And so on. He would spend hours doing this, dreaming of how he would go here and there, lie on that beach, explore that rainforest, climb that mountain, dive into those caves.
But there was one thing he kept coming back to, though I don’t know why. He had a thing about Fiji. He’d seen the pictures in the brochures from the air, the iridescent, psychedelic blues and greens. He’d been to see both versions of The Blue Lagoon. He’d got a picture of Brooke Shields in a grass skirt up on his wall. He had every brochure on Fiji ever published.
Look at that, Frankie. It… it’s paradise. No one about. That blue. The coral reefs. God, to scuba-dive a reef like that. There are sharks out there. Then, the people used to be head-hunters.
He knew it all. That there were 322 islands large enough for human habitation, but there were thousands more. That there were seven basic kinds of coral – his favourite was the elk-horn fire coral, with its beautiful curves and whorls, which, of course, he had only seen pictures of. He knew about kava, the ceremonial drink, about the traditional roasting of meats in the pit, about the fire-walking, the spearing of the stingrays, the meke dance. Fiji was his dream, his Shangri-La, his own private Blue Lagoon.
To this day, however, he has never got further than that trip to the Oktoberfest, plus, on one occasion, a cheap weekend in Ibiza.
On these dreaming and wandering walks, Colin might be with us, and sometimes, but rarely, Tony, who seemed even then to have more of a social life than the rest of us put together. But on this occasion, this deliberately wiped-out and until now edited occasion, it was just me and Nodge.
It was a Friday evening. Mum and Dad had gone away for the weekend, leaving me with the key. As it happened, we knew of a party that night being held by a friend of Nodge’s brother, Trevor, three years older. It was in the back room of a pub in one of the nastiest parts of the Bush, near Colin on the White City Estate. Nodge’s brother was known as a bit of a villain. He’d been cautioned two or three times for petty theft and selling a bit of puff, and he was loud and vaguely malicious. But he told us that he could get us in, and we were ready to do anything that would take us away from the monotony of trudging the streets between Shepherd’s Bush and Acton High Street, tossing pebbles at cats and glaring hopefully, pitifully, at strolling girls.
That night we began to indulge in an extended fantasy about what might come about. The emptiness of the house, the imminence of the party. Perhaps a miracle would occur and we would lure two girls back, although if we had done I’m not sure we would have known what to do with them. We were both reluctant, resentful virgins, rammed to the extremities with unfulfilled sexual desire.
At six o’clock, Nodge arrived at my house. The Goth/New Romantic cult had begun to root itself in the inner suburbs and Nodge had had a go. It didn’t seem so much against his character in those days. His hair was bleached and he wore a ripped fishnet T-shirt, cut-off jeans with high, fifteen-hole black patent-leather boots. I was resplendent with wash-out-in-one-go violet hair, a black shirt and vinyl trousers.
The party didn’t get started until eight-thirty, so we had time to kill. Nodge’s brother had gone into an off-licence and bought him two bottles of cheap red wine, which Nodge carried, one in each strangely delicate hand. I opened a bottle and we sat down at the white melamine kitchen table with two whisky tumblers and began to drink. We had a few records to play. The Human League, Joy Division, Fad Gadget.
My mother was a keen, though hot particularly skilful, gardener. There was a twenty-foot patch of land at the back of the house which was turfed and edged with rockery plants, evergreen bushes and small hardy perennials. The flowerbeds were in bloom. Nodge stared out of the window, pulling at his drink, already growing bleary eyed with the effects. At the centre of the strip of tended land on the left-hand side of the garden was a cluster of heavenly blue flowers, in perfect bloom. Nodge’s heavy lids raised slightly when he noticed them.
See those blue flowers?
He lazily raised a hand and gestured in the general direction of the garden.
What about them?
Nearly three-quarters of the bottle of wine had already gone. It was sticky, sweet, foul, but we swallowed it anyway, grimacing theatrically.
I think they’re Morning Glory.
He nodded, as if doing so would add to the gravitas of the announcement. I felt I was expected to react in some way. There was a long pause before I began to formulate a sentence. Already the room was rotating slightly in front of my eyes. All I could manage was, What?
The record came to a halt. I moved unsteadily towards the turntable and substituted another.
They’re meant to be hallucino… hallucinogen… They make you see things. T rev was telling me, the other day. Ways of getting off your face. Nutmeg, for example. If you eat a whole one, you start to trip. Banana skins. There’s these mushrooms that grow on golf courses. And Morning Glory. Heavenly Blues. Something like that. They’re like acid. You have to eat a lot of them though.
I coughed.
I’m not eating flowers. I’m not a fucking hippie.
Nodge waved away this objection with his thin white hand.
You don’t eat the flowers. You eat the seeds.
I screwed up my face.
