Becoming Nancy

by Terry Ronald

  ‘So what else did he say?’ I yell at Frances, still pulling at her toggles.

  But now she’s shaking her head.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘His mum was there most of the time showing me the new vacuum cleaner she’d just bought, and it was only when she went out to fetch the tea that we had a chance to talk properly. The important thing, though, is that Maxie is all right, David, and he says he cares about you – so stop worrying. He’ll be back at school soon, I know he will.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I sigh, finally releasing Frances from my clutches. ‘Hamish did say Maxie would be coming back to do the props for the play, so I guess that’s something; but it’s not just Maxie, though, is it, Fran? Have you seen how the other kids are with me now since parents’ evening? They all know! The ones that don’t shout fucking names at me can’t bring themselves to look at me without sniggering. I walk around this place like a fucking ghost. I’m like Cathy at the tail end of Wuthering Heights.’

  Frances is rolling her eyes.

  ‘I just wish Hamish would hurry up and cast another bloody Bill Sikes,’ I tell her. ‘At least if I could get on with my bit in the sodding play it would take my mind off all this other shit.’

  ‘Your language is getting worse,’ Frances smiles.

  And then, quite suddenly, her face falls and freezes into a death mask of unequivocal odium.

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’ she mutters.

  So I spin my head around just in time to catch a glut of fourth-year boys headed towards us, tailgated by a grinning Bob Lord, who is merrily kicking a football along in front of him, and Mr Peacock, who looks utterly inappropriate in a bright-red Adidas tracksuit with a whistle hanging around his neck. The boys themselves just sail past us, but not without one of them, a spotty creature with an erratic bum-fluff moustache, shouting ‘Bender!’ at me as he does. Mr Lord, however, comes to a sharp halt as he reaches us, and he kicks the ball towards the centre of the pitch, the boys chasing it like puppies. Mr Peacock stops behind him, waving and winking at Frances and me.

  ‘Well, Mr Starr,’ Bob Lord smiles. ‘Are you happy now, son?’

  I look up at him, and Frances grabs my arm as if to stop me saying something I might fast regret.

  ‘Happy, sir?’ I say, mirroring his colourless grin. ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘I mean, Starr, that we now have a boy – young Maxie Boswell – missing his school and all his friends and his sports because of your selfishness,’ Mr Lord says.

  ‘Leave it, Bob,’ Mr Peacock interjects softly, but it falls on deaf ears.

  ‘We have a distraught mother and a broken-hearted father, and the reputation of another teacher on the line because of your antics, because you couldn’t keep your filthy hands to yourself. And now I don’t think he’ll be coming back to this school at all, despite what your Mr McClarnon seems to think – I did warn you, Starr.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Bob.’ Mr Peacock tries again. ‘David’s not to blame. Now let’s get on, shall we?’

  But Mr Lord completely ignores him and shakes his head, laughing quietly and smugly. I stand up, slow, to face him and Frances jumps up behind me, still holding my arm protectively.

  ‘You’re not a very nice man, are you, Mr Lord,’ I say.

  ‘Am I not?’ he says, still grinning. ‘I think you’ll find I just did what was for the best, Starr, despite what you and anyone else might imagine. It’s what Jesus would have done.’

  I smile and nod in agreement.

  ‘You might be right there, Mr Lord,’ I say, sweating slightly but trying desperately not to lose equanimity. ‘… but then look what happened to him.’

  And as Bob Lord’s face sours to an incensed scowl, Mr Peacock grits his teeth and closes his eyes as if he wishes he might disappear into thin air. Then he blows his whistle loudly to signal the start of the game. Frances and me head back across the field towards the school for our next lessons.

  On my way home that evening in the semi-dark, I stop outside the bistro that used to be David Greig’s. It’s open tonight and I can see the light from the crystal chandeliers bouncing off the emerald tiles.

  ‘You’d know what to do, Grandad,’ I say out loud.

