by Wade, Calvin
Richie sang, “Have I Told You Lately”, a beautiful Van Morrison song, but he sang it like a cat that was having its tail rammed up its own backside with a broom!
“He’s crap!” I whispered to Kelly.
“I know,” she whispered back, “he knows too, he’s just doing it for me! How sweet is that?”
“Very!” I replied honestly.
I considered for a second whether Ray would do the same for me, it only took that second to dispel it as a preposterous notion, with the answer most certainly being,
‘Not a chance!’ Ray took himself far too seriously to agree to such a stunt.
Once finished, Richie gave us a little bow and then he was off back down the path and we watched him slowly disappear into the distance down Wigan Road.
“Do you still really think, Richie, with the way he feels about me, crept into your room and screwed you that night at the Birch’s?”
I knew why Kelly was asking. It was the same reason she had invited me into her room to witness Richie’s devotion. Richie’s feeling for Kelly were being reciprocated but Kelly felt she needed my consent before anything happened.
“I’m not sure now,” I replied, “his body certainly seems different to the one in the bedroom. I was really drunk Kelly, I can’t be 100% sure, maybe I have made a massive mistake.”
“I think you did!” Kelly said like a girl excited to be on the verge of a great romance.
“I think you definitely did!”
I gave Kelly a hug. Tactfully, I had given Kelly my blessing to begin a relationship with Richie Billingham. There was nothing I wanted more in life than to see Kelly happy and that morning, I realised Richie would do anything for her and he had the ability to make her happy. Bizarrely, one of the feelings I had to suppress, as I went to have my breakfast, before getting ready for work, was a feeling of jealousy. It wasn’t because I was attracted to Richie, far from it, it was just because big, romantic gestures were not really Ray’s style. He might change though, I told myself, as I finished my cup of tea and toast and besides, nobody’s perfect.
Richie
It was a beautiful summer’s day. There were a couple of big, fluffy, cumulonimbus clouds in the sky and up in the heavens a few whispy cirrus ones, but other than that it was just a mass of blue sky. Just the weather I had hoped for, or so I thought, until I was halfway up Holborn Hill between Ormskirk and Aughton, then I started wishing it was not quite so hot!
I had told Kelly I would meet her at her house and, weather permitting, we would go on a picnic. My Mum had bought a brilliant straw picnic basket which contained everything you could possibly need for a picnic - plates, plastic glasses, cutlery, a picnic rug, salt and pepper pots, condiment pots, the only thing missing was the food itself, so I had been up early and begged a lift off my Mum into Ormskirk to buy that. I even managed to get away with being eighteen in order to buy a mini bottle of champagne. I was only a few months off eighteen and with being tall, no-one ever requested documentation from me.
Despite the heat, I eventually managed to make it up to the top of Holborn Hill and then by Christ Church we crossed over Northway, the dual carriageway that ran from Ormskirk to Liverpool. After criss-crossing along a couple of back roads, we ended up on Clieves Hill, our picnic destination point. This was the side of Aughton that I loved best, small, quaint, nineteenth century cottages, old narrow roads that wound their way to Formby and Southport and a mass of greenery. From the hill, you see for miles in all directions. I was in my element, perfect place for a picnic with perfect weather and perfect company too. Fantastic!
“Look at the view!” I said excitedly to Kelly as we finally stopped walking and opened the basket to lay down our rug.
“That’s Liverpool over there and just beyond it, that’s Wales and if you look across the other way, you can see Blackpool. Can you see Blackpool Tower there in the distance?” I asked Kelly.
“Yes. I can see it! It’s wonderful up here, Richie! I bet it’s great on New Year’s Eve when all the fireworks are going off. Imagine it on New Year’s Eve 1999! It’d be amazing!”
“Maybe we can come back here with our kids that night!” I suggested.
“Maybe! All five of them!”
“Six”, I corrected her, “don’t forget Looby Trixy Lix!”
Kelly and I had now been dating for twelve months and both of us were guilty of making statements presuming we would remain a couple for the rest of our lives.
