“Come on let’s do it!” Harry yelled as we started to charge into them.
It was war. The same ancient instinct of tribal warfare had brought out the worst in mankind for thousands of years. This was skins versus mods, a common occurrence after gigs, mobs of drugged up kids looking for trouble.
The two groups collided in an explosive melee. I didn’t know what to do? I really didn’t want to let my mates down, but I had Lilly to look after and I’d promised to keep her safe. Bottles and bricks were raining down on us and, with it being so dark, it was impossible to avoid them. Silly really, but even though it was scary all the same, we couldn’t stop laughing. Crash, boom, splat, blood was running in the streets and all we could do was laugh.
“We are the mods! We are the mods, we are, we are. We are the mods!” We shouted and sang in chorus. The sound of 60 people charging down the road like a herd of stampeding buffalo was unbelievable. Deafening!
Harry ran over and made up my mind for me. I’d been wondering if it was too much for Lilly. She’d never seen this kind of action before. He looked at me and screamed, “For fuck sake Abbie, get Lilly out of here! We ain’t gonna be able to hold ‘em off for long.”
I didn’t need telling again. I grabbed Lilly’s hand and the two of us sprinted along the lane towards the station. I could hear a train on the tracks above us going in the same direction. That’ll do, I thought and increased my speed. Running as fast as I could and dragging Lilly behind wasn’t easy when we were both wearing winkle pickers. Even though we were out of the firing line, I felt safer somehow when I was in the middle of the mob. We were exposed, easy targets.
I could hear the rest of the mods behind me. They were all running now, running for dear life.
“Hold the tube, hold the tube. . .” they shouted.
We ran across the station car park as the train pulled in via the viaduct. Lilly and I bolted up the iron staircase into the station. It was a tight race and my 38DDs were pounding, whilst I gasped for air. I could hardly breathe.
Rudely, we shoved paying passengers to one side while we ran through the crowd like a hot knife through butter, laughing our heads off the whole time. The bystanders looked terrified as our gang of mods descended upon them. We hardly even noticed them really. They might just as well not have been there. In our haste, all our concentration was on reaching the train in time. We’d be dead at the hands of the skins if we didn’t.
The doors signalled they were going to close, but we managed to get in between in time to hold them open as Lilly jumped on. I could hear shouting downstairs in the station as the mods rushed into the station and up the stairs. The guard was going mental at us for holding the doors.
“Fuck off!” I yelled. I’m about to save lives here. Who do you think you are, Jobsworth?
The first of the mods were now running into the carriage as Lilly and I held the doors standing on either side. Quite a few of the lads were covered in blood, they obviously had a bad kicking. Some of them were holding wounds and groaning. I could see adrenaline-fuelled fear in their eyes. Harry and a few stragglers appeared at the top of the stairs. Harry was always one of the last to get away from the action. It was like he never wanted it to end, enjoying every waking minute.
The skinheads were right in amongst them, fists flying, Harry lashed out with a bit of metal piping. He and a couple of other lads were managing to keep the skinheads at bay as the rest of the boys jumped onto the train. One of the skins took the full force of the piping across the face, and I heard the crack of his jaw as he crumpled onto the platform in spurts of blood. His blood-curdling screams went right through me, rising above the noise of the mob.
Everyone paused for a second to give Harry enough time to jump aboard as we let go of the doors and they slammed shut with a bang. Almost immediately the train began to move away, the driver obviously aware of what was going on. A few more missiles bounced off the windows as the train sped up and out of the station. Luckily the glass held firm and we left London behind.
I gulped for air and thought, This stuff only happens in movies. One day I’ll have to write a book, but no one will believe me!
I looked around the carriage. It looked like the medical tent in the TV series, M.A.S.H. There were a few regular passengers on the train and they appeared terrified. Most were trying their best to move to another carriage.
I glanced across at Lilly and smiled, “What a night!”
We all started laughing together. I felt exhausted as the adrenaline bled out of my body like the air out of a leaky tire. We’d had it on their turf, their manor. Yep, we had gone down to the smoke and took the skins out. Hell yes! Yeah okay, fair enough, we got bashed a bit, but only because we were outnumbered. Our pride was intact. As calm descended over the carriage and the train continued towards Victoria, everybody started getting their breath and reflecting on the battle. Who did what and to whom? Did you see this? Did you see that? One story after another whilst we made our way home.
In my darkest days of loneliness, that’s what kept me going, rallies, gigs, bank holiday weekends and street brawls. The adrenaline, the violence, the unbridled anger, the coming together of people just like me, the anarchy and the people who didn’t give a toss about rules. These were my kind of people and they knew how to have a good time. They were my friends and made me feel important.
I knew it wasn’t good for me, but it was all I had and all I wanted.
Chapter 25
It was almost 4:00 am by the time we got back to Harry’s place. There were about ten of us who were intending to crash there. His parents were away for the weekend.
Slumping down on the sofa, I watched as the drinks were getting poured and pills shared around. We were going to watch a movie called Clockwork Orange. I don’t honestly remember much at all because I was totally shattered. Drugs and booze took me down and I was soon out cold.
