by Joel Golby
OUTCOME
So I mean yes, technically we would classify my pacifism vs. his angry dead-dad rage a loss for me, I suppose, yes, fine. LOSS.
Could I win a fight against the M&M spokescandies? It is not a question anyone has ever asked. The motive for the fight is not necessary. The point is: Could I win? Could I win it? Could I defeat a sentient candy in a fight?
We can only go on form, and existing knowledge, and assumed knowledge about how well a candy the size of a small cow could fight if pissed properly off: we can only conclude that both the M&Ms Red and Yellow would absolutely rinse me in a fight. I could probably just about take Red in a fight—he weighs, what, eighty, ninety pounds? I could feasibly pick him up and heft him into, for instance, a pond, where he would deteriorate and dissolve—but both Red and Yellow leaping at me, kicking my long legs? Yellow up on my shoulders now, huge white hands scratching at my eyes, my arms wailing wildly at where I think he is going to be, rapping my knuckles on his shielded back? And Red, awful Red, slowly coming at me with a candy shiv, and—pop, pop, pop, prison-style—goes once into each kidney and then through my stomach, puncturing me three times until my knees buckle beneath me, until I am the awful M&Ms’ height, and then they drag me down, lower, until I am writhing on the floor, blinded, leaking blood from every side, and they kick, kick, kick me in the head with their candy-hard feet, until I stop fighting, until I stop jolting and fall still. I am not proud of this, but, yes: the M&Ms would beat me in a fight.
EXT. SCENE. CHURCH GRAVEYARD. My funeral. I have been kicked to death by two four-foot candies. Around the hole in the ground where my coffin is lowered, the mourners come. My friends, dressed in black. My family, stoic and respectful. All the incredibly attractive women I always imagined loved me but never articulated it, red lips and split-to-the-thigh black dresses, scenically sobbing as my bones are lowered into the ground. And there, shameless, in their Mafia way, the red M&M and the yellow one, too, in wide-lapelled black leather suits. “Psst,” the M&Ms say to one of the women who secretly loved me. “Let’s blow this joint.” They ride away on a shiny chrome motorcycle, the girl riding behind. In death, a final loss. One last defeat for Joel R. Golby. The M&Ms would beat me. They would beat me to death and spit on the grave of it. They would beat me so hard it would go down in the ages.
At Home, in the Rain
As a kid I was some kind of divine rain whisperer, because rain brought with it unbearable pressure headaches that manifested behind my eyes and up through my ears, leaving me bedbound and watching as the first thin droplets of it skitted against my window. The view from my bedroom rolled on forever: first, a thin line of elderly-care-home bungalows, orange-red brick and curved steel fences; then a row of shops, all sagging with fraying plaster and neon light; beyond that, a bridge above a highway, sandstone blasted clean white, then dirty with knee-height petrol smog again, an endless loop; and then, beyond that, the town’s wooded golf course, a barometer of the seasons—lush and petrol green during summer, electric and vivid lime in the spring, thin and brown and spindly as the winter rolled in, often somewhere in between them all, rustling slightly in the breeze. When the weather came, I would lie on my side with my ear to my pillow watching the clouds rise over the horizon and bringing with them the rain I could already feel—salt-and-pepper gray on good days and blue-black like a bruise on the bad—eyes pulsating with the pain, veins just visible on the periphery of my vision, the thump of rain against my head, pulse-pulse-pulse. “Stop faking it and get up,” my mum would say, soothingly. “Bring the washing in,” I would say. She never would. Our towels always got put away just slightly damp. We dried our bodies in the smell of the rain.