“When we get married, I’d like it to be at St. Michael’s in Aughton,” ,Kelly would say,‘”it’s such a beautiful church”.
Or I would say, “When we go on our Honeymoon to Tahiti, which island will we go to? Do you fancy Bora Bora?”
Everything was going so well, it just didn’t seem natural to think one day it would come to an end. We sat down on our rug, looking out across the miles and started to tuck into our picnic.
“So when did you say you used to come here?” Kelly asked with her mouth full of a chicken drumstick.
“Pretty often when we were kids. My Dad used to bring us here. Mum raised us without much help from my Dad really. My Dad was a gambler, still is, so his Saturday’s were spent engrossed in the horse racing on BBC 1. If he wasn’t gambling, he’d go to watch Bolton Wanderers with a few of his mates, so sometimes on Sunday mornings, Mum would be tearing her hair out because she’d had us all week, so she’d say to my Dad, something along the lines of,
“Can you take the kids out for a couple of hours just to give me some peace?”
So Dad would reluctantly bundle us all into the car, buy a newspaper and take us somewhere. If it was a nice, pleasant day, he would get Mum to make us a picnic and bring us here. If it was raining, he’d normally take us to Southport and let us loose in the Amusement arcades. He’d normally end up on the fruit machines too!”
I paused, looking around, taking everything in again, as childhood memories came flooding back.
“I loved coming here though. My Dad used to call this place ‘The Sunny Road’ because we only ever came here on sunny days. He told us whatever the weather was on the other side of Aughton, it was always sunny here. It took me a few years to realise he was lying!
On a lovely summer’s day, he’d just sit here, with a flask of coffee and a paper and we would just play in the fields and run up and down the lane before stuffing our faces full of sandwiches and Wagon Wheels! I’ve a lot of happy childhood memories of this place. Kelly put her arms around my neck and kissed me.
“We should keep coming here then!” Kelly decided. “Then you’ll have happy adult memories of this place too. On a Saturday or Sunday in the summer, if its sunny, we should do what we’ve done today, make a picnic and then say, ‘Right! Let’s go to the Sunny Road’!”
“OK, let’s do that!” I agreed. “It can become our place then, rather than just my childhood place.”
“Then,” Kelly added, “if we ever split up, when you drive past here in your Volvo with your wife and three kids, you’ll think, ‘I used to go there with that girl. What was her name again?’”
I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. A few seconds earlier, I was having six kids with Kelly, now Kelly and I were splitting up and I was being allocated a Volvo, a random wife and three kids. We hadn’t ever talked about splitting up before. Every conversation about the future was about our future together.
“What makes you think we’ll split up?” I asked in a sullen fashion.
“I’m not saying we will split up, I’m just saying ‘if we ever split up’. Hopefully we won’t.”
“We won’t!” I stated firmly. “Unless you finish with me!”
Perhaps I wore my heart on my sleeve too often but I couldn’t help it. That was me.
Kelly ran her hand through her hair and then fixed me with an intense look. A serious look rather than an annoyed one.
“Richie, I don’t know whether I will ever finish with you and….”
I was about to butt in with
‘I know I’ll never finish with you!’ but sensing that, Kelly verbally marched on, acknowledging my interruption as she went.
“Let me finish, Richie! I don’t know whether I will ever finish with you and I don’t know whether you will ever finish with me. Saying we won’t is basically promising things will stay exactly as they are now and we will stay exactly as we are now. Things change, Richie! People change. Who knows how you will feel when you go to Uni? You may meet someone on your course or you might study miles away and we may try everything in our powers to stay together but the distance may intervene. We just don’t know! We just have to make the most of our time together and hope fate is on our side and we stay together for a very long time.”
“Or forever.” I suggested.
