5

Boys Are Never Teacher’s Pet

‘If my father had hugged me even once I’d be an accountant right now.’

Ray Romano (actor and comedian)

Zelda Linseed is pushing her luck. She’s already in trouble for covering her English exercise book with a Smash Hits double-spread of Paul Young and writing ‘bumfluff’ with an arrow pointing at Young’s armpit hair.

Everyone was supposed to cover their exercise books to make them last longer. At home, my own method had been to find a roll of Anaglypta wallpaper in a cupboard and attack it with some very large scissors. The result made my schoolbooks look like they’d each grown an asymmetrical beige crust. You could stack them in a pile with all the ease of balancing ten clams. Surveying my efforts, Mum took pity and bought me some brown parcel paper.

But Zelda is a rebel. She’s compounding her bumfluff transgression by chatting now at a high volume with Tiffany Rampling (still the younger sister of Tess Rampling) while our new form teacher is trying to speak. Our new form teacher is not the benign dictator of the Mrs Brockley style; this one will endure a certain level of background natter right up until the moment she won’t. At which point, her own unique approach to class discipline kicks in.

Mrs Slater turns in the general direction of the noise and says, ‘Zelda, Tiffany, you appalling dogs, please be quiet. I’m trying to explain how you can make good on the crimes of your predecessors.’

Zelda and Tiffany are cartoonishly open-mouthed at being addressed as ‘dogs’. It seems to me that Slater is using the word like a pirate might – to mean ‘cur’ or ‘wretch’. That’s already quite full-on, but what Zelda and Tiffany obviously heard was the teenage slang that boys use to describe girls who won’t have sex with them: for example, ‘Madonna is a right dog’.

We’re in the library and it’s a getting-to-know-you session not only for Mrs Slater and Form 1B (shortly, next year, to become Form 2S), but also our first close-up encounter with the Dewey Decimal Classification System. The ‘crimes’ she refers to are the way some books have been sloppily returned to the wrong place. We’re going to spend half the lesson sorting that out and the second half just . . . reading. On our own.

Much as I’ve grown fond of Miss Wain now that The Endless Steppe has finally ended, I can’t imagine her describing the act of misplacing a library book as a crime. This new English teacher talks the way I suddenly decide all English teachers ought to talk: with an obvious delight in the abundance and ironic possibilities of English. She’ll make jokes that no one gets; she’ll use vocabulary that no one understands; she’ll talk to a class of twelve-year-olds in roughly the same way she talks to a class of eighteen-year-olds. It’s like a teacher of Spanish conducting a lesson exclusively in Spanish – it’s our job to keep up. This won’t always make her popular. The fact that she obviously doesn’t give a shit about that is another reason I immediately like her.

Having done some re-ordering, we get a few minutes to choose a book to read by ourselves and then borrow. I head straight for ‘D’ in Fiction to find Terrance Dicks – my favourite Doctor Who author. I’m slightly ashamed of this because I know I ought to be looking for something more grown up like, I dunno, Agatha Christie or something. Dicks isn’t a ‘proper’ author in that sense – he’s just good at adapting TV stories into books.

Amazingly there’s one here and I haven’t got it at home – Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon, an old hardback from the Tom Baker days. I’m just reading the blurb on the back when suddenly Mrs Slater is at my side.

‘Ah, a Doctor Who fan.’

I nod sheepishly.

She frowns at the book. ‘I’m a bit of a sci-fi ignoramus, I’m afraid. You’ll have to tell me what I’m missing.’

I blink at her. ‘What, now?’

She half smiles and nods, still looking at the book.

‘Well, erm, I like the stories.’

‘That’s a start . . .’ She says it to my elbow. I get the feeling I’m only going to be rewarded with eye-contact when I come out with something vaguely interesting.

‘Well, I like it that you already know what the characters look like.’

‘Because you’ve seen them on the TV?’

‘Erm, yeah. I s’ppose . . .’ I feel like the world’s stupidest wanker. ‘I’ve got quite a few of these at home.’

She looks straight at me. ‘You’re a collector?’

‘Yes!’

‘You’re not going to pinch this, are you?’

‘What? I mean, sorry?’

‘You’re not going to add this one to your collection?’

‘Oh, Christ no!’ Ooh. Am I allowed to say Christ? The panic makes her smile and then she takes a beat for herself, scanning the shelves.

