by Kim Newman
You black out.
Read 13, and come back here.
When Mum finds you, there really are insects crawling over your face.
Something has happened to you.
Victoria says you are marked out.
For something?
It’s well over a year since you left school.
And nothing.
Your CSEs don’t count for anything.
Nothing counts for anything.
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ Vince confides in you. ‘Things were going along just like normal, and she just stopped talking to me. It’s been going on for over a week. One afternoon, we were chatting on the phone and things were fine. That evening, we all went out and she didn’t say a word to me. It was weird, man. The next evening, the same. She won’t come to the phone. Nothing.’
You gather Marie-Laure has chucked Vince but not told him.
‘Face it,’ you say. ‘She’s mad.’
‘Too fucking true, Keith.’
The two people you see most often aren’t talking to each other. This cuts your life in thirds — rent-earning chores, comics with Vince, dope with Marie-Laure. You wonder how many more fractions you can take, before each fragment becomes so small as to be not worth pursuing.
A possibility occurs to you: Marie-Laure.
You’re in Marie-Laure’s bedroom, mildly stoned. The Beatles’ Double White is on her hi-fi. The black-and-white telly is on, sound turned down. BBC, so there are no adverts. Doctor Who, with that long-scarfed impostor who took over from Jon Pertwee. Marie-Laure won’t talk about Vince except to call him ‘a drip’. You notice her shakes have come back. You have to roll and light the joints, because her fingers don’t work for small tasks like that.
Marie-Laure has an ideal life. Her dad has moved in with his girlfriend, and her mum, who gets a huge monthly support cheque, ignores her completely. She is pissed more often than her daughter is stoned. Dad would never let Laraine have some bloke in her room smoking dope. Marie-Laure gets to keep all her giro, though she also has to cook most of her meals. A char does the washing and cleaning.
But Marie-Laure still wants to leave home.
‘It’s oppressive,’ she says, ‘like the House of Usher.’
There’s a crack in the wall of her bedroom. She has rammed wadded-up shreds of pink tissue paper into it.
You’re sure there are spiders in the crack.
A tiny leg extrudes itself, impossibly long, many-jointed. Like a growing hair, it reaches for you.
Inadvertently, you cringe, pressing yourself nearer Marie-Laure. She touches your shoulder, with a shaking hand.
You turn.
If you try to kiss Marie-Laure, go to 32. If you shrink away, go to 31.
30
Throughout Rag Day, the town centre is clogged with students in costume, accosting passers-by for money. Neil Martin demonstrates the untruth of an old saying by trying to sell hot cakes from the Corn Exchange steps. Desmond Fewsham has found an accordion he can’t play and is anti-busking, providing a minute of merciful silence for every 10p given him. A few seconds of tuneless wheezing is enough to solicit a donation. No one is sure which charity Rag Day is supposed to be raising money for, but Michael Dixon, president of the Student Union, assures everyone it’s all in a good cause. Mickey Yeo, creeping around in a Dracula cloak with his hair in Johnny Rotten spikes, has voted the Union use the money to send Satanist missionaries to backward Christian countries. Mostly, students take Rag Day as an excuse to loon about.
You’re in fancy dress. Over a pillowcase with eyeholes, tucked in at the neck, you wear an old trenchcoat and fedora inherited from a deceased great-uncle, thick gloves, and tinted ski goggles. You are supposed to be the Invisible Man.
Probably because no one has ever seen you wear the coat and hat, which have been at the back of your wardrobe since your grandmother passed them on to you, the disguise makes you a genuine man of mystery.
You show up outside the Corn Exchange, which dominates the centre of town, and people pay attention to you.
Not speaking, you wave cheerily and nod your head.
‘Who is it?’ Michael asks.
‘Invisible Man,’ says Desmond.
‘Then why can we see him?’ Roger asks.
‘We can’t, dolt,’ says Desmond.
