Paperboy (30 page)

‘Paint what black, sir?’

‘Everything. It will be a day of artistic anarchy. We’ll take all the work you have produced this summer and paint it all black. Then we’re going to glue it all together with the record player at the centre, along with anything else that you feel belongs in the sculpture, and stand it in the middle of the school quadrangle as a statement about ourselves.’

It seemed a bit stupid, but nobody argued.

‘What if somebody tells us to take it down, sir?’ said Doggart, a pudding-basin-haircutted weed who was born to say ‘sir’ a lot in his life.

‘You don’t take it down. You don’t obey anyone’s orders until the stroke of noon. Then I’ll appear and we’ll play “Paint It Black” from the centre of the sculpture. The
art
will last for the duration of the song, and then we’ll destroy it.

‘How, sir?’

‘We’ll set fire to it.’

‘But this is a smokeless zone, sir.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll forewarn the other masters.’

So, preparations were made, the date was set for the last day of term, and we painted everything we could lay our hands on before adding it to the pile. Clocks. Chairs. Tyres. Lampshades. Toys. Tailors’ dummies. Car exhausts. A washing machine. And all the time, the damned record played on and on until it wore out and had to be replaced with a new copy.

Mike Branch strolled around the art room, shifting from table to table, stopping to watch as Ashley Turpin, a fat kid with almost geological facial acne, attempted to get black paint to stick to a brass candelabra.

‘Extremely groovy, Turpin,’ he pronounced, running his thumb across his chin. Turpin, who had previously shown no promise in any area of scholastic endeavour beyond O-level Body Odour, was pitifully grateful.

Identified to other classes by our laminated badges (black, circular, blank – oh, the
nihilism
), we suddenly found ourselves treated as a creative élite. I and the other despised and shunned creeps had finally found our cause.

We began to be bad – bad as in modern bad, good bad. Soon we were discovering the non-artistic applications of Paint It Black. Minor-league anarchy: having pizzas with disgusting toppings delivered to the masters, cash on delivery; gluing their wipers to their car windscreens. Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns upped the stakes by removing the back wheel from the French teacher’s moped, painting it black and adding it to the sculpture. We made crank calls to masters’ wives from the caretaker’s phone. We
started
wearing black shirts to go with our black ties, and became threatening towards weaker classmates. Anyone who whined that it was wrong was ditched from the group and had his badge revoked. If we had paid attention during History, we might have learned something about Mussolini.

By now there was an all-or-nothing atmosphere among members of the group. On the last day of term, Mike had arranged a double art period for his band of angry young rebels. All of the black-painted sections of the sculpture were arranged around the room. The Rolling Stones record played at top volume. The art room was rechristened the Rock Shop, so you could say, ‘Hey, if anyone wants me during the study period, I’m at the Rock Shop.’

We began to assemble the sculpture. Forming a chain, we passed the sections out into the school quadrangle. Table legs, television sets and dolls’ arms poked out from the twisted black heap, which grew and grew. The record player was wired up but we were going to be late for our noon deadline, mainly because we were so strung out by now that we were repeating each other’s tasks.

The big moment arrived and we were still building the sculpture. Most of the school had turned out to watch. The record player was started and the song began to play. Everyone knew that something special was about to happen. All kinds of rumours were flying around, most of them far more imaginative than what was actually planned. The headmaster appeared to see what all the fuss was about. He stood at the front of the crowd with his bony arms folded behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh watching native dancing, a look of attenuated tolerance upon his face.

All eyes were on us. We were the rebels and we had something to say.

Except that we didn’t.

We looked around for Mike. Our Mike, the leader of the black. But there was no sign of him anywhere.

‘If you’re looking for Mr Branch,’ said the headmaster in a clear Scottish Presbyterian voice that rang across the quadrangle, ‘you will not find him here. He left the school premises last night with no intention whatsoever of returning today.’ He carefully pronounced the ‘H’ in ‘whatsoever’.

Our headmaster turned on his heel and led the other teachers back to the common room. And the record stuck. It stuck on the word ‘black’. The repeated syllable taunted, and the derision began. Everyone drifted away, snorting to each other, too bored to even come and beat us up. The natural order had been restored, and we were back at the bottom.

I wondered if Mike Branch had ever intended to stay for the final act of rebellion, and what he might have done. Some years later, a friend told me that he had been spotted working as an estate agent in Kensington. I found myself wondering if he realized the effect he had had on all of us. He had given us pride and faith in ourselves, but also arrogance and ill-will. Then he snatched it all away.

It was incredible that we had put all our trust in someone who wore a purple turtleneck sweater and yellow beads beneath a brown patch-suede jacket. But I owned a mauve two-tone shirt with a huge round collar and canary hipster bell-bottoms, so what did I know?

1
The perfect parody of a tie-dyed art student. He hit a tree on Barnes Common and went off to live in Fairyland.

2
We loved the Dadaist movement because you could look like a rebel just by nailing a Brussels sprout to a tree.

29

The Safety of Scientists

KNOWING THAT MY
father had sacrificed his career for me should have been the turning point you reach in films and novels, when bridges are mended amid welling tears, and a profound and lasting sense of respect is established between the protagonists as the son views his father with fresh eyes.