  But would he? Grandad’s answer to almost any problem was to make a hot, sweet cup of tea and pop on a Kathy Kirby record, and I doubt that would help me now. I mean, how am I supposed to keep going back to school to face all this on my own, day after rotten day? Dreaming my way through lessons, dodging Jason and his mob as best I can and, on top of that, Mum and Dad hardly speaking to me when I get home. Even the musical seems ruined now that Maxie can’t be in it. It suddenly dawns on me, as I stare at the happy, laughing couples in the bistro, that I’m very, very tired. I need to sleep. I need to go home to bed and sleep. I shan’t even bother with Crossroads tonight.

  When I finally do get off to sleep, I can hear a helicopter, its blades spinning faster and faster, and now I can see it. Agnetha and Anni-Frid are standing beside it in their brilliant-white jumpsuits, beckoning to me with urgency. I have to get on, I’m thinking, I have to get on that helicopter – I can’t miss it. But hard as I try, and hard as I run, my bare feet slip and fail on the sodden grass and I don’t seem to be getting any closer.

  ‘Wait!’ I hear myself calling through the din of the engine, but they’re boarding it now, waving sadly at me and closing the door.

  ‘Can’t you wait? I’ve lost my clogs!’

  And then it lifts off the ground, swinging gracefully from side to side, then moving up higher … faster … higher. And then it’s gone. Shit.

  Twenty

  A Slow Fast Train

  November 1979

  It has not been an especially good day today. For a kick-off, advertising this train as a fast service is possibly one of the great overstatements of the twentieth century. It has lurched unceremoniously to a halt so many times between stations that I firmly believe I could have ridden a pogo stick up the A23, blindfolded, and arrived at my destination more rapidly than this. I also seem to be faced with a jarring fusion of life’s unfortunates in this cramped British Rail carriage; a microcosm of hell, one might imagine. An extremely overweight man opposite me is munching his way through his second box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, while his perilously thin female companion is peeling, and nibbling, Dairylea cheese triangles.

  ‘I’m full up!’ she announces for the second time in the last ten minutes. He, apparently, isn’t.

  To my left is a woman in the company of two of the worst-behaved and most putrid-smelling children I have ever had the misfortune to stumble upon.

  ‘I want my comic,’ screeches the snot-covered little boy.

  ‘You’re not ’avin’ your fuckin’ comic,’ says the mother, who is wearing a parka with the hood up.

  ‘I want my comic an’ all!’ squeals the little girl, who is porcine and wildly unruly.

  ‘You’re not ‘avin’ your fuckin’ comic,’ says the mother.

  I actually want to suggest to ‘mum’ that she fling these children from the train when it reaches top speed, but I shan’t. I also long to recommend that she extinguish her cigarette in this tiny space, before the filthy, matted, fake-fur fringe around her parka hood catches fire and we all go up like a blue light. But of course I don’t. Instead, I turn my attention to the ill-advised couture adorning the glaringly evident transsexual in the far corner of the carriage: a skirt in thigh-length puce, with bulky American tan tights and court shoes you could cruise the Med in. I soften slightly though when I consider that, like mine, her chosen path – particularly gender-wise – cannot have been easy with a jaw like Joe Frazier, so I give her a little smile to communicate some sense of kinship or solidarity. She thinks I’m taking the piss, though, and sneers at me maliciously.

  No, it is categorically not a good day today.

  I put my hand up to my eye and touch it gingerly – Christ, black eyes fucking hurt! I can still feel the ferocious welt on my lip too, taste the blood, and my sto
mach turns over. I hate violence, and I especially hate it when it’s directed at me. How dare he? How dare any of them?

  As it happens, I’m running away to Brighton – and why not? There seems to be little to nothing left for me back there in Chesterfield Street, or at the Dog Kennel Road Secondary Modern, or, indeed, at the Lordship Lane Working Men’s Club. My parents have all but betrayed me, I’m pretty much certain I’ve lost Maxie for good, and even Frances Bassey doesn’t want to know me any more after today, so it’s a done deal. My first port of call will be Hamish McClarnon’s flat in Hove. It’s like his weekend home, I suppose, and I know exactly where it is because he took Frances and me there once after a school trip, and we had brownies laced with hash and fell about laughing and listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson. He’s there now, actually, having taken a day off – backed up with marking – but I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to say to him once I get there. Can I be fearless enough, perhaps, to at last tell someone the truth about what happened last summer? After all, that has reared its ugly head again and led to my getting a good kicking. Could I possibly be brave enough to tell Hamish about what happened … today?