‘Pity,’ she says, ‘nobody steals from the library any more. It’s a bad sign.’ She starts to move off and then, almost as an afterthought: ‘Smart chap – you know what you like. Enjoy it.’

I’m relieved that the encounter is over, although I’ve no idea whether I’ve just been encouraged or ridiculed. On balance, I’m pleased. I look down at the blurb again. I see that the story was based on the Greek myth of the Labyrinth of Knossos. I wonder if that ‘K’ is silent or if you’re meant to pronounce it as in Willy Wonka’s Vermicious Knids. It also says that ‘Nimon’ is a play on ‘Minotaur’. Damn, I wish I’d said that. ‘The point of science fiction, Mrs Slater,’ I should have said, ‘is the same as the point of any other fiction. To take the world and re-imagine it. To refresh our understanding of human beings by imagining ourselves in a different place or time.’ But no, I mumbled about having a book collection. The fact that it was a collection that I spent time actually reading seemed to help for now, but it wasn’t enough. I’m suddenly in a terrible hurry to impress Mrs Slater. But it’ll have to be done quietly.

After the lesson, Pete Garvey catches up with me in the corridor. He’d been sitting opposite me and tucking into Right Ho, Jeeves. He won’t exactly be shouting that from the rooftops either.

‘Oi, Webb, what was Slater on at you about?’ A few other boys are tagging along with him.

‘Oh God, something about what book I was reading.’

‘She’s a nosy fucker.’

‘Exactly. I told her it was none of her fucking business.’

‘Haha. Apparently her first name is Heather!’

‘Oh God. Heather! What a massive . . . spastic!’

‘I know! We’re going outside after lunch for a bit of Ball Death.’

Oh great, more Ball Death. The rules of Ball Death are easily explained. We take it in turns to be the Kicker. If you’re not the Kicker, you’re one of the Runners. The Runners line up on one side of the exterior brick wall of the Sports Hall and then, one at a time, run from one side of it to the other. As they do so, the Kicker kicks a football as hard as possible from close range at the vicinity of the Runner’s testicles. If the Kicker’s aim is not initially true, rebounds from the wall are allowed. If one is a Runner, it is illegal to protect one’s balls. One must simply run with one’s hands in the air whilst hysterically screaming ‘BALL DEATH!’

As the slowest runner and the worst kicker, I find the game to be of limited appeal.

I say to Garvey, ‘Cool! Count me in.’

Jesus. It was better when we just watched the shit breakdancing. What do girls do with their time? They seem to just mill about, talking. We assume they’re talking about how ‘immature’ we are. That seems to be their main thing at the moment.

Of course, it’s always possible that they’re not talking about us at all.

*

Every family has a last family holiday, assuming there was ever a first one. It’s the one that everyone enjoys so much they quietly agree never to do it again. I don’t mean the odd break or visit. I mean the Full English tri-generational package piss-up in Spain. I was twelve in the summer of 1985 and this was my third and final experience of it. Of watching my beloved elders becoming maudlin and argumentative in a swimming pool context from Happy Hour till bedtime. It had never bothered me before, but it was much worse this year and with good reason. Nan had just died of cancer, aged sixty-four.

The phrase ‘It’s what she would have wanted’ really comes into its own when you’ve got a foreign holiday booked and then someone in the party dies. It was perfectly true of course – Nan was a lot of fun and would have been very cross at the idea of Dada, Trudy and Mum cancelling a holiday and wasting all that money just because they were grieving for their wife/sister/mother. So we’re going anyway. We’re being tactful.

Derek stayed at home because Derek didn’t do holidays. Mark stayed at home because, while Mum was out of the country, he was secretly planning to buy a Ford Capri that he couldn’t quite afford. Andrew came along and was nice to me for two weeks, which I found unnerving.

I wasn’t invited to Nan’s funeral. Bit weird? Twelve is plenty old enough for your grandmother’s funeral, isn’t it? I suppose we’re not very ‘death-literate’ in our family. Twelve is old enough to watch Only Fools and Horses in a small living room with four people smoking in it. And it’s old enough to be constantly encouraged to climb trees and canoe off the end of Niagara Falls for the sake of some fresh air. But we protect twelve-year-olds from funerals. Or at least, I was protected from this one.

