We drove all the way to Hastings and stopped at a nice pub-hotel. Viola called home and told her parents that we were going to stay the night and asked me if I wanted to call mine. She was very impressed when I told her no, I didn’t need to check in with Mum and Dad, I was my own man after all (quietly thanking Albert for covering for me). I had forty quid saved from work and with Albert’s sixty it was a hundred pounds well spent as we ate together and went to bed together. It was, of course, fantastically short-lived, but as teenagers we had another go and in the end spent most of the night at it.
The next morning we got up very late and had a lovely pub lunch. It was gloriously relaxed and I had a couple of beers but Viola, who was on cloud nine, must have drunk most of a bottle of wine. We decided to head home and got back in the car. Stevie Wonder was blaring out of the speakers with the windows down, as we headed back up the motorway, stealing glances and letting our hands play over each other’s whenever I changed gear. After about half an hour, Viola began to look uncomfortable in her seat. I closed the window and asked her if she was cold. She said she was fine, but soon began shuffling around. I asked her what was wrong and she said that she’d maybe had too much to drink and she was desperate for the loo.
We’ve all been there and so I did the honourable thing. I said that I’d try to pull over so that she could take a wee. She was embarrassed, but obviously extremely relieved when I pulled off onto a slip road. She gratefully got out of the car, thanking me profusely and made her way over to the verge. The grass verge had a sheer drop behind her and was very breezy, so I offered to shield her from the wind and the passing traffic, but she said no and that she was quite all right to go it alone.
It was quite precarious because she had to balance her body in a crouched position with her whole centre of gravity concentrated in one place. I too know that feeling because years later I travelled to India, a country which invented that devil’s contraption called a squat toilet. I was using one of these squat toilets on a bumpy train and let me tell you I almost fell into the hole. But at the time I knew nothing of these things.
She asked me not to look, but it was hard not to as she squatted at the top of the verge. I will never forget the look of pure bliss on her face as she began to wee. Because it was the last thing I saw before her legs went flying up from underneath her as she tumbled backwards down the grass verge. Although I was madly in love with Viola it was still the funniest sight I had ever seen. She looked like a urinary Catherine wheel as she fell head under heels down what must have been an eight-foot embankment. I went running as fast as I could to the verge to make sure she was all right and there she was at the bottom in a heap. I couldn’t keep the tears of laughter back as she slowly crawled up the bank. I helped her up the last few feet and she looked a right state. She had twigs and leaves in her hair like a wild bush woman and her face was smeared with mud.
She sat in silence for the rest of the journey home, looking more and more dejected. The more I tried to control my laughter, the worse my giggles got and before long she had started to cry with embarrassment. I felt terrible for her, but her tears only made the whole thing seem funnier to me. By the time we got back to South London she’d stopped crying, but when I pulled into her street and stopped the car she ran inside without saying another word to me. I called her later and asked her if she’d come and meet me in the park, but she said I was an insensitive bastard and that she never wanted to see me again.
That night I went over to Albert’s flat to return his car and he asked me how it had gone. I told him that it was all over between me and Viola. I told him about the urinary Catherine wheel and he laughed his head off with me about it, which cheered me up. He told me, ‘You need to find a girl with a good sense of humour. If you can’t be yourself you’ll never find the one. Stephen, let me give you some advice: love is like a lost fart. If you have to force it; it’s probably shit.’
I’d lost my virginity and broken up with the love of my life in less than forty-eight hours but still, I thought to myself, it had been a pretty good weekend all told. I’ve never had another like it. To this day, I think that Viola overreacted. I thought she was being really harsh on me as, after all, I’d run to help her up. I couldn’t help it if I found the whole thing amusing. Anyone would. I called her one more time that week, but she said that I shouldn’t call her house any more. She swore me to secrecy over the whole urinary Catherine wheel incident, but then while we were having sex that night in Hastings she’d sworn that we’d be together for ever. So, Viola Kovach of Tooting High Street, here’s to you.
13
A TAXI DRIVER ASKED me the other day, ‘Here. If your parents are Nigerian and you grew up in South London, how comes you talk so posh then?’
I just said, ‘Call me Miss Daisy and drive on!’
Another one of these national treasures said to me, ‘What did you do before you did comedy then?’
I said, ‘I studied law.’
‘Do you think you’d ever go back to it?’
‘Why would I?’
‘Because then you could help your people. A lot of the young black men get in trouble with the law.’
‘Lots of young black men like comedy as well,’ I replied
But it does make you wonder about how differently things can turn out. When I was finishing school, I really did want to be a lawyer more than anything else, and how do I know if I wouldn’t have been happier doing that? Sometimes I think it would be cool if there was some way to see how your life could have turned out if you’d just made a couple of decisions differently. Well, now you can: there’s a computer game that people are playing online at the moment called ‘Second Life’ and I met this woman that said you could live a whole new life in-game these days. She said that you can choose what you look like, what job you do, buy a house anywhere in the world, have pets, fight – you can even go dancing in clubs. I read about a couple who got married on ‘Second Life’ and divorced without ever actually meeting. To me this seems like a world gone mad. I wonder if they ever electronically hooked up? It sounds risky to me. I wouldn’t want to trust my bits to any kind of sexual computer plug-in because what if it developed a fault? For instance, I’ve got a printer attached to my computer at home and paper is always getting jammed inside. When that happens I either have to yank the paper out with surprising force or call in a computer repairman. I don’t fancy doing that with my tool stuck in the spool.
