by Gary Locke
Gayle smiled at him as he struggled.
“He used to love all these American bands that were really big in the late ‘80’s. I used to watch it with him. A lot of them were really good.”
“Cool” said Gayle. “Sounds like a cool guy. Where is he now?”
“Don’t know” said Clive shrugging his shoulders. “My Mum, sorry foster Mum, she had lots of male friends..... but none of them ever ended up sticking around. Too many kids to look after, I suppose. Bet they all felt like they were second best to us kids. Mum always puts us first. Sooner or later, suppose they didn’t like that..... Jim was cool though!”
Gayle looked on intently. Clive had never seen her this close before and her brown / green eyes had a real warmth to them; it was like he was looking at someone that he had known for all his life. And she was actually very, very pretty. He carried on talking.
“Yeah Jim, he had long hair and used to wear brown leather pants quite a lot. He drove an old, blue Skoda, around the time that all those jokes about Skoda’s were popular – but he didn’t care one bit. He was too cool to be bothered.”
Gayle looked confused. “What jokes?”
“You know,” said Clive “like, what’s the difference between a hedgehog and a Skoda? A hedgehog has the pricks on the outside!”
Gayle laughed.
Clive smiled, happy that he’d made her laugh. He may as well go for the full repertoire of Skoda gags that had always amused him and he’d somehow always remembered.
“Why do Skoda’s have heated rear-windows? To keep your hands warm when you’re pushing them! What do you call a convertible Skoda? A skip! What do you call a Skoda with twin exhausts? A wheelbarrow!”
Clive stopped there as Gayle laughed. He was sure there were more jokes than that – maybe he couldn’t remember them all, after all.
“I always remember the Stan Ridgeway song Camouflage when I think of Jim’s blue Skoda. He always seemed to have it playing.” He said smiling.
Gayle looked a bit blank again.
“You don’t know that song?” asked Clive.
Gayle shook her head.
“I’m sure you’ve heard it, it was on the radio, like all the time, for a while in the late 80’s. It’s about a mystical, superhuman marine – “camouflage”, helping a stranded soldier out of a hopeless situation in the Vietnam War. It’s probably a metaphor for fate or salvation or something. But it feels like more than a song. It’s like listening to a film. It’s really cool; I’ll have to bring it in for you to listen to..... you know, if you want?”
Gayle nodded. She wasn’t completely convinced by his song description but she liked the idea of Clive “bringing something in” for her.
“Yeah, sounds good.”
She paused for a while before saying, with a cheeky grin.
“This Jim of yours, though, he doesn’t sound very cool. Sounds like he dressed and looked like a woman and drove an old man’s car!”
She laughed as she spoke, before adding.
“Sounds more like a saddo to me!”
“Ahhh” said Clive now turning his body in his chair to be face to face with Gayle and talking over her laughing. “That’s where you’ve misunderstood what being cool is. A person isn’t cool because they wear the clothes or listen to the music that everyone else does. You’re cool if you do whatever you want to do – because you want to, regardless of whether others would think of you as cool. There’s a massive difference between acting cool and being cool.”
Gayle stopped laughing but continued smiling. She quite liked the fact that Clive had now turned to face her. Now she was seeing him close up for the first time she was surprised how good looking he actually was. She had always thought he was just a weasel looking boy who liked to draw penises, but there was a bit of a young David Bowie look about him. He had a really nice, and very attractively cheeky, smile; and his blue eyes, now she was right next to him, looked so familiar; somehow like she already knew him.
The two of them just sat there smiling at each other for a little while before Clive asked, “What about you, how did you get to know about Bad English?”
“Because of my Dad” said Gayle a little irritably. “He works for Sonic Media, an agent of most of the big record companies. He worked away a lot. Often went to America and he used to bring back advance tapes of all these cool bands that you never heard on UK radio, like Bad English and Skid Row and Warrant and Nelson and Damn Yankees and Poison and Alice Cooper and.....”
