Chapter Twenty
The C-30 demo cassette sat uncomfortably in Theo's front jeans pocket all the way through the next day's X-Tradition practice session.
He had failed to solve the difficult question of how to give August his tape of The Dead White Sky. Thinking about it now, maybe he should have just arrived before everyone else and played him the damned thing there and then, but it was too late for that now. He decided that he just had to wing it, and hope that an opportunity would present itself.
The practice session passed without incident, with August demo-ing a couple of new songs. Every time he introduced one of these songs, Theo's heart skipped a beat in case it was August's version of The Dead White Sky and he had missed his chance. But the new songs were called 'Green Unpleasant Land' (a song about the racism encountered by the first immigrants on The Windrush), and 'The False Economy', which seems to be about the evils of capitalism.
Luckily, this particular practice session was sparsely attended, with only the group itself and one of Sophie's friends in the relatively smoke-free attic space. Sophie and her friend left as soon as the last song had been played, and the other members of X-Tradition set about packing up their kit. Theo was leaving his drums however, so to give himself some more time he disappeared to the toilet and came back five minutes later, the C-30 cassette still burning a hole in his front pocket.
As he had hoped, the rest of the band had left as he re-entered the room, leaving just August, who was rolling himself another joint. How many of these does he get through in a day? Theo wondered to himself.
He saw his chance. Gravity left him as he reached into his front pocket to bring The Dead White Sky into the world, but then August muttered to himself "Shit, I forgot to give that album to Tom." He then rushed to his record collection and pulled out Penis Envy by Crass. "Back in a mo" he said and bounded out of the room.
Theo dug the cassette out of his front pocket and tapped it against his thigh. Did he really have the nerve to give it to August in person? Perhaps a better idea would be to leave it here for August to listen to later. Yes, that sounded like a plan. So where would be a good place? By the record player would make sense. He walked over to the multi-levelled sound system and left the tape upright on the closed lid of the turntable, its spine facing the room with the words DEAD WHITE SKY written on it.
When August re-entered the room, Theo grabbed his jacket and got ready to leave. The two friends arranged another practice session for a couple of days' time and talked about maybe meeting up on Friday night to check out whatever band was playing at The White Hart. Their renewed friendliness bolstered Theo, giving him the confidence he required.
"Oh, by the way, I left you something; it's on the record player."
"Oh, okay, cool" August replied.
"Yeah, just a little something, but have a listen and see what you think."
August nodded and took a drag on his joint. He offered it to Theo, who against his better judgement took a hit and handed it back. "Thanks. See you on Friday then."
-
Theo's days off from X-Tradition duties saw him spending both morning and afternoon sketching in the surrounding countryside. He had now filled up just under two full A3 pads with rural studies. He had tried to emulate Van Gogh's woodcut style but found it too difficult, so he abandoned the idea and concentrated instead on creating his own style. Taking the quarry sketch of the stone mason and his circular saw as inspiration, he continued the technique of leaving the paper completely blank around any activity happening in the scene. This gave his sketches a kind of kinetic energy that made them leap from the page. He was confident that his art teacher would appreciate this new direction and he was sure he had a large enough portfolio for the coursework part of his A-level exam.
Now that he felt he had found his own style with pencils, he decided that it was time to move on to oils. Up until now, his only experience of painting was a couple of abortive watercolour still lives, or using guache to colour in images he had copied from magazines. He ventured to Harris' in Green Street in Bath and bought a starter set of oils and a couple of pre-stretched A3 canvases There was no need to buy an easel as there was one on the garage, bought by his mum when she'd gone through a brief painting phase a couple of years back.
When he got home, he rooted around the garage and found the easel leaning up in a corner, obscured by an old Raleigh Grifter and a wooden step-ladder. He dusted it off and took it out to the garden. As he surveyed it he began to wish that he'd bought a new one after all, as this one was rather large and clunky. Still, he was saving money by re-using it - so more money for booze and ciggies. The easel had a surprisingly large amount of hinges and screws, all of which seemed to be rusted and in need of oil. He found some 3-in-1 and managed to loosen the hinges enough to open it out to its working position. He then positioned a canvas on the easel's horizontal mount and fixed it in place using various sliding wooden joists. Once he was satisfied that he'd set it up correctly, he pretended to sketch out a scene on the canvas using his finger, but it felt strange at this upright angle - he was used to sketching horizontally with his sketch pad on his lap. Still, he was sure he'd get the hang of it.
