Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  ‘Shit!’ said Neil, who swore very rarely. ‘That was one of my mum’s favourites!’

  Me and Ben laughed, probably more than we really felt like. But Thomas and Jase weren’t even thinking about the plate.

  ‘That. Was. Fucking. Unbelievable,’ said Jase.

  Thomas just smiled a little smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We can use that.’

  ‘Um, would it be possible to turn it down just a bit?’ I said, wanting to say so much more.

  ‘Yeah, s’pose,’ said Thomas.

  And so, from that moment on, Neil didn’t just sing, he also made weird noises on the keyboard all over the songs. And not just rumbles and zooms, as he managed to work out a sound that you could play proper notes with as well. Like his singing, his keyboard playing kind of sat on top of everything else, fitting in some of the time, but not really that much. At first he almost had to lie down to do it, and because he was still holding a microphone, he caused a whole load of wailing feedback every time he faced the wrong way. He didn’t care, he liked it, said it was incorporating random elements or something, but even Thomas and Jase made him cut that out. So he saved up his meagre pocket money and bought a keyboard stand after a few weeks, which was the first financial investment Neil had made in the band. Pretty small, considering the amount of equipment the rest of us had bought, or at least got our parents to buy for us. But Neil wouldn’t do a paper round because he wanted to concentrate on his schoolwork, and his mum was poor. She was still a dinner lady at the primary school and just did cleaning jobs on top of that. God knows how she ever ended up with that house. Divorce settlement maybe.

  Anyway, the keyboard wasn’t the only change that happened around then. It was just after the New Year that Thomas started going out with Jenny from the youth club. Christ, that was the love affair of the century, that was. She’d been going there since November, and for ages Thomas kept going on about how unattractive or ‘scrunty’ she was, then suddenly that first week after the Christmas holidays they were getting off with each other in the alleyway.

  Jenny, now she was a funny girl. Well, when I say funny I don’t mean she’d make you laugh or anything like that. Just that, well, she was a bit of a nightmare actually, not funny at all, in fact. Really, she was the devil. I think she might have been a psychopath. I’ve been trying hard to represent people fairly, to at least try to understand things from their perspective, but with Jenny I can’t. I really don’t have any memories of her that portray her in a good light. However hard I try, I can’t find any motivation for the things she’d go on to do other than pure evil.

  Still, she was attractive, sort of. Well, she acted like she thought she was attractive, anyway, and that’s half the battle, I suppose. She had long straight dark hair, and glasses. But good designer frames, not NHS ones. Her family were quite well off, so she could afford them. And dark hair on her arms too. She didn’t really go for the metal or grunge look, which made the fact that Thomas ended up with her quite surprising. But then, he was best mates with Jase. That tells you something. Jenny wore good clothes, I guess, quite expensive-looking. Not really your usual Quireley gear. Too upmarket, too chic, like what trendy people would wear in London. I particularly remember a pair of stripy trousers, for some reason. Almost a sixties retro look, like all that stuff that Neil obsessed over.

  Christ, I hated Jenny. The way she used to swan about that youth club as if she owned it, practically from the first week she went there, taking massive strides in her stripy trousers as if she was marking out her territory. And the way she’d talk to you: being super-polite, with impeccable diction, and the odd clumsy attempt at a lower-class accent thrown in, but all the time making it perfectly clear that you were beneath her, like everyone was. She even talked down to Thomas. Occasionally he’d call her a stupid cow or something, then she’d stomp off very deliberately, and he’d have to go and apologise like a good boy. He’d make up for it a little bit, slagging her off behind her back. But mostly he just took it without question. Looking back, it’s hard to fathom why he ever went out with her, but at the time we never questioned it, I guess because Thomas dictated our whole concept of what was normal. Still, they were the same in certain ways. They both managed to control large groups of kids, Thomas with his gang, and Jenny with her little twitty friends swarming around her all the time. Maybe she was all Thomas thought he deserved. A female, nastier version of himself.

