There were other games in which we were more evenly matched. Luck games like Monopoly, Ludo, Sorry!, Snakes and Ladders. Although somehow I seemed luckier than Colin. Luck, I have always believed, is a quality you have, like blue eyes or grace. Nodge, for instance, has always been luckier than me. It drives me crazy.
Skill games, draughts and chess, and Chinese chequers. Paper games – battleships, hangman, noughts and crosses. There were quizzes, from books, or on the Magic Robot, which magnetically swung to the correct answer. There was Spy Ring, Totopoly, Escalado, Cluedo, Formula One, Campaign, Risk, Go, Escape from Colditz, The Battle of Little Big Horn. If it was sunny, there were penknife games, when we threw a small, unfolded blade into the grass in my back garden. You tried to stretch to it with your foot. There was football of course. Catch with a tennis ball – two misses and you were down on your knees.
There were toys – the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Starsky and Hutch. I had the Gold Attacking Martian Robot whose chest opened and a gun fired, whereas Colin had the Dino Robot, whose metallic head opened to reveal a dinosaur inside. I had a plastic Starship Enterpise Play Station, Colin had Steve Austen the Six Million Dollar Man and Oscar Goldman, his boss. I had Chewbacca, Major Matt Mason, Evel Kneival, Action Man, Dobie, Kojak, Huggy Bear. He had a model Ford Torino, Captain Scarlett and the Mysterons, the Bond car, Planet of the Apes action figures. Between us, we had them all. And we would lend them to each other, even our very favourites, without question or hesitation. We knew they would be safe in each other’s hands.
Every day was another contest, especially in those long summer holidays, when we lived in each other’s houses – or, in Colin’s case, his flat – slept over, exchanged secret codes, swapped comics.
We went on adventures too. Perhaps to the paddling pool at Kensington Memorial Park, cobalt in the August sun. Colin and I splashing each other, bombing, having underwater races, playing ‘It’ around the pool perimeter as barking mothers commanded their children. Ours let us go alone. It was thought of as safe then. His body coffee ice cream, while mine turned a baffling pink. Shouts of laughter. Absolute presence in the day, in the hour, in the second. Such luxury then, with no past, and only the slightest trace of future in our minds.
Once we even went on holiday together. Colin came with me and my family to Cornwall, me vomiting in the Austin Allegro on the way down, while Colin stood slightly apart, indifferent, reading Silver Surfer in the dull light. He didn’t try to comfort me; children don’t assume those responsibilities, they aren’t expected. You knew your limits, exactly. I didn’t mind.
What did we do on that endless white beach, the dunes scattered with sharp, tall grass, the English green seaweedy sea? What did we talk about? I can’t imagine. It wasn’t necessary to talk then. That’s how close it was. Now, when I go out with a friend, even my best, my closest, my least vengeful friend, and we sit in a pub, or walk in the park, words need to be spoken, like talismans warding off silence. Ten, fifteen seconds and it starts to be uncomfortable. Someone has to fill up the space, or…
Or what? Intimacy, that’s what. That’s not allowed any more, now you’re grown up. But for Colin and me, silence was our currency, all the different kinds of it. Excited silence, anticipatory silence, glum silence, angry silence, concentrated silence. We saw then what we have now lost – that the words didn’t matter, that words were screens behind which to hide. We had our silences. We lived in them like the fish we saw darting in the grey pools at the edges of the beach as we searched for red crabs and starfish and jellyfish.
I remember the beaches being empty then, and just the two of us walking towards the low, flat horizon, the sea sucking at the sand, bubbles pulling through the holes that the hermit crabs left. Distended shadows of seagulls showing against yellow cliffs. Greenstones, granite, black slate, molluscs on black rocks like remnants of foam. The sheer brute randomness of the rocks, as if they had been dropped in one piece from a great height and had then shattered. The suck and wash of the sea. Changing weather, beating wind. Adults looming in the distance, another strange species like the weird anemones in pools.
