Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  As it turned out, though, he had little reason to be frightened.

  Over the years, I’d got used to interviewing people who didn’t look much like my mental image of them, but in the flesh Jenny Fabian looked so little like my impression of Katie that, upon shaking her hand, it was impossible to conceal my double-take. A frighteningly petite woman with a pink streak in her grey hair and the legwear of an early Nineties grunge fan, she resembled the world’s coolest grandma, but certainly not the obvious grown-up incarnation of the spirit of headstrong Sixties free-living. Strolling along the King’s Road next to her, I couldn’t help feeling like some form of lumbering security guard, employed to protect something brittle.

  It was embarrassing, after Fabian had been agreeable enough to meet me, having to explain to her that the whole reason for this encounter was probably at this moment asleep on someone’s kitchen floor using a can of Silly String as a pillow, but she took the news well. For the following two hours, the two of us walked the length of the King’s Road, stopping as Fabian pointed out her old hang-outs – bohemian coffee houses, hairdressers that specialised in giving you ‘the Brian Jones’ regardless of your sex, and boutiques, most of which had now been replaced by travel agents or branches of Pizza Express. The world of Groupie – a plethora of chicks, pads and casual plating – was gone almost without a trace, and as she indulged me in a game of Name The Inspiration, it transpired that many of the thinly disguised real-life stars of the book were now dead (one of the few who wasn’t was Syd Barrett, another of Fabian’s sexual conquests). I’d assumed that revisiting her old haunts was something Fabian was used to, but, as we stood outside the house she used to share with the whiney psychedelic rock band Family, she revealed that she hadn’t actually been back here since the late Sixties. For the first time, she seemed emotional about her past, and for the first time, I really, really wished Peter was here, too. Later, she took me to a shoe shop and let me help her pick out a pair of bright orange slip-ons, and I wished Peter was here considerably less.

  In the Seventies, Fabian had forsaken the rock and roll life to hang out in the country with equestrian types with ‘Sir’ before their name. These days, she was dabbling in music journalism and coming towards the completion of a sequel to Groupie with her co-writer Johnny Byrne, but she talked more like an unusually clued-up member of rural high society than a washed-up hepcat, enthusing about hare-coursing, and recalling classic psychedelic bands in the same way that pundits on retro TV programmes recall slightly kitsch toys that they’ve grown out of.

  Before meeting her, I’d been unsure of the kind of lesson she could offer Peter, but now I understood – sort of. As an example of rock and roll moving towards the end of middle-age, Fabian was a great illustration of how, today, the Sixties seemed so far away yet simultaneously so close – a living lesson in the passage of time in a musical world and its attendant pathos. At one point in the none-too-distant past she’d needed all the proximity to fame and talent and hip, happening things she could get – not to mention the concomitant plating – to feel fulfilled. Now she bought a pair of garish shoes and went home happy. At one point her generation had wanted to change the world with peace and love. Now they were deliberately nasty to small furry animals and didn’t feel bad about it. It got me thinking about how the moral and artistic values that I’d held onto as if my life depended upon them ten years ago already seemed silly, and would soon probably seem even sillier, and about how the same thing would happen to Peter before too long, whether he liked it or not. The whole thing gave you a unique sense of perspective. Well, it gave me a unique sense of perspective, anyway. I had my doubts as to whether Peter would have been willing to stop thinking about computer games, crisps and Swugelbacker Airbuses for long enough to dwell on it. And besides, wasn’t ignoring what adults told you about how you wouldn’t be young for very long the whole point of being young?

  About an hour after I’d met up with Fabian, I finally received a call from Peter, who was still at Zed’s house and claimed that he’d run out of credit on his mobile phone and forgotten what tube station we were supposed to meet at, yet failed to explain why this had prevented him from calling me from a landline ninety minutes earlier. At this point I made it quite clear to him that, if he was going to at least say hello to Fabian, he had to hotfoot it over to Chelsea from North London in under an hour. True to my expectations, he turned up sixty-three minutes later, lolloping (less true to my expectations) cheerfully into the King’s Road branch of Waterstones in a manner more redolent of a fan of Herbie Goes Bananas than The Crow.

