While Nev was off in Florida, I made a new friend. Sam Evans lived in Hammersmith, West London, in a flat. All of my suburban chums lived in houses – not big houses, but houses nonetheless – so a flat seemed terribly cosmopolitan. You walked up a flight of stairs to enter the living room, where Sam’s mother Erica slept on a bed that folded out of the sofa. Upstairs was Sam’s room. He had a poster of Judge Dredd, a Commodore 64 computer and a large bookshelf with grown-up novels; apart from Tom, I had not come across a boy who had read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Animal Farm. I poked my head into Sam’s sister’s room. It was phenomenally untidy: clothes piled everywhere, ashtrays – shocking in itself – and posters of David Bowie on the walls.
‘Your sister looks cool.’
‘Are you joking? Let’s go downstairs and get Mum to make us some French toast.’
Erica Evans, who was American and wore oversized glasses and bright yellow dungarees, worked for something called the Institute For Psychic Research. ‘We’re all psychic,’ she said in a matter of fact way as she worked through a pile of papers on the dining table. ‘It’s just a question of unlocking the power within.’ I told her about the Ouija board episode. ‘Yeah, you get some pretty restless spirits with Ouija,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Ghosts are dead people who haven’t resolved their issues in this world, so they cling on to the living. Best not to mess around with that shit.’
Sam picked up a plastic bag full of white powder that was sitting on the top of a bookcase and said, winking at me, ‘Are you selling cocaine again, Mum?’
‘I realized this morning we had run out of washing powder and I didn’t have time to go out and buy some more, so I asked one of the gay guys downstairs if I could borrow some. He was wearing incredibly tight jeans, and I swear, he had no penis whatsoever. I couldn’t stop staring. I hope he didn’t notice.’
I was incapable of contributing to this conversation.
It got worse, or rather, better, when Erica had to go out, presumably for a combination of cocaine selling, ghost hunting and the examining of tiny penises. Sam’s flat had a video machine and he suggested we watch a film called The Man Who Fell to Earth. ‘David Bowie plays an alien. Fancy it?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘It’s got, like, a blowjob scene, but it’s no big deal.’
‘Cool,’ I said, with a shrug. What was a blowjob?
It was like moving to a foreign country for the afternoon.
The television was on the floor, under the stairs, which meant that the best way to watch it was lying down. Perhaps a family’s discipline could be measured by the height at which they relaxed. At Will Lee’s house, with the exception of the beanbags in the attic, stiff wooden chairs with high, straight backs kept you at a minimum of two feet off the ground at all times, which seemed unfair considering his mother was under five feet tall and had to climb onto them. In our house everything levelled out at a conventional foot and a half. At the Evans’s, sitting above carpet level was for the unenlightened.
The film was made up of a series of exotic images, none of which I understood but which stayed with me for years afterwards: David Bowie watching a bank of televisions; wandering around an arid, distant planet; painted figures performing a ritualistic dance in a Japanese restaurant; and a sex scene with the aforementioned blowjob, something that before then I didn’t actually know existed. As the months passed those images kept playing back at me, ever more jumbled and confused but still with vivid flashes, and always associated with the first time I saw Sadie Evans.
It was some time near the end of the film when she came up the narrow stairs and into the flat. She must have been about fourteen, the same age as Tom, but she looked older. She had lank reddish hair cut to her shoulders and pale, pimple-flecked skin. She was wearing denim jeans, a denim jacket, a studded belt and a Motorhead T-shirt. She hovered over us, hands on her hips.
‘Who said you could watch my Man Who Fell to Earth?’
‘Who said I couldn’t?’ Sam replied, not looking up at her.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said with a curl of the lip, ‘that I’m in a good mood.’ She kicked her brother in the ribs. Sam yelped and called her an idiot. She cocked her head at me and said, ‘Who’s this?’
‘I … I … I … I’m … Wuh-whu-whu … Will.’
‘You will what?’
‘That’s his name?’ said Sam, eyes raised heavenwards.
For some reason this appeared to annoy her, as she stomped off to her room. But halfway up the stairs she stopped, looked at me, and winked. She took the last remaining steps at a slow, steady, sashaying pace.
Half an hour later, the telephone went. It was Mum, telling me it was time to come home: Nev had returned. I left the flat as if in a trance, with only a hazy impression of taking the tube for the three stops from Turnham Green to Richmond, walking up the alleyway at the side of the station and bashing into a man who told me to watch out where I was going, then crossing Queens Road and getting honked at by the oncoming traffic.
