Northern Soul

My first real boyfriend was called Ricky. He was short, about 5'7" -
back then I had no problem with short men. He had the most exquisite
green eyes, with great long silky lashes, a badly set previously broken
nose and a big mouth.

At 16, a year or so older than me, he arrived at my small town
secondary school from a bigger comprehensive in London, and came
straight into our year. As far as I can remember, Ricky didn't actually
do anything concrete to deserve the reputation he immediately got,
though he did wear a leather jacket and some top of the range polyvelt
shoes.

Looking back, the report from his previous school obviously told the
teachers at this one, far more than he told us and the slight
nervousness that the teachers seemed to have around him kind of
filtered down to a bunch of kids, who hoping to achieve the same, stuck
by Ricky, as if cool could be achieved by a form of osmosis.

Previously, Andy John and Robbo had been top dogs, but Ricky moved
effortlessly in and overtook them, with his habits of bunking off
school, smoking and hanging around the Swiss Roll Caf?. At lunchtimes
and after school, we'd all troop off down there. You could spin a
coffee out for hours, and the bloke who owned it would sell fags for 5p
each.

My best friend Rachel and I stopped going to Lizzie's at break times
for egg sandwiches and a quick fag, and soon joined Ricky's crowd -the
smell of rain soaked leather and Benson and Hedges cigarettes can still
take me straight back to those days.

I remember him saying one lunchtime to a rapt crowd of hanger ons
that his mum had bought him a Pontiac back from America, and until he
was old enough to drive it, his friend was looking after it. Yeah, I
know what you're thinking, forgive me -  I was only 15.

His northern soul dancing at youth club discos was a revelation for
us small towners. He'd bring in these 7" trojan singles and stick them
on the record player, and dance. He then started organising trips to
all-nighters... he took us from youth club ping pong tornaments with
snog breaks at the  back of the the dilapidated netball
court, to speed fuelled all nighters at Wigan Casino.

Ricky vanished halfway through the fifth year, and Andy told
me that he had gone to HM Glen Parva, borstal. A few weeks later
someone knocked on the door in my English class at school, and handed a
letter to my teacher, who passed it onto me with a disapproving
look.

Over the next few months the heavy white and blue speckled envelopes
with drawings of hearts and dragons became familiar to me, as Ricky
expressed his love. For me! The letters with their HM postmark
always came to school, I suppose at first this was because he didn't
know my parents address, and later because he didn't want me to get
into trouble with them. I rapidly became the new star of the
fifth form. Ricky's girl. 

Years later, I see how prison can make men long for stability and a
sense of loving and being loved. It didn't seem odd at the time, 
but it should have. We hardly knew each other.

After he came out of Borstal and returned home, we started a
relationship. This mainly went along the lines of Ricky asking me to
sleep with him, and me refusing. My family moved house at this time,
from a small semi on a council estate, to a big semi in a nice part of
town. It was so cold in there; my parents just scraping enough to pay
the mortgage had no money for fancy stuff like double-glazing or
central heating. Through the back of the very small kitchen was a
utility room with a huge boiler. The previous people had left a twangy
clothes line strung over it, and mum used it to dry all the towels and
blankets. One day dad knocked down the adjoining walls, and there the
boiler stood for a year, in the middle of the kitchen 'til they had
enough money to get a new one installed in a cupboard. The cat used to
shit on the shovel left by the side of it overnight, enraging my mum
and making me laugh.

Ricky lived with his alcoholic mother who had returned from wherever
it was she'd been, at the other end of town. He was older now, but the
Pontiac firebird never made an appearance of course. Instead, a
burgundy Morris Marina stood outside their bungalow, waiting for him to
pass his test.

Meanwhile he bombed around on a noisy little white and silver
Kawasaki 50cc, up and down. Once, a policeman stopped him when I was on
the back. When questioned about his license, Ricky told the officer
that he was taking me home because my period pains were so bad I
couldn't walk. The conversation makes me cringe to this day. It was
typical of Ricky, in that he would farm out blame wherever he
could.

Ricky's mum fell pregnant after we'd been together about eight
months. I'd watched him ranting around the bungalow searching for
bottles of alcohol loads of times. I felt thrilled once, as he stood at
an open window, leaning out backwards and smashing a bottle his
mum swore contained strawberry milk on the wall beneath
it. She stood in the doorway, tears pouring down her face, begging him
to stop. The stench of strawberry and sherry was vile.

When her baby came, it was dark skinned. It seemed that shortly
after Ricky's step dad left (to move in with our school secretary), his
mum had slept in a drunken stupor with a local Pakistani guy that used
to ride round the seafront on his bike, shouting randomly at people.
Ricky didn't say anything to me about this. She called the baby a weird
name, a mixture of both Ricky's and mine. She hoped for more I think,
but the baby went for adoption. His six-year-old twin siblings were
already living at their fathers. He hadn't wanted Ricky, had never
wanted Ricky, he threw him down the stairs regularly from the age of
about two.

Mum and dad feared for me, and disapproved with quiet reluctance of
my boyfriend. His mum went into hospital, and my mum made up the spare
room for him. They were good people, my parents. Ricky moved
in. A probation officer used to come round every week, sit in the front
room and spray biscuits as he blew out "must do better, stay out of
trouble " words at Ricky in front of my embarrassed parents. Of course
they felt sorry for Ricky, and wanted him under their own roof where
they could keep an eye on us both. I see that now.

One day, I opened a drawer in Ricky's room that was stuffed with ?20
pounds, all screwed up and boinging everywhere. I showed my
friend.  "Where's it all from?" asked Rachel, goggle-eyed. I
shrugged, and took ?40 for us to go shopping with. Ricky told me later
that he'd won on a horse at Ladbrokes. The horse was called "Lucky
Penny" - except of course, there was no horse, no bet and no winnings.
There were a lot of chalet thefts at Butlins that year.

He paid for a lot, but never gave anything to mum. I think he
probably stole a ring of hers that dad had bought her at a bazaar in a
heady 1966 Istanbul though - she cried a lot about that. I still wasn't
sleeping with Ricky, though I thought I loved him, the thought of sex
scared me half to death.

He was almost 18 by now, and of course sleeping with half the town
when he wasn't thieving off them. He would creep into my bedroom when I
was at school and go through my things, drawing moustaches and blacking
out teeth on posters of James Dean and Adam Ant, which although comical
now was infuriating at the time.

I did eventually sleep with him, as he wore me down, going on and on
about it. All the clich?d old arguments,  "If you really loved me
you would", " I will leave you if you don't. Surely you can't
expect me to stay with someone who doesn't show me love?" persuaded me.
I'd die laughing at anyone that said those things now, but at the time
they seemed like valid points he was making.

His mum still in hospital and his house all closed up, the deed was
done in a spare room at home. Still no money for decoration, I stared
up at the remaining polystyrene tiles that hadn't peeled away from the
ceiling yet and just waited. Messy, painful, and the day after, a girl
called Anna knocked on my door and said that she was pregnant by
him.

Dad to asked him to leave. Mum helped throw his bags out.