Losing It (8 page)

‘Brian and me go way back,’ Clive says, opening the Faruk and
Diesel, me and Clive division which sometimes shows itself in our doings together.

‘But the fact is that together, the Four Horsemen, by which I don’t mean our cruelly received musical partnership, but us four as mates, go back only a few months. A few months! But I feel like I’ve known you lot all of my life, you know?’

Am I imagining it or is Diesel starting to well up?

‘It’s true, my friends, we’ve lived it large,’ Faruk says.

Why is everyone getting so wistful?

Someone asks if we remember getting caught by security guards as we skateboarded through the shopping centre, then someone else remembers the first wrap of hash we ever bought, which turned out to be Oxo cube. Then other priceless stuff is brought up, like Faruk surprising Clive with Trudy’s dildo stuck up his bum (Clive still says he fell on it, getting out of the bath). Then there was the night Diesel and Faruk used a loudhailer and scared the shit out of shagging couples at a remote picnic site. None of this happened more than a matter of weeks ago and yet Diesel’s talking about it nostalgically, like it’s all in the distant past and such days won’t be coming again. It’s like he’s suddenly grown up. he’s suddenly grown up.

But the rest of us are still top-trumping each other with reminiscences of good times, or times that look good now that a decent interval has been allowed to elapse since they occurred. Diesel’s injuries after he tried to skate down the department store escalator weren’t actually funny at the time. But Faruk and me bonding over all those old records; Clive getting pissed and going shopping in Trudy’s clothes; our graffiti period, torpedoed by Clive’s spelling and Faruk’s colour blindness; our urban adventure phase, when we were marooned on the library roof the whole of a cool summer’s night after the decorator returned for his ladders: we all agree that those were good times.

Then the other plans we’ve made are revisited, especially The Road Trip, the pipe dream of pipe dreams in which we celebrate
finishing school next July by taking off somewhere together. Amsterdam. Barcelona. Marrakech. Wherever. How cool would that be, we ask, for the hundredth time? We all know it’ll probably come to nothing, but it’s always great to talk about. There’s no doubt about it, these last few weeks have bonded us as real friends and right at this moment, it is hard to envisage a time when universities, girlfriends, changes of location and finally, marriage and kids will ever tear us apart.

The Four Horsemen have been built around these things and an unspoken other, which is our shared virginity. So we all see the threat to our tight little unit when Diesel pushes away his plate at last and says, flatly, ‘I had it off with Lauren Sykes last night.’

And no one knows what to say or even what expression to assume.

The natural reaction would be to say ‘No way?’ and to crack up. Not Lauren Sykes, we should have said, ‘Lauren Sykes with the legs like skittles and the lunar complexion?’ Who’d be desperate enough to fuck lardy Lauren Sykes of all people, in the bushes behind the bandstand in the park? Surely not Diesel Dalziel, who’s just ‘fessed’ up to exactly that? But none of us says a thing.

It is an earth-shattering announcement. Yet for reasons which will become clear, we all nod or shake our heads, mould our features into knowing grins and take the news like it’s the most commonplace thing in the world. I had it off with Lauren Sykes. We are amazed, appalled and secretly jealous.

It breaks down like this: the same thoughts are going through my head, Faruk’s and Clive’s heads, with one or two fairly crucial differences. Faruk, never mind that he’s subject to an arranged marriage with a girl called Rashida, who lives in a suburb of Istanbul, whose photographs I have seen on numerous occasions and about whom Faruk has mixed feelings, has told us on numerous occasions that he lost his virginity with exchange
student Donato Epifano, on the night before she went back to Italy. Clive popped his cherry, supposedly, during a weekend in Brighton ‘with mates’. And, as I remember graphically, I assumed the mantle of manhood after fucking ‘some dirty little blonde’ after a party in a house down the road. Needless to say, the family moved almost straight afterwards and I’ve completely lost touch with her since. Diesel was supposed to have lost his virginity with ‘Serena’, a cousin who supposedly lived on the Isle of Wight.