I had met girls before. Not many, but I had, and I knew what they looked like and how they sounded. What was it about Sadie, a girl I had known for a total of twenty-six seconds, which caused this strange feeling?
Who could I talk to? Tom was out of the question. Will Lee was unlikely to be of much help. A boy that spent after-school sessions classifying fossils could not be expected to know the mysteries of love. Nev would surely know what to do and what to say. He had intimate knowledge of difficult women and it looked too as though once more he had the strength to take on his paternal duties. After I had crashed through the back door and opened the fridge to glug orange juice straight from the carton, I saw the family, sitting around the table, looking at me expectantly.
Nev was no longer a spectre of ill health. He was looking young and fresh in jeans and a colourful T-shirt that said Welcome to Florida, The Land of Sunshine. He was tanned and he had filled out, the edges taken off his angularity. He gave me a stiff hug before presenting a gift: my own Sony Walkman. This was welcome indeed. It meant I no longer had to steal Tom’s and risk a beating. Nev got Tom an electronic baseball game. Now I would get to risk a beating for stealing that instead. Nev also had Levi’s for both of us, explaining that Rick, the man he had been staying with, worked in the jeans business and gave them to him at a discount.
‘But the most interesting thing about Rick is his religious beliefs,’ said Nev. ‘He belongs to an Indian sect called the Brahma Kumaris. They believe the soul is eternal and our bodies are just vehicles, which we pass through, one after another. They teach that we can return to our natural, soul-conscious state through stillness and concentration, while our actions in this life determine the destiny of the next. They also believe there was no Big Bang, but that the earth always existed.’
‘How does that make sense?’ said Tom, inspecting his new jeans. ‘Everything has to come from something.’
‘Oh, I know, it’s way out stuff.’
There never was a chance that night to ask Nev what I should do about Sadie – the jet lag took hold and he passed out straight after dinner – but when Mum came in to make me stop listening to my new Walkman under the duvet, I said to her: ‘Do you remember you once asked me if I had a girlfriend? Basically, I met a girl today and I really like her, and I think she might like me too.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Sam Evans’s sister. Yes, she’s older than me, and she’s probably done all kinds of things I haven’t, but there was a way she looked at me this afternoon that made me think, well …’
Mum took my hand in hers, and pushed my downturned chin upwards. ‘You’ll see her again soon.’
‘Don’t laugh, but I don’t know what to say to her. I’ve never been in love before. And the thing is, I don’t know what to do, because … I’m shy.’
Mum may have not laughed, but she definitely smirked. ‘You just need to be nice to her. Give her a smile. Maybe there will be a time when you go round to Sam’s that you can sit and talk. You’re young. You don’t need to do anything else.’
I nodded, and said, ‘Thanks, Mum. Oh, and Mum?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘What was that business Nev was talking about? Something about the Brother of Kuwaharas?’
‘Take no notice. It’s one of his fads. It’ll be something else in a few days.’
It was after a trip to visit Aunt Angela and Uncle Richard, Nev’s older sister and her husband, when I first sensed something might be afoot. After standing around and drinking orange squash on the clipped lawn and neat patio of Angela and Richard’s house in Cheam, Surrey, we drove round to the new church the family attended every Sunday. A man with large glasses, a grey buttoned-down shirt and a clip-on tie played ‘Amazing Grace’ on a keyboard as members of the mostly white congregation clutched their breasts, clenched their eyes, raised their arms and generally looked like something was really wrong. One woman started howling. Another was crying. An old man rolled about on the floor until two young stewards in polyester shirts picked him up and led him away. Then the madness was over, almost as quickly as it began. Everyone filed through to the hall next door and chatted about the cricket.
Under normal circumstances, this would be fuel for our parents to devour in the car journey home; further evidence of the mania raging underneath the carapace of convention. But Nev stared at the road ahead with an odd, wistful air, even after Mum wondered aloud why born-again Christians had to wear clothes that made them look like they had just escaped from a mental institution.
‘It’s interesting,’ said Nev, as we escaped the traffic lights of Cheam. ‘All of those people looked so normal, like they could be working in the local tax office, but something happened in there that took them to another place entirely. You could see how whatever they felt was genuine. And yet I felt nothing.’
‘It’s the Holy Ghost,’ I offered. ‘When it calls you, there’s nothing you can do.’
‘What the hell would you know?’ snapped Tom, who was slumped deep in the back seat, sullenly operating his electronic baseball game. He was sulking because he had planned to spend the afternoon on his ZX Spectrum home computer.
