Life's Lottery (10 page)

After the long, hot summer of 1976, you go on to Sedgwater College, where you don’t have to wear a uniform and are required to take only three subjects: French, German, history. You are asked to think harder but this keeps you fresh. It is tougher on your competition than on you. Laraine is at university in East Anglia, reading geography. You know you can do better, and start thinking about Oxford colleges.

Unexpectedly, Victoria Conyer stumbles in the first year at college. Her parents have been training her from infancy, and she revolts. Tired of being clever all her life (she hasn’t had many friends at school, suffering the catty envy of all), she decides to be stupid. Graham, who broke up with Laraine when she left for university, starts going out with Victoria and has her sing in his band. Overnight, she exchanges sensible blouses and skirts for greasy leather and ragged jeans. She dyes her hair white and chops it randomly, becoming by default the town’s first punk. You knew Graham was a trap, waiting for someone. Now, Victoria is lost. She stays at college but risks expulsion by openly smoking dope in the common room. That seems a hippie thing to do, but she is openly scornful of all things hair-headed, which you see irritates Graham. She keeps pushing the group, currently called Vicky’s Vomiteers, to be more ‘radical’.

Stephen Adlard, you realise, was never really in the race. You were misled by his neatness, his skill at presentation. Incapable of independent thought, he recycles expected answers in his perfect handwriting, with soullessly ideal diagrams. He will survive, prosper even, but never catch you. A sexless, faceless nobody, he is doomed. If you think about it, you picture him becoming an estate agent or council inspector. Living death in an office, making regular mortgage payments.

You are out in front.

If you ever look around, you’re surprised to find your only real competition comes from mad people, Mary Yatman and Gully Eastment. Mary hasn’t hurt anyone badly in years but you remember what she was like when her monster was around and leave her alone to get on with it. Gully straggles all over the place – he plays drums in Graham’s band and has a fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Bronagh Carey – but keeps revealing unexpected resources. If he lags behind, he puts on a spurt and catches up. He is in trouble with Bronagh’s parents for sleeping with her and giving her drugs, but even this doesn’t really hold him back. If it weren’t for his crazy side, Gully would get ahead of you. But maybe it is only his crazy side that gives him the juice to stay in the race.

* * *

In your second year at college – 1977–8 – you decide you haven’t been competing in the whole event. Your academic scores are unmatched and you have a shelfload of track trophies, but there are other events in the decathlon. To take home the gold, you need to be a social success.

People don’t dislike you, actually; but you make them uncomfortable. At college, the stars are not outstanding academics or athletes but people like Gully or Michael Dixon or even Victoria, the unconventionally clever, setters of fashions, organisers of events. Michael takes over the Students’ Union and masterminds parties, revues, discos, concerts. This arena, unfamiliar to you, becomes important.

You know you can catch up.

First, you need a girlfriend. James, two years younger, has been seeing Candy Dixon, Michael’s sister. Experimentally, you have got off with two girls: Jacqui Edwardes, who introduced you to tongue-kissing, and Gina, a girl from Wells you haven’t seen since. Neither is a serious candidate. You need someone who will complement your strengths, augment your prestige. You consider the question as if you were prime minister of a Balkan state seeking an alliance with a neighbouring principality.

Mary is an obvious, if scary, choice, but you don’t want to go out with someone who might get ahead of you. Equally, you can’t go with a thicko who would hold you back, like poor Jacqui. Roger and Rowena have been going out for over a year, but argue all the time. Roger isn’t measuring up to Rowena: he smokes drugs with Graham, Gully and Victoria, and Rowena violently disapproves of hippies. That might be an opportunity. Rowena already knows how to be a girlfriend, which would be a clear advantage.

Mary is tall and blonde, with a pretty face and long, slim legs. Her huge eyes are still scary. As far as you know, she has never had a boyfriend. Shane admitted once that he always fancied her but was afraid of what she might do. You find her uncomfortable but attractive. Intelligence is hidden inside her, coiled like a snake, always tensely ready to strike. Rowena is still tiny but shapely. You have thought about her breasts too many times in the dark of night. She has a goofy humour you can’t quite follow but which suggests she’d never be boring. Also, you’ve overheard her tell a friend that if you weren’t in such a hurry she might fancy you.

