Paperboy (23 page)

I had been born unfashionable, from my Oxford toe-caps to my short-back-and-sides haircut. Pens leaked in my shirt pockets. I always wore my cap. I was a classic hopeless case, and, worse still, I knew it.

School was a different planet. To get there, I had to pass through Blackheath, which was filled with dark antique shops and genteel tea rooms, and called itself a village. The residents would have liked to build a moat around the place to keep out the proles. Later it filled with crimson boutiques selling lime-green miniskirts, much to the horror of the retired colonels who lived there. But it was a better place to hang out in than Abbey Wood, not least because there was less chance of being murdered by someone from a rival school who had decided you’d looked at him the wrong way.

When you found yourself being bullied, I discovered, it was best to team up with someone frightening and unpredictable. United by the fact that our classmates went out of their way to avoid us, Simon and I proceeded to bring each other’s most disruptive qualities to the fore. First, we reduced our maths teacher to tears of frustration, contributing to his decision to embark on a year-long sabbatical in Wales. Then we started on the English master.

Our friendship was a source of great mystification to all. When he was sixteen, Simon horrified the teachers by riding to school on a motorbike like the one in
Easy Rider
, and suggested that we should take the headmaster’s car to pieces behind his back; we laid it out in the school car park as neatly as a stemmed Airfix kit. The art master was thrilled because in Simon he recognized a true rebel who, when asked to create a piece of art for the school corridor, produced a plate of ketchup-smothered fish and chips.

We began manufacturing a libellous magazine in Simon’s bedroom, and recording sarcastic comedy radio programmes mocking everyone we knew. Our symbiotic partnership was deplored by all, as Simon was seen to be perverting me from the course of true devotion to learning, and I gave Simon a devious sense of credibility that encouraged teachers to grant him a stay of execution every time he glued the school cat to something or made prank calls around the neighbourhood masquerading as a telephone engineer, encouraging locals to whistle down the phone in order to test its acoustics.

Boys never tire of bad behaviour. Quite the reverse; we developed sophisticated new techniques for disturbing our elders and disgusting our classmates. Through years of fine education, through the principles of economics and the laws of physics, through the Wars of the Roses and the symbolism in Shakespeare’s sonnets, we cut open golf balls and tied pupils up in elastic, carved rocket ships into desks, forged each other’s signatures and translated jokes from Monty Python into pig-Latin. Drawing enormous pleasure from defacing the English classics, we targeted Anthony Trollope’s novel
The Warden
for destruction, simply because it was the most unforgivably dull book ever written – and we got away with it, not because we were arrogant or privileged,
but
because we were bright and bored, and didn’t even realize it.

Simon made me look cool. I made Simon look academic. Simon’s mother wore a business suit and made transatlantic phone calls. My mother wore a Sainsbury’s apron and made buns. Simon wanted to ride a Harley across America. I wanted to get through the day in one piece. Simon laughed. I worried.

In desperation, the careers officer asked us to provide him with clues to our futures. Simon said he would like to design cars. I said I wanted to write novels. With a barely suppressed smirk, the careers officer advised me to go into insurance, and suggested that Simon should enlist in the territorial army. As we left the room, we wondered what kind of loser would want to be a careers officer anyway.

By now, we had become obsessed with Monty Python, remaining fans even after John Cleese left, when a fourth series exhibited a devil-may-care attitude and featured some of the most surreal writing ever produced in the UK. Monty Python created a true generation divide. Without jokes to cling to, many audiences found themselves adrift, and an older generation used to punchlines involving black people, the Irish and mothers-in-law turned off in droves. Python was not the only bizarre comedy around; Charlie Drake’s experimental TV series
The Worker
also reflected British playwrights’ fascination with stripping back reality to surrealist arguments and set pieces. Incredibly, it ran for decades. Simon and I wanted to create feverish, disorienting fantasies, not kitchen-sink chatter. Dialogue, we knew, was not conversation. If we didn’t bother to investigate our dreams we wouldn’t catch glimpses of our souls, and without souls Simon said that we were mere ambulatory meat-sticks. True surrealism was ageless because its roots ran deeper than current fads. Plus, you didn’t have to explain it to anyone.

Simon said that the further West you went the more everything was explained to you, so that even death was shown to be not only safe and harmless but also tastefully decorated. In Eastern Europe, where death still maintained a strong link with the living, surrealism was alive and well. It survived in any books and films where dislocating events went unexplained. The critic Kenneth Tynan pointed out that you didn’t need to know why two people fell in love, only that they did. So many irrational events were happening in the world, but it seemed that in England they were rarely put on paper. The English still liked their stories with neatly tied-up bittersweet endings.

Rebellion; it was all very annoying and predictable, my mother thought, but Bill was convinced that decency had departed the world when National Conscription ended. Kath merely endured her children’s teenage years; Bill would have preferred us to have prison sentences, or at least classes in engine maintenance.

Puberty reared its ugly head in the form of spots, silly clothes and even worse haircuts. Simon bought a leather jacket. I opted for an orange nylon polo-neck shirt with Velcro fastenings, bought from one of the catalogues my mother worked for at the time.

Nobody in our class ever got a chance to speak to an actual real live girl, because it was an all-boys school where strapping chaps played lots of healthy contact sports in shorts. In due course I discovered that our head boy and the gym master were involved in these contact sports in the shower room after games. Years later, someone told me they were still running one of Blackheath’s antique shops together.

Simon met a girl called Jane, although she only ever saw him from around thirty feet away. He worshipped her from afar, because ironically the school’s toughest rebel had a secret – he was too shy to talk to her. I had to make
the
phone call, but as we still had no phone on the hall table at home, Simon and I had to go to the urine-reeking public callbox next to the campsite in the woods.

