After Brock (14 page)

   

Pete identified the entrant from his facetious speech as Sam Price. He had seen him about Leominster occasionally over the years but never spoken to him. Though a contemporary, he had been sent to boarding school when very young, and so was out of the circles in which Pete himself moved. Trevor Price was owner-manager of Price's Menswear in the High Street. As it happened, he had in fact spoken to Pete on his last visit to the shop about his son. ‘He's a sophisticated lad, if you get my meaning,' he'd said ambiguously, as if not quite approving of this attribute, ‘and clever too, even if he's not a High Flyer like your good self.'

Well, this sophisticated, clever lad had now edged himself further into the junior school shoe-room. He peered at the seated Oliver Merchant with frank but not detectably sympathetic curiosity, as he might have at some rare zoological specimen with an interesting malady. ‘The cost of talent!' he pronounced, ‘my Old Man says of actors, the bad-uns swoon before and during, the good-uns swoon only when they've done their duty.'

‘Mr Merchant did not
swoon
,' said Mum coldly. Pete could tell at once she didn't think Sam Price knew his place. ‘He's suffered a nose-bleed.' And, with schoolteacher's precision, she gave Sam the same information she'd given her son.

Sam Price was not to be put down. Had, he asked, Mr Merchant's blood gushed out in a stream or fallen in big drops? Did he feel giddy like you did after a ride on the Big Dipper at the fair?

Mum's answers were perfunctory, but, ‘In my opinion Mr Merchant needs at least five minutes more of sitting completely still, with his head well lowered. I'd be glad, Sam, if you told Trevor this. We'll join him and the others just as soon as we can. Nose-bleeds are not the trifles they may seem.' She clearly thought the messenger was underestimating their gravity. ‘And Peter, I don't think there's anything for you to do down here, so why don't you leave with Sam? The two of you do know one another, don't you?'

‘The whole world knows Peter Kempsey,' said Sam returning to his drawl, but unexpectedly proffering Pete a right hand, ‘he's the cleverest man in the whole Midlands, is he not? Wow, if I'd known Peter Kempsey was to be down here, I'd have brought my autograph book along. His signature'll be fetching a mint in a few years.'

Hard to know in what spirit to take this, but Mum put a stop to any more of the same by saying, ‘I'll see you then, Peter, back at the house. Depending of course on how long it takes Oliver to recover.'

‘A true Florence Nightingale!' enthused the blocked voice from Oliver's loins and nose. Pete couldn't help thinking he might have come up with a compliment a bit more original.

So out into the dim corridor Pete followed Sam Price, who, disconcertingly, stopped, gave the kind of laugh that's really a snort, and then sang right into his left ear:

   

‘I laid a divorcee in New York City,

I had to put up some kind of fight.

The lady then she covered me with roses,

She blew my nose, and then she blew my mind.'

   

He chuckled lewdly. ‘Not that I'm casting aspersions on your mother's virtue, mind. You get it, don't you? The Stones, “Honky Tonk Women”, second verse. That little scene just put it into my head. We won't ask what “blew my nose” means to Mick Jagger, will we?'

Sam's breath tickled the entire shell of Pete's ear, while up his nostrils floated the scent of the liberally applied patchouli. Pete thought it didn't become him to show amusement. He drew apart from the speaker, unsure what his next move should be. But already the Price boy's blend of self-confidence, insouciance, impertinence and languor was having an effect on his blood, was proving a come-on like his lotion was supposed to be. But a come-on to where? Pity to part from this intriguing character the minute they'd met!

Sam was continuing in his thick whisper: ‘I'd better relay your mum's words to my father, hadn't I? And then we can get out of this place, can't we? It's a tip!'

Wasn't that an invitation of sorts? Pete watched him go into the changing room, and talk briefly with Trevor Price. The fleet of candles illuminated them, so ludicrously unalike: Trevor was stout, Sam lean, Trevor florid, Sam sallow, Trevor bald, Sam long-haired. Pete had never much cared for the garrulous, pompous older man with his habit of holding forth to captive customers, and had never made his wanting to get away asap from him secret whenever he had to buy school uniform or sports clothes at his store. Odd to feel flattered now by the over-tures of his son.

