by Lee Evans
Without thinking and still blinded by passion for Jenny, I took a quick glance up at Mrs Henford, who was having a dreadful time of it. She was pinned to the blackboard, on the receiving end of full-on abuse from everyone in the room. ‘Mrs Cluck Cluck Henford. Cluck cluck cluck cluck.’
I looked back at Jenny. Aching to impress her, I automatically picked up the lighter and held my book aloft. Igniting the flame, I set fire to the pages. All the while, I stared at Jenny; it was like I was hypnotized by her beauty and sirens’ voices were ordering me to do it because that’s what Jenny had commanded. Suddenly, the book began to flare up, illuminating my hand with a wonderful orange glow.
I heard the sirens’ voices, now singing in my ear: ‘Jenny loves the fire, the magical orange flames. She loves you, Lee, too, she really –’ Aaargh!
All of a sudden, I awoke from my trance and realized I was holding a significantly hot fireball in my hand. I looked to Jenny for help, but she was just cackling demonically and called out mockingly, ‘You total turd head! Look, Miss, look! Evans is setting the school on fire!’ The whole class began laughing derisively and getting out of their seats, ready to evacuate the room.
The fire alarm rang out around the school and through the window I saw other kids running past our classroom. I started to panic as smoke filled the room. Swiftly opening the lid of my desk, I shoved the now flaming book inside, slammed the lid shut and applied my full weight to it. There was a brief pause when I thought that by chucking the book inside the desk I might have suffocated the flames, but then black smoke and yellow flames began billowing out from underneath the lid. Hurling the burning book into the desk had only succeeded in stoking the fire. I was in serious trouble here.
Everyone started evacuating the room. From the middle of the scurrying crowd, Jenny glanced over her shoulder and gave me a curious look of puzzlement. I wasn’t much good at this sort of thing, but I reckoned it meant she fancied me. There again, she may have just thought I was an utter wazzock.
Then Jenny was gone, swallowed up by the ubiquitous smoke as if exiting through a stage-managed cloud of dry ice. Now there was just me and Mrs Henford. Through the smoke I could see the teacher, still frozen to the same spot, mad eyes staring straight ahead in shock, mouth agog, traumatized, her fingers now gripped so tightly around her handbag it would take a team of surgeons to remove it.
With flames beginning to rise up around me, I was still glued to the lid of the desk. Unable to resist the urge to examine the carnage I had caused, I lifted the lid of the desk. At that moment, a huge fireball erupted out, singeing my fringe right up to my hairline and giving me an instant feather cut. I looked like a very charred, eyebrowless Neanderthal version of the lead guitarist from the very popular glam-rock band Sweet. Not a good look. Jenny was never going to fancy me now.
The moral of the story? True love can burn you. Or perhaps it’s just ‘Beware of pretty girls bearing lighters’.
On another occasion, which only underlined my status as a dork, I took on the challenge of fighting the school hard-man, Brian. I should have guessed he was tough – his nickname was ‘The Karate Kid’ – but I was ever-eager to impress.
As he approached me in the playground, we were instantly surrounded by a gang of lads shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’
I have to say, the shouting really spurred me on a bit. I felt encouraged by the whole thing; it began to rile my teenage hormones. Disconcertingly, though, Brian just stood stock-still, holding his ground and looking exactly like a psychotic turkey, parrot, scorpion thing. I was now just feet away from him and coming in at some speed, lungs burning, cheeks red, tears in my eyes from the wind. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do when I got there but, boy, was I fired up now! I noticed, though, that Brian hadn’t moved a single muscle during my massive run-up. He had just stayed exactly in the shape of his turkey, parrot, scorpion thing …
So I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised when I was whacked by the most sickening scorpion sting – or was it a turkey attack or a parrot assault? The other kids told me afterwards that when I ran headfirst into Brian’s fist, I looked like a jelly trifle that had been dropped into a clothes dryer on spin cycle.
On the positive side, after that initial blow I never felt another thing. It was as if Brian’s fist hitting me repeatedly in the face acted as a general anaesthetic. I never even flinched when he threw me to the floor and began systematically showering my body with a serious of scorpion-like over-head kicks followed by a bunch of varied pincer-claw punches. I didn’t even react when, according to one amazed onlooker, Brian threw me like a carrier bag full of feathers all around the playground. I never screamed once. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that I lost that particular fight.
