2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu)
Page 12
From his mum’s flat, those buildings down there in Docklands looked like Manhattan. When Henry was five, he thought he could see New York from his mum’s flat. On his first day at school, he told his teacher he could see America from where he lived. The teacher laughed at him, and because the teacher laughed at him, so did the other boys in the class.
Then sometime after that they built the Gherkin. This was closer. Some days it felt like he could lean out of the window and touch the Gherkin. Now it is time we address something about the actual age of this Henry Pedders. Earlier on, the claim was made that Henry was nineteen, so born in 2004. The Gherkin was built in 2003 and has been there all of Henry’s life. The truth of the matter is that Henry is, in fact, thirty-four years old, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned Henry is nineteen and will be for ever. And when we say ‘rest of the world’ we mean the rest of some parallel world. And there is part of Henry, a big part of Henry, that will always be nineteen. Nineteen and angry at everything and everyone.
There is a story behind this anger and why he is still nineteen and not the thirty-four years he should be. And a reason for some parallel world. This is his story:
When Henry started school, it was not only because he thought he could see America from his mum’s flat that the other boys laughed at him; it was because he was fat. The type of fat that puts people off; not cuddly loveable fat like James Corden but nasty fat like Billy Bunter. So Henry had to learn, and learn fast. Henry learnt to act. Act the fool, act the stranger, act the hard man, act the bully. The teachers thought Henry was good at acting: he got to play King Herod in the nativity play at school. It wasn’t just the kids that booed when he came on stage as King Herod, it was all the parents as well.
It was one of his teachers who recommended that Henry should join the kids’ theatre at the Arcola Theatre, just up the road from where he lived. Henry was shit at football and the other things that boys did on Saturdays, so Henry did kids’ theatre every Saturday, and he always got the parts of characters the audience wanted to hate.
Then one Saturday morning, he and all the other misfits that did youth theatre were told some big film people were going to come along and watch them act, and if they were very good they might get picked to be in a film. Henry’s mum loved to rent videos and watch films; she loved those films set in American high schools. Henry wanted to please his mum. Henry’s mum was the only one who didn’t boo him.
The next Saturday, Henry was told the people from the big film company liked him and they would like him to go to Pinewood Studios to do a screen test.
His mother took him and he was offered a part. The part he was offered would change his life.
He was offered the part of Dudley Dursley in the first of the Harry Potter films. This was in 2000, when Dudley was ten. Now, if you don’t know, Dudley Dursley was Harry Potter’s fat cousin. Dudley Dursley was everything Harry Potter was not. Dudley Dursley was there in the stories to be a horrible, fat, spoilt brat who bullies whoever he can. There were no redeeming features to Dudley Dursley, or not enough for us to bother about here. Dudley Dursley existed in the Harry Potter stories for children to hate.
Henry Pedders was the perfect fit for the role of Dudley Dursley. He told all the kids at his school he had got a part in a film and he was going to be a movie star and this time next year he would probably be living in Hollywood and never have to go to school again.
But none of this happened. Those who made the decisions at Pinewood Studios changed their minds. If truth be told, they felt that although this Henry Pedders could out-act all of the other child actors they had signed up for the various parts in this Harry Potter film, it was felt he was not of the right class. And neither was his mother. They felt he could not be relied upon. There was something too real about Henry Pedders.
So instead of Henry Pedders they chose somebody from acting royalty to play the part of Dudley Dursley. Someone whose grandfather had been a Doctor Who – a Time Lord. Someone whose mother would get him to Pinewood on time.
And the children at his school laughed at him even more when the first of the Harry Potter films came out and Henry Pedders was not Dudley Dursley. And Henry Pedders did not become a film star living in Hollywood.
And Henry Pedders became a teenager.
And Henry Pedders became angry.
And Henry Pedders would go down to Saint Pancras Station and watch the kids queuing up to have their photographs taken at platform 7 and ¾.
And Henry Pedders would want to smash those kids up.
It should have been me!
And Henry Pedders became angrier.
And Henry Pedders knew he had been robbed of what should have been his.
And Henry Pedders became fatter.
It should have been me!
And Henry Pedders became even angrier.
And as each of the Harry Potter films was released Henry Pedders would go and watch it. And every time he would want to burn the cinema down with all the kids inside.
And then when Henry Pedders turned seventeen, something happened. He decided he did not want to be fat any more. He didn’t want to be Henry Pedders who did not get the part of Dudley Dursley any more. So he went to the gym. He went every day. It wasn’t one of those modern gyms mums go to; it was an old gym that had been there for decades, where East End boxers used to go. It was where Rude Boys used to go. And it was now where Henry Pedders went. And he lost weight. There was a new Henry Pedders coming out from behind the old one. This Henry Pedders was fit and toned, with a punch that could flatten anyone who wanted trouble. Henry Pedders would look at himself in the mirror and for the first time in his life he liked what he saw. People did not recognise this Henry Pedders. This Henry Pedders could walk down Kingsland Road on a Saturday morning and girls would turn their heads to check him out.
