Losing It (12 page)

So yes, I knew her by arse and also by reputation – she was known as Lauren the Gob, which I had dozily thought was
because of her large mouth, a feature I’ve pondered on more than once in connection with my own problem. That was when that old joke sprang to mind, the one about the woman who refuses the bloke’s offered cock, saying she’ll smoke it later. But Clive and Faruk came to see me while I was recovering and told me that she was Lauren the Gob for a very good and much more obvious reason. They’d found this out from firsthand experience, when Diesel had brought her to the Casablanca, presumably so he could break the ice between Lauren and his mates. It goes like this:

Clive and Faruk haven’t been expecting female company and don’t know how to deal with the contingency. Clive stands up to shake her hand while Faruk mumbles something about her being most welcome in his humble establishment, which just confirms why we never get anywhere with girls, though Clive, of course, has another reason. Diesel sits down and tries to stir up some lively chatter but Faruk and Clive don’t know how to include a girl in their usual banter and so many subjects now seem off-limits, notably, Who Would You Shag In Year 12? My Very Best Wank and one that Diesel usually loves, Who’s Got the Biggest Arse At St Saviour’s Not Including Any Nuns? Diesel quickly exhausts what he’s got to say about the weather, Sheffield United FC, whether you could teach a parrot to convincingly imitate Joe Pasquale and how nutritional and low-cal the kebabs are here and then shuts up, leaving Lauren to have her say.

It’s quite a long say, too. She asks which do they like best,
The X Factor
or
Britain’s Got Talent?
And as they don’t answer immediately, she goes on to enumerate the differences between the two shows and the reasons why she thinks that, on balance,
Britain’s Got Talent
is the superior show. ‘I watch them both just for Simon Cowell,’ Lauren says, and when she’s finished listing the qualities of Simon Cowell, which are mainly that ‘he’s gorgeous’ in so many ways, she launches straight into the interesting differences between Cheryl Cole and Amanda Holden,
two names which might ordinarily have cropped up in our own conversations, though for completely different reasons.

Then she talks about how much her friend’s mum is paying to have liposuction, how smoking curbs your appetite but is never cool unless you’re like in a movie or something and then asks if they’ve been watching the women’s tennis. (They have, but again, probably for different reasons). She talks a lot about hair, her own, her friends’ hair, our hair and the five different salons she’s tried on this road alone. She’s thinking of becoming a hairdresser, perhaps having her own salon one day, which might one day offer a range of therapeutic and beauty treatments too, which she details and explains, slowly and exhaustively.

Eventually, Clive says, she seems to realise that she might be monopolising the conversation, just a bit, and she asks what they are going to do with their lives. Diesel must have already told her about how he wants his own record shop, something dealing in dance and hip hop vinyl rarities, which won’t be affected by the download market, though it’s hard to imagine her listening to all that. Clive is about to tell her about his plans to study interior design and perhaps get a slot on a TV show, where he will kick some Bowen ass and show Nick Knowles a thing or two and Faruk is all ready to outline his plans to be a TV chef, graphic designer, private investigator, paparazzo, police helicopter pilot, barrister, forensic pathologist, Formula One mechanic, travel rep, rock photographer or a DJ (all he has to do now is decide which).

But Lauren sees Faruk’s music mag lying open on the table and instead of asking him if he wants to be a gangsta rapper like Snoop, whose picture fills half a page, she sees the small Army recruitment ad and thinks he’s been looking at that. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she says. ‘A uniform would really suit you,’ and then, glancing at Diesel, who is eating two kebabs, with chips, adds dryly, ‘It wouldn’t fit him.’

Then she tries to include Clive in the conversation. ‘I suppose you’d be more at home in the navy?’

So it’s not just Faruk and Clive and me and Diesel who are marooned on a remote hillside in Derbyshire as the rain starts to come down, it’s Lauren too, who is sitting in the back seat, keeping herself to herself as she has done throughout the day and which is as unexpected as it is somehow unsettling. Faruk and I are having words about it, under the bonnet. ‘They’ve had a barney, that’s favourite,’ he says, unscrewing something which then slips from his grasp, rattles its way through the engine and drops into long grass beneath the car, never to be seen again. ‘Or she’s on the rag,’ I say, offering my bottomless understanding of the female condition. Clive wonders if Diesel’s not letting her have any cock, a possibility we dismiss with derision, considering that it’s only very recently that he’s found the instructions for it.

The man himself comes over, looking well pissed off. ‘Have you called your brother, Faruk?’

‘He won’t pick up,’ Faruk says, which may or may not be true. He did look like he was calling someone at one point.

‘Try him again.’

‘I have,’ Faruk says. ‘Twice.’ Which isn’t true.

‘Fuck me,’ Diesel said. ‘I don’t want to be stuck out here with you, them sheep and a cow who’s got the strop on.’