‘Hello, Jane, you don’t know me but I’m a friend of Simon … Yes, Psycho Simon, that’s the one … Well, he wondered if you’d like to go out with him … No, why would I be joking?’

Simon was hopping around outside the callbox, desperate for an answer. ‘Well? What did she say?’

‘She says thank you very much, but could you continue to stay more than thirty feet away from her?’

Simon insisted I had misheard and made me call her back half a dozen times. There were no restraining orders in those days, otherwise we might both have gone to jail.

The only other way of meeting girls was to sign up for the annual operatic production arranged with our sister school, Prendergast.
¹
Simon naturally baulked at this, but only after I had already foolishly joined, assuming that he would too. Consequently he got to hang around with girls backstage while I made nightly appearances as a dancing villager in a shrill, off-key production of
The Bartered Bride
.

We double-dated. Simon met a blue-eyed blonde called Erica, whose breasts were each bigger than her head. Erica had a look of sensual insolence that suggested she would introduce herself by sticking her hand down your pants. I got her best friend Dina, who had legs like a bentwood chair and a complexion like wood-chip wallpaper. She wore so much make-up that I couldn’t touch her for fear of getting it all over my clothes, like fresh paint. Even in summer Dina usually had a vest on over her bra, then a
shirt,
then a jumper, and only allowed me to touch certain parts of that.

Simon played it cool at the school disco, refusing to dance to T Rex’s ‘Ride A White Swan’, while I put my back out moving spastically to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’.

Simon bought a purple E-type Jaguar before he was old enough to drive it, not because it attracted girls but because he really liked the engine capacity. I had a pushbike and a bus pass.

I hung around Simon’s place so much that his mother must have thought I’d been recently orphaned.

We made lists of all the things we wanted to do. I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Frank Knight in Upper-4 B says I would make a total
branleur
.’ I thought it sounded cool. I didn’t know it meant wanker. And also ‘I’m thinking of taking up pottery.’

Simon said, ‘I’ve worked out how we could burn down the school without getting caught.’

Sometimes I wondered what on earth our intense friendship was based on. Then I realized: Simon stopped me from being beaten up. He gave me visibility, confidence and a kind of filtered-down charisma that reached me like the effects of secondary smoking. He stopped me from feeling that there was no one else in the world who would ever understand. And there he remained, in my mind and heart, comfortable and constant throughout the years, like Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be re-attached if ever I needed it.

When Simon came to my birthday party many years later, friends said, ‘Are you sure this is your old rebel schoolfriend? He’s got a grey moustache.’ I had to assure them that this was indeed the same boy who had once circulated a press clipping of a former classmate convicted of being an axe murderer with the words
THIS IS WHAT
A
GRAMMAR SCHOOL EDUCATION CAN DO FOR YOU
emblazoned across it.

But all that was a long way in the future.

Meanwhile, Simon and I decided to write and distribute a humorous magazine, and discovered how to press the Greek technique
stichomythia
into service. Short, sharp volleys of conversation had been used for comic effect by everyone from Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward to Saki, Joe Orton and Monty Python. We stole jokes, re-wrote old gems and stumbled across new ones, but the material remained stubbornly scatological, stolen, scurrilous, sophisticated yet childishly obscene. Anyway, Simon soon became more interested in engines and girls, in that order, and I returned to filling up exercise books alone.

In order to allow myself more time to concentrate on books I broke up with Dina, telling her that I didn’t fancy her any more. This proved to be a case of poor judgement and even poorer timing, as no one had ever denied Dina anything before and she ended up hanging on to my ankles in the middle of Woolwich market, screaming, until a policeman apologetically trotted up to make sure that I wasn’t a mugger.

1
Where did these names come from? It sounds like a passive verb describing the state of being horrified by the sight of suspenders.

23

A Nice Day Out

‘I THINK WE
should have a nice day out.’ Bill stared out of the window, jingling the change in his pockets. ‘That looks like a barge full of wood heading for Dagenham.’

It hadn’t stopped raining in over a week. The woods behind Cyril Villa had sprouted into a murky, dripping jungle. Somewhere far above us, water dripped steadily through the attic beams on to the floorboards below. Bill had spent the previous day hammering at the other end of the house until there was a dangerous-sounding crack followed by ominous silence and a sheepish retreat. When it came to DIY, his motto was ‘There’s no job that can’t be started.’

He had also decided to start on the garden, which had clearly not been touched since the outbreak of World War Two. To assist him in this task he had purchased a chainsaw, a band-saw, a sledgehammer and a new pickaxe. My mother had been hoping for a few boxes of peonies and some crazy paving. Instead she got a huge pile of rubble removed from the concrete forecourt of the garage. Bill had decided to smash up the old surface and
relay
it, but the concrete appeared to be several feet deep, and he only succeeded in removing the top layer, creating a bomb crater that remained for years to come. Every time it rained, the hole filled with brackish water that attracted flying things from the woods with long legs and stingers.

Bill was bored, if truth be told, and was always looking for something to do. His life was slipping by in slivers of wasted time spent working on projects he was never enthusiastic enough to finish. He had recently decided that we were spending too much money on over-priced shop products like fizzy drinks and soap powder, and had passed a couple of fruitless months attempting to create his own versions more cheaply. He knew a lot about chemistry and physics, and broke down these items into their chemical components, coming home with five-gallon drums of an industrial-strength Teepol
¹
-derivative, explaining that the solution was used as the basis for all washing-up liquids. He only stopped after Kath pointed out that he was giving me and Steven skin complaints.