  The previous twelve hours’ events unravel in front of me like a lurid nightmare that did not, could not really have happened. My brain is flickering and blundering around each frightful episode in the day’s proceedings, unable to settle on or digest the machinations and consequences of any of them. It did happen though. Today did happen. And it happened like this.

  ‘I don’t want to go into school, Moira. How can I? How can I conceivably go in there again, day after hideous, wretched day, with everyone knowing and laughing at me or about me? The teachers, the headmaster and, worse, the other kids? None of them fucking want me there any more, so why should I keep going?’

  It was eight thirty on the morning of what was to be the worst day of my life, and Moira was wringing out a J-cloth at the kitchen sink and shaking her head.

  ‘You’re gonna ’ave to, love. You’re gonna ’ave to keep goin’ in, cos it’s school and you ’ave to go. You can’t hide in ’ere for the rest of your natural, can ya? Feelin’ sorry for yourself – upstairs, playin’ your LPs: your Abba and your Debbie Harry; sitting there surrounded by all your posters. Life’s not about that, love. It’s about … it’s about something else other than that, but you’ve got to go to school and keep on going. If someone’s got something to say, then let ’em say it. If someone kicks the shit out of you they’ll only do it once. Then they’ll get bored.’

  Moira attempted to smile benevolently, but her new short-cropped wig afforded her the look of an unyielding women’s prison guard.

  ‘Oh, great!’ I snorted, picking up my blazer and shoving my unfinished Weetabix across the table. ‘That’s really reassuring, Moira – ta very much! And where’s Chrissy? Even she doesn’t want to walk to school with me any more. She doesn’t want to be seen with me either.’

  Moira came over to the table and put a chubby hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Look, Dave, you’ve been at school for the last few days with everyone knowing and nothin’s ’appened yet, has it? You’ve just got to ride it out. Besides, you’ve got the musical to look forward to, ’aven’t ya? Surely you don’t want to let all that bloody ’ard graft go to waste, not to mention all that taffeta your mum used to make your frock.’

  ‘But I’m starting to think he’s not coming back, Moira,’ I said. ‘Maxie, I mean. I think his mum and dad might keep him away for good. And anyway, what use is doing the play without Maxie? And how can I go on stage as Nancy after what’s happened? They’ll shout things out at me … they’ll bloody crucify me!’

  ‘They bloody well won’t,’ she said, and she pulled me close, pressing her breasts up against me absurdly. ‘My dad gave me some very sound advice once regardin’ ignorant people shouting things at ya. He said to me, “Moira, if you don’t want people shouting things at ya, cover your tits up when you walk past the docks.”’

  And she winked and tickled me under the chin.

  ‘Why did he say that?’ I asked.

  ‘He was a pisshead,’ Moira said. ‘Now get to school with you, you fuckin’ drama queen.’

  As I reached the kitchen door I stopped in my tracks and turned slowly back. Moira had turned the radio up loud and was singing along to ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’.

  ‘Moira,’ I said, but she didn’t hear me, so I hollered over the din.

  ‘Moira!’

  ‘What now?’

  She swivelled round with a bottle of Squeezy, and looked irritated.

  ‘Haven’t you gone yet?’

  I looked her square in the face, and I put down my satchel.

  ‘Are you having an affair with Chrissy’s Squirrel?’ I asked. ‘Because if you are …’

  Moira’s almost instantaneous scarlet flush told me that I might have whacked the nail on the head.

  ‘Don’t be an arsehole!’ was her eventual retort. ‘What the fuck makes you think I’d wanna be messing around with a schoolboy? I like my men to be men, darlin’. Who’s been tellin’ you that, anyway?’

  ‘No one. But I’ve seen you and him all friendly, and so has Frances – she saw him in your bloody mini-van!’

  Moira silently put down the washing-up liquid, and then straightened her wig slightly in the mirror on the kitchen wall.

  ‘I got him some weed, if you must know,’ she all but spat.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yes, oh!’ Moira said – she was clearly furious. ‘Accusing me of all sorts before you know the sodding facts. You wanna sort out your own back alley before you start pokin’ around in mine, David Starr!’

