‘All right, Neil,’ said Thomas. Neil was opening the door for him at that week’s practice. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Jase’s dad was lugging something out of the boot of his car. It was a keyboard.
‘Wow,’ said Neil, as it was brought into the house and dumped on the floor.
‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘I thought you could have a go at playing this. It’s pretty old. They bought it for my dad’s social but no one could work out how to play it. Then they got a Casio with the drumbeats and they use that. But if you could do your spidery-widery playing on this, that would be splendid.’
Neil ran his hands over all the various knobs and switches on it. ‘This is amazing,’ he said to himself. ‘Roland Juno-6, analogue but polyphonic. Best of both worlds. Absolutely amazing.’
‘Yeah, we don’t have a stand for it, though,’ said Thomas. ‘You’ll have to play it on the floor, by the look of it.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘And we’ll have to put it through the bass amp. There’s two inputs on that, but it’ll probably distort.’
‘Will it?’ said Neil. ‘Oh good.’
Thomas went to find a jack lead for Neil while Jase set up his drum kit. Me and Ben looked at Neil on the floor fiddling with his switches and levers. Then we looked at each other. I shook my head, Ben just shrugged his shoulders.
Thomas handed one end of the jack lead to Neil, who plugged it into the back of the keyboard. Thomas plugged the other end into the bass amp.
‘OK, turn it on!’ said Thomas.
Neil did so.
‘Right, play something!’ said Thomas.
Neil pressed down all his fingers on the keyboard. At first, nothing happened. And then, suddenly, a harsh crackling sound emerged from the bass amp. It grew louder. You could feel it in your teeth. The tourist trinkets on the wall began to vibrate and the windows and the drums started to shake. And then the crackling turned into a zoooooom! that felt like a jet plane had just flown through your brain. With a tiny comedy blip! the sound ended. There was silence. Until a picture plate of the Alps fell from the wall and smashed against the fireplace.
‘Shit!’ said Neil, who swore very rarely. ‘That was one of my mum’s favourites!’
Me and Ben laughed, probably more than we really felt like. But Thomas and Jase weren’t even thinking about the plate.
‘That. Was. Fucking. Unbelievable,’ said Jase.
Thomas just smiled a little smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We can use that.’
‘Um, would it be possible to turn it down just a bit?’ I said, wanting to say so much more.
‘Yeah, s’pose,’ said Thomas.
And so, from that moment on, Neil didn’t just sing, he also made weird noises on the keyboard all over the songs. And not just rumbles and zooms, as he managed to work out a sound that you could play proper notes with as well. Like his singing, his keyboard playing kind of sat on top of everything else, fitting in some of the time, but not really that much. At first he almost had to lie down to do it, and because he was still holding a microphone, he caused a whole load of wailing feedback every time he faced the wrong way. He didn’t care, he liked it, said it was incorporating random elements or something, but even Thomas and Jase made him cut that out. So he saved up his meagre pocket money and bought a keyboard stand after a few weeks, which was the first financial investment Neil had made in the band. Pretty small, considering the amount of equipment the rest of us had bought, or at least got our parents to buy for us. But Neil wouldn’t do a paper round because he wanted to concentrate on his schoolwork, and his mum was poor. She was still a dinner lady at the primary school and just did cleaning jobs on top of that. God knows how she ever ended up with that house. Divorce settlement maybe.
Anyway, the keyboard wasn’t the only change that happened around then. It was just after the New Year that Thomas started going out with Jenny from the youth club. Christ, that was the love affair of the century, that was. She’d been going there since November, and for ages Thomas kept going on about how unattractive or ‘scrunty’ she was, then suddenly that first week after the Christmas holidays they were getting off with each other in the alleyway.
Jenny, now she was a funny girl. Well, when I say funny I don’t mean she’d make you laugh or anything like that. Just that, well, she was a bit of a nightmare actually, not funny at all, in fact. Really, she was the devil. I think she might have been a psychopath. I’ve been trying hard to represent people fairly, to at least try to understand things from their perspective, but with Jenny I can’t. I really don’t have any memories of her that portray her in a good light. However hard I try, I can’t find any motivation for the things she’d go on to do other than pure evil.