‘I’ve seen things, Tom,’ I replied, feeling a chill at the memory of the Ouija board. ‘Things you wouldn’t understand.’
That evening, I asked Nev to help me with the long division homework which, earlier in the day, I had denied the existence of. He calmly showed me a fail-safe system for doing it which my maths teacher had failed to explain, in terms which those not naturally gifted at mathematics could understand. He didn’t get angry when it took me a few attempts to get the hang of it. ‘It’s only dull and unimaginative people like me who are good at maths,’ he said as we crouched around my overcrowded desk and made space for sheets of long division. ‘Creative people like you and Mum are entirely useless at it.’
‘What about Tom? He’s good at everything.’
‘You can’t compare Tom to a normal person. He has an enormous brain on a withered, feeble body, like the Mekon.’
Through the open doorway of my room I could see Tom. He was applying a soldering iron to his ZX Spectrum and muttering, ‘When are these so-called computer experts going to invent something I can work with?’
Ever since coming back from Florida, Nev had been complaining about the medical trade it was his job to report on. ‘They’re so materialistic,’ he said to Mum the next evening. ‘It’s like Brave New World.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she replied, dishing out the sausages and mash while I read a copy of 2000 AD and Tom scraped the dirt out from under his fingernails with a fork. ‘I never understand it when people say Brave New World is a satire on a nightmare society. Everything is clean, you don’t have children, the stupid people are kept separate and if you feel sad you just take a pill. It sounds ideal.’
‘What I mean is, the entire health profession has become a drugs industry. Any kind of holistic approach to wellbeing is rejected as mumbo-jumbo by the medical establishment. It’s very frustrating. We all know about the placebo effect, but doctors seem so resistant to accept that the mind can control the way we feel. Suggest that our frustrations, feelings and aspirations have an effect on our health, which I would say is common sense, and you’re dismissed as a kook.’
‘Like Prince Charles,’ said Tom.
‘Yes, but also anyone who says our health industry shouldn’t depend on drugs alone,’ Nev continued. ‘It’s the same as believing you only need a big house and lots of money to be happy.’
‘That is ridiculous,’ said Mum. ‘You also need a decent hairdresser.’
Nev furrowed his brow. ‘Anyway, the good news is that the paper is happy for me to report on alternative health and complementary medicine. Tomorrow I’m meeting a consultant pathologist from the Maudsley called Malcolm Carruthers. He approaches medicine as an art form rather than as a technical issue. The paper asked me to write a piece on twenty ways to save your husband from a heart attack, and I called up Carruthers. Do you know what he suggested? ‘“Tell your husband you love him.”’
‘What about twenty ways to save your wife from a heart attack?’
‘Carruthers is also into meditation. He’s asked me to attend a press conference on meditation at Westminster Abbey. This is interesting stuff and nobody is reporting on it.’
‘What’s meditation?’ I asked.
‘It’s the art of training the mind to change your consciousness. Come on. Let’s finish our meals. Hammer House of Horror is on in a minute.’
Nev’s burgeoning interest in things that didn’t involve spending weekends in tile warehouses didn’t make much of an impression on me at first, chiefly because I had more pressing concerns. Sam Evans invited me to spend a weekend at his dad’s house in the Wiltshire countryside. Mum forewent her world of work to drive me over to Erica Evans’s flat one sunny Friday afternoon, where Erica’s former husband would be arriving to pick up the children. Mum even came upstairs and accepted an offer of a glass of wine. Usually, she couldn’t get away from her fellow parents quick enough.
‘Will tells me Sam’s got an older sister,’ said Mum, eyes darting about the flat as she sat in the dining area with a raised chin and a professional smile.
‘Yes, and she’s going through what I believe is known as the difficult stage,’ said Erica, as Sam and I collapsed onto the living room sofa bed and disappeared into copies of 2000 AD. ‘Everything I say and do right now is wrong. If I tell her off for smoking, if I tell her to tidy her room, if I dare to suggest that she gets off the ‘phone to her friends and does a bit of homework for a change, she says she can’t help her bad behaviour because she’s a child from a broken home.’
‘Oh yes, blame the parents.’
‘What Sadie fails to take on board is that I couldn’t bear to live with her father another minute.’
Mum sprang into action. ‘It sounds to me like you did entirely the right thing,’ she said, leaning over the table towards Erica. ‘What’s this obsession everyone has with families staying together and everyone having to be a couple? It’s all so sentimental. As far as I can see, the family is the greatest source of misery and dysfunction in the modern age. I do honestly sometimes wonder why I had children. I suppose Nev and I were too young to know any better.’
