The train’s just pulling out of Haywards Heath now, and some other unfortunates have boarded: a disconcerting man, who’s sitting opposite me and who keeps twitching and laughing out loud at nothing in particular, plus two ceaselessly gossiping middle-aged women in pleated skirts and A-line rain macs who got on at Redhill and haven’t come up for air since.
‘I got up eight times during the night last night,’ the much skinnier of the two women was saying as we passed Three Bridges. ‘Had fourteen cups of tea.’
‘Ooh!’ the other, frizzy-grey-haired one, said. ‘All that tannin!’
I must have drifted off after that, but as the train lurches to yet another halt between stations, I’ve woken with a start and they’re still going at it hammer and tongs.
‘I said to him,’ the skinny and clearly more talkative one is cackling, ‘I know what you’re gonna say to me, Bob … pork chop!’
I glance wearily over at the man opposite me, who twitches three times in succession – and well he might, I think, having to listen to these two idiots. I’m not sure that they’re ever going to let up. I decide then and there that I must blot their voices out of my sore, bruised head or go completely insane – one of the two – so I take a crack at gazing out of the window at the leaden skies and let my thoughts drift back to the grisly events of the day again. I would dearly love to say that it had improved after the incident in the cellar with Marty, but that wasn’t the case. As I’d stumbled up the steps of the cellar and into the day-lit yard – I couldn’t possibly have gone out through the bar and waved cheerily to Denise with her old man’s muck all over me as she emptied out the slops trays – I felt giddy, as if I were drunk.
I began to weave slightly along Lordship Lane, like the time Frances Bassey and I had drunk my nan’s Southern Comfort from the sideboard and then set off to get saveloy and chips from Elvis’s Chip Shop: Frances had, that evening, nearly come a cropper in front of a 185 bus headed for Catford Garage, but I’d grabbed her culottes and yanked her back on the pavement in the nick of time.
As I crossed the road, I feared I might be staring death in the eye myself as traffic whizzed and buzzed around me. I felt entirely unable to navigate my way across: the swish of every passing vehicle became a jet engine, causing me to flinch and start until eventually I just stood solid, like some kind of human traffic island.
‘Get out the fuckin’ way, you prat,’ someone yelled at me from a Mini, and I snapped out of it for a moment and finished crossing, shakily. When I reached the other side of the road I was outside the bistro and I stopped again, only this time in an attempt to pull myself together. I closed my eyes and squeezed my left hand shut, tight, as if I was holding on to my grandad’s hand.
‘Right! What are we havin’ for lunch today?’ he’d say. ‘Some of that nice cold meat pie with a bit of piccalilli while me and your nan watch the racing? That sounds good, eh, Melksham? And when we’ve got that, we’ll go up the betting shop and you can pick me out a pony in the four forty-five. There’s one called Kathy’s Clown – named after your mum. P’raps we should put two bob each way on that one, eh?’
Yes, Grandad, let’s do that. Please, let’s do that.
When I got a bit closer to school I felt no better, as the drunken, woozy sensation was fast replaced by a waterfall of repugnance poured upon me from somewhere above. As I passed the small bit of green that housed the big advertising hoarding, I caught the smell of Marty on me, and I stopped and vomited with as much poise as one might on a busy main road at nine thirty in the morning. There was only a cup of tea and half a sugared Weetabix to behold, but it was abundant and grim nonetheless. I was disgusted, and disgusting. What the fuck had I done? Looking up at the Marlboro man, I took several deep breaths and turned back towards the school, only to discover Frances tearing towards me in some sort of semi-hysterical flap.
‘David! Where the bugger have you been? I’ve got something to tell you; you’re not gonna believe it.’
Oh, Christ, not now, Frances, I thought, please! And I lurched on in the direction of the school gates, barely acknowledging my friend and her overexcited blether.
‘You’ll never guess in three million yonks what’s happened – you won’t! Mr McClarnon has given Maxie’s part in the play to none other than Jason Lancaster! Jason is playing Bill Sikes – Mr McClarnon says he’s got less than a week to learn the part properly, and he has to be on his absolute best behaviour. Can you fucking believe it?’
I looked at her fleetingly, and shrugged. I could believe just about anything.
‘Did you hear me, David? Don’t you fucking care?’ Frances screeched. ‘Jason Lancaster! Nazi boy is playing Bill … your Bill. He’s got to kill you in the second act. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did it for real. David!’
I stopped suddenly, whipping my head around.
‘What the fuck do I care about the poxy school play now? I don’t give a shit: my whole world’s falling apart – crumbling around my fucking ears!’
Frances did the West Indian whoop that I’d heard her mother do.
‘Lisun to yaself, bwoy!’ she mocked. ‘Such a feisty likkle drama queen!’
Then, in her regular voice – but fuming and hurt – she said, ‘Don’t you ever speak like that to me, David Starr. I’ve been the one that’s been your friend, I’ve been the one that’s—’
‘Yeah, Frances, whatever you say, lovey,’ I snarled back. ‘Now, why don’t you run along and be someone else’s friend, eh?’
Frances grabbed my arm, pinching it hard through my blazer.
‘Well, maybe I should,’ she yelled through tears and teeth. ‘You obviously don’t give a shit that your sister is back with that NF Squirrel freak after what he did to me. All chummy-chummy with him now, are you? Some fucking friend!’
