Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  ‘Whoops!’ Faruk says.

  ‘Kindergarten’s out early, I see.’

  Standing behind Ros is her keeper, Teresa Davenport. Can’t Ros do anything without this girl abruptly appearing to whisk her off to some sado-Nazi lesbian encounter group? Which is the sort of thing I can see Teresa Davenport would think was fun. What is her problem? And why does Ros always seem to go along with her? Today is the first time since Prom night that I’ve seen her separated from her Siamese twin. Poor Ros – it must be like having a human version of an electronic tag. But Ros had already decided to leave before it all becomes a sort of sausagey Agincourt and has gathered together her iPod and shouldered her bag. Before she heads off with Irma Grese in the direction of the doors and TD’s lesbian group, she takes out her earphones and says to me, ‘See you around, Bernie.’

  ‘It’s Brian…’ I say, but Ros and her parole officer are already being borne away by a low-flying cloud of year 10 sports chodes, heading for the games field. I’m only vaguely aware of Faruk looking at Clive and then at me. I’m still looking at the doors Ros has just passed through.

  ‘Bernie?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ That sounds like me.

  ‘See you around?’ Clive says.

  ‘BJ?’ says Faruk.

  ‘Oi, Johnson!’ Clive says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh fuck me,’ Faruk says to Clive. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Very unlikely,’ Clive says. ‘But I am thinking BJ’s gone terminal for Ros Chandler.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Faruk says, as he watches her disappear through the swinging doors. ‘Rosalind Chandler? Are you sure?’

  ‘Trust me.’ Clive says, but Faruk’s still looking like he’s been given a puzzle with square holes and a full set of round pegs.

  ‘But why?’ he says, which is when I begin to think that Faruk might not be in possession of his full quota of marbles. It’s funny that I didn’t notice it before.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mama Told Me Not To Come

  ‘What you want, my son, is a big party.’

  It’s not my father talking, though, it’s Roger Dyson, fresh from the shower. He’s been working out in the yard, shifting rusty metal, chucking oily components in the compactor. He’d have had to shower even if Clive hadn’t made a strict rule about it and even if the house wasn’t looking less like the residence of a scrap metal dealer by the day and more like the winning entrant in a homes and gardens competition. Well, obviously not the garden bit; Roger’s still resembles an ancient battlefield, despite the first signs of a tidier mind at work here and there. The dogs, who should be straining on chains in the yard ready to tear the bollocks off anybody with big enough ones to brave a visit, are sitting either side of the hearth, looking like a pair of fireside ornaments – albeit with that pissed-off look they have when they’ve just been shampooed. Roger was still finishing up in the shower when I arrived with Clive, but he’s told me to make myself at home in the sitting room.

  Which is harder than it sounds. The place is spotless, the cushions plumped, Laura Ashley curtains tied back with little red ropes and vases of carefully-arranged flowers placed on every surface. I notice that the photograph of Nick Griffin in the Cath Kidston frame has been changed for one of Nick Clegg. I walked home from school with Clive, invited to his for a session on his Playstation. (Roger’s bought him Call of Duty 7, but unless my luck or Clive himself has changed, we’ll be setting up home together in The Sims again tonight.) Now, though, Clive has gone off to see if any of ‘the fucking fabric samples’ he’s been sent ‘will do for the fucking bedrooms.’

  That was when Roger had appeared in the doorway, wearing a very short towel and his tattoos.

  ‘That’s right, a fucking party,’ he repeats. ‘Think about it, Bri. You invite all that muff in your little black book, then you pump the boy up with alcopops or whatever he’s drinking now.’

  ‘He likes “Sex on the Beach”.’

  Roger takes a moment, then understands.

  ‘Then you get him dancing, the birds wetting themselves for him, and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Have a bedroom reserved specially for him. We’ll set the mood beforehand: soft light, a packet of Durex ribbed on the bedside, maybe a tube of KY in case she’s a little tight. I tell you, Brian, it can’t fail.’

  I’m not so sure. I’ve never been to a party where everything has gone right. Or one where anything has gone right, now that I think about it.

