I am tantamount to wetting myself with excitement, despite our really crappy seats, as I leaf through my concert programme. Wembley Arena is positively glittering tonight, and much, much bigger than anywhere I have ever been to see a show of any sort – but then again … this is Abba!
Frances’s face is glowing next to me as she unravels her shabby homemade fan-scarf and waves it above her head, screaming, ‘Come on!’
I giggle to myself and wonder what the Jason Lancasters of this world might make of Frances and me – whooping and hollering for our Swedish idols with glitter on our faces and scarves around our wrists. They were all still out there – those unapprised fuckers – but tonight we cared not. Tonight, just like Jason, crumpled hopelessly on the school stairwell outside Class D6, they were voiceless.
‘I want it to start!’ Frances says, turning to me. ‘Maxie would have loved it – wouldn’t Maxie have loved it, David?’
I’m not convinced that Maxie even liked Abba, to be honest, but I’m certain he’d have got a kick out of the buzzing crowd, and the electric atmosphere, were he here. But he wasn’t.
On the afternoon before our opening-night triumph, Geoff Boswell, Maxie’s dad, had apparently announced to his family that he’d been relocated, after a vehement reshuffle at Stationery Universe had left the company wanting in one of their smaller concerns just outside Lytham St Annes. Evidently Vi Boswell had scarcely waited for her old man to peruse the letter before she’d packed up her bits and pieces, alerted the estate agent and enrolled poor Maxie in a high-achieving mixed comprehensive in Ormskirk. They’d put their house up for rent and vacated it within about two weeks and, according to Maxie, had been so wildly keen to do so that Vi had not even given her recently lain and hitherto much cherished peach shagpile a second glance backward.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was – Maxie was gone, and, after a certain amount of lip service implying unwavering devotion and a few desultory phone calls, so was Maxie’s apparent zeal for our so-called romance. It had stung at first, and for a short while, as having one’s heart ripped out might tend to. Then, on the night I threw Frances a glam-rock-themed birthday party and sleepover at number twenty-two Chesterfield Street, her dashing next-door neighbour, Warren, boldly invited himself to stay, sharing my bed in the shortage.
A boy of mixed race, Warren boasted glossy, poker-straight black hair and lips with a trampoline bounce, and he had behaved unexpectedly and gloriously improperly for a blindside flanker during the night, and well into the hours of dawn. He then cheerily reported to me, as he pulled on his Farrahs that morning, that I had definitely – and I might be paraphrasing here – brought him off better than his bird ever had. This was quite an accolade, I felt, and served to bring me notion and hope of pastures new, boyfriend-wise: onwards and upwards, I thought.
That very same bright week, there had been splendid reports of the downfall of Bob Lord at the Board of Teacher Governors’ extraordinary meeting to determine the new Head of Fifth Year, Miss Jibbs having point-blank refused to return from her auntie Iris’ chalet in the Vale of Glamorgan after a stress-related depression that led to Bell’s palsy. Mr Lord had attempted to convince all and sundry that he would be taking over from the afflicted Miss Jibbs, insisting that he was the only man for the job. Bob came unstuck, however, when facing the board – which, chaired by the headmaster, also consisted of Hamish McClarnon, Mr Peacock and a couple of the more left-wing members of staff, who felt that he might not possess the nurturing disposition required to handle the gaping array of teenage issues that he could well be called upon to deal with.
‘I’m afraid that as a unanimous vote of the board is required,’ Hamish had seemingly told a crestfallen Mr Lord, ‘you’ll not be offered the position you’ve applied for in this school.’
Word has it that Bob Lord’s resignation was on the head’s desk that afternoon.
Things are ticking over favourably on the home front, too, on the whole. Mum and Aunt Val are no different than they were before my coming out, apart from the fact that now they try to get me to admit that I do, in fact, lust after Paul Michael Glaser and hadn’t just wanted to get my hands on the knitting pattern for the cardigan after all. Even Dad seems to have resigned himself to the inevitable, this highlighted by an incident at the Lordship Lane Working Men’s Club last Thursday night, on my shift during the ladies’ darts match. I was enthusing to Denise about a well-endowed French acrobat I’d spotted on The Generation Game, when an unfamiliar man waiting to be served – a thickset and rather puffy individual with an unruly tone – turned to my dad, who was also propping up the bar, and snorted, ‘Who’s the fuckin’ faggot serving behind the jump?’
An older woman standing next to my dad and holding a barley wine turned and met the man’s eye with a toxic stare.
‘That’s my grandson,’ Nan said.
‘Yeah, so fuck off!’ Dad supplemented.
And he did.
Frances is shrieking and making a complete show of herself as synthesizer swells build and then suddenly consume the arena before melting into a spectacular refrain, the crowd’s ovation duly rapturous.
‘I can’t believe we’re here, about to watch Abba, can you?’ Frances says, almost tearfully.
‘No, I can’t! I really can’t.’
Now drums … now bass … now guitars … everyone is on their feet, except for me – I’m strangely frozen. Now lights … now screams!
‘Get up!’ Frances hollers. ‘It’s starting – they’re on! They’re on!’
And I leap out of my seat, and then there they are …
‘People everywhere, sense of expectation hanging in the air …’
And we’re off!