Dance On My Grave (5 page)

‘The shop happens to earn our living.’

‘That’s important, yes, but your mother could have managed somehow. From my brief experience I’d say she’s pretty good at getting her way.’

‘It’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t owned their own business. I had the same trouble when I was trying to explain to the Head why I was leaving.’

‘Try me.’

‘Coffee or beer?’

‘Some more beer, please.’

‘My father and mother started the shop from nothing, right? They wanted to do something where they could be together all the time. Dad liked music. The shop seemed the answer. They built up a good business. Regular customers. Big stock. They put a lot of work into it. Now the place is a kind of centre for people interested in music. It was Dad’s life really.’

‘That doesn’t mean it has to be yours, does it?’

‘No. But I do feel some kind of loyalty. Music means a lot to me. The business means a lot to the family, and to the town as well. It would be a waste to let it fall to pieces or to sell it off. I just felt I had to carry on what Dad had started.’

‘You were right. I still don’t understand.’

‘Haven’t you ever thought about following in the paternal footsteps?’

‘My father’s a baggage handler at the airport.’

‘So you don’t want to be a baggage handler at the airport. What do you want to do?’

I shrugged. ‘Haven’t a clue, to be honest. That’s the current problem. Get a job or stay on at school. I think that’s what Osborn wants to see me about this afternoon.’

‘Trust Ozzy. He’ll want to have his say.’

‘Why not? Everybody else does.’

‘Have some more beef, you’ll need it.’

‘Ta. But I like Ozzy.’

‘A minority taste.’

‘People grumble because he makes them work, that’s all. He knows his stuff and I think he makes it interesting. Anyway, if I get through O-level lit, it’ll be because of him.’

‘I’ll grant you he thinks Eng. lit, is the only thing that matters.’

‘Sounds like you drew blood.’

‘Now and then. Drink up.’

‘I’ve had enough, thanks.’

He started clearing the table of the dirty plates. ‘When you’ve seen him you tell me all. Just to see if I’m right.’

I looked at him, the question unspoken.

‘Well,’ he said breezing it up, ‘you’ll have to collect your clothes. Mother’s already got them in the washer. And you’ll be bringing my stuff back, won’t you? You can tell me then . . . Okay?’

17/That was how it was.

Correction:
That was how it was not.

We said all that. But there was more going on behind our faces so to speak.

But if I’m going to get it right—and I have to get it right or why bother with all this in the first place?—I’ll have to make a cringing confession that will help explain. The sort of confession people only make when they are drunk or hypnotized on a psycho’s couch. Or are mad. Loony. Like me. The sort that wakes you up afterwards, in the middle of the night, shaking your head and groaning ‘No, no!’ in an agony of sweaty regret. But what the hell, I’ve told you too much now anyway. You might as well hear the rest. And you can’t skip it because if you do you’ll miss something that makes sense of everything that happened.

When I was a kid of about seven I watched a television programme, I’m not sure whether it was a play or an old film, about two boys. If I saw it now I’d probably rupture myself laughing at the incredible banality and pukiness of its story. But when you are seven, if you can recall those far-off days of last year, a TV sci-fi monster made from plastic foam and kitchen foil is frighteningly convincing;
even the newsreaders look real. In short, at seven you still believe.

These two boys were a couple or three years older than me, and together they had a series of adventures of the kind that, at seven, you think must be the most exciting events known to man. In the first adventure they found an old tin can that was supposed to be full of magic beans. These magic beans possessed the power of transporting people back in time. So Our Heroes had day trips to such wonders as Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, the Spanish Armada on the High Seas, Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Romans, and the Court of King Arthur during a period when the knights weren’t getting on too well together. Wherever they went Our Heroes sorted out everybody’s troubles by dint of native twentieth-century knowhow and stunningly precocious intelligence, like commonsense. I am ashamed to admit that I was thirteen before I stopped enjoying that kind of gunk. As Barry used to say about me in a slightly different circumstance, there are times when I can be a late developer.

The important thing is that at one glorious moment near the end of the first adventure Our Heroes swore eternal fealty, one to another, by each cutting his hand with a forage knife freshly sharpened on King Arthur’s stone, and then, holding their bleeding wounds together, mingled their blood while chanting a solemn oath and gazing deep into each other’s eyes.

