Losing It (4 page)

Mum and Dad aren’t Heathcliff and Cathy, theirs wasn’t a wind-blown romance. It couldn’t have been. I can’t imagine Mum filling Dad’s thoughts the way Rosalind has filled mine. I can’t imagine why he proposed to her or why she accepted, but I can imagine that convenience came into it somewhere. But that’s not to say that theirs hasn’t been a successful marriage. It’s lasted nearly twenty years and it’s produced me, for one thing, though the fact I’ve no siblings suggests they weren’t keen to repeat the experience. And in a way, it does work. Dad decides how they will live their lives and Mum goes along with it. I don’t know if she actually regrets marrying Dad or whether she wonders how her life might have turned out without him. I don’t know if this is the life Dad has always wanted or whether he once had his own, secret, dreams. It doesn’t look like a marriage made in heaven, but they’ve stayed together this long – perhaps because they can’t see an alternative, maybe for my sake or, just possibly,
because they really love each other. I have no way of knowing.

I don’t know what I would have done back then if I hadn’t been able to go next door. Gone mad, I expect. Clive’s house wasn’t run on timetables, his dad didn’t complain if Clive played his music too loud and he didn’t much mind when he came and went. Not that Roger Dyson didn’t care about his son’s wellbeing. In fact, there was something Clive’s dad cared very much about regarding his son, but we’ll come to that in a moment.

When I first got to know Clive, we would play outside. Clive liked catch and tag and wrestling, so long as I didn’t play rough, but as Roger seeded the garden with more potential mantraps, jagged bits of metal or rolls of barbed wire, we confined ourselves to playing in Clive’s bedroom, where there was plenty to play with. Roger had sorted his son with an awesome range of toys and sports stuff. There was a PC with
Tomb Raider
and
Grand Theft Auto
and an internet connection with no parental controls, which can be of enormous educational value when you’re twelve. There was a pair of boxing gloves and a four foot pro punch bag hanging from a fixing in his ceiling. Other sports goods included a football signed by the entire Millwall team, two rugby balls, a cricket bat and a half set of golf clubs. In a chest of drawers I found an arsenal of cap guns, plastic daggers, catapults and everything you might need for re-enacting the assault on Baghdad. All brilliant stuff, but Clive never wanted to play with any of it. Instead, we would spend whole days dressing and undressing his Action Man figures.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It didn’t seem to matter that Clive didn’t like football but quite liked dressing up in Roger’s girlfriends’ clothing. I was only too pleased to have a friend with a bolt-hole I could escape to whenever I liked. As far as Dad was concerned, I wasn’t supposed to be going round Clive’s at all but Mum would tip me the wink and so long as I was back before he was, that was all right. I had spent so much time round at Clive’s that I hardly noticed that he was getting
progressively less like my other friends and more like Jane Gallacher, whose parents were our other neighbours. Now I think about it, there was a phase when he seemed to be copying her hairstyle.

To Roger Dyson, Clive’s blossoming gayness was particularly galling. Being a shaven-headed scrap dealer who had until recently used flags of St George for curtains and kept a pair of Rottweilers (even if they too were a bit gay), he could not ‘for the life of him’ understand how he had sired an offspring with less than the full complement of masculine attributes. What had he done, he asked me once, to deserve a son with a voice like Alan Carr and a walk like Barbara Windsor in a tight dress? Not that Clive hadn’t been aware of these original characteristics himself. For a while – and probably because he’d taken some stick at school – he’d done his best to disguise them, adopting a Mockney accent that would have made Lily Allen blush and a gait like wading through treacle instead of dancing on hot coals.

Roger Dyson had, after a period of denial, seen where things might be going with Clive and had equipped him with every masculine accoutrement he could think of. He took him to boxing evenings, where Clive had been shocked by every punch thrown, covering his face and complaining loudly, ‘That must have really hurt, Dad!’ or ‘I like those shorts!’ After that, he took him to watch Millwall play at home, but Clive had spent the game flicking through a homewares catalogue and politely clapping when a goal was scored – by either team. Or, like a bird teaching a fledgeling how to fly, Roger had tenderly pointed out gorgeous babes on TV or one of his stronger DVDs and had nudged his son in the ribs, saying, ‘Couldn’t you just slip her one, eh, son?’ He’d also made sure that his collection of hard core porn magazines were piled just under his bed, where Clive would be sure to come across them (if only!) in the course of his cleaning.