  ‘You’re too late,’ I told him. ‘She left about two minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh, bummer. Soz. But this thing’s shit.’ He dangled his miniature phone scornfully between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Was she pissed off?’

  ‘Not really. She’s really quite—’

  ‘Cool. That’s a relief. Hey, guess what? It was dead funny. There was this kid at this party last night, Nigel. We call him Nozzle Man, ’cos he’s got this weird nose. Anyway, you should meet him, he’s dead cool, he likes a lot of the music you like – Aerosmith, you like them, don’t you? Well, he lent me this tape – and his dad’s like this film director or something. Well, like films for TV. But yeah . . . His dad’s got this garage full of space hoppers. They’re these Seventies inflatable things with ears that you hold on to. I guess you remember them, but I hadn’t heard of them and they are sooo cool. There were about nine in all, and me, Raf and Nozzle Man and a couple of other kids just started bouncing down his road on them. It’s a cul-de-sac so there are no cars really. It was so, so cool – there were all these grannies looking out of windows and stuff. Then we went in and had this game of Rude Scrabble and I had the top, like, word score thingy – a triple, with ‘Bumcake’. You know, from that song in This Is Spinal Tap? I know it’s not a word and stuff, but that was kind of okay . . . I can’t even remember what time I went to sleep.’

  He paused at last to catch his breath.

  ‘So you had a good time then?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. Yeah. The best. Like, dead funny.’

  ‘And you got around to watching This Is Spinal Tap? I’m impressed . . .’

  ‘Yeah! I’ve seen it six times now. Well, six and a half, really.’

  ‘What about Groupie? Did you get chance to have a look at that?’

  ‘Oh, no, shit. I forgot.’

  It was nice to see Peter so upbeat, and I felt a dilemma approaching. On the one hand, I felt slightly hurt about how little he seemed to care that he’d let me down, and felt that some sort of penance was in order from him. On the other, it was gratifying to hear him talking so enthusiastically and embracing the universe above shoe level, and I sensed that I should be taking advantage of this.

  I’d seen Peter in a post-party state before, but today was different. The signs were immediately familiar to me: the sunken yet euphoric eyes . . . the delayed reaction times . . . the uninhibited anecdotes . . . the lazy smile that seemed to look at the world from a slight angle and find it a thing of unlimited surreal wonder . . . the slightly stale aroma wafting up from his leather jacket. I was suddenly glad that Peter hadn’t met Jenny Fabian – and not just because of the odour of his jacket. The last thing he needed right now was a yawn-inducing lesson from me about the transience of youth. He was too busy experiencing his own epiphany, and I was too busy feeling grateful to be caught in the middle of it to deny him.

  Last night, I realised, Peter had been drunk for the first time.

  Not wildly drunk, maybe. Probably not even drunk enough to lose his inhibitions. But drunk enough to feel better about himself and to never think alcohol tasted horrible again, or at least not to let that be a factor in stopping him consuming it.

  As the most tenuous, unrelated of guardian figures, I had a uniquely divided perspective on this revelation. One portion of me worried on behalf of Jenny. Another felt morally outraged that teenagers seemed to be drinking at younger and younger ag
es these days. Another told that part to shut up, be realistic, and remember the night in 1989 when me and Matthew Read had downed five cans of Special Brew each and walked up the street adjacent to our secondary school, twanging car wing mirrors. Another part forgot that Peter was fourteen at all and felt the urge to pat him on the back and treat him to a pint of the hair of the dog that bit him. Another part felt a little like Janet, the fifty-year-old subject of a case study from Adolescence: The Survival Guide.