Trev says it’s quite good. They taste fucking horrible, but you get visions of things. The world lights up. He said it was like listening to a record which only ever had dust on the needle and then suddenly the dust came off and you heard it properly. Why don’t you go and have a look and see if your mum’s got any?
I thought about this for a moment.
I don’t want to have visions.
Of course you do. Nodge was up on his feet now, unsteadily. Everyone wants to have visions. It’ll be like… like being in Fiji. Everything’ll be blue. Everything’ll be liquid. There’ll be… elk-horn fire coral. Come on. Where does she keep them? I bet they’re in the cupboard under the stairs. That’s where parents always keep their crap. You can find anything under the stairs. Drink, rat poison, glue, feather dusters, candles, trowels, entire families of Pakistanis. Anything.
This was in the days before Nodge acquired his sensitivity towards ethnic minorities. I didn’t take any notice. Nodge opened the door of the stair cupboard and began banging about inside. I could hear heavy objects falling from shelves. After a few minutes, he emerged from the darkened space, grinning from ear to ear.
Here you go. Two packets of Heavenly Blue. Jesus, that’s some cupboard. I’m sure there’s something fucking living in there. I was afraid for a while. It’s dark, you know. Black as… as a… very black thing.
I stared dumbly at the two packets he held in his hand. Pictured on each were photos of the flowers in the garden, shown giant in the foreground against a perfect blue sky. With a single movement, he tore the tops off each of them and emptied the seeds on to a saucer on the table. They were pinhead-sized and there were about a hundred of them in all.
I’m not eating those. They’ve probably got fertilizer on them. I’ll probably get something sprouting in my guts, if I don’t die first.
Ah, fuck it. I’m game, said Nodge. Nodge was up for anything in those days.
Suddenly I felt the need to show him that I wasn’t afraid. He was always the one who took the initiative, who took the big step. Like when he stopped Tony attacking Colin. I wanted to show that I had some bottle too.
What the fuck?
We said fuck a lot in those days. It was a way of separating ourselves from our childhood selves. It tasted good on the tongue, forbidden, adult. When my father heard me say it under my breath, when I was ten or eleven, he struck me on the face with his open hand. The only time that ever happened. I knew then I was going to say it a lot more.
I picked up half a dozen of the seeds and swallowed them at once, then shrugged.
That wasn’t so bad. You can’t hardly taste them.
Nodge shook his head.
You don’t just swallow them. You have to chew them up. Li
ke this.
He picked up a small handful and placed them delicately in his mouth, then began to move his jaws. Slowly, comically, his face took on a look of exaggerated revulsion.
Shit a brick, that’s horrible. It tastes like earth mixed with chalk mixed with cow shit.
But he kept right on chewing, until he finally, as if in pain, swallowed. Immediately he took a swig of wine, threw back his head and began gargling. He swallowed, went white, looked right at me and said, in half-whisper, I’m going to blow my doughnuts.
And for a moment I thought he really was. He tensed and a slight gag reflex sounded in the back of his throat. Then he gave an almighty burp and settled back in the chair, looking self-satisfied.
Not so bad. Quite nice really. If you like the taste of foul and unspeakable things.
Seeing his expression, determined not to be outdone, I picked up a larger handful of the seeds, put them in my mouth and began to chew. Another in that endless round of competitions. The taste was truly awful and the seeds went immediately to the consistency of Cow Gum, sticking to the palate and wedging in the gaps between the teeth. I didn’t want them, whether they worked or not; especially if they worked. But even then Nodge and I had developed a rivalry, which had started on the running field and, though I didn’t know then, would always continue. I wasn’t going to let him outdo me, or prove himself braver. So I smiled, took another handful and said. Not bad. A bit like peanut butter with reinforced cement, peat and old chewing gum mixed in.
Nodge, thus challenged, took another mouthful himself. We sat there, chewing at each other, each now fighting to disguise our revulsion, trying to erase the taste with baths of equally foul red wine. Amazingly, at the end of it, neither of us was sick. After five or ten minutes, the nausea began to pass.
Now we were competing to see who could drink the wine quickest. Each of us filled a glass and tried to sink it in one. The second bottle was consumed entirely in about fifteen minutes.
I was beginning to feel extremely strange. Nodge, in front of me, seemed to move about, to billow and flow, as if the water that, I had read that day in science, made up 80 per cent of him had suddenly achieved mastery over his bones and muscles. It felt unpleasant, as if I were watching everything through the thick ends of dirty water tumblers. When Nodge spoke now, it was barely more than a slur.
T’Sato. Clock.
Wha?
T’Sato. Clock. We going?
Uh.