We used to be four secret virgins. Virgins with stories, which were repeated and embroidered upon whenever necessary, but virgins all the same. It was something we had in common that bound us, something else that had forged our identity as The Four Horsemen or, more simply, as four close friends. Could we ever be the same again? How could we be three virgins and Diesel? How will this affect the dynamics? How can we ever pretend to be other than virgins now – not when Diesel already has the knowing look that seems to say to everyone, ‘Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve actually shagged a girl. So what?’ It is a period for reflection. Clive is playing with his phone while Faruk gazes over the road where his brother is fiddling with the carburettor of our car. I’m sneaking stealthy glances at the girls who giggle. They’re actually just about fuckable, I decide. All about our age, one with the most enormous tits which she’s showing off with a low top and the others a bit overweight but fit enough to be cocksure of themselves. I only wish I was. When Diesel orders a plate of baklava, I notice he winks at Deniz. Does he always do that? I’m not sure.

As for the sex itself, of course we all want to ask him what it was like but that would blow our covers out of the water. Whenever we glance his way, Faruk and I are piecing together the details of Diesel’s amorous encounter with Lauren Sykes – what Clive’s thinking is harder to say. Did they kiss, I’m wondering? How many clothes did she take off? What would she
look like naked? What does Diesel look like naked? Eurrgh! Don’t go there! Did he feel her up, tits first, then fanny? Did he get a hard-on right away or did she have to suck him? What must it have felt like, even with Lauren Sykes, as his fat little cock (I actually have no idea how big Diesel’s cock is) slid slowly into a warm, wet cunt? Was he on top or was Lauren? Did she make a lot of noise as he thrust into her? How long did it take? Is it exactly like you imagine, when you come inside a woman? Did he come inside her? Is she on the pill? Did he use a condom?

These and a million other messages are chasing about my cerebral cortex as I watch Diesel apply himself to the dessert like a man with a well-earned appetite. I don’t know how many hours have elapsed since he made his announcement, it seems like hundreds and no one has said anything except for Faruk, who has managed, ‘Fuck me, Lauren Sykes,’ to which Diesel has replied, ‘No, fuck
me
, Lauren Sykes.’ This has broken the ice and slowly, as if it doesn’t matter to us, we prise out little details. ‘Back of the bandstand, under the rhododendrons,’ he says. ‘Where Tony the tramp sleeps. No, he wasn’t there, what d’you think, I wanted a threesome?’

He sounds so experienced.

And then he tells us everything, about how they had been going back to Lauren’s where her mum was out, when she stopped to snog him in the park. She started to rub herself up against him, he said, actually placed his hand on her tits and in the dark she’s actually all right, is Lauren, with a nicely shaped body. She stuck her tongue in his mouth and he slipped his fingers under her bra and felt her hot, hard nipples and that was when he knew he wasn’t going to make it to Lauren’s house. If it was going to happen, he said, it’d happen there or in his pants. And he might have told us about how he fucked her like a stud, going on for ages, making her beg for more, but he didn’t. I think it was out of consideration for our feelings that he told us the less-than glorious truth. ‘I came as soon as I got inside her,’ he
says. ‘And that was pretty much it, really.’

Faruk shakes his head and says, ‘Fuck me, Lauren Sykes,’ again, while Clive mutters, ‘Rather yours than mine’ as he watches boys in leather mounting motorbikes outside. I’d like to know a little more, in fact I’d like to know a lot more, but that would be uncool and besides, I’m still not feeling well, which is the thought inside my head as my whole body convulses with a seismic jerk and I sneeze loudly, uncontrollably and incredibly messily, all over Diesel’s dessert. The comic chorus in the corner has never, ever seen a funnier thing.

C
HAPTER
7

One More Saturday Night

It’s late when I turn into Laurel Gardens and see GD’s camper van parked directly under a streetlight, so that its time-warped patterning of skulls and roses, weird dancing teddy bears and the huge, white-painted decal on the front – which I’d thought was Volkswagen branding gone mad but is actually a Ban the Bomb sign – can be easily enjoyed by anyone taking a nosy peek from their front windows. It’s late because after we’d taken the Green Dragon for another test drive and then had to return it yet again to Faruk’s brother’s garage (the car is throwing up a mechanic’s alphabet of problems: Alternator, then Bearings and now the Carburettor), Diesel insisted I went back to his. Apparently, in Diesel’s eyes I am sensitive and intelligent and someone he can talk to about a problem he’s got.

