The History of Us

by Jonathan Harvey

  Only to discover that Adam wasn’t on his own.

  I really did think that I’d fall into the kitchen and have Adam rush to my rescue, wondering what on earth was wrong. He would hold me up as I staggered to the nearest chair as I gasped for breath and explained that a major international crime was being committed under our very noses. He would mop my fevered brow, pour me a medicinal Vimto and debate with me whether we needed to phone the police or not, or stage a rescue bid, before deciding against it and agreeing that there was probably a very good reason to keep someone locked up in an attic and that, weighing everything up, we probably weren’t at risk of being kidnapped by this nameless family and fed to him in bite-size chunks.

  But none of this happened, because Adam wasn’t alone. He was with Jocelyn.

  ‘Conky! What’s the matter?’ she gasped, her hands out-splayed on the table as Adam painted her nails a garish shade of green.

  I recovered well. I didn’t know Jocelyn well enough to be overly dramatic in front of her. I also didn’t like her calling me Conky. It was my nickname at school, short for Concorde, because of my stupidly big nose. Adam called me it sometimes, forgetting it hurt me, and she’d picked up on it. I was sure she didn’t mean anything nasty by it, but it still stung all the same. I guessed it was one of those nicknames that just tripped off the tongue once you’d said it a few times. Conky. It could sound quite sweet, if you didn’t know what it meant.

  ‘Oh . . . nothing,’ I said, hoisting myself to my feet by gripping the wall, as if I’d not said my previous sentence. Crisis? What crisis?!

  Adam and Jocelyn looked at me, bewildered. Adam cocked his head towards a spare seat at the kitchen table, and I quietly slid into it. I knew I was in for a disappointing night. Ever since Jocelyn had moved to the area, Adam had only had eyes for her.

  ‘Adam’s doing my nails,’ Jocelyn pointed out, as if I was stupid and had never seen nail varnish applied before.

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ And I have to admit, I didn’t sound that impressed when I said it. But I couldn’t help it. Like Nan often said, I always wore my heart on my sleeve. If I sounded surly, it’s because that’s how Jocelyn made me feel.

  Adam and I had been best friends since our first day of nursery together. He’d pushed me off the rocking horse and made me hold his clackers for him while he had a ride. And for some reason, I thought he was great. I followed him round like a doe-eyed fan, and that pattern had pretty much continued to this day. I had high hopes that one day he’d ask me out. He was the perfect boy really, and so unlike all the others in our school. He could dance, he knew all the words to Madonna’s Like a Virgin album and he was really good at helping you choose accessories to go with your clothes. And, as he was demonstrating tonight, he was really good at applying your make-up and nail varnish for you.

  What more could a girl want?

  Well. Sex, according to Melinda McCorrigan in our class. She was the most ‘experienced’ girl in our school because she reckoned she’d done it loads of times in her mum’s back bedroom now she was working nights at the petrol station. Whether I actually believed her was another thing, as her descriptions seemed wildly exaggerated. (‘When he came it was like Mount Vesuvius erupting. It drenched the back yard coz I’d left the window open. The gnomes looked like they’d had wax poured on them.’ And ‘It was so big, when I climbed on board my topknot kept hitting the ceiling.’)

  That kind of thing didn’t appeal to me. Firstly, I’d never be able to get away with having a lad back to the house, never mind in my bedroom, or my nan’s back bedroom, because if ever anyone came round she would police the visit like a royal bodyguard with sniffer dogs. And secondly, I had decided that I wasn’t going to have sex until I was married. I just didn’t like the sound of it. I couldn’t bear the idea of passing wind in front of a lad, never mind showing him my downstairs doodahs. It filled me with horror. And it’s what the Bible preached, according to our vicar, so what was wrong with waiting a wee while?

  Another reason Adam seemed like ideal boyfriend material to me was that he had never made any physical advances towards me. All the lads at school would try and have a quick grope in the dinner queue, pretending they were reaching out for a tray or some cutlery, but Adam just wasn’t like that. See what I mean? Perfect.

  And he had a really high descant voice when he was singing in the choir.

  I mean, a lot of the lads at school called him a fruit, and a queg, and a bum bandit and a turd burglar. But I just reckoned they were jealous because he had so many girl friends. He couldn’t be any of those things. Why else would he have had posters of a near-naked Madonna all over his bedroom walls?