I haven’t mentioned the cleaning? This, as much as Clive’s posters of Barbra Streisand and a recent tendency to use just a
little eye-shadow, was what made everything so much worse for Roger Dyson. Not only was his son homosexual, a condition apparent to everyone except the boy himself, it seemed, but he was a compulsive cleaner too and was developing a mania in this department that bordered on OCD. He was never happier than when armed with a packet of Jay cloths and a bucket of homemade cleaning product, he attacked some corner of his home which had presumed itself safe from incursions of this kind.

While Clive could do nothing about the forgotten battlefield outside, he waged his own war on dirt and dishevelment inside. He cleaned the place top to bottom – okay, not so hard in a bungalow – leaving only the kitchen untouched. ‘You’d need someone who cleans up murder scenes to tackle that,’ he’d said. Then he started haranguing his dad about buying whatever was necessary to smarten the place up. Roger might have been severely disappointed about his boy’s sexuality but he was still his father and still as likely to cave in to requests regularly and winningly made. And the boy had a point, he admitted; the place, now you looked at it, was a bit of a tip.

This didn’t mean that Roger felt any more comfortable being dragged around Habitat or Laura Ashley while Clive looked for some ‘nice pastel throws’ to cover his tatty furniture. It was funny how there weren’t other blokes in Laura Ashley wearing England shirts, he’d thought. With the patience of a saint, Clive’s dad had considered the merits of chenille covers, cinnamon fabrics and special edition wallpapers. In time, something was bound to rub off on the one-time terror of the New Den. I was with them when Roger caused a little scene by the counter where Clive had laid some scatter cushions. Their colours would set off Roger’s new bed linen perfectly, he explained. But Roger was of a different opinion. ‘Cerise and aubergine? Together?’ he’d exploded, holding up two of the cushions. ‘Fuck me, Clive, you’re having a laugh! Go and get the burgundy, like I told you.’
About this time, Roger’s latest girlfriend Nerys, who thought a few filled ashtrays and empty bottles made a place homely, moved out.

And slowly, little by little, the bungalow was transformed from the sort of place where a bloke could put his boots up on the sofa after a knackering day in the yard, sink a few beers with his takeaway and clear everything away in the morning (or not) into something you might’ve seen in the pages of Ideal Home magazine. In fact Roger said that Clive had obviously drawn some of his inspiration from the June issue they’d shared in the dentist’s waiting room. My own dad would have been gobsmacked to see the difference between the house’s exterior and its interior. He’d have had that slack-jawed expression The Doctor’s assistants wear when they first enter the Tardis. It was the look Roger used still when he came in from outside smiling about something, having momentarily forgotten that his son was a fairy who had just transformed his drum into something he would never feel entirely comfortable in again. He didn’t think his old London mates would, either. He could just imagine Clive bustling about in his pinny and dusting their Doc Marts off the coffee table.

Clive was turning his father’s life upside down and inside out. He even had him wearing shirts at weekends, not his England shirt or the Millwall home strip, but proper shirts with collars and cuffs. I caught him one day looking at himself in the mirror and deciding whether or not he had the bottle for a shopping trip up the high street wearing cream chinos, brown brogues and a
not-fucking-lilac, it’s purple
shirt. If Dad knew half of the misery Roger was enduring, he’d have lightened up considerably. I don’t know what he’d have said if he knew that I was the only person Roger could turn to about his troubles – his mates weren’t the sorts you could talk to in much depth about incipient homosexuality and the design ideas of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen.

‘Brian,’ he said to me in the kitchen one day, while Clive was
in the front room, flicking his feather duster over a signed portrait of Nick Griffin which he’d reframed in a lively Kath Kidston rose-pattern, ‘you’re a man of the world.’

I shrugged, looked man-of-the-worldly.

‘Can’t you do something about Clive?’

