinions but we don’t like paying for things or actually doing things. I’d lost track of the number of online petitions I’d signed. I’d saved gay people in Russia, had environmental activists freed, banned Page Three and released caged hens. In reality I hadn’t done any of those things. I’d ticked some boxes on a website, felt smug and self-righteous and then never gone back to see if I’d made a difference. Well, of course I hadn’t: gay people are still being persecuted and my mum, no matter how many times I beg her to check where the eggs are coming from, doesn’t. There are still boobs winking at me from the magazine racks in Asda.
But now that the petition was mine it felt very different. It was decided that there was no point in utilising all my online friends because none of them were in Brompton and the issue wasn’t theirs – also, I’d hardly spoken to them since I’d started hanging out with Polly and the gang. We all felt that this needed to be local residents.
Alex managed to discover through his dad that the owners were actually part of the same group who ran the pier, which was also losing money (last summer had been a washout). They wanted to focus their energy on the pier and sell the land. Frankly, they didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass what happened to the site as long as it was no longer their concern.
Our petition went as follows:
We, the undersigned, believe Fantasyland crazy-golf course is an important tourist asset in Brompton-on-Sea. We believe Fantasyland provides the young people of the town with much-needed entertainment. It is one of only three local attractions which does not serve alcohol or promote gambling. To close the attraction or redevelop the land would be a great loss to the seafront.
The idea was we would ask the council to step in and run Fantasyland as part of its Parks Programme, either permanently or until such a time that a new owner could take over running the attraction.
This, we felt, wasn’t unreasonable. The council maintained the putting course and boating lake in Greenacre Park and were responsible for the beach, so it kind of made sense, at least to us. We formed a group called ‘Save Fantasyland’ and Beasley knocked us up some pretty professional-looking letterheaded paper. If you want something doing … do it right.
Break times and lunch took on a whole new purpose. We talked the printing shop in town into doing us a discount on some ‘Save Fantasyland’ T-shirts, which we had made XXL to wear over our jumpers on the freezing playground. In pairs we strolled around the school, looking for signatures. ‘Have you signed the petition yet?’, ‘Do you ever go to Fantasyland?’, ‘Help us keep Fantasyland open.’
We were – how can I put this lightly? – bullish. The football team, the pretty girls, the scary girls, the nerds, the musicians, the theatre lot, the emos, the Goths – we interrupted all of their sandwiches. Most people signed the damned thing to get rid of us, to be honest, but that didn’t matter. Of course some people were downright rude: ‘Is it a dyke petition? Will it make me gay?’ some Year 9 boys wanted to know.
‘Yes. It will make you gay,’ I responded. ‘Just sign it or I’ll tell everyone you have a pseudo-penis like a shrivelled olive.’
I got the signature.
Polly was in hysterics. ‘I can’t believe you said that! It’s really hard not being able to punch people.’ Polly had decided to go on a charm offensive to get the petition signed. She hadn’t maimed anyone in days. Quite an achievement.
We attached copies of the petition to the noticeboard outside the main hall and in the sixth-form entrance area. We appealed to teachers, dinner ladies and even the head teacher.
On a weekend we took to the high street. Although people mistook us for charity muggers – those tabard-wearing monsters who try to wrestle your bank details from you outside Primark – if we engaged people they were happy to sign. Most people had no idea Fantasyland had shut down and seemed genuinely disappointed. ‘Oh, that’s a shame. I used to take my kids there when they were little,’ was what we heard a lot, or ‘Aw, man! I used to go there all the time when I was a kid.’ Fantasyland wasn’t only ours, it belonged to the town. Even those who weren’t there three nights a week had such fond memories of the place. It was a good, positive, harmless thing and the town was better with it. It wasn’t clogging arteries or damaging livers or emptying wallets. Like anything harmless it had been an easy target. Evidence Exhibit A? The local library, Daisy once told me, is now a Poundland.
Daisy did a great line in ambiguous foreboding too. ‘At the moment, the land could be used for anything,’ she’d say with doe eyes. ‘I mean, they could turn it into a toxic waste dump for all we know.’ That got a few more signatures, and wasn’t strictly a lie.
I sensed there was something going on behind Polly’s fervour. Something beyond her rousing speech about preserving Fantasyland for the waifs and strays of Brompton in years to come. I asked her about it as we petitioned outside the pie and mash shop near the harbour. ‘What’s this really about, Polly?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Saving the golf course. You texted me at seven thirty this morning and it’s Saturday.’
‘It’s like I said … that place kept me going. It still keeps me going.’
I narrowed my eyes and played devil’s advocate – a role precisely no one gets thanked for playing. ‘I love the golf course too, but only because you’re all there. You could put us somewhere else and we’d have just as much fun. All the freaks and geeks in Year 9 will find somewhere else to go.’