  Some people were so stupid.

  If I’m honest, the only reason I really joined the church choir was because he was in it. He loved the drama of it. As the choir was so small he loved being an outspoken, lone male voice in it, and he bossed the vicar about something rotten. I found him very funny, and clever, and he brought me out of my shell more than anyone else did. I could be prone to being quiet, but he inspired in me a confidence to be a bit bolder than I would usually. I thought the world of him, and he did me. That is, until Jocelyn arrived on the scene.

  Jocelyn’s family had moved to Alderson Road a few months previously from the Wirral, where Jocelyn and her sisters still went to school. Nan instantly took against them, as she remembered Jocelyn’s mum from when she’d lived here years back. At first I just put that down to racism: we were a very white street, and people were so scared of anything ‘different’. Jocelyn seemed nice, and stylish. She always had the latest fashions, really nice trainers. But Nan scoffed.

  ‘Her mum probably nicked them. Single-parent family, see?’ she said one day when we had Adam over for his tea. (Gammon and peas, with a fried egg on top. No chips.)

  ‘But we’re a single-parent family,’ I argued.

  ‘Your poor mother had a breakdown,’ she groaned, like the memory stung her. It was the excuse she rattled out whenever we had company. Even though she must have known that Adam was more than aware of the truth. ‘Her slut of a mother couldn’t keep a man if she was covered in bastard superglue. Oh, and now she’s made me swear. Honestly. You keep away from them. The McKenzies are trouble. And their name’s Scotch. Even worse.’

  Which made me want to hang out with her even more.

  ‘Her mum works four jobs, you know, Nora,’ Adam pointed out. He was the only person under eighteen who could get away with calling my nan by her first name. Honestly, he could charm the birds from the trees.

  ‘Doing what?’ I enquired.

  ‘Cleaning a bank before breakfast. Then she’s a nurse up the hospital. Then she cleans someone’s house of an evening. And then she has a small business on the side.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I said. ‘She’s a grafter.’

  ‘She’s on the make. And don’t swear!’ Nan snarled. ‘You don’t know half the things her mam got up to when she used to live round here. I was glad to see the back of her. No man was safe. Wanting to dip their biscuit in the chocolate pot.’

  Adam and I looked quickly to each other, then away, trying hard not to laugh.

  Jocelyn was an enigma on the street as she didn’t go to the local school like me and Adam, having instead to catch several buses to go over the Mersey to a private school on the Wirral every day, which we thought was the height of sophistication.

  ‘Don’t you find that Jocelyn a bit snooty?’ Nan continued.

  ‘No, she’s dead nice, Nora,’ Adam argued. ‘It’s her adenoids.’

  ‘We’ve all got adenoids, Adam. It’s just some of us like to keep it quiet.’

  Nan had a point. Jocelyn did seem to look down her nose at everyone, though Dorothy had suggested this could be an indicator of having an adenoid problem. Apparently if you had one of those you had to hold your head back all the time, which gave the impression that you were standoffish and literally looking down your nose at everyone. None of us had had the nerve to ask
Jocelyn if it was true, though she did always sound like she had a cold coming.

  Anyway. Here we were: in Adam’s kitchen, above the sweet shop. And he was applying varnish to Jocelyn’s nails.

  ‘Adam’s got some news,’ Jocelyn said, lifting one hand to her mouth and blowing on it. I looked to Adam, who wriggled in his seat, beaming with pride.

  ‘About the nativity play?’ I said, trying to show off to Jocelyn that I was already kind of in on the goss. Adam nodded, and I felt a pang of jealousy that Jocelyn already seemed to know what the announcement was.

  ‘I’ve written it. It’s amazing. And I showed it to Mr English, and he’s greenlit the production.’

  ‘So proud of you, Bubaloo!’ cried Jocelyn, in a voice that made her sound like she was in pain. ‘High five for Adam!’ And they high-fived.

  Adam had shown an interest in being literary for a while now. He loved writing essays in English lessons, the more outrageous the better, and he’d won the school poetry competition with his (to my mind incomprehensible) poem about Greenham Common. I knew he’d been working hard for the last few weeks refining his new masterpiece How Far Is It to Bethlehem? and I knew he hoped to stage the play during the Christmas service next month. I was also rather hopeful that he’d cast me and him as Mary and Joseph; he’d hinted as much a few weeks ago, during a mooch round the shops in town one Saturday. He’d even suggested asking to borrow the baby from the family who lived next door to him, to play Baby Jesus.

