by Paul Magrs
On the way the tour guide had made the whole coach watch a Freddie Starr Live video. Vince didn’t relish the thought of more of the same.
They carried on walking in silence. He looked behind to see the lights of the coaches swaying and bobbing, moving away, back towards the motorway. That reminded him of something. As the coaches roared past on the coastal road, their lights rearing up and receding, excitable faces pressed to the window, something came back into his mind irresistibly.
‘It’s like Pinocchio,’ he said, putting the T-shirt over his head as the drizzle worsened and the great lit-up coaches went thundering by.
‘You what?’ asked Andy, who was starting to think they really had missed their coach. And it was his fault. They would have to get a taxi to his nanna’s. She would have to put them up in her back parlour. Even wet and tired Andy found the idea strangely exciting. He huddled into his jacket and turned to Vince. ‘What did you say about Pinocchio?’
In the downpour Vince was blushing. This was part of his private mythology. He said, ‘In Pinocchio there’s that island where they tempt all the bad boys to go. The bad lads’ land. It’s where they think they’re gonna have this smashing time with gambling and booze and messing round, and then they all turn into donkeys. Pinocchio goes there, tempted by his friend Lichinoro, who says they can go and have the time of their lives.’
Andy was smiling, watching the traffic. ‘I remember.’
‘Anyway,’ Vince went on, ‘in the book I had, it described this bit with all the wagons going off to the shore, with the boys bound for the island, for the bad lads’ land. And it said there was a fat jolly coachman hanging off the front, taunting Pinocchio for being scared. And all the boys clinging on, laughing. It said that the wagons’ lanterns were swinging and lurching in the darkness and horns were hooting. And Pinocchio was jumping up and down going, “Wait for me! I’m coming too!”’
He fell quiet. Andy was nodding. ‘Like he was feeling he’d missed the boat.’
‘Summat like that.’ Vince was starting to feel daft, as if he’d given too much away. His ears were still ringing and he noticed that they had both slipped further into a broad Geordie accent. As if they were being bluff and easy-going with each other, but in those exaggerated accents there was also a guardedness, a put-on roughness that hadn’t been there an hour earlier when they’d both shrieked themselves raw down at the front as Bowie sang ‘Heroes’.
‘Here’s all the coaches bound for bad lads’ land,’ Andy said. ‘And they’ve left us behind! Bloody typical, that!’ He was soaked to the skin. ‘Listen. Next phone box we come to, I’m ringing Nanna Jean and she’ll book us a taxi for nowt. She’ll pull in a favour and get us in warm and dry before we know it.’
‘Smart,’ Vince said. Actually, he wasn’t sure if he felt he’d missed the boat at all. In terms of the Pinocchio story, he felt that, since the Blue Fairy was nowhere to be found, since she’d gone and never put him right, he’d gone straight from wooden boy into being a donkey. And in the meantime he had never been a real boy. He was cursed into being a doltish, lascivious donkey… Getting vaguely stirred up by the idea of maybe sharing a room with Andy in this nanna’s house. But he’d be happy just to talk to Andy a bit longer. Andy listened to what he was on about.
‘I’ll have to phone me dad, too,’ Vince said, as a box came into view. By now all the coaches had gone by and they were none the wiser as to where theirs had been.
The phone box stood opposite Marsden Rock. This was a rock the size of the Albert Hall, two hundred yards out to sea. In daylight you would see it swarming with a myriad irate seabirds. In the dark all you got was an impression of bulk and seething life. As Andy used the phone first and told Nanna Jean he was coming and bringing a friend with him, Vince shivered and stared at the massive rock, thinking that could be the bad lads’ island there. The place the lights went lurching and bobbing towards.
Vince was being smothered in a reek of perfumes. It was like being a kid again, slobbered over by one of his aunties. All his dad’s sisters made a fuss of him once his mam left home. But in 1984 they all upped and left for Australia, all five of them.
They married five Australian brothers. His dad had never approved, although it was still his dream to go out there some day to visit them. If he had the money he would be hard pressed to say which trip he would spend it on, Australia and his sisters, or the Graceland pilgrimage. When Vince was younger it had always been promised that his dad would take the pair of them on holiday when the time came. It never had. Vince added that lost holiday to the stock of things they had never done together.