The problem is Lauren Sykes, who is full on for Diesel. This morning she called for him before lunch and when he said he had to go out, she made him wear her bright red hooded sweatshirt because it was raining and even then he hadn’t been sure she wasn’t following him to the Casablanca. And we all heard him fielding her phone calls when we were road testing the Green Dragon: call 1) she wants him to come round for tea at hers to meet her mum, 2) there’s a rom-com she’s dying to see at the Odeon, 3) she’s seen a snuggly pullover she wants to buy him but needs him to come with her to try it on, 4) she wants him to tell her that he loves her, out loud, on his mobile phone.

‘All I wanted was a shag,’ Diesel complains, as we saddle up our video game horses to ride out of town. ‘Not my life mapped out for me.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘Worse. We’re going shopping at Meadowhall tomorrow.’

Meadowhall is Sheffield’s busiest shopping centre.

I scope some hombre taking a bead on us from the roof of the saloon and my Winchester cracks out two shots; the dude is coyote meat before he hits the dirt. ‘That’s real tough, pardner,’ I say, but secretly I’m wondering if I don’t see the hand of justice in this. Diesel’s been led on by his cock. He’s not thought about how this irresponsible act might affect The Four Horsemen – who appear now to be galloping towards us, guns blazing – and what’s more, he’s not committed his crime with somebody who would actually be worth it, Rosalind Chandler for example, but with The Minger, Lauren Sykes. I try to offer what advice and consolation I can, but there’s not a lot I can say. Diesel has made his bed and now he’ll just have to lie in it. With Lauren Sykes, it looks like. It’s a lesson for us all.

At the back of the house the kitchen light is illuminating a trapezoid of stripy lawn and Garcia, who is sitting in the middle of it, licking his balls. This might be a good time to mention that Garcia is GD’s black and white collie dog. In the bright kitchen GD and Dad appear to be arguing. It’s not unusual and it’s not surprising: in terms of dress and lifestyle, likes and dislikes, they’re as different as chalk and chutney. I think it might be down to genes, the ones that skip a generation especially. Or maybe it’s just a matter of one generation rebelling against the last. GD’s own rebellion was as wild as his upbringing was strict. And maybe because of that, my dad’s made sure he’s as different from GD as possible. Maybe.

‘That dog stays out of this house,’ my father – nattily attired in a new beige dressing gown and his crisply-ironed green striped pyjamas – is saying, ‘until it has learned not to, ah, do his business in the f-f-flaming shoe cupboard.’

GD, wearing his big old jeans and the starburst tee shirt which pulls focus to his considerable paunch, is making a hot drink for Nana. He takes her one up before he retires to the camper for the night. He can’t sleep in this house, where everything
is in its place and the only part which hasn’t had the life sucked out of it is my bedroom, an agreed no-go area for parents in which there is plenty of life, even if most of it may be growing on unwashed plates and old pizza boxes.

‘He can stay with me in the van,’ GD is saying. ‘At least he won’t feel unwanted there.’

They take no notice of me as I check out the fridge before helping myself to a bowl of Dad’s All-Bran and sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘This is not about the dog,’ Dad’s saying. ‘And it’s not about that blasted monstrosity you insist on parking in front of the house. It’s time we talked about Mum.’

‘Ruth is where she wants to be, and that’s at home, with me,’ GD says. ‘I thought this was all settled. I’ll bring her in for treatment but the hospital is not going to have her, Charlie.’

Dad has started to unload the dishwasher. He can’t just talk and he can’t just watch TV for that matter, he always has to be doing something else as well. God knows what he does while he has sex. Mental note: really must stop thinking about parents having sex. He’s sorting cutlery into the drawer as he says, ‘But, Dad, you must see that’s not right?’ (With GD being so young at heart and Dad so old before his time, it seems arse-about-face whenever Charles Johnson calls GD, Dad.) ‘She needs a proper, supervised medical regimen, close observation, palliative care.’

‘And waking every four hours for her obs and poked and prodded and talked about like she was just an interesting case? That’s not what I want for my Ruth, Charlie, and it’s not what you should want, either. And if you knew your mother like I do, you’d appreciate that.’