I yanked myself free of her and headed across the playground, saying nothing. When I reached the centre of the playground I suddenly felt dreadful, and I turned to look behind me. Frances had gone.
What actually proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say, came at the end of second period as I hurried along the corridor on the top floor towards the drama room, in the fraught hope of locating Hamish McClarnon. I had struggled valiantly through my first lesson, but I now felt as though I could not possibly go on for another minute without talking to him. He alone would understand and offer me safe harbour – help me make sense of this morbid twist of events: he’d help me turn it around, help me to find myself again … help me find a way to get Maxie back. But just a few short yards from my destination, and sanctuary, Jason Lancaster stepped out in front of me, emerging from the boys’ washroom like one of Doctor Who’s arch-enemies in the final scene of the penultimate episode.
‘Hello, my little darlin’,’ he beamed. ‘Have you been avoiding me? I’ve not seen you around much since you and your little mate got rumbled at parents’ evening – what a fucking palaver.’
And then he howled like a dog. I tried to pass him but he stepped efficiently to one side, blocking my path.
‘’Ang on, ’ang on,’ he said. ‘’Aven’t you ’eard the good news? We’re gonna be sweethearts; you’ve been promised to me, darlin’!’
He shook gently with a cocky and nauseating chuckle, and I wanted to grab hold of the ludicrously fat knot in his tie and pull it tight until he turned blue and stopped breathing.
‘I might just have to use a real club in the scene where I beat the shit out of you and kill you, though,’ he went on, not smiling any more. ‘I want it to look realistic. I’m a bit of a method actor, me.’
‘Oh, get lost, Lancaster,’ I snapped.
And I shoved past him, forging purposefully on towards the door at the end of the hallway; but then, quite suddenly – and I have no idea why the hell I did it – I shouted back at him over my shoulder.
‘You’ll like that, anyway, won’t you?’ I called out spitefully and, as it turned out, injudiciously. ‘Playing my boyfriend. It’ll probably stir some old memories for you: make your cock hard for the first time in a year, eh, Jason?’
The unwelcome note Sellotaped to the small glass window in the locked drama-room door sent my stomach into freefall.
Mr McClarnon is away till Monday to catch up on some marking. Miss Jibbs will be taking his classes in Room 3g.
Oh Jesus fucking H. Christ!
As I turned and lumbered, slow and zombie-like, back along the corridor, Jason was upon me again, but this time there was no escape. This time he was seething, his face a furious burgundy.
‘Don’t you ever fucking say shit like that to me again, Starr,’ he hollered, punching me full and fast in the face. ‘You fucking bent cunt – don’t you EVER!’ A blow to my belly, felling me like a dry tree, my knees hitting wood with a thud, Jason’s finger prodding at my throat.
‘You better watch yourself from now on, Starr. One of these days you’re gonna turn down the wrong street on the wrong night and get your queer arse raped. I know people. I seen it done.’
A kick in the mouth left me slumped outside the French room, and there ended a delightful morning. Parfait!
At long last my train slows into Brighton, and now it is dark. The twitching, laughing man has got off somewhere without me noticing – or perhaps he in fact threw himself from the moving train in despair at the sustained babbling from the two cartoonish middle-aged women who are, of course, still rattling on as we draw into the station.
I grab my Gola bag from the rack above me and shuffle past them, then stepping off the train and eventually on to a rainy street, I realize that my plan of ‘having a little wander’ before heading for Mr McClarnon’s flat mightn’t have been a wise one. It is teeming down, and I’m all confused about directions now it’s turned dark. I am also both ravenous and dehydrated, not to mention drained from the day’s cataclysmic events and the excessively lengthy and exasperating train journey. And, of course, I’m sporting a singularly unfetching fat lip, courtesy of the lovely Jason. So instead I start to trudge in what I believe is the general direction towards Mr McClarnon’s place, face smarting as the fat raindrops slap my war wounds.
I can smell the sea air now, and it takes me back to the beanos we went on with the club when I was a kid: a coachload of us there’d be – all the grown-ups drinking and singing and telling filthy jokes along the way to whichever seaside town we were about to invade. We’d actually come here to Brighton a fair few times – it would be of a Sunday or a bank holiday – and my grandad would take me on the rides along the pier and on the front. Mum and Aunt Val were always dressed up really nice, and they’d take Chrissy and me to buy chips while Dad and his mates played on the machines in the arcade. Then, if we behaved, and it was warm enough, we’d sit and eat our chips on the beach and then we’d go for a paddle, with Nan and Grandad holding Chrissy’s hand cos she was scared of the waves.
There was never any rain then, I don’t think, or at least there hadn’t seemed to be, looking back – I think it was always sunny. Different today. When we’d go back home on the coach, there’d be a gang of us kids who would all sit together on the back seat, singing along to my tape recorder and the songs I’d recorded off the Top Twenty on a Sunday evening: The Sweet, Gary Glitter or The Bay City Rollers. How the weather’s changed now.
I turn, utterly drenched, into another street, and as I walk I attempt to map out in my mind how I’m going to lay this all out to Hamish when I get there – all this new stuff, and the old; where I’m going to actually start with it all. But the more I think about it, the more mixed up and disorderly it all becomes in my head, so I just give up and plough forward up a rather steep and unfamiliar street, and wonder what on earth Hamish will say when he sees me at his front door. I can’t smell the sea any more.