On his return Sam kept up his curdled whisper: ‘No need for us to traipse all the way back down the corridor, you know, Peter. There's a door out into the car park just here, I've been using it all day, in my forced capacity as errand-boy.' And so there was!

Sam worked its long metal lever, and released the pair of them into the slapping coldness of the night air.

God, what a blessed relief to receive those slaps! It'd been such claustrophobia sitting in the Assembly Hall through the tedious, unfunny opera, on a chair hostile to bum, balls and thighs – and then, to cap all that, to witness Mum's attentions to her partner! All right, all right, he wasn't a partner of that kind! At least not provably!

‘Well,' Sam had edged up close to him again as they took stock of a yard quite remarkable in its darkness: scarcely a light on anywhere nearby, the Priory at its back not flood-lit as normal, street lamps, by government decree, shining at forty per cent of their strength. The parked cars here, thought Pete, looked like so many rows of turtles which might crawl away into further deep shadow.

‘Well! To
think I'm actually standing beside one of the Lugg Valley's few celebrities: Mr Peter Kempsey in the flesh. How did you enjoy that little Yuletide entertainment we've just endured?'

Pete couldn't do better than: ‘And how did Mr Sam Price enjoy it?'

Sam gave another of his snort-laughs: ‘Whatever fool do you take me for, man? It was a load of shit, was it not?'

‘Can't disagree,' Pete said.

‘Speaking of shit, do you fancy any? We've got enough time and…' he gestured ahead of them, ‘plenty of space. What with Mr Merchant's gory ailment and all the TLC your true Florence Nightingale of a mum is giving him, not to mention my Old Man's tendency to hold forth at the drop of a hat, the Lugg Valley Players won't be leaving their makeshift Green Room yet. We'll have the car park to ourselves, and can be “out of sight” in more ways than one!'

‘Meaning?' asked Pete.

‘Come off it, man, you know what I mean full well.' Sam's deep-brown eyes glowed like little gig-lamps in the dark. ‘I've got the stuff right here, on my person,' Sam was assuring him, ‘don't like to be without for too long. But the two of us should not skulk here so near the main building. Despite the prevailing murk, we can be pried on by any townsfolk of Titipu who emerge. Let's find ourselves some remote nook or cranny where we can safely get stoned if we want.'

   

Pete did not get stoned. But he inhaled that evening far more deeply than he'd previously done. How could he not when the spliff was being handed him by someone so ‘sophisticated'? Soon a welcome warmth was easing an unresisted way through his whole body, separating the basic or profoundest part of him from all the surface irritations and discomfort of the evening so far. Beyond him little fleeces of vapour rose in the chilly air from between stationary cars to float over brick walls and beyond, where they sought out larger vapours hanging over the town's water-meadows. Watching these gave Pete a pleasant sense of being anchored, and anchored in company appetisingly different from anybody else's in his life. The corner the two youths chose to occupy was blocked off by Lee T. Webster, Electrician's parked van.

‘So this is something of a red-letter day for me, Peter, meeting you,' Sam told him, ‘I need to talk to guys with brains, you see, otherwise I'd perish here in my parents' house, wouldn't I? And how could I do better than talk to your brainy self. Assuming I'm up to it!' Pete, suspicious he was being sent up, noted the asymmetry of Sam's oval face, mouth crooked on the right-hand side, one eye possibly a tiny fraction of an inch lower than the other.

‘Pete
,
not Peter,' he stalled, ‘I'm never Peter to friends. Never!'

‘Keep cool, friend, not a matter of life and death surely! But I'll be kind enough to comply. So tell me,
Pete
, doesn't it feel strange treading the streets, going in and out of public buildings, riding trains and buses with the common herd, all the time knowing you're the cleverest person the region has to offer?'

For all his bravura on the programme Pete did not consider himself this. People might think he did, but he didn't. Paradoxically his two radio victories had made him doubt his intelligence more than at any other stage of his life. ‘Only the cleverest among volunteers,' he corrected.