Next he had to decide what (and where) to paint. The huge amount of kit he now needed to take with him made part of the decision for him: there was no way that he'd be able to cycle anywhere with the easel, the canvases, the paints, the brushes and the palette. So it had to be somewhere within walking distance.
Although Theo's house was on a main road, one of the great things about Lyncombe was that you were never very far from greenery. At the end of Theo's garden, there was a narrow lane that ran adjacent to the houses, and on the other side of the lane lay an overgrown and seldom-visited allotment. Theo had spent many happy hours in this allotment as a child: in autumn he would take his dad's tennis racket and see how far he could hit fallen apples from the wild orchard that grew there. Or he would find a good-sized stick, whittle it down with his penknife and spend an afternoon beheading stinging nettles. It had been a while since he'd visited the allotment, but he recalled that there were a couple of small derelict single-storey stone buildings at the bottom of the allotment that might make a perfect subject for his first attempt at oils.
All this new painting equipment unnerved him though. What he loved about sketching was its free-form nature; that he could just go out on his bike, travel the country lanes and stop and sketch on a whim. But the oils, the easel, the bulky canvas - it was all so ostentatious, so permanent. It seemed to cancel out the opportunity for spontaneity. To banish his qualms, he decided that he needed to go out and paint now before he could talk himself out of it.
It took him two journeys to the allotment to drop off all his gear. Apart from a lone pensioner tending her patch on the far side of the allotment, the place was as deserted as he'd hoped it would be, and the two derelict stone buildings were still derelict and very much on the losing side of a battle with nature. In fact, the roof of one of them had caved in and a small apple tree was growing out of it. Theo found an abandoned wheelbarrow nearby, which he leant up against the front wall of one of the buildings to give the scene an added agricultural feel. There were plenty of trees situated around the orchard which bathed the scene in a pleasant dappled sunshine reminiscent of the impressionist paintings he had seen in art class.
Once satisfied that he had chosen the best vantage point from which to paint his scene, he set about assembling the easel. Annoyingly, his chosen location was on a slight slope, which meant extending one of the easel's three legs more than the other two to gain a horizontal footing. This wasn't something that he'd needed to do when trying the easel out on the flat lawn of his back garden, but now that he needed to, he found that the required screw had in fact snapped off, and the leg was immovable. Cussing under his breath, he looked around for something to put under the offending leg to flatten the easel's angle out. He found half a brick nearby and wedged it firmly into the dry grass and pla
ced the easel leg on top of it. This seemed to do the trick, and he forced the other two legs into the hard earth to add some stability. Next he set about fixing the canvas to the easel, looking around him to see if anyone was coming while he did so. He managed to get the canvas in place easily enough, but once there, a sudden gust of wind came up from behind it and practically lifted the whole thing into the air. Only Theo's quick reflexes stopped the easel from taking off. Did Van Gogh have these problems, he asked himself.
He tried to find some other way of fixing the easel to the ground in case of further gusts of wind, but in the end had to resort to standing with his left foot permanently resting on one of the easel's lower slats and his right non-painting hand holding on to the edge of the canvas.
Thus he began to sketch the scene in front of him. The feeling of pencil on canvas was new and surprisingly satisfying, and before long he had created a pleasing outline From which to work. Maybe he should just quit now: this outline would suffice as artwork in its own right, the canvas adding some gravitas to the pencil lines. But no, Theo knew that he had to continue, that he had to make the bold step into oils. So once more he looked around to make sure he was alone and opened his first tube of oil; a cerulean blue to realise the sky. He dabbed it on his pallet and then put a medium-sized paintbrush into the glossy gloopy splodge. Then he put it directly onto the canvas. It looked far too dark for this hazy August afternoon. Then he remembered that you weren't necessarily meant to use the paint neat; you could thin it with turpentine. Did he have any of that in his starter kit? He had a quick look and confirmed that he did indeed have some thinner.