  ‘We were delighted that he suddenly wanted to talk to us again,’ Janet had explained about her teenage son, Chris. ‘We would have long conversations about his friends, his problems, the state of the world, the existence of God. The only thing was he wanted to wake us up and have these talks sitting on the end of our bed at one in the morning when he’d just got home from an evening out with his friends.’

  I could see Janet’s point: it was irritating how teenagers only seemed to want to open up to you when you were most irritated with them. But, ultimately, I had it easy. Peter hadn’t woken me up. Neither, mercifully, had he tried to get me into a conversation about the existence of God or shown me any of his poetry. It wasn’t my responsibility to show him why drinking was wrong, and when and where he could and couldn’t be overenthusiastic about life. I was, I had to remind myself, teaching him to embrace rock and roll, not to run and hide from it. Besides, alcohol seemed to be having an entirely positive effect on him, if you ignored the smell of his jacket: during the hour that I walked along the King’s Road with him, retracing the steps I’d taken with Jenny Fabian, pointing out where record shops, cafés, bookshops and boutiques with names like Middle Earth and Granny Takes A Trip used to be, I didn’t once lose him to a silent, melancholic reverie or hear him use the word ‘nnghhh’ as a form of communication.

  No: moral outrage and responsibility be damned. Peter seemed to be seeing unusually clearly and it was my job, as his teacher, to make the most of this by putting the correct objects in his immediate vision. For the moment, I wasn’t going to question him about last night’s experience; I wasn’t even going to comment on it. I was going to ride on the crest of my gothic friend’s receptive post-booze rapture and use it in a manner that served both myself and our adventure in the most convenient manner possible. And I was going to start by asking him a question that I’d been meaning to ask him for several weeks – a difficult question that would always be harsh to spring upon any innocent human being, but, nevertheless, a question that I felt, now more than ever, to be a crucial element to our studies.

  ‘Do you fancy going to Nottingham?’

  PAPER v. STONE: THE SHOWDOWN

  ‘SO, WHERE IS it, like, exactly? I’ve never really been there. My mum has. I know it’s somewhere up north, but not that far north, and I know they said it was the most violent city in England, after London.’

  ‘You mean you really don’t know? How can you know what the capital of Kenya is but not know where Nottingham is? I didn’t know where Nairobi was when I was your age, but I knew where Milton Keynes was.’

  ‘But that’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you grew up in the Eighties. And you were in Nottingham.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So they probably didn’t teach you stuff like that, I guess.’

  ‘But you said you didn’t know where Nottingham was. So how can you know what kind of stuff they didn’t teach me when I lived there?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Anyway, don’t worry about it. It’s sandwiched between Leicester and Sheffield.’

  ‘I think I know where they are.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Anyway, why are we going there?’

  ‘It’s a surprise.’

  ‘It’s not another groupie, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s plating?’

  ‘Ha! So you did read the book!’

  ‘I dunno. I kind of, like, looked at it . . . but not much.’

  ‘Ha! Your teachers were right – you are an enigma . . . Plating’s what hippies called giving someone a blow job.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Way.’

  ‘Gross!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘This traffic’s really pissing me off.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Do you want me to put something else on the stereo? I expect you’ve had enough of The Best Of Wings now, haven’t you? Put one of yours on if you want.’

  ‘I dunno. I’m a bit bored with most of that stuff.’

  ‘Do you want to play Stone, Paper, Scissors?’

  ‘Alright. Ha. Wicked. I won. Paper wraps rock.’

  ‘I never understood that. What damage exactly is Paper doing to Stone by wrapping it? Surely a stone can’t suffocate.’

  ‘Hmmngh. When Raf and me play it we have another thing. As well as Stone, Scissors and Paper, we have Telephone Box. That traps everything inside it, except Stone, which can break its windows.’

  ‘But how do you imitate a telephone box with one hand?’

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘Mmm. Impressive.’

  ‘There’s Sparrow as well, which pecks Paper to death, but gets its beak blunted by Stone.’