  It was heartbreaking really, to see him reduced to this. It wasn’t as if he was doing it just to get a shag, because Thomas could have got one practically anywhere by now, including half the boys, I expect. No, he really seemed to care for her, for some reason. And not only that, after they’d been going out for a couple of months, word got out that she wasn’t going to be letting him into her knickers any time soon. Not even a handjob. She was nowhere near ready, it was said she had said. But, and this was the deal, if their relationship matured and developed and blossomed, maybe, just maybe, she might be ready by the summer. Or possibly early autumn.

  As for Neil, she really didn’t like him. In fact, she was the first person at the youth club not to get on with him at all. Strange, because I think they were interested in some of the same things. But she looked down her nose at him, and encouraged all her girlfriends to do the same. She’d talk to him as if he was a child, patronising and cruel, and of course her twitty friends would copy her, and soon they were all doing it, every week. It got pretty fucking tiresome. I mean, she’d say things to him like, and this was in front of everybody, mind, ‘Neil, you know that you can get brushes for clothes. You could get all that dog hair off your trousers. Then you’d look less scruffy, then maybe you could get a girlfriend. But aren’t you gay? I heard that you were.’ And Neil would just stand there like he didn’t mind. But, Jesus, I wished he’d stand up to her and tell the stupid witch to fuck off. Mind you, no one else did either. If only we had, we’d have saved us a whole load of hassle over the years. But then I suppose at the time loads of other people were actually taking Neil deadly seriously, including Thomas. Maybe he just didn’t think he needed to care what Jenny said or thought.

  We all hated Jenny really. But the thing was, none of us had the mental discipline to work out why. It was just vague, unfocused bad feeling. And maybe that’s why she had to put Neil down so much. She knew he was the one person clever enough to see through her, cut through her bullshit. What she didn’t know was that even if he did, he’d never say anything to anyone about it. That’s where Neil’s troubles really started, I think, with Jenny. Perhaps, if she’d never entered the picture, maybe it would have all been different. Maybe he’d have ended up normal and happy, with a girlfriend and a job and money and stuff. Maybe he’d have been OK. Maybe.

  17

  Neil on work experience. That’s a story in itself.

  It began when we went back to school after the Christmas holidays and we all had to choose where we wanted to do our placement. Everybody was made to do it, something we had to go through before we took our exams and were thrown into the big bad real world. I suppose it was meant to prepare us for that. A lifetime of paid employment and drudgery. There was a list. On it were loads of local employers who would take kids on for two weeks. Sholeham wasn’t exactly a manufacturing hotspot, so most of them were banks and building societies, or high-street shops or tea shops in Quireley, that sort of thing. I think my first choice was a bicycle-repair shop, for some reason, and my other one was the post office. It wasn’t cool to put too much thought into it, especially in Thomas’s gang, and even more especially in the band. Because, if we were really all just going to get proper jobs, what were we doing in the band? It was never said, but the band was going to be our life. Any daydreaming out loud was stamped on by Thomas, who was having none of it. I suppose he was thinking that if we failed, someone somewhere would remember us saying we were going to be successful, and laugh at us, or more specifically at him. But we were all doing it, in our heads, never quite able to share it wit
h the others, but each of us knowing that we all felt the same way. Even Neil did, I think. You could never be totally sure what was going on with him, but I just know he was somehow. Meanwhile, outside Thomas’s circle in the normal world of school, with its basketball and football and lessons and tutor groups, the kids who got too excited about their placements were still seen as being square. But some kids didn’t even bother turning up for their placements at all, and nobody thought that was cool either. As usual, the middle ground was the safest place to be.

  We all had to hand in the pieces of paper with our choices during our tutor group time. Neil was in the same one as me that year, and while we were waiting for the teacher to pick them off our desks, I mumbled to him, careful not to sound too interested, ‘What did you put, then?’

  ‘Oh, I put down Alliance and Leicester and Midland Bank,’ he said.