Hours later, when I was finally released from the school sick bay, I found myself sitting outside Mr Nelson’s office waiting to receive my punishment. I was by now an old hand at this cane lark. I looked over at my fellow miscreant, Brian, who was sitting on the other side of the corridor. I wanted to see how a karate expert might handle the pressure of a potential whack across the scorpion’s arse. But Brian had his face tucked tightly into the wall, and I thought it best not to disturb him because, by the sound of it, he was sobbing. We all handle things differently, I suppose. I just took it that he must have been working through some kind of ancient Chinese blubbering ritual – I’m not sure, but he certainly called for his mum a lot. I would have tried it myself, but by now I’d had the cane so often, I had a backside that was starting to look like a Land of Leather sofa. So I used that as my strength.
Brian, it appeared, had never had the cane before, and so that’s what made him cry like a baby at the prospect. After witnessing me receive a few whacks from Mr Nelson’s special stick, I felt as though Brian admired my cool and blasé attitude to the pain. Maybe, just maybe, my stoical demeanour in the face of a heck of a beating gained me just a modicum of respect in the playground. I may have been a punchbag, but at least I was a brave punchbag.
The worst part of the whole experience, in fact, was getting home from school that evening. When I entered the house with a bigger black eye than a panda, Dad demanded I tell him how I’d got it. After I’d explained to him that I’d been beaten up at school, he started chasing me round the house, clipping me round the earhole and shouting, ‘Never, ever, get involved in violence!’ Then, just to ram home the point, he ran and kicked our long-suffering dog, Dougal.
Those anger-management lessons clearly weren’t working.
Even as the school years passed, my relentless quest for a girlfriend went largely unrewarded. In fact, I’d only had one serious girlfriend in Billericay, Sue. She was nuts, even by my standards. It was a total mismatch. She, quite rightly, thought I wasn’t the right one for her. She was one of those girls who craved danger. She needed someone to treat her badly, a moody bloke with misspelt tattoos and oily fingernails who smelled of leather. Sue wanted an out-of-control rebel who she could change – she was desperate to be the one who saved him.
But the rumour was, Sue went like the clappers on Red Bull and a pot of coffee. She oozed sex appeal. Every word that came out of her luscious lips indicated that there might be a shag in the offing.
I tried to explain to her that I could be bad, I could be rough, I could be savage, I could go like the clappers if required. If she really wanted, I could quite gladly punch her in the face. I could dress in moody leather, perhaps her dad’s chamois. I could even fart my name in a menacing way, comb my hair the wrong way, put my clothes on backwards, if I could just have a shag right there in her front garden, right in front of all these trees, grass and her mum’s special brass sundial.
Like the nutter I could be, I promised Sue that if she could wait five minutes, I’d be anything she wanted me to be. As my young teenaged hormones were on gas mark 9, just about to come to the boil, I’d have done anything just for a quick feel. I clearly knew the way to a girl’s h
eart.
As you can see, it was no suprise that her parents hated me – not because I was a good-for-nothing roughneck who could flob a whole potful of phlegm. No, they loathed me because, in trying to create the bad-boy image, I failed miserably. I couldn’t even be a successful lout.
For instance, I simply couldn’t hold my liquor. After one ill-conceived night out at the local pub to try and save our relationship, Sue was so disgusted with me that she walked on ahead as we turned into her street. I thought my getting hammered was what she wanted, but there you go. She stormed into her house and I staggered after her. I pinballed my way down the hall into the kitchen. There I found her at the kitchen table, arms folded, ferocious eyes glaring at me.
Through my blurry vision, I noticed to my horror that sitting across the table from her was Sue’s very formidable hard-arse father. I was in big trouble. He had a face like a thunderstorm. I had unwittingly upset his princess, and he didn’t like it one bit. He’d been looking for an excuse to have a right go at me ever since I’d been introduced to him. He had always thought I was a bit weird and not made of the right stuff. I was obviously not nearly good enough for his beloved daughter. From the other side of the kitchen table, he and his walking hairdo of a wife fixed me with a look as if I’d just kicked their cat’s backside into touch.