Games have moved on since I was a kid but I’ve always loved them for the escapism they provide. I was around a bit before Nintendo and the Mega Drive, but what I did have was my Atari 2600 battery-powered breeze-block gaming system. It was loaded with three games and had a joystick as big as a baby’s forearm. It didn’t have good graphics; it wasn’t in colour; and each set of massive square batteries only lasted about half an hour. In fact, my sister’s Spirograph was probably more technologically advanced. I’d got it for my sixteenth birthday and my favourite game was ‘Space War!’ and I was still hooked two years later. No, I’m not a slow learner! I’m sure games were more difficult back then. I tried playing my nephew’s PlayStation 3 game ‘Little Big Planet’ last year where you play a little ball of wool jumping about the place. Where’s the jeopardy? Where are the spaceships? I ask you!
In ‘Space War!’ You played a giant flying dinosaur, who went about swallowing spaceships. It was excellent and came second place only to ‘Donkey Kong’, which was loaded onto the family computer upstairs. Naturally, we weren’t allowed to use the family computer unless it was for educational purposes: homework only. I played it all the time though. The secret was not to get caught out – although I was often sprung by Mum.
‘What are you doing?’ she would bellow. I would jump.
‘Is it a toy?’ Silence.
‘Who allowed you to switch it on?’ I was trying to think of a good answer.
‘Hmmm?’ I was paralysed with fear.
‘Am I talking to myself like a mad person?’
‘You, Mr stuff and nonsense, you want to break it?’
Come to think of it, I wonder why Dad had even loaded a game onto the main computer at all? It was like he just wanted to taunt us with something in the house that was designed for fun but that we couldn’t use. Well, that was my dad for you. This was the same man who kept the biscuits in a locked cupboard in the kitchen and if we begged him for a Rich Tea he’d maybe let us have one while shouting, ‘Just take one! There are twelve in there and I’ll know if you have more!’
I remember playing ‘Space War!’ during the summer just after I had finished my final A levels. I was in that weird time between your first life of education, school uniforms and sports days and the second life you’d have as a young man somewhere in the murky future. The coming A-level grades would decide what kind of life that would be. Maybe university, maybe that job at McDonald’s where I’d be set up for life with a possible management training course leading to those five stars on my lapel? The future seemed full of possibilities.
Nobody knew what was going to happen and it was really pissing off my mum. Normally in the summer holidays, I’d have been off trying to get a job at the insistence of my parents. But this time around was different. There was no good pestering me to get my part-time job at Olympus Sports back if a full-time job at the council was what was needed. Likewise, why waste time applying for full-time positions if university was a possibility? All we could do was wait and see if I’d got the magical As or the dreaded Us. For maybe the first time in my teenage years, Mum couldn’t tell me what to do, so playing computer games seemed like the perfect distraction. Plus I knew it really got under her skin. So I loved it even more.
I remember one morning I was happily playing away on my Atari when I was defeated by the lack of power, and not in the superhero sense. My hand-held gaming device screen began flickering, making it increasingly difficult to eat the spaceships and take me on to the next level. A level I was desperate to achieve. I sighed: a noise I knew so well and that I had been making repeatedly since completing my final exam. It’s the noise you make when you are resigned to the fact that there is nothing more you can do.
Lost in my own imagination, a little computer-gaming scene was played out. There was I, dressed in a gleaming white, pristine starched lab coat, safety goggles on my forehead, with a serious look upon my face. I purposely entered a futuristic science laboratory, clipboard in hand, pen protruding from between my clenched teeth. Sprawled on the operating table in my imaginary lab, was an exact replica of the massive creature I had used to devastatingly devour all the spaceships in my favourite game. A full-size spaceship-eating dinosaur lolled over the table, but I had no sense of fear. As I approached the desk, the creature looked up at me with despair in its huge reptilian eyes. I instinctively shook my head.
‘Nooooooo,’ it cried. Actually, it was more of a Kenneth Williams’ wail, which took me back. That was definitely not the sound I imagined this creature would ever make. A single tear fell down its … face, I guess. With hand outstretched, I rested my palm on his shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can do.’ We both lowered our heads. Game over. Who says computer games dull the imagination?
Checking in the drawer, I saw that I’d run out of the bumper pack of batteries that Dad had bought me as a congratulations for finishing my exams. Duracell? No! Dur-a-sell me, a cheap knock-off battery pack from the market. Thanks, Dad! The famous Duracell bunny jingle played in my head, ‘They go on … and on … aaaand stop working.’ So I decided to push my luck, take my life into my own hands, and try to tiptoe upstairs and turn on our family computer.