He was standing in the doorway of Boots, under the hot gush of the fans, waiting for Andy. I’m really wallowing in the past today, he thought. He watched as Andy laughed with the girl who was serving on the make-up counter. Sometimes Andy could make anyone laugh. He was there buying makeup for himself, so he could do himself up like a Goth. He had explained to Vince that tonight they were going to the nightclub round the back of MFI. Flicks, it was called, although the fake scrawling of the neon logo made it look like Fucks. Tonight it was retro eighties night and, in Darlington, that meant a night out for all the town’s Goths, most of whom didn’t realise that they were being retro. They just liked the music and the dry ice and the Snakebite at a pound a pint.
Andy came back to the doorway and they left the shop. Vince was glad to gulp in the bus fumes of the main street. ‘So you’re dressing up as one of the Sisters of Mercy then?’
Andy nodded. ‘It’ll be excellent.’ At the moment he was in a Take That outfit, one of those cropped T-shirts to show off his stomach, despite the time of year. His anorak was cropped too and it had a fake orange fur trim.
Vince asked, ‘Can you get away with wearing make-up in Dario at night these days?’
‘Course. And I’ll look dead hard anyway. You’ll see.’
Andy was leading them towards Skinnergate, towards the charity shops. Vince understood that the days Andy was up early enough, he cruised the second-hand clothes shops. Inside his wardrobe there were the faint smells of face powder and strong detergent. An old people’s smell, Vince thought, that smell of second-hand shops.
That was what Nanna Jean’s house smelled like, late that night in 1987 when she let them into the hallway. It was from his Nanna Jean that Andy got all his second-hand habits. It was all waste not, want not with them. While both Vince and Andy saw their lives in terms of feast or famine, it made Andy scrimp and save, but Vince pissed everything he got into the wind.
‘Ha’way in, pets,’ Nanna Jean had shouted, lumbering up the hallway, showing them into the parlour, where the old stove was on. The place was full of heat and steam from fresh baking. ‘I’ve put some pies in for the pair of you.’ Vince stood uncertainly by the doorway. Andy smiled at him. ‘Mind,’ Nanna Jean said, ‘if I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.’ She laughed at herself and went off into the scullery to see to things.
She was a huge woman. The tiny dimensions of the house by the docks helped that impression, but to Vince’s eyes, she was a monster. She was in a tentlike black frock, with a well- scrubbed grey pinafore over the top. Her hair was in a bun and her feet were dainty and pointy as if they had been bound that way. She called out harshly from the back, ‘You pick your moments, you do, Andrew! At the moment I’m all worked up because of old Iris. Remember Iris, who I used to go down the Spiritualist church with? Aye, well, she’s not well.’ Nanna Jean reappeared in the doorway with a tray of fine china, cakes and the biggest black teapot Vince had seen.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Andy sat on the hard-backed settee.
‘She’s going to die, bonny lad. Now move up so your nice-looking friend can get on there with you. The pies will just be a minute or two.’
Every detail of that night came back to Vince whenever he thought of it. It was a lovely night. Nanna Jean sat there and regaled them with stories right into the early hours, feeding them and encouraging th
em both to talk. Yet all the while Jean was thinking about Iris, her best friend from before the war years, and that she wouldn’t last out the winter. And it turned out that Jean knew Vince’s dad’s family too, which Vince thought was a weird coincidence.
‘Nah, pet!’ Nanna Jean patted his knee. ‘It’s a small world, this one. You watch, when you get a bit older. You’re always crossing each other’s paths in this world. You can’t stop it. And that’s nice. And anyway, if your family came from up here, round this town, then there’s none more likely to know someone that connects them than me.’
‘She’s right,’ Andy said. He was finishing home-made steak pie with a sickening amount of tomato sauce. ‘Nanna Jean knows the whole world.’
‘And who I don’t know I ring up on me phone.’ She patted the heavy, old-fashioned phone beside her armchair. ‘Any family with five sisters and one son is bound to stand out. Aye, I know your people, hinny. And Northspoon is a name that stands out an’ all. You’re from a decent lot, you are.’ She looked at Andy and nodded. Vince started. Something had passed between them.
