Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  ‘Isn’t this fun?’ screamed Rob again, quickly followed by ‘Don’t cry.’

  Once we reached the top, the cage came to a violent halt. Then it moved forward a little. I could see the whole of North America laid out in front of me. There was a grinding of metal, a slight pause and then we were let loose.

  You know those cartoons? Where the character suddenly drops, but leaves something of themselves behind? That’s what happened with my stomach. As my body fell, my guts resolutely remained in the same place. They passed up my windpipe and seemed to hang in the breeze, until some complex bit of intestinal wiring forced them back down and inside again.

  We ended up upside down, braking sharply, the roots of my hair stiff with fear.

  ‘That was great!’ roared Rob, quickly followed by, ‘Susan, would you like me to call someone?’

  The next day we went to Universal Studios, where it was agreed we’d do something more sedate. The ET ride seemed like a decent compromise. There was an element of roller-coaster elevation (albeit at 0.2 mph) for him, with a good dose of the sentimental and the infantile for yours truly. Now, the best thing – the wonderful thing – about the ET ride was that you got to say your name into a voice-recording machine as you went in, so that ET could say goodbye to you, personally, when you left.

  So I said, ‘WANKER.’

  It really is impossible to overestimate how thrilled I was as I mounted that bike and slowly ascended to the bright moon above. Fibre-optic stars glittered in the black drape of night as the sound stage swelled with the luscious sounds of John Williams’ strings. And, as I began my descent, there he was – ET, arm outstretched, finger lit.

  As I glided past he murmured in that distinctive timbre, ‘Goodbye … WANKER.’

  There was a moment, just a moment, when I felt like the funniest person in the world. I was poleaxed with laughter, tears running down my face. And then I heard ET continuing, behind me:

  ‘Goodbye, dickwad!’

  ‘Goodbye, flange face!’

  ‘Goodbye, numb nuts!’

  That wizened foul-mouthed alien was spewing the most awful filth. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea. Word had got out and now EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WAS DOING IT.

  They’ve shut it down now – that ride – something to do with ‘people abusing the system’. It’s terrible, really. People are awful, truly awful. But, as ET would say, ‘Fuck ’em.’

  Nowadays I love nothing more than holidaying in the UK. I love the landscape, the people, even the weather, Nothing beats Sennen Cove in December, with the wind whipping at that empty curve of white sand. The Dales, shrouded in autumnal mist. Glencoe at dusk. I often stay in National Trust or Landmark Trust properties – mainly because they’re beautiful, but also because I get to play my favourite game of all time, Spook the Tourist.

  The beauty of this game is it requires only three things – a pen, the visitors’ book and your imagination. The aim of the game is to unnerve the next guests as much as possible by detailing you’ve experienced ghosts or paranormal phenomena during your stay. If you’re playing this game for the first time, here are a few sample suggestions, taken from entries I’ve made.

  Lovely comfy bed, gorgeous views – but what was scratching at the bedroom door all night long?!

  Great cottage, although I avoided the lounge. Had the feeling I was being watched in there!

  Came here for a long weekend with the rest of the investigative team. Can’t believe we finally saw the infamous Grey Lady! With love from the Solihull Paranormal Society.

  Sorry for the breakages. We came down to see the plates flying off the dresser! PS Where are the cushions in the main bedroom from?

  Enjoy!

  Two

  * * *

  CAMBRIDGE 1988–91

  Go East

  I was far from a model pupil at school – not badly behaved as such, just … well, distracted. Sadly, distracted looks an awful lot like badly behaved to members of the teaching profession.

  I can be devastatingly obtuse when the mood takes me. I certainly wouldn’t want me in my class. Recently I was handed a children’s book called All Dogs Have ADHD by a friend of mine. It was an OK read – I got through most of it in twenty seconds to be honest. Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to finish it as a squirrel caught my eye in a nearby tree. It was only then I realized it had been less of a reading suggestion and more of a diagnostic tool. Oops.

  I’m an all-or-nothing student. I get As or Es, distinction or fails, firsts or thirds. If I’m interested in something, then I’m fanatically interested. If I’m not, then I’ll make my excuses and leave, disrupt the lesson or try to make a large hat or makeshift cape out of any bits and bobs to hand.

  Chemistry interested me right up to the point I was banned from setting anything else on fire. Biology interested me until they wanted me to toy with the insides of a dead frog. Arithmetic started well but hit a dead end once they got our art teacher, Mrs Samson, to stand in for our maths teacher for a term. Mrs Samson was, I believe, the first maths teacher to wear a smock, and certainly the first to do equations in watercolour. Crucially, she knew exactly as much about maths as the eight-year-olds she was teaching.

  In our first lesson we examined the relationship between fractions and decimals. In that lesson I learned that half of something equates to 0.05.

  Yes, 0.05.

  It all went downhill from there.