This was the last house I ever lived in with my parents. It was our big place in Balham near the Tube station, next door to Fola. Having chased the old couple downstairs out, we now had the run of the whole place – it had three floors, four bedrooms and two reception rooms. Plenty of places to hide, you might think, but you’d be wrong. The house was Mum’s undisputed territory. The kids were grudgingly tolerated at best so long as we didn’t get in her way. Privacy was an English word that got lost in translation for my parents. ‘Privacy! What is that? You want privacy? Buy your own house!’
We had one phone and it took pride of place in the hallway. And, aged eighteen, I still couldn’t even use it without being listened to disapprovingly. On the rare occasion when someone phoned me, I would have to be very quick. ‘Uh, hi! I can’t talk for long … because Dad is staring at me!’ He didn’t understand that if they call you then they are the ones who pay for the call. Well, he did understand that but was just generally distrustful of the kids touching anything that could potentially cost him money.
Once my sister Cordelia made the grave error of actually dialling a number (maybe to see if the phone worked) and the next day Dad installed a lock on the dial. However the Amos kids were pretty smart and those of you old enough to remember the old rotary dialling phones will recall that you could dial a number by tapping the tone dialler up and down really quickly. So if you wanted to dial a nine you’d tap it up and down nine times and then give it a second before starting in on tapping out the second digit. At the end of the month Dad got the bill and he was like ‘Ay! Ay! Who’s been using the phone?’
‘We don’t know! You installed the lock remember?’ the kids would reply smugly and Dad would look at his wife with a weary eye and mutter to himself. Amos phone hackers!
When Dad was out at work, which was pretty much all the time, Mum would patrol the house like a brave lioness patrolling the Serengeti, sniffing the air and cocking her ears to make sure there was no one up to any ‘nonsense’ in the house, as she put it. You had to keep your ears open in case the lioness was on the prowl. The way Mum could creep, stalk and then pounce on the unsuspecting young gazelle was like something out of a David Attenborough wildlife documentary. I used to think she had padded feet because you could never hear her coming.
That was odd because even though we had carpets, the stairs did creak. And not a gentle subtle creak, no. We lived in a horrendous Hammer house of horrors and the creaking was so loud that you could hear it not only from outside, but across the road too. Why the neighbours hadn’t complained to the council remains a mystery to me. Maybe there had been complaints that I didn’t know about. Councillors were probably used to getting calls saying, ‘That house party over there is too loud! Turn it down!’ but maybe ‘That house over there is too loud. Knock it down!’ would just generate confusion. I used to think the house was haunted and I remember lying awake at night, terrified of the dark, with all the sounds of the house giving me nightmares. I asked if I could have a night-light.
‘No. Who is paying for the electricity? When you get a job you can have a night-light.’
I couldn’t fart in that house without the whole place vibrating like the inside of a guitar echo chamber. If I was returning very late from a night out I had to tiptoe backwards up the stairs so that if I was caught I’d say I was simply going to check that the front door was locked. In all my flash gear.
Now I have big feet and I’m a big man and so tiptoeing isn’t even that easy a task for me, but I was feeling bold that day. I didn’t think twice about the consequences. There was nobody upstairs. What’s the worst that could happen? No sooner had I pushed the floppy disk in with my finger than I heard a voice. That voice. A voice I’ve heard call out my name in the exact same disappointed and angry tone for eighteen years. Shit! Caught red-handed. My only chance was that technology wasn’t fast in those days. I had about six minutes until the game loaded.
‘Stephen! What are you doing up there? … Well?’
I struggled to find the right words, but still nothing came out. As I slowly turned around, there she was in all her raging glory.
‘I was gonna work on my CV!’ Bloody hell! Where did that come from? That’s one to go in the Rolodex of swift comebacks for use at another time.
There was definitely a shift of gear. Mum’s face softe
ned.
“Your CV? Well, I don’t think you’ll be needing that. Not just yet at least.’
Mum came and sat next to me. Just to the side of the computer and a bit too close for comfort. I tried to angle my wiry teenage body, both to hide the screen and position myself into something resembling the sprinter’s starter position (in case I had to make a quick getaway). Any minute now, the screen is going to come to life with DISC READY, revealing the logo of the jungle monkey game.
‘What do you mean, Mum?’ I asked.
‘You have a letter,’ she replied with a broad grin. Sure enough in her hand she had a letter. ‘Here.’ She passed it to me. ‘Open it.’
I looked at the front of the envelope; although it was definitely addressed to me, it was already open. I took pleasure in knowing that all my personal mail was in fact delivered to my mate’s house down the road. I bit my tongue, but I wanted to shout at her, ‘Ha! I win in the end, sucker!’
To keep the peace, as usual, I removed the letter, making no mention of the fact that my privacy had once again been violated. Mum looked eager: clearly it must be something good.
It was from Westminster Polytechnic. I read it.
‘Read it out loud, I want to hear,’ Mum said. Again, I bit my tongue and did as she requested.
‘“In light of your excellent interview, we are pleased to offer you a place on the criminal justice law degree upon you achieving two Cs and one D grade.’
I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Page 13
