by Kim Newman
The big change is girls. Michael’s stutter gets exponentially worse at Ash Grove: it takes him months to get a coherent sentence out in the presence of a girl. Gully and Mickey turn into major leches and obsess over any girl they happen to be in a class with, though they can only actually get off with girls a year or two younger than they are.
You find you like girls, not just in the obvious way. You see how stale your thinking was getting at Marling’s, which was all about jumping through hoops and ticking off boxes, and are forced to question all that. You start going out with Victoria Conyer, who is the Girls’ Grammar answer to you — smart and on course but with an independent streak. Perhaps you’re too similar, because you don’t last three months. You see in her a wildness you find a touch frightening. She reminds you of Scary Mary Yatman, who is still around and apparently a reformed personality.
In 1976, you pass eight O Levels, four at grade A. You go on to Sedgwater College to take a two-year A Level course. There, you become president of the Students’ Union, with Michael as your deputy. He becomes a small-town impresario, and stages a series of parties and ‘entertainments’, breaking away from the umbrella of the college to evade censorship.
You go out with Rowena Douglass, also a language specialist. You put off sleeping together for months but both find your parents less disapproving than you’d have thought. Rowena is allowed to stay over at weekends. You are sensible about contraception.
You get your A Levels and go to Manchester University. Ro wants to retake German and opts to put off further education for a year, but comes north to live with you. You get a flat together and feel very grown-up, almost married. She never does go to university, but tops up her qualifications with practical courses at Manchester Poly — secretarial, business, computer-programming.
You get a First Class degree but decline offers of postgrad places. It’s 1981 and you want to get out of education into the real world.
You and Ro move down to London and get a bigger flat — part financed by your parents, but you’ll pay them back — in Chelsea. She works as a bilingual secretary and you take a temporary job as an international courier and translator. You get to go to every continent, including Antarctica, and discover a knack for setting up and organising business negotiations between many parties. It’s like putting together a jigsaw.
Several times, in different foreign cities, you have brief affairs with business contacts. Always, you feel guilty but you don’t regret the experience. The women are mostly older, studied in glamour and sexual enthusiasm. They convince you that you’re really in love with Ro, rather than just drifting along because you’ve been together since school.
Dad dies in 1982. The next year, once your mum is out of mourning, you announce you will get married. Without planning it, Ro gets pregnant. Mum, herself engaged, is appalled and delighted that she’ll be a granny. Ro blossoms and blooms as she swells. Your sex life has never been better than in the months of her pregnancy.
At the same time, you get capital together to found your own business. You’ve expedited so much for so many, while going from job to job, that you have more contacts than any of your bosses, and a better reputation in the field. You’ve picked up some Japanese and are in the forefront of Anglo-Japanese trade links. You’ve even done a lot of work for the government, though you’ve never voted for them.
You have a 1984 wedding. Ro gives up work and has twins, Jeremy and Jessica.
You buy your Chelsea flat but start looking for a house out of London. Not in the commuter belt, a real retreat. You have an office in the city and a full staff there, but do most of your work in the field, out of the country. Your wardrobe includes gear appropriate to every climate and social occasion. You own tropical suits and alpaca parkas, and have multiples of dinner jackets in white and black. Ro teases you about dressing like James Bond, and asks if you can have an ejector seat fitted in the BMW.
Finally, you buy a house in Sutton Mallet, near Sedgwater. You return almost as a conquering hero. Your old teachers all want to take credit for you.
You have friends and contacts all over the world but stay in touch with a surprising number of people from Ash Grove. Mark Amphlett founds The Shape, a magazine, and becomes a ‘style guru’. Michael Dixon is a comedian, TV personality and novelist. Victoria Conyer emerges shrieking from punk and survives as a singer-songwriter. Gully Eastment is another kind of guru, leader of a nomadic tribe of travellers; he goes to jail for his part in a poll-tax riot and is the subject of several television documentaries.
Laraine, a lecturer in history at East Anglia, marries Fred, her university boyfriend. James comes out of the army and starts a security firm. You employ him to run security at conferences whenever there is a possibility of terrorist attack. Councillor Robert Hackwill, your old school bully, is always leaving messages on your answerphone, wheedling support for local schemes.
When the kids start school, Ro comes into the firm. She turns out to have a flair for design, and handles your PR. Victoria poaches her to run her indie record label, which is a surprise but works out amazingly well.
The 1980s are good to you. It’s hard not to feel guilty about that. You work closely with a great many business people you feel are no better than crooks but manage to keep your own integrity. You won’t work in South Africa, Chile, Indonesia or the Philippines (until Marcos goes). With Michael and Mark, you get involved around the fringes of Live Aid and keep up your charitable work, donating a great deal of free time and expertise to discreet fund-raising and environmental lobbying.
It’s possible that you make a difference.
But, as the ’80s draw to a close, and you turn thirty, you start thinking.
Isn’t everything all just a bit too easy?
The point of a jigsaw is the putting together. Once it’s done, you don’t frame and admire the picture. You feel you’ve finished this puzzle. There’s a nagging urge to break up the picture into a million pieces and put it back in its box. Then start again.