At the end of term, in the run-up to Christmas, the college has a Rag Day. Everyone dresses up in costumes and runs riot, raising money for charity. Michael, still stuttering crazily, is president of the Rag Committee, which consists of his girlfriend, Penny Gaye, and his long-time associates Mickey, Neil and Mark. On the evening of Rag Day, the last day of term, the committee is to put on a show at the college, a mix of comedy sketches and musical acts. Graham’s band, this week called Flaming Torture, will top the bill.

You decide, after much internal debate, to ask Mary to go with you to the show and the wild party Michael will hold afterwards at his grandmother’s house miles out of town in Achelzoy. Then, you learn Rowena has found out Roger has slept with Victoria and acrimoniously broken up with him. You reconsider your plans. After all, you aren’t certain either girl will accept if you ask her to go out with you, and the shame and embarrassment of rejection would be insupportable for someone in your position. You are so used to victory that you cannot bear defeat. You’d not play rather than lose. You sit in your parents’ hallway, looking at the telephone. You have numbers for Mary and Rowena written down. You are sweating. You think of Mary’s eyes and Rowena’s breasts.

Who do you ask to go with you to the show? If Rowena, go to 22. If Mary, go to 26. If you duck out of asking anyone and go alone, go to 30.

Y
our parents look relieved when they see Mr Brunt’s face. At the interview, it is agreed that a mistake has been made and that your exam paper should be set aside. For a moment, you wonder whether this is fair: why didn’t Paul and Vanda get interviews, with their parents waiting outside the office, to set aside their results?

Mrs Vreeland holds the picture you drew for her, of a bank manager on Mars with a briefcase attached to his space-suit by an air hose. She asks you to go outside and play while she talks with your parents. You do, though there’s no one else in school to play with. You walk across the grass towards the copse, bounding slowly under reduced gravity. A Martian monster lives in the copse, so you stay away from it. You’ve left your ray-gun at home.

On the way home, Dad says you’ll be going to Dr Marling’s after all. Your mum is so happy she is almost crying. You don’t suppose it makes much difference whether you’re in a school with Shane or with Paul.

Go on.

I
n the third year at Marling’s, the last year it will exist, a group of you are walking through town on a Thursday afternoon. You’ve just suffered through a geologic age of double geography.

As usual, you put off the moment of getting back for tea. The group aren’t your particular friends, just boys who happen to live along the route you take home, through the town centre and out towards the Achelzoy road.

Mickey Yeo has (against regulations) stuffed cap, tie and blazer in his satchel, trying to look as if he goes to a harder school. Stephen Adlard seems about ten in his perfect uniform. Norman Pritchard scurries ahead and darts back all the time, unable to keep to a steady pace.

You hang about Denbeigh Gardens, a rec ground. Younger kids are playing football and Mickey wants to scare them off, sending Norman in as a shock troop. Norman is keen, but you and Stephen aren’t so sure.

Stephen asks you a question about homework but you aren’t interested. Officially, you are a good pupil, like Stephen. But he’s boring. His idea of a good time is drawing a Venn diagram, using all the inks in his multicolour pen. Mickey, clever (too clever) but temperamental, and Norman, a Trouble-Causer, make you a bit uncomfortable. But uncomfortable is better than boring.

You always stop at Denbeigh Gardens, at Mickey’s insistence, because a steady file of Girls’ Grammar girls pass through at about the time you are there. None of you has ever actually tried to speak to any of these girls, but Mickey and Norman throw each other around in slow motion like stuntmen, trying to attract their attention. Sometimes, the girls giggle.

‘
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
,’ Mickey says.

Everyone else stopped playing cowboys in primary school, but with Mickey the re-enactment of fights from films he’s seen is less a game than a ritual. When he arranges you into characters from
Shane
or
The Magnificent Seven
and talks you through shoot-outs, insisting you die in order, he’s invoking something. He occasionally varies the model, straying from Westerns to war films (
Tobruk
, with you all trundling like tanks, or
The Great Escape
, in which you are Donald Pleasence) and even, once, the assassination attempt on Governor George Wallace. Recently, with 10cc’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ in the charts, Mickey has re-enacted that, with you as Sergeant Baker.

Mickey is Liberty, Lee Marvin. He taunts you, as James Stewart. Norman, as John Wayne, gets to back-shoot him from the shadows. And Stephen is the bald coon who tosses Wayne the rifle he fires at Liberty.

