"Here," I said.
Man you would think it was a pipe bomb I was offering him the way he turned his nose up.
"Suit yourself," I said.
And just as I was about to drop them back to where they had landed Titch snatched them out of my hand.
"Any news about the new car, Pete?" Titch asked lighting up.
I didn't have time to cringe before Pete tapped the brakes.
We jerked forward.
That was Pete's non verbal way of saying, "Shut it."
The car was a sore point, a sore that, to Pete, had become infected with pain.
It was a car all right.
It had wheels but not quite the hot wheels he'd asked his dad for.
And it was all too much for Pete to take.
So he'd gone off the rails and sought solace in anything that would take away the pain.
He got lost in booze and sex for a while. And when that didn't rip his old man's arms out of their sockets, he turned to speed and cocaine too. And I heard he'd been on Ice and Crystal too.
It meant his dad had had to haul him out of the cop shop more than once because of those dragon chasers.
But Pete would just laugh.
"So what," he'd say. "It isn't my fault the old man's slammed the brakes on me, cramped my life. He's got to pay until he starts seeing things the right way."
Which meant Pete's way.
And he would tell us all this with a big beaming smile on his face.
Like Pete owned the world.
That the world should crash down on its knees for this coming new god. For the handsome one whose body and mind seemed able to live through God knows what kind of destruction without it showing, at least for a while.
But it was August, it was evening. The weather was fine with a cool breeze coming in through the windows and then Pete dropped his cigarette.
He yelled, "Shit!"
Then leaned over looking for it, and someone else yelled, "Watch out!"
Could've been me.
Don't know.
But Pete sprung back up like a jack-in-a-box and yanked down on the wheel, first one way to avoid a truck, then the other, to avoid a traffic-light crashing into our grills.
Red light spells danger, of course, but we missed everything on the way through.
God knows why we all laughed when that was a split second in the past.
Then it went quiet and I was left wondering if death is devoid of pain. Blood rushed from my head to my feet then back up again, pounding my veins wide on recoil and prickling my skin.
It was like my soul had been sucked out and rammed back in again.
It wasn't long after that I remembered I had to pretend to think it was funny.
Funny that we'd nearly copped it for the great junkyard in the sky.
Heaven is supposed to be endless blue skies and big fluffy white clouds, and none too few angels floating around and plucking at harps.
But all I saw inside of me then, looming all around in my imagination in aftermath, was a yard full of dust and rust and junk, twisted metal and congealing blood.
That vision didn't make me feel so good.
In fact it made me feel sick, scared sick.
And even although I went along with the guys and laughed myself stupid, something had died inside of me and had punched through all the laid back could care less stupidity at the same time. And it was telling me this.
This isn't right, Jack.
But I ignored it, didn't want to hear it, laughed it out.
It wasn't a real laugh, just a pretend laugh.
The kind of laugh you keep in reserve for moments like that.
A kind of let's brazen it out laugh, because I didn't want to be seen as the one not being part of the crowd and not getting a joke that was too dumb, too dangerous.
But by then the blood-rush had begun to settle and I had time to think, and wonder at all the other times I'd pushed down on the self-doubts, the pretence stances I'd taken just keep in with the crowd.
Was it worth it?
Of course it was worth it.
Those guys were my friends.
Shit it was like we had known each other all our lives.
It felt like we were brothers even if we always didn't get along.
I kept telling myself over and over that we'd do anything for each other, we trusted each other.
But that was the problem. Someone somewhere sees that trust, and someone somewhere is always working at how to abuse it.
It's a fact of life, one I hate, but a fact all the same.
Someone somewhere is always looking out for that weak link in your chain and how they can use it against you and make you do stuff just because they know they can.
And you know what? You will always do it because you'll always stick with the devil you know, always stay with the crowd even if it's killing yah.
Because anything else will only be worse, man.
But when you're a kid, stuff like that does not compute.
You don't want it to compute, because if it did, it would mean losing out on too much by facing facts.
You'd be out on your own. A nerd as they say.
I never thought of Pete abusing his father's trust.
It was his means of survival. Thinking of it like that didn't make it feel right.
And I'd heard Pete justified what he was doing to his dad because Pete's mother had died giving birth to him, which meant Pete was all that his dad had left.
And because of that, Pete's dad felt guilty, if distantly so.
Pete blamed for killing his own mother, his dad blaming his only son for the loss of the woman he loved.
It's a theory, a shit theory, but a valid theory all the same.
And that's why Pete always got, got, got, until now, until the car.
But, you know, after our near crash with truck and post, the sound began to come back to ears.
My lungs started working again, and the thought that anything might be wrong, just ever so slightly wrong, sank like submarine iron way down inside of me along with all the other junk I didn't want to admit to.