Unfortunately, this revelation came just when I had become an art rebel, so I carried on ignoring him. I was too busy dyeing all my clothes black and being moody. I had discovered
Hamlet
and studied it obsessively, searching for parallels with my own life. My father was not an adulterous murderer, but I was quite convinced that I shared qualities with the Dane, including prevarication, incoherent anger, impoliteness, a tendency to mope and an attraction to shoulder-pads. The phase was short-lived, though, and vanished with the non-appearance of the cowardly class warrior Mike Branch on our last day of term. I was quite relieved to be able to return to normal; being a rebel didn’t suit someone who preferred Offenbach to Iron Maiden.

Things were a little easier after that, but being with my father was rarely a picnic. As Bill coped with the loss of his mother and re-discovered the existence of his wife, he came to depend more on Kath than he ever had done on Mrs Fowler, following her from room to room, hardly ever letting her out of his sight. He would sit beside the sink smoking as she washed the dishes, and would traipse from room to room behind her as she vacuumed the carpets. He curtailed her freedom in a thousand unthinking ways, but whenever she turned to talk to him he could find nothing to say. Perhaps too many years of silence had passed between them to allow conversation to return.

It seemed impossible, but the family circle had shrunk still smaller. Without ‘Aunt’ Mary or Mrs Fowler around to drive us mad, a torpor descended upon the house, slowing our days and flattening all emotions. It was as if we had all been tranquillized. Elsewhere in the world there were wonderful adventures to be had and great loves to be celebrated, but life in South London had flat-lined. When Kath had first laid eyes upon my father, I wondered if it had it been like Cressida’s sighting of Troilus as he passed beneath her window in gleaming armour, then decided that as Bill looked more like Arthur Askey
¹
than a Trojan prince, the answer was probably not.

Within a month my father and I were constantly arguing once more, so Bill refocused his affections on Steven, who shared his love of everything mechanical.

The time of waiting seemed to last for ever. I crept off to horror films as though paying furtive visits to a forbidden lover. It was a way of experiencing all the things I could not yet feel, or be allowed to feel. If it wasn’t exactly improving my mind, it was better than digging out
bottles
of rum from the sideboard and getting pissed in the middle of the afternoon, or hanging around in bus shelters, casting weaselly glances at adults while planning gang wars over disputed territories. There wasn’t a wide range of activities to choose from in Abbey Wood if you had no money.

I returned to writing longhand. The Remington had tangled its keys once too often. I had tried to straighten them with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, but now they defied any attempt at realignment. After each visit to the Odeon I headed home to fill up more exercise books with stories, notes, and ideas filched from everything I saw, but sometimes the sheer effort of being so self-absorbed got to me. By now my secondhand writing was suffering from the law of diminishing returns.

Girls take an interest, but boys become obsessed. In the past I had been obsessed with Thunderbirds,
Mad
magazine, Hammer films,
The Avengers
(Diana Rigg series only),
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
,
The Prisoner
,
Hancock’s Half-Hour
(radio series only), Superman,
Playboy
and Dracula.

Oh, to see a film in which Superman fought Dracula for Diana Rigg on a space station. Sadly, there was as yet no internet to provide solace for one’s more exacting obsessions. I looked back at the dismally predictable list and felt very ordinary indeed. I re-read the short stories written out in my diary and the feeling of ordinariness grew. I was the same as every other child in the neighbourhood, probably the whole of London, England, the Earth, the Universe. I probably even had the same fantasies, which included:

I slammed my notebook shut when I realized that Kath was reading over my shoulder. ‘I think we need to have a little talk,’ she said, indicating the diary. ‘Bring that with you.’

We usually headed into the overgrown garden filled with rusting motorbike parts whenever we wanted to be alone, so as to keep our conversations hidden from my father. Bill had lately taken to chopping chunks out of trees in the adjacent woods, spreading his knack for destruction into the natural world, so Kath made herself comfortable on a sawn log and took the book from me. She read in silence for what felt like ages, then closed it gently and looked at me.

‘Well, they’re not terribly good, are they?’ It hurt me that she could be so honest. Her green eyes gazed steadily into mine, demanding that I reply with equal frankness.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘They’re rubbish.’

‘No, not exactly rubbish. But they’re not really yours. They’re someone else’s ideas, re-worked, which is fine if you want to get a job in advertising. Instead of writing about mad scientists, can’t you write about people you know?’

It was horrible advice, as nearly all the people I knew were demented or damaged in incomprehensible yet mundane ways. Not one of them behaved in the fashion
I
was led to believe was correct and laudable. I preferred the safety of scientists. They only had killer plants and space viruses and evil mutants to deal with, not decade-long arguments, mammoth sulks, buried resentments and secret struggles for control. You always knew where you were with scientists because they gripped pipes between clenched teeth and strutted about thinking aloud with one hand in the pocket of their lab coats. I liked them because they were just like robots, not real at all.
Oh
…

Her point began to dawn on me.

‘Will you write me a story about us?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you’d like it very much.’

‘Then write about your favourite singer. Do you like …’ She searched for some form of modern music with which she was familiar. ‘Cliff Richard?’

‘No, I like Noël Coward.’
²

‘Oh.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?’

‘A film critic.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A lyricist.’

‘Why not become a proper writer?’