Half Plus Seven (22 page)

‘So can anyone tell me what the initials PR stand for?'

A kid at the back of the room shouted, ‘Paedo ROCK ON!' I suppose I'd asked for that. Expecting above board audience participation from a room full of testosterone-tripped teens was a bridge too far. This was going to be a long twenty minutes.

Flashback.

The last time I was stood on this very stage I was drunker than I was right now. Thirteen years ago to the month. It was National Poetry Day and for homework Mr Warhurst had made the whole year learn a complete poem of our choosing off pat. In assembly that morning five names were to be called at random to recite the verse to the rest of the kids. Mother Superior was poised to punish anyone called up who was unable to pull a sonnet from up their sleeve. After the fashion to which you've no doubt become accustomed, I forgot. I'd spent the previous evening trying to spy on our new neighbours through my bedroom curtains. They looked like randy buggers (my dad had said as much) and if I could catch a glimpse of them at it then, by proxy, I'd have had sex. An early pre-cursor there to the sound reasoning that would come to characterise later life. In the toilets before we congregated in the hall, I'd had a nip of Stephen Norman's whisky (stolen from his dad who was clearly a tee-totaller or alcoholic judging by the poor choice of brand). I'd weighed up the odds – five out of two hundred made for… oh, fuck it. The whisky had gone to my head. Assembly started.

My name was called.

Shit. Shit.

The booze helped me from my seat and up the steps. I did what I'd do in hundreds of these situations in the future and thought on my feet. I'd copied a poem from a collection of love verse into a Valentine's card I'd sent in vain to Trisha earlier in the year. I called on all my reserves of memory to mumble through a few lines. If only I'd had a smell of the old foisty book. Despite my retarded recantation, I'd done enough to avoid a beating at the hands of a repressed virgin. Result.

‘Gaaaaaylord!' had come up an accusation from the floor. On reflection, perhaps we weren't all that different to the kids sat fidgeting in front of me now. It seemed reciting the Romantics was enough to invoke this frankly wide of the mark response from my poetryphobe peers. I don't know if you've ever been a teenager, but being called a ‘gaylord' in front of two hundred other kids kind of sticks. After my name was called for the register: ‘Gaylord!' Walking through the corridor en route to double maths, a punch in the arm and: ‘Gaylord!' Ordering a French bread pizza and chips from a dinner lady: ‘£2.60. Gaylord.' Scrabbling around for a role model's counsel, I went for the next best option and asked my dad.

‘If they bully you, hit them.' Sage words as ever from Father. I resolved that whoever next called me the name, I'd punch them there and then. The unwanted tag was already ruining my chances of convincing more girls to let me have sex with them. I'd practiced the punch in my bedroom mirror a hundred times over. Straight and true. I hadn't banked on the next person to be Brother Geoff, our broad-shouldered PE teacher. Men of the cloth shouldn't be throwing homosexual invective around, even less so when directed at defenceless boys. Well, I sure showed Brother Geoff who was defenceless. I was pulling on my mauve and gold school kit when it happened, stalling to stay in the changing rooms rather than go out in the cold and wet for cross-country. I hated cross-country. The rest of the boys were waiting impatiently, flicking goosepimpled legs and christening new running shoes.

‘Get a move on, gaylord, we haven't got all day,' he'd said. That was it. I'd made a promise. I punched Brother Geoff hard and direct in the family jewels. He'd gone down like a sack of mash. My gym kit clad colleagues had screamed with laughter and then cheered. This wasn't Dead Poet's Society, but if we'd have been the kind of school where kids got carried to glory on their contemporaries' shoulders, I'm certain I would have been held and hoisted. News of the David v Goliath clash spread like herpes around the school. No one troubled me again.

The rest of the talk rushed by in a blur of clichés, chuckles and eye contact with Christy. Let the little fuckers have their iPhones and tits on tap. Who was I to be bitter? They had the gadgets to get fucked. We had the economy to fuck. They had no hope of getting a job anyway.

‘Bill, you were great…'

‘William McDare, well I never…' I hated it when two people said hello at the same time. Where to look?

‘Christy, meet Mr Warhurst. Mr Warhurst meet Christy.' The voiceover to a no-hopers version of
This Is Your Life
played out in my head.

‘I'll always remember Bill, never sat at the back of the class, never sat at the front. He took a moderate interest in Shakespeare and showed a flair, if not a passion, for creative writing. To be honest, we never thought he'd amount to much. Most of the kids here, they never do.'

‘Well, look at you, Mr McDare. A model for our young people. A pillar of society.' I raised an eyebrow. Christy seemed proud of Warhurst's praise. He addressed her. ‘We didn't mark Bill down for great things but look at him now… a fancy Italian suit, a high falutin career, his own secretary no doubt… and a beautiful wife?'

Mr Warhurst's tone rose at the end of the sentence. Christy looked confused before her mouth broke into a smile of realisation, as sharp as a shiny pin stalking a brilliant red balloon.

‘Bill and I were forced to be buddies by our workplace and at first I wondered what they'd let me in for. He always stunk of booze and his knowledge of the office filing system was rudimentary at best. But we got on, he made me laugh and then things moved on… he threw up all over me. We got over that one. Now we're really close, we enjoy spending time together. He's like a big brother to me.'

POP.

‘Oh, wife? Me? God no, we're…'

‘Yes…' said Mr Warhust, as if waiting for an answer on iambic pentameter.

‘We're friends,' I said. ‘Just good friends.' Relief covered Christy.

‘Oh, I am sorry. Awfully presumptuous of me. Whisper it, but I think I've been around these bloody nuns too long. The opposite sex can't spend time together unless anointed before the Lord,' he said, then hushed, ‘and all that bollocks.' The bell rang and a hundred screaming, texting, jostling St Ignacians rushed past us into the freedom of the outdoors, off for chips, fags and fingering before physics. I looked at Christy but couldn't catch her eye.

Chapter 22

I'm not exactly sure when I first noticed that it was her. It could have been from the moment I first saw her, my soul accepting the lot of bumping against these insignificant others in the most singular of circumstances. It could have been when Christy was detailing her morning routine, my eye wandering and catching her figure, accepting her presence like a passer-by in
The Truman Show
, my mind trying to concentrate on a checklist of pre-work activities I hoped one day to be a part of. If it was neither of these times, it was almost certainly when her eye-etched hand grabbed the microphone and she cleared her throat while the assembled oddities clapped their last. It was The Mystic.

‘We need to stop thinking in terms of food miles and get switched onto food feet. We don't need to buy food grown on the other side of the world under artificial lights from huge supermarkets owned by faceless corporations. Our climate is perfect for raising our own crops. We can grow all manner of fruit and veg in this country – so why aren't we doing it? Well, you know what, we are going to do it: I propose we start a community garden. Food by the people, for the people. But it wouldn't only be the food we'd benefit from… think of the employment opportunities, the way it'd brighten up the neighbourhood, the way it'd create cohesion within our community. Climate change is happening, guys. Food prices are on the up and up and it's only going to get worse. This can give us food security and wean us off a fossil fuel-supported way of life. Growing food is a basic human instinct. If our forefathers didn't do it we wouldn't be here today. The apparent convenience of modern life has replaced need with nonchalance. It's time to take the soil back. Who's with me?'

Applause rippled around the small space. Who knew The Mystic was a crusty Churchillian? She had the room rapt. Granted, many of the twenty or so gathered in the narrow corridor upstairs in The Golden Fleece looked too stoned to protest much, but either way, she'd struck a chord with the discordant.

I'd been dragged along to a transition town meeting with Connie and Craig. I use dragged in the loosest context; I'd heard them talking about permaculture through the hole in the bathroom floor, slid downstairs and casually dropped in a passing interest in sustainability. Now, I know what you're thinking; did I fuck give a fuck about the planet and, to give you your dues, to a point you'd be bang on. But in fairness to myself, I don't drive a gas-guzzling twatmobile (granted, previously down to dangerous levels of intoxication) and I couldn't tell you the last time I flew long haul. But the real reasons why I was currently sat in a damp room with some annoying hippies were altruistic, if not environmental. Following my contribution to the recent Chinese cook-off, it was time to build some bridges with my housemates/de facto landlords. Now, I'm not suggesting I was the worst housemate in the world. I paid my rent on time and rarely, if ever, caused congestion around the cooking apparatus. Still, number 35 was hardly like the set of The Monkees so the time was right to stir some homely harmony, even if it did mean going to listen to a load of jobless wonders talk bollocks. Purely coincidentally, attendance at the meeting of the mead-drinking misfits offered the chance for a sexually non-threatening date with Christy.

‘She's right you know, Bill. The post-cheap oil era is an opportunity for us. Life can be better than this alienated consumer culture we've got now. We can rebuild the heart of communities and our relationships with each other, and while I'm at it, our relationships with our bloody selves. I mean, when did you last have some proper “you time,” Bill?'

‘Not in front of Christy, Craig…' It took him a while, but he got the joke. Eventually.

‘Very good, but I didn't mean that kind of me time. It's not a laugh, this, you know Bill. This is real. This is your children's future.'

‘I don't have any children…'

‘That you know of…' interrupted Christy, winking and nudging. Connie snorted.

‘Ahhhh…' I made the noise they make after the collective laughter at the end of
Scooby Doo
. The kind of noise where Fred actually meant ‘Yeah, that fairground operator sketch
was
funny, but let's get these credits fucking rolling so I can go and smoke a doobie and try to get to third base with Daphne.'

‘Anyway, Craig, you hate other people,' I said, reverting to the original conversational course.

‘No I don't!' His nostrils flared a little. He seemed upset by this accusation.

‘Okay, well if we're talking about community…' I racked my brains, ‘you hate our neighbours.'

‘I don't hate our neighbours.'

‘You say that, but you did try to poison their cat.'

‘It kept shitting in our garden, Bill.'

‘So…'

‘There have to be rules in the new society. There always have to be rules.' Connie moved uncomfortably in her chair. Christy attacked the potential awkwardness caused by Craig's admission of feline torture by saying the word everyone who's ever been in a pub wants those who've joined them to say:

‘Drinks?'

Craig's eyes lit up. Craig was an ale drinker, supping everything from Bishop's Boulderdash to Ferreter's Fancy with the pomp and ceremony of the wankiest of wine connoisseurs. The offer of a free round afforded him the opportunity to go off-piste without the risk of financial penalty, sampling the strangest of brews safe in the knowledge that if it turned out to be more Badger's Arsehole than Unicorn's Fancy, he was none the poorer. Hops expert though Craig might be, he was still a grade A fucking tightwad.

‘I'll come to the bar with you if that's okay? Wouldn't mind running my eye over the pump clips…'

‘Great!' said Christy, nervously enthusiastic. ‘Connie?'

‘Just a lime and soda for me please, mate.' Christy nodded a head-held shopping list nod and drew a tick in the air. This behaviour was very un-Christy like.

‘I'll have the same actually,' I said.

‘Have you two got a bottle of vodka stashed away?' said Craig, his bonhomie overflowing at the imminence of his paid-for pint.

‘No. No we haven't, Craig,' I said. I pitched my tone close to that of a patronising orderly in a retard's home.

‘Maybe we don't need alcohol to have a good time,' said Connie, joke-sneeringly.

‘Well, I'll check out if hell has frozen over out of the window but whatever,' he replied. ‘Come on you.' He grabbed Christy by the arm and dragged her the short way through the fleeces and dirty hair to the bar. We were having the kind of stilted banter you'd expect from a pair of cruising couples in the first half hour of date #1. We just didn't have the party snacks and poppers to break the ice.