There were chaps inside our legs from all the walking, nylon swimming trunks caked in mud. Colin and me, the beach, silence, clarity, singing air. We were absent, out of our selves, in that child’s way, and this enabled the connection between us to stay charged.
It was… holy, I think. I know that’s how Colin saw it – saw it in an almost literal way. I can be sure. Because he put it on paper. He painted it.
Colin was not a particularly talented child. His parents, Olive – sane then – and William, Billy B. as he was universally known, were assiduous in making sure that he completed homework, and the small projects he returned to the class once or twice a week were always well presented and on time. Unless it was mathematics, for which he had an undoubted gift, the content was usually mediocre. Colin was one of nature’s C-students who nevertheless managed to achieve consistent Bs through effort and application rather than flair. But the writing his work was presented in was almost pathologically neat. If everyone finds their own way of tidying up the world, it seems to me now that Colin then attempted to beat down all the uncertainty and shapelessness that make up a child’s life through the shape and precision of his writing. It won plaudits from the teachers. It was truly miraculous, and in a school where merit in handwriting was considered – for some reason – to be a primary qualification for survival in the adult world, it became Colin’s chief source of status in a place where he otherwise found only indifference.
This much-admired graphic precision, however, was a hindrance in other fields. When sitting exams, Colin never finished in the allotted time so concerned was he that each letter should be correctly formed on the yellowing woodpulp we used as paper. Also, the concentration necessary seemed to involve the protrusion of his tongue, making him look simple-minded – which, in a certain way, I can see now, he was. This led to constant ribbing by other pupils.
In those days, of course, I did not join in.
Colin and I were not competitive at school in the way we were at games – as I say, it was as if the playing out of that instinct on boards, fields and ping-pong tables bled the relationship of its conflict. This was just as well, because I was a kind of mirror of Colin in that I was a natural A student who was too lazy to make the grades, and was happy to drift along with the same Bs that Colin had worked so industriously and single-mindedly to achieve. My mind always raced ahead of his, like the hare’s mind it was, while he cautiously, step by step, moved premise by stumbling premise through to a rigidly adopted conclusion. But our – artificial as it turned out – equivalence on the field of study helped to maintain the idea that he and I were essentially equal for a long time.
The number of areas in the school timetable where we actually were equal was limited. I was better at sport, English, geography, history – you name it. Facts, interpretations, remembering – it was like breathing to me, while Colin struggled and wrestled with his own limitations. I always made the first eleven at football, while Colin, with his small, weedy frame, his slight, persistent asthma, always got picked last, and walked shamefaced towards a complaining or indifferent team.
My success at football helped to override the natural shame I felt at the birthmark on my face. I would often make a wish that that birthmark, raspberry-coloured, the shape of Australia and protruding half an inch beyond by hairline on to my forehead, would disappear, perhaps after pulling a chicken wishbone, or once every year with a silent prayer after blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. But only scoring goals at football seemed to work. The more goals I scored, the more applause I received, the more it seemed to pale and fade when I looked at it in the mirror. Once, when I scored a hat trick, I thought it had gone altogether. But it always returned. It was one of the things that linked me with Colin, because it announced my difference, my seemingly inescapable role as misfit.
Only in art classes did Colin and I have anything
like the same natural ability – which, in fact, was a kind of lack of natural ability. We were both hopeless in our very particular ways. I was slapdash, all over the place, impatient. There was a flair of some kind there – so the teachers informed me – but to corral it into the shape of a meaningful painting or portrait involved, for me, an impossible amount of patience. I couldn’t sit still that long, my hare’s mind running ahead to the next moment ahead of this one. Each attempt I made to represent something of real life on the paper, although energetic, and sometimes imaginative and colourful, was technically hopeless.