There came an angry scream from above. Before we could see her, we could hear Sadie shouting: ‘Mum! You promised to wash my jeans!’
She stomped downstairs. Gone were the heavy metal T-shirt and the studded belt of only a few weeks earlier. Sadie was wearing a red polka dot dress and had her hair in a bow. When she saw Mum, she stopped frowning.
‘If you looked in the laundry basket, darling daughter, you would find your jeans all nice and clean,’ said Erica, winking at Mum. ‘And by the way, this is Liz.’
She walked over to Mum and held out her hand. ‘Hello.’
Mum looked her up and down. ‘Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Sadie looked at Mum quizzically and said, ‘Really?’ She glanced over at me and said, ‘That’s interesting.’ Meanwhile, I hid behind my copy of 2000AD. Mum said she had better be leaving, taking her big hair and clanking jewellery out of this world of batik tapestries and hanging macramé baskets. As she kissed me goodbye she smiled in an indulgent, almost pitying way and said, ‘Have a lovely weekend. And don’t forget, you’re still young.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I never got the chance to find out because the doorbell rang even before Mum left the flat. It was Sam and Sadie’s father. I had expected a bearded man in sandals, but the person waiting outside was a tall, stern figure in a dull tailored suit, with grey hair in a politician’s wave topping deep lines in the forehead, a jutting chin and an angry nose.
‘Well, come on then,’ he said hotly to Erica.
‘Do you want to come upstairs for a moment? Sadie’s still packing.’
‘No, I do not. I told you we would be leaving at six sharp and that is the time. Sofia is waiting in the car. It was your responsibility to ensure the children were ready.’
Sadie slouched downstairs with a holdall, hugged her Mum, and said, ‘Thanks for washing my jeans. Sorry I shouted at you. I love you.’ She pushed past her father.
He tried to take her bag. ‘Sadie, I told you that we had to leave by six to miss the traf –’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ she snapped, as she wrestled her father away. ‘The amount of times The Italian has kept me waiting.’
‘The Italian’ was an expensive-looking, chain-smoking woman in her mid-thirties who sat in the passenger seat and stared ahead as we got into the car.
We drove in silence, until Sadie told her father she had started Sociology O-level. He said it was a pointless subject. ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you,’ she replied. ‘It helps the world to understand why people like you have taken all the money.’
Sam tried to engage his father in a conversation about politics. The Italian spoke to him in Italian, to which he replied falteringly. All the while, Sadie’s hand kept creeping onto my thigh. She twisted her body towards mine and kept asking questions I didn’t really have answers to, like, ‘Your mother’s a good looking lady, isn’t she?’ or, ‘Do you like girls?’
‘Stop embarrassing yourself, Sadie,’ said Sam, who was staring out of the window, looking disapprovingly at the cars in the fast lane.
‘Sitting next to me isn’t embarrassing, is it Will, hmm?’ she said, pushing my hair behind my ear.
I couldn’t actually say or do anything. I was frozen. Close proximity to this impossibly exotic creature rendered me incapacitated. ‘Your mother is far too lenient with you,’ said their father, as I felt my mouth lock into a hideous rictus. ‘The worst thing that can happen to a young woman is she gets a reputation for looseness.’
‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’
Of course I hadn’t. I was only just beginning to realize they existed at all.
With a sigh, Sadie turned the other way. Sitting in the middle of the back seat, the option of staring out of the window was not available. And The Italian was filling the car with smoke. There was little left to do other than focus on the lines on the motorway, and then on the twisting, hedgerow-shadowed curves of the dark roads that told us we were heading deeper into the wilds of Wiltshire. Eventually, we seesawed up and down on an uneven track and came to a halt.
I didn’t have much knowledge of English country cottages, but this one fitted into whatever preconceptions of them I harboured. Its walls were made of Chilmark stone and its wooden porch was garlanded with roses. While The Italian sat in the car, Sam and Sadie’s father reached up to a ledge above the door, said something about ‘bloody people’, and eventually pulled down a key, which he rattled furiously in the door until it creaked open. He went back to get The Italian, draping a coat over her head so the rain didn’t put out her cigarette.
‘Home sweet home,’ said Sadie, throwing a bag and then herself down onto an old sofa, its red canvas cover frayed and oily.
‘It’s damp,’ said Sam. ‘We need to get the fire going.’