When I woke up, I was half dressed and, as usual, totally clueless as to why, or even if anything had happened. All I knew was I had tattoos that weren’t there when I was compus mentus the day before. Someone must have thought it would be highly hilarious to tattoo “Mod” on the top of my arm. I had love heart tattoos on my pelvic bones, so someone had been in places they shouldn’t. I must have really been out, I thought. How could I get tattoos without knowing it?
Lilly woke up in pretty much the same predicament. Someone had tattooed “CND” and “Y” on her forearm. It took her a minute to realise what had happened, then she quite literally went berserk.
“Oh my god! No! Oh my god! Who did this?” she shouted, scrubbing at her arm. It had the effect of waking the lads. They all had the look of, What the fuck? I could see them feeling their bruises from the night before. Lilly’s tantrum was not particularly welcome on top of throbbing hangovers.
“You lot are fucking wankers!” I snarled at Kev. We had been starting to have a bit of a fling but this blew his chances as far as I was concerned.
“I didn’t do anything,” he pleaded grabbing for me as I stormed into the kitchen looking for my bag.
“Just fuck off and leave me alone!” I shrugged him off. I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
Lilly and I grabbed our stuff and walked out of the house, followed by jeers from the lads about nice tits and ass. Kev was pleading with them to give it a break, but the boys were still far too high on drugs to listen. We stopped by the tattoo shop on the seafront but they were closed. It must have been far too early. We noted the opening times and arranged to go back to see if they could get rid of the tattoos before Lilly’s parents noticed.
Lilly came back to my digs and we sat in my room trying to think of what she could say to her parents if they saw her arm. She was terrified of their reaction.
“Just wear long sleeve tops until we can get it sorted,” I counselled. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. She started getting herself into a right state thinking what else might have happened.
“What if they raped us?�
�� she said.
“What if they did?” I was very blasé about it really. “There’s nothing we can do about it if they did.”
“We could report it to the police,” she said in between sobs.
“Sure. And what will they do clever clogs? Apart from discover we took drugs and tell your parents that is! Tell you what? You do what you like. As far as I’m concerned it’s forgotten. It’s not like it was planned. It was just a bunch of stoned and drugged up teenagers doing whatever. For all you know we asked them to.”
“Oh fuck, I hope we’re not pregnant,” was all she could say.
“Me too.” Yikes! I hadn’t even considered that!
The guy in the tattoo shop said we would have to wait for them to heal and then we could get them tattooed over the top. “I can’t do anything else, no one can.”
“Brilliant! Just brilliant!” Lilly threw her hands up in the air exasperated as she stormed out of the shop.
“Calm down,” I said.
“Now what? Long sleeves forever?”
“Just get it over with,” I said. “Tell your parents now before all the scooter rallies start. That way if you get grounded, you’ll be off grounding when you need to be.” I was trying to make her feel better, but I don’t think it worked really.
She was grounded for a month.
I hated it. Lilly and I did everything together and it felt like one of my arms was missing. I had purposely avoided the lads since that night. As far as I was concerned there wasn’t anything I could do about what they had done. But I knew I couldn’t trust them not to do the same again. We needed new friends and quick. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get to the rallies and gigs without transport.
I rang around a few friends and started going out with a different gang of mods from Canterbury. They all knew me anyway, so it wasn’t hard to be accepted as one of them. There weren’t many girls in their crew either, so it was pretty novel for them to have a girl around. “J” was sort of the leader of that gang. He decided when and where and he became my next boyfriend. His scooter was pretty flashy. He had the Clockwork Orange spray painted on the side panels. It looked very tasty, and I loved riding pillion because everyone cooed over the paint job.
The lads from Margate kept pestering me all the time though. Kev kept calling round for me, or sitting outside my window on his scooter beeping and trying to get me to go out. But I couldn’t be bothered with any of them anymore.
A knock on my door brought me back to reality. Evie came in and sat down.
“I thought I had better check that you’re alive. Haven’t seen you for ages.”
“Oh? I’m okay.”
She went on to tell me that Albert had visited on a few occasions but I was never in. He left his number and said if I needed anything to call. I never saw Albert again. To be honest I wondered what happened. He dropped me off four months ago and I hadn’t seen him once. So much for caring! I thought. Just another person to come in and go out of my life. He was so sweet, I thought he was different. But I realised it was just his job to care, and I was no more than paperwork.
I looked in my mini fridge and saw a few cartons of milk, all lumpy and sour. I had a pile of those small, individually wrapped parcels which were slices of bread that Evie had wrapped together and put outside my room. I don’t think I had eaten any of it since I had arrived. Evie explained that she still had a duty of care, because there was a Care Order and she was expected to provide minimal food items. So whether I ate it or not, it would be at my door every day I lived there.
She congratulated me on how well I had been getting on with the other house mates. Little did she know it was turning into a bit of a drugs den. Almost everyone there did drugs of some kind. The kitchen had become a place for the preparation of drugs, or for making special meals or tea out of Magic Mushrooms or whatever new thing we could find that gave us a buzz. It was our way of dealing with things. We didn’t give any consideration to what it might be doing to our health, or if there were long term effects. Well you don’t think when you’re 15, do you? I did worry once though, when I had been asleep for over three days solid and no one noticed. I could have been dead for all anyone knew.