I was at John and Trudy’s house on that Saturday morning for the arrivals. Everyone looked amazingly smart. We have extended family from Boston and Cambridge and the house became quite full. I sat on a chair, next to the door to the kitchen and my ‘uncles’ (whether they were actual uncles, great-uncles, or just friends of my parents or grandparents) all did a strange thing when they walked past me.

To start with, they would be talking to each other and the various wives, looking serious and worried, like grown-ups. But on seeing me, the sad face would become a smile. And then, on their way to the kitchen, they would pretend to beat me up. One after another, for about half an hour, my male relations walked past me, smiling broadly and doing an ‘Ooh, I’m going to give you such a punch in the gob!’ mime. The style varied from a fist patted against a flat palm with a nodding ‘you’re going to get it’, to a left hook millimetres from my nose. Uncle Alec did a fully committed, slow-motion headbutt. It took ages.

I sat there, sipping lemonade. They were being nice. God knows, I didn’t want them to hug me, for aftershave reasons alone. But all the pretend thumping and crushing of the child on the day of his grandmother’s funeral did strike me as a bit peculiar.

I had my tea at Roger’s house. His mum, Sue, dished up the beans on toast and said, ‘I’m sorry about y’Nan, Robert. I didn’t even know she was poorly.’ Roger was respectful of the moment. We played on his VIC-20 and then sat until it was dark in his dad’s car, hailing for intelligent life through the CB radio. Roger’s dad was a truck driver and Rog had picked up some of the gist. He set the channel to 14 and we took it in turns to invoke the CB mantra: ‘One-Four for a copy . . . One-Four for a copy . . .’ Eventually, we got a copy.

‘How many candles y’burnin’?’ came the friendly question. Roger looked at me. I whispered, ‘He must mean birthday cakes. He’s asking how old we are.’ Roger nodded and responded. ‘Copy that, amigo. Er, we’re twelv – we’re burnin’ twelve candles . . . mate.’ Our CB amigo chatted with us for a couple of minutes and then signed off. It was a bit of an anti-climax, to be honest. I was mainly disappointed that the man had an accent as if he lived next door. We had both been hoping for some whacky American from The Cannonball Run or at least B. J. and the Bear. Anyway, it was good being with Roger on a night like this.

Roger caught the mood and turned on the overhead light. He took out his pocket penknife and offered to make a blood pact about staying friends for ever. I looked at the affectionately offered cutting implement and didn’t fancy it. Instead, I told him earnestly that he was my best friend. He found that a bit embarrassing because obviously drawing blood would have been more fun, but cometh the hour, cometh the boy and he said: ‘You’re m’best mate too, Rob. I’ll not let you down.’

He never did.

If you’re determined to get to Costa Dorada but haven’t really got enough money, then one solution is to go by coach. You just hop on at Lincoln and a simple nineteen hours later, you arrive at your Spanish beach resort refreshed and in the middle of the night – the second night.

To be fair, the first four hours were the worst. That got us to Dover. To lighten the load, one of the massively overweight drivers who didn’t happen to be driving at the time put on a video.

He taps his mic. ‘Right then, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls – it’s time for our family film presentation. It’s called Who Dares Wins and I hope you enjoy it!’ He takes the VHS tape out of its box and then, as if the thought has occurred to him for the first time, says, ‘Obviously it’s quite violent. And, to be fair, there’s some pretty strong language.’ He looks for a bit longer at the back of the cassette box. ‘But I don’t think there’s much in the way of sex, as I recall . . . Although actually . . . yeah. Anyway, as I say there’s some fairly strong language so . . . if . . . anyway it’s bloody good.’

The hero of Who Dares Wins is, of course, played by the actor Lewis Collins, who had made his name in The Professionals by driving through walls of empty cardboard boxes in a Ford Capri. On the occasions I was allowed to stay up and watch, I thought it was ace, fab and brill.

A digression. In a London pub in 1998, I’m describing how we played The Professionals at primary school. All join up for playing . . . The Professionals! NO GIRLS!

I say, ‘I was always Cowley. Roger Baxter and Matthew Tellis took it in turns to be Bodie or Doyle.’

David Mitchell puts his pint down in surprise. ‘How come you always got to be Cowley?’

‘Well, they – hang on, what do you mean, got to be Cowley. No one wanted to be Cowley.’

‘What are you talking about? Cowley was in charge. Cowley gave the orders.’