‘Like what, Mr Dyson?’

‘Like take him out, get him drunk and, you know, sort him out with some fanny? All that boy needs is a taste of cunt, I’m sure of it. This’ —he swept a hand around the newly wallpapered front room (a delicate black fern motif on a light grey ground) and over the chenille-covered armchair and sofa, the sprays of flowers in vases, the pink rope tiebacks on the new curtains— ‘is probably only a phase.’

Self-deception, I was thinking, might be a sort of safety feature, something the brain does when it can’t take in the information the eyes are sending it.

‘I don’t think that would be easy,’ I said.

‘Look, Brian,’ he said, softly, with one eye on his son, who was drip feeding a bonsai tree on the mantelpiece. ‘When I was his age I had a life of drinking, fighting and shagging anything with a pulse. It was a man’s life, normal, you know what I mean?’

I nodded, meaning that I’d drunk and had fights and shagged a lot of birds too.

‘You’ve put it about a bit, eh, Brian?’

‘Use it or lose it, Rog,’ I agreed. He’s a big bloke with a serrated line tattooed around his neck, with the words ‘Cut here’. I wouldn’t want to upset him, even if he has taken to wearing fuchsia shirts.

‘So you’ll help me, won’t you? Get him shagged, Brian, and the sooner the better. Once he’s wet his wick he’ll be a different boy. He’ll be man, I’m telling you.’

‘I don’t know, Rog,’ I said. ‘You can lead a horse to water…’

‘I’m not talking about whores,’ said Roger, who had misheard me. ‘Just find him someone nice who won’t mind fucking a fairy.’

‘I’ll give it a go,’ I said. ‘But don’t—’

‘Good lad, that’s settled then. I’ve always appreciated your friendship with Clive, Brian,’ he said, a big, meaty fist on my shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you how important this is to me. You won’t let me down, will you?’

My menace-detector was going into overdrive: hard to tell if this was a friendly request for a favour, or an ultimatum with bruising consequences.

‘Of course I won’t, Rog,’ I said, and we both turned to watch Clive, who was humming a tune from Billy Elliot as he emptied a bag of pot pourri into a little bowl on the windowsill. Get Clive laid? Some chance. I hadn’t even been able to get myself laid. And yet here I was, suddenly elevated to Roger’s great shining hope, who would successfully pimp his son and return his life to normal.

Oh. My. God.

And Roger wasn’t the only one thinking about match-making. Roger didn’t know it then, but all Clive’s work in sorting out the house, and then his father himself was being done with a similar object in mind – which was to get Roger fixed up with a better sort of girlfriend, not another brassy tart who left her hair in the shower and her knickers in the toilet but a nicer sort of girl altogether. One Clive could talk to about clothes and go shopping with. One who might, who knew, make a nice mother.

C
HAPTER
4

Dancing Queen

‘You’d have to be quick, or you’d be up my arse.’

Diesel, who else? He joined the sixth form of St Saviour’s this year.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are sitting on orange moulded-plastic chairs with our feet up on four more plastic moulded chairs, in a dark corner of the assembly hall, discussing whether we’d choose to perform the sacred act of sexual intercourse with Shelly Lark, who is wearing a strappy silver top which shows off her boobs amazingly and ‘takes all comers’, or Kirsty Stephenson, whose designer-jeaned arse with its faintly visible thong line, is to die for. Faruk belches loudly and says he wouldn’t kick Holly McManus out of bed, either. She’s the one in the thigh boots who’s dancing a little too closely with Kelly Jordan, who shouldn’t be here anyway, as she’s in the year below.

‘I’d fucking have the lot,’ Clive says. He’s having one of his self-denying butch phases, which piss us off more than when he’s being camp. ‘Fucking Shelly Lark could suck my cock any day.’

Faruk belches again, as if he’s had a pint too many. ‘Shelly Lark’d blow you out in bubbles,’ he says shortly.

