Then, when we got there, all the other guys found it fucking hilarious too. Well, some of the college kids didn’t seem that impressed, but overall it got a huge laugh from pretty much everybody. Now that it was obvious we’d disassociated ourselves from Neil’s performance, everyone felt free to discuss how terrible it was. Neil was the joke of the moment that evening. Even when he turned up.
None of us could believe it as he made his way over the mound towards us. ‘Oh no, it’s Neil,’ said one of the Louises, loudly. There was a general murmur of ridicule and disapproval. Thomas’s face was a mask.
‘All right, Neil,’ said Jase, as if Neil was actually a human being.
‘Hiya,’ said Neil, jovially, like a total fucking idiot.
The rest of us said nothing. Neil circulated. He got the cold shoulder everywhere he went, except for a few of the college kids. Some people just mocked him to his face. Then, unexpectedly, he found himself in front of Louise. It was the first time she’d been out in her new zombified state, with an invisible leash tethering her to Jenny, who hovered not too far away. Neil mumbled a hello, but Louise said nothing, as if he wasn’t even there. Although they would come across each other several more times that summer, they would never speak again.
(I wasn’t there, but apparently around this time, Jenny got Louise to burn a photo of Neil taken at the gig. People said she was laughing and crying more or less simultaneously as she did it.)
Later that evening, Neil sidled up to Thomas. ‘Hi, Thomas,’ he said.
‘Yeah, what do you want?’ he snapped back.
‘Just wondering if we’re still on for the practice on Saturday.’
It was unbelievable. How could he think we were still in a band with him? We all waited to see how Thomas would deal with this. It was bound not to be pretty, we all thought.
But we were wrong. ‘Yeah, why not?’ said Thomas.
And so the band continued. And Neil kept on turning up at the bonnie. He still got the brush—off from most people, including us – except Jase, of course – but we were still in a band with him, and we were still going round his house on Saturday for our practice.
At first, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was just like old times. The practice was civil, if a little tense. There was the odd dig at Neil’s performance, but nothing major. We mostly just got on with it. We turned up at the usual time, plugged in and got ready to play. Thomas had some more chords and, as ever, Neil had some new lyrics. This time, though, they were a bit different from his usual surrealist wordplay. They seemed a bit personal, although I didn’t see exactly what the point of them was. They went,
You live in a secret room
But you ain’t got the key to your secret room
And we’ll be friends to the end of time
And it’s getting very near the end of time
I couldn’t work out who was in the secret room. I was thinking about it all week, though. Louise, perhaps. That sort of made sense. Or maybe it was about us. Me, even. But surely if anybody lived in a secret room round here it was Neil, with his weird ideas about what music was and how you went about making it. We lived in the real world, where lead singers had to sing in time and in tune.
Over the next week, Neil kept on coming to the bonnie, and still he got ignored. There was a fair bit of abuse now too. Some of it was coming from Thomas, it has to be said. Some from Ben too. I just pretended I couldn’t see him, like most people. It was round about now that we began to see less of the girls; I think they only came once or twice that week. And also that was when people started getting sent to Coventry left, right and centre by Thomas. The new kids too, who the week before had only been a little group, were beginning to move in en masse, smiling too much and their hair too short. On Thursday, Neil asked again, after he’d just been called a mongoloid twerp by Thomas, whether we would be practising that Saturday. ‘Yeah, may as well,’ said Thomas.
So that Saturday we were round again, although only Jase made it on time, and as ever, more chords and more lyrics were unveiled. Both were slightly depressing. Thomas’s chords were mostly minors or minor sevenths strung together, unlike his usual power chord riffs, while Neil’s words were pretty maudlin. He called the new song ‘The Haunting’, the only bit of which I remember went, ‘A record plays but I don’t hear its tune, just footsteps’ echo in a nearby empty room.’ They weren’t his best by any means. Nowhere as good as the other stuff. The atmosphere was worse that week. Ben was bored, and Thomas was in a pretty foul mood. There was an incident. After we’d been through ‘The Haunting’ five or six times, he slammed his bass down. ‘This is fucking dreadful,’ he said. ‘Let’s chuck it.’