  Now, you don’t need me to tell you these weren’t right for Neil. Not only were there placements available in the art gallery and the local bookshops, but he’d all but declared war on what he called the dictatorship of commerce and finance several years previously. At the time I had just tuned it all out, like most of his usual bollocks.

  ‘Why the hell d’you choose those for?’ I scowled.

  ‘Because I’m interested in those environments,’ he said. ‘I want to see how people act in them, and what they do to people psychologically. Also, they are prime targets for subversion.’

  Naturally it didn’t make any sense to me, and I thought it was obvious what working for an insurance company did to people, because that’s what my dad did, so I just said he was making a mistake and left it at that. But it wasn’t only me who thought it was strange. Even the tutor called him up on it. I remember him telling him to come to his desk, and murmuring something like, ‘Do you really think this is what you’re suited for? Wouldn’t you get a bit bored?’

  And Neil just said, ‘No, I’m sure. This is what I want to do.’ Then the teacher gave him a quizzical look, as if to say he knew that he was up to something weird, and if he knew what, he’d stop him, then let him sit down again.

  Anyway, I didn’t get my first choice of the bicycle-repair shop and had to spend a wretched fortnight in the tiny post office in Quireley High Street with some old biddy, hardly being allowed to do anything because if I screwed up the mail there’d be hell to pay. So I mostly monitored the stock of wrapping paper and worked the till if someone only wanted to buy a pencil. But Neil got his first choice, the regional office of the Alliance and Leicester building society.

  To start with, everything seemed to be going well. In the first week of his two-week placement, Neil was apparently polite, well presented in a shirt and tie that his mum hadn’t bought in Oxfam for once, and very eager to get on with any job they gave him. They started him out on the filing, but he made sense of their system so quickly that he was finishing it with hours to spare. Even the people paid to work there couldn’t get it done as fast. And he was deadly accurate too. Not a file, letter or folder out of place. So after a few days, they moved him over to some basic data entry. Nothing important, just change of address and details stuff. Again, he got the hang of it nearly straight away, and it turned out he’d taught himself to touch-type and everything, something they were reluctant to teach us at our boys’ school, presumably because it was such a feminine skill they were worried that it would turn us all gay. Anyway, by the end of the week, Neil was getting through whatever they threw at him in record time, to the point that his supervisor, a middle-aged man who was like everybody’s dad in Quireley, ended up telling him he could work slower if he wanted.

  At the band practice that Saturday, we were discussing how things were going with our various placements. Jase was in a car dealers somewhere, making the tea while observing the salesmen’s techniques. He was enjoying that, pretty much. Thomas was in a bakery, his fuzzy ginger hair kept under wraps by a dinky white hat. Ben was meant to be working with Ken on some building site, but he called in sick on his second day and hadn’t been back since. We decided that this was fucking useless, especially seeing as it was his own brother who got him the placement, and we all called him a twat. Well, Neil didn’t, obviously.

  ‘How’s yours going, Neil?’ asked Jase.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ he replied. ‘But it won’t be for long.’

  ‘Why’s that then?’ said Thomas.

  ‘There’s no room for creativity. It’s dehumanising. It turns people into machines, essentially at one with the machines they use. At best, that makes them cyborgs. So the system must be exposed for the lie that it is through an act of play. I shall instigate a situation.’

  It all went way over everybody’s heads, naturally, but by this time everybody was used to that, and Neil was still in Thomas’s good books back then. It went unchallenged.

  Back at work on Monday, Neil began putting his strange little plan into action. This is how he did it. You see, he was entering onto the computer information regarding change of address, phone number or surname and things like that, either official forms picked up and filled in from Alliance and Leicester branches, or just hand-written or typed letters. Once he’d keyed in all the information from a batch of forms or letters, he’d take the originals and file them away. Now, remember, he was working faster than anybody else, and he’d proved himself so good at this stuff that no one was really watching him any more, even though they should have been under the terms of the agreement with the school. So, Neil had all this information to enter, and as far as anybody else was concerned, he was doing a fantastic job.