Still, she was attractive, sort of. Well, she acted like she thought she was attractive, anyway, and that’s half the battle, I suppose. She had long straight dark hair, and glasses. But good designer frames, not NHS ones. Her family were quite well off, so she could afford them. And dark hair on her arms too. She didn’t really go for the metal or grunge look, which made the fact that Thomas ended up with her quite surprising. But then, he was best mates with Jase. That tells you something. Jenny wore good clothes, I guess, quite expensive-looking. Not really your usual Quireley gear. Too upmarket, too chic, like what trendy people would wear in London. I particularly remember a pair of stripy trousers, for some reason. Almost a sixties retro look, like all that stuff that Neil obsessed over.
Christ, I hated Jenny. The way she used to swan about that youth club as if she owned it, practically from the first week she went there, taking massive strides in her stripy trousers as if she was marking out her territory. And the way she’d talk to you: being super-polite, with impeccable diction, and the odd clumsy attempt at a lower-class accent thrown in, but all the time making it perfectly clear that you were beneath her, like everyone was. She even talked down to Thomas. Occasionally he’d call her a stupid cow or something, then she’d stomp off very deliberately, and he’d have to go and apologise like a good boy. He’d make up for it a little bit, slagging her off behind her back. But mostly he just took it without question. Looking back, it’s hard to fathom why he ever went out with her, but at the time we never questioned it, I guess because Thomas dictated our whole concept of what was normal. Still, they were the same in certain ways. They both managed to control large groups of kids, Thomas with his gang, and Jenny with her little twitty friends swarming around her all the time. Maybe she was all Thomas thought he deserved. A female, nastier version of himself.
It was heartbreaking really, to see him reduced to this. It wasn’t as if he was doing it just to get a shag, because Thomas could have got one practically anywhere by now, including half the boys, I expect. No, he really seemed to care for her, for some reason. And not only that, after they’d been going out for a couple of months, word got out that she wasn’t going to be letting him into her knickers any time soon. Not even a handjob. She was nowhere near ready, it was said she had said. But, and this was the deal, if their relationship matured and developed and blossomed, maybe, just maybe, she might be ready by the summer. Or possibly early autumn.
As for Neil, she really didn’t like him. In fact, she was the first person at the youth club not to get on with him at all. Strange, because I think they were interested in some of the same things. But she looked down her nose at him, and encouraged all her girlfriends to do the same. She’d talk to him as if he was a child, patronising and cruel, and of course her twitty friends would copy her, and soon they were all doing it, every week. It got pretty fucking tiresome. I mean, she’d say things to him like, and this was in front of everybody, mind, ‘Neil, you know that you can get brushes for clothes. You could get all that dog hair off your trousers. Then you’d look less scruffy, then maybe you could get a girlfriend. But aren’t you gay? I heard that you were.’ And Neil would just stand there like he didn’t mind. But, Jesus, I wished he’d stand up to her and tell the stupid witch to fuck off. Mind you, no one else did either. If only we had, we’d have saved us a whole load of hassle over the years. But then I suppose at the time loads of other people were actually taking Neil deadly seriously, including Thomas. Maybe he just didn’t think he needed to care what Jenny said or thought.
We all hated Jenny really. But the thing was, none of us had the mental discipline to work out why. It was just vague, unfocused bad feeling. And maybe that’s why she had to put Neil down so much. She knew he was the one person clever enough to see through her, cut through her bullshit. What she didn’t know was that even if he did, he’d never say anything to anyone about it. That’s where Neil’s troubles really started, I think, with Jenny. Perhaps, if she’d never entered the picture, maybe it would have all been different. Maybe he’d have ended up normal and happy, with a girlfriend and a job and money and stuff. Maybe he’d have been OK. Maybe.