So I laughed.
Shit, I was in hysterics.
I mean I was going crazy with laughter in between two other guys doing the same. And Pete was laughing so much himself that he couldn't keep his eyes on the road again.
But then that all came to a stop when we swerved off the road and into the estate.
We were on our way.
Another whirly gig gunship flew overhead chasing another supersonic plastic bag.
What I didn't realize was that I had experienced my first wave function in the process of collapsing.
And that idiot chopper was part of it too.
I thought we were just heading out for the Black Widow's place to relax for a while, and then head back home like always.
But this time I was dead wrong.
#
I'd had a few drags of what Titch had brought along, and hell we were all toking like there was no tomorrow, like there never was.
And then everybody was talking to each other, but like we weren't really talking to each other just to ourselves.
It was like each of us had slithered into our own personal little depth charges where we could only hear the sound of our own voices jabbering with nodding sympathetic egos.
I swear to God I even began to like Titch at that point.
That's when I realized that smoking and toking is like giving your brain a chemical peel.
All superficial whacked out and ugly in the eye of the beholder.
But you know that kind of self-knowing hurts, and that kind of knowing arrogance will bleed you dry if you let it.
So you deflect that kind of pain by toking all the more until you're sick of the sound of your own voice, your own thoughts.
And before the agreeing with yourself starts to really get boring, and you start arguing with yourself and ripping yourself apart bit by bite and limb from reality,
you toke all the more.
But that's when your swim in deep blue becomes a purple haze of sludge that's growing deeper and more difficult to wade through as you struggle to keep your snout above the surface.
Only it's dragging you down, man.
You are drowning and you don't know it.
You do not want to know it.
And my only excuse in taking it was because I did not want to think about those cops who had disappeared all those years ago from that place we were all headed to.
And none of them ever came back.
A good excuse to run away from the wife and kids, they said.
One, maybe, but four cops all at the same time, I didn't believe it.
No sir, I didn't.
Not one damned bit.
And so we all kept up the pretence that we were all hugely entertaining to each other and that solved the problem for a while.
It absolved guilt, it dissolved danger, and it glued us together in a funny kind of way until it was all pretence as ever before.
It was kind of weird though, but it always was kind of weird those summer nights.
There weren't many of them when you strung them up end to end, but when each night happened it felt like it would go on forever.
Know what I mean?
But anyway Cammo was empty by then, which was around eight.
And after a while Pete swerved us off into the estate, an old residential place.
Only then did Pete start to slow down a bit.
Not by much, but just enough to let us know where we were going without every semi-detached, buddleia and bowling ball lawn smearing into a blur on the way.
Then after a while, and with the sun dying and turning everything ochre, it felt like we were breezing along inside an old sepia photograph.
Of a time long gone and passed away some like we had entered a timeless zone.
Whatever it was a change had taken place and everything went quiet.
We all stopped laughing, and we didn't talk.
And if we had we would have probably done so in a whisper anyway.
It all felt as if things were battening down from the heavens in great clouds of cotton wool pushing into our mouths and ears and stuffing into our eyes.
It all looked and felt different from all the other times we'd gone there is what I am trying to say.
There was no one around in the street.
And there was something else I noticed.
I didn't see a bird flying from one garden to another, like crows or ravens, which are rife around that part of the world.
They wake you with their cawing an hour before dawn, and an hour before the sun sets they start up all over again.
But there were none around now.
It was sun dying time and there was nothing.
Not a flutter, not a starling even as we slowed and swerved down the lane taking us to the meadow of the Black Widow's mansion.
The said Black Widow long since passed away years before any of us were born.
We were mellowed, the street silent, and we should have been relaxed to the point of meltdown.
Only it didn't feel like that this time.
Something had changed.
I don't know what it was, and maybe it was just me.
I don't know.
But it was different somehow, like we were about to roll over the edge of a cliff for real and there was no kid back there now yelling at me to stop.
Even the sound of the engine seemed to be crammed full of kapok from what I remember.
We had travelled that way many times that summer and it had never been as quiet as that.
And I remember how I felt the breeze flowing through the windows caressing the skin of my face, and that I was shoulder to shoulder with Titch and Boyd in the back.
That I wanted to take a look around at them, to make sure that they were still there as a way to make sure that I was still where I thought I was.
But I didn't want to embarrass myself by making it look obvious.
In a sense I felt as if I was in a vice and being squeezed down into something more solid than flesh and bones, changing into solid glass.
Even Pete had stopped looking over his shoulder at us now as blond boy Grant next to him in the passenger seat saying nothing, like a mortuary attendant.