‘But you can’t keep her at home, you just can’t,’ Dad says. He runs himself a glass of water from the tap and peers out into the blackness of his garden. ‘I don’t think that you realise how very demanding her home care will become. You simply don’t have the f-f-facilities or the skills to deal with what is going to happen.’

‘We do, as it happens,’ GD says. ‘There’s a nurse on tap, she’ll
be in and out and there’s a tame doctor in the village. She’ll have friends dropping by to see her. She’ll have me. This is what Ruth wants, more than anything else. And this is what she will have.’

Dad waits for GD to calm down before he clears his throat and says, ‘There’s a very decent place I know about, set in lovely gardens, with a man-made lake she can sit beside. I have a little money put by and—’

‘She’s not going to die in a hospice either,’ GD explodes. I haven’t seen the normally peaceful GD angry before, but right now, he is furious. ‘Ruth is not going to a Centre Parcs for the dying. She doesn’t want a nicely packaged death, Charlie.’

Stop. Stop. Stop.

It’s like a flash has gone off and everything freezes for an instant, Dad tightening the cord on his dressing gown, GD with the kettle in his hand. They know I’ve heard. Suddenly we’ve all stopped pretending. I know Nana’s very ill and maybe I haven’t thought she’d get much better, but no one has said out loud that she’s going to die. It’s been easier to imagine Nana and GD going on turning up here for Nana’s hospital visits and Dad going on complaining about GD’s camper van and the hundred other things that annoy him about his parents’ chosen way of life. But now the truth is out and it’s ugly as fuck. Nana the poet, Nana the person I’ve always gone to for wise words instead of the platitudes which Dad would trot out or the helpless looks and
best ask your fathers
which was often all Mum could offer, is dying. Nana is going to die. It’s like the floor has dropped away and beneath me is a bottomless abyss. And that’s what it must be like for her, only a million times worse.

I know she’s not religious, not in the sense the nuns at St Saviour’s are religious. She doesn’t go to church and I’m not sure she believes in God. I know she doesn’t believe in a life after death, because she told me so once, when we walked past the churchyard in the village where people were gathered around a hole in the ground as they buried Mr Simpson, who had
managed the post office. ‘We’re just brief flashes of light in the darkness,’ Nana had said, and then she told me to shine brightly while I was here, whatever that meant. What can it be like for her, standing on the edge of that empty black hole knowing that any time soon she’ll topple in and be falling, endlessly? And that pit will have no bottom, because death has no end, you die and you die and you die.

No one I have ever known has died. No one at school, none of my relatives. I’m only seventeen and though I sometimes panic about being struck by some terrible illness like those kids in the paper, the ones with bald heads who now go to Disneyworld instead of Lourdes, and though I know how dangerous and unpredictable modern life can be – people at bus stops mown down by lorries, the house fires and disasters at football matches, bombs on trains and aeroplanes falling out of the sky, I’ve always thought of death as something too vague and too distant to waste much time thinking about.

But now death is in my house. Nana is actually dying. When is she going to die? Does anyone know? Why wasn’t I told about this sooner? Is she dying now, in the room above my head? I feel faint, cold and queasy. I have been looking at the last twigs of All-Bran in my bowl, like a fortune teller reading tea leaves and when I look up I see that GD has left the room, taking up Nana’s hot drink, I suppose, and Dad is being all brisk and efficient, washing out the milk bottles and acting as if nothing has happened. The only telltale oddness about his behaviour is that when he puts out the bottles, he lets in Garcia and gives his coat a bit of a ruffle before settling him in his basket by the door. ‘Well, Brian,’ he says. ‘Sunday tomorrow, big day in the garden, so I’ll say goodnight!’ And off he goes. I hear him checking the locks on the front door, unplugging the television and then mumbling something to someone, GD presumably, at the top of the stairs.

When GD appears in the kitchen and says Nana is asking for me, it is all I can do to get my arse off the chair. But I do and I
tread softly upstairs and open her door. Sometimes Nana seems well, at other times she’s not so good. After what I’ve just heard, I’m expecting her to look awful. But tonight, Nana’s sitting up in bed looking at a bookmarked collection of poems, her night light throwing out a soft pink glow. The hot chocolate is on the bedside table, next to a framed photograph of herself and GD, which is so old that the people in it both have long, dark and shiny hair. She looks okay and I can’t quite believe what I have just heard, that she really is dying.