‘Sit down, Lee,’ Sue’s dad growled, menacingly tapping the chair next to his. They had been playing a quiet game of Scrabble before we’d walked in and now they wanted us to join in. That was going to be difficult, as I was really drunk and didn’t know how long I could manage not to slur my own words – let alone make any up.
I slumped down into the chair. The room felt heavy and fuggy after the fresh night air outside. I suddenly came over all hot and shaky – alcohol has a tendency to really hit you hard as soon as your body comes to rest somewhere. All of a sudden, it realizes it’s drunk and begins its own defence process by throwing out anything that isn’t wanted. All the warning signs were there …
As they set up the game to include us, their nice blue-and-white Formica kitchen with soft-closing drawers began slowly to spin. I tried desperately hard to collect myself, to focus on the Scrabble board, but I could feel my stomach was on the move. Just as the doorman down the pub had asked me to leave, so the same was happening to my insides: the undesirable drunks and hangers-on were being asked to vacate the premises.
It came out with such force it surprised even me. More vomit gushed from my mouth than the entire batch the props departments made up for the film The Exorcist. It was a novel – and very unwelcome – method of redecorating Sue’s kitchen.
After the lava flow from my mouth had finally ended, no one around the table had been spared the beer-soaked splatter of the old Hughie Green. It was like a technicolour bomb had just gone off. People sat around the table, their eyes peering out from face masks of ‘Yo ho heave ho’, staring straight ahead in stunned silence. As the tidal wave subsided, all that could be heard was the sound of dripping. Sue’s mum’s previously immaculately coiffed hair was now a blasted mess of barf, adorned with various unnamed vegetable chunks. Very gingerly, I looked around at her dad. I knew what was coming. His eyes narrowed and turned red with rage.
I landed in a crunching pile outside on the driveway. But that really didn’t hurt as much as the dad’s massive sucker punch that knocked me off my feet and propelled my limp frame through the chilly night air. I heaved myself up into a sitting position and, brain-dead and in double vision, tried to zoom in on Sue’s enraged father standing just inside the front door. Even in that state, I could see that his whole body was shaking with fury and that his face was still covered in my minestrone.
‘If you ever come here again,’ he shouted, filling the air with livid spittle, ‘I swear I will smash your little retard head in, you tosser.’ And with that home truth, the door slammed with such force it blew my hair up from five yards away. I wasn’t definite, but I reckoned that would probably be the last I’d see of his daughter. No chance of a shag there, then.
18. Getting the Band Together
I couldn’t really wait to leave school at sixteen. I felt that I was never any good at anything those poor teachers tried to drum into my dense skull. My sense at the end of it all was that I hadn’t actually discovered anything new, apart from an obvious and deeper feeling of inadequacy than I’d had before. Anyway, I already knew what I wanted to do for my job. I told my dad after he had sat me down to ask me. I told him straight: I was going to be a musician.
I was surprised by his reaction. He was livid, dismissing it out of hand and telling me that would be impossible. ‘You can’t just be a musician!’ he stormed.
‘Why not?’ I enquired. I was young and naive, of course, but I posed the question to him in my most exasperated voice. ‘You are!’
I’d already had my first taste of the music business. While in my last year at school, along with my friend Bill, we had formed a band. Well, I say ‘band’ – there was just us, me and him.
Anyway, Bill played a mean guitar, and I would flit between a clapped-out electric piano, a second-hand bass bought from a junk shop and a set of drums borrowed from one of Bill’s mates called Alan, a rich kid who lived up the road in one of the big houses on the other, better, side of the high street.
Learning the drums!
Bill’s mum, an elderly, grey-haired lady, didn’t like what we played. She fumed that it was too loud and too aggressive. As soon as she left the room, Bill would turn to me and say, really aggressively, ‘It’s not aggressive! It’s gentle!’ On the word ‘gentle’, he would smash his fist into the pillow in his tiny bedroom upstairs at his council house. We’d been confined to play there, strumming frustratingly quietly and singing in that sort of fake throaty whisper you do when you imagine that you’re in front of a large, enthralled crowd. But one mistakenly played loud chord, and his mum’s angry grey head would once more be poking round the door: ‘Now I won’t tell you again, William!’
