Novella

ONE

It’s early evening in the first-class lounge at JFK. My fellow flyers are tapping at laptops, poking at PDAs or immersed in housebrick-sized special edition paperbacks. I get occasional glances, but know how to glare them away.
Most people dislike the sterile aridity of airports, but I don’t. There’s nothing to intrude on your thoughts, nothing human to invade them. Everything looks designed by a robot who’s never interfaced with a real person.
The waitress arrives with my fourth vodka and the ghost of a disapproving expression. I tip her, she smiles for a nanosecond and clicks her high heels back to the bar, her gym-toned calves standing out.
I wonder again why I am going back. I haven’t had any contact with anyone from those days, then, out of nowhere, an invitation. I’m about to be shot faster than a bullet from Brooklyn Heights in a warm April to where? To a windy, drizzly Northern England suburban sprawl, an unregenerated, resolutely unfashionable city. And to what, exactly?
I get out the photos. Age 17, as the aged magician Prospero in “The Tempest”. Addressing the audience near the end. This rough magic I here abjure. Silence from the audience packed into the school hall. I have complete power over them, wielding my and Prospero’s magic, commanding spirits, and I know I want to do this for ever.
The flight is called and the vodka goes down in one. I’m still on the side of drunk when you are thinking better, or at least you think you are. Feeling good and numb.

How did they find me?
Stupid question, all they had to do was look me up on the web, find my agent. Who fastidiously keeps away all unauthorised people who try to contact me. Whoever got in touch must have been pretty persuasive to get him to pass on the details, the invitation.
Go on, Josh said, do it. We were in his office at the end of a beautiful warm Friday.
No publicity, I said. His face fell a bit then. This is a private thing, I said. What isn’t private with you pal, he said, smiling again. You make Garbo look like Zsa Zsa Gafuckingbor.
And that, I said, is just how I fucking well like it, as you know. But I took the details anyway. He grinned, poured us Jack from the bottle in his desk (who the hell still keeps a bottle in his desk?).
“So”, he said. “Tell me all about your first time. God, I can just see you in your school play. Hey, you bang Desdemona?”
“Wrong play, you ignorant fuck”, I told him. He knew that, of course. English Lit at Princeton.
“It was Miranda”, I said. “And she was sixteen. I know that’s your preferred age, but – “
He flipped me the finger and then poured us another. We drank it, then decided it was going down really well, so out we went to the Point, a new bar in the Lower East Side near the Indian restaurants (the smell and the taste of home). We propped elbows against the counter and ordered a beer and a Jack each.
“So?”
“So what?”
“So”, he said. You didn’t say whether you had your way with Ophelia, back in the day.
“Up your bum”, I said.
“Nice. That must be the sophisticated English wit I hear about. You guys and your bums and your toilets – that must be some very weird potty training your nannies give you.”
I said nothing and just looked at him with what I hoped was an expressionless face.

Josh Daniel Salinger, 41, a couple of months younger than me, took a pull on his Bud as if he did it for a living. Thick-set, piggy eyes, a bald patch starting and an address book full of women. My agent and ever-reliable drinking buddy. He got me my first job, taking me from about as far off-off Broadway as it’s possible to get while staying on the mainland, to something approaching fame and, if not fortune, at least comfort – thanks to some nice English-accented slick villain parts in shit action flicks, back when they were making money.
And now, I was back doing way-off-Broadway, much to Josh’s feigned anguish and secret pride.
We got another round.
“So what was she like”, he asked.
“Why are you so interested in my adolescent love life?”
“Oho!” he laughed, and continued in his favourite David Niven clipped English accent: “So there was an affair!”
I drank my whiskey. It felt good all the way down to my rapidly warming liver.
“OK, “he said, “I was intrigued. ‘Cos she’s the one who kept calling me. I told her, I said I don’t put fans in touch, or old friends, or anybody, but she kept at it and I finally gave in to get her the hell off my back.”
“She contacted you?”
“Oh, did I not mention that before?”
“No. A cynic might suggest that you were saving this little piece of information for an apposite moment.”
“Oh a cynic might, might he?” Josh said, after taking back most of his Jack.
“I thought the invitation had come from the school – from Richard Avridge.”
“It did – but after I sent it back with a polite refusal, as per His Highness’s instructions, this Jenny gets on the damn phone and doesn’t get off it until I agree to persuade you to do it. Which brings us right up to…thirty three minutes ago in my office.”
“Jenny Schofield.”
“Un-huh,” he said, shaking his head and swallowing a mouthful of Bud.
“You said – “
“Young.”
“What?
“Young. Jenny Young. But she said she was in your cast, and played Miranda.”
Young. So they had got married.