But Henry Pedders was not interested in these girls.
And Henry Pedders was still angry at the world.
Some teenage boys take drugs and get drunk and steal cars and smash up bus shelters.
But Henry Pedders was not some teenage boys.
Instead Henry Pedders just kept going to the gym.
And when he was not at the gym he sat and stared out of the window of his mother’s flat as he had always done. From where he was sitting his hate and loathing found a new and very pointed focus. A building was being built some miles directly South of his window onto the world. This building just got higher and higher. And sharper and sharper. It was already taller than the Gherkin and it was hardly more than half built. And this building started to appear in his dreams.
In July 2011 The Deathly Gallows – Part Two was released. It was all over the television news and the front pages of all the papers. It was now time for the next chapter in Henry Pedders’s life to begin.
Less than a week after this, the last of the Harry Potter films was released, things started to happen. Things were kicking off up the Kingsland Road in Tottenham. Kids were taking to the streets and throwing bricks through shop windows. It was on the news. Kids of his generation from where he was. Kids who maybe hated the world like he hated the world, even if they were kids who hated him when he had been at school.
It was all over Twitter.
Henry got on the bus up Kingsland to Tottenham. Throwing his first brick through his first window felt like the best thing he had ever done in his life. Then he made a fire bomb, lobbed it through the windows of the old Co-op building and watched as, within minutes, the whole place was ablaze.
And that night he opened his new Twitter account. Using the name Henry Da Riot, he soon had thousands and then tens of thousands of followers – and by the next morning he had over 100,000 followers. But it didn’t last. Within a week he was back spending his days just staring out of his window at the world he hated.
And he was skint.
And he was arrested.
And he was charged.
And he was given community service.
He was then put on a scheme for ex-offenders. It was a scheme to get ‘young people’ back into the mindset of working. ‘An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay’ – or that is what he was told by his supervisor. He was given a box of tea towels and other cheap kitchen bits and pieces and told to go door to door selling them. It was shit. Demoralising shit. And it was a scam. Nobody wanted to buy anything from him. Or nearly no one. But he had to keep doing it. He promised his mum. He promised her care worker.
At the end of one day after selling fuck all down The Bishops Avenue, he bought a litre bottle of vodka. Then he went up to Alexandra Palace and drank the whole lot while spending the night looking across the city.
As dawn came up he knew he needed to do something with his life. He knew he had what it took. Not only to out-act all those other little shits and drama-school wannabes, but to write too. He knew he was better than the shit scriptwriters they had on the Harry Potter films. He knew what proper writing could be like.
He started writing straight away on a scrap of paper with the pencil that he was supposed to use to write down what he had sold. These are the first words he wrote:
The Earth grumbles
Growling. Rising. The city street-lamps flicker up
Loud distorted music blaring out
He wrote and he wrote.
He wrote for hours and hours.
And when he had nothing left to write on he went home.
Over the following weeks and months he kept writing. He did not know what these words were for. There were thousands and thousands of words. The words seemed to be about everything, but especially about how he saw the world as he walked the streets of London trying to sell tea towels to people who wanted him to go away.
He took the words to the one person he knew in the world who ever had any time for him: the Turkish bloke who ran the Arcola Theatre. But he was not there, so he left his book full of words there with his mobile number. He never heard back. Nothing. Fuck all.
The anger returned.
He stared out of the window again for hours and days and weeks.
He tried not to write any more words.
It was now the Summer of 2012 and the building he had been watching was now complete. It was on the news. It was called the Shard. And he kept dreaming about the Shard. In the dreams it had a huge eyeball on the top of it. The eyeball swivelled and stared back at him. And sometimes in these dreams this Shard was ablaze like the Co-op building up in Tottenham during the riots.
Henry wanted to see the Shard burn.
But the years started to slip by and his mother was not well and Henry hardly ever went out. In his twenties – those years when you should be out there making your mark, meeting people, making things happen – Henry just hid from the world. He looked after his mum. And the eye on top of the Shard kept staring back at him.
And his twenties turned into his thirties. But in his head he was still nineteen, waiting for life to begin.
It was years since he had sent out a tweet. But in theory he still had over 100,000 followers from way back in 2011.
This morning, Henry has just opened a parcel addressed to the Aga Khan and found a book in it. You may remember from the last chapter – it seems so long ago – that Henry read some words about respect that sounded like they came from a religious book. Henry liked religious books. His mum used to take him to an evangelical church when he was small. He always liked the sound of the words in The Bible. Not the words of Jesus, but the words in the Old Testament. They used to make sense to him. That is what got him into words in the first place.