‘Yeah, what we gonna do then?’ says Clive. ‘We can’t sleep in the car.’

‘Impossible,’ I say, which it would be, stuck in the back with a couple of sumos like Diesel and Lauren.

‘Don’t your grandparents live round here?’ says Faruk, deviously shifting the focus in my direction.

‘Yes, they do, just over the ridge, but…’

I have a nasty feeling about this.

‘Is it far?’

‘Not really, but…’

The last thing I want to do is arrive at Narnia with these nerks, when Nana is ill and needs as much peace as she can
possibly get.

‘Well for fuck’s sake, let’s start walking,’ Diesel says, as the rain starts to shovel down.

‘I’m down with that,’ Clive says. ‘Get somewhere dry.’

‘No,’ I say, and immediately feel outside the group. They’re looking at me like the sheep are looking at them. ‘We can’t.’

‘What the fuck?’ Diesel says.

And I’m just about to tell them why it wouldn’t be a good idea for a bunch of cold, wet, hungry, noisy and generally insensitive youths (plus Lauren, who may well have recovered the power of infinite speech by then), to impose themselves on a frail, dying woman for however long it takes to get us sorted – when a familiar blue camper van crests over the ridge and appears to get air for just a second before it thumps back down upon the tarmac. The silhouette inside is recognizably GD’s and though I don’t think he’s seen me and won’t have set eyes on the Green Dragon before, he’s slowing right down, pulling over on the grass bank beside us and already is asking Faruk if he can give us any help. What a treacle my grandfather is.

C
HAPTER
10

Our House

To my huge relief, Nana’s on an upswing. That’s what it looks like, because she gets up from her chair to greet us, spritely enough. Perhaps the last treatment has done her some good. She seems overwhelmed by our unexpected visit, but it’s in a good way. I don’t like the colour of her face, which I think is called sallow and her eyes seem to have sunk a little more into her head and when she gives me a hug I can feel her bones. But the smile, the smile I’ve known all my life and which is the very soul of Nana, that hasn’t changed one little bit. She asks if I’m recovered (I am, of course I am, how can she ask about how other people are?). She asks too whether Mum has thought any more about her flower shop (she does nothing else) and how is Dad (he’s as well as he has time to be, I think). Then she greets my friends like they’re an extended part of the family. She’s met them all before at least once, all except for Lauren, of course.

She tells GD to take our wet things – two soaked hoodies and a sweatshirt – and dry them on the Aga in the kitchen and to put the kettle on while he’s there. ‘Make a pot of good, hot coffee,’ she says. ‘And Arty, bring out my sticky toffee cake.’ She tells everyone to find a space, sit down, make themselves at home, but Faruk, Clive, Lauren and Diesel, they’re still standing over by the door, just blown away by the coolness of my grandparents’ place. We could see the little stone cottage as we rounded the last corner, a half mile up the road, light behind the thin red curtains and a lantern over the door sending out a warm glow of welcome across the valley.

Inside, it’s cosier than a hobbit hole, with stone flags and a Welsh dresser full of Nana’s home-thrown pots in the kitchen, while stepping down into the living room is like stepping back in
time. Two small rooms have been knocked into one, which is still quite small. The whitewashed walls look like they were rendered by a really useless plasterer, the mortar following the bumps and indents of the limestone beneath. Pictures, big and small, cover the walls, one or two framed. There are prints I recognize from art class, such as Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for
Alice in Wonderland
, a psychedelic-style tour poster (advertising the Grateful Dead, of course), which is scribbled on and might even be signed. On a handbill for a poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall, among some names even I can recognize, is Nana’s, or Ruth Nash, as she was, back in the sixties.

The room is furnished with a comfortable-looking sofa covered in a home-made patchwork blanket (where Nana is now settling with Clive and Lauren), then there’s Nana’s own rocking chair, which I’ve already staked out and an old pine table with chairs in the corner (made by GD in his workshop behind the house). Next to the open fireplace is a stack of smaller tables supporting what looks like an old but high-end stereo system, with a turntable and an amplifier and speakers, which really have to be heard to be believed, especially if all you ever listen to is headphones or the speakers on your PC. No CD player, no MP3 input. No TV, for that matter.

But that doesn’t seem to worry some: Diesel and Faruk are getting comfortable on a couple of huge red cushions in front of GD’s enormous, carpet-stacked row of vinyl records and Faruk’s already starting to tell Diesel what’s good, in his opinion, and what’s just ‘old hippy stuff’. In another corner is a compact open pine staircase, which turns back on itself (also beautifully made by GD), and under this are shelves filled with hundreds of books and a folded-up daybed. The room is lit by a pink bulb inside a huge paper globe decorated with turquoise Chinese dragons, which is suspended from the heavy oak roof beams and a couple of wax-caked candles in bottles.