That’s silly.
In many ways, you’ve only just started. There are the kids. New puzzles, constantly exciting and interesting. You’ve no real idea what pictures they’ll make yet. Work is still stimulating. You and Ro aren’t bored with each other.
If the next word in this train of thought is ‘But …’, go to 169. If the next word is ‘And …’, go to 274.
25
You call it Year the Second-and-Fifth (of Ash Grove and Hemphill), after James the First (of England) and Sixth (of Scotland). For the first two terms, from September 1975 to Easter 1976, you work hard on your new courses and achieve a middling placing in classes of clever kids.
Your parents are mad keen on the O Level lark. Laraine, who will go to university at the end of the month, is ordered to tell you what a wonderful time she had at Sedgwater College. Previously, toiling in the lower depths of the CSE stream, you were lost. Now, there’s the possibility of salvation.
Marie-Laure is jumped to the O Level stream in art and scripture (religious studies, they call it at Ash Grove). Vince Tunney joins you in maths, which gives you an ally but perhaps holds you back a bit. Reversing the pattern, Shane Bush is only doing English O Level, dropping all his other subjects to CSE.
Now you’re all world-weary sixteen-year-olds, former grammar-school kids don’t persecute former Hemphill kids. Rowena Douglass, who is with you in French, even makes something of a pet of you, ostentatiously helping you in class. You feel a little patronised but also realise you’re out of your depth. You keep up on paper but don’t have the confidence to speak in class and have to be painfully drawn out.
The void still gapes. Maybe Sedgwater College is a way of putting it off? But if you have to work full out on an O-for-Ordinary Level course, how could you do at A-for-Advanced Level? The black void extends spider-tendrils.
You are often in a state of suppressed panic.
In the run-up to your exams — mostly CSEs, but those two O Levels loom larger �
�� your parents take you to Sedgwater College for a special interview.
If you pass all your exams — a big if — the college will accept you, studying not for A Levels but for a certificate in business studies. That alone won’t get you into a university.
Business studies.
‘It’s a good grounding,’ Dad says. He left school at sixteen to work in the bank. ‘It could lead to a position. We always have openings.’
The future is an unimaginable emptiness. You have no conception of what you want from it. But of one thing you are sure. You don’t want to work in a fucking bank. You don’t want to spend two years on a certificate in business studies. You might as well buy a prat suit, like Laraine’s bank clerk ex-boyfriend Sean Rye wears, and bury yourself alive.
You feel yourself falling. Spider-webs of shade cling to you, wrapping you tight.
It’s all the worse for the time and effort you’ve wasted on what turn out to be useless O Levels. You were betrayed. When you were persuaded to take maths and French, you weren’t told you needed at least three O Level passes for it to mean anything. You might then have stretched yourself, and gone for history or art or English. It might then have meant something.
But you were conned. You’ve jumped through hoops — you’ve been patronised by that big-titted cow Rowena, you’ve given up hours of free time sweating over a slide-rule — and all for nothing. A big fat zero.
Again, you won’t talk to your parents.
You slacken off revising. Oddly, this means you’re less worried and more relaxed when you sit the exams, and probably do better than you would have done if you’d been screwing yourself into knots trying to be at your best.
After the exams are done, a German soldier leans over your wounded body and cackles, ‘For you, Tommy, ze education iss over.’ Whatever results you get, you’re not taking business studies. You go home and wait for the darkness to close in.
Go to 29.
26
‘Your, uh, friend’s here,’ Mum says. ‘She looks very nice,’ she whispers.
This is embarrassing. Your parents are delighted you have asked Mary out. They don’t remember the monster from primary school. Parents have an incredible ability to forget the unforgettable.
Mary lives in Achelzoy, the outlying village where Michael Dixon will throw his party after the show, and she has learned to drive. It seems strange but she is calling for you, in her mum’s Honda Civic.
That she can drive and you can’t makes you feel — briefly — like a girl. You’ve grown up familiar with the rituals of teenage courtship shown in American movies and TV programmes, but things are different in Britain. You suppose you and Mary have a date, but no one at Sedgwater College would call it that. Now you feel as if you are dolled up in a prom dress with a ribbon in your beehive hair, while Mary idles below in her hot-rod, a pack of cigarettes tucked into the upturned sleeve of her T-shirt and a wad of gum going in her mouth.
Downstairs, Mary waits. She is wearing a yellow dress and an orange overcoat. She has used make-up cleverly, to hide the scariness in her face.
Momentarily, you are certain you have made a mistake. Mary has agreed to go with you to the show and the party as part of her long-planned revenge scheme.
You called her a girl once and she nearly killed you. Now, you’ve asked her to be your girlfriend and she’s going along with it, drawing it out, scheming.
You think of the bucket of pig’s blood in Carrie.
Mary smiles and makes polite conversation with your mother about college work. Mary says she would like to take a year off after college to work before going on, if she does, to university. She is thinking of working on her uncle’s farm.
Dad, hiding behind a newspaper, is stricken. You notice, as usually you don’t, that Mary has a yokel burr. You’ve failed to pick up a Somerset voice but rarely realise how strongly accented your friends are. You imagine Mary driving a tractor, sucking a straw, wearing a smock.
