We tried, but our ears were still ringing from our own noise pollution.
‘I think the door bell’s ringing.’
It was. Neil clambered over furniture and amps to get to the hall to answer it.
‘It’s for you!’ he cried from the front door.
‘Which one?’ Thomas shouted back.
‘All of you, I think. It’s some … uh, girls – I mean women.’
We all made our way to the front door, Ben lagging at the back. Sure enough, there at the door were, I think, five or six girls. One of them was Jenny. One of them was Hannah, the others … I forget. Probably all called Louise, because nearly all of Jenny’s friends were, but it doesn’t matter. More girls than had ever been on Neil’s doorstep before, I’ll wager.
‘Hello,’ said Jenny. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but we were wondering if you’d let us hear you play? We promise we won’t be a nuisance.’
Neil just stood there looking perplexed, his brain trying to process the unique event of girls wanting to enter his house, and probably some obscure issue of artistic integrity thrown in. It looked pretty clear he wasn’t going to make a decision any time soon.
Thomas turned to the rest of us. ‘What do you reckon?’ he said. ‘Is that all right by you lot?’ Strange for him to be asking us. Maybe he was hoping one of us would say no. We didn’t, although I doubt any of us thought it was a good idea. But six teenage girls on a doorstep, you always say yes to that, don’t you? It’s something you can’t argue with. So in they came.
It was cramped enough in that front room already, but somehow they managed to make a little circle for themselves on the floor, between the amps and coats and leads. Their collective perfume mingled with and temporarily smothered the usual rehearsal stench of boy smell and dog. ‘Just carry on as if we weren’t here,’ said Jenny. Fat chance of that. Her and Thomas immediately launched into a mumbled conversation that lasted minutes while the rest of us fiddled about. You could tell he was uncomfortable from the way he shuffled about from foot to foot, as if he really wanted to leave. But Jenny had some power over him, which always made him stay in her presence until he was dismissed. Hannah just looked at me and smiled. All the other girls looked at Jase, pretty much, after glancing briefly at the crazy decor and deciding not to look at it any more because it was doing their heads in. Ben and Neil were probably invisible to them.
Even by our standards, the rehearsal had drawn to a complete standstill. Ben lost patience. ‘Are we going to play something or what?’ he snapped.
‘Yeah,’ sighed Thomas. ‘OK, “Town to Town”, again.’
He nodded at me to strike the opening chords. I did so, and he joined in with the bass on the third bar, Jase on the drums on the fifth. We had hit a groove, I suppose you’d call it, and the girls started nodding their heads, following the lead of Jenny. So far so good. Ben’s lead part came in, smooth, pretty much professional standard. They nodded their heads even more, which meant they were into it. And then Neil started singing. And they stopped. At least they stopped when they noticed that Jenny had stopped. She frowned. We were halfway through the song now. Neil’s keyboard solo, if you could call it that, was cutting through everything, a sonic tear through the sound. We were used to it by then. It was just what happened. Jenny shook her head. The other girls watched her. Hannah was alternating between smiling at me and watching Jenny.
The song ended. Amid the usual jamming and drum fills, even more frantic this time because we were so nervous, Jenny beckoned Thomas over and talked into his ear over the din. There was something the matter. An issue that needed to be addressed. An action that needed to be taken. Thomas said nothing, but had the look of someone who was only too aware he had sold his soul to the devil. And now I realise it was then, at that moment, when music lost its hold on me. I would still hear it, I would still enjoy it, I would enjoy making it, but never again would it transport me to that state of elation. Here is the moment I have been looking for. When the spell was broken. When I had to make my first grown-up decision and I chose to remain a child, the very choice ensuring that a child was something I could never be again. My innocence was lost. I knew that something bad was going to happen to someone I loved, and I did nothing to prevent it. Right then and there, when I betrayed Neil, somehow I betrayed music too. I no longer deserved to hear it. So it went away, leaving me to chase after it in vain, destroying all I touched as I went.
And with that little word in the ear came the end of not just mine but all our simultaneous, interconnected golden ages, though they would only reveal themselves as such much later. But there are still threads to be untangled, so I must continue, picking them apart, one by one.