Gayle stopped because Clive was nodding and smiling at her. “What? Are you making fun of me?”
“No!” said Clive. “I love all those bands. It’s like you’ve just read through my record collection..... Just one thing though – Alice Cooper isn’t a band, he’s actually a man!”
Gayle smiled at him.
“I know!”
Whilst still smiling, she added:
“Of course, I love Take That as well. I mean, come on, everyone does, don’t they?”
Clive was just about to say “NO!” as angrily as he could until he noticed Gayle was still grinning and looking beyond him, out of the window. She was clearly joking with him. She was pretty funnily.
Gayle frowned a little before looking back at Clive and saying:
“My Dad wasn’t cool though, he was a complete knob. He cheated on my Mum and then left us both. I haven’t seen or heard from him in months. At least he showed me the music that not a lot of people knew about. He left something that I could have that was just mine.”
Her last words were followed by complete silence and the atmosphere in the room felt a little tense as Gayle again stared past Clive and out of the window.
“He does sound like a knob” said Clive after a while. “Just to be clear though, that music isn’t yours, it’s mine!”
Gayle looked back at him and mirrored the large smile that Clive was wearing. She gently pushed him in the chest before saying,
“Maybe we can share it?”
Clive kept smiling as he nodded his approval.
“Can I ask you something?” said Gayle. “There’s something that I need to clear up.”
Clive nodded a little suspiciously,
“….ok, then.”
“Why do you draw pictures of cocks everywhere?”
Clive opened his eyes wide taken completely by surprise.
“I don’t draw cocks..... anywhere!” he said defensively, feeling his face heating up faster than an angry Yosemite Sam.
“Yes you do.” said Gayle “The first day I joined your class, you were drawing a big one on the window, just over there!”
Clive frowned as he thought about it.
“I was not!” he said, again defensively. After thinking for a while he added. “I may have been drawing a rocket?”
He reached into his school bag and removed his maths book, flicking to the last but one page on which he had drawn a more detailed rocket during another of Pervy Jackson’s ridiculously boring lessons.
“Did it look like this?” he asked.
“Yes!” said Gayle laughing out loud. “There’s another one you’ve drawn!”
“It’s clearly a rocket!” said Clive as he stared at it, now realising that he probably shouldn’t have gone for the pink and purple colour scheme.
“Damn” he added, now laughing along himself. “I knew I should have coloured it green.”
After a good twenty seconds of laughing together, Gayle calmed down and said,
“I take it art isn’t your thing then?”
“What?” said Clive in amazement. “You do know that’s my art portfolio displayed in the corridor near the library don’t you? I am the North West High School Artist of the Year this year! So, apart from penis-looking rockets, then art is actually very much my thing!”
“Oh my God” said Gayle. “All those paintings are yours? Wow, you’re really good. You could probably make a good living out of doing art!..... Especially if there’s a market for penis portraits!”
/>
They both laughed at each other.
“Ok, can I ask you a question now?” said Clive.
Gayle smiled, looking like she was really enjoying herself. “Of course, bring it on!”
“What’s with the big poodle..... the big, permed hair thing? Isn’t it a bit 1980’s Kylie Minogue-ish?”
Gayle sighed.
“It’s my Mums fault. I wanted to try something different and she talked me into having this done. I feel like Cher sometimes! And there’s no taming it, I’ve tried all sorts. I’m thinking the only thing I can do is chop it off and start again. What do you think?”
“No!” said Clive straight away. “I actually think it suits you. It’s different to everyone else. It’s unique..... it’s feisty.”
Gayle smiled.
“Are you flirting with me?” she asked cheekily.
As Clive’s cheeks reddened once more, Gayle could also feel a little hot flush of her own coming on. They looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds before Gayle said.
“So that makes me cool then doesn’t it? If I’ve got a look that’s different to everyone else but I don’t care because it’s just the way I want to look?”