  ‘And you invite that Rosie What’s-her-face and you take her aside and you tell her all about your shared interest. What was it again?’

  ‘Books.’

  ‘Right, you tell her all about the latest Chris Ryan and then you cop a quick feel of the goods and it’s all systems go for launch.’ Roger grabs himself through the towel and gives an extravagant thrust in my direction. ‘So what do you say?’

  Okay, so he’s crude, rude and probably thinks The Guardian is a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean, knowing the names of a few dead artists doesn’t constitute intelligence, does it? But now he’s put it like that, now we have Rosalind in the picture, his idea doesn’t sound so bad. I’ll have to tell Ros that the invitation doesn’t include one other, though. Especially if that other is Teresa Davenport. And talking to her, one to one, at a party won’t attract the attention I’d get if I talked to her at school. A party would be noisy, of course, and we’d probably have to take a walk outside to hear ourselves discuss books or whatever. Maybe in the direction of the park and the band stand, who knows? This idea is sounding better by the minute. On a more practical note, though, we’d have to clear a lot of the furniture out of this room to make space for the dancing, a point I now raise with Roger.

  It’s a point which elicits an unexpected reaction.

  ‘Have the party here?’ he says, like he’s choking on something sharp. ‘You’re having a fucking laugh, aren’t you, Brian? Of course you are. Do you know how much that fucking wallpaper cost? Or those fucking curtains? And I’m not having some cunt empty his dinner onto this fucking carpet, no fucking way. Fuck me, what would Clive say?’

  There’s a colourful movement in the doorway.

  ‘About what?’ Clive’s changed out of his school uniform into his silk kimono, which he says makes him look like an off-duty Samurai. It really doesn’t.

  ‘Brian here wants to throw a party,’ half-naked Roger says.

  ‘I’m down with that,’ his geisha son says.

  ‘He wants to have it here,’ Roger says.

  ‘I don’t think so!’ Clive snorts.

  ‘I thought no fucking way, too,’ Roger says.

  ‘Where else can we have a party?’ I say. ‘Hang on, this wasn’t even my idea.’

  ‘What about your place?’ Roger says. ‘If you can get your old man out of his watchtower for the evening.’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ I say. ‘Not after the last one.’

  ‘The Party To End All Parties,’ Clive reminds his father.

  There is complete silence for a moment.

  ‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that,’ Roger says. ‘I’ve still got the fucking newspaper clippings.’

  ‘We can’t do that again,’ I say. ‘It’s unthinkable.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Roger says. Clive nods.

  ‘Somewhere else, then?’ Clive says.

  We agree to hold a party somewhere else.

  The Party To End All Parties. This is how we talk of it now, because it very nearly was. A lot of kids in our year who were scheduled to have parties, didn’t, because their parents had seen what had happened at this party (aka, The Mother of All Parties) and had cancelled them out of hand. And I’m not talking just about our year at our school. It was a complete knee-jerk reaction. No one bothered to find out exactly what had happened and how it had all been the result of one silly mistake which anyone might have made – particularly me.

  My parents still talk about it as if it happened last Friday night, not almo
st a whole year ago. I’ve only to put a foot out of line, e.g. leaving unwashed plates in my room for, like, a few weeks, and out it all comes again, the fag ends and the roaches trodden into the brand-new carpet, the pink vomit floating in the fishpond, the soiled underwear in the microwave and the fire in the garden shed. Then the broken upstairs window, the trampled flowerbeds (which still gets Dad’s back up), and the bright orange, buck-toothed rabbit which was spray-painted on the dining room wall are all brought up one more time. It’s pathetic. And anyway, this is all stuff which happened before the party had properly kicked off.

  I could understand their attitude much better if the thing had happened at our house. But it didn’t, it happened at a house on the far side of the estate. If you have a good memory, you’ll probably remember some of the details. What had attracted the attention of the national newspapers was partly to do with the massive SOS banner, which Wendell Marney had nicked from a Sons of Sodom gig and had somehow managed to hang across the roof, by way of the dormer window.