I was beginning to notice that my determination to stay with Kelly may be interpreted by her as desperation. This was not good. Caroline once said in one of her more profound moments that it takes two people to drive a relationship, one to steer and the other to change the gears and work the pedals. If either person wants to do all the driving, the other will just go and buy another car! Although I loved Kelly and wanted us to stay together, I would never become a doormat and hoped she realised this, despite my statements of everlasting love! Just to be on the safe side, I warned myself to ease off a little!
Kelly reached over and kissed me again. She was very tactile, I could be too but sometimes I would debate, inside my head, whether it was the right moment whilst Kelly would just do whatever she wanted to do!
“Let’s just keep making the most of our time together, that’s all I’m saying!”
Kelly was smarter than me. She talked about things on a level I didn’t. My natural tendency was to worry about simple things and problems that existed in the moment, like whether it was a good time to kiss or whether I should put my hand down her top or what we should do for the rest of the day, whilst Kelly would naturally think about the meaning of life and whether there is a God or not and how a lifetime is a short time and we should do and see as much as we can whilst we are here. We were different animals but I could throw myself into her world and she could slot into mine. Kelly knew though that her little speech had dampened my spirits, derailed my emotions, so she tried to get things back on track.
“I know what we should do!” she announced.
“What?” I replied, not quite snappily but certainly moodily.
“Whatever happens we should meet on the ‘Sunny Road’ for the rest of our lives. Once a year, every year, on New Year’s Eve, we should make a pact to meet up, irrespective of whether we are together or not!”
This was one of those rare occasions that Kelly was in such a rush to make me feel better, she had not properly thought through her suggestion. I started to laugh a little.
“Kelly! If you and I weren’t together, soon enough you would have a new boyfriend and I would have a new girlfriend. Eventually you would get married and have a husband and I would get married and have a wife. Do you not think they would get a little suspicious if we kept disappearing on New Year’s Eve? Anyway, it wouldn’t even be a ‘Sunny Road’ at the end of December!”
Kelly was ruffled! I was not used to seeing her ruffled!
“Don’t laugh at me! It doesn’t have to be New Year’s Eve, I was just thinking aloud! We could meet any day of the year you wanted. If it had to be sunny, we can say we will meet every 4th July, American Independence Day, for the rest of our days, but if we get close to ‘Sunny Road’ and it is not a sunny day, we will leave it for another year.”
I liked this now. It was becoming a big romantic gesture.
“That’s a better suggestion! What would we do when we got here? Kiss, cuddle, bonk?”
I was half-joking, but half-serious, I was trying to picture the scene a few years down the line and wanted to know whether Kelly would be clambering into the back of my car for a quickie or whether we would just formally shake hands or share a peck on the cheek. I was almost eighteen, I was dictated to by testosterone, any thoughts always came back to sex! Kelly’s brain was as sharp as a politician’s, she was ready with an immediate response.
“It would depend on what our circumstances were. If we were both happily married, it would just be an opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives. We would probably give each other a tender, informal hug or perhaps a pleasant kiss on the lips, but then just sit here in the sunshine and talk. Talk about how are children are doing or air frustrations that maybe we couldn’t talk about to our husband and wife. I might moan that my husband never changes the babies nappies or that he pees on the floor around the toilet and you might moan that your wife is always out buying designer shoes or has a headache every time you want sex! We wouldn’t tell anyone we were going, only you and I would know and this would carry on as we got older and older until one day we are sitting there with our walking sticks, plastic hips and false teeth!”
The idea was continuing to grow on me.
“What if we were both single?” I enquired.
“As long as we were both single and neither of us was cheating on anyone, then we would just sneak off to that hay field over there and screw each other’s brains out!”
Kelly had this amazing ability to shock me and she had done it in fine style here! We were not sexually active and I had no idea when we would be, but here she was talking about random sexual encounters for the rest of our lives! The mood clouds that had been lingering above my head, immediately blew away.
“What time on 4th July?” I needed to know this now!
“Midday.”
“OK.” I said. “I’ll see you here, on this very spot, at midday on 4th July, for the rest of our lives. Deal?”