‘I like it,’ said Neil.
‘Yeah, well, so fucking what,’ said Thomas. ‘You like your own fucking singing.’
‘I’m just trying to do something different,’ Neil said quietly.
Finally, Ben came to life. The first time in months, it seemed. ‘Neil,’ he said, ‘no one, absolutely no one, liked your singing at the gig. No one at all.’
Neil said nothing. Maybe he had no way of defending himself, or maybe he didn’t feel he needed to.
‘That’s not true, actually,’ said Jase, from behind his drum kit.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ sneered Thomas.
‘Damien said he really likes what Neil does, and actually I happen to like what Neil does as well, and I’m not going to stop liking it just because someone tells me to. Now let’s play “Sound of Sound”.’
There was obviously a coded message for Thomas in there about Jenny, and only Jase would ever have got away with giving it. But there was another clue in there as well, if only we hadn’t been too stupid to see it. Not just about the music, but about the strange cloud that was August. If only we’d realised what a small world the bonfire was, and exactly what was going on outside it.
In the third week of August, things really started to get bad. Those kids who we suspected of being townies brought their mates, who most definitely were townies. Naf Naf jackets, baseball caps, rave music blasting out of their boom boxes, the works. They were all called things like Wayne, Shane, Darren and Dean, like the flash kids from school. In fact, we had been to school with a few of them. But that meant nothing now they’d turned townie. It wasn’t like they were hostile, in fact they seemed pretty friendly, on the surface. But you could feel the latent violence. They wanted us out.
The townies were all over the bonnie. It was like an ant infestation. Practically all our girls had gone now. The townies had their own girls, horrible shrieking ginger things, who, we suspected, might not be as innocent and pure as our own. Also gone were so many of our mates, ostracised but no doubt in their bedrooms with a smile on their face while they sampled their first tastes of carnal pleasure, their innocent suburban girlfriends turning less innocent underneath them. But there at the bonnie, it was just us, a few of the hardcore from Thomas’s old circle, and some college kids. Not many left now.
Something needed to be done. Fortunately for us, the crazy kid who jumped through the bonfire was there to do it. And on the third night of the townie infestation he saved us all. We saw him coming over the ridge with several cans of Napalm, wearing an old Army and Navy shop coat, which was actually fashionable at the time, whistling the theme from The Dam Busters. Nobody drank Napalm any more, so we thought it was quite odd that he had some. We weren’t that bothered, though, because he was a mad bastard. Good mad, not Neil mad.
The townies were everywhere. I mean, there were loads of them, absolutely fucking loads of them. It was like that Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds, if the birds had worn shell suits. In what used to be our special place, we were now outnumbered nearly five to one. There was no way we could have taken them on. But that didn’t matter now, because the crazy kid was here to save the day.
He stood up on the ridge. Then he put up the hood of his Army and Navy shop coat and zipped it right up. He opened the first can of Napalm and
poured it on his head. All of it. There was froth rolling right down him. A few of the townies saw it and laughed. The crazy kid’s doing something crazy, ha, ha, ha. Then he opened the second one and did the same. Then the third, then the fourth. Everyone was watching now and laughing. What a mental. If only they knew. He walked back a few paces. And started to run. And yell. He built up momentum as he went over the ridge, and much more as he skidded down the steep bank. He nearly tripped and fell at the bottom, but he recovered and kept right on going, very, very fast. Right into the fire.
He came out the other side a fireball, the absurdly high alcohol percentage of the Napalm transformed into flame. And he just kept on going. Straight at some townies. He was screaming his head off, the loudest scream I’d heard since Neil at the talent show all that time ago. They ran for their lives. He kept on going, lapping round the bonfire, flames leaping out from him, townies scattering like mice. He must have been round three times before he slowed down and started to pull off the Army and Navy shop coat. The alcohol had burnt out now, and he really was just on fire. He frantically tried to get it over his head, but the red-hot zip burned his hand when he tried to tug at it. Finally, just when we thought he was going to die, he managed to pull the coat off and flung it in the fire, which leapt up as it absorbed the last of the Napalm.