  It was supposed to attract the attention of the hip and the happening of the neighbourhood, who would see it and identify with it and come on by. And he was right, it did get the place noticed – first by the Neighbourhood Watch, who made dozens of phone calls to tell each other not to panic, and then, interestingly, by the pilot of a Boeing 737 bound for Nicosia, whose report of a huge distress signal on a suburban home where suspicious black figures lurked in the grounds and a fire raged behind the house brought a totally disproportionate response from other agencies.

  The police helicopter, which clattered overhead, its searchlight playing on the gnomes sat fishing in the back garden, confirmed the sighting of an SOS signal and the presence of black-clad, possibly para-military figures in the garden (most of us wore black and Doc Marts were pretty much obligatory that month). Not long after the tins of paint and chemicals stored in the garden shed had ignited with a fantastic explosion, some serious paint-ballers arrived, or that’s what we took them for at first.

  They were wearing helmets and carrying some fuck-off paint-ball guns. The paint-ballers turned out to be an anti-terror squad from either the police, the SAS, Special Branch, MI5 or the council. They crouched behind cars and fiddled with body armour and pointed things but as soon as it was realised that someone had fucked up big time, they were bundled into a van and spirited away, leaving the local plod and various emergency services to sort the mess. Who paid for the operation was never established, despite questions in the House.

  The Daily Mail reported it all and accompanied its spread with pictures taken from another helicopter. They took the ‘failure of modern parenting methods’ line while the Sunday People concentrated its investigative efforts upon the mysterious, naked girl who was witnessed vaulting across a succession of garden fences before disappearing into the morning mist.

  I can kind of understand the perverted gratification some people derived from all of this. Seeing the house on TV, the burned-out revellers still staggering home when other kids were queuing for the school bus, the shell-shocked faces of Mr and Mrs Colby, the owners of the house, as they returned home from a boating holiday in Abersoch to find a TV crew, two pink sheep and much of their furniture on their front lawn. The two ambulances bearing customers for the overworked stomach pump and a fire crew, which was too late to extinguish the blaze in the garden shed, had already departed. From some perspectives, it was a sensational event, and we might have enjoyed it as much as the other partygoers, had we (that’s the Four Horsemen) not been held mostly responsible for this horror.

  I won’t bother you with the grisly aftermath, suffice to say that if Mr Colby hadn’t been a Mason, and if Dad hadn’t been able to pull some strings, and if an insurance company chairman hadn’t also been a Mason with wayward kids of his own, then we would probably have been charged with crimes not yet on the statute books, transported to some long-forgotten tropical penal colony and left there to rot. It would have been hard to see the punishment as more than we deserved, too.

  There are photographs. You can find them on Flickr or the Facebook pages of most of the guests, both the invited and uninvited, if you happen to know them. I have a page of them up right now:

  Img 1: Darren Alexander grins at camera as he pours Coco Pops into the goldfish bowl.

  Img 2: Andy Towse and one unknown other moon from the front windows.

  Img 3: Someone’s cock, peeing in the toilet.

  Img 4: Two unidentified cocks, peeing in the kitchen sink. Washing-up in sink.

  Img 5: Dave Brownhill wearing a pair of blue satin ladies’ briefs.

  Img 6: Shelly Lark, Janet Carstairs and Jenny Wright, all topless.

  Img 7: Shelly Lark on sofa, with half-naked man on top, possibly having sex.

  Img 8: A dog being sick.

  Img 9: Dave Fletcher, Martin Heard and Alice Jameson smiling, with green (caged) parrot.

  Img 10, 11, 12: Various unknown faces, arms flailing as they try to capture (uncaged) parrot sitting on curtain pole.

  Img 13 Parrot caught in flash as it escapes into the night sky. Img 14: Dave Fletcher being sick, mostly in toilet.

  Img 15: Shelly Lark kneeling in front of, to judge from indie-style jeans around Converse trainers, Derek Bacon.

  Img 16: Shelly Lark being sick in fishpond.

  Img 17: Unidentified male rifling bedroom underwear drawer.

  Img 18: Martin Lloyd, wearing a black bra with matching knickers (on head).