Chapter 26
The loud knock on my door got my attention. No one ever knocked on my door, especially Evie.
“Mail,” she called out.
“Wow! Now that is novel,” I said taking the small blue envelope and closing the door. “Thank you.”
The letter was marked with a stamp saying it had been opened and checked. That aroused my interest straight away. Well, you don’t see letters stamped that way very often, I thought. It was from Dave. He had been detained in a military prison. I had to read it twice for it to sink in. Why on Earth would he be in prison?
The letter went on to explain that he had smoked some weed on the night we were supposed to meet in Leicester, and how he was sorry. Blah, fucking Blah. He said nothing actually happened with the girls, they were just friends. Sure, does he think I’m stupid? Because he rarely did dope, he said it totally blew his mind. He had been AWOL--absent without leave--in order to meet me.
By all accounts the police had recorded the phone number I had on me and figured out I had written down his friend’s number and traced Dave there. I had a rush of guilt. I never thought for one moment he would have gone AWOL to be with me. The guilt didn’t last long though. Well! Serves him right for not turning up to meet me when he should. If he had met me as arranged, he wouldn’t have got caught, would he? We could have been happily living together now, away from all the crap, if he had just kept his side of the bargain.
The letter went on to say he had spent ages trying to get hold of me and that he had finally managed to get in touch with Albert. Albert wrote back to him and gave him my address. The letter was full of mushy stuff, but I had moved on and it had been almost six months since that fateful night in Leicester. Does he really think that I’d still be waiting? I didn’t even reply. What was there to say?
When I came back after going out for a walk up the beach, there was a letter under my door. It was from Lilly. She had rang Evie and asked her to tell me that she was finally free from her grounding, so I got busy planning our next weekend away. The Canterbury lads were all looking forward to meeting Lilly, they had heard so much about her. She must be nice, she was my friend after all.
We were on our way to the local youth club, coke and crisps were cheap and it was somewhere to hang out. The roads were a bit icy but that never stopped us going anywhere. I was riding pillion to J and we were coming up to a sharp bend in the road. The next thing I knew I was being dragged along the ground on my back by the scooter. I didn’t feel any pain, but I remembered grabbing air and trying to reach for something, anything. The road beneath me and my trapped leg were going so fast, I was unable stop myself. But before I knew it, the scooter stopped sliding on the grass bank at the side of the road. Amazing how despite the speed it felt like everything was in slow motion!
I remained trapped under the scooter and in some pain. It took a while for me to realise what happened. My mouth must have come in contact with the road at some point because my two front teeth were broken in half. I asked someone, “Where are my teeth?” I also remembered J standing there with his hands on his head aghast, mumbling something about no insurance. “Look at the state of my scooter,” he cried.
Never fuckin’ mind the state of your scooter. What about me?
Some strangers tried to pull the scooter off my leg. I was shouting to make them hurry. It really wasn’t helping, but I was in a bit of a panic. I let out a scream as the scooter was lifted, my leg still attached. One of the mirror rods had gone all the way through my knee. I took one look and passed out!
The Ambulance driver was beside me when I came around, telling me to breathe through the mask. I don’t know how they got the rod out of my leg, but by the time I arrived at the hospital most of it was gone. I thought, Where the hell is J? I remembered Lilly calling
my name and sitting in the ambulance, then I saw Lilly’s parents at the hospital. I could hear them outside my room telling Evie I could stay with them until I got better, asking, “Where is her family?” I made a mental note to ring Alex and say hello. It must have been a year since I had spoken to him, and that was like trying to pull teeth.
I was discharged from hospital the next day following observations and after they removed a piece of rod out of my knee. X-rays revealed a small piece remained in my leg so I was given a local anaesthetic into my knee and they dug in there and pulled it out. I didn’t feel much. After the doctor checked me over again, I was taken to Lilly’s house.
Lilly’s parents were lovely. They were always kind to me, but secretly I suspected they hated the influence I had over their daughter. They had me to stay for almost two weeks until I was able to get around and look after myself. After that, they dropped me off at my little pad. Lilly’s mum had done a bit of shopping for me, so I didn’t have to worry about food for a while.
Evie’s persistent knocking on the door woke me from my nap. The pain killers were nice as they made me feel very calm and I slept a lot.
“There’s a guy keeps riding his scooter up and down up front,” she said. “I’m guessing it’s for you as he is wearing one of those parka things.”
I stood and looked out of the window but whoever it was had gone. There was no one there I knew. Evie left me to it and I started to doze. I soon heard the beeping sound of a scooter’s horn. It pains me to say so, but it sounded like a child’s bike. I stood up again to look out of the window. It took me a second to register that the face looking up at me was in fact, Dave. Dave? Dave! Panic rushed through me from head to toe.
“Oh shit!” I shouted, running around, doing my hair and putting on makeup. What am I doing? I thought. I hobbled downstairs.
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