  In my penultimate year at school a careers adviser from London came to visit us for the day. The idea was she’d briefly interview us about our likes and dislikes, then give tailor-made suggestions for our potential life journey. My classmates filed in one by one, and one by one she told them, in a bored monotone, that they’d make good secretaries. All of them. She told every one of the thirty people in my class that – except me.

  She told me I should be a dentist.

  When I said that I didn’t want to be a dentist, and that I had almost zero interest in teeth, she gave me a long hard stare and scribbled something in her notebook. When her report came back, it said that I should maybe apply to a polytechnic to do a subject other than English.

  That was the exact moment I decided to study English.

  I’ve never really responded to peer pressure. What I do respond to, however, is someone categorically telling me I can’t do something. I trill at the sound of a gauntlet going down. It feels like a dare. And I’ve never been able to resist a dare.

  That night I vividly remember going home and asking:

  Me:

  Mum, what’s the best university?

  Mum:

  [carving a Viennetta] I don’t know. Ask your dad.

  I wander into the lounge, where Dad is shouting at the Charlton Athletic result.

  Me:

  Dad, what’s the best university?

  Dad:

  How would I know? One of the rowing ones, I guess. Cambridge? Yes, Cambridge, I think.

  So that sealed it. That’s where I was going to go. I was going to Cambridge to study English.

  I have no idea why Cambridge took a punt on me and asked me for an interview. My O-level results had been average at best (As for the subjects I enjoyed, Cs for the subjects I didn’t). I suspect my wonderful music teacher Lora stuck her neck out and gave me a decent reference. Either way, in the autumn of 1987 I received notice that I was to come to New Hall and be interviewed by the senior tutor.

  There are three parts to getting into college: the interview, the offer, then getting the grades. I was now one third
of the way there.

  Or 0.03 of the way, if you prefer it in decimal.

  That morning Dad woke me at first light and inched out the dun-coloured Peugeot so I could climb in.

  ‘BERT! MIND THE SIDES!’ shouted Mum from the front door, still in her nightie and slippers.

  I’d barely slept but felt awake, skin prickling with excitement – the first flickering of my now constant colleague adrenalin, I guess. I’d never been east before. I’d never really been anywhere before – so I nestled back into the faux-suede seat and watched the landscape flattening to greet the rising sun.

  Looking back, whether it’s true or not, that day feels like one of the very few times as an adult that Dad and I spent any proper time together. He was ever-present in my childhood – waking us every morning before he went to work, returning in time for dinner at 6 p.m. sharp to share some jokes from his day. He bookended my life from the moment I had a conscious thought right up to the point I left home. The morning routine never varied in all that time. At 6.30 a.m. exactly there’d be his lumbering tread on the stairs and the clank of cups on metal tray. Slowly we’d stagger like zombies (in varying states of annoyance and doziness) into our parents’ room. We’d sit on the carpet and I’d sip on cold milky tea each and every single morning until I was old enough to tell him I actually liked it strong with one sugar and just a splash of the white stuff.

  Dad was particularly good when I was sick, which was often when I was little. There’d be the comforting sounds and smells of Mum busy in the kitchen, and then Dad would materialize out of nowhere, brandishing a bottle of Lucozade. I remember the rustle of gold cellophane, the dizzying fizz as it opened, that particular stinging sensation in my nostrils. Then he’d settle himself down on the side of the bed to deliver the next instalment of my favourite story, Sammy the Squirrel.

  There wasn’t much to Sammy, other than he appeared to live a relatively uneventful woodland life in a support group for alliterated animals. Other members of this group included Henry the Hedgehog, Richard the Rat and Deirdre the Deer – not forgetting their nemesis, Wicked Willie the Wolf.

  I loved those stories as much as I loved him, although strangely they have left me with a pathological fear of chains of words with the same first consonant. These feelings will often overwhelm me, particularly in the refrigerated section of an M&S Food outlet. I can’t tell you how incendiary I find those pre-packaged tropicals – Mango Madness, Fabulous Fruity Fingers, the Perfectly Pointless Pip-Riddled Pomegranates. It makes me want to commit a Motherfucking Murder Medley.

  When we finally arrived at New Hall that October morning, I thought I’d just be an hour or two – a quick ‘Hello, yes, I know I don’t belong here, goodbye’ – but it transpired I needed to do an interview, an exam, another interview and then an analysis of the exam. I’d never been so scared. Dad stood there, looking lost in his threadbare camel coat. What would he do in a place he didn’t know – for a whole day? His answer was:

  Locate the nearest tea room.

  Analyse the height, depth and width of the scones on display at the counter.

  Order the scones with the largest surface area.

  Eat scones.

  Leave the tea room, carefully counting the number of steps between there and the next available tea room.

  Order scones at the next tea room.

  Using a stopwatch count how long the scones take to arrive.

  Eat the scones.

  Pay for the scones while calculating how much they would cost in francs, Deutschmarks and pesetas.

  Leave the tea room and head off in search of another tea room, keeping note of how many blue cars seen on the way.

  Repeat from 1.