As was often the case, Colin’s problem was the converse of mine. His pictures and paintings were painstaking and meticulous, and he was extraordinarily good at copying material that appeared in two dimensions – a photograph from a newspaper perhaps, or flowers on a calendar. But when he was asked to think in an extra dimension – copying something from real life, for instance, or using his imagination to paint thematically – he would fall apart. His pencil or brush seemed to freeze on the page; the mental equipment simply wasn’t there. Perhaps nowadays it would be recognized as a mild form of autism, that extreme literal-mindedness he possessed, that exactitude, that simplicity. Yet it was that I loved in him – a kind of absence, an insufficient ability to dissemble or disguise himself.
Anyway, I remember on one occasion that the art teacher, Willy Knocker – a ludicrous character with a name to match who actually wore a beret when he painted, smoked in defiance of the rules in class and affected a bohemianism that in Shepherd’s Bush was thought of as somewhat pathetic even by his audience of ten-year-old boys – asked the pupils to paint a picture on the theme of love.
At the announcement of the theme, Colin looked frozen, the posture he always adopted when confused. I, in the meantime, had already begun to attack the paper with a series of reds and purples, and even scarlets, since there was an edge of sexuality appearing in my idea of love by then. The mess I put on the paper suggested hearts, roses, the lips of a kiss – a child’s cliché of the idea of love.
Today I would probably draw handcuffs.
We had two hours to work on this painting. I would occasionally look across to Colin to see how he was getting on – in a different kind of class, I would have tried to help with a proffered fact, or a sneaked calculation to make his marks look better. But in art I was helpless.
To my surprise, Colin had lost his frozen look and was working on the large stretch of sugar paper. His face was abnormally close to the paper, his tongue protruding as if he was doing his best handwriting. There was a slight flush to his face. When I caught his eye once, to give him the reassuring wink I would offer when I felt he was in trouble, he avoided it and bent back to the painting without acknowledgement. I shrugged and went on with my mess.
I ran out of patience after the first hour. Standing back from the painting, I could see that what I had done was a disaster – lacking in method, thoughtfulness, any kind of discernible technique. It looked as if a tin of plum tomatoes had been spilled into a dish of custard. Giving up the struggle, bored, I scanned the room for distraction.
Many of the other children had finished and were whispering, giggling, forging paper pellets and dipping them in paint to use as missiles. But Colin, four desks away, I noticed was still bent tightly over his palette, his sparrow’s chest tracing the slant of the surface. His face was crumpled into a wad of concentration. Crooked teeth, crooked hair, the quiff standing up outlandishly from his crown, untamable. The muscles in his tongue had described a point at the end of it rather than a soft contour, always a sign that he was working to his absolute limit. I wanted to walk over and see what he was doing, but Knocker’s avowed bohemianism stopped at any relaxing of discipline. Each pupil was to wait in silence at his desk until the lesson was finished.
Eventually, the bell for the end of the period rang. Knocker had already collected my painting with a grimace and was completing each of the other rows of ten desks. I left my seat, but instead of heading for the door went to where Colin sat, even now with head bent, brush working the paper with that doleful determination of his. He seemed to sense my approach and looked up towards me. At that moment, to my amazement, he sort of… reared up. A kind of panic appeared, registering all over his body as a slight tremor. As I progressed towards him, he started looking about wildly. I had seen him do this before, when cornered by some of the rough kids, but had never seen anything like it addressed to me. A look of puzzlement rippled across my face. Then Willy Knocker spoke from behind me.
Blue, the lesson’s finished. Get out.
But, sir, I –
Shut up. Get out. Do it now.
I saw a shadow of relief pass over Colin’s face. The expression in his eyes changed to a kind of welcome. He gestured at the playground as I retreated towards the door and mouthed as he pointed, See you there.
Knocker now stood over Colin’s desk. The harshness in his voice, adopted to clear the classroom, continued to rattle in the air.
Come on Burden. Christ, that’s what you are, isn’t it? A burden, a weight on everyone’s shoulders.
Then something odd happened. Knocker, who had clearly been in a rush, hovered momentarily over Colin’s picture, then paused altogether. The classroom was practically empty now, but I hung back, waiting for Colin. Knocker picked up the sheet of paper and held it at an angle to catch the light. He gave a quick, not unkind smile, then glanced at me by the door, then back at Colin, whose nervousness had increased at the unwelcome attention. When Knocker spoke, it was more softly, and without the brisk dismissal that had characterized his voice a few moments previously.