I never knew how we ended up here because neither of my parents were from Chesterfield, Derbyshire—the town in the near-enough exact center of England where I grew up—and every time I asked, I was told it was the only place equidistant between the two cities they were born in, Wolverhampton (Dad) and Newcastle (Mum). “But why do we live here,” I would ask, looking out at the town’s gray expanses of concrete, or kicking round a town center you could loop through every shop at in half an hour flat, or gazing at the abandoned court building, to date still the ugliest construction I have ever seen. The town always felt like a sigh to me: a large exhalation out, the moment that precedes something bigger than before. “We didn’t want you growing up with our accents,” they would say, having met in London twenty years before, both abandoning the northern sounds and pulsing tones of their own regional voices. Instead I grew up with an unshakable proto-Midlands accent, deep vowels and the inability to ever make a convincing t sound, caught between the slowly separating train carriages of two identities—the flat, newsreader accent I heard at home and the local variant I learned at school—so much so that every time I go home now and get in a taxi from the station, the guy in the front seat turns bodily round and asks through the thick plastic window: “So where are you from, then?” I can’t answer that question, friend, even to myself.
It was the same lush golf course that my dad and I used to go on for our walks. This was the primary Sunday morning activity of my childhood: Dad, me, and Dad’s dog, Suzie (Suzie was very pointedly not our dog: She was this ratty, very visibly dying mongrel who smelled like an old sofa, and used to sit loyally with my dad and nobody else, and I literally do not remember petting her once as a child.) would go on a trail that took us up over a bridge above a motorway, along through a short section of canal, studded with trailing trees and wild garlic; then we would lift a loosened flap of chain-link fence and dash across a highway, creaking over this ancient abandoned railway bridge and down to the back end of the golf course. Ostensibly, we were there to scout shooting locations for my photographer father, but what we were really there for was for Dad to steal errant golf balls: he would swipe at the backwater patches of rough with an old pitching wedge, occasionally dinking lost balls up out of the grass, which he would quickly pocket, adding them to his collection at home. Dad would stagger back home with his vest bulging monstrously, and in the days that followed we would see him on the field behind our house—the same one my school, up the road, used for summer PE lessons—dinking the old balls into a bucket he’d positioned fifty yards away. “Hey,” kids in my class would ask me, between games of tag and touch-rugby. “Who’s the crazy golf guy?” And I would squint at him, off there in the sun amongst the daisies, chipping and chipping and chipping, and say: I don’t know.
I think everyone has a cherished childhood field. Ours was called “the Field,” and as well as playing host to PE lessons, it was also the arena for most of my childhood games of summer soccer. The Field was subdivided into three sections: at the top, a steep hill of rough grass; in the middle, a concrete playground that led to another, less steep hill, with a twice-monthly-trimmed playing pitch at the bottom; and beyond that, a ditch-like jungle of dead wooded trees and jags of straw-like grass cluttered together behind a single barbed wire fence. Mainly we would play soccer on the middle bit, occasionally interrupted by drunk men meandering home from the pub up the road (they would always crouch and put their hands towards their feet when they saw us playing, going “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” until we passed them the ball, which they would inevitably shank so violently west that one of us would have to run and get it: one man, attempting a wonder goal, just fully fell over on his arse once, and, instead of facing the consequences of his embarrassment about that, fell woozily asleep in the summer sun), so the Field was where I have most of my cherished childhood memories: playing endless games of Cuppies until the sun dipped below the surrounding houses; finding an old two-liter bottle someone had used to sniff glue with; taking a cricket ball full in the face and shattering my glasses across my nose like I’d been shot by a sniper; running home in the sweltering heat to dip my head into the chest freezer in the cellar, droplets of sweat teetering on my forehead before dropping heavily onto the ice pops below.
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The writhing is what I remember the most. The way he thrashed from one pain to another. They had come from a gray brick tower block in another city, the two boys down my road, one older and one younger, and never seen the likes of the green we had to play with here. Both our houses backed onto the Field, and I would gaze out of my parents’ window until I saw them there, in the distance, bouncing a soccer ball, and then I would sprint out to meet them: either to play cricket, or soccer, or “spies,” some sort of game that involved us crawling through the long straw grass talking into our collars as if reporting to HQ. That’s where we were when Sadi fell into the nettles, the first time he’d ever seen them in his life. That’s where we heard the sound of him, searing.