‘Is that you, Brian?’ Nana finishes what she is reading before she turns to me and smiles. ‘Have they been quarrelling again?’

‘Yes.’

‘I do wish they wouldn’t. But they’re each as pig-headed as the other. Neither of them wants to give an inch about anything. It’s such a shame.’

I sit on the end of her bed and say, ‘I wish Dad could be more like GD.’

There’s a lengthy pause and I’m thinking that Nana has dozed off. But then she says, ‘We all have to be true to ourselves, Brian.’ She puts down her book and folds her spectacles. ‘And if that’s what your father is doing, then we must respect that.’

‘Is that what he’s doing?’

Nana sips her drink before she offers a reply.

‘I think your father’s shielding himself from what he sees as a threatening world. He’s had his ups and downs, has our Charlie. Life has disappointed him. Frightened him too.’

‘Frightened him?’

She won’t let me help as she shakes up her pillow, settles back into it and turns to me.

‘We’ve frightened him, Arty and me. We didn’t mean to, of course, but ours was never the life for a strange little boy like Charlie was. We tried to bring him up the way we thought a boy should be brought up. We wanted him to question everything, to be happy and out-going, to live for the moment, not for some far-off
day that never comes. But none of this was for Charlie and he began to retreat from us, to spend more time in his room doing his own things. It wasn’t our idea he joined the boy scouts. You remember the way we lived at the cottage?’

Dawn strolls, music making, shrieks from bedrooms, anarchic disorder.

‘I can’t imagine Dad being there.’

‘He wasn’t, not in spirit. And the fault was ours, Brian. He didn’t like the lack of restraint, he was frightened of our freedoms. I don’t know what we could or should have done for your father. He didn’t fit in and there was an end of it. He couldn’t wait to leave home and he did, at the first opportunity.’

‘That’s terrible,’ I say. ‘I can’t imagine you and GD being bad parents.’

‘Irresponsible parents, that’s what we were. Too intent on having fun, always thinking that our way was right and so Charlie must turn out right in the end.’

It’s hard for me to envisage anyone not liking living with GD and Nana. I’ve spent as much time with them as I can and I know they’ve been a bigger influence in my life than my own parents.

‘Is he happier now, do you think?’ I say.

‘With Violet and you, of course he is. And he’s happy to have his garden, where he has complete control and is lord and master of all he rotovates.’

I have to laugh: it’s so true. Nana smiles.

‘Your father’s done a better job with you than we did with him. So don’t think any better of me than I deserve, Brian. Think of me as someone who had a lot of good intentions that she often buggered up.’

She’s sounding like she’s writing her own epitaph.

‘Arty thinks I should have a word with you.’

‘About what?’

‘About me. He thinks he may have shocked you this evening. Wants me to talk to you about the pickle I’m in. I think you’re old
enough to talk about such things?’

I nod dumbly, because what can I say? I can’t refuse her anything, now that I know.

‘It’s funny, you know,’ she says, with a little chuckle. ‘But once you know you’re on your way to the check out, you can get taken much too seriously. It’s like everything you say must contain a pearl of wisdom. GD has started treating me like an old, wise woman.’

‘You are,’ I say. ‘Wise, I mean.’

‘Wisdom is just common sense tempered by experience,’ Nana says. ‘And I’m no wiser and certainly no more sensible than when I was well. So don’t start taking what I say as profound. Arty thinks we should have told you about my prognosis before this, but your father worried about how you would take it and to be honest, we thought there was more time.’ She must have seen my face fall because then she says, ‘But death is the most natural thing in the world, Brian, as natural as being born, as having your own babies, as growing older. People regard these events as beautiful, but if you saw a birth you’d probably think it was anything but beautiful. There’s blood and tissue and you can’t always control your own bodily functions and you scream and you swear. And then you can give birth to a corpse, a stillborn child. There’s nothing beautiful about that, let me tell you. And yet people persist in the illusion that these are magical moments always to be treasured, whereas death is always ugly, always to be feared.’