Minutes later she was up on her tiny feet again, casting an immense shadow on them in the dusky light. It was past four in the morning. She gave Andy quick instructions for making up a bed in the back parlour and then retired to her own. And then she said to them both, ‘Don’t worry about getting up in the morning. Lie in. Don’t worry about anything. It’s been a long night. It’s been a special night. Now you two are new friends. It’s good. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, lads.’
That night they lay on settee cushions and clean sheets in the back room. Vince stared up at the window, at the vase of plastic violets on the sill. And, under the candlewick bedspread, he and Andy held hands all night, their hands red and slippery with sweat and confusion. When the sun came over the terrace backs, into the yard and through the net curtains, Andy was pressing his first kiss on to Vince’s shoulder. Vince turned to meet it.
SEVEN
When she walked into Fran’s kitchen at nine o’clock that evening, Jane’s eyes shone with an eagerness brought on by Babycbam. Fran wasn’t used to seeing her in make-up. She looked oddly overemphasised.
‘I haven’t had this thing on since the honeymoon,’ she announced, twirling quickly on the doormat. It was a lime-green dress that made the best of what she had. Fran applauded. Taking her cue, Jane praised Fran’s new outfit.
It was something she ought to have done straight away. She should have been shocked by this young and expensive new look of Fran’s. But Jane was a coward. To her, Fran didn’t look quite right got up like that, and the lie nearly stuck in her throat.
Fran’s black frock was all the things it was meant to be, classy and alluring and ever so slightly tarty. Nervously submitting to inspection, Fran had the air of a plain but respected actress receiving an award at a glitzy ceremony.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Jane told her.
Fran’s make-up — pale fuchsia lipstick, eyes ringed black like an Egyptian’s — was pure 1965.
‘You’re like one of those sex kittens.’
Fran snorted. ‘It makes a change from being an old dog.’
Jane’s deprecations were stifled by Liz’s entrance. She burst into the kitchen, rattling the blinds, and gleaming from head to toe in skin-tight gold lame.
‘Not a word!’ she cried.
‘No,’ said Fran. ‘It’s… stunning.’
‘It’s very gold,’ Jane said. ‘You’re like something off the telly.’
Liz went to stand under the lampshade. ‘In the shop they called it Golden Sunrise.’
Jane muttered, ‘More like the Crack of Dawn.’
Frank put his head round the door. ‘Are you going then?’
‘Just about.’ Fran shot him a look. She didn’t trust him tonight. He was too acquiescent. ‘You’ll be all right with the bairns?’
‘I’ve set them off stuffing cushions. And I won’t start drinking until all of them are asleep.’
‘Make sure you switch the central heating off, too.’
Liz paid their bus fares with a flourish, instructing them to grab the back seats. It was only when Fran and Jane were sitting down, the engine throbbing right underneath them, that they saw that Liz was talking to the driver — their driver — and telling him where they were off to.
To distract Jane, Fran said, ‘I seem to spend most of my life on the bus.’
Jane watched Liz finishing her little chat. ‘I hate the back seat. It always smells of pee.’
Moving down the aisle towards them, Liz cut a tight swathe of gold through the debris and used tickets. Jane turned to the window. It was dripping with frosty condensation.
‘He’s a sweetie.’ Liz checked the seat for stains and flung herself decorously down.
Jane said, ‘There’s Nesta, talking to someone.’
They all peered out to see Nesta nodding slowly at someone in a camouflage jacket.
‘She’s talking to that Gary,’ Fran burst out. ‘The traitor! I’m glad we never invited her now.’
‘At least he hasn’t got his dick out this time. Nesta would die. How’s your bus driver, Liz?’ Jane tried to ask this lightly.
‘He’s not my bus driver. He’s all our bus driver. I mean, he belongs to all of us. And he says he wishes he was coming out with us tonight. We all look terrific, he says.’
Then the bus pulled away and Fran cried out, ‘Bless his heart!’
They started the evening off with a bottle of Bulgarian red in the graveyard just off North Road. Vince and Andy passed it between them on a park bench, wincing and taking the wine like medicine.