If we were rehearsing at my house, we were allowed to set up the drum kit in our garage and go bananas. Plus, Bill was permitted to plug his guitar in at low volume. Although we had to keep the noise down because of the neighbours, we were amped, and so felt like a proper band. We could only play for an hour, though, before someone would be banging their fist on our garage door for us to shut the noise up.
I would bash away on the drums, while Bill tried singing over the top. Every now and again, he would shout over to me, ‘It’s good, ain’t it, Lee?’ his eyes wide and wild-looking. I would respond by banging even harder and sort of growling back at him over the drums through a face full of spots.
We actually sounded like a major pile-up on the M3 between a lorry carrying cymbals and another transporting zoo animals, but we thought we sounded fantastic. We began to take ourselves seriously by trying to look moody whenever we were out up the high street, combing our hair in various directions so it looked as though we’d just arrived on a motorbike. We’d hang around a lot smoking roll-ups and reflecting that the reason we had no gigs was because we were really a studio band – even though we’d never been in a studio.
So we mused that we could perhaps write our album in the garage. We just had to find two more people – hopefully with some instruments – and then we’d be a proper band. As far as we were concerned, we were going to be the next Beatles. Unfortunately, all we actually seemed destined to be was four Pete Bests, the bloke who dropped out before they made it big.
Bill had exactly the same ambitions for the band as I did. However, it was difficult to realize those as he could be a little unpredictable in nature. He might be perfectly gentle and amicable with you one minute, then the next he’d completely lose it. At band practice, he would suddenly slide into the corner and drift off into his own small world, tranced-out and fixated on his amp, which was turned up so loud it surely showed up on the Richter Scale in Brazil.
He’d gaze off in
to space like some absent-minded cabbage, strumming away on the strings of his guitar. He was cut off from everything around him like someone who had just been hit over the head with a large anvil, ungluing something in his head. He had the infuriating habit of constantly contradicting anything you said, just for the sake of being contrary and wanting an argument. He also had about as much patience as a great white shark on a case of Red Bull at feeding time and he loved to fight. Bill was a small stout lad, as solid as a pit bull on steroids, with a cow’s-tail hairdo perched at the top of his forehead. He wore huge, thick glasses that magnified his mad, mischievous eyes, making them look like windows into the asylum without any bars.
What a guitarist Bill was! There wasn’t a chord he didn’t know. He was like Bert Weedon on amphetamines. During a number, his fingers would move continuously, rapidly reforming into all kinds of shapes, whipping across the frets in a blur, up and down the neck of his Gibson copy. When he really got going – watch out! – he was like a train with no leaves on the line and no brakes. But once he was on one, you didn’t dare stop him. That would be like waking up an unhinged man while he sleep-walked. If you interrupted his flow when he was at full tilt on those frets, he was likely to rip your face off and use it as a joke mask.
The Cave Club was a much-coveted local venue in Brentwood, the next town along from Billericay. The club was a magnet for any budding musician; it introduced lots of new bands from around the area. So it was important that we somehow got a gig there. When we eventually had the desired four members of our band, we called ourselves THE ANONYMOUS FIVE. Even though there were only four of us, it sounded good, and if anyone asked where the other guy was we always replied that he liked to stay anonymous. Either way, people just smirked at our terrible explanation.
So there was Bill and me, Alan, the rich kid with his own set of drums – a great asset because his parents didn’t mind us practising in the shed at the back of their house – and a guy called Rob. He was a real hottie, heart-throb type who stood around wearing dark glasses indoors, with his legs astride a large set of bongos, striking the odd pose while rhythmically bashing animal skins. He was all virile and strapping. Women loved him, so of course I hated him. He was chosen not necessarily for his musical skills – mainly because he had none – but for his looks. He was a real magnet for the birds. Me and Bill’s somewhat crafty way of thinking was that Rob would churn the waters for us, and we could come and pick up the girls he didn’t want, like hungry seagulls behind a fishing boat. Well, at least, that was the idea. It didn’t work in practice – I remained resolutely girlfriend free!