‘Now,’ said one of them afterwards, ‘we are bosom friends forever.’

I remember those words exactly for two reasons. The first reason is that I had just that week learned that a woman’s breasts are sometimes called her bosom. (The fact that bosom also means chest, man or woman’s, had not yet become clear to me.) One of those TV boys calling the other the friend of his breast was therefore a little
startling to a small boy with a fresh interest in mammary glands.

The second reason isn’t so easy to explain. It wasn’t so much the phrase ‘bosom friends’ that struck me, but the idea behind the phrase. It put into words something I have always wanted since I can remember: an out-and-out, no-holds-barred, one-for-both and both-for-one, totally faithful, ever-present friend. And I do not mean a pet dog.

Here was this bilgewater TV show putting words and pictures to my till then unspoken desire. Ah-ha!, I must have said to myself, or whatever gasp you emit when you are seven and talking to yourself about something as surprisingly illuminating as a flash of mental lightning, Ah-ha! So other people want to have friends like that as well! I am not alone, I must have thought. Somewhere out there is someone looking for me, just as I am looking for him. A boy with a can full of magic beans.

I’ve thought about that moment of surprise often since. The only way I can explain it to myself is to suppose that because I did not have any brothers or sisters to knock romantic ideas of friendship out of me at an early age, this irrational desire for a bosom pal took hold. Or maybe my mother should have let me roam the streets and get beaten up sooner than she did. Or maybe it was all genetic, or had something to do with what I ate, or didn’t eat, or maybe it was the result of not being taught to say my prayers at night because my father is a raving atheist.

I might add that nobody warned me at an appropriate age about wet dreams, and maybe these had something to do with the persistence of my desire for a bosom buddy into adolescence so that it was still with me, as strong as ever, when I was sixteen. But then, nobody warned me earlier about television and how a little of it tends to corrupt the mind and a lot of it corrupts the mind
completely. And, after all, it was television which gave me, during one of its frequent wet emissions, the words and pictures to imagine this idea of a possible reality—the hope for a bosom friend. Remember Vonnegut: We are what we pretend to be. So in the end it is probably all television’s fault that I became a bosom-pal freak.

Whatever, here I was at sixteen years six months corrupted by a long-lasting desire for a bosom friend without ever having found a friend to be truly bosomy with. Mind you, I did have some close calls in my search for a soul mate. There was Harvey, for instance.

Harvey came to live in our street when I was nine and growing despondent, having by then searched for two years without success for someone to cut a hand with. Harvey, I was sure, was He. And for a while everything went just like on TV. We had adventures. Not, sadly, with a can of magic beans, but more routine stuff like sleeping at the bottom of our garden in a tent made of an old blanket over a washing line. (God, the daring! The day it was due to happen I broke out in a rash at the excitement of it all.)

In the middle of the night we swapped our best jokes, by which you’ll recall, everyone at nine years old means their dirtiest jokes. The joke that kept Harvey and me giggling longest that night was this one:

There’s this little girl and this little boy and the little boy says, ‘Can I come to your house?’ and the little girl says, ‘You’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ So they go to her house and the little boy says, ‘Can I come to your bedroom with you?’ so she says, ‘Well you’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ The little boy says, ‘Can I get in bed with you?’ so she says, ‘Well you’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ The little boy says,
‘Can I put my finger on your belly-button?’ so she says, ‘You’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ So the little boy does, and the little girl says, ‘That’s not my belly-button,’ and the little boy says, ‘No, and that’s not my finger.’

Of course, when we’d gone through it two or three times and worn ourselves out with giggling, we tried acting it out, which I enjoyed very much and couldn’t understand why Harvey got tired of the game so soon.

Another time we built a secret den behind a back yard garage rarely used by its owner. Harvey said the owner was a 102-year-old man who lived on Coke and mashed cornflakes. A young and pretty District Nurse visited him a lot, which gave rise to much speculation between Harvey and myself about the extraordinary properties such a diet must possess. We tried it for a while, but it did nothing for Harvey.