As Sam and I built up a fire from old firelighters, yellowing copies of the Telegraph and piles of wood, then attempted to light it with sodden matches, I got a sense of the place. The room had worn rugs thrown over a cold floor, a large, soot-encrusted hearth, bookshelves with books that seemed to have grown into each other and a mullioned window looking out into the night. There was a dusty record player with a pile of records, but no television. Next to the living room was a kitchen with a huge sink and a fridge, but no dishwasher. Up the narrow stairs was a bathroom with a chipped, stained tub and a rubber shower attachment, but only two bedrooms. One had a double bed and one had two single beds, all tightly bound with threadbare sheets.
Which meant Sam and I would be sleeping in the same room as Sadie.
Surely two of us wouldn’t be expected to share a bed?
‘Give me a hand getting down this mattress,’ Sam and Sadie’s father said, craning his head around the bedroom door. He pulled down an attic ladder of twisted steel. ‘You stay there and take it from me.’ After disappearing into the black hole for about a minute, and shouting ‘damn it and blast’ after the sound of something smashing, a thin, ripped, dusty blue mattress appeared.
‘Well grab it then!’
I yanked it through and lay it down on the floor between the two single beds. ‘There are sheets in that cupboard,’ said Sam and Sadie’s father, gesturing manically. ‘Blankets, eiderdowns and pillows. Can I leave you to it?’
An hour later, Sam and Sadie were in bed and I was on the mattress. And once the light was off Sadie began to perform a striptease. ‘Duh-der-duh-da-da,’ she went, pulling off her T-shirt before unclipping her bra and twirling it around her head and throwing it across the room. She was silhouetted against the moon shining through the lattices of the window.
‘For God’s sake, Sadie,’ said Sam, pulling the pillow over his head. ‘You are a cretin.’
‘Will doesn’t think so,’ she said, poking her leg out from the eiderdown. ‘Have you ever seen a woman naked before, Will?’
Twelve years old and thrown into confusion.
Somehow Sadie ended up in her pyjamas, so I felt it was safe to emerge from under the sheet and say: ‘What are we doing tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I’m going to see my friend Spider.’
Sam and Sadie’s father expected us to do the washing up by ourselves – in our family’s system of washing, drying and putting away, it was generally assumed a parent would take on the washing role while Tom and I fought over the other two tasks – but this was the kind of unreasonable behaviour I was learning to expect from this man, especially after Sam told me a story about their summer holidays.
‘We stay in a nunnery in Italy,’ he said, instantly creating a vision of misery, as we washed up after breakfast. ‘Every morning we have to make our beds. But then the nuns come along and strip the beds and make us make them all over again.’
‘What’s the point in that?’ I asked, as I battled with an old sponge and some ineffective washing up liquid to remove the last vestiges of omelette from a frying pan.
‘It’s meant to teach us responsibility.’
I had never heard of anything so stupid. Sadie appeared, still in her pyjamas. She told me Spider was a hippy who lived in the woods. The only hippy I had come across was a wild-eyed Rasputin type who wandered around Richmond in greasy flares and a corduroy jacket, carrying a broken guitar. It was years later I discovered he was Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac.
‘Sounds cool,’ I said. ‘I love hippies.’
‘Yeah, actually I kind of want to go without you and Sam, if you don’t mind. So you should probably hang around the house and have a game of Monopoly or something.’
Ten minutes later she was in jeans and Wellington boots, running off into the woods. Sam said he knew where Spider lived. We pushed through dead leaves and broken branches, climbing over logs slippery with moist moss and kicking toadstools into oblivion until we came to a clearing. There was a house made of wood and tin, with a little chimney from which smoke billowed. A large blue van was parked up alongside a static caravan and an old ladder. A wheelbarrow and a few shovels were leaning against the house. At the other side of the clearing was a wooden stage.
‘They built that last year,’ said Sam, pointing at the stage, ‘so they could hold crazy festivals where they all smoke cannabis and take their clothes off and roll around in the mud. Anyway, let’s surprise them.’
We crept up to the door of the house, which creaked and groaned in the wind. Sam nodded and counted three, two and one with his fingers. We jumped in.
Sadie was lying on a low cushion/sofa-type arrangement, leaning against a man with an enormous frizz of hair and a Rajasthani waistcoat over his bare chest. At the far end of the room, where the stove was, an incredibly skinny man with dreadlocks and a greyish cut-off T-shirt with arm holes hanging somewhere around the waist was shaking a wok and dancing to reggae. Sadie exhaled a cloud of smoke from a badly made cigarette in our direction.