We’re all a bit annoyed with Clive. We know he’s gay. Everyone knows he’s gay. No one cares. We want him to come out, mainly because we all think it will be fucking spectacular when he does, like a peacock fanning its feathers. But tonight, at the Prom, he thinks he’s Gene Simmons or Iggy Pop. ‘I’d fuck her and all,’ he says of a Year 9 who’s only come with her parents to collect her elder sister, the girl who was sick at the feet of the saint whose plaster image stands between the doors to the boys’ and the girls’ toilets. Saint Upchuck, she’s called now.

Clive’s behaviour is partly my fault. ‘Take him out and get him drunk,’ his father had said and I really don’t like to argue with Roger. Half a bottle of Tesco Value Vodka has disappeared into Clive’s Sunny D already and he’s nudging me to top him up under the table again.

Diesel is showing us a pill he’s found on the floor. ‘Ecstasy. It has to be ecstasy.’

‘Could be a contraceptive,’ Faruk offers.

‘Or Viagra,’ I say.

Diesel considers his options.

‘So that’s an uncontrollable erection, a big hit of female hormones or getting so loved up I grope Lauren Sykes.’ The word minger was coined for Lauren Sykes.

‘Do I feel lucky?’

He swallows the pill with a big hit from Clive’s plastic beaker and I watch him as he waddles off to check out the table of flapjacks and brownies provided by food tech. I’m looking for Rosalind Chandler, of course. I’ve clocked her once or twice already, easy to pick out amongst the bunches of upper sixers decked out in penguin suits and Prom frocks. She’s wearing some kind of vintage black dress with lace edges but her same old bag, stuffed with books, is hanging off her shoulder. Her hair is like a bunch of ruffled black feathers with coloured beads and plastic mirrors and things in it, totally unique. The next time I saw her, she was standing in the middle of the dance floor staring at the coloured lights with that look she sometimes has, like she’s listening to an imaginary iPod, then I lost her behind a crowd of Prommers zombie dancing to Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
. Needless to say, she looked totally, gobsmackingly gorgeous, a bohemian cocktail two parts Helena Bonham Carter to one part Ally Sheedy in
Breakfast Club
. Tonight I will speak to her, I thought, tonight she will know I exist.

Prom night. Our latest American import and one which is fast becoming as ubiquitous as a Big Mac. It’s the new rite of passage
for upper sixth formers about to go off to university to encounter a whole new world of opportunity, drugs and debt. Like the long wedding scene in a DVD I saw called
The Deer Hunter
before Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken go off to get fucked up in Vietnam. But the lower sixth, that’s us, are here tonight to make up numbers and add to the takings on the door. The Prommers have to look the part, but we can go as we want. We’re not dressed up as headwaiters and their wives like they are, not this year at least, but that isn’t to say that we have spent any less time with our preparations for this big night. Maybe more, in fact. It’s all been about hitting the right note.

I’ve really gone for it tonight, wanting to look my absolute best in case I end up (in some separate universe with two suns and a World Cup winning England squad) actually talking to Rosalind. It’s not something I’ve managed yet, though. She seems so beyond anyone I’ve ever known. She reads, for one thing. According to a glance I stole at the contents of her shoulder bag – it was hanging off the chair in front of my desk – she’s into writers whose names begin with the letter K, Kafka, Kesey and Kerouac it looked like, so I’m beginning to think she’s almost halfway through a very long reading list. She’s different, special. You can tell that from the space the other girls give her. And tonight, with a bit of luck and quite a lot of Tesco’s Value Vodka, I’m going to make her aware of Brian Johnson. I can’t see Rosalind and I’m thinking about the phone calls I’ve been getting from Clive’s dad. ‘Regarding Clive, Bri?’ he’ll say. ‘Any news on the cunt front?’

He’s not threatening, but he’s persistent and he’s big and he has tattoos and it would show willing if I could somehow send Clive home with a girl tonight. Even an unconscious one would be something. I need to talk to Clive, who has been in a world of his own this evening. As an icebreaker, I compliment him on his decorating.

‘Fucking nice job,’ I say. ‘Like what you did with the
windows.’

‘Yeah, I had a right fucking time trying to team those fucking Designers Guild curtains with that fucking Farrow and Ball shade on the fucking walls,’ Clive says. ‘And trying to find fucking decent modular furniture within the budget of your average scrap dealer can be a right pain in the arse too.’