The disguise is like armour. You decide not to say anything for a while, to see how long you can get away with it. It will be an experiment, discovering what it is like not to be you.
Victoria arrives, illegally parking her old Mini van by the Corn Exchange steps. She emerges, dressed as a ragged Cruella De Vil. Safety pins dot the diaphanous folds of her skirt and cloak. Her black-rooted white hair is teased out in hook-like curls. She wears white-face make-up, with Egyptian designs round her eyes. For her, this is an everyday look.
‘Roger,’ she says, draping her arms around your shoulders and looking into your reflective goggles. She inclines her head to one side and sticks her red mouth over yours, kissing you through your mask, prodding the tight cloth with her active tongue. You hold her up, gloved hands supporting her ribs, thumbs pressing under her breasts.
The warmth of her body is pressed against you.
‘What a great look,’ Victoria comments, pulling back. ‘Roger, that’s so you.’
Michael is laughing. Roger looks on, appalled. You smile under your mask, which must be lipsticked, and point at Roger.
Victoria turns, eyes widening. She is astonished, shocked, puzzled and intrigued. This may well be the most emotion you’ve ever raised in anyone.
‘If it’s not Roger …’
‘We’ve no idea, Vic,’ says Michael.
‘Say something,’ Victoria suggests.
You shrug, wryly.
‘You’ll be found out before the day is done,’ she says.
Desmond’s money runs out and he starts wheezing the squeeze-box, yelling an out-of-tune ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely?’ to unbearable chords. Everyone looks through pockets for change and Victoria tosses him a coin to shut up.
‘All in a good cause,’ Desmond grins.
‘It’s a shame you didn’t dress up as the Inaudible Man,’ Michael says.
By early afternoon, after a considerable amount of under-age drinking in the Lime Kiln, everyone you know is desperately drunk. Rowena, loitering around Roger and looking alternately angry and pathetic, is especially stricken, and keeps downing brandy to ward off a sniffly flu. It takes four blokes to haul her upright after she’s been epochally sick in an alley. You congratulate yourself on not being here with her. She’d now be your responsibility and you doubt there’d be much romance in wiping off vomit.
You drink through a straw stuck into a tiny hole in your mask, which slows you down. You have also had to drink whatever you’re offered, since you don’t speak for fear of giving yourself away. You had no idea how vile rum and black really was.
At the table in the beer garden — it’s winter cold, but you’re all outside anyway — you are still the Mystery Man.
‘We can work it out through elimination,’ Michael suggests. ‘Who isn’t here?’
He begins naming your entire male college year, as if calling a register at Marling’s, soliciting comments. When a name is mentioned, everyone at the table tries to remember if the person has been seen today and, when a sighting is confirmed, rules him out. Your name doesn’t come up, but no one notices it’s missing.
Is this all the impression you have made? You have known some of these people since kindergarten. Finally, Desmond mentions he saw you earlier with Mary Yatman. Everyone accepts this and hurries on to the next suspect.
Mary has been on the fringes of everything, not in costume, quietly moving among mortals, not really involved, observing. It’s not too late. You could still ask her to the show this evening. No one else will. She’s at the other side of the garden, chatting with Neil Martin and someone dressed as a Womble.
You don’t think you’d have to
be invisible to interest Mary. You’d have to take off the mask to ask her out. The mystery business is getting to be a bore anyway.
‘It couldn’t be a girl?’ Victoria asks.
Everyone laughs.
‘You kissed him,’ Roger says. ‘It, rather.’
She gives the matter some thought.
You’ve never considered Victoria much. She’s one of the Weird Women. Her intelligence and now her style have removed her from your mental list of girls you fancy. Actually, she carries her punk princess persona rather well.
She’s not a slag, like Jacqui. But she isn’t tight, either. You know she went out with Graham for a while, and has slept with Roger and several others. She is experienced, adult. But not like those girls who already seem married to their boyfriends and are picking out three-piece suites. You don’t imagine Victoria thinks about three-piece suites. She firmly believes there won’t be a future.