‘It’s cold and it’s rough,’ said Andy, ‘but it’ll get you pissed.’ He looked proudly at Vince and the way he had dressed him up. Late-eighties grunge, Andy called it, a faded tartan shirt left undone on top of a green fisherman’s jumper. Green faded, ragged jeans. It was as if Andy had set inverted commas around Vince’s one-time scruffiness and made it wonderful. They looked smart together, Andy thought; Vince all scuffed and slouchy, Andy sharp and made up like someone out of Depeche Mode.
‘I won’t make myself too ill.’ Vince glanced thoughtfully over the smog beyond the gravestones. ‘I’m going back home tomorrow. I’ve got all next week’s lessons to prepare.’
‘Oh.’
‘I can’t miss any more days.’
‘You’re sounding like a grown-up.’
‘Mm.’
‘Do you realise how much you’ve talked about coursework and marking and schedules today? You can’t help it. It’s already sucked you in.’
This, for Andy, was an outburst. Vince said, ‘It’s inevitable, I suppose.’
‘The old Vince wouldn’t have bothered. He’d have just told his class to write something nice about themselves or paint something. You’ve turned into a real teacher.’
‘Maybe I have.’
‘Just… oh, it doesn’t matter.’
Vince could sense that Andy was reining himself in. He was keeping hold of the bottle and picking at its white label, very bright in the gloom. Vince could feel the first of the wine fumes knocking about in his head.
Andy said, ‘But doesn’t it make you feel weird? Going back to the same school? Living with your dad again?’
‘Of course it’s weird. I’m treading water. Magnificently well, but I’m treading water all the same.’ He lit a cigarette so fiercely that it broke, gaping hot smoke in the open air. He threw it away. ‘I’m stagnating.’
Andy ripped the label off the bottle in one piece. That one point of brightness was gone, crumpled in his fist. ‘Do you think it’s a realistic thing to do? Coming back to Aycliffe?’
‘Probably not.’ Vince felt vulnerable in front of Andy, and uncomfortable, as if this was the final, impossible intimacy. ‘The truth is, I was scared. Scared of doing anything else.’
‘Thought so,’ said Andy simply. He said it as if being scared of the world and everything in it was an ordinary way to be. This anno
yed Vince. It always had.
‘Anyway,’ Vince tried to change the subject, ‘I’ve never felt very realistic. But I did once think I’d end up doing something better than staying in Aycliffe. I used to imagine that I was being filmed during every moment of my life. I was acting out the part of someone else, called Vince, in a long, long film with no edits.’ Andy smiled at him, as if he was making it all up for his amusement. But when Vince thought about it, what he said was absolutely true. He spent years thinking that he was in a film. Every now and then the film would end and the credits would roll over a shot of him in some significant pose, the camera slowly pulling backwards into the clouds. He remembered once lying on his back on a hillside in Durham. From there he could see all the swamps behind the cathedral. He was eight and had run away from his dad, who was there for a bikers’ weekend. The helicopter shooting him backed steadily away into the sky as the cast list rolled upwards, leaving him just a speck in the distance. And he never got to see the name of whoever was playing ‘Vince’.
Andy said, ‘It’s no wonder.’
‘What?’
‘You are like you are. You’ve got the biggest and the most damaged ego of anyone I’ve met.’
Something in Vince flared up. How dare Andy, who spent his days hiding under a duvet, tell him anything about ego?
To Vince it seemed the only natural way to grow up, that very deliberate alienation he had practised. Andy was chuckling as though it was something sweet. Vince wanted to say it was just a way of making the world seem funny, even when it was hurting you. The world can be abrasive, but not profoundly disturbing. If you can regard it as a mildly off-putting illusion, then you can spend your time undermining and subverting that illusion.
‘Here.’ Andy thrust the bottle at him. ‘Drink the rest and start being less coherent.’
They wandered through the gravestones towards the jagged railings. As they did so Vince was thinking (although he never mentioned it, so as not to upset Andy) about planes in space. They were walking upright, vertically. It was too obvious to mention. Yet they were cutting diagonally across a dark field crammed with bodies lying on their backs, staring upwards.