Silent, sleepy eyed, and slowed mouth drooling to zero.
Pete's hand was on the wheel, his other out the window flicking ash.
The breeze flicked up his hair a couple of times as we turned up past the old track, sailing by empty houses splendid and hidden from the city on one side, by oak, elder and willows lining the path behind broken fencing on the other.
Pete took a sharp curve to the right and that brought us back to awake.
More blood rushed down to my feet and slammed back behind my face on recoil.
Titch lurched forward and grabbed Pete's headrest.
"What's going on?" he asked.
It wasn't a yell and sounded out of context.
"Badger," was all Pete said swerving us back into the middle of a road that had seen better days.
"Striped rats," Grant said easy as you like, unfazed, brained on Barbexiclone, Veronal, and Christ knows what else to keep him breathing.
I twisted around between the guys and tried to look out the rear window but everything was too cramped.
I didn't feel any bumps of wheels rolling over something soft bodied, so I guessed Pete had actually missed the animal.
A little while later I would wonder if he hadn't actually aimed for it deliberately.
See what I mean about questioning trust?
But anyway, since no one else said anything I felt a fool for even thinking it.
So I slid back down I twisted myself back around front lifting one arm then the other to make my shoulders fit between two other bollards in for the ride.
I could smell the meadow coming in through the open windows, the green grass and whatever else was growing there.
No cow shit though, which was a blessing, but a kind of clear fresh air smell as we sailed in a curve and up the incline with trees and meadow on one side of it, fields on the other.
And when I looked over Grant's shoulder I could see this wheat looking soft as yellow velvet.
Everything else buckled in green dunes leading to the copse at the top of a hill where the horizon is masked by trees.
And there, just in front of the hill, I saw the old water tower with its crenulated top.
A tube of a stone building it had only been recently that I had learned of its purpose; a water tower for the fabled Black Widow's Mansion.
Said mansion a ruin now, burnt to the ground in the seventies and most of the rubble it had been made of now buried deep under mounds of earth that had long since overgrown the scars of its cremation.
Pete pulled the Mondeo into this bare patch.
The wheels crunched over gravel and Pete parked us at an angle facing the meadow barely visible through the trees.
The fungus soft fence posts and the mangled wire around them were strangling them.
Titch climbed out first, his boots scrapping on spiky concrete that was covered in broken snail shells.
I followed behind, with the others joining us.
And after a few seconds of all doors slammed there was that silence again.
Then a raven flapped out of the branches of an aspen and somehow that made me feel better.
It proved we weren't the only things left alive on the planet.
No people though, just us, a rag tag rabble bag of teens standing around with our hands in our pockets, looking at anything but each other.
We were too embarrassed to catch eye-to-eye because no one had a clue as to why we were here again.
Everyone needed to know at that least one of us knew something, to lead the way so we could follow, that our purpose in being there had somehow been planned.
But no one said anything and so I took the opportun
ity to keen my ears against the silence, to feel the warmth of the dying evening air pouring down on upon us.
We had gone to that place for more times than I cared to remember but suddenly it felt wrong.
I don't know why.
It just did.
Something wasn't right and there was no way for me to express it.
Not until later, much later, would that feeling prove to be right.
Pete locked up the Mondeo, spun around and said with his big clown grin.
"Let's go!"
To where? I asked myself.
The same old place it seemed.
To the stables that were once but now no more.
The first time I saw it I thought the building, grand as it was for a stable, was in fact the house.
It was too small to be anything of the sort, of course.
But somehow I'd always imagined stables were built of bricks, not great blocks of stone, and yellow sandstone at that.
Anyway we all marched after Pete, me third in line after Titch, with Boyd trailing after me and Grant as usual at the last.
It wasn't much of a climb really, more of a gentle slope between ancient elms and alders that twisted into pines around the bend.
And every once in a while I'd take a look over my shoulder, to that water tower in the distance, thinking of it as one step away from a Neolithic standing stone.
It was kind of weird feeling, you know, the way the trees closed in on us the further in we walked in, sucking us into a Sensurround satori in Mescaline Park.
Some places have that kind of affect you know.
Something silent about them that goes way in deep, right into your cells, and then even deeper into a place you don't even know about yourself.
None of the other guys said anything about it, that feeling, so I didn't.
But I wasn't the only one who felt that way about that place.
I read about it later.
I just wished I had before then.
We kept on walking until the fields on our left were closed off by a curtain of branches the further in we went.
More trees obliterated everything on our right until it felt like iron doors were closing us in.
The meadow, the stables, the house itself, was located even further up out of sight surrounded by the oldest trees, bushes and vegetation in the country.
Revolution Page 9