Before long Harvey turned out to be a disappointment. His idea of bosom friendship was all for him and none for me. For days I supplied every demand of this self-indulgent creep, hoping my unselfish devotion would eventually win him for the cause of true and lasting amity. But the more I did to please him, the more his appetite for slavery increased. I’ve noticed since that this is how a lot of friendships are. I soon decided palship meant more to me than being dogsbody to an egotist. We split up after a nasty row that ended in a scuffle on the pavement outside Harvey’s house, and remained sullen enemies thereafter.

Next there was Neill. He came along about a year after my friendship with Harvey broke up. Harvey had had one good effect. He had made me suspicious. Harvey looked clean-cut, open-faced, honest. The sort of kid your mother says you should try and be more like. But behind that innocently cute phizzog was a scheming and selfish
mind. People are not always, I realized after Harvey, just what they look. Even less are they what they say.

Neill was overweight, mother-coddled, and quiet. He had a long nose that was fat at the end and sometimes dripped on cold mornings, like a leaking pear. He was also an only son. After Harvey I felt safe with Neill. Life was never exactly sparkling and he certainly did not possess the can of magic beans. But he was always there, willing and faithful. We went to school together every day, watched TV, flew kites, shared meals, sat around talking. Also Neill was a big reader; he took me to the local library and made me join, which I hated him doing at the time, but now I’m grateful because it was something I would never have done on my own. We spent hours thereafter lying side by side on his bedroom floor with our noses stuck in books.

But none of this is really what kept me friends with Neill for three years. What did was one thing: obsession. In this case, Neill’s, not mine. Neill knew exactly what he wanted to do in life. You’d never have thought so to look at him; you’d have thought he was a wet slob with a mind as flabby as his overfed body. But not a bit of it. He fascinated me because till I met him I had never known anyone else but myself who had an obsession. And he had something more. He had a concentrated personality. He did not just have an obsession, he devoted himself to it totally. What we did as we apparently did nothing but lie about talking and reading, was to talk and read about Neill’s obsession. Neill wanted to devote his life entirely to
experimenting
with electricity. It was this that provided a few mind-blowing moments of such high excitement that the long boring stretches of life with Neill were well worth suffering.

These big moments happened because it never occurred to Neill that you are supposed to wait till you are
grown up before you engage in scientific experiments of the kind that might push out the barriers of human knowledge but might also kill you in the process. He was already getting on with the job when I met him. He had commandeered the spare bedroom and turned it into a laboratory stuffed with gear he had begged, bought and filched—wire, and meters of various sorts and sizes, and inexplicable gadgets, and control units as ominous as robots. And from time to time the entire house seemed to be nothing more than a testbed for Neill’s latest experimental wizardry.

What I could never understand was the way Neill’s mother encouraged him. In everything else she smothered him with maternal protection. Even in summer she made him wear a sweater, a thick jacket, an overcoat and a scarf if the sky went cloudy. And he wasn’t allowed to go into town on his own in case he got lost. Neill never protested; I suppose he couldn’t be bothered. But I was a godsend to them both. Neill’s mother trusted me for some reason (motherly women always trust me, to wit Mrs Gorman, I put it down to my sad eyes) and regarded me as a safe junior child-minder who could take care of her son for her when he was out of the house. Neill knew that if I was with him he could go places and do things otherwise forbidden unless accompanied by mum. Both showed their gratitude. Neill’s mother never stopped trying to feed me up to similar proportions as her son, and Neill allowed me to help with his experiments, a privilege no one else enjoyed. (I never saw Neill’s father, by the way. He was a merchant seaman and came home only rarely.)

Not that I ever understood a thing Neill was doing. But the experiments provided the excitement. The first such I witnessed was when Neill set his next-door neighbour’s house on fire. He had designed a gadget which somehow
involved the mains electric circuit. With my nervous assistance he rigged up oddments of equipment to the electricity meter controlling the household supply, which was located in a cupboard under the stairs. All seemed to be going according to Neill’s plan when we heard the unmistakable noise of a fire engine hurling itself down the street and skidding to a fierce stop, as we thought, outside Neill’s house. We raced to see what was going on only to find the engine had stopped next door, which was already smoking badly from every crevice. I’m sorry to admit that we watched with amused interest while the fire was put out. People are cruel when they are twelve. How Neill’s tampering with the mains supply accomplished such spectacular results neither he, nor anybody else, ever discovered.