‘What, so at your school everyone wanted to be Cowley?’

‘Yes.’

‘Seriously? You were all queuing up to be Cowley?’

‘I don’t remember a queue, but yes, essentially.’ He takes the drag on a cigarette I just gave him. ‘To be fair,’ he says, ‘we were quite weird, our little gang. It’s probably more normal to want to be the macho men.’

David will spend his twenties being the only example I’ve ever known of a successful social smoker. He bums a couple of fags in the pub (good luck with that, American readers) and then doesn’t dream of having another the following morning. I don’t mind this because every now and again he’ll turn up with a pack of ten and hand them over as a contribution to an ongoing tobacco kitty where I keep the change. I mean the spare cigarettes, rather than the mutation of a cancer cell, although at some point I suppose I’ll be keeping that change too.

We’re fishing for ideas. We’ve just landed one of our first proper writing jobs, coming up with sketches for Armstrong & Miller on Channel 4. We go to the pub, get a couple of notebooks out and start talking. The aim isn’t especially to make each other laugh because that would make us feel self-conscious. It’s more that we just chat while keeping half an eye out for a funny idea creeping up on us. They always do – they wander in from the edges of sight. If you look straight at them, they disappear, like faint stars. You wait until they’re in plain view before stealthily picking up a pen. Then you’ve got them.

Talking about TV is typical of us on these occasions, but talking about school is not – we’re in our mid-twenties and too young to find children interesting.

On the coach, Lewis Collins has done his usual thing of carrying out a series of extra-judicial killings with varying degrees of regret. He’s momentarily quite sad when his terrorist girlfriend gets mown down in a hail of SAS bullets, but quickly pulls himself together and shoots everyone else.

I’m still thinking about how exciting it all was when a boy approaches with a mini chessboard and asks if I want to play. Derek has taught me the rules and he even let me win our first game. So I might as well.

The boy, Gareth, sets up the tiny pieces and asks me to go first. I advance a middle Pawn two spaces as per the classic opening moves I’ve seen on Play Chess in the holiday mornings. Gareth responds by jumping his Queen into the space the Pawn just vacated. ‘Check,’ he announces.¹

Right. I wonder if I should say something. His Queen is adjacent to mine so I take it. He frowns at this for a second but then advances one of his Pawns four spaces forwards and one to the left. ‘Check.’

I see. Shall I join in with the Chess Moves From Planet Git? Would that be fun or would it make the whole thing even more meaningless than it already is? I stick to the script and move a knight, correctly. Gareth is quick to object. ‘You can’t do that, you’re in check.’

Christ, OK. I take his stupid Pawn with a madly illegal move of my Queen’s Bishop. He doesn’t seem to mind that. He just parachutes in another random piece next to my King. ‘Check.’

This is making me so unhappy I want to cry. What am I supposed to do with this pillock? Talk to him? Engage with him? Teach him the rules?

It’s out of the question.

I make a show of looking at the board very closely. ‘It’s mate, I think. Yep, it’s checkmate. Well done.’

Gareth is concerned. ‘Are you sure? I mean, you could always . . .’ His hand starts moving towards my King and he’s clearly about to suggest something demented.

‘Nope! That’s checkmate all right. Well done.’

‘OK, shall we play again?’

‘No. Well done.’ I can’t think of anything to add to this, so I just repeat ‘no’ and shake my head at him. He abruptly packs up his chess set and goes away.

I get the feeling I could have handled that better but don’t know how.

Many years later I’ll be talking to a friend (not David, but another comedy writer) who puzzlingly seems to have moved from one terraced house to an almost identical one in a slightly different part of Brixton. He tells me that, in the last place, the neighbours started using his bins for their overflowing rubbish. I ask him, ‘What did you say?’

‘Oh God, I didn’t say anything,’ he replies. ‘No, we decided it would be easier to move house.’

This makes me laugh for about three minutes. I know he’s joking, but mainly I’m enjoying the idea that I’m not the only grown man who will go to incredible lengths to avoid an awkward conversation. Especially with a rule-breaker. Yes, I’m looking at you, Gareth.

But I’m also looking at me. Getting rid of Gareth won’t be the last time I resort to low cunning because I haven’t got the social skills for anything better.