“No way” said Clive straight away. “You’ve just admitted that you look the way you do because you Mum told you to do it – that makes you the biggest geek in the school!”
They both laughed at each other again.
“Can I listen to Bad English for a few minutes please?” asked Gayle when they had both stopped laughing.
Clive had never let anyone listen to his walkman before, it was one of those “rules” that he had. Kind of like when your Dad buys a newspaper but won’t let anyone as much as look at it before he has read every last word of it.
“Yeah sure” said Clive, finding that his lips had taken over from his brain when it came to making important decisions. What were his lips after?
“Let’s listen together!” said Gayle after Clive had passed her his walkman.
She leaned over and gently put one of the ear buds into Clive’s right ear before putting the other one into her left ear. Their heads gently touched to ensure that both buds stayed in ok, and it felt nice.
As Gayle pressed play on the walkman she said, “I never knew it until now - but I quite like detentions.”
Chapter Twelve: Love Is…
Clive sat at the small desk that had nothing more than an old fashioned telephone on it of the, seemingly, hastily put together “office” that was the head quarters of the Deanwater Way branch of Love Is..., “a brand new enterprise that will revolutionise and give new life to relationships in this country.” (According to the words of the poster he was reading anyway.) He had hung his wet coat on the back of his chair and was now wondering if there was an actual medically acknowledged length of time for which sitting in wet trousers would guarantee the onset of piles.
Clive looked around and focussed on the numerous posters that hung on each of the four walls in a large room that was brightly lit by the two large front windows and the small sky light up on the ceiling. He had followed a man with a broad Brummie twang named Jason, who had been wearing the sandwich board advert for Love Is..., to this small, (albeit alarmingly bigger inside than it looked from outside) former shop down one of the tight alley ways off the main precinct. Clive had never been down here before and, quite frankly, didn’t even know that this part of the shopping centre even existed. After a brief chat in the pouring rain, Jason had encouraged Clive to come and meet his boss, Jeremy, for a discussion about how Love Is... could help to find those lost feelings of love between him and Gayle. It had taken both Clive and Jason’s combined efforts to get in through the “shop” door that could only be best be described as “a little stiff” and in need of “a drop or two of oil”.
Clive had been sitting here for about five minutes now after Jason had gone into what he described as the “back office” to see “if Jeremy was available right now.”
As he continued looking at the various posters on the walls, most of which wore a slogan describing exactly what “Love Is”, Clive began to feel uncomfortable. Not just because this “office” used to be a One Quid Bakery store and the smell of stale cheese and onion pasties was overwhelming and really quite nauseating, but because he couldn’t help but ask himself: were things not a bit late now between him and Gayle for him to be doing something as radical as this? Coming into the office of a business he had never heard of and thinking that they may somehow be able to miraculously wave a magic wand across his and Gayle’s relationship; a relationship that had been breaking down for well over a decade, and fix it - just like that? The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded; and even more American than the idea of going to counselling all of those years ago. Maybe he should just get up and leave before this Jeremy arrived? He was almost certain that the main reason he was here anyway was the advertised “money back guarantee if we are unsuccessful”.
God he was a sucker for money back guarantees, most of which were not anything of the sort anyway and were offset by confusing, lengthy small print that would have been much clearer if it had just stated:
Money Back Guarantee*
* - Under no circumstances is there any way in which you will ever get any of your money back.
Before Clive got the chance to further explore the possibility of skedaddling (a perfectly functional word that is grossly underused these days) the door behind him opened and a tall, thin man with a neatly-trimmed handle-bar moustache entered the “office” area. He walked slowly across the room looking like he was trying to minimise the squelching noise that his, clearly soaking-wet, shoes were making on the concrete floor. He smiled at Clive as he walked around the small desk and sat on the seat opposite him, his, also unmistakably saturated, trousers connecting with his chair making the sound of a wet towel being dropped onto a tiled floor.