  ‘Who’s playing Mary?’ I asked, a little too desperately.

  ‘I’m going to hold auditions,’ he replied – which wasn’t the answer I was expecting.

  ‘That seems fair,’ Jocelyn butted in. ‘I mean, if you want it to be good, you may as well get the best person for the job. Is it a singing part?’

  Adam nodded. ‘It’s a musical. That’s why it’s taken me so long to write.’

  ‘Fuck. How long did it take?’

  I didn’t like it when Jocelyn used the ‘f’ word. Nan said it was unladylike.

  ‘Three and a half weeks.’

  ‘That’s so long!’ I gasped.

  ‘I know.’

  This was the first time Adam had mentioned he’d written the nativity as a musical. No wonder it had taken him so long to create. In that moment, my hope disappeared faster than a Wagon Wheel from my nan’s biscuit tin.

  You see, the thing with Jocelyn was – and everyone agreed on it – she was an exceptionally gifted singer. Well, I say everyone. Her voice was a bit Shakin’ Stevens for me. Not that she sounded like him; it’s just that whenever she belted it out, she did that shaking thing with her voice. She called it ‘vibrato’ and said it was an established singing style. I just thought it sounded like she was really straining on the toilet. Adam thought it made her sound like Mahalia Jackson, but I didn’t know who that was. (Maybe Michael Jackson’s mum?) I also thought it ruined the sound of our modest church choir, as her voice drowned out the rest of us put together. I was fair to middling and could certainly hold a tune, but as Adam often complained, my voice was wafer-thin. And next to Jocelyn, I just looked like I was miming.

  ‘Are there any non-singing parts?’ I ventured.

  ‘Yeah.’ He sounded enthusiastic. ‘Abigail-Jade’s mum, and the Archangel Gabriel.’

  Jocelyn smiled encouragingly. ‘And Kathleen, they’ve both got really big noses.’

  I had that sinking feeling that this was going to be a long night. Why did Jocelyn have to spoil everything?

  To cheer myself up, and feel like I was somewhat in the driving seat, I changed the subject: ‘So are we going to listen to Alf?’

  ‘We listened a bit before you got here,’ said Jocelyn, like I was an inconvenience, and that was the end of it. And I wanted to say, ‘Oh, really? And tell me, Jocelyn. Has your mum had any odd phone messages recently?’

  It was a matter of great excitement that Adam had recently discovered that Jocelyn’s mum had a thing in their house called an answering machine. Basically it meant that if she wasn’t in when people phoned up, the machine would answer on her behalf and record any message that someone cared to leave. Then when she got in, she could listen to the messages and act accordingly. Bearing in mind my house didn’t even have a phone in it, Adam and I thought this was hilariously space-age. Jocelyn’s mum’s ‘small business on the side’ was working as a saleswoman for a teasmade company, which is why she had to have the answering machine while she was out doing her other jobs. But unbeknownst to Jocelyn, Adam and I would often go to the phone box when we knew there was nobody in the house, and call and leave funny messages on the machine.

  First up you’d hear Jocelyn’s mum’s voice saying – in her hilarious Sierra-Leone-meets-Liverpool accent – ‘Hello. This is Wavertree Teasmades. We are not here right now. Please leave a short message after the tone.’

  And then she must have been looking for the right button to press, because there was a silence; then you heard her going, ‘Where is it?’ And then you heard the beep. And I’d leave messages like:

  ‘Oh hello, Mrs McKenzie? I’d like to order three million teasmades. Please can you send them to Queen Elizabeth the Second at Buckingham Palace? There’s a love.’

  We called them ‘anonies’, short for anonymous messages. We also left ones like:

  ‘Does your teasmade make coffee?’

  Or – our particular favourite, even though it had nothing to do with the making of tea:

  ‘Is Mr Wall there? Mrs Wall? Any Walls? Well, how does your bloody house stand up, then?’

  And each time, we would slam the phone down and wet ourselves with uproarious laughter.

  But I couldn’t say that to Jocelyn right now. It would betray a secret Adam and I had kept. And I liked that we had secrets from her. It made me feel more special to him than her. Even if at times, like now, I didn’t feel I really was.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jocelyn continued, ‘I wanna hear more about this lad. What was his name? Mark?’