‘Aren’t you wondering how we found you?’ asked Sam.
‘Not really,’ said Sadie, nestling deeper into the cushions as her head settled on the frizz-haired hippy’s chest.
‘Sit down,’ said the hippy, making a benign gesture with his scrawny little arms. ‘Join us.’
Introductions were made. Spider was on the cushions and a man called Sandra was doing the cooking.
‘Why have you got a girl’s name?’ I asked Sandra.
‘We have no genders here,’ he said, droplets of sweat trickling from kinky armpit hairs and landing in the wok.
Spider had built the house himself. He spent about half the year on the road, either in Europe or at festivals around the country. He and Sandra were musicians of a sort; there was a guitar, some bongos and a flute lying about. At the front of a stack of records was one with a teenage girl, naked from the waist up, staring out of the album sleeve and holding a toy airplane.
‘What kind of music do you like?’ I asked.
‘Just good music,’ said Spider, nodding gently, as he rolled a cigarette.
‘I like Jimi Hendrix.’
‘Cool, man. What’s your favourite record?’
I thought on this a while. ‘Smash Hits.’
‘Grub’s up,’ said Sandra, sticking a bony finger in the wok, licking it, nodding, and sticking it in again. That seemed like a good time to make our excuses and get the hell out of there.
In the evening The Italian sat in the kitchen, reading Vogue and smoking cigarettes. Sam and Sadie’s father cooked chicken. Sam and I started on a game of Dungeons & Dragons and Sadie spent a very long time in the bathroom before coming downstairs to paint her nails by the fire. When Sam and Sadie’s father asked ‘you children’ to lay the table, Sadie raised her eyes and stomped over to clang down a few knives and forks while Sam did the plates and I did the glasses. Over dinner, The Italian smoked and ate at the same time while Sadie poked at her food and Sam complimented his father on an excellent chicken.
‘What do your parents do, Will?’ asked Sam and Sadie’s father.
‘Journalists.’
‘Ah,’ he said, raising his eyebrows as he poured wine. ‘The Street Of Shame. Did they want to be serious writers and not quite have the skill for it?’
‘I don’t know, actually,’ I said. ‘I’ve never asked them.’
‘That’s pretty rude, Dad,’ said Sadie. ‘I don’t think being a lawyer gives you a right to act all superior.’
‘Being a father gives me the right to deserve a little more respect from you.’
‘In Italy,’ said The Italian, ‘children worship their mothers and fathers.’
‘Tell that to the Borgias.’
After supper, a miracle happened: everyone went to bed except for Sadie and me. She put a record on the turntable sitting on the floor near the fire: it was Hunky Dory by David Bowie. ‘This is for sure my favourite record of all time,’ she said, gazing at a sleeve featuring a hazy image of a feminine creature clutching golden hair, elbows raised. ‘He’s a genius … listen to this.’
She sat with her legs tucked underneath her, on the rug, holding the sleeve. I nodded solemnly for a minute or so as Bowie sang about the changes we were all going through.
‘Sadie, I …’
She stopped me before I began, holding up a finger and widening her eyes. Only when the song finished, and she took a deep breath and kept her eyes closed for a good few seconds, did she speak.
‘The thing about David,’ she said, ‘is I’ve always known he’s speaking directly to me. Listen to this song. It’s called ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, and …’ she nodded her head rapidly, ‘I happen to know he actually wrote this about me. It’s a personal message, telling me how people like my dad have had their day and now it’s the turn of the switched-on girls to take over the world. Maybe my mum met David at, like, a Buddhist retreat or something.’
Sadie handed me the sleeve so that she could listen in meditative respect with her eyes closed. The album came out in 1971, when Sadie was three. I supposed it was possible he wrote it about her.
‘The point is,’ she said loudly, somewhere around the second chorus, ‘my father doesn’t love me. If he did he would never have run away with that awful woman. So why should I listen to him?’
‘I’m sure he does really. Maybe he’s, like, an uptight square.’
‘You’ve got that right. Oh my God. My favourite song is coming up.’
This was ‘Life On Mars’, and although I had absolutely no idea what Bowie was going on about, with the story of the girl with the mousy hair, lawmen beating up the wrong guy and sailors fighting in the dance halls, Sadie dissolved into tears. I would have put my arm around her had I dared, giving her the kind of consolation of which only twelve-year-old boys are capable.
‘Nobody understands him,’ she said through sobs. ‘Nobody apart from girls like me. We know how he feels because we feel the same way.’