The crazy kid laughed hysterically. He didn’t seem to mind that his hair was singed and his skin was black and blistering. But it had done the trick. The townies had gone.
And in their place was Neil. ‘Hi,’ he said.
We were too excited to ignore him or tell him to fuck off.
‘Did you see that?’ I asked him, laughing.
‘Yeah, that was like a Chris Burden thing or something. It was great.’ No one knew what the fuck he was talking about, obviously.
‘What can we do you for, Neil?’ said Thomas.
‘Just wondering if we’re going to practise on Saturday,‘ he said.
‘You and your practices,’ said Thomas. ‘Alwaye hassling me for one. OK, yeah.’
‘Great,’ said Neil. He turned to go.
‘You not staying?’ said Jase.
‘Nah,’ said Neil, and he disappeared into the woods.
That last rehearsal was not good. Ben was not in a cooperative mood at all, me and Thomas had just had a conversation about how hacked off we were that we could never get to see our girlfriends any more, and even Jase wasn’t exactly chipper. Don’t know why, maybe he just didn’t feel like it that week.
Neil had a new set of lyrics for Thomas’s chords which he hoped he would like better, but they were even more depressing.
They went:
Everyone is born without form
Until with time the edges are worn
I’ve lost my faith in cause and effect
What’s wrong with me
I can’t connect
None of us were really enjoying it, and the new song was as much of a dirge as ever. Then there was another incident. As Neil started trying to play his keyboard over the miserable chords, and somehow ended up playing in a major rather than A minor scale, Ben just got up, went over and turned the volume down. I mean right down, to silence. OK, Neil’s playing was pretty bad, but even I could see that was a bit rude. Neil didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything. Instead we just carried on, and Neil didn’t try to play the keyboard any more. The hours dragged on until it was mercifully time to go. Then, without any of us really saying much, we packed up, and for the last time left that weird house, with its smell of dog and all the strange souvenirs from the seventies on the wall.
We had the bonfire to ourselves that night, just us, a few of the college kids and the crazy kid. No townies, thank God. But no girls either. Then on the Monday, I was cycling through the Fields to the bonnie, when I saw Jeffrey on his bike.
‘Hi, Chris,’ he said.
‘All right, Jeff.’
He got off his bike and motioned me to do the same.
‘Listen, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy for me to tell you this, but I think I’m going to have to. You know your girl’s been spending a lot of the time round Jenny’s recently?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I could already feel something gnawing in my gut. Things were about to get very bad.
‘Well, ah, how can I say this? Look, fuck it, I’ll say it. There’s been stuff between her and Damien.’
I tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come out. It hit me that I hadn’t seen Damien at the bonnie since the girls stopped coming.
‘Yeah, apparently Jenny’s parents went away on holiday for the month, and basically Damien’s been over there a lot, and stuff’s happened.’
I felt as if the path was sinking and the trees were falling on me. It’s funny, I thought, Thomas never mentioned Jenny’s parents being away. Did he know?
‘I mean, he’s just been a total sleaze, apparently. Just, ah, doing stuff with a lot of the girls there, really taking the piss.’
I felt stomach fluid in my mouth and I had to stop myself from dribbling.
‘Look, I think you should go and talk to her, but whatever you find out, be careful what you say to Thomas.’
I was in so much shock it took hours for it to register how odd it was for him to say that. What had it got to do with Thomas? I thanked Jeff for telling me and he hugged me in a manly way. I gave up on the idea of the bonnie and went home, where I stared catatonically at the TV for hours and then failed to sleep all night.
The next morning, I surprised Hannah on her doorstep. I told her I knew about her and Damien, and I could see she was about to deny it, but then she thought better of it. Instead she said, ‘Oh,’ and took me up to her bedroom to explain. Turned out that Damien had felt it was his duty to introduce her and a few of the other girls to the joys of oral pleasure one night, and he was such a gentleman about it that afterwards he didn’t even ask for anything in return, and just wanked himself off in the toilet.
I was crushed. Half of me wanted to punch her face in, the other half wanted to get her to pull me off just so I could get something out of this whole sorry relationship. ‘I’m going to go now,’ is all I ended up saying. And I let myself out. I can’t remember if she said she was sorry.