  At 5.30 p.m. he came to pick me up, his arteries lined with clotted cream and his collar caked in scone dust. By that point my head was buzzing with the possibilities of a brave new world: Marxist dialectics, post-structuralism – a subsidized bar! We drove home in the rain, the earth rising to greet the setting sun. I knew something had changed – that I was about to let loose my family moorings and become my own person. I didn’t think that exact thought, as such; I was just aware of that moment being tinged somewhat, that moment of being a kid, in the car, with her dad – and how goddam transitory and precious it all was.

  On 5 January 1988 I found out I’d been offered a place, but it wasn’t until a summer’s morning six months later that I found out I’d actually got the grades I needed to get in. These were still the halcyon days of the Royal Mail – when something you sent arrived at its destination rather than boomeranging to a depot in an industrial estate on the A406. These were the days when you knew the name of your postman (Bill), and that Bill would be there at 8.20 every morning and 12.30 every afternoon.

  The morning my exam results were due I leaped from my bed at dawn, crept downstairs and made a beeline for my parents’ drinks cabinet. I instinctively knew this wasn’t one of those moments when you could countenance being sober. My arm snaked past the dusty decanters and old sherry bottles to the very back, where I pulled out a neglected bottle of cheap whisky. I loaded up a tumbler and sneaked back to bed. By the time Bill arrived at 8.20 on the dot, and the metallic snap of the letterbox rang through the house, I was properly, properly blotto.

  I still remember opening that letter. I remember every second of it. I remember how small the envelope was, and how thin the paper inside – as if it had done everything it could to belie its own significance. I remember the black punch marks of the typewriter and the indented lines and curves that spelled my future. I remember the thump of my pulse in my neck.

  It felt like my whole life was on that page.

  I read its contents and breathed out. I noticed a peaty stink as I exhaled. I wandered into my parents’ room. They were both in bed with the sheets up above their heads, waiting – as terrified as I was. I guess I knew, and they did too, that this wasn’t just a certificate. It was a passport.

  I remember saying my grades out loud, woozy with booze, and them leaping into the air like the Buckets in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There was a sudden blizzard of threadbare sheets and handmade quilts. It wasn’t just my joy, it was our joy. It wasn’t just me heading off, it was all of us – the Perkins and Smiths and beyond – the countless generations of car dealers, midwives, soldiers and charladies. Here we all go, onwards and upwards, until the next generation comes along and mercifully outdoes us all.

  Finally I could start to make plans for the intervening year. But that was going to cost money, so I had to resort to the worst thing imaginable to any seventeen-year-old.

  WORK.

  I’d had a Saturday job since I was fourteen, chambermaiding at a family friend’s hotel. It mainly involved hoovering architraves and cleaning toilets. I earned £7.50 for a morning shift, which I’d spaff on fags, vodka miniatures and pick ’n’ mix sweets. Once, after cleaning a particularly unpleasant bog bowl, I realized the Arab gentleman responsible for the eruption was still in the room, dozing under a pile of blankets.

  ‘You. You come here,’ he growled exotically as I made to leave. I approached the blankets. His breath smelled of something I can, with hindsight, now identify as halloumi. He grabbed my hand and opened my fingers. ‘You take this. For your trouble.’ Christ, but his intensity was captivating.

  Something heavy fell into my palm. We locked eyes for a moment. I headed for the door, but it wasn’t until I was outside that I allowed myself to look at my booty.

  A kilo of half-eaten pistachios.

  It was then I realized the service industry was not for me.

  In 1988 Sherratt and Hughes bookshop was a rare jewel in the br
utal concrete coil that was the Whitgift Centre, Croydon. It was an independent outfit, struggling to avoid the clutches of increasingly expansive chainstores. Most importantly, and most memorably, you could smoke on the shop floor. Baby, you could smoke all over it.

  Smoking was my hobby. It remains the only thing I have ever been really good at and truly committed to, so working there was my dream job. It was a dream job, with dream colleagues,* but with a business model doomed to failure as the dark shadows of corporate branding and mega-bucks bullshit loomed.

  Every day I’d pitch up around 9.30 a.m. and sit at the till, puffing away like a bastard. There was no dress code and we were actively encouraged to read at our stations. I never once took my eyes off the page. I read and read. Then I smoked and read some more. This approach had its pros and cons. On the plus side, customers never felt pressurized by any of the staff and browsed at their leisure. On the down side, the store had one of the highest rates of shoplifting in the south-east. Apparently one bloke would come in every week, regular as clockwork, carrying a large empty cardboard box. He’d proceed to fill it to the brim with bestsellers, then walk out, bold as brass, with it over his head. We only found out a year later when we had CCTV installed. We hadn’t even noticed.

  Every Tuesday we’d open the shop late, and instead of serving customers spend that first hour telling each other what books we’d read. We’d take notes, get recommendations, widen our horizons. It meant that when someone asked us to suggest a damn good read, we were better equipped to answer them. See? I told you. Terrible business model. With that level of care and love it could never have worked.