I try to read Clive’s geezer performance as a hopeful sign and direct his attention to some girls in our class who are almost unrecognisable in their party clothes and slap. Cheryl Park’s red satin miniskirt, which only just covers her bum, draws an encouraging reaction from Clive. ‘Fuck me!’ he says. This is good, but it would be better if he weren’t looking at Patrick Nally’s well-stuffed packet.

‘I can have a word with her if you like,’ I tell him. ‘See if she’s up for it.’

‘Nah,’ says Clive. ‘You’re all right. There’s plenty of pussy here. I’ll make my mind up later.’

The Prommers have had a couple of hours to get into party mode. Mr Stevens has relinquished the turntables to Andy Ottewell, who’s now amping the mood nicely. Mr Bembridge and Mrs Rochard have gamely taken to the floor to demonstrate how totally uncool dancing was in their day. Diesel is looking fairly uncool himself as he idiot-dances with Lauren Sykes, a silly grin spread across his face – not something that might be produced by oestrogen or Viagra, I decide. Faruk, who hasn’t had a drink in his life, is serving up his party trick: pretending to be blind drunk. This is something he does very well, becoming alternately belligerent, funny, morose and sometimes falling over. (The dead giveaway is that he hasn’t yet mastered the art of puking in the street and being abusive to taxi drivers.)

Kids have collected in their little groups. The uber cool boys, ironically and not so ironically called the Gods, hang around like bulls in the field. You know that lame old joke? The old bull and the young bull clocking a field full of cows? The young bull says,
‘Let’s charge down there and fuck one.’ But the experienced, older bull replies, ‘No, let’s walk down and fuck them all.’ I actually get the joke now that I watch Dave Fletcher and his mates coolly appraising the available fanny, which for them is most of it. The kids who want to be cool but aren’t, hang out in another clique, each with one eye on the fanny and another on the Gods. They don’t have the easy, relaxed style of the Gods; everything they wear is this year’s brand, the latest style and the rips in their jeans look freshly made.

There are the geeks, whose standing is now higher than the nerds, thanks to their expertise with technology and also to their heavily-framed glasses, which are finally cool. Then there are the loners, the wall-flowers, at least three gatecrashers from Mafeking Street, two nuns who are dancing together and us: the fat kid wasted on E, the Muslim drunk on Appletise, the gay kid who claims to have shagged every bird in the place and Brian Johnson, who has a complex about the size of his penis and may be hopelessly in love with Rosalind Chandler.

It’s over two hours into the Prom and cracks are beginning to appear. It’s not only the kids who have smuggled in secret supplies of alcohol: Mr Crowley is sitting inappropriately close to Sarah Payne and Lisa Moreton on the next table to us and he’s telling them how his wife doesn’t understand him, that there’s more to him than being a teacher and something about ‘releasing the animal inside’. Sarah and Lisa are nodding and giggling and probably recording it all on their phones for wider consumption later. Smeggy Cleggy, our deputy head, looks terminally stressed as he tries to separate Dave Fletcher and Jennifer Davies, who are enjoying a grope behind the piano while he shouts noiselessly at an unidentified group in the darkness beyond the windows, betrayed by the dancing fireflies of their cigarette ends. He hasn’t noticed that Andy Ottewell is now playing some totally obscene mixes.

Over by the fire exit, Diesel is dancing dangerously closely
with Lauren Sykes, his porky hands stretched over her bum while Faruk lurches about the room with a plastic glass of apple juice assuring everyone that he’s not drunk, he can handle it. ‘I love you, man,’ he tells me, as he passes. Then I see Rosalind again, her eyes aglow, skin bathed in orange and blue light, a puzzled frown on her face. Unusually, she’s on her own. It’s not often I see her without that other girl in tow – Teresa someone, she’s called and she hangs on to Ros like a terrier with a bone.