On long walks with Dad he used to teach me about animals, nature, plants, and trees. Blackberries, pussy willow, honeysuckle. One afternoon, huddled under some trees as thunder loomed above us, he pointed out an innocuous green plant. “Dock leaves,” he said, rolling a wet cigarette in his hands. “If you ever get stang off a nettle, rub those on it. They always grow nearby.” Sadi thrashed beneath us as I tried to explain the magic leaf thing to his brother: we sprinted off in different directions, mazy in the long grass and straw, until I found a blossom of them, ran them back for his arms, and legs, and face. We took his top off and sat him up and worked in silence, each of us rubbing and rolling a fat bottle green leaf until it wadded up and rubbed away; Sadi’s face dry with tears, his skin brown and pink with sores and green-yellow with remedy, and we watched the sun set, and we walked home, separately, knowing some pain had driven something unfixable between us. Nettle stings are a peculiar thing exclusive to childhood, like treading in dog shit is. When does an adult ever get stung off a nettle? It just doesn’t happen, does it?
Chesterfield is a town that is built around its central spire, which is famously malformed: it twists and buckles beneath its own weight, and leans and tips like the Tower of Pisa might if it were made out of lead. (This monster of failure is the single note of individuality the town has.) There are two accepted theories about how that happened, one I like more than the other. The first is: the black death finished just twelve years before the spire’s completion, and skilled craftsmen were hard to find. The ones who made the spire used soft untreated wood for the beams and overly heavy lead for the tiles, which means the roof heats and contorts in the sun and twists a couple of centimeters a year under its own weight: this is where its iconic name, the Crooked Spire, first came into being. This is dull but accurate. The second theory is much, much better: that it was a normal spire, once, but a virgin got married at the church beneath it, and the devil—the actual Big Lad himself, Lucifer the devil—was so surprised he sat on the spire in wonder, squashing it. I like this because, mythologically, it suggests two things: one, that the devil was just in Chesterfield one day, running errands (Was he going to the Big Tesco for his bits? Was he in Thornton’s? Was he at one of the town’s four branches of Greggs?); and two, that chaste women are so hard to come by in Chesterfield that the devil himself was astonished to see one pass by. Slagginess is baked into the very mythology of Chesterfield, legend tells us; it pulses through the veins of it. And I’m not saying I believe the myth but: if you have been in as many Chesterfield nightclubs at kicking-out time as I have, then you would lean towards it, too.
The spire is plastered on everything that means anything to the town—pubs are named after it, more than one chip shop bears its name, the town’s primary cab company has the church printed on the side, the spire is the logo of the local newspaper; most crucially the soccer team, Chesterfield FC, or “the Spireites,” who reached the semifinals of the FA Cup in the 1996 season with a spire-shaped badge. This remains #1 of the three most notable things that happened to Chesterfield in all the time I lived there (the other two were: the Somerfield supermarket in town went on fire and you could see the cathedral of smoke winding out above it from miles away, and the Demaglass factory that previously employed hundreds in the town was shut down and dismantled, and we all assembled a safe distance away to watch the towers crumple in on themselves in a timed explosion) (the most notable thing that ever happens in Chesterfield is, quite frequently, massive destruction). This place took on a magical air in the run-up to the soccer match: news crews descended on a town center that was constantly full of fans in replica kits with their faces painted blue, entire coachloads of people took a trip across the Peak District to see the team play at Old Trafford, and I sat cross-legged and hopeful on my friend Dean’s floor—Dean had cable TV, so dozens of us crammed in there to watch it—as the team played what is still the most exciting game of soccer I’ve ever seen. Chesterfield—a bunch of journeymen, part-time players and a guy who was literally traded in exchange for a bag of soccer balls—put two past Middlesbrough, a new-money Premier League mega-team who assembled on the pitch like overpowered movie villains, boasting the likes of Juninho, Emerson, and Fabrizio Ravanelli (who just sounds more exciting than Sean Dyche, the orange Chesterfield captain who tonked in the most no-nonsense penalty I’ve ever seen to give us the lead). Middlesbrough struggled back, then made in 3–2 in extra time, and it looked all but over: Premier League class had ground out Division 2 spunk. Then something absurd happened, something I still can’t quite explain today: one last cross of the game whipped diagonally across the pitch to the edge of the ’Boro box and onto the head of Jamie Hewitt, a Chesterfield-born left-back who was phenomenally out of position, and from eighteen yards out he bafflingly chose to header it, and the ball looped high, up, way above the height of the goal, then dipped again, yes, spun down and—yes—somehow, impossibly, dropped into the corner of the Middlesbrough net—3–3. The town exploded like a bomb. I will never be as delirious as I was when that Jamie Hewitt header went in. Every adult emotion I’ve ever had has been pitched against that barometer: Yes, this sex is good. But is it a Jamie Hewitt header against Middlesbrough in 1997? Honestly. That man has ruined joy for me, forever.