  I felt myself blush.

  ‘Mark Reynolds,’ says Adam.

  WHAT?!?! Why? Why had he told her about Mark? MY Mark?

  Oh, but wait. She was taking an interest. He’d told her there was this lad at school that I fancied, and he’d been really sweet about it, and now they were going to be encouraging and lovely, and I’d misjudged her. I smiled, and was about to say, ‘Oh, he’s a dreamboat,’ even though I knew you weren’t supposed to use words like dreamboat these days – but before I could even open my mouth, Jocelyn was continuing.

  ‘It’s so sweet you fancy him.’

  And she said it in such a patronizing way.

  ‘Oh, I know he’s really out of my league. And he wouldn’t look at me twice.’

  ‘Ah, don’t say that, Conky.’

  Conky. There it was again.

  ‘Adam says it’s quite sweet, the way he talks to you.’

  ‘What, like I don’t deserve it?’

  ‘No!’ snapped Adam, ‘Like he likes you. Like he fancies you. You’ve gotta start believing that lads’ll fancy you.’

  ‘And trust me, Kitty Kat –’ if there was one thing that could annoy me more than Jocelyn calling me Conky, it was Jocelyn calling me Kitty Kat – ‘some guys like a big conk.’

  I felt like hitting her.

  I didn’t want her talking about Mark. Mark was my business, not hers. My crush, no-one else’s. Part of me was annoyed that Adam had been discussing him with her, but another part was flattered that they found me interesting enough to talk about behind my back.

  Mark was . . . well, I couldn’t think of any other word for it. A complete dreamboat.

  I knew that word made me sound like I was about ninety, or that this was the Fifties and I was wearing bobby socks, and not the bang-on-trendy Eighties and my up-to-the-minute leg warmers. OK, they were leg warmers that my nan had knitted me, but they were leg warmers all the same.

  And I’d done my hair in a side ponytail like Adam had advised. He said that with that
flapping about at the side of my face, it would draw attention away from my nose. I could see the sense in that, though any sudden movements meant I whipped myself with said ponytail.

  I said the word again in my head: dreamboat. It was a word my nan often used, though admittedly in her case she mostly used it about Elvis Presley. And sometimes Cliff Richard. Or, as she called him, Cliff Richards.

  I knew using that word made me sound like a sap. But I liked it, and I could think of none better. And if it sounded slushy, then so be it. That’s how Mark Reynolds made me feel.

  Mark wasn’t in our class, he was in the year above; but I knew his timetable off by heart, and every crossover time between lessons was spent going the long way round to try and catch a glimpse of him on his route between classrooms. That was on a good day. The bad days were when I searched in vain and then discovered that he was off sick, or bunking off. I usually discovered this via my spy in his class, my cousin Carmelita Isabella, whose mum, my aunty Pam, had a bit of a Spanish theme going on in her life. She’d done up her semi in Wavertree Garden Suburb like a Spanish villa, and had given her kids Spanishy names. As well as Carmelita, she had a son called Paolo. He preferred to be called Paul, but that was lads for you.

  Anyway, Carmelita was aware of my obsession and was very quick to whisper, every time she approached, ‘He’s on his way!’ or ‘Bad news. He’s off sick!’, which could bring a black cloud to the rest of my day. Adam was the perfect partner for these ‘let’s bump into Mark’ adventures, and he always seemed to get just as excited as me. Heaven knew why.

  Mark might only have been sixteen, but he seemed to be all man. He shaved, he walked with the swagger of a cowboy, and he had LOVE and HATE biro’d on his knuckles, freshly applied each day. He had a dusting of freckles over his nose and cheeks, green eyes and hair the colour of gravy. Ah, Bisto! It was styled in the perfect wedge, that went up and down in length, depending on the time of the month. Oh, it wasn’t to do with some sort of male menstrual cycle; it’s just he seemed to get it cut near the beginning of each month, which is when his ears would stick out like taxi doors, but as the wedge descended it at first tickled, then more or less covered them, and I loved trying to second-guess when he’d next be going back to the barber’s. Carmelita Isabella had found out that he favoured Bracey’s Barber’s on Smithdown Road, and so I always took a detour if I was anywhere near there of a weekend, but thus far I had never seen him in one of their adjustable chairs.