It’s not quite the same thing as good manners. You have to improvise. You have to work out at lightning speed how best to respect the person with whom you’re sharing this bit of space. There are no fixed rules to this game – let’s call it Human Interaction – but you always sense when someone else is cheating. The grown-up thing to do is to address it. Like the centimetre of overhang on a standard two-ply loo roll that got itself out of sync – it’s a situation that won’t resolve itself.

But some of us don’t want to resolve it. Some of us just tear the ragged bits of loo roll off and think, ‘Someone else will deal with Gareth.’ Even when other people don’t cheat, there’s always the option of walking away. People who do a lot of walking away from Human Interaction are called ‘unsociable’ or sometimes ‘writers’.

Girls, I think, are told from an early age that they need to be good at Human Interaction. Boys, less so. Those of us who catch up (and I’m the man who will always nod a friendly hello to fellow parents at the school gates before immediately getting my phone out: friendly hello = manners, phone = still shit at Human Interaction) only stand a chance of doing so with the addition of an ace card: confidence.

You might think I had a massive advantage when it came to acquiring confidence because, as a white boy in a rich, free western country, I was under the heavy impression that this was my world and I was the default human. But that’s not confidence, that’s just a wrong-headed sense of entitlement.

When it comes to the gaining of genuine confidence and genuine self-respect, even the supposed default humans need a surprising amount of encouragement. What they need, like everyone else, is a) one thing to be good at, and b) one person to notice.

With me, that starts at school.

It starts with Mrs Slater.

*

‘Robert, I don’t suppose you could be persuaded to step into the breach. It’s about as close to a National Emergency as we’re ever going to face.’

It’s 1986, the end of my second year at QEGS and I’m thirteen. Mrs Slater is being a bit twinkly, but the situation is serious.

One of QEGS’ battier traditions is the Eisteddfod, where the three forms that make up the second year compete with each other in drama, music and gymnastics in front of an audience of parents.

For our form, Pete Garvey – he of the secret P. G. Wodehouse joy and the inventing of Ball Death – has written a ten-minute comic play set in the year 2000, in which we all meet for a class reunion. He has given himself the main part of narrator, who has also had huge material success: he arrives at the reunion in a Daimler driven by his chauffeur, Webb. Unfortunately for Garvey, and with far-reaching implications for Webb, Pete goes to hospital with appendicitis two days before the performance.²

Mrs Slater is looking at me, expectantly.

Jesus. What would Han Solo do? Screw that, what would Jesus do? The idea of stepping into the main part is absurd. Up until now, the biggest part I’ve had to cope with was a one-liner in a Coningsby Junior School nativity. As King Herod’s Captain of the Guard, I’d made an entrance by stepping on my own cloak, choking and then recovering just enough to say, ‘Someone threatens you, my lord?’ I was on stage for about eighty seconds and hated every one of them. Acting was embarrassing. Which was a pity, because I would love to be an actor. Ideally I would be an actor without having to do any acting.

But something has happened while we’ve been rehearsing Pete’s play during Mrs Slater’s English lessons, something quite unexpected.

I love it.

The character of Webb is a chauffeur, but also a kind of butler. Pete’s encounter with Right Ho, Jeeves has made an impression and although most of my lines are either ‘Indeed, sir’ or ‘No doubt, sir’, I think I have a good idea about how to say them. It will be a few years until Stephen Fry gives his Jeeves masterclass on ITV, and I haven’t seen any of the films. But I did borrow the book the moment Pete put it back on the shelf.

Some of it really makes me laugh. And I get the idea that Jeeves is the straight man. Like Tommy Cannon from Cannon and Ball. Probably a bit more posh. And clever. Something like that.

So in the rehearsals I play Jeeves like a posh Tommy Cannon and Form 2S starts to laugh. I stand with my arms forming a rigid V-shape, ending in folded hands in front of my balls – à la Cannon – and start to relish the moments when everyone expects me to say, ‘Indeed, sir.’ It becomes obvious that once you’ve got their attention, you can wait. And you can make them wait with you. In fact, the longer you make them wait for ‘Indeed, sir’, the bigger the laugh will be when you say it. Confusingly, if you wait too long, they won’t laugh at all. So I start to listen to the audience. I start to time it.

The timing depends on what I hear from them, but also what I hear from a little internal clock that I seem to have. It’s always been there somehow, but it’s only been useful around best friends. Roger, I suspect, likes me because I’m funny.