Henry turned the page to see what was next in this book. There were only three words there facing him:
BURN THE SHARD
Nothing else, no explanation. There was nothing else that needed to be said. Henry knew these words had been written for him. Henry picked up his mobile. It was time to send out the first tweet he had sent for over twelve years:
Tonight we Burn the Shard
He then sent out a second:
We will march down Kingsland
Through the City
Across London Bridge
We will be there by midnight
The Shard will Burn
Henry Da Riot was back. The Twittersphere was ablaze. Nothing for a dozen years and he is back. He will lead the people. His people. The people who hated it all. The people who loathed Starbucks and all the shit. Who hated all this world peace and everything being all right and all the start-ups you could want and all the greenness of everything and the equal opportunities and everything being sorted. The people who wanted to express their anger. Who wanted to feel what it was like to turn over a car and burn a bus and throw a brick through a window. And not give a fuck.
Henry Da Riot was back.
Jura
29 April 1984
Dear Diary,
I decided to stop that chapter there. What happens to Henry Da Riot next will have to wait. There are more important things going on around the world on the morning of 24 April 2023 than what is happening with those responding to Henry’s Twitter feed.
For a start, this Welsh girl calling herself Tracey Tracey turned up today claiming to be the journalist from Classic Biker. She is no more than twenty years old, so what she knows about classic bikes is anybody’s guess. And she was driving an over-engineered Japanese sewing machine she claimed could do nought to a ton in less than ten seconds. Even if it can, as far as I am concerned that doesn’t count, as it is not a proper motorcycle. I tried to tell her about the Burma Railway and how my cousin died building the bridge over the River Kwai. And how we should not buy such things. But she feigned not to know what I was talking about.
I am also loath to mention the fact that she was wearing a black leather, all-in-one, zip-up jumpsuit, like she thought she was Emma Peel. Certainly it seemed to turn heads at the bar last night. I left the bar early and headed for home. Goodness knows where she ended up.
This morning Tracey Tracey turned up at my place on her sewing machine – okay, it is called a Kawasaki 900, but why anybody would want to drive it I have no idea – to do the interview and take photos.
I have to admit she had done her homework: not only had she read Fish Farm, she had also read Uganda, and knew all about Brough Superior Motorcycles. It also seems she had just returned from South America, where she had driven the route Che Guevara covered in the early 1950s on a ’39 Norton 500 – a proper bike, the bike Che Guevara had actually done the trip on in the first place. So maybe I was being too hasty in my judgements.
I gave her some of the novel I am writing at the moment and she seemed to be quite impressed with it, but then she told me she should be the leading lady in it, or at least a major character. I said the book was not about that sort of thing. There were no romances or the like. She then suggested I should base either Winnie or Yoko on her. She was very persuasive and the fact she had driven all over South America on a Norton 500 was impressive, so maybe there will be a part for her later in the book.
Then she told me that on her journey up through Mexico, at the end of her South American adventure, she met up with a young revolutionary who was part of the Zapatista movement called Rafael Guillén. It seems this Tracey has a thing for Latin revolutionaries, and there may have been some romance, etc. But the main thing this Tracey Tracey wanted me to know was that she told Rafael Guillén he needed an image, and that she got him on a horse with a couple of belts of bullets slung around his chest, an AK-47 in his arms, a black balaclava on his head, and a cap with three red stars on the front on top of the balaclava. But the thing that Tracey Tracey claimed she came up with, and that all the world will remember him for, was the pipe she took off an old village peasant and shoved in Rafael Guillén’s mouth.
She said she told him it would make him into a worldwide star to rival Che Guevara, if he was seen to be smoking a peasant’s pipe. Then she told me she renamed him Subcomandante Marcos. It all sounds highly unlikely but it made a
good story and maybe I will take elements of it and use it in my novel.
Tracey Tracey was quite keen on this idea, but then asked if I would write it so readers would think she had had a romantic liaison with this man on a horse with a pipe in his mouth.
Then Tracey Tracey got me out on my Brough, made me wear my Halcyon goggles and white silk scarf, and then from nowhere she produced a large Havana cigar that she had me chew on for the photograph. I have to admit it made me feel very special, and I look forward to seeing the photographs when they are developed. She promised she would post me a couple of prints.
And that was that. She was off on her Kawasaki, or was it a Suzuki?
Yours,
Roberta
Postscript: she left me the cigar. I might just smoke it this evening down at the bar, while wearing my white silk scarf.
Jura
30 April 1984
Dear Diary,
I have decided to get a new literary agent.
I have just driven all the way down to the hotel again to send and receive faxes from Dog ‘Face’ Ledger. There was one from him. I was hoping it was going to contain encouragement, along with a few gentle words of advice.
But no!
He is telling me in no uncertain terms I have to remove all of the characters I have ‘ripped off’ (his words) from the manuscript he got from some young would-be hopeful. It was called The Philosopher’s Gate. He had posted me a copy of this manuscript, as he wanted me to have a look at it to see what I thought. I read it, and was taken in by it, but it was rubbish. No legitimate publisher would be interested in it. But …
But there was something about it.