He opened it and poured some into a well on his easel, presumably there for just that reason. He then stuck his paintbrush in it and tried to thin the paint already on the canvas. Inevitably, the resulting mess thinned to such an extent that it trickled down his pristine canvas. Desperate to stem the flow, he hurriedly put his paintbrush down on the easel's rest to retrieve a tissue from his pocket and watched as the paintbrush clattered to the ground, marking his jeans as it did so. Cursing, he finally managed to extract a tissue from his pocket and set about dabbing the canvas, and then used the same tissue to wipe his jeans.
Now he was beginning to feel frustrated. He clearly hadn't thought this through. He needed to learn how to thin the oils and how to blend the colours. The pallet that came as part of the starter kit was only small and couldn't accommodate many different colours. Shouldn't he have some little mixer wells as well, like you have for watercolours? He needed more provisions. But seeing as he was here, he decided to just go for it: he squeezed paint directly onto the canvas - greens, blues and reds for the overgrown allotment, yellows for the abandoned buildings and various blues for the sky. Splat splat splat! Then, using the brush as freely as he could, he began to try to mould the paint to fit the scene in front of him. He was hoping to achieve a kind of brutalist naiveté. But what he in fact created was a swirling near-black mass in the middle of the canvas with a poorly realised sky above it. It reminded Theo of one of those scary Francis Bacon portraits. He squinted to see if this would help his painting's appearance, but it didn't. Next, remembering something he'd seen his art tutor do: he turned his paintbrush around and used it like a pencil, pushing the globulous mass into small spikey points around its periphery. He wasn't quite sure what he was hoping to achieve with this as he had now clearly given up trying to replicate the scene in front of him. Now the canvas just looked weird.
He was thinking about packing up when, in the distance he could hear voices. Sadly not the gentle undulating tones of an elderly couple coming to tend their lot, but the fierce, fast and agitated sounds of youths all talking and laughing at the same time. Theo's heart sank.
If he were sketching he could quickly pack up his gear and wait for them to pass. But now he was stuck here with an easel, a canvas, and most distressingly a wet half-finished mess that looked like it could have been created by a not particularly adept junior school pupil.
He looked around to the source of the noise, and sure enough, there was a group of five youths, all about ten years old, all on bikes, coming from the lane at the back of the houses into the allotment.
Inevitably, they made their way towards him and stopped on the path below his easel.
"Right?" One of them said.
"Fine thanks. And you?" Theo replied as neutrally as he could, hoping that his bland tone might bore the youths into leaving him alone.
"What are you doing?" Another asked.
"Just doing some painting." Go away, please go away.
"Can I have a look then?"
This was the question that Theo had been dreading. If he were to say 'Do you mind if you don't' would they respect his wishes and leave? He doubted it. So he tried "Don't you have anything better to do?" To which of course the answer was "No."
The kids got off their bikes and made their way up the slope towards him. Their excited chatter came to an abrupt halt as they looked at the canvas. Theo could almost feel their disappointment. True enough, the art on offer was of an inferior kind, but the kids' sudden silence implied that it was so bad, that even the uninhibited high spirits of youth couldn't find anything to poke fun at.
Theo felt the need to justify himself. "This is my first attempt okay? I'm not usually a painter, I prefer pencils. I was trying to do something... abstract."
"Is that another word for crap?"
Theo had to concede that in this instance, the answer was probably yes.
The ringleader's friends all started to laugh. Now Theo could feel his face starting to turn red. "Look, would you mind just clearing off?" he said, for some reason speaking in the manner of a 1950s school master.
"Ooooohh!" came the massed reply.
"I'm just having a laugh mister." Replied the ringleader, a momentary look of innocence on his face, before he began to giggle again.
"Well I'm not laughing am I, can you just go away?"
And then it started to happen . Not now, not now. His bottom lip began to wobble and his eyes filled with tears. It wasn't the bullying tone of the youths that had upset him; it was that they had seen such a poor effort on his part. He hadn't even really been trying. It didn't seem fair. Why did they have to see this?
The ringleader must have seen the tear in his eye. "Blimey, we've got a right little girl here," he said.