  Img 19: Someone’s hands skinning up a monster spliff.

  Img 20: Two policemen and one policewoman surrounded in the living room by four naked men.

  Img 21: Dave Fletcher wearing a policeman’s helmet.

  Img 22: Dave Fletcher in back of police car.

  Img 23: Blurry crowd in the hall. Someone who might be Ros, sitting all by herself on the stairs.

  And so on. There are thousands of them. There is footage on YouTube, too. The audio quality is so poor that the music is just a deafening roar of undifferentiated sound but these phone-shot sequences would be more than enough to convict a number of faces I know – but can’t name here – of criminal damage, petty larceny, animal cruelty and stupidity in the first degree. Then there are the physical artefacts which are now in the keeping of various party veterans and which are prized as bizarre souvenirs, to be brought out and discussed at length down years to come, until they have taken on the mystery of Mayan glyphs or Egyptian scarabs.

  Martin Wright keeps the charred trainer which was unearthed among the ashes of the shed and is the foundation of a rumour that someone was unaccounted for when the party ended. Jen Edwards is thought to have the super-sized dildo which formed the basis of many of the impromptu party games. Tanya Jordan has a pair of police handcuffs which supposedly date from the party.

  Then there is Frank the tortoise, which we keep in our garden and which I said I bought from someone in a cafe because now that its shell has been carefully painted with the words Tortoises Do It Eventually on one side by someone with patience and humour, and then daubed with MY PRIVATE sHELL on the other, by someone else, I have been unable to bring myself to take it back. And so it lurks under the lilac bush, too embarrassed to come out.

  So, you must be wondering, how does such a thing happen? How can we learn from your mistakes so that our parties will run smoothly and be looked back on in years to come as sources of nothing but fond memories?

  Another good question. I can’t remember exactly whose idea it was to have the thing, but as soon as The Horsemen got wind that my dad was taking Mum away for a long weekend at Headingly (Dad going for the cricket and Mum going because Dad wanted to), there was never any question about the venue. It would be great to have a little do, just the four of us and one or two friends, female if possible.

  But we could see immediately that would be a criminal waste of opportunity. We’d invite one or two more, just so the thing rocked a bit. Not too much, as I didn’t want to annoy the neighbours and everything
would have to be spick and span, as Mum says, by the time the parents returned. So there would be just us, a few girls and one or two sensible, yet fun friends. Deciding who to invite and who not to was just about impossible. Suppose the party went really well and everyone talked it up at school? Anyone we didn’t invite would never talk to us again.

  That was how the invite list got a bit longer. A lot longer, in fact. Then Diesel suggested that it might be a good idea to invite a few people who were actually old enough to get served in the offie, so they could buy the booze. So we added one or two safe people from the year above. Booze sorted; what else? We wouldn’t want any drugs of course, but it would be terminally uncool if there wasn’t a token amount of weed, so Manic Mick was invited, him being St Saviour’s tried and tested traveller in pharmaceuticals. But that would be it, no one else, just us and this hand-picked crew.

  I would be in charge of the invitations, which I’d email to the lucky people on our exclusive list. No problemo. But then, looking through my contacts, I realised that I only actually had the email addresses of four people on the list and two of them lived on our street anyway. I admit I went into panic mode for five frantic minutes – it was Wednesday evening and the party was scheduled for Friday night. So I was more than a little relieved to remember that all I had to do was post the invite on Facebook and all my friends would see it and no one else. Brilliant. And those who weren’t one of my 39 Facebook friends, would be given the nod by mutual acquaintances.

  Of course, I now see how it’s possible for some of those friends to extend the invite list simply by forwarding the details to their own list of friends and acquaintances and also how the less scrupulous might elaborate on the party plans, so that anyone reading them would feel they had to go to that party or die trying. It now appears that some people arrived fully expecting a free bar, live music and strippers. But back in my bedroom on that Wednesday night, I bigged up my party as BJ’s Big Bash, promised an evening of fun and frolics, entered the address and time it would kick off and hit ‘Send’ in the full expectation that my invitations would be seen only by the eyes of those I wanted to come.