20
And from that point on, nothing was quite the same. Jenny’s sniping at Neil entered a new phase, not just influencing her twitty friends, but trying to turn the otherwise iron will of Thomas Depper. She, and only she, had the power to do that, but the field of music was the one area in which he would take a stand against her. He said to her face that she had rubbish taste in music, and at first her impassioned opinion that the noise Neil made was, in fact, horrible seemed to fall on deaf ears. But, nevertheless, little by little, the trickle of bile that left her mouth could not help but make some impression. But I don’t want to talk about that yet. Because there’s something, one little thing actually, that happened after that practice which was beautiful, and which I’ll cherish for ever. Probably the last thing involving Neil that didn’t get corrupted and shit.
It was the May Day bank holiday. Same as every year, there was a funfair on the Fields. Jenny was going with all her little friends, including Hannah, of course. Boyfriends were obviously to be dragged along for multiple purposes – winning soft toys, holding on to on the scary rides, buying things with their hard-earned paper-round money, keeping at bay the seedy fairground workers, with their shirtless and tattooed bodies. The thing was, neither me nor Thomas were into the fair. I’d never liked it as a kid, and I certainly didn’t like it now. Townie scum in shell suits everywhere. Metallers, or metallers in grunge disguise, didn’t go to the fair. But there we were, me and Thomas, press-ganged into going. We’d stick out a mile, and probably get the shit beaten out of us behind the dodgems by some gang of thugs from Raneleigh Park.
Both of us were thinking along the same lines. Safety in numbers. We’d take as many of our friends as possible, so we weren’t too much of a target, and also in the hope that Jenny’s friends might sponge off someone other than us. We sent out a message along the grapevine that this was happening, and people should join us. Only problem was, our GCSEs were nearly upon us, and practically everybody we knew was revising like crazy, memorising packs of cards with science facts on them and whatnot. I mean, we were too, of course, but we had girlfriends, we had responsibilities, we couldn’t revise too much. It wouldn’t have been tolerated. But for the boys not blessed with a serious, heavy, committed relationship, an evening at a townie funfair wasn’t an option. Even if they wanted to, their parents had barricaded them in their bedrooms With a pile of textbooks. Ben wanted to come, because there would be girls he could fail to get off with, but he didn’t because his dad couldn’t drop him off and pick him up in the taxi that night, and he was too fucking lazy to walk. Jase said he would probably be too busy 69ing to make it, but he’d be there if he could. He’d fit right in anyway, seeing as he looked like a townie half the time. But other than that, there were no takers, or so we thought.
We didn’t ask Neil, but he found out about it anyway. And as soon as he got the opportunity, there he was, on the phone to me, wanting to know the details. Only thing was, I knew how big a problem Jenny had with him, and I didn’t want the evening to turn ugly, partly for Neil’s sake, but mostly for my own. ‘Tell you what, yeah,’ I found myself saying, ‘I'll phone up Thomas and get him to ask Jenny if it’s all right for you to come, because it’s kind of her thing.’
‘Ah. Oh right, OK,’ said Neil. Even he must have seen how wron
g it was. Why would you need to ask permission to go with a group of friends to a funfair? It’s a public place, for Christ’s sake! But like a total fucking arse, I didn’t just say, ‘Fuck it, Neil, come.’ No, I went ahead and phoned Thomas, who phoned Jenny and phoned back half an hour later to say it was OK. A bit of a surprise; maybe I’d got her wrong. Or maybe Jenny just knew the old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Fuck knows what excuse I’d have come up with if she’d said no.