Now I’m being funny in front of people I’ve only known for a year. Presumably, on the night of the show, I’ll have to be funny in front of people I’ve never met. That’s quite a leap, but manageable as long as I only have to say, ‘Indeed, sir.’

But the main part! That’s massive! Mrs Slater doesn’t look like she’s about to offer it to anyone else. I think to myself that I’m being told to do it. Well, that’s fine then because I didn’t have a choice. If I’m a disaster it will be her fault.

I shrug and say, ‘Yeah, all right.’

Form 2S win the Eisteddfod.

There’s a dodgy moment in the gymnastics round because Zelda Linseed has athlete’s foot so has to scale the climbing rope in trainers rather than the regulation bare feet. This means the judges can’t tell if she’s pointing her toes, although she swears indignantly that she is.

The drama round, though – we’re a smash hit. Pete’s narrator is surrounded by idiots and I play him as an exasperated Basil Fawlty. When I say ‘play him as’ I mean ‘do an impression of’. But the laughter comes in all the right places. Mum is standing at the back, smiling nervously and giving me a discreet thumbs-up.

There’s some post-show milling around with coffee and people are looking at me in a way I’ve never seen before. It’s weird enough that they’re looking at me at all.

*

That night we’re all in the living room watching the BBC sitcom No Place Like Home starring William Gaunt and a young Martin Clunes.

What would it take, I wonder, to be allowed to do that as your job? It really doesn’t look that hard. Does it look easy because they’re very good at it? Or is it just easy? They don’t seem to be doing it as well as John Cleese does it. Do they know? Do they go to the pub afterwards and say, ‘Well, we can’t all be John Cleese.’ Or is it because of the script? Would the young, tall one with the big ears be as funny as John Cleese if he had some funnier lines? Maybe he would. This is serious. I lean in and look hard for something that Mr Clunes is doing that I couldn’t do just as well. Hmm, for a start he’s a grown-up who looks like he ought to be on TV rather than a Lincolnshire schoolboy who obviously mustn’t. And he’s very clear and confident. And he talks with that accent from the south of England that so many funny people on TV have. He just looks like he belongs there. How did he do that?

Suddenly I have a name for that feeling I had in Dad’s car on the way back from the Flashdance fireworks. That feeling, the one that made me blush, was an overwhelming desire to be famous.

Because that would help, wouldn’t it? Dads don’t hit famous children, right? They don’t ignore them either. They take them fishing. You can be quiet when you’re famous, but people can’t ignore you. Not really. They look at you the way they did tonight after the Eisteddfod. It’s a look I could get used to. When you’re famous, people look at you like they’re trying to figure something out.

And the other boys. Imagine doing something so wildly beyond the reach of the other boys. What would I care for their wasps and nettles and football and swimming and maths and fighting and science and shandy if I could do this one thing, this one thing that none of them could do?

So I’ll be famous. And funny writing and acting is what I’ll be famous for. That will help because famous people are safe. Famous people don’t have problems. And they can probably have the radiator on as often as they like. And maybe girls like them.

That’s decided, then. Unfortunately, almost the same week that I start to wonder if being funny can be used to impress girls, my body starts to make a chaotic, head-swivelling, nipple-swelling reply. Puberty rushes in like a pyrophobic arsonist, chucking petrol bombs in all directions while screaming ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT THE FUCKING FIRE!?’

*

The first girl I ever danced with was Cathy Shepherd. Her dad was landlord of a small local pub and he closed it one night for her thirteenth birthday party. Most of 2S were there. Cathy’s older sister, Chrissy, was left to supervise.

Before the dancing came Spin the Bottle. I didn’t think it was possible to be this bored and this embarrassed at the same time. There was no The X Factor in the twentieth century, so there was nothing in the culture to prepare me for this level of tedium and mortification.

Actually, I tell a lie. There was the night that my brother Mark’s friend Larry was made to do some disco dancing in the bungalow kitchen on a Friday night. Larry had come round, ready to go out. Mark mentioned that Larry had just won an inter-county disco competition and encouraged him to do some disco dancing right there in the kitchen. It’s not big, our kitchen. Larry tried to demur, but ‘no’ is not a word for Fonzies and Mark was already at the record player, putting on ‘Stool Pigeon’ by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Mum was delighted, but just needed a moment and asked Larry to move aside so she could get to the washing machine and put some whites on. This accomplished, Mum sat down two feet away to enjoy the performance. So that’s me, Mum, Mark, Andrew and Derek sitting around the table looking at Larry. Larry uncertainly retook his position in front of the slowly rotating laundry as Kid Creole’s trumpets kicked in.