I’m sweating a little as I board the plane and turn left inside the cabin door. The flight attendant’s eyes show a momentary flash of recognition, but he’s trained not to gawp, and anyway I’m hardly gawp material – more “I’m sure I saw him in something”.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been lightening Josh’s pocket by doing theatre, from big shows to little shows, but all for little money. I’m known for it now. One of the British broadsheet newspapers came out six months ago and did a piece for their arts magazine. They called me the Reluctant Star, focusing on my perverse eschewal of Hollywood roles just when things were starting to take off. I let publications do the occasional interview with me, always asking the same question: why? They never got much by way of answer. They used words like ‘taciturn’, or alternatively ‘tight-lipped’ if it was a middle market piece.
The British journalist was one of the thirtysomething female clones who adorn the glossy sections and op-eds, with their “attractive but attainable if you play your cards right” headshots taken five years ago. She was nice enough in the flesh, a great deal of which she was flashing in the hope of getting me to talk. I did talk, a lot, in a hotel lobby in LA over several pitchers of margaritas, by the end of which she was slurring slightly and I’d said nothing at all. It’s an art. She tottered off to her hotel room – having first invited me there and made do with planting a big, and, I have to say, quite nice, wet kiss on my mouth – and that was the last I saw of her until the headshot cropped up in my clippings, presiding coquettishly over an article that called me a cold fish and made some pointed references to a “Spacey-esque reticence about his private life.” I sent her some flowers and a note suggesting she change the headshot, as she was getting more attractive as she got older.

The sun’s starting to set as we take off, and I regretfully watch the gently gleaming Manhattan icons edge out of view, replaced by the darkening sea. I turn my attention to the bottle of champagne at my right elbow and the interactive entertainment system at my left. About forty-five minutes to dinner. I click on The Dark Side of the Moon. The trippy, ‘wow-man’ synths make me smile, and as Dave Gilmour sings ‘And then one day you find/Ten years have got behind you’ I close my eyes and think of Floyd, Purple, Sabbath, Yes…
*

“Total and utter shit.”
“It’s not!” I said.
“Yes it is,” said Michael Young.
“No it isn’t!.”
“Pretentious twaddle.”
“It’s a masterpiece.”
Michael Young and I were sitting halfway down the huge, long, high, grassy bank that separated the school buildings from the expanse of playing fields below. A few others were with us, enjoying the last of the lunch break before English Lit. It was September 1977, the first day of the first week of the first term of our final year. Sitting between us was a portable cassette player on which the latest album by Yes had just finished playing. I’d bought the album, Young had supplied the tape player. The girls had commandeered the music centre in the sixth form common room, where no doubt the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was now playing. We’d decided to go outside, play progressive rock, enjoy what was left of the good weather.
Our school was a large, new-ish comprehensive that was starting to age prematurely. It loomed over the big grassy bank as if it were staring balefully down at the football, rugby and hockey pitch many yards below us. To the right of the pitches, at the edge of the school grounds, was an athletics area, and then, on the other side of the right boundary fence, the local park sloped steadily up into the distance. Far over to our left, a scrubby area of long grass and stunted bushes lay outside the school grounds, and separated them from my old junior school, which had once seemed so big and now, from where we sat, looked like a discarded toy. In front of us, byond the fields, another great hill rose in front of us in the distance, this one covered with a low-rise housing estate whose black and white 1960s concrete buildings led the first residents to dub it the Badger. The name had stuck and become official. The view, up, down and across the playing field valley, had been familiar for nearly half our lives.
“And what sort of title is that anyway – Going for the One?” sneered Young. “What’s it mean?”
He was a recent convert to punk, like most of my school acquaintances. The inky music papers were now saying all the bands I liked were BOFs (Boring Old Farts) and they were writing about brutal music I didn’t understand and didn’t want to.
“It’s about how people try too hard to achieve things, then find out they still aren’t happy”, I said, but no-one was listening. Young flipped Yes out of the cassette player, chucked the tape towards me, stuck another one in, and pressed Play. ‘Looking After Number One’ by the Boomtown Rats started up.
“Oh Jesus”, I said, putting my cassette carefully back into its plastic case and in my pocket. “Cacophonous crap.”
“You hear them on John Peel, Mike?” said a voice behind us. I turned round. Peter Lawson was stretched out on his back with his eyes closed. It was the first time I’d heard him talk in the whole break.
“Don’t get me started on that git”, I said. “That scouse accent’s fake, you know; he went to Shrewsbury School and thinks he’s down with the kids just cos he plays that unlistenable shite at midnight when no-one’s around to hear it except for pissed-up punks just back home from gigs spent gobbing at groups called The Wankers, or The Turds, or - .”
“He’s off,” said Luck and Young in unison.
“Will you shut up?” came another voice, from behind an NME a few yards away. “You’re an anachronism, John.”
Francis Danforth was a year below us, but thought he was too cool for his contemporaries, so hung around with us. I ignored him. He wasn’t one of us, but the other two were showing signs of starting to like him.
“Now THIS is shit”, I said, gesturing at the cassette player. “Bob Jerk-off and the Boomtown Twats. Ten years from now, no-one’ll remember he ever existed.”
“You’re all very boring,” said Francis, and he rose, carefully brushed loose grass from his trouser legs, and sloped off as languidly as anyone could manage when ascending a steep grassy bank.
“How long have we got left?” said Young, to no-one in particular.
Law sat up, and pressed the button on his new LED watch. He had to shield the face from the sun to see the time. “Ten minutes”
“Oh, enough for eight more punk-rock tracks then”, I said.
“Or half a Yes track”, Young said. I thought about telling him to piss off, but was getting tired of the conversation, sensing, not for the first time, that my schoolfellows’ changing musical taste, execrable as I was convinced it was, meant that they were moving on, or at least away, and I was staying behind. They could all get into pubs; I was too small and looked too young, so stayed at home. They were all going to gigs at grubby crowded little clubs I hated the sound of when they went on and on about them the next morning. After the seven years we’d spent arguing, fighting, playing and growing up since we’d been thrown together in the First Year, we’d become used to each other. But I wondered, sitting on the bank that day waiting for the bell, how long it would be before that wasn’t enough. University was coming, a mysterious, enchanting, undiscovered and slightly scary world, and the school year had begun with an ominous sense of an ending. I wanted something to happen to bring us together one last time before it was all over
The five-minute bell rang. We raced each other up to the top of the bank, and to the common room, as if we were fourteen. By the time we got there, we were laughing and sweaty and I could feel my heartbeat.
*
There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact, it’s all dark.
My pulse is too fast. The night’s closing in and through the aircraft window I can’t see the ground.
My mouth’s dry and my bladder’s about to burst. I struggle free of the seatbelt and hope no-one’s hogging the toilets.
I sit down to pee, not trusting my aim, and at the same time wipe my face with a towelette. I get up and inspect the damage in the mirror. Nobody looks good in an aircraft toilet mirror, not even in first class, but I look very bad. I clean my teeth with the little travel kit they give you, but the brush is too soft and I still have a mouthful of fur, only now it’s minty fur.
After a couple of minutes I feel ready to re-emerge into the cabin, where they’re about to serve dinner. I go for the lamb and some Pinot Noir. And a litre bottle of water which I drain half of in one go. I can feel post-binge anxiety starting to wrap its tentacles round my chest, but there’s valium in my pocket if it gets really bad. While I wait for the food I look at the video screen, which tells me we’re over Newfoundland with a good tailwind. I switch on the news. The British politicians seem to have stopped wearing ties. A football club’s been bought by someone who looks like an Eastern European gangster. The club manager’s position is safe apparently.