‘I think,’ I said, trying hard to look solemn, ‘I think I understand him too.’
The only thing disturbing this scene of perfect wonder and excitement was the image of Sadie sidling up to the hippy in the tin hut. I asked her if she had a boyfriend.
‘Not really,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Too much trouble.’
After a pause I said: ‘What about Spider?’
‘You must be joking.’
If only I could think of something to say. I edged towards Sadie, but the record ended and she turned it over. That meant I had to sit there and appreciate the brilliance of David Bowie’s message of love on ‘Fill Your Heart’ and the wit of his tribute to Andy Warhol, whom I had never heard of, but Sadie said he was a very cool artist from New York, as she explained to me every nuance of every song. After agreeing with everything she said, I resolved to think of a line to move our romantic involvement onto the next level. An older boy at school had told me you could get any girl you wanted as long as you kept the conversation going. She sat on the rug and leaned on one hand with her head tilted downwards, a picture of soulful introspection. She looked thoughtful, serene. Her sad eyes looked up and caught mine. They stayed there for a world out of time. They dropped down. She was younger, childlike, no longer an untouchable goddess but a teenage girl, reaching out for a connection. This was the moment. This was my chance.
I had to say something profound. ‘Do you know how much my Dungeons & Dragons starter kit cost? It was almost twenty pounds. I saved up my pocket money for three months.’
Sadie looked at me.
‘I think I’ll go to bed.’
I decided not to share details of my thwarted romance with anyone, and went home to discover Nev in a state of excitement. The scene was normal enough. Tom, in ripped black drainpipes and a loose white T-shirt he had attacked with scissors, was leaning on the back legs of a chair by the kitchen table. Mum was unpacking an Indian takeaway with one hand and with the other, passing through the pages of the Sun in search of her byline. She even managed to kick away the tabby cat that had wandered in. Nev, meanwhile, had a lighter-than-air look, one I hadn’t seen before. He was spooning pilau rice onto his plate in a distracted fashion.
‘Ah, Sturch,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad you’re back. I’ve had the most amazing experience. I have to share it with you.’
‘Here we go,’ said Tom.
Nev explained how he had gone along to a press conference about meditation at Westminster Abbey. The Reverend Edward Carpenter, Dean of Westminster, was in conversation with an Indian swami on the nature of the soul, and they were comparing Christian and Indian mystical perspectives. The swami was expounding on the benefits of a practice called Siddha Yoga, and at the end of the conference there was a meditative chant of the words ‘Om Namah Shiva’, which translated as ‘I bow before the God within’. An acolyte with a squeezebox sat before the swami and made a droning melody that was similar, said Nev, to the one used to invoke the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then there was a silent meditation that lasted for five minutes. That’s when it happened.
‘In those five minutes of silence, a golden red light poured down into the centre of my forehead,’ said Nev, wide-eyed at the memory. ‘It was absolutely stunning. The bliss that accompanied it was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life before. It was so concrete. It was like a flower opening out, bright yellow. I could see it, as if it was absolutely there. Tears poured from my eyes. I was transported.’
Nev told us he paced the streets for two hours afterwards. ‘When I eventually did get back to the office, I looked in Gray’s Anatomy. I thought there might be a physical explanation for this. But there wasn’t. This thing was like nothing I’ve ever come across. In that moment it was as if I saw a glimpse of life as it is meant to be lived; as if everything else, from our bodies to our possessions to the earth itself, is just a stage set.’
‘I still think you haven’t recovered properly from your illness,’ said Mum, licking a finger and turning the pages of the newspaper. ‘You know your constitution has never been very strong.’
‘It’s essentially a Platonic idea,’ Tom declaimed, his eyes closed and his teeth jutting forwards goofily. ‘The world of the senses is the world of lesser men. The enlightened see physical objects as mere shadows of deeper truths. And Socrates taught how reality is unavailable to those that use their senses. The annoying thing is, I always thought if anyone in this family would receive enlightenment and divine flashes of inspiration and open the doors of perception, it would be me.’
I certainly didn’t appreciate the significance of Nev’s epiphany at the time, and besides, an incident at school convinced me that he was going to forget all about his golden lights and transporting flowers in order to pick me up and throw me against a wall. Ever since the time I got caught copying Bobby Sultanpur’s homework I had been waiting for Nev to lose it, to make me wilt under his mighty paternal wrath. This looked like it was going to be the moment.