I see from a quick search that ‘Stool Pigeon’ is three minutes and twenty-five seconds long. I think for Larry it lasted about a week. By Tuesday, Mark was supportively turning the volume up on the record player. On Wednesday Mum briefly tried clapping to the beat in case that might help. Towards the weekend, Larry said, not for the first or last time, that there wasn’t really room to do a proper spin. On it went. Sometimes, you just have to see these things through. For Larry to give up, or for anyone to put Larry out of his obvious misery, would be like leaving the pub with an unfinished pint on the table. It could be a male thing, a working-class thing, a British thing or a human thing. But sometimes you’re in the middle of a big mistake and you just keep going for the allotted time.

So: Spin the Bottle.

Almost everyone sits in a circle on the floor, watching the neck of the bottle go round like a roulette wheel in the Glum Casino of Enforced Snogging. It goes without saying that the snogging will be strictly heterosexual. Sure, you might have to kiss someone you don’t want to kiss, but there are limits.

The only person I want to kiss, and to kiss her would make my decade, is Tiffany Rampling, friend of Zelda and the younger sister of my future dream-girl Tess Rampling. Yes, that’s right. One day I will adore Tess and get nowhere. But only after two years of getting nowhere with her sister Tiffany.

Tiffany, of course, is not playing Spin the Bottle. She and Zelda are sitting aloof on bar stools, watching the game and shaking their heads in disgust.

I go to the bar to help myself to another Coke. Tiffany re-crosses her legs and says, ‘Why are you playing that immature game, Webb? Why don’t you just get off with whoever you want to get off with?’

Tiffany, who would rather eat mud than kiss a boy her own age, is not making an offer here. I mumble something like ‘It’s not that simple’ and return to the game. Tiffany and Zelda exchange world-weary glances.

Later, the supervising Chrissy puts on some music and says to me conspiratorially, ‘Cathy wants a smooch with you, Robert. Shall I say yes?’ I look over to a corner where the birthday girl is sitting watching her sister’s proposal with a mixture of hope and utter mortification. I do my Han Solo shrug and say, ‘Sure.’ Chrissy excitedly beckons Cathy, who now crosses the room literally dragging her feet and rolling her eyes at the ceiling so violently I think she’s going to break her neck. ‘Sorry about my sister,’ she says, ‘she’s always embarrassing me like this.’ She really is embarrassed, but she also looks like she’s pleased this is happening – which is fine by me. I quite like Cathy. Although not as much as I like . . . I glance over to where Tiffany and Zelda were perched. They’ve disappeared somewhere.

‘Now then,’ says Chrissy, who is having a great time with this. ‘Have either of you had a slow dance before?’ We both shake our heads.

‘Right. Well, Robert, you put your hands here,’ Chrissy efficiently puts my hands on Cathy’s waist. ‘And Cathy, obviously you put your hands around Robert’s neck.’ Cathy does a face like this is the stupidest idea she’s ever heard and promptly does exactly as suggested.

I’ve never been in such close proximity to a girl. She smells lovely.

‘And now you just sway to the music!’ concludes Chrissy. There are a few other ‘couples’ now and it doesn’t feel so bad. Not bad at all, in fact.

The last track has just ended and we hear the introduction to ‘Feed the World’ by Band Aid.

The trouble with ‘Feed the World’ by Band Aid as a ‘smooch’ track, however, is that even if you ignore the romantically underperforming topic of starving children, you are nevertheless quickly into an anthemic knees-up while clinging on to a girl and solemnly rocking from side to side. Neither of us has the confidence to stop so we just do this for the whole song. At the end, we let go of each other with relief. I feel like I ought to bow or something, but instead, and with a novel rush of courage, I give her a kiss on the cheek. She looks around the room, nodding and smiling. ‘Yeah, thanks,’ she says.

Tiffany and Zelda burst back in and fall over, laughing hysterically. Oh, so that’s where they were. They’d pinched a bottle of wine and got shit-faced in the car park.