So I phoned Neil back and told him where to meet us. And then I thought it was obvious that Neil would want to come because I remembered that Neil absolutely fucking loved funfairs and amusement parks and fairground rides and stuff. He obsessed over it all, the same way he did about loads of things. How he found room in his head for it all, I don’t know. For instance, he could tell you the complete history of rollercoasters: how and why and where they were invented; how they evolved from sleds dropped down a slope; when they started going round corners; who made the first one that went upside down, all of that. He’d even collected pictures of old ones from the nineteenth century and put them in a folder, along with photos he’d taken of ones on tatty seafronts when he went on holiday. And not only that, he had a separate folder for dodgems and waltzers and what have you, with all the pictures in historical order to show things like how one ride would always have a musical theme in the decoration, and there’d be pictures of someone who looked like Elvis painted on it one year, the Beatles the next and John Travolta ten years later. The last one in the sequence had the ride renamed the Thriller, and a giant Michael Jackson painted on the front. Christ, I hope that’s not still doing the rounds.
So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised Neil wanted to come. I wasn’t that comfortable with the idea of walking around with a bunch of girls and him being weird, but at that point no one else seemed to mind, so I thought what the fuck. And I also shouldn’t have been surprised when we got to the entrance to the Fields and found Neil waiting for us. Neil never really got the hang of the teenage thing of not being quite on time. He was visibly excited. I mean, not in that way; it was just that he couldn’t wait to get in, you could tell. He was pacing up and down, banging his hands on the gate, straining his neck left and right, not knowing which direction we would be coming from. We saw him before he saw us, as we’d used a side path he hadn’t taken into account, so we got a full view of his angsty spaz dance.
‘Oh dear,’ said Jenny in her stripy trousers. ‘Look at him. How sad.’
‘Oh, he’s sweet,’ said Hannah.
‘But sad, too,’ Jenny corrected.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Hannah, remembering her place, ‘very sad.’
‘What do you think, Thomas?’ Jenny said. ‘Do you think Neil’s sad?’
Thomas said nothing.
‘I said, what do you think, Thomas?’ she said again. ‘Is Neil sad?’
Thomas shrugged.
‘He is sad, isn’t he?’ said Jenny.
‘S’pose,’ he said finally.
‘Oh, he is, he’s very sad, very sad indeed,’ Jenny said to nobody and everybody. ‘I bet he’ll jump when he sees us,’ she said, as we got nearer to him. ‘Watch!’
She crept up behind Neil, who’d finally stopped pacing and had sat down on the gate, as he stretched his neck as far as it would go to the left, while rubbing his back for some reason, then to the right, switching arms to rub his back with. She waited until his neck was stretched completely to the right, and the tendons were sticking out of his neck. Then she edged herself closer and closer, until she was just a few centimetres away from his ear.
‘Boo!’ she shouted.
Neil nearly wet himself. He jumped right off the gate and yelped.
‘Hello, Neil,’ said Jenny. ‘Didn’t mean to surprise you.’ Then she laughed, a horrible, undignified laugh. Neil laughed too, out of politeness. Jenny’s friends also laughed dutifully. Even I managed a smirk. Thomas was stone-faced.
It was a beautiful evening. I mean truly beautiful. Spring, with the promise of summer in the air. Smell of blossom, excitement in the breeze. You had to feel good on an evening like this. The future was rushing towards you and you just had to let it carry you away. You had to ride it. Ride it like a fairground ride. Ah, the fairground.
Now, as I said, I’ve never liked funfairs. Not the rides, anyway. I think it’s the loss of control; I don’t like it. You just sit back and whatever happens, happens. And because of the rides, which are everywhere, and someone’s always hassling you to go on one, I don’t like the funfair. But here we were, on this beautiful evening, in the pink and the blue with the pale moon and the first stars overhead, going into the funfair, and for the first time it felt like a good place to be.
The funfair’s odd when you’re just that bit older. Nobody wants to make a fuss about going on a ride in case they appear childish. So everybody just saunters along being casual, almost like they’re bored. That’s unless you’ve got Neil with you, of course. In which case he’ll be running up to the first ride that he sees, nearly jumping up and down trying to find someone to go on it with him, which in this case was one of those things where everybody stands in a cage that ends up getting flipped upside down. Of course, everybody was too cool to agree to go on, even if they actually wanted to. ‘Nah, no, not really,’ they all said. Me, you wouldn’t get me going on one of those things if you put a gun to my head. Neil looked despondent.