  ‘I wasn’t accusing,’ I shouted in a very high pitched voice. ‘I was just asking, and now I know … then … that’s OK.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Moira laughed acerbically. ‘Well, thank you very much, David, I must say. And by the way, I’d like you to keep this quiet, please. I promised Squirrel that I wouldn’t tell Chrissy cos she don’t like ’im smokin’ the stuff, so if you don’t mind …’

  And she stormed back over to the sink, muttering to herself. ‘Havin’ an affair with Squirrel, for Christ’s sake!’

  I felt like shit.

  ‘Sorry, Moira,’ I mumbled.

  Then I gathered up my satchel and trundled off.

  I was just dragging myself past the Co-op on my way to school when my employer, Marty Duncombe, shouted at me from across the street.

  ‘Oy! Davey! Davey!’

  I wasn’t feeling much in the market for his brand of joviality, so I quickened my pace as I shouted back to him.

  ‘What, Marty? I’ve got to get to school … apparently.’

  Marty, however, not taking the hint, jogged over the main road towards me in grey track pants and a washed-out burgundy Lacoste shirt.

  ‘I’ve heard all about your troubles at school an’ that, mate. Sorry!’ he said, almost genuinely.

  ‘Everyone’s heard,’ I said with a fixed grin.

  ‘Your dad just needed someone to talk to, I guess,’ Marty smiled, popping a Rothman into his mouth and lighting up. ‘So he came to me. It can’t be easy for him.’

  ‘Can’t it?’

  I leaned back against the bus stop and Marty held out his cigarette to me, smirking. I snatched it, half laughing, and took a long drag, filling my lungs, and puffing out with a slight cough.

  ‘Didn’t know you smoked, Davey boy,’ Marty said, also leaning on the bus stop.

  ‘On the odd occasion I do,’ I said. ‘I might start full-time the way things are panning out lately. Right now though, Marty, I’ve got to get to school – I’m in enough shit as it is. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, eh?’

  I passed the cigarette back to him, and he smiled at me with something that for a moment I felt might be approaching compassion.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, straightening up and tossing his smoke, ‘I’ve got a bit of a favour to ask you, Davey. The fucking drayman has done his back, so I’ve
got a beer delivery to get down the cellar. You don’t fancy comin’ over the club and givin’ me a hand wiv it, do ya?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t wanna go to school anyway, did ya?’ he chuckled playfully. ‘Come on, mate, it’ll fucking kill me doin’ it on me own. It’ll take us twenty minutes, tops! And I’ll shout you a bacon roll after – how’s that sound?’

  I stared up at Marty’s rather daft, pleading simper. Fuck it, I thought, I didn’t have a lesson first period anyway.

  ‘I want extra for this,’ I said flatly.

  ‘You’ll get it,’ Marty said. ‘You’ll definitely get it.’

  ‘And,’ I added, suddenly blessed with a genius idea, ‘I need to use the office phone first.’

  Marty slapped me on the back, hard.

  ‘Done!’

  The club was empty when we got there but for a solitary cleaner who was mopping out the Gents, which was precisely as I’d hoped it would be. While Marty toddled off to converse with the semi-invalided drayman, I tore into the office and grabbed the telephone, dialling Maxie’s home number so fast I nearly broke my fucking finger. This was the best thing to do, I told myself. I’d call him at home from the club office where nobody could hear me, and finally get to speak to him properly: tell him how much I love him, tell him how terrible it all is without him, tell him …

  ‘Hello.’

  When Maxie answered the telephone – after thirteen and a half rings – his tone was dull and wintry.

  ‘Maxie, it’s David.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I’m so glad I finally got to speak to you, it’s been fucking awful this last week – bloody torture!’

  Maxie’s silence was unsettling.

  ‘Is somebody there: your mum?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, can you try and manage more than one syllable?’ I laughed. ‘I’ve been absolutely dying to talk to you. They’re all trying to stop us from seeing one another, you know, for ever. Your mum and dad, mine … all of them. Mr Lord has kicked up such a fucking fuss at school, the evil bastard. Apparently half the teachers in the staffroom aren’t even talking to him any more. It’s OK though, Maxie, I’m not going to let them fucking scare me off. You don’t have to worry about that.’