The only way Theo could banish the tears was to go on the offensive. So he shouted at them as angrily as he could:
"Just FUCK OFF okay? Just fucking well FUCK OFF."
He moved as if to run at them, which seemed to do the trick and they fled in various directions, all laughing as they went. When he was sure they weren't looking back, he wiped the tears from his eyes and went back to his easel.
Now he was in even less of a mood to carry on. But he didn't want to disassemble his kit when there was a chance that the youths were still lurking about. So he half-heartedly went back to work, trying to salvage something from this terrible afternoon. But then, just as he was squeezing out a tube of ochre on to his paltry plastic pallet, an apple landed with a loud splat right in the centre of the canvas. Instinctively he ducked, then looked around for the source of the missile and was rewarded with another, smaller apple direct to the forehead.
Realising he was under attack, he took cover in the nearby stone building that until recently had been the subject of his endeavours. Apples rained in through the glassless windows and absent roof. He picked up the few that had not disintegrated on impact and threw them back in the direction they came from. He heard distant laughter. After a minute or so under attack, the youths gave up and Theo could hear them getting back onto their bikes and riding off.
He left the building and made his way back to his easel, now lying on its side, a selection of bruised and split apples lying all around it. He righted the easel and looked at the canvas. A couple of flecks of apple skin had become lodged in its thick sticky paint. Feeling suddenly whimsical now that his tormentors
had disappeared, he took a pencil and wrote "Orchard Scene, mixed media, 1983" at the bottom right, and then went home.
-
At dinner that evening his parent's broached the subject of the week's work experience at Cabot Farr estate agents. As there were only three weeks of the holiday left, his parents were keen for him to make a decision sooner rather than later. Theo was happy to start the following week, but needed to check with August about the practice schedule for X-Tradition. They had been practicing an awful lot recently and as far as Theo knew there were no gigs in the pipeline, so he didn't think that taking a week off would present a problem. His parents were pleased with this and Roger phoned his friend Rick Ingram, who co-owned the Cabot Farr estate agency in Bath.
It was arranged that Theo would start the following Monday. He phoned August after tea to check with him and August said that it was cool; he thought they should take a well-earned break anyway. They confirmed one final practice session before the week-long break on the up-coming Friday. Frustratingly, August did not mention the demo of 'The Dead White Sky', and Theo was too shy to bring it up. He assumed that Wells had yet to hear it.
The dress code for Cabot Farr was 'smart casual', which his parents explained meant shirt, jacket and smart trousers (not jeans). Theo liked wearing a shirt and tie whenever the opportunity arose and went up to his bedroom to look through the available options. He thought that the recently acquired beige sports jacket would work well with a white shirt and any one of his collection of vintage ties. The one thing he lacked was a decent pair of trousers, so another Saturday trip to the markets in Bath was necessary.
So things were shaping up nicely: he had a Friday afternoon practice session with X-Tradition (during which he may partake in the occasional joint) followed by a night at the White Hart with August and Pete and the rest of his friends. Then on Saturday a shopping trip to Bath, and on Sunday the traditional Blues Train gig. All in all a pretty decent weekend.
After tea, he retired to his room where he consumed a couple of cans of Holsten Pils and then wandered down to the White Hart. He studied the gig posters to see who was playing on the upcoming weekend: Friday's headliners were The Executives. This made Theo smile: The Executives were a local funk band that he had drummed for a while back. He left the band using the excuse that his parents wanted him to concentrate on his studies but the truth was Theo couldn't stand their Level 42 aspirations or the dreadful clothes they insisted on wearing. The lead singer was allegedly a friend of Curt Smith and kept on insisting that Tears for Fears management were interested in signing them. That they were still playing The White Hart on a Friday night seemed to suggest otherwise. It would be fun to watch his old band to see if they had become any less tedious.