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Geographically, Chesterfield is sandwiched between two notable areas of British topography—the Peak District to the east, and Nottingham’s Sherwood Forest over to the west—which means the town sits in a weird little basin where extremes of weather are sucked into the more glamorous and tourist-friendly vortices on either side, and we are left with the drizzle in between. Something similar happened with the town’s accent and identity, too: technically, Chesterfield is in Derbyshire, which is listed as being in the Midlands, an anomalous expanse of land between Stoke and the start of the North proper, but spiritually Chesterfield is nearer in outlook to Yorkshire—defeatist, a constant feeling of being underestimated or ignored, cheerfully grumpy, very proud about their sofa—which sort of butts up against that. Walk the streets of Chesterfield and tell the people there that they are Midlanders, and enjoy, my friend, enjoy getting your fucking head kicked in. They identify as northern even if the geography stacks against them. If anything, wanting to be northern when you’re not is more northern than actually being northern. Chesterfield adheres to a curious idea: that of aspirational northernness.
The town itself is a few landmarks pavemented together around some terraced houses, and not much else: the Crooked Spire leads down to the train station that leads out to the golf course; reverse back the other way and you’ll find the town’s ancient center, a centuries-old daily market featuring everything from pirated DVDs, bread, fresh fruit, and a stall that just seems to sell…bungee cables? For some reason? Beyond the town center is Queen’s Park, home to the town’s major swimming pool and a small ornamental train my friend Paul drove for a summer, growing so local-boy famous as a result of it that he had a harem of teenage girls with emo fringes waiting for him after work every day (Chesterfield’s famous alumni include the glamour model Jo Guest, a handful of cricketers, former royal butler Paul Burrell, and steam-train inventor George Stephenson, who wasn’t born here but did
die here: you can see how Paul, on the tiny train that circled the town’s favorite park, leapt briefly onto that list); over the big roundabout by there you have the convergence of the town’s two rivers, the Rother and the Hipper, then beyond that the famous Brampton Mile, an assault course of pubs that is seemingly constantly having two opposing stag and hen parties, whatever time you go past there, even if it’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday; up beyond there are houses, a supermarket, eventually ceding to countryside. Go right way over to the other side of town and you have the new big out-of-town complex, built around the soccer team’s new stadium: some car dealerships, a Donkey Derby pub, formerly Europe’s second-largest Tesco (since eclipsed by another, larger European Tesco); then that all too soon makes way to houses, cluttered around supermarkets and roundabouts, until it leads out to a highway, until that leads right out of town. Chesterfield is tiny, centrally, but if you count all the tiny fragments of it that are embedded like teeth in the countryside around it, then the population nudges a hundred thousand; the central town itself can be basically crossed on foot in about twenty-five minutes flat.
Which is what, as teens, we did. The best thing in the entire world, sadly, is being a teenaged boy between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, up past midnight on a summer night, walking to the Big Tesco on the outskirts of town. This is close to holy. There is something about the air, up there, in those electric thrilling hours between 12 and 2 a.m.: it smells different, softer and more fragrant, the same way the air smells salty and powerful the nearer you get to the sea, the way the air smells electric and full of potential in the minutes before it rains. On long summer evenings after long summer days, when the sun hasn’t gone down, more dipped just hiding out of view, so the air around you goes blue-green instead of dark, ecstatic orange streetlamps blurring into view around you, the occasional car on one long stretch of concrete highway, vrrrrrooom, and it feels like you have carved out a whole new world just for you, a whole clear pure space above everything where you are the king.