Nana asks Faruk about the breakdown and gets a lot of guff
about leaky cylinders, sludgy fuel lines and a dodgy coil. She nods and tells GD to pop next door to see Tim, a neighbour who knows all about cars and who will probably be able to take a look at ours in the morning. He won’t want paying, Nana says in answer to Faruk’s unasked question, ‘He likes to do things for me.’

By the time we’ve phoned our parents and told them where we are, GD has brought in just what we need. We drink big mugs of GD’s coffee, which is scalding and sweet, and eat sensational mouthfuls of a toffee cake, which Nana swears she didn’t bake herself, though it’s one I’ve never had before (and never have found since, despite a thorough search of supermarket shelves). GD sits on the window seat, commenting on the selections Diesel pulls from his extensive stack of records. Faruk is in some other place, just him and the music he’s put on the stereo.

Having told GD to think about what they are going to give us for our dinner, Nana picks up an old photograph album and starts to leaf through it, pointing out this or that to Clive and Lauren. I get up from Nana’s chair to look over her shoulder at page after page of stuck-down colour prints, some with captions in Nana’s neat handwriting, and as I hear her frail voice apologising to her guests that what they see was all a long time ago, when times were very different, I’m able to patch up my own crumbling memories of the time I spent in this house as a temporary but well-contented resident of Narnia.

Lauren still hasn’t said a word. What Nana is saying as she shows her the photographs must all be strange to her – actually, famous poets dropping by with bottles of wine and professors of literature running riot, bollock-naked in the garden sounds odd to me, too – but I can see she’s smiling and trying to understand. In fact, like the others, she may be starting to see Nana as I do, as a cool and motherly source of inspiration and advice – and love, too, of course. Nana turns the leaves, sometimes chuckling at some old memory or at a photo of GD with long black hair and a
cowboy hat. Then she shows her guests page after page of pictures of her travels in India – Nana spent three years there, working for an Indian charity.

There are pictures of wild-looking men and women, mostly taken in this room. Clive sits on the other side of Nana, taken as much by the fashions as by anything else. In the really ancient shots, long haired men wear colourful cheesecloth shirts, patched jeans, velvet jackets embroidered with flowers and granddad T-shirts, brightly tie-dyed. There are Zapata moustaches, chains and amulets, CCuban heels and broad and big-buckled leather belts. The men sit on cushions or drape themselves over armchairs, playing guitars, laughing and gurning at someone’s camera. The young women wear long, flowery dresses, headbands and chokers, bare feet and, from what I can see, no bras. No one takes photographs of sad or dull occasions but to look at these is to think that life chez Arthur and Ruth Johnson was one big and friendly party.

GD picks up a tortoiseshell kitten which tries to scratch him as he glances at what Nana is doing. ‘Those were the days, my friend,’ he says in a singsong voice.

Nana looks up from her photo album.

‘You can still talk bollocks, husband of mine,’ she says. ‘These are the days too. Look at these kids, living through the biggest technological revolution since the steam engine and, Arty, being young enough to see how it all plays out. These could be the best of days, the very best of days, if everyone gets it right.’ She pauses, like speaking is sometimes an effort for her. ‘But yes, these here were ours. And we had a load of fun, didn’t we?’

‘We did that,’ GD says, bending to kiss Nana on her forehead before helping Faruk and Diesel to choose another record to slip on his old turntable. ‘Here we are, then, Grateful Dead,
Europe ’72.’

I catch Nana rolling her eyes. ‘Not again,’ she says. ‘If we must have the Dead, how about
American Beauty?’

‘It’s always been a bone of contention this,’ GD says. ‘I love the live stuff, the long improvised jams, but Ruth has yet to see the light. Stubbornly sticks to the studio albums, don’t you, mule? We nearly divorced over that, once. I’d have had grounds, too.’

‘Rubbish, Arthur. Don’t listen to him, kids.’

GD disappears into the kitchen, from where appetizing smells start to filter. There’s a lot of clattering, the sound of something falling and skittering across the floor and GD singing about being ‘trailed by twenty men’. But the bowls of pasta dowsed with a sweet chilli sauce – which we eat on our knees – are exactly what we need after a long and frustrating day out, trying hard to have fun. After the meal, which Nana barely touches, GD stands in front of the hearth as if he’s warming his bum, though being summer, there’s no fire there just now. He puffs out an impressive stomach and says, ‘Did I ever tell you people about how I joined the Dead after they played Hollywood?’

‘You joined the Grateful Dead?’ Faruk says.

‘You were in Hollywood?’ says Diesel.

Granddad unwraps a boiled sweet and pops it into his mouth.