The only thing that was worrying him was The Dead White Sky. He had given the demo of his version of the song to August over twenty four hours ago, and had not heard from him. Was this good news or bad news? He leaned towards the latter. August was such a sociable, effusive person he was sure that he would have phoned to offer his congratulations had he liked the song. That left two other options: that he had yet to hear it, or he did not like it. Theo thought that the former of these two options was the most likely, but what if it was the latter? Theo thought that the song was good, but what if it was a copy of some other melody that he had subconsciously heard? What if August was cringing with embarrassment whilst listening to it, thinking of a way to diplomatically break the news to him? Maybe Theo had put an unnecessary strain on their growing friendship by trying to be something he clearly was not. Maybe he should have just stuck to playing the goddamn drums.
Well, he'd find out tomorrow. And if August did not like the song, it wasn't necessarily the end of the world. He could always try again or maybe write his own lyrics to put music to. He toyed with the idea of phoning August to see if he had played the cassette but decided against it. Better to just wait until tomorrow. Then an image of that undeniably pretty girl Martine came to mind. Should he phone her instead? With so many other positive things to look forward to over the weekend, he thought he would be able to withstand the rejection should she not want to see him. But Theo needed more courage than he currently possessed to phone her, and more courage meant alcohol. Unfortunately he didn't have any left, and the two cans from earlier on had lost their effect. There was no way he could get to the off-licence in Chippenham, so he would have to come up with an alternate solution.
Annoyingly, his parents didn't actually possess a drinks cabinet as such, instead there was a shelf in the kitchen that currently housed dry cider, sherry, a sticky permanently half-empty bottle of elderflower wine and five tins of Watney's Red Barrel. It was the Red Barrel that interested him now. He didn't really like the taste but it was better than the other options. Instead of taking a can without asking, Theo decided to ask his dad if he could have one. Surely he was old enough now? Maybe his dad would treat it as a one-off celebratory can, now that the estate agent work experience had been set up. He checked in the living room, but no dad. Chances were then that Roger was up in the sitting room - his retreat from the pressures of family life.
The sitting room was filled with antiques collected by his parents over the years - Louis XIV armchairs, an Edwardian chaise longue, a Victorian Grandfather clock, a vintage gramophone player, Victorian books, statuettes and illustrations. He and Jon weren't exactly unwelcome here, but it was made clear to them that the room was a special place where adult rules of conduct had to be obeyed.
He knocked on the door and waited for the resultant "Come in!" He entered and heard the familiar sound of Gregorian chant playing quietly in the background - this was what Roger listened to to relax. Theo found it rather eerie and anything but relaxing. His dad was in his favourite armchair reading a novel. He smiled as he saw Theo enter.
"What can I do you for buster?" his dad asked good-naturedly.
"I was just wondering if you might fancy one of those cans of Watney's in the kitchen?"
"Yeah, I wouldn't say no. I suppose you might fancy one as well?"
"If you're offering, cheers." Roger smiled so Theo went back to the kitchen and returned with two cans.
But Theo had forgotten the sitting room etiquette, and his father looked alarmed as he brought the cans into the room "You couldn't possibly get some glasses as well could you? And maybe you should pour them in the kitchen."
So Theo traipsed back to the kitchen, found two glasses and opened the two cans of ale. He looked around to make sure he was alone and quickly glugged one of the cans down. He then opened another and poured the contents into the two glasses and carried them back up to the sitting room.
He re-entered, carefully holding the glasses in front of him. He set Roger's down on a drinks caster on a small table to the left of his armchair and then sat on the uncomfortably hard chaise longue. Not knowing where to place his own glass, he kept hold of it.
"Cheers!" his dad said as he took a glug.
"Cheers back" Theo replied, taking only a small sip, as he was beginning to feel bloated from his quickly-downed can in the kitchen.
"How are you finding the guitar? Tim said you were doing pretty well."
"Did he?" This pleased Theo no end. "Yeah, I'm really enjoying it."
"And how are things going with Wells Junior?"
Theo looked confused by this, so his dad clarified: "I mean August."
"Oh right. Yeah, really well. He's a great guitarist. And he writes pretty good songs..." Theo trailed off slightly; the thought of song-writing raising the spectre of The Dead White Sky.
"So what's the next step? Have you got any gigs lined up?"
"Not that I know of" replied Theo. And although the prospect of gigging with August was exciting, it wasn't nearly as exciting as the prospect that August might like his version of The Dead White Sky. He wanted to tell his father about the song, but thought it might be better to wait until after tomorrow, when he'd know whether August liked it or not.