‘Never mind, Neil,’ said Jenny, ‘I’m sure someone will go with you on one of the rides.’ She made out like Neil was retarded for wanting to go on anything, even though the whole funfair thing had been her ideal. Christ, she was evil.
After effectively stamping dead the ride idea, she made us go into an arcade, where she bullied Thomas into pouring half his money into one of those machines with a claw you control to pick up a cuddly toy. Of course, it’s a con and it’s completely impossible, so he was just pissing his money up a wall. Thomas danced about impatiently – he hated arcade games, never even had a computer or a games console – while all the girls waited patiently, too cool or too gormless to actually do anything. Me, I stuck my tongue down Hannah’s throat, just to pass the time.
After wasting several quid out of Thomas’s paper-round money, Jenny then threw some more away by demanding candyfloss. She ate about a tenth of it, and then decided she didn’t want any more. She offered it to her friends, who turned their noses up as if it was dog shit – after all, if Jenny didn’t want it, why would they? Then she gave it to Neil. ‘Here you are, Neil,’ she said. ‘You can have this. Nobody else wants it. Yuck!’
Neil tried not to look self-conscious as he ate the evidently diseased candyfloss, as we passed ride after ride that he desperately wanted to go on. Then we came to the dodgems. ‘Let’s all go on them!’ shrieked Jenny, clapping her hands together as if she was five. Suddenly it was all right to be a child, and soon all her friends regressed as one too, clapping and cheering, ‘Yaaay! Dodgems! Dodgems!’
It was two to a car. Me and Hannah. Thomas and Jenny. Two twitty friends. Another two. As usual, Neil was the odd man out.
‘Oh no,’ said Jenny, with mock concern, ‘what are we going to do?’
‘It’s OK,’ said Neil, ‘I don’t really like dodgems anyway. They’re not like any other fairground ride.’
‘Why’s that then, Neil?’ said Jenny. ‘Please tell us, do!’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘on any other ride, once you’re sat down and strapped in, you have no control over what happens to you. The ride begins, and it will not stop, however much you scream. You have no choice but to go through it to the very end, or try to throw yourself from it and almost certainly die. But with dodgems, it’s different. You’re faced with countless decisions. Where to go, which way to turn, when to stop, to stick to the sides or aim for the centre. And most importantly, whether to go by the official definition of the ride, which is dodgems, i.e., you are aiming to avoid the other drivers, or to go by its popular name,
bumper cars, which suggests that the point is to deliberately drive into everybody else. Now this in itself lays down the grounds on which you establish a relationship with authority, which in this case is represented by the fairground workers. By treating them as bumper cars, you risk antagonising them. At the same time, you could also be potentially recognising the outsider status that fairground workers have within society, and validating it by the very breaching of their own rules, of which they make a token gesture of enforcing by the use of the term “dodgem”, but in reality have very little interest in. So, for me, the bumper car ride does not embody the suspension of existential responsibility that other rides do. It’s what Foucault would call a heterotopia, a site of alternate ordering, existing within the larger heterotopia of the funfair itself—’
‘OK, Neil, that’s enough now, lecture over,’ said Jenny. ‘Why don’t you wait for us like a sweetie?’
She made that gesture that means something’s gone over your head to her friends, then grabbed Thomas by the arm and led him to the booth to spend his money. We all followed her, except Neil. He just waited at the barrier, looking forlorn. I don’t care what he said, he wanted to be with us on those dodgems. Then I looked at Jenny. At that moment, I was so filled with loathing for her, and her stripy trousers, that I made one of those radical existential decisions that Neil was always going on about. And this is the beautiful part, more beautiful than the sky or the evening or Hannah’s sixteen-year-old smile. Something that the memory of Jenny and her trousers and everything that happened afterwards can’t corrupt.
I found myself turning round, no, I chose to turn round, and I pulled Neil round the barrier. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I know you want to go on.’
‘No, really, it’s all right,’ he protested, not very hard.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Hannah.
‘I’m going on with Neil.’
‘What about me, then?’
‘Go on with one of your mates.’
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 13