On the last Friday of August, three things happened. Firstly, on the day before Jenny’s parents flew back from their holiday, she finally let Thomas where some other man, or indie-kid, had most probably gone before. All the way, right in there. The drought was over. We were free at last to have our way with all the girls Damien had deflowered behind our backs while we weren’t paying attention. Secondly, me and Ben went down the bonnie. We were the only two people there. None of us ever went there again. Thirdly, Jase got a call from Neil. He was just phoning, he said, to say he didn’t want to do the band any more. Jase couldn’t believe it, and begged him to reconsider, but Neil said no, they’d won. He’d had enough.
The last ripple of all our golden ages disappeared from sight. There would be no more. Finally, it was all over. Now real life could begin.
II
The Aftermath
1
And with real life, real time began. Before then, in the golden age, and all the little golden ages contained within it, time hovered, like a bubble we floated in. Now it began to move, like the current of a river. Very slowly at first, barely noticeable, but definitely there, a build-up of days lived began to grow, and that build-up would come to be known as a life. It was constantly being added to, with the days stacking up more and more, and at a faster and faster rate, until a long time was no time at all, and years would take what once was a month to pass. Birthday would follow birthday, and after a while, we would have to think twice before we could remember how old we were. And before we knew it, we were no longer at the very start of our stories. We were many chapters in.
But it was not like that at first. At first, it was almost as if the golden age had never ended. It was mid-September, summer was dead and buried, and we were all about
to start sixth-form college. Well, they called it the sixth form, but it was actually a different place altogether from school. It was in a flash new building on the other side of the Fields. There were probably about half the kids from our school going there. Most of the boys from the lower sets just went out into the world and got jobs. I could never get over how one minute they couldn’t be bothered to turn up on time, or at all, never did their homework and were abusive to all the teachers, and the next they had become good little workers, doing exactly what they were told by their boss and bringing home the bacon for their pregnant girlfriends. The school sociopath ended up manager of the local Spar.
College was totally different from school. For a start, there was no uniform, you could wear what you liked. Amazing. Also, you called the teachers by their first name. This was a hard habit to get into, and it was pretty embarrassing for the first few weeks because I just couldn’t remember to do it. And not only that, it was so informal you could pretty much swear in front of the teachers and they wouldn’t care. Most of them wouldn’t, anyway. But obviously the biggest difference was that there were girls. Oh yes, girls. The college took on the pupils from not just our school, but the local girls’ school as well. I’m glad to say, though, that Jenny and Hannah didn’t end up there. They went to some special Catholic place run by nuns that they had to go to church for ages pretending to be religious just to get into. Anyway, as you can imagine, having girls about changed absolutely everything. The way we talked, for one. Spastic, mongoloid, spazzer, spacker were all gone for good, except for the odd furtive, sniggering use when there were no girls about. And the way we behaved, how cruel we could be seen to be in public, that all changed for us. You couldn’t just swear at a monger in the corridor for no reason, for example. Nevertheless, it was funny watching all the monger kids who hadn’t been around girls that much struggling to deal with them suddenly being there. They made right twats of themselves trying to be cool and impress them, and ended up looking desperate. Still, it wasn’t just the mongers who had problems with change. I think we all did. For a start, there was the whole clothes thing. For instance, the first day there, me and Ben turned up in our metaller gear – and really that was when we realised we’d outgrown it. I mean mentally, not physically. We hadn’t gone lardy or anything. We’d been mixing the metal with the grunge look all year, but for some reason we both thought that on our first day we should show our colours and go in hardcore metaller gear. But when we were surrounded by all the other kids, who looked pretty mormal except for the odd crusty, I think we both felt a bit stupid. It wasn’t as if it meant anything to us any more. We’d been listening to the music less and less, but there we still were in our leather jackets, black denim and studs. Neither of us ever wore that stuff again. It was the grunge look all the time from then on. You were safe with the grunge look. We’d grown our hair way over the collar during the summer anyway, so we could pull off the look quite well.
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 18