"So w
hat sort of music is it that you play?" his dad asked, taking another sip from his glass.
"Well I guess you'd call it punk rock really" Theo replied "it's pretty political stuff though, pretty serious."
"Yes, your mum mentioned something about you going to a Crass concert the other day. So is this stuff you believe in, or is it all August?"
This was something that Theo hadn't really asked himself. Did the songs that August wrote for X-Tradition resonate with him? He certainly didn't consider himself to be an angry young man. He couldn't really think of anything to be angry about.
"Well, some of the songs are pretty far out there, but August said from the beginning that he wanted this band to be more of a co-operative and that everyone could contribute ideas. So I might have a crack at writing some songs to see if he likes them."
"Excellent!" replied his father. "Why not? I mean now that you're learning the guitar, there's nothing to stop you having a crack at writing. That's actually how I know Rick Ingham - he used to be in a rock n roll band in the sixties and your mum was one of the backing singers. I wrote some silly lyrics for some of their songs. You should ask him about it when you see him next week."
That his mum had sung in a rock n roll band was a revelation to Theo, as was the fact that his father had written lyrics. "What sort of songs were they?" he asked.
"Oh just silly stuff really, a bit like The Goons or the Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band. Well, that's what I was aiming for anyway. It was just a bit of fun."
Encouraged by his dad's flirtation with songwriting, Theo opened up some more: "Well I'd definitely like to try writing songs. I've come up with a few melodies on the guitar, but I don't really know what to write about yet."
"Write about what you know" his father offered. "Andy Warhol once told a friend that he didn't know what to paint. His friend told him to paint what he loved. So he painted a dollar bill and the rest is history. What do you love?"
Martine came to mind but instead he said "Van Gogh?"
Roger thought for a moment. Did Theo know about 'Vincent' by Don McLean? He assumed not. He thought he'd better mention it.
"There is quite a famous song about Van Gogh already you know."
Theo raised his eyebrows. How could anyone else possibly write a song about Van Gogh?
"It's by Don McLean" his father continued. "It's called 'Vincent', or 'Starry Starry Night', I'm not really sure. It was the B-side of American Pie. Or possibly it was a double-A side."
Theo had heard American Pie. He didn't know what a levee was and the song annoyed him as a result. It was catchy though. How could the singer of such an up-beat song possibly write convincingly about the anguished soul of Vincent Van Gogh?
Roger was worried that he might have discouraged his son so tried to make amends: "But just because someone else has written a song about Van Gogh, doesn't mean that you can't too. After all, how many songs have been written about love? People write song after song about that".
"True" said Theo. "True."
The bar has been set pretty high though, Roger thought to himself as he watched his son take a long swig of his ale.
-
That someone else had had written a song about Vincent Van Gogh put Theo on edge. After excusing himself from the sitting room, he went immediately to his absent brother's room to search through his record collection for anything by Don McLean. He also tried his parent's collection but came up empty. 'Starry Starry Night' his dad said the song was called. Sounds a bit... wet, he thought to himself.
He brooded in his room for a while wondering what the song might be like. He would ask his friends tomorrow if they had heard of it. But not wanting to be outdone by the creator of American Pie (what is a levee and what's the big deal about it being dry?), he reached for a pencil and tore out a leaf from his sketch pad. In large capital letters he wrote out VAN GOGH SONG in mimicry of August's DEAD WHITE SKY lettering. If August can write a complete song in two minutes flat, so can he. Theo stared at the blank space below. What now? An image of The Sunflowers came to mind; a logical place to start. Then its petals morphed into the famous self-portrait of Van Gogh smoking a pipe. What made him think of this particular painting now, he wondered? Maybe he associated smoking a pipe with quiet contemplation, which is what he himself was attempting. But it wasn't working - no lyrics came forth to fill the expanse of paper. He stared some more at the dead white page. Was this what was called 'writer's block'? Determined not to be a slave to inactivity he wrote the first thing that came into his head:
The sunflowers and the stars/ the landscapes before cars
Whoah! Why was he writing about cars in a song about Van Gogh? He seemed to have gone 'off topic' very quickly. He crossed his effort out and reached for another leaf:
The way you see things/ in your mind
Leaves others cold/ and critics blind
Blind critics? What sort of image is that? What's going on?