Polly shook her head. ‘It’s more than that.’ I knew it. ‘That place, for most of my life, has been the best place. My mum used to take me when I was little and she always let me win. She used to be pretty good fun. **** knows what went wrong. Then when I was cutting, I used to go to distract myself, keep my hands busy. It means the ******* world to me, that place.’
I said no more. Now it made sense.
Zoë and Polly, now officially A THING, made a banner on some old bedding and tied it to the chained-up gates of Fantasyland. It was a crappy-looking thing – sub-One-Direction-concert stand
ard – but it worked. On the Saturday afternoon, as Alice and Alex were petitioning anyone who came to try to play golf, a photographer from the local Gazette arrived. At least we hoped he was a photographer – a slightly crumpled old man with a camera turned up to take a picture of us in front of our banner.
Luckily for us, he wasn’t a sexual predator, and our picture appeared on the third page of the paper the following Monday morning. ‘I got one!’ Polly ran up to where Daisy and I were waiting in the corridor to go into French. ‘Look, look, look!’
‘Let me see!’ I leaned over her shoulder and saw us lined up outside Fantasyland, making the ‘sad’ faces the photographer had told us to do. GOLF-CRAZY TEENS CAMPAIGN FOR PARK REOPENING. Polly looked incredible with her serious face. I looked really confused, which was less great.
‘We all look so good!’ Daisy squeaked. ‘Like a pop band.’
I laughed. ‘I look simple.’
‘You do not,’ Polly said. ‘The piece is ******* awesome too. The journalist is so on our side … listen: “With so few activities for young adults, some residents are concerned teens will be left with no choice but to loiter in the streets.” That’s good. That means the council will have to listen to us.’
‘We should get some hoodies and start drinking cider in cul-de-sacs or something.’ We were still laughing when Mr Wolff appeared.
‘Oh there you are,’ he said. ‘I just read your piece in the paper.’ I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. ‘I have to say, I’m really impressed, girls. I can smell the teen spirit.’
‘Oh god, Dad, no.’
‘I mean it! You’re doing a great thing for the community. I’m proud.’
She hid it pretty well, but underneath the scowl, I could see Polly beaming.
End of the Pier
That day on the end of the pier
We walked in a chain
Slow motion, wind-machine hair
Cotton candy flypaper fingers
Turquoise-tongued.
Photo-booth photobombers.
Insane! Lame!
I’d hate us if I wasn’t one of us
Three faces in four pictures.
Watertight to hyena laughter
And bitter sideways sneers
Of those who forget they were once us
And porridge people who could never be.
Two penny-drop millionaires
Carousel cowboys
Quicksilver rippled through the slats
At a raspberry-sorbet sunset.
Speaking our own Esperanto
My calabrese and my wildcat
Hypotenuse, opposite, adjacent
Triangles are the strongest shapes.
Chapter Thirteen
Mayor
Something became clear during the weeks we were campaigning. We defined ourselves by the golf course. Whereas before we’d been ‘Angry Freak’, ‘New Girl’, ‘Gay Boy’ or ‘Anorexic Girl’, we were now ‘The Annoying Golf-Course People’, a label we were all happy with. Perhaps that’s why I’d felt so strange at my last school – I’d been a nomad looking for a tribe. This was my tribe. It was like coming into focus after long years as a blur.
The delightful new clarity only made me more determined. Polly’s dad had spoken to Alex’s dad – proving parents do come in handy from time to time – and managed to wrangle us a meeting with the mayor. Polly was going with her dad but asked me to go with her for moral support and I’d agreed at once. I was in this to the death.
‘Which do you think sounds better?’ Nico asked me one evening. I was splayed face down on his bed, scrolling through Tumblr on his laptop while he strummed away on a guitar, jotting lyrics in his Moleskine. ‘Semtex latex or latex Semtex?’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘Well, “Semtex latex” sounds quite kinky, like exploding fetish catsuits or something and “latex Semtex” sounds like liquid explosives somehow.’
‘OK, maybe “Semtex latex” then.’
‘In what context?’
‘There isn’t one, I just thought it sounded cool. “Semtex latex, high-tech red necks”.’
‘Cool.’ I rolled upright. I looked down at his lyric book. An offer to write with him perched on the tip of my tongue … but that would mean telling him about my poetry and that would be … well … mortifying. He’d want to read them and … just no.
I changed the subject. ‘Would you be sad if I went over to Polly’s later? We think we might have a thousand signatures now. We’re going to try to count up.’
‘Sure,’ he replied without a beat. ‘I’ll ride down to Etienne’s. We have loads of band stuff to sort out.’
‘Yeah?’ Nico talked about the band a lot. If I’m honest, I phased some of it out.
‘Yeah. Can you keep a secret?’ That got my attention.