Yes. That’s good, Colin. A very good effort.
Sir.
I could see then, bewilderingly, that it was not only Colin but Knocker too who was embarrassed. It was the way he gathered up the painting a little too quickly, the way that instead of putting it on top of the pile, he slid it into the middle and began to hurry away to his desk with a too sudden shift back to his previous tone.
Well, then. What are you waiting for? A big kiss?
Sir. No, sir.
Disappear then.
Colin was always tongue-tied with the teachers. He sauntered towards the door, where he now saw me standing, a shadow of blush still on his cheeks. His hands were daubed with paint and he reached out, as a joke, towards my hair. I laughed and dodged, flicking some of the paint from my own hands on to the front of his clean white nylon shirt. It showed like a spray of red over his heart. We began to run down the corridor, him chasing me brandishing his hands. A teacher saw us and called a halt, and we fell into step. By now we were both breathless. We stopped at a drinking fountain and Colin bent to suck the thin jet of water.
What d’you do a picture of?
He raised his head, but didn’t look at me.
Dunno. Nothing. It was stupid.
Mine too. Looked like I’d spewed my ring.
He laughed.
Me too.
And he caught me by the hair and rubbed, imprinting blue paint on the front hemisphere of my rough-cut fringe, staining my birthmark.
The normal rituals of playtime were gone through – running, water bombs, ‘It’, football with a crushed-up newspaper – and by the time the bell rang, I had almost forgotten the oddness of the scene with Colin and Willy Knocker.
Colin and I separated for the second half of that afternoon. The streaming system, defined by the size of the intake rather than rules of meritocracy, meant that we split up for many of our lessons. So it was that I walked along past the art studio on the way to – whatever it was.
I looked in and noticed that the room was empty. On Knocker’s desk, the pile of paintings he had just collected. The scene of the two of them came back to me, intrigued me. I opened the door and went in. The air smelled of oil, chocolate, radiators.
When I reached the pile of paintings on the desk, I remember that I suddenly felt absurdly furtive, as if watching something secret and grown
up and forbidden through a hole in a wall. I began to sort the sheets, looking for Colin’s effort. The other paintings, it was a relief to see, were quite as bad as mine had been. Whatever the word love suggested to a ten-year-old mind, it was clearly pink and amorphous and involved cartoon hearts and badly drawn stick-figure mothers.
I knew which was Colin’s painting before I read the inevitably perfect inscription of his name at the bottom. Even though upside down, I recognized the place he had depicted. He had made it out of powerful, bright colours – stark yellows, a blue sky the colour of the last stage of a Zoom ice lolly, pillar-box reds.
It was a bad painting, I suppose, as bad as the rest of them there. But it had a certain quality, and perhaps this was the quality that made Knocker pause and think about it. I couldn’t see it at first – my child’s mind was puzzled at the attention it had merited, and the palpable embarrassment of its author when I had approached it.
The scene showed an island, an area of yellow land enclosed by water. There were green hills in the background, gulls, a beach, all the normal images that would crowd a child’s mind when thinking of the seaside. A cartoon sun shone from the sky, too round, too yellow. It was entirely unremarkable.
What was strange, however, were the two figures portrayed running on the white beach. It was strange at first because they were so obviously alone on this island and simultaneously dwarfed by it. Most of the other paintings represented people large, in the foreground, dominating the scene. This was just a wide, empty beach with two figures on it. All Colin’s time must have been spent working on these tiny pale figures, overwhelmed by the colours that pressed down and around them.
The contorted angles of their limbs suggested that Colin’s intention was that they were running. Two of the sticks that held out from the approximate bodies joined together; the figures were holding hands. Discernible fingers twined round each other. One had blond hair, the other brown. There were what were intended to be rivulets of water spreading down their lobster-coloured legs.