You scrabble in the dirt for the gun you have dropped – a piece of wood – and Norman fires his branch from behind the gardener’s shed.

The timing is perfect. Three girls, in straw boaters and bottle-green blazers, come through the latch-gate just as Mickey takes the shot in the back. More elaborately than Lee Marvin, he wheels round, dropping his gun, clutching his wounds. He staggers this way and that, then spread-eagles on the grass, gurgling his last. The girls hurry on, looking down to avoid noticing the mad boy. There’s injustice there. Mickey’s artistry should be rewarded somehow.

The girls have gone and Mickey is spread out on the grass.

Stephen comes up behind you as you stand over Mickey and nudges you in the back.

‘Nothing’s too good for the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ he says.

You think Stephen has pulled a six-shooter from his satchel and is going to rewrite the script by plugging you in the back, leaving Norman to get off with Vera Miles and live in that half-built desert house with the cactus rose.

Actually, he has a thin pack of cigarettes. Not sweet cigarettes. Players No 6.

Mickey springs back to life and Norman is interested too.

‘Give us one, Adlard,’ Norman says, barging in.

‘Dying for a gasper, I am,’ Mickey says.

A dynamic is changing in this group. It should be one of the bad boys offering the cigarettes round. Stephen is the best-behaved boy at Marling’s. His homework is always perfect, as if laboured over by a medieval monk; his geography maps are illuminated texts.

Mickey and Norman have fags in their mouths and suck the taste through the filters. Of course, neither has matches.

Stephen is quietly pleased to be prime mover rather than the coon (a word your mum doesn’t like you using) throwing John Wayne the rifle. He has a flip-top lighter, metal and shiny. Norman takes it but doesn’t know how to use it, so Stephen takes it back. Promoted from coloured help to suave decadent, Stephen plucks a cigarette from the pack, taps it on his hand (like Sean Connery as James Bond), and sticks it jauntily in his mouth. Cupping his hand to shield the flame from the breeze, he flicks the lighter and lights up. He inhales deeply and sends plumes of smoke out of his nostrils.

You couldn’t be more impressed if he blew rings.

Stephen holds out the flame and Norman and Mickey light up. Norman gulps down a lungload, coughs and goes greenish. Mickey merely takes a suck, pretends to like the taste and breathes out a cloud.

‘Keith?’

Stephen is offering you a cigarette. Your hand goes out, but you hesitate. In adverts in comics, Bobby Moore says, ‘Smoking is a mugs’ game.’

Norman splutters badly now. Green slime trickles from his nose and tears dribble down his cheeks. Mickey is enjoying the show, smiling in a superior way. He takes another bogus puff.

Stephen raises the pack as if it were a gun.

If you turn down the cigarette, go to 16. If you think you can get away with the fake smoking demonstrated by Mickey, go to 73. If you think you can do better than Norman and smoke properly, like Stephen, go to 19.

R
owena says she is coming down with flu and doesn’t think she’ll be going to Michael’s party. She’ll be in town for Rag Day, but thinks she ought to get home in the evening.

She coughs into the phone. That makes you think this is a turn-down not a legitimate excuse. Rowena is trying too hard to convince you she’s sick.

Maybe she’s off men after Roger and needs to be convinced you’re not a swine like him. Or maybe you misunderstood her interest in you.

When you put the phone down, she’ll call up all her friends and tell them you had the temerity to ask her out, emphasising the ridiculousness of your expectations. Everyone will know.

Score one against the runner.

To get through Rag Day like this, you’ll have to wear a mask. Or be invisible.

Or maybe she just has flu. It happens.

‘Sorry,’ Rowena says.

If you accept the excuse and hang up, go to 30. If you try to use your powers of persuasion to wheedle around Rowena’s excuse, go to 28.

I
n September 1974, you start going to Ash Grove. Though on a new site, combining the ivied quadrangle of Marling’s with prefab shacks, you still have the Hemphill teachers, the Hemphill classes. You study for Certificate of Secondary Education exams, the thicko versions of the O Levels ex-grammar-school kids are taking. Laraine’s O Levels got her into Sedgwater College, from which she’ll go on to university. CSEs are a rubber-stamp for cannon fodder in the job market. If anything, the schoolwork is easier than it was at Hemphill, almost insultingly so.