He was wearing a yellow and red vertically striped shirt and a bright green bow tie; a clear trying-too-hard-to-be-quirky fashion statement that seems to be popular with a certain faction of society lately (you know, odd balls). Judging by the large name badge he was wearing that detailed: Jeremy Corden. CEO. Love Is..., Clive assumed that this was, indeed, the aforementioned Jeremy. Although he did share more than a passing resemblance to Jason who, as yet, had not re-appeared from the “back office area”. (That may or may not actually be just a kitchen area that still had large industrial ovens that were once used to bake highly-saturated, luke-warm savoury snacks.)
“It’s Clive, isn’t it?” asked Jeremy in a thick, Australian accent as he reached a hand over the desk for shaking. “Sorry for the delay mate, I’ve been stuck in the office all morning on the blower, people trying to arrange appointments. You know how it is when you’re busy, don’t you?”
Clive smiled and nodded his head whilst coming to the conclusion that something didn’t quite add up. Why would someone who had been “stuck in the office all morning” be as soaked as Clive was himself – someone who had been “stuck in the rain all morning”? And why did Jeremy, despite the fact he had a very distinctive moustache and spoke in a different accent, appear to be very, very, very, very, very (I think that’s enough verys’) similar looking to Jason?
“Jason tells me you want to discuss the possibility of us taking your case on?” said Jeremy in a kind of statement / question way and putting the sort of over-Australian emphasis on the word Jason that would make you think it must be spelt: Jaiiii-sun.
“Erm yeah. I just saw the advert that..... Jason?..... was carrying and thought it might be worth a go.”
Jeremy nodded his head.
“This is what we do” he said, his arms stretched out wide to bring attention to all the different posters on the wall.
Clive took a few seconds to look around the room again and read some of the different slogans that he was being presented with.
Love is a Football Field.
Love can be your Best Friend and your Worst Enem
y.
Love is like Oxygen.
Love is the Perfect View from the top of the Highest Mountain.
Any 3 Pasties or Sausage Rolls for £1. (Clive assumed this was a relic of the One Quid Bakery days, well certainly hoped it was anyway – otherwise it was a pretty strange love slogan. Mmm, 3 pasties or sausage rolls for £1 – even though they would make you feel sick as a dog, you would be powerless not to eat them all at once.)
Love Makes The World Go Around.
Love is like a Butterfly.
He stopped at one particular poster and felt like he had to ask Jeremy about it.
“Love is like an old Boiler? That’s not particularly..... poetic?”
Jeremy smiled.
“That is one of my favourites, and is actually one of my own sayings; a real analogy that really fits. Old boilers are the best in the world, much better than the flaky, plastically modern ones you get now. But when they break down, they can be really smelly, and you start to wonder if they are past their best, maybe even obsolete, better off being replaced. But those babies were really meant to last and don’t have much that can go wrong with them. When they do, it’s usually something simple like the pilot light just needs re-lighting. And when it is re-lit then the boiler fires again, as good as new, and rages just like it used to – much stronger and hotter than any of these new ones can ever hope to.”
He smiled as he spoke, his energy and enthusiasm really shining through, despite that rather large moustache that dominated most of his face.
“Is your relationship going down the dunny? Because maybe you just need someone to help relight the pilot light for you?”
“Yeah it is..... kind of has been for a long time.....” began Clive, before noticing that Jeremy’s handlebar moustache had begun to slump near the right side of his mouth. It was clearly a stick-on facial hair accessory.
“Ok, where were we?” said Jeremy, noticing that Clive had stopped talking mid-sentence. “Oh, before we go on, can I get you a drink of something? I know I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of a cocky’s cage!”
Clive didn’t say a word and instead just stared at Jeremy as his moustache was, very slowly, peeling away from his face like wallpaper from a wall that hadn’t had enough paste applied. (Yep, memories from Clive’s attempted decorating in the past.)