  Then it was Neil’s last day. He’d made a great impression. Everybody was pleased with him because not only had he done a good job, he hadn’t been any trouble or really taken up anybody’s time. In gratitude, his supervisor and a few of the office girls who thought he was cute had clubbed together to get him a book token. They all shook his hand, and some of the girls were giving him little hugs and peeks on the cheek. And he was five minutes from getting out of the door when some young oik with bog-brush hair piped up, ‘Neil, can you explain this, please?’

  The bog-brush guy had a bunch of letters. These had been printed off automatically by the computer, as they were at the end of every week, thanking people for informing Alliance and Leicester of the change of details. They were, of course, addressed to the new residence that the customers had supplied details of. Only, this time they weren’t. In fact, where their address should have been, it read, simply, ‘Underneath the paving stones …’

  There were loads of them. Bags and bags of them, ready for the post room to send out. They looked on the computer. Every single address that Neil had entered that week said the same thing: ‘Underneath the paving stones …’

  ‘What have you done, Neil?’ said his supervisor calmly.

  ‘Oh no, oh no,’ the girls said behind him, their fingers by their mouths.

  Neil said nothing.

  The supervisor shook his head. ‘The only way we can sort this out is by looking in the files of all these customers for the hard copy,’ he sighed. ‘My, you’re a bit of a one, aren’t you, Neil?’

  The bog-brush looked at Neil as if he was some shit he had to clean up. ‘Better check ’em,’ he said. ‘Make sure he hasn’t pulled any more funny business there.’

  ‘Come along, Neil,’ said the supervisor, and he, Neil and the bog-brush marched over to the filing cabinets that lined one wall of the open-plan office.

  The supervisor found the file that matched one of the envelopes in his hand. There, on the top, exactly where it should be, was the original notification of change of address. But the new address wasn’t there. It had been deftly blocked out in thick black felt pen. Written at the side of this black block, very neatly and elegantly, were the words, ‘…the beach.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said the supervisor. ‘Oh Christ almighty …’

  18

  Neil was in deep shit. This wasn’t just him being a bit weird, which had been grumpily tole
rated by the school up until now. Even that time he brought a knife into school, he got away with it because it turned out his mum had given it to him to sharpen his pencil with. No, this was wilful destruction of the property of a company that had kindly accommodated one of their pupils for a work-experience placement. Which made it a community-relations issue for the school. OK, the Alliance and Leicester staff had been negligent by not bothering to supervise him properly, but still … They now had completely lost contact with hundreds, if not thousands, of their customers. There was talk of expulsion.

  It didn’t come to that, or even suspension. Once again, Neil’s saviour and number-one fan, Miss Millachip the lesbian art teacher, came to his rescue. She argued, loudly and deeply, with a slight smoker’s rasp, that although as a member of staff she could not of course condone the destruction of private property, as an educator she could not help but point out that Neil was merely working in the tradition of Situationism, another of those art movements which she used to justify any crazy shit that Neil chose to pull.

  At least that’s what I thought at the time. But I’ve actually looked into it just to see what it meant, and I’ve found that in fact she was right. That’s exactly what Neil was doing. Apparently, the Situationists were an art group back in the fifties and sixties who hardly made anything, because they didn’t believe in work, and wanted to play instead. They had a thing about the capitalist, consumerist society which they tried to bring down by doing crazy things like stealing toys from department stores while dressed as Father Christmas and giving them to children, or lopping off the head of that statue of the Little Mermaid in Denmark. Mostly they stole and vandalised things, by the look of it. Obviously it didn’t work, as the capitalist consumer society was still going strong the last time I looked, but the important thing is that they had something to do with the riots in Paris in the sixties. Now, during the riots they used to write graffiti on the walls, things like ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’, and, this is important, ‘Underneath the paving stones, the beach!’ And what that means, I think, is that if you rip up the pavements of the streets, which are rubbish because of all the capitalism, then life will be better, like a nice beach.