‘I can.’
He rested his head against my bare thigh. ‘We’re firing Zoë.’
‘What? No way!’
Nico didn’t look me in the eye, instead circling his finger round and round a freckle on my leg. ‘This guy Etienne knows wants to join. He’s amazing, Tor.’
‘But Zoë is our friend … and Polly’s girlfriend.’
‘Yeah but, between you and me, she sucks on the keys. You said that yourself.’ That was true. At the last gig it had sounded like she was playing with boxing gloves on. ‘And she’s joined The Gash too. She misses rehearsal half the time.’
I pouted. ‘OK, well, I didn’t know that.’
‘You did. I told you last week. I bloody knew you weren’t listening.’
‘I always listen. I listen to you breathe when you sleep …’
He laughed. ‘Creepy! She’ll get over it. I don’t think she’s enjoying it anyway. Don’t say anything, obviously … even to Pols.’
I pushed him off my leg. ‘Aw, you can’t burden me like that! I’m a rubbish secret-keeper!’ That wasn’t strictly true; I was still guarding the closet door for Beasley. ‘I won’t, but tell her quickly. Can I have a kiss before I go though?’
He finally looked up at me. ‘I think I can manage that …’
We did a tiny bit of sex.
When I got to Polly’s, I was in for a surprise. When she opened the door I didn’t recognise her. Her hair was black. Plain black. I’d never seen her with such dark hair, let alone hair a colour that could feasibly grow out of a human head. ‘Wow! Your hair!’
‘Do you like it? I wanted it to be a sensible colour for when we meet the mayor. You know, I don’t want her thinking I’m a joke.’
She looked older. Her nose ring was still in, but she could easily pass for twenty … more. It was like seeing a future version of the woman she’d become. I suddenly realised I had no idea what Polly’s natural hair colour actually was. ‘She wouldn’t think you’re a joke. It looks good. It’ll just take me some time to get used to it. You don’t look like you! You look like me!’
Polly smiled warmly. ‘I do a little. We could be twins or something!’
Polly led me to her room, where I found another surprise waiting for me: Zoë, in very much the same position I’d been in on Nico’s bed. ‘Oh hi,’ I said, very aware I shouldn’t talk to Zoë in case Nico’s news somehow fell out of my mouth.
‘Hey,’ she said sleepily, lounging like she was Cleopatra.
I’d assumed it was just going to be Polly and I and felt a little put out at not having been warned. Who wants to be a third bloody wheel? I’d never invite Polly round if Nico and I were doing couple stuff.
Polly brought up the rear and shepherded me in. ‘Zoë said she’d help too,’ she said cheerily.
‘Great. Many hands make light work, or whatever.’ I forced myself to smile brightly. I didn’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I don’t know why it bothered me, but it did. It was plainly bad … friend etiquette.
TORIA GRAND’S GUIDE TO FRIEND ETIQUETTE
1. Do not go to the cinema with one friend when you know another wants to see the same film.
2. Do not invite a
lone single friend to a gathering of couples.
3. Ask single friends if it’s OK to bring a BF or GF to a gathering – do not assume they’re welcome.
4. Do not cancel plans if it means another friend will be stuck alone with a difficult friend.
5. Never, EVER blow off your friends to see a BF or GF. That comes with the worst karma of all.
We got to work on the petitions, Zoë all the time talking about The Gash and me all the time biting my tongue. I sensed she preferred the sisterhood of her new band, but couldn’t help but think her expulsion from Judas Cradle was going to cause trouble. How could it not?
Polly and Zoë couldn’t keep their hands off each other, making me feel even less welcome: Polly running her hand up and down Zoë’s exquisite long legs. Chipped silver nails stroked Zoë’s inner thigh, all the way under the rim of her skirt. We’ve established I’m no prude, but I didn’t know where to look.
‘So I reckon –’ Polly finished the final stack of papers. They were piled all over her bedroom floor, somewhat spoiling the zen – ‘that we actually have over a thousand. ******* amazing.’
‘That is incredible,’ I agreed, surveying our wonderfulness. ‘We must have everyone at school.’
‘And most of college,’ added Zoë.
‘The mayor has to take us seriously. She has to.’ I was starting to feel that we could actually do this. I felt powerful and it felt good.
‘OK, I’m really underdressed,’ I said on the morning of the meeting with Mayor Thompson. Polly was wearing a tailored jacket that she’d borrowed from her sister. She looked so different: her hair was neat, tied back in a sleek ponytail, although she’d left her nose ring in. She wasn’t the cliché in either direction. I was wearing a blouse and some trousers with my jacket so I looked more like a waitress than a businesswoman. ‘I look stupid.’ I clambered into the back of Mr Wolff’s car. He was so impressed at our good citizenship, we’d been granted the morning out of lessons.