We both tried to stand up to make our way to the party. Nodge started to fall over, giggling, and I grabbed his hand to stop him. I felt his hand round my wrist, pulling, and I yanked him upwards until he was approximately vertical, then he began to fall slightly towards me. The red wine was on his breath, and tobacco that smelled sweet instead of foul. We balanced against each other, and then I noticed that the record was stuck in a groove, repeating…
It was at this point I always lost the ability to remember. I know people say that, I know they say they can’t remember, after they’ve had a few drinks, and I’ve never really believed them. I always thought it was a joke, or just something you said to show that you had the bravery to abandon self-control utterly. But all I could ever remember is that track stuck in the groove, turning and turning, and Nodge’s delicate hand in mine, and us tottering about the room, the seeds and the wine rotating my vision like a busted, boring kaleidoscope.
There is one bit I have sort of begun to remember, though. Since the marriage proposal, that bit has come back, although I turn my mind away from it every time it flickers up there on the blank juddering screen at the back of my head. It isn’t so much a fluid memory as quick successions of still pictures, as if from a security camera. I’m not even sure it’s in colour. That would make it too real, too believable.
The picture, the security camera shudder, is this. I’m on my bed in my bedroom. It’s a single bed, on the far wall of the room, ten feet from a bay window. I can feel the pressure of my eyelids on my eyes, and it feels as if there is an enormous weight on top of my head. I am in pain, real intense pain that seems to stretch from the behind of my eyeballs round in a cutting curve through the entire circumference of my skull.
I feel consciousness seeping into me like a dimmer switch being gradually rotated in a darkened room. Outside, there is a hum of a motor mower, the whine of an aeroplane. It is hot. I have my shirt off, but my trousers are intact. My hair is matted with sweat.
There is a smell in my nostrils like weak, dried bleach that I do not recognize, and a pressure on my back, which is not painful but uncomfortable. There is a faint light in the room being cast through closed curtains. I can hear a ticking clock and this prompts me to very slowly risk opening my eyes a slit. Directly in front of them, there is an alarm in the shape of the Sesame Street character Big Bird. It’s a joke present that my aunty, who always miscalculates my age, bought me. It says 10.05. The alarm is on the floor.
I try to stretch out and feel an obstruction. The bed seems even smaller than usual. The dimmer switch rotates another number of degrees and I try a small shake of my head, which seems to set the pain roaring again. I reach out to try and steady myself, and feel something warm and soft and slightly damp. I almost jump, believing it to be some kind of animal. But it is too still. I am bewildered, and slowly, to minimize the pain, crane my head around.
It is then that I see Nodge, eyes closed, breathing gently, in the bed with me. He is bunched up, as if a baby, but he is squat and hirsute for someone in his mid-teens. His hair is mussed, there is a shadow of soft fur on his face, stubble’s mild ancestor. The expression is one of perfect innocence, even bliss. He is deep in sleep. I notice, at first, quite neutrally, that he too is topless, that the soft pressure on my back is in fact his chest, and I realize that beneath that he has one of his hands down the front of my trousers. It is gripping, quite firmly, my half-erect cock.
I do not move, trying to take in information that is simply not acceptable. I am afraid to move in case it wakes him, and in case we are forced to face this thing that I like to choose not to remember. He groans slightly and flexes. His body is all muscle at this age. I feel my own body go rigid, not in excitement, but terror. On the wall, a poster of Pete Burns from Dead Or Alive grins down at me. Mocking.
Very slowly, inch by inch, holding my breath, I begin to move towards the edge of the bed. After what seems like minutes on end, I have extended my left forearm down on to the floor. Nodge’s hand feels jammed. I shift and shimmy to shake it loose, gently, in case he wakes up. I feel the nap of the carpet under my fingertips and I let it take my weight. I begin to move my centre of gravity across until half my body is flapping over the rim of the bed frame. My left leg is down now, toes touching the floor. Nodge’s hand is free.
Nodge moves again, moaning slightly, and I stop moving. I feel his hand reach out for my calf. It touches and rests there. I am balanced between floor and bed, and am afraid to move in case the removal of my leg nudges him into consciousness. I wait, until my leg and arm can take the pressure no more, then something softly collapses and I fall off the bed. The Big Bird alarm clock falls over and begins to sound.
Wakey wakey! Rise and Shine!
Then it gives a little Big Bird chuckle.
I quickly roll over to smother the clock with my body. It does not stop, but it mutters under my diaphragm. I feel its vibration, the painful pressure of its yellow plastic beak. Again, I hold my breath, and crane my head to look at Nodge. I see then that his eyes have flickered open. For a terrifying moment, he catches mine, then allows them to flutter closed again. Whether he is genuinely conscious or not, I do not know.
After several more minutes, I manage to roll in a way that clicks the alarm off. Now I rise and, swiftly as I am able, I zip up my trousers and put on a shirt. I drag on my basketball boots, fumbling furiously with the laces, walking towards the door as I try to tie them. Then I’m down the stