I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (17 page)

She sat in silence for the rest of the journey home, looking more and more dejected. The more I tried to control my laughter, the worse my giggles got and before long she had started to cry with embarrassment. I felt terrible for her, but her tears only made the whole thing seem funnier to me. By the time we got back to South London she'd stopped crying, but when I pulled into her street and stopped the car she ran inside without saying another word to me. I called her later and asked her if she'd come and meet me in the park, but she said I was an insensitive bastard and that she never wanted to see me again.

That night I went over to Albert's flat to return his car and he asked me how it had gone. I told him that it was all over between me and Viola. I told him about the urinary Catherine wheel and he laughed his head off with me about it, which cheered me up. He told me, ‘You need to find a girl with a good sense of humour. If you can't be yourself you'll never find the one. Stephen, let me give you some advice: love is like a lost fart. If you have to force it; it's probably shit.'

I'd lost my virginity and broken up with the love of my life in less than forty-eight hours but still, I thought to myself, it had been a pretty good weekend all told. I've never had another like it. To this day, I think that Viola overreacted. I thought she was being really harsh on me as, after all, I'd run to help her up. I couldn't help it if I found the whole thing amusing. Anyone would. I called her one more time that week, but she said that I shouldn't call her house any more. She swore me to secrecy over the whole urinary Catherine wheel incident, but then while we were having sex that night in Hastings she'd sworn that we'd be together for ever. So, Viola Kovach of Tooting High Street, here's to you.

A
TAXI DRIVER ASKED
me the other day, ‘Here. If your parents are Nigerian and you grew up in South London, how comes you talk so posh then?'

I just said, ‘Call me Miss Daisy and drive on!'

Another one of these national treasures said to me, ‘What did you do before you did comedy then?'

I said, ‘I studied law.'

‘Do you think you'd ever go back to it?'

‘Why would I?'

‘Because then you could help your people. A lot of the young black men get in trouble with the law.'

‘Lots of young black men like comedy as well,' I replied

But it does make you wonder about how differently things can turn out. When I was finishing school, I really did want to be a lawyer more than anything else, and how do I know if I wouldn't have been happier doing that? Sometimes I think it would be cool if there was some way to see how your life could have turned out if you'd just made a couple of decisions differently. Well, now you can: there's a computer game that people are playing online at the moment called ‘Second Life' and I met this woman that said you could live a whole new life in-game these days. She said that you can choose what you look like, what job you do, buy a house anywhere in the world, have pets, fight – you can even go dancing in clubs. I read about a couple who got married on ‘Second Life' and divorced without ever actually meeting. To me this seems like a world gone mad. I wonder if they ever electronically hooked up? It sounds risky to me. I wouldn't want to trust my bits to any kind of sexual computer plug-in because what if it developed a fault? For instance, I've got a printer attached to my computer at home and paper is always getting jammed inside. When that happens I either have to yank the paper out with surprising force or call in a computer repairman. I don't fancy doing that with my tool stuck in the spool.

Games have moved on since I was a kid but I've always loved them for the escapism they provide. I was around a bit before Nintendo and the Mega Drive, but what I did have was my Atari 2600 battery-powered breeze-block gaming system. It was loaded with three games and had a joystick as big as a baby's forearm. It didn't have good graphics; it wasn't in colour; and each set of massive square batteries only lasted about half an hour. In fact, my sister's Spirograph was probably more technologically advanced. I'd got it for my sixteenth birthday and my favourite game was ‘Space War!' and I was still hooked two years later. No, I'm not a slow learner! I'm sure games were more difficult back then. I tried playing my nephew's PlayStation 3 game ‘Little Big Planet' last year where you play a little ball of wool jumping about the place. Where's the jeopardy? Where are the spaceships? I ask you!

In ‘Space War!' You played a giant flying dinosaur, who went about swallowing spaceships. It was excellent and came second place only to ‘Donkey Kong', which was loaded onto the family computer upstairs. Naturally, we weren't allowed to use the family computer unless it was for educational purposes: homework only. I played it all the time though. The secret was not to get caught out – although I was often sprung by Mum.

‘What are you doing?' she would bellow. I would jump.

‘Is it a toy?' Silence.

‘Who allowed you to switch it on?' I was trying to think of a good answer.

‘Hmmm?' I was paralysed with fear.

‘Am I talking to myself like a mad person?'

‘You, Mr stuff and nonsense, you want to break it?'

Come to think of it, I wonder why Dad had even loaded a game onto the main computer at all? It was like he just wanted to taunt us with something in the house that was designed for fun but that we couldn't use. Well, that was my dad for you. This was the same man who kept the biscuits in a locked cupboard in the kitchen and if we begged him for a Rich Tea he'd maybe let us have one while shouting, ‘Just take one! There are twelve in there and I'll know if you have more!'

I remember playing ‘Space War!' during the summer just after I had finished my final A levels. I was in that weird time between your first life of education, school uniforms and sports days and the second life you'd have as a young man somewhere in the murky future. The coming A-level grades would decide what kind of life that would be. Maybe university, maybe that job at McDonald's where I'd be set up for life with a possible management training course leading to those five stars on my lapel? The future seemed full of possibilities.

Nobody knew what was going to happen and it was really pissing off my mum. Normally in the summer holidays, I'd have been off trying to get a job at the insistence of my parents. But this time around was different. There was no good pestering me to get my part-time job at Olympus Sports back if a full-time job at the council was what was needed. Likewise, why waste time applying for full-time positions if university was a possibility? All we could do was wait and see if I'd got the magical As or the dreaded Us. For maybe the first time in my teenage years, Mum couldn't tell me what to do, so playing computer games seemed like the perfect distraction. Plus I knew it really got under her skin. So I loved it even more.

I remember one morning I was happily playing away on my Atari when I was defeated by the lack of power, and not in the superhero sense. My hand-held gaming device screen began flickering, making it increasingly difficult to eat the spaceships and take me on to the next level. A level I was desperate to achieve. I sighed: a noise I knew so well and that I had been making repeatedly since completing my final exam. It's the noise you make when you are resigned to the fact that there is nothing more you can do.

Lost in my own imagination, a little computer-gaming scene was played out. There was I, dressed in a gleaming white, pristine starched lab coat, safety goggles on my forehead, with a serious look upon my face. I purposely entered a futuristic science laboratory, clipboard in hand, pen protruding from between my clenched teeth. Sprawled on the operating table in my imaginary lab, was an exact replica of the massive creature I had used to devastatingly devour all the spaceships in my favourite game. A full-size spaceship-eating dinosaur lolled over the table, but I had no sense of fear. As I approached the desk, the creature looked up at me with despair in its huge reptilian eyes. I instinctively shook my head.

‘Nooooooo,' it cried. Actually, it was more of a Kenneth Williams' wail, which took me back. That was definitely not the sound I imagined this creature would ever make. A single tear fell down its . . . face, I guess. With hand outstretched, I rested my palm on his shoulder.