‘Oh, aye, yes indeed,’ he says. ‘Hollywood Music Festival, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1970. The first time the Grateful Dead played on these shores. I joined the band as a roadie for a spell, after I rescued them when their tour bus broke down outside Stoke-on-Trent. I was reminded of that when I saw you lot broken down today, though Brian here would need a little more hair to pass as Jerry Garcia. I picked them up with their guitars and everything and got them to the festival with only minutes to spare.’

‘Amazing,’ Faruk says.

‘It certainly is,’ Nana says.

‘It was raining then too, and that was before I’d had the roof on the van fixed, so they did get quite wet. Not that it dampened their spirits, not the Dead. In fact, they were so grateful that Bob
Hunter wrote a song about that van, and called it
Box of Rain
. And Jerry took me on as driver-cum-roadie and once I’d introduced him to Newcastle Brown ale (I always carry an emergency crate in the van) we became firm friends. He never forgot me, either, you know. Always a card at Christmas.’

‘Incredible,’ Faruk says.

‘Isn’t it?’ Nana says.

‘When the band wasn’t playing, Jerry and I used to jump in the van and go off in search of a pint of real ale, or a decent drop as we called it then. Jerry became a hard-core fan of British beer. It’s a little-known fact that
Dark Star
was actually inspired by Jerry’s love of Newcastle Brown. You check out the label on the bottle – two dark stars. And the idea for
Uncle John’s Band
came from a story I told him about my Uncle Jack, who was banned from every pub in Chesterfield.’

‘Arty,’ Nana sighs, but it’s no good, GD’s on a roll.

‘Soon, Jerry and I had converted the rest of the band. They loved it. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. We went everywhere, in search of the perfect pint. Some nights, you’d find three great lorries full of amps and tour gear parked in front of a little country pub in the wilds, and you’d walk in and there would be San Francisco’s finest, Jerry, Phil, Ron, Mickey and Bob getting outside a few pints of Sam Smith’s or Timothy Taylor, and me and Bill enjoying a game of darts. Fantastic days.’

‘Fantastic is the word,’ Nana says.

‘Then, one day, we got pulled over by the police and searched, following a tip off, probably made by a rival band. The New Riders of the Purple Sage or the Quicksilver Messenger Service, I expect it was. Anyway, the cops pulled everything apart looking for drugs and couldn’t believe there was nothing on board. Even Owsley were clean. Not so surprising, really, because Jerry and me had been obliged to ditch several kilos of top grade Mexican grass in the Manchester Ship Canal, to make room for another six crates of Boddingtons.’

Faruk, who has been following every word, starts to laugh. The penny rolls, clatters and finally drops for Diesel too and everyone’s laughing, though as for me, I’m wondering about the signatures on the poster and an almost indecipherable scribble which might just read, ‘Your round next time, love and peace, Jerry.’

We have been so engrossed that we haven’t noticed that Nana and Lauren had gone into the kitchen and when they come out, it looks like they’ve been talking. Lauren looks a little more cheerful, anyway. Nana looks exhausted, and GD decides it’s time he and Nana retired. A little later, Lauren and Diesel, who have been assigned the spare bedroom, go upstairs. I see that Lauren’s talking to him for the first time that day, but softly, so she doesn’t disturb Nana. Clive takes the sofa and the patchwork blanket. Faruk, after one last look through the records, unfolds the camp bed. I’m not tired, so I volunteer to sleep in Nana’s rocking chair, where I sit and rock and think about Nana, and what GD will do when she’s gone and how unfair it is that she has to go like this, so long before her time.

I think happier thoughts too, of the warm welcome we’ve received, of the amazing toffee cake, and of how I want to tell Ros all about this place when I’m back at school next week – if I can engineer a meeting and if she will speak to me, of course. But drowsy, warm and happy, I am confident too and think that she will. I’m wondering if I can stay up and perhaps see the dawn in a few hours time, like we used to when I was here before. I’m not aware of having fallen asleep but when I feel GD’s big hand on my shoulder, gently shaking me awake, there’s the faintest sliver of light bordering the edges of the curtains. He puts his finger to his lips and beckons me to follow him. We step over Faruk in the low day bed and quietly open the door, which someone has forgotten to lock. It’s cool and fresh outside, with just enough light for us to make our way along the narrow lane that leads to the hillside, where a faint glow behind the distant castle is
announcing the coming of the dawn. I look at my watch as GD strides ahead. It’s 4.44 in the morning.

‘Have you told your father?’ GD asks, as we enter the ring of standing stones. In the centre, one of these ancient slabs looks like it has been extracted from the earth and laid upon two others to form a seat. We make use of it.

‘Not yet,’ I say.

‘You’ll know when,’ GD says. ‘It’ll be a shock at first. But once he knows, he’ll be all the better for it, I’m sure he will. We were mistaken in taking him, I think. We weren’t right for him, though we tried to be, we really did.’

‘He does love you,’ I say. ‘In his own way.’