  ‘And who wins out of Sparrow and Telephone Box?’

  ‘Sparrow. It builds a nest in the handset.’

  ‘Ooh. Painful. Do you and Raf ever feel like you have too much free time on your hands?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘So what made you change your mind?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About drinking.’

  ‘Oh . . . Er. Well, it was just like, I dunno, after I’d had more than one can it just tasted better. And stuff just kind of seemed . . . I dunno, funnier? It’s just like the space hoppers. Normally that would have been funny, but last night it really made us piss ourselves. And this morning I woke up and Raf had put this can of Silly String under my head as a pillow and it was . . . I dunno. Just ace. I don’t think I’d do it, though – y’know, like really getting drunk – unless I was with my mates.’

  ‘But you’re with your mates a lot, aren’t you?’

  ‘Hmmgh. I suppose.’

  REALLY LOW-FI

  I’D INITIALLY WANTED to take Peter to Nottingham because I felt it was important, at this stage in our studies, to show him that not too long ago I, too, was a music-mad teenager, striving for direction, meaning and the most obscene t-shirt logos known to man. Taking him on a guided tour of my own personal musical evolution, I sensed, could only give him a greater understanding of my teachings and a greater respect for my wisdom. Here, among the endlessly sprouting Big Issue salespeople and theme pubs of my hometown, he would be reassured to find the landmarks of a time when I was just like him, only with even less symmetrical hair. Then, I hoped, he would put two scruffy, moody teenagers together, notice the similarities, and come up with the natural assumption that, from this point on, everything I said about rock and roll, food, the opposite sex, alcohol, crisps and life itself could only be the gospel truth.

  That was my main reason for taking him to Nottingham, anyway.

  There was one additional incentive.

  A few weeks previously, I’d read a report in a broadsheet newspaper about the worryingly ‘teenage’ qualities of the current generation of twenty-some-things: my generation. According to the report’s conclusions, people in their twenties were finding it increasingly hard to shake off the tastes and habits of their late childhood and were shirking responsibilities that previous generations had considered an obligation – responsibilities such as marriage, house buying, home cooking, remaining financially independent and refraining from listening to sadistic dance music at unsociable volumes.

  As a married twenty-seven-year-old who hadn’t prevailed upon his family for monetary support in more than a decade, and whose principal form of socialising revolved aro
und the local golf club, I couldn’t help feeling a little put out by this, not to mention somewhat jealous. It wasn’t fair: even after hanging out with one of the teenage ranks for the best part of a summer, I didn’t feel like an adolescent. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been bored, never mind the last time I’d been bored enough to listen to sadistic dance music at unsociable volumes. Yet, as this report would have it, I was the exception to the rule, and in spite of my best intentions I began to show signs of envy and mistrust. Could it be possible, I wondered, that my friends weren’t telling me something – that they didn’t really spend their free time filling out direct debit forms and striving to track down reliable plumbers, and that instead, behind my back, they hung out in packs around the entrance of Kentucky Fried Chicken, smoking and giving one another wedgies?

  ‘What are you up to tonight?’ I asked Steve and Sue Golden, a couple of days after reading the report.

  ‘You know,’ said Sue, ‘winding down. Doing a bit of cooking. Making the weekly phone call to our parents. Steve wants to go to Pets At Home to get Molly a cat hammock, but I’m a bit too tired.’

  ‘What about after that?’ I persevered.

  ‘Well,’ said Steve, ‘they’re repeating Nigella Bites on UK Food. I was thinking I might watch that.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Er, going to bed, I guess.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I mused, not totally convinced. ‘It’s just . . . I heard there was a good nu-metal night going on in Croydon these days. Two pounds a pint all night.’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

  Even my wife could not be held above suspicion.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked her in the wake of a shopping trip to Norwich city centre, eyeing the somewhat familiar long metallic strip protruding from her Top Shop bag.