Will she be disappointed when your mask comes off?
‘He’s not a girl,’ she says, having thought it over. She takes your upper arm and squeezes. ‘I’d have noticed.’
‘You’d recognise him if he took his trousers off,’ Roger says.
Victoria picks up her almost untouched glass of cider and deliberately spills it into Roger’s lap.
‘Fuck,’ he shouts.
‘Clumsy me,’ she admits, hard.
‘Temper, temper,’ says Michael.
‘You need a kick in the cunt,’ Roger says to Victoria.
‘You’d lose your foot,’ she replies, breaking her glass across the side of his head.
She could have blinded him.
You wonder about Victoria. Just how out of control is she? Just how much do you want to sit next to her? By the end of the evening and with a few more drinks or some mix of drugs, that could be your face at the receiving end of a glass or a bottle.
Mary, at least, got over her violent streak years ago.
Michael and Desmond hold Roger down. He isn’t badly cut.
‘You were out of order, man,’ Desmond says.
Roger is in a bad mood, you realise. It must be down to Rowena. In the last few years, you’ve got used to the tension and attraction and friction running around your peers. It’s just fucking adolescence.
Roger pulls a hankie out of his jeans pocket and dabs the trickle on his forehead. He has been lucky.
Mary is leaving the garden, unnoticed by everybody but you. If you get up now, you could still catch her. You could still ask her out.
Suddenly cheerful, Victoria asks you to buy her a drink.
If you stay invisible and buy Victoria a drink, go to 36; if you leave the table, take off the mask, and ask Mary to come to the show with you this evening, go to 26.
31
Marie-Laure kisses you. You aren’t that interested. But you get together anyway.
She suggests you get a flat together in town, but — now it’s a possibility — you aren’t sure about moving out. You know Marie-Laure well enough to guess she’s not the most practical of girls. At home, you at least eat properly on your mum’s cooking and have your washing done.
Once you’ve slept together, Marie-Laure gets a bit clingy. You’re somewhat spooked.
She has ‘spells’. She doesn’t come out of her room for three days and plays one single — ‘Kites’, by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, bought when she was eight — over and over again at full volume.
You get tired of being the dependable one, the sane one, the one who takes care of things. Marie-Laure drinks. With full access to her alky mother’s booze cabinet and a lot of time on her hands, it is probably inevitable.
A year dribbles by. The only landmarks are rows. You and Marie-Laure have a lot of them. Once, in a ‘spell’, she hits you with an ashtray. She’s immediately contrite but you finish with her. She telephones. Many times. She screams at your dad.
You live like an emotional turtle, head and limbs pulled in. You try to avoid mad people. You stay at home, watching children’s television, listening to records.
Except on signing-on day, you don’t get up before noon. The only person outside your family you see regularly is Vanda Pritchard. Behind the DHSS counter, she seems as depressed as the claimants queuing up to present their UB40s.
Your signing-on time is between nine-thirty and ten. One week, you oversleep and are an hour late. Most clerks would give you a hard time, but Vanda sorts it out for you.
She asks you if you want to have a lunch-time drink with her. A lunch-time drink? You are so far out of the mainstream that the concept seems exotic to you. A lunch-time drink.
Why not?
Vanda knows about you. She has access to your social security files, so she knows you’re living at home and that you’ve been passed over by employers. Eighteen months after school, you aren’t even going for interviews or wandering miserably around the Job Centre any more.
She doesn’t seem much of an advert for employment.
In the Lime Kiln, she tells you long, intricate, involved stories about the politics of her office, and the trials she has with difficult claimants. You know several of them, including Laraine’s ex-boyfriend Graham, who moves from squat to squat and has memorised his benefit rights down to the smallest print. He is capable of reciting them very slowly while a needy, irritable queue extends behind him, growing like a monster’s tail out the door and into the street.
Your policy has always been to go in, sign on and get out. Make no trouble and you’re all right.