*

One of the people I’d been glad to see before Nan’s funeral was Auntie Dot. Nan and Trudy’s sister, Dot was another great-aunt and a lively one. She lived on the outskirts of Cambridge and Tru would sometimes take me for a visit at half-term.

It’s a council house on an estate just off Newmarket Road. On previous visits I had been with Dot and Tru to Bingo, where I would get chips and join in.

This time, I’ve decided that I’m too old to be hanging out in public with a pair of old ladies. Or at least, that’s what I think I’m supposed to feel, so that’s what I choose to do. Trudy asks if I’d like to come out to Bingo and, for the first time, I say that I’d rather stay in and read. It’s bullshit – I’d love go out with them to Bingo. I register the disappointment that flickers across Tru’s face, but then she smiles. She’s seen this all before. Still, I get the feeling that what happened to Mark and Andrew wasn’t supposed to happen to Robert.

But what did happen to Mark and Andrew? For all I know, aged thirteen, either one of them would have enjoyed hanging out with the old ladies and would have been cool enough to say, ‘Nice one, Tru and Dot! I am a bit partial to a spot of Bingo!’

I like to think so. But anyway, I’m nowhere near that cool. I have to go with the flow. And the flow is: stop doing stuff you like when it becomes somehow inappropriate. It’s not so much Act Your Age as Act Your Gender. The two rules are related – it’s as if a ‘boy’ can amateurishly muddle through, but a ‘teenage boy’ has to turn pro.

To be fair, I’m perfectly happy staying home alone with my current Doctor Who book.

I’m in my bedroom, reading in bed. It’s a pity that the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa, has chosen to part company with the Doctor, staying behind to help with the space leper colony. But then, I think, as I remove the last of my clothing, that’s Nyssa for you: beautiful and kind-hearted. I put the book to one side, and think about beautiful Nyssa and how, on the space leper colony, she wouldn’t have anyone to help her if, for example, she somehow got a splinter in her vagina.

I’m not sure how often this happens, but I’m pretty sure that if Nyssa had a splinter in her vagina, I’d be a good person to call. I’d probably be one of an elite squadron of teen space-doctors who happened to be passing through.

Nyssa and I would probably get chatting in the TV lounge of the space leper colony and, relieved to be talking to someone who didn’t have space-leprosy for a change, she would confide her embarrassing predicament. After I had reassured her about my discretion and experience, she would gratefully allow me to extract the splinter with infinite care and precision using my teeth. At that point, and recalling the diagrams I’d learnt at the Elite Teen-Doctor Space Academy, I’d probably provide the customary aftercare service of licking her clitoris with nerve-electrifying skill and artistry. And then Nyssa, what with being such a kind girl, would probably teach me how to wank properly the way other boys probably do and I would . . . HANG ON, SOMETHING VERY ALARMING BUT FANTASTIC IS HAPPENING! I SHOULD STOP THIS – IT’S MAKING ME GOING TO DO A WEE! NO! IT’S NOT A WEE, IT’S SOMETHING ELSE! IT’S . . . OH MY FUCKING LORD!

And thus it was that the would-be Doogie Howser MD of space cunnilingus had his first orgasm.

I dart to the bathroom and try to do a wee in case somehow that was just a wee gone wrong. But no, I don’t need a wee. Anyway, what has just spurted out of the end of my cock is of a colour and consistency quite apart from any world of wee. Bloody hell. OK, well at least it all works. Is that how it’s supposed to work? I mean, it was pretty fucking alarming. My penis is painfully sensitive now and I wonder if I’ve damaged it. No, that’s probably how it’s meant to happen. That was a wank.

There’s a full-length mirror in the bathroom and I turn to see myself in it, still naked and more than a touch flushed. Was God watching? Was Nan watching? Holy crap! No, surely they’ve got better things to do. Should I feel ashamed? I do feel ashamed and don’t want to see myself like this. I streak back to the bedroom and get dressed.

Still, that was amazing. That was bloody amazing. Who can I tell about this amazingness? Not Tiffany or Zelda, obviously. Certainly not my brothers. Not Pete Garvey, who’s probably been doing it for years.

Oh yeah . . . Will, maybe. It’s the kind of thing I could tell Will.

________________

¹ If you’re unfamiliar with the rules of chess, all you need to know is – so was Gareth.

² Pete survived, in case you were worried.