You hurry through the hallway, hustling Mary out of the house. Your parents come to the door to watch you go, beaming with a pride that reddens your face. You mumble promises to be back sometime, though you fully expect not to return until tomorrow. They wave as if you were going to Afghanistan. You want to hit your dad right in the grin.
You struggle with the unfamiliar seatbelt in Mary’s car: it doesn’t seem to fit together properly, offering two identical catches that refuse to interlock. Mary slides into the driving seat and sits beside you, in the dark. You are sure her X-ray eyes discern the packet of condoms you have got from the machine in the Gents at the Lime Kiln after waiting for twenty minutes in a stall for the place to be empty so no one would see you. It is highly unlikely you’ll have any use for them, but you are used to planning for all eventualities.
Mary leans closer to you. To kiss?
A warm, sickly feeling nestles in your throat. You feel the threat of an erection.
Mary turns on the overhead light.
‘Hello, you,’ she says.
Are you expected to kiss her?
‘Hello, Mary,’ you say, almost croaking.
‘Your mum don’t half go on.’
You know your face is scarlet. You mumble that Mary is right. Recently, your parents have been impossible. It must be their time of life.
Mary reaches down and sorts out your seatbelt. You have been trying to fasten yours to hers. You curse yourself for an idiot, knowing what the girl — it’s all right to call Mary a girl these days — thinks of you now.
‘Well,’ Mary says, smiling, ‘wagons roll.’
She lets off the handbrake.
It’s too late. You are now going out with Mary Yatman, and you have no idea what that means.
Later, with cider inside, you have relaxed. Checking your face in mirrors, you see you are no longer scarlet. You look cool. The black suede jacket was a worthwhile purchase. Some of the other students are in fancy dress, left over from parading round the town centre all day for charity.
The Rag Show is an informal event. Students and hangers-on drift in and out of the college auditorium. Knots of secretive kids drink or smoke, avoiding the lecturers nominally in charge.
You are outside the main building, with Mary. The weather has turned cold. Shallow pools of recent rain turn to gritty ice. The noise of Flaming Torture explodes through the tall windows. All their songs sound alike, and you can only hear Gully’s drum-beat and Vic’s cut-glass high notes.
Michael Dixon, in a dinner jacket and bow tie, is trying to calm down an irate, shivering neighbour who has turned up in her dressing-gown to complain about after-hours noise. He is talking fast, stuttering all over the show, to distract the woman from Vic’s lyrics.
Victoria Conyer is singing a song about strangling the Queen Mother with barbed wire.
Mary thinks it’s funny.
‘She’s got a lovely voice,’ she comments.
‘She’s certainly got the full octave.’
The song ends, with Vic screeching. Dogs in the area must be bursting eardrums.
You still aren’t sure about Mary. All through the evening, she’s been pretending to be normal. You know all about that. You’ve been pretending to be normal too. If anyone has questions about you being with Mary, they’ve kept them to themselves. You’ve been studiedly casual, occasionally looking at Mary from one side, thinking, ‘That’s my girlfriend.’
You sort of expected people to come up and congratulate you, to welcome you to the world of coupledom. All that has happened is that Roger has warned you against the wiles of wicked women. He is drifting around drunkenly embittered without Rowena (she stayed at home) and breathing cider on various girls. You think he’s got off with Jacqui, which wouldn’t surprise anyone.
‘Are you coming to the party?’ Michael asks you both.
‘Might as well,’ Mary says.
‘Top hole,’ Michael says.
He is harassed by a hundred things that need organising and explaining. Michael gets off
on orchestrating events.
‘Gramma’s away and there are no neighbours,’ Michael says. ‘That’ll be a relief. No possible complainants.’
Just inside the glass doors of the college hall, Desmond Fewsham lifts a fire extinguisher from its bracket, fending off a desperately drunk Mickey Yeo, who advances under a raised cloak like a punk Dracula. Michael, appalled, knows before it happens that Desmond will let the thing off, squirting foam all over the place. White froth spatters the doors and ghost-faces Mickey.
‘Excuse me,’ Michael says. ‘I zh-zh-zhust have to kill some close friends.’
As he stalks off, Mary laughs. You do too, and find you are holding her hand.
‘Glad you came?’ you ask.
She doesn’t answer, just squeezes your hand. It occurs to you that Mary has never been out with anyone before. She is just as lost as you are.
Maybe that’s not so bad.
Mickey, screaming and laughing through his frozen and foamed face, staggers through the double doors like a monster, arms outstretched.
Shadows flit across the car park. You realise how cold it is. Your breath and Mary’s frost in the air under the halogen lights.
‘Do you remember my monster, Keith?’
You say nothing, pretending. It was a long time ago. You could have forgotten.
‘My monster remembers you.’
She dances away from you, literally, picking up the beat of Flaming Torture. Harsh shadows make a kabuki mask of her face. Her hair falls over her forehead in a wing. Her lips are red as blood. Her teeth are sharp.
She dances with her shadows. They flicker away from her, spreading like skirts, and fall back into her body, scattered tendrils of her dark.