‘But I heard your June performance, man. Wow! Three times wow! And I was actually present in the audience for your first show, yeah, right there,' he jerked his thumb behind him, to the school buildings, ‘back in September '72. My Old Man felt we ought to do our local support bit, and so he dragged me along. Those tests you told us all about – they must be quite something.'

‘True, true… but,' said Pete, marvelling that Sam had remembered this, ‘but… but…'

He was being given an opportunity, he suddenly saw, by this brazen young man who was arousing his spirit and his flesh in about equal measure, to put right his relationship with Leominster, with the region, the country, the world, with his parents, his brothers, himself. Get himself on a decent, realistic footing with all that. These ‘buts' could mark a tentative beginning of his doing this…

‘But
what
, man? It's a fucking fact, as I see it.'

‘It could just be a happy coincidence that the things I shine at are what those two American shrinks value most. That's what my parents believe, I know. They don't say so outright, but it's obvious. Mum's always loyal to her old college friend who gave me the tests, but I'm pretty sure she agrees with my Dad who thinks…' painful to get the next words out, but Sam's presence, and the spliff, stimulated – or relaxed – him into managing them, ‘who thinks I'm not even as clever as my two younger brothers.' He shivered, not with cold nor dope, but from feeling afresh this injustice, this mistake in computation. He looked round him, before going on with what he now had to confess to this new friend of only minutes' duration.

‘I've got myself up shit creek in all this
High Flyers
business, Sam.'

And after daring his deepest and sweetest inhalation of the evening, Pete described his deception. ‘So there it is, the BBC is expecting me to participate on January 31, while my parents think I did as they wanted, and declined.'

Sam gave out a low hoot of conspiratorial interest. ‘Well, they're lopping your balls off, aren't they? And you can't have that! Parents! Mine were determined I went to a swank public school, to prove how much dough they'd accumulated over the years, and chose Darnton,' he spat out the name in hatred, ‘and I couldn't be doing with life there. It may have traditions that go back a thousand years and have ace connections with the law and the church and the army, even with the pearly gates themselves, but it wasn't for me. And I told 'em so enough times, and others told 'em too, but did the fuckers listen? Did they hell! So in the end I was forced to see to my own removal, wasn't I?'

By now Sam was standing even closer to Pete than before. So much so that, leaning against the meeting of two brick walls as they were, it felt as though they were lying upright together, two mates side by side in some natural outdoor bed, in an intimacy that intended to go further than just the exchange of youth's miseries. ‘Now listen, Pete, you've fucking well got to act on your own behalf, just as I did. And I know just how.' His eyes had a fervid, almost hysteric sparkle. ‘You're going to write straightaway, this very evening when you get back to your abode, to Bob Whats-his-name. You will tell him to address any and every communication to Mr Peter Kempsey c/o Price, The Tall House, Bargates, Leominster, Hereford-and-Worcester. You will explain you're staying with us while your parents are away. I'm now living at home – going to a crammer's in Hereford in the New Year so I can take my A Levels in the summer – and I'll get downstairs to the morning post before anybody else does. But to be on the safe side, I'll spin Mother and the Old Man some tale – oh, that I've agreed to enter some competition in your name because – well, are you eighteen yet, Pete?'

‘Not till January 7,' said Pete, now a-bubble with an elation he couldn't name. Behind those stammered ‘buts' of a few minutes ago had been the longing to extricate himself from his brain-box status – and his apparent need to live up to it in his own community (as well as to a nationwide audience). But now, with the aid Sam was proposing he passionately wanted to vindicate it. And bugger the whole lot who doubted him.

‘Well,
I
turned eighteen in September. So there we go, my friend. Parfait! Perfetto! I've entered the competition because I'm eighteen whereas you are not. Obviously I'll let you know the split-second anything comes from the BBC. How d' you feel about it?'

‘Sounds pretty watertight! Yes, I'm up for it!' Anyway hadn't he a moral duty to take part in the January 31 special edition? Bob Thurlow might well have decided on this extra edition of his show primarily to give a further opportunity to Peter Kempsey whose brilliant earlier performances he so admired. What other course was there for him but subterfuge?

Or rather,
more
subterfuge.