Frustrated that he was tying himself up in knots, he tried another tactic. Instead of rhyming couplets, he wrote down single words, in the hope that something would germinate from them:
Harvest/ workers/ sunrise/ swirls/ sunlight/ vivid/ colour
But nothing did. And then the image of Van Gogh with his pipe filled his vision again. This time he seemed to be shaking his head almost imperceptibly from side to side.
He balled up his first attempt and threw it in the waste bin. He had more tolerance for the list of seven random words, so he folded that piece of paper up and placed it in the top drawer of his desk. His mind then turned to the three remaining bottles of Watney's Red Barrel on the kitchen shelf. He padded softly down the stairs and when he got to the kitchen he saw that there were only two cans left. His dad must have come down and taken one. He was sure Roger would be fine with him taking another one as well.
As he headed back up to his room, he passed the telephone and he thought of Martine. Of course! He was going to phone her. His heart started to race. But was it too late? He looked at the clock in the kitchen: nine thirty. Technically speaking yes, it was too late. But after the three cans of Watney's he was feeling reckless, so he opened the phone book and thumbed through until he got to the Ws. There she was - K Walker, College Road Atworth. He dialled the number and listened to the ring tone. It lasted an awfully long time. He was just about to hang up when he heard a girl's voice at the other end.
"Hello?"
"Hi Martine, it's Theo!"
"Oh I'm afraid she's gone out for the evening. Can I take a message?"
"Um, not to worry, I'll call her back."
With that he hung up. Martine's sister he assumed. Theo remembered her talking about a sister (or sisters) but couldn't remember if they were older or younger. The one who answered the phone sounded just like her.
He told his parents that he was going round to Pete's. He retrieved his ten-speed from the garage. It was already dark, and the bike had no lights, but this was irrelevant as he had already made up his mind that he was going to cycle to Atworth. What he was going to do when he got there he did not know, his plan did not extend further than cycling to the street where Martine lived.
He hoped that the white t-shirt he was wearing would make him stand out to any passing traffic. As it turned out, the roads were virtually empty, but to reduce his chances of being hit, every time he heard a car coming he stopped at the side of the road to let it pass. After twenty minutes or so, he deviated from the main road and took the left turn that he believed the bus had taken on that afternoon a few weeks back, and cycled for a further ten minutes. This road was narrow and had no street lights to illuminate it, but the night was clear and the moon gave him some light to go by. He came to a fork in the road at which there was a signpost, but neither direction indicated Atworth. He now realised that he was lost. And to make matters worse, the cycling had sobered him up and he now began to see what a futile and pointless journey he had embarked upon. He didn't even have a clear idea as to what he would do when he got to Marti
ne's. But the alternative was going home, which didn't appeal either.
The signpost indicated Devizes to the right, and he seemed to remember that Devizes was the final destination of the bus. So he headed in that direction, the road thankfully becoming wider and lined with lights after another half-mile or so.
As he continued, he felt the occasional bump from his rear wheel. He assumed this was something to do with potholes in the road. But then the act of pedalling became more and more difficult. Was he becoming more and more sober? The bump from his rear seemed to be getting more frequent and regular. He could hear a car coming so he took that as an excuse to dismount and inspect the rear wheel. He felt the tire: it was virtually flat. He knew that there was no pump on the bike, despite their being a holder for one on the diagonal tube of the frame. An image of a rusty, cobwebbed tire pump resting on the shelves of his garage came into his mind. Bollocks.
Now he knew that he would have to abandon his mission. He turned the bike around and got back on. He started to cycle but it was too difficult - his calf muscles started to burn. He dismounted and pushed the bike instead. His main concern now was that his parents would start to wonder where he was. They were used to him coming home around midnight, but he calculated that it would take him at least two hours to get home from here and it was now 11 o'clock. Not wanting to worry them unduly, he started to jog, singing The Dead White Sky as he went.