“Deal.” We both spat into our hands and shook like two kids out of an American kids TV programme.
“Only if it’s a sunny day though, remember!” Kelly reminded me.
“Fine. No point shagging in that hay field if it’s peeing down!”
“That’s true.” Kelly agreed. “Muddy bums aren’t very attractive!”
“I beg to differ, Kelly Watkinson!”
I am sure Kelly’s bum would look fantastic whether it was muddy or not!
“Well I hate to disappoint you but it doesn’t do it for me! Let’s hope for some good summers for the rest of our days!” Kelly concluded.
We sat there, on ‘The Sunny Road’ for several hours that day, before making the long walk back. Kelly suggested, after a small glass of champagne, that we should stay to watch the sun set, which we were going to do, but we were both struck down by, “numb bumitis” and eventually decided to make our way home early in the evening. To go from ‘The Sunny Road’ to Kelly’s house to mine was probably a six mile trip, but that was no problem for a lovestruck teenager.
I hoped the ‘Sunny Road’ would become our place, but not for a once a year get together, just a summer picnic spot for us and our children. That’s if I could have children. I’d had my lump for twelve months now and had still not done anything about it, I still hadn’t been brave enough to go and see the Doctor. The lump was definitely still there, but it didn’t seem to be getting any bigger and it didn’t really hurt either, which I told myself was surely a good sign. I kept meaning to go to the Doctor’s just in case, but for whatever reason I hadn’t got round to it.
A few days after this first trip to the ‘Sunny Road’ my hand was forced. I was getting dressed one morning and Jim sat up in his bed.
“Did you ever go to the Doctor’s about that bollock lump?”
“No.” I replied as I shuffled into my jeans.
“Does that mean it’s gone then?” Jim asked.
“No. It hasn’t gone. It’s not sore though and no bigger. I think you’re right, I think it’s just a cyst.”
Jim was unimpressed.
“Is that what you are going to have on your gravestone?
‘Here lies Richie Billingham, died aged 20, much loved son of Dorothy and Charles, brother to Helen, Caroline and Jam
es. Beloved boyfriend of Kelly Watkinson. Famous last words, ‘I thought it was just a cyst’!”
“You said it was a cyst, Jim!”
“I did not! I said it could be a cyst. How do I know? I’m not fucking Quincy!”
“Well, I reckon it is just a cyst!”
I was trying to persuade myself as much as Jim.
“Look Richie, you’ve had it for ages now, if you don’t get it checked out, I’m going to blab.”
“Judas!” was my response.
“I don’t care!” Jim replied. “It’s for your own good. If you don’t get to the Doctor’s by this time next week, I’m telling Mum and Dad and I’m telling Kelly what’s lurking there in your underpants!”
Jemma
I wanted to punch her. Punch her in that stupid, fat, drunken mouth. My pre-disposure for violence had eased since I had started ‘going out’ with Ray, but at the very least I wanted to hire Mohammad Ali, in his prime, to come to our house wearing boxing gloves and put a George Foreman mask over Vomit Breath’s head. We were mid argument.
“Yes, she is…” I again stated.
“No, she is not.” Vomit Breath replied.
It was a verbal rally of positives and negatives that had gone on for some time.
“Not whilst she’s living in my house, anyway.” Vomit Breath reemphasised.
Kelly just stood there and observed, like the referee in the aforementioned Ali-Foreman fight. As far as I was concerned, it was not her prerogative to maintain a neutral stance, she should have been in my corner, fighting this battle with me. It was a battle for her future after all.
“Look, I’m working now. I’ve been putting some money away, I’ll help pay for her to stay at school. She got nine GCSEs, for God’s sake! If you just let her study, she’ll be earning twice as much in five years time.”
Vomit Breath did not appreciate the lecture in child rearing. She was a know all. A thick know all, if such a thing existed. I was by no means a Mastermind Grand Champion myself, but I was a lot smarter than Vomit Breath. It felt like a five year old in armbands refusing to take swimming lessons from Duncan Goodhew.