But now Rosalind Chandler is by herself and actually looking like she might welcome some company. This is my moment and being a man – and a little drunk – I seize it. I begin to push through the jostling, bouncing bodies towards the place I think I saw her last. Various potentially disastrous chat-up lines are rushing through my head, Is it hot here, or is it just you? Fuck me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we met somewhere before? Do you come here often? (Why not come at my place instead?) None of the above must even begin to form on my lips when we meet. But I have confidence born of the finest cheap vodka and I’m certain I’ll know exactly what to say as soon as we’re face to face.

Just then there’s a commotion in the crowd, which has begun to draw away from its centre, like the ripples from a shopping trolley dropped in a canal. The music I’m hearing is something old and iconic and DJ Andy O has pumped up the volume. Of course, it’s the intro to the Bee Gees’
Staying Alive
, always a crowd pleaser, but never more so than tonight. Something is happening in the middle of things and suddenly that’s where I am, just in time to see Clive, for fuck’s sake, dancing the most perfect interpretation of this song I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot. I know he spends hours in his bedroom dancing to records, but up until now I haven’t paid it much attention. It was just something Clive did while I played GTA on his computer.

But here is now, our own John Travolta, launching himself across the floor, hair flopping, groin thrusting and hand-jiving, as the crowd claps to the beat, everyone full of respect, loving his
moves, no-one taking the piss. It’s an A-starred performance. Is this Clive’s dancing twin? He jumps, he struts, he strikes poses, he whirls his jacket above his head before throwing it into the crowd. He pirouettes, adds a break dance where he falls on his hands, flips over twice, spins on his back and leaps back on his feet. Some girls in our year push in front of me, desperate to catch it all on their iPhones, totally floored, like everyone else, by this secret side that Clive has decided to showcase tonight. Tomorrow he’ll have a hangover the size of Japan, but tonight there’s no stopping him. The record is ending but Andy segues the last seconds into
You Should Be Dancing
and Clive takes off again, adding a crotch-splitting slide across the floor on his knees before an audience which is whooping and calling for more. Fuck me, I think, if I can’t get him laid tonight then it won’t be my fault. I can see half a dozen damply excited girls who’d go home with him right now.

Which reminds me, I’m trying to find Rosalind and who knows, maybe take a step or two towards getting myself laid too. I scan the gel-shiny and wax-spiky heads of the crowd and spot something flashing in the lights. It looks like one of the tiny mirrors that Ros has woven into her hair tonight. The crowd pulses to the beat like a huge collective organism, gaps appearing and then closing up again. I get a tantalising glimpse of her, then my view is blocked by a swaying wall of torsos with upraised arms. I’m standing by some chairs on which a boy with hair like Jesus appears to have passed out, when the crowd opens for me like the Red Sea parting for Moses.

It’s like this has been decreed by fate, that nothing shall obscure the moment when she lifts her face and looks directly at mine. Which is when I tip my glass of Sunny D&V all over Andy Towse’s crotch. She’s looking at me, there can be no doubt about this. Yes, me, Rosalind Chandler is looking directly into the eyes of Brian Johnson. And not just looking, but staring. Staring directly at me. I feel kind of faint, but excited too. I hold her gaze,
savouring the moment. I try to look cool, as if this were no more than my due, that it was only a matter of time before she recognised me for what I am, a sex god.

I’m thinking things are going to pan out. I’m going to go across to her, start a conversation. We’ll find somewhere quieter where we can talk. We’ll chat and we’ll laugh and we’ll wonder how we never connected before and there will be that look again, the one she’s giving me still. It’s true, then, I think. Time really does stand still at moments like this. It has to, because she’s been standing there gazing intently at me, not moving a muscle for what must be ages. Something isn’t quite right. The gears in my brain, which have temporarily seized up, begin to grind and turn once more. I become aware of the music again – it’s
Night Fever
now and the crowd is still clapping and chanting Clive’s name, but Rosalind Chandler is oblivious to everything, as she holds that look. The look of love, I thought it was at first, but it’s starting to look a little odd and even disturbing. Then the bag of books falls from her shoulder and her eyes roll back. Everyone else is watching Clive and only I see what is happening and I run towards her, colliding with a girl carrying a tray of Diet Cokes and just miss catching Rosalind as she collapses to the floor and lies there, perfectly still.