Vanda has broken up with Barry Mitcham, who is working in a petrol station. She asks after Marie-Laure. You don’t know. She asks after Shane. You don’t know.
She buys you several pints and a plate of sandwiches. When her lunch hour is up, she goes back. You arrange non-committally to do this again next week.
Outside the DHSS, there’s an awkward moment. Vanda is expecting to be kissed. You oblige. She kisses you back, properly. She hugs you, fiercely. You sense desperation in the fervour of her embrace. She leaves finger-marks on your arms.
You kiss her again and walk away.
If you do see Vanda again next week, go to 34. If you make an excuse and get out of it, go to 150.
32
You kiss Marie-Laure. She doesn’t seem that interested. But you get together anyway.
You get a flat over a chip shop. The DHSS reckons you are cohabiting, which you suppose you are, and cut your benefit. It’s Vanda’s job to write and tell you about it. Signing the letter, she still puts a tiny heart over the ‘i’ in ‘Pritchard’. Marie-Laure’s mum gives her odd wedges of cash. You take your washing home to use your mum’s machine.
You occasionally do bits of work without declaring income. Stock-taking at the jam factory. Picking up rubbish after the Glastonbury Festival.
Years pass. Margaret Thatcher is elected prime minister. Victoria goes to university, gets a degree in history, and comes back again. Laraine gets married to a bloke called Fred, then divorces. James joins the army. Dad dies. Britain counter-invades the Falklands.
The system changes and you get separate giros for housing benefit and supplementary benefit. You have to have an annual interview with a bored bureaucrat — Rowena Cunningham, whom you remember from school — who knows as well as you that you have no chance of employment.
When you first signed on, you were a school-leaver. Now, you’re long-term unemployed. You don’t get hassled so much because lots of other people are out of work. In waiting-rooms, you see older men, unemployed since the lay-offs at the Synth, nervous and at sea, unsure how to cope with the boredom and despair. You feel sorry for them.
Your mum remarries, a younger guy, Phil Parslowe.
Marie-Laure gets pregnant. You work out that the child benefit will come in handy. You have two kids, Josh and Jonquil.
It takes you a few moments to remember what year it is when filling in the date on benefit forms. With each year, the problem gets worse.
You’ve lived through 1984. S
till, you can’t believe it’s the 1980s.
Vince comes round a lot. You still talk with him about comics but are out of date: he’s high on Alan Moore and Frank Miller Jr, while you stick with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. There’s a new Robin, which strikes you as sacrilege. And Doctor Who is a curly-haired pillock in a parti-coloured coat.
You and Vince spend quite a bit of time remembering out loud the names of all the Tracy Brothers or the catch-phrases from Hector’s House and Play School. Marie-Laure always finds something else to do when you’re going ‘through the round window’.
You never did quite grow a beard, just as Marie-Laure never quite filled out a bra. You eat too many chips and get a bit of a gut. Marie-Laure takes the kids and leaves but comes back after a week. She works part-time in the jam factory. They’ve laid off full-time, long-standing staff to take on less-qualified people they don’t have to pay as much. It’s all very well, but when Marie-Laure earns anything, the DSS — reorganised and rechristened — cut your giro back to almost nothing. With the kids, you can’t deny that you’re cohabiting.
You smoke dope less, though Graham and Victoria — who live in a squat in Sutton Mallet — still deal in a small way. You’ve had a headache for years, throbbing slightly, not bad enough to be serious, never clearing up entirely.
It’s ten years since you left school.
Whenever anyone tells you the ’80s are a boom time for the country and that you should be a part of it, you snap, ‘Not in this life.’
When you talk with Vince, you discuss either what’s happening right now this week — usually hassles with benefit — or minutiae of the years before 1976. You take to running through your old school register and wondering what has happened to everybody you knew.
A lot of them are in the same boat as you. It’s just that you climbed on the scrapheap while they tried to get along in the world of work and were thrown there.