It was during a game of football. As usual, Sam Evans and I found ourselves cast out as defenders, shivering in the cold mud of the pitch, away from the action, talking about Judge Dredd and hoping the ball didn’t come anywhere near us. We were discussing Dredd’s recent trip to the mutant wastelands of the Cursed Earth when a boy from a rival school sped past us and swept towards the goal, thereby angering our entire team.
‘You’re a pair of statues,’ shouted the team captain, a boy called Tucker. ‘You’re untrainable, useless and lazy. And you’ve just lost the game for us.’
‘It’s only half-time,’ I pointed out. ‘Don’t be so defeatist.’
He marched up and pushed me over into a puddle of mud. Mr Block, our games teacher, witnessed the whole thing. He was standing nearby, rain splashing off his egg-shaped head.
‘Sir!’ I shouted. ‘Tucker just pushed me over for no reason.’
‘Get up, Hodgkinson,’ Block shouted. ‘Go to the changing rooms and bring out the half-time oranges. And take your ‘girlfriend’ with you.’
The entire team brayed like donkeys. We ran off and vowed to take our revenge somehow, when Sam suddenly stopped.
‘Hey, here’s our chance for revenge.’
Between the playing fields and the changing rooms was a copse of trees with a muddy pathway cutting through it. Next to the pathway was an abandoned coil of twine, presumably used for some sort of sporting activity. ‘Tucker always pushes everyone out of the way to make sure he’s first back to the changing rooms,’ said Sam. ‘Why don’t we give him a little surprise?’
We tied the twine between two trees on either side of the path, about a foot from the ground, and ran in to get the half-time oranges. Sure enough, after we lost the game by letting two more goals get past our defences, Tucker, having punched Sam and me on the arm by way of punishment for our lackadaisical approach to competitive sports, ran ahead of everyone. The plan worked perfectly. He tripped over our twine and fell into the mud, knocked down like a skittle. He raised a grim, defeated head and wiped the grime from his face to see everyone laughing at him – everyone, that is, apart from Mr Block. The laughing stopped. Block told everyone to gather round.
We shuffled towards him, a motley mass of dirtied, bloodied knees and spotty red faces. Some of the boys looked like junior Hulks, subject to sudden growth spurts; others were still twig-like and androgynous. I was somewhere in the middle, a beanpole who had sprouted upwards with no muscle development of which to speak.
‘Who did this?’
Nobody said anything.
Block crossed his arms and spoke slowly in his blunt Yorkshire growl. ‘Do you know what happens when you play tricks like this? First boy trips over trip wire. Second boy, carrying pointed corner flag, trips over first boy. Result: dead boy.’
‘Sir,’ I said, perhaps not realizing the seriousness of the situation, ‘is that the first or second boy who’s dead?’
After Block had grabbed me by my ears and pulled me towards him while telling everyone else we would be doing nothing but squat thrusts and press-ups for every games lesson until the end of term unless the culprits owned up, Sam Evans and I had no choice but to confess to our crime. We thought our teammates would agree Tucker had it coming, but it seemed they were on his side. ‘He could have been killed,’ said one boy. ‘I can’t believe you two are so immature,’ said another. Tucker himself put it best. ‘Just because you’ve failed in life doesn’t mean you have to take it out on those who haven’t.’
Our parents received ‘phone calls before we even managed to make it home. The word ‘suspension’ was muttered in authoritarian circles, but it got downgraded to a detention. I could only imagine how Nev was going to react.
Nev was already at 99, Queens Road, which made it worse. Mum was there as well, the tips of two fingers in her mouth. Nev looked distracted, distant, and Mum looked worried, like they had just been discussing a plan of action. Perhaps, if I did all my homework, didn’t steal anything, told no lies, went to bed when I was told and didn’t even turn the lights back on after I thought Mum had gone downstairs, I could escape the black cloud of shame after a week or so. That was the best I could hope for.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ I began, holding my arms out as I sat down at the kitchen table. ‘And I want to point out that it wasn’t my fault. And I’ve been punished already.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Nev, absently. ‘We must be careful not to hurt each other.’
Mum looked more worried than angry, which wasn’t like her. After it became clear Nev was going to say nothing further on the subject, I said, ‘Is that it? Aren’t you at least going to shout at me and send me to my room?’
‘We all make mistakes, Sturch.’
‘Nev’s got an announcement to make,’ said Mum. ‘It’s come as much of a shock to me as it will to you.’
‘What is it?’
Nev looked extremely pleased with himself.
‘I’ve given up my job.’