Part One
JUNE
–
This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
The End of the World
The world would end on Thursday at five to four, immediately after the disco.
Until then, the nearest we’d come to such a cataclysm at Merton Grange were the rumours of apocalypse that took hold once or twice a term, the circumstances broadly the same each time. Nothing as banal as a solar flare or asteroid. Instead a tabloid would report a Mayan prophecy, some throwaway remark from Nostradamus or freak symmetry of the calendar, and word would spread that our faces were due to melt off halfway through Double Physics. Resigned to the hysteria, the teacher would sigh and pause the lesson while we squabbled over who had the most accurate watch, and the countdown would begin, the girls clinging to each other, eyes closed and shoulders hunched as if about to be doused with icy water, the boys brazening it out, all of us secretly contemplating the missed kiss, the unsettled score, our virginity, our friends’ faces, our parents. Four, three, two …
We’d hold our breath.
Then someone would shout ‘bang’ and we’d laugh, relieved and just a little disappointed to find ourselves alive, but alive in Double Physics. ‘Happy now? Let’s get back to work, shall we?’ and we’d return to what happens when a force of one Newton causes a body to move through a distance of one metre.
But on Thursday at three fifty-five, immediately after the disco, things would be different. Time had crawled through five long years and now in the final weeks, then days, an air of elation and panic, joy and fear began to take hold, along with a crazed nihilism. Letters home and detentions couldn’t touch us now, and what might we get away with in this world without consequences? In the corridors and common rooms, the fire extinguishers took on a terrible potential. Would Scott Parker really say those things to Mrs Ellis? Would Tony Stevens set fire to Humanities again?
And now, unbelievably, the final day was here, brilliant and bright and commencing with skirmishes at the gates; school ties worn as bandanas and tourniquets, in knots as compact as a walnut or fat as a fist, with enough lipstick and jewellery and dyed blue hair to resemble some futuristic nightclub scene. What were the teachers going to do, send us home? They sighed and waved us through. With no plausible reason to define an oxbow lake, the last week had been spent in desultory, dispiriting classes about something called ‘adult life’, which would, it seemed, consist largely of filling in forms and compiling a CV (‘Hobbies and Interests: Socialising, watching television’). We learnt how to balance a chequebook. We stared out of the window at the lovely day and thought, not long now. Four, three, two …
Back in our form room at break we began to graffiti our white school shirts with felt-tips and magic markers, kids hunched over each other’s backs like tattooists in a Russian jail, marking all available space with sentimental abuse. Take care of yourself, you dick, wrote Paul Fox. This shirt stinks, wrote Chris Lloyd. In lyrical mood, my best friend Martin Harper wrote mates4ever beneath a finely detailed cock and balls.
Harper and Fox and Lloyd. These were my best friends at the time, not just boys but the boys, and while some girls circled – Debbie Warwick and Becky Boyne and Sharon Findlay – the group was self-sufficient and impenetrable. Though none of us played an instrument, we’d imagined ourselves as a band. Harper, we all knew, was lead guitar and vocals. Fox was bass, a low and basic thump-thump-thump. Lloyd, because he proclaimed himself ‘mad’, was the drummer, which left me as …
‘Maracas,’ Lloyd had said and we’d laughed, and ‘maracas’ was added to the long list of nicknames. Fox drew them on my school shirt now, maracas crossed beneath a skull, like military insignia. Debbie Warwick, whose mum was an air hostess, had smuggled in a carrier bag full of miniatures in the chocolate-box flavours that we favoured, coffee and cream, mint and coconut, and we wrapped them in our fists and swigged and winced and spluttered as Mr Ambrose, feet up on the desk, kept his eyes fixed on the video of Free Willy 2 that played in the background, a special treat ignored by everyone.
The miniatures served as an aperitif to our very last school dinner. Memories still remained of the legendary food fight of ’94: the ketchup sachets exploded underfoot, breaded fish sent skimming through the air like ninja stars, jacket spuds lobbed like grenades. ‘Go on. I dare you,’ said Harper to Fox as he weighed a leathery sausage experimentally by its tip, but the teachers patrolled the aisles like prison guards and with the promise of brown sponge and brown custard to come, the dangerous moment passed.
In the leavers’ assembly, Mr Pascoe made the speech that we’d all expected, encouraging us to look to the future but remember the past, to aim high but weather the lows, to believe in ourselves but think of others. The important thing was not only what we’d learnt – and he hoped we’d learnt a great deal! – but also the kind of young adults we’d become, and we listened, young adults, stuck between cynicism and sentimentality, boisterous on the surface but secretly daunted and sad. We sneered and rolled our eyes but elsewhere in the hall hands gripped other hands and snuffles were heard as we were urged to cherish the friendships we’d made, the friendships that would last a lifetime.
‘A lifetime? Christ, I hope not,’ said Fox, locking my head beneath his arm, fondly rubbing his knuckles there. It was prize-giving time, and we sank low in our chairs. Prizes were awarded to the kids who always got the prizes, applause fading long before they’d left the stage to stand in front of the photographer from the local press, book tokens held beneath the chin as if in an ID parade. Next, led by Mr Solomon, Music, the Merton Grange School Swing Band clattered out to satisfy our craving for the American big-band sound with a cacophonous, lolloping rendition of Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’.
‘Why? Just why?’ said Lloyd.
‘To put us in the mood,’ said Fox.
‘What mood?’ I said.
‘In a Shitty Mood,’ said Lloyd.
‘“Fucked off” by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra,’ said Fox.
‘No wonder he crashed the plane,’ said Harper, and when the barrage came to an end, Fox and Lloyd and Harper leapt to their feet and cheered bravo, bravo. On-stage, Gordon Gilbert, looking quite deranged, held the bell of his trombone with both hands and sent it high, high into the air where it hung for a moment before crashing down onto the parquet and crumpling like tin, and while Mr Solomon screamed into Gordon’s face, we shuffled out to the disco.
But I realise how absent I am from the above. I remember the day well enough, but when I try to describe my role, I find myself reaching for what I saw and heard, rather than anything I said or did. As a student, my distinctive feature was a lack of distinction. ‘Charlie works hard to meet basic standards and for the most part achieves them’; this was as good as it got, and even that slight reputation had been dimmed by events of the exam season. Not admired but not despised, not adored but not feared; I was not a bully, though I knew a fair few, but did not intervene or place myself between the pack and the victim, because I wasn’t brave either. Our year at school was distinguished by a strong criminal element, bicycle thieves and shoplifters and arsonists, and while I steered clear of the scariest kids, neither was I befriended by the bright, obedient ones, those garlanded with book tokens. I neither conformed nor rebelled, collaborated nor resisted; I stayed out of trouble without getting into anything else. Comedy was our great currency and while I was not a class clown, neither was I witless. I might occasionally get a surprised laugh from the crowd but my best jokes were either drowned out by someone with a louder voice, or came far too late, so that even now, more than twenty years later, I think of things I should have said in ’96 or ’97. I knew that I was not ugly – someone would have told me – and was vaguely aware of whispers and giggles from huddles of girls, but what use was this to someone with no idea what to say? I’d inherited height, and only height, from my father, my eyes, nose, teeth and mouth from Mum – the right way round, said Dad – but I’d also inherited his tendency to stoop and round my shoulders in order to take up less space in the world. Some lucky quirk of glands and hormones meant that I’d been spared the pulsing spots and boils that literally scarred so many adolescences, and I was neither skinny with anxiety nor plump with the chips and canned drinks that fuelled us, but I wasn’t confident about my appearance. I wasn’t confident about anything at all.