Should you really chase so hard? The truth of sport plays rings around you, Going for the One.
*
“You seen her?” I ask.
We’re walking across the large playground that separates the new buildings, where our sixth-form block is housed, from the old, where we’re about to meet our new English Lit teacher.
“Lawson reckons she’s alright,” says Young in his most leering tone.
“He’s not exactly discriminating is he”, I said.
“Whereas you are so discriminating that you don’t get any even though there’s someone who fancies the arse off you.”
Before I could register surprise or protest, Young drank the last of his coke and belched loudly.
“Vulgarian,” I said, then took a huge swig of my coke and belched louder.
“Hypocrite,” he said.
“Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable! Mon frere!” I shouted at him.
“Sod you and your Waste Land. More pretentious twaddle. Jon Anderson’s probably read it.”
“Just cos you don’t understand it,” I said.
“Nobody fucking well understands it,” said Young. “That’s the point.”
“I understand it,” I said.
“Yes, well you would.”
Yes, I certainly would, I thought.
I stopped suddenly, looking at the empty can.
“ ‘Please dispose of this can thoughtfully,’” I read aloud. We studied our cans intently, put pensive fingers to our lips, and tossed the cans over our shoulders, laughing. A couple of paces later a stentorian, vaguely female, voice stopped us.
“What do you think you’re up to?”
Mrs Nicholson, the housecraft teacher. Or domestic science as the school now called it but we still, to her extreme annoyance, called it housecraft. She was middle-aged, with big square glasses that went badly with her big round face and aggressive perm. She had her big arms crossed round her bosom, and they just about overlapped. Her legs were oddly thin, so standing there, she looked like a huge fat sparrow. She wore her customary bile-green cardigan and malevolent expression, which was at present trained on us as if we were a couple of unfortunate earthworms.
“How old are you two?”
After a pause Young said: “We assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
I sighed silently. We could be in for a session. She was one of our sixth-form general tutors, which meant she didn’t teach us but was supposed to have us in her pastoral care for the two years. This in effect meant that she paid random visits to the common room in free periods to make sure we weren’t playing table-tennis, which we usually were.
“Very clever. But clearly you’re not clever enough to set a good example to the younger children.”
I motioned to her over her shoulder.
“Don’t interrupt,” she barked. “You two really think a lot of yourselves don’t you? I’m told you’re both very impressive, but I’m not impressed at all, because to me you’re just a pair of silly little – WHAT?”
I pointed over her shoulder to where two fourth-years, who were bigger than either me or Young, were kicking the shit out of each other, watched by an increasingly interested crowd.
“I think a couple of the younger children need your attention, Miss,” I said.
She grimaced at us, turned and bore down on the miscreants, passing Peter Law on the way.
“What have you been doing to upset the delightful Miss Cowbag?” he asked us as we neared the old buildings (which were still quite modern, but the concrete was more crumbly).
“Existing,” I said.
“So you’ve seen her then,” said Young, after a pause.
“Oh yes,” said Law. “She was talking to Avridge this morning in the corridor outside the staffroom.”
We had reached Room 11 and Young and I peered in through the single narrow door window. The sole occupant of the room was a woman with long brown hair and a girlish face, a tight white top and a short brown skirt. She was sitting on the teacher’s desk with her legs crossed, reading. Her right shoe was half off and dangling from her toes.
“Fuck me,” Young whispered.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Told you,” said Lawson.
“Are you three idiots going in or not?” came a sharp voice behind us.
“Oh, after you Jenny,” said Young, with an exaggerated gesture of chivalry. Tutting like a Geiger counter over a deposit of uranium, Jenny pushed in past him, and we followed. I felt someone poke me in the back.
“Get a move on mate, we’ve got learning to do,” said Helen Smith, smiling at me. I half-smiled back, and went to join Young, who had placed himself in a strategic front-row seat.
The woman at the front of the class put the book down (it was Yeats, I noticed). She surveyed the class as if she were studying a restaurant menu, licked her lips and said:
“Right, you’re all here. Let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Christine Hobson and I’ll be with you this year doing Shakespeare and Eliot.”
*
Dinner’s over, and they’re putting us to bed. I can’t sleep, despite the booze. I fiddle with the sound system again. A bit of vintage Elton, before the lost years of drink and coke between 1976 and 2001. Oh teacher, I need you/Like a little child/You got something in you/To drive a schoolboy wild…
*
“You two are pathetic,” said Jenny as we left the room, adding a little more quietly: “And she’s a tart.”
“Oh beware, my Lord, of jealousy,” said Young.
“Oh piss off,” said Jenny before signalling to Helen in the hope of them doing a synchronised flounce off down the corridor, but Helen lingered too long giggling with me and Young, so Jenny gave her long blonde hair an ostentatious toss and flounced alone.
Helen said she’d better go, and then she did. A good foot shorter than Jenny, she had short dark curly hair. They looked an odd couple but were seldom seen out of each other’s company at school.
“What have I done now to upset the fragrant Jenny?” said Young.
“Apart from staring at Hobson’s knickers for an hour?” I said.
“Well they were on show, I had to, it’s the rules.”
“What colour?” asked Lawson.
“White,” said Young.
“Bo-RING” said Lawson.
“With red flowery bits,” I added.
“That’s more like it, said Lawson.
We were interrupted by Mr Avridge, our other English teacher, bursting out of Room 13.
“Ha! Mr Law, Mr Young and Mr Darke. Just the men I need!”
“Oh yes, Sir?” said Young, smiling.
Ignoring him, Mr Avridge said: “Come with me if you’ve got a minute,” and swept us off down the corridor.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“You’re all going to be in the school play,” said Mr Avridge. “That’s what’s happening.”

TWO

I’m crying.
People are shouting at me.
I’m bad because I can’t do it right.
I scream to make them stop.
I keep screaming.
But they won’t stop.

I wake up sweating and shaking. We’re flying into the dawn. The sky’s going from indigo to blue and the clouds are starting to take shape far below. I can’t breathe properly, and I realise I’ve pulled my diaphragm so tight into my sternum I’m crushing my own chest. Time for the pills.

Josh followed me out of the Indian restaurant on East 6th Street. It was one of many, but it was our favourite because the manager made a fuss of us. My picture was on the wall.
“Drinking and curry,” slurred Josh as we walked. “What a heaven, what a paradise on earth is encapsulated in those three, simple little words.”
I hailed a cab on Second Avenue, and we slid into it.
“What next?” he said.
“Home,” I said, then braced myself for the wild protests. When Josh paused for breath I pleaded tomorrow’s matinee and he gave in after a couple more minutes.
“You still haven’t told me whether you boffed her.”
“And I’m not going to,” I said.
Silence, then:
“You know your fucking problem.”
“I have a feeling I am about to be enlightened as to its nature.”
“Apart from being a damn smartass, your problem is that you are shut down.”
I said nothing.
“Shut down, freeze-dried, vacuum-packed, fucking impenetrable,” he said, warming to his subject.
“I don’t like personal questions.”
“You don’t like anything, that’s your trouble. You are incapable of pleasure. You know what they call that?”
“Anhedonia,” I said.
“Damn right, smartass. Did you know that the original title of –
“Yes I did know that the original title of Annie Hall was Anhedonia.”
“Well that’s you.”
“And this matters to you why, exactly.”
The car pulled up. He looked at me and for a brief time his eyes stopped rolling. He said: “You are not an easy person to like.” He stumbled out and past the concierge of his apartment building with surprising speed and grace for such a big, and drunk, man.
We headed south for the bridge. I closed my eyes for a long time. Then I called Kim. She had just got home after a fancy formal dinner. I told her I missed her, and she told me to come over. We turned around, went back uptown and I got out at 81st and Amsterdam. I was walking more steadily than I had any right to, but when a tall thin blond man emerged from an apartment building with three tiny dogs on a leash I nearly trod on one of them.
“Watch yourself,” he hissed, before recognising me and wondering whether he should carry on giving me shit. I was in the building before he could decide.
The elevator dinged and I pulled the door open. Kim was there waiting.
“I saw you come in,” she said. “Shame you didn’t squish the pooch.”
“Next time,” I said, and we laughed and went inside.
She was wearing her short black cocktail dress, and smelled of perfume and the cigarettes I couldn’t get her to give up. I hugged her and breathed her in.
“Ooohh, you smell wonderful,” she said. “Indian food and beer breath, always a turn-on.” She went into the bathroom and came back out with a bottle of mouthwash, which she threw towards me before going to get changed into something less comfortable.
An hour or so later, we lay in the dark.
“There are so many reasons to go,” she said. “You should go. You can take me. I’ve never been to England”
“There are reasons not to go.”
She drew herself close to me.
“Oh, Jonathan,” she said softly. You’re ok now. Everything is ok now. Why don’t you believe me?” she said.
“I do.”
“I wish you did. I really do,” she said, and moved even closer.
An hour later, I said: “You know you’re the only person I trust, don’t you?”
“I wish I wasn’t, for your sake,” she said, and kissed me goodnight at the bedroom door.
I put the money on the silver tray on the sideboard before leaving.

*
“No way am I prancing about on a bloody stage,” said Young.
“What was that?” said Avridge.
“Sorry. No way am I prancing about on a bloody stage, Sir.”
“I have a feeling we’re not being given any choice,” said Law.
“Very perceptive,” said Avridge.
“I’m not doing it,” said Young.
“Yes you are,” said Avridge.
We were heading down the wide corridor running between the main school entrance and the hall, towards a notice board. While Young, Law and Avridge were arguing, I went to look at it. There was a new notice. Townley Comprehensive’s first ever school play. The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Produced by Richard Avridge. Directed by Christine Hobson. Auditions September 13th, 1977. Performances April 3rd to 7th, 1978. Actors and backstage people required. All ages and abilities welcome.
Two names on the sign-up list below.
J.Schofield.
H.Smith.
And now:
J.Darke.

THREE

The day of the auditions, I woke just after six. I’d been dreaming of Sally.
The room was cold, but I got out of bed anyway. I pulled back the curtain and rubbed condensation off the window. The sky was red over the factory backing onto the semi-detached houses on this side of the street. Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning, my grandmother said.
They were changing shifts, and every morning at this time I was woken by metal doors clanging open and van doors slamming shut. I hadn’t got used to it yet. Mrs Hopkinson had lived here for forty years and would be asleep for another hour and a half.
I opened the curtain fully to let the light in, and crawled back under the covers. I liked to lie here and wait for the day to start. A couple of flies, stirred into action by the daylight, danced around each other near the ceiling. I considered whacking them with my copy of ‘Sounds’ but it might wake Mrs Hopkinson and anyway I wanted to read it before getting squashed fly gunk all over it.
I thought about the coming day. Economics first thing, then a session with our English teachers in preparation for the entrance exams. Young and I were sitting them in a couple of months’ time – Oxford for me, Cambridge for him.
Then, at lunchtime, the auditions.
The sounds of the quiet street stirring into life were familiar – the clicking of high heels on the pavement, the buses going past the end of the road, the rheumy cough of cars starting after a couple of tries, the dogs’ dawn chorus – but they still sounded strange from this side of the road. I missed our old house, across the street. I thought of our long back garden and that summer six years ago, in 1971, when Sally came.

*

Sally was a gift from a friend of my father’s – the only rich person we knew. He had a Rolls Royce; a new one, the Silver Shadow. I looked it up in my Ladybird Book of Motor Cars. I’d decided to call her Sally, after her mother, a black-and-tan dachshund. Sally was the youngest.
The day she came, we put her in the cardboard box my grandmother had made into a bed for her. She was so small my five-year-old sister could hold her in her hands. My sister was so excited we had to take the dog from her in case she dropped her. I was ten and trying to be mature about it all, but couldn’t keep my eyes off this little tadpole with legs. She was fragile and helpless, and my sister and I watched her exploring her new home, all day.
Our parents were still away, on the south coast. Our father was in hospital, having had a mild heart attack on our holiday, and my mother had stayed on the coast to be with him. We didn’t have a telephone, so my sister and I went to the callbox at the end of the street every day and phoned my mother at the guest house.
I’d read the book about dachshunds, that my grandmother had bought, and wondered how a dog like this, barely a foot long, could hunt anything, never mind badgers. But two weeks later, when my parents got home, my father looking grey Sally had doubled in size.
My father loved Sally. The doctors had given him some tablets and told him to make sure he went easy on the exercise and ate plenty of protein – cheese, milk, meat – easy on carbohydrates. They said try not to drink or smoke too much.
Less than a year later, at dawn on a beautiful mid-June day, Sally, by now fully grown, woke me at dawn with her furious barking as the ambulancemen came for my father, who had had another heart attack, much worse than the first. I hid under the bedclothes while they took him away, and didn’t emerge until I heard the chug of the taxi bringing my mother back from the hospital with the news that he was dead.
When I got downstairs my grandmother was saying ‘Why couldn’t it be me?’ over and over. They asked me if I wanted a day of school but it was orchestra practice so I said no. The radio was on. ‘Apeman’ by The Kinks. I liked that song. The chorus was simple enough for me and my sister to sing – I’m an apeman, I’m an ape-ape man, well I’m an apeman. I was sitting with Sally on my knee, and smiled, then cried. My mother tried to hug me but I stiffened and the Sally growled.
After the funeral, my grandmother’s sisters, aunties Nellie, Edith, Flo and Alberta, told me I was the man of the house now. I was thinking I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I was eleven.
The summer holidays came. I started to look forward to my first term at Townley Comprehensive. We spent a week with Aunty Edith, one of the who’d had all her teeth out at forty and decided not to get any new ones. She made chewing motions with her gums all day long, and my mother warned me and my sister not to remark on it. We didn’t, but spent the whole week in corners, imitating Edith, laughing till we felt sick.
We’d left Sally at a kennels and when we picked her up I could see that she had hardly eaten for the week, and was flea-ridden and thin. She looked at me accusingly for a week. My grandmother and I tended her back to health. That summer my mother took a second job in the pub down the road, and was there most nights. She seemed angry whenever we saw her.
Every day that summer holiday, my sister and I played with Sally in the back garden. We made up games. My sister’s favourite was Catch the Dog, which, my sister being only six, was simple. After failing to catch the dog, we’d sit exhausted on the swings until Sally trotted up demanding to be chased again. My favourite game was Land of the Giants. This was based on the new series that had just started on ITV, about a group of astronauts whose spaceship, the Spindrift, had gone through a timewarp and landed on a planet where everything was ten times normal size. Our game involved my matchbox cars and my sister’s dolls and toy ponies, being menaced by Sally the Giant Dog. Sally didn’t understand this game, and would bark and get mad, which made it more fun for me and my sister. We had to be careful though. I ended up having to have a tetanus injection after a particularly dramatic episode in which I attempted to divebomb the Giant Dog with a newly-glued Airfix plane.
When we were not playing with Sally that summer, I was teaching my sister to play the recorder. She was getting very good at it. My grandmother listened to us from the kitchen where she was cooking or cleaning. We worked our way through the School Recorder Book Volume One, and when we got onto any old traditional song my grandmother recognized, she’d come through from the kitchen and sing the words to it. My grandmother was looking after us now. My mother was in bed when we left for school and in the pub when we went to bed.
Suddenly it was September 1971, and with it a new uniform, a new bag, a new, massive, frightening, school, and a new series of UFO, the first live action programme from the makers of Thunderbirds. But this show was different - it was dark, mysterious and menacing. Spaceships were landing on Earth, but no-one knew why they were coming or what the occupants wanted.
One day a man came to pick up my mother to take her to work. He was a big, tall man with a deep voice. My grandmother said she didn’t like him. Neither did I. By Christmas that year they were married and I was no longer the man of the house.

Cut to August 1977.
My mother and stepfather had always wanted a pub – the career of choice for entrepreneur alcoholics. After their training and the relief management stints, the brewery had finally offered them a permanent place, but it was on the other side of the Pennines, in Liverpool, which to us was a semi-mythical place, conjuring images of football, fertile creativity and squalor.
I arrived home from school on the last day of term. They were celebrating, flushed with pride and beer, and told me we were moving in two weeks.
“I’m not going,” I said immediately.
“Don’t be bloody daft, of course you’re going,” my mother said.
“I’m not. I’ve got entrance exams in November and the teachers are helping me study for them this summer. I’m staying at Townley, and I’m not going.”
My stepfather, who could never live with the fact that I wasn’t scared of a man twice my size, accused me of being selfish.
“You think you can throw your weight about and mess up your mother’s plans, you can think again,” he said.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I have very little weight to throw about. And I’m not upsetting anyone’s plans. You go. I’m not going.”
“Emotional blackmail, that’s what this is,” he said.
“What telly programme did you get that phrase from?” I asked with a smile. “You certainly didn’t think of it for yourself, and I doubt it was on Little and Large.”
His face took on a more threatening look.
“Think you’re so fucking clever don’t you?” he said.
“I don’t think it, I know it. And as for being selfish, do you think any of us, other than you two, want to go and live in that shithole? They don’t.” I motioned towards my grandmother and sister, who’d sat quietly through all this, looking nervous. “But they’ve got to. I don’t have to, and I won’t.”
I maintained the expression of arrogant sullenness that I knew made him hate me.
“You’re coming and that’s it,” he said.
“I’m not. And anyway, think about it, you don’t want me there anyway, do you?”
My mother snarled: “You’re entitled to come, you’ve no choice.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘obliged’. And I have a choice. As for being obliged, what the hell makes you think I’m obliged to you, after you—”
“You snobby little bastard,” my stepfather opined. “You’re lucky you don’t get knocked through that fucking wall.”
My sister and grandmother were crying now.
“Well done,” I said to him. “You’ll do well in Liverpool.”
My mother looked at him, and they went upstairs. We could hear them talking. Finally, my mother went out and across the road to Mrs Hopkinson’s house. Half an hour later, she returned and told us what was happening.
And so it came about that in the first week of the first time of my final year of school, I was staying right across the road from our old house, with a neighbour I hardly knew.
I spoke to my grandmother and sister every day on the phone. The pub was indeed a dump, and the area wasn’t much better, but miraculously the school was good, although my sister was a year ahead of her class. When I talked to my grandmother I could hear her sniffling. She told me she was starting to forget things. I never spoke to my mother or stepfather at all. They sent money every week to Mrs Hopkinson.
They had Sally put down a week before they left for Liverpool. I had the job of clearing up her toys and food and water bowl and putting them in the dustbin, because my grandmother was too upset to do it.

The clock radio clicked and on came Radio 3’s Morning Concert, quietly, so as not to wake Mrs Hopkinson, who didn’t normally stir until half past. It was still early so I played Name the Composer. Eighteenth century, didn’t sound Austrian or German though, and not weird enough to be French baroque. That left English. William Boyce. I waited for the end, and the announcer intoned, in Received Pronunciation, that we’d just heard the Symphony No. 8 by William Boyce. It was going to be a good day.
I shuffled to the bathroom for what was only fourth or fifth shave. Young had bugged me about taking off the facial fluff about two weeks before, and since I’d done so I was still revelling in the novelty of this strange activity.
Freshly shaved and Splashed All Over with the Great Smell of Brut, I re-entered the bedroom and looked out of the window at our old house. By now, in the second week of term, I was beginning to relish the freedom, although I worried about my sister and grandmother. Mrs Hopkinson was a good cook and spoiled me wonderfully with great meals, served with a tiny hint of pity.
I could smell bacon and eggs downstairs. After a quick pee in her immaculate toilet (I was always terrified of missing the bowl) I went downstairs. At breakfast I was especially careful not to get grease on my new shirt.
I usually walked halfway to school and met Young and Lawson at the bus stop near their homes. They saw me coming, and we gave our familiar two-fingered greeting to each other as I approached. We all had plastic Revolution Records vinyl LP bags, along with the mandatory Adidas holdalls. We usually tried to get in to the common room a bit early to commandeer the turntable. The girls had taken to playing ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life over and over. We were ambivalent about Stevie Wonder, and were concerned that ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ might be signalling a long decline into schmaltz.
“What you got?” I asked Young.
He pulled Dr Feelgood’s Malpractice out of the Revolution Records bag. Hardly anyone knew about them and we felt we’d discovered them ourselves. Lawson had A Night on the Town by Rod Stewart. We were getting worried about him too – a bit too poppy, coming on like some sort of sex god, which, we reasoned, was only a natural thing to feel like if you were shagging Britt Ekland – but were confident 1978 would see him getting over all that and getting back to his roots. I had Who’s Next. The other two nodded approvingly. Heavy enough for the hippies, anarchic enough for the punks.
The bus came, and we raced upstairs. I got out my copy of The Tempest.
“What part did you decide to go for?” asked Young.
“Prospero,” I said. “You?”
“Caliban,” he said, in a suitably monstrous growl.
“Hope you get it,” I said. “We’d save time.”
“Why?”
“Well, you wouldn’t need any make-up,” I said.
“Fuck off.”
“You know, I think that’s exactly what Caliban says to Prospero in Act Two,” I said. “You’re learning the lines already.”

FOUR

As the senior pupils in the school, we got priority in the queue for the school canteen. Every day we would walk to the front, running the gauntlet of simmering, and often more than simmering, resentment on the part of the fifth-years lining up, hungry and frustrated.
After Economics, over fish fingers (double portion – no way was three enough), chips and mushy peas, we debated the important issues of the time: the loan from the IMF, the power of the trades unions, whether the electorate would ever really vote for a woman Prime Minister, and when punk rock started. Young maintained that it was a UK movement that rejected the bourgeois pretentiousness of the prevailing musical trends. Lawson argued that it started with the New York Dolls rejecting the manufactured west coast pop-rock of groups like The Eagles. I took a more holistic approach, suggesting that it began when Alice Cooper declared in 1970 that he was going to put a stake through the heart of the Love Generation. And that, with the notable exceptions of Alice Cooper and Talking Heads, it was all shit. Young said that Alice and Talking Heads weren’t punk anyway. I said that was bollocks but at least it would explain why they weren’t shit. Mrs Nicholson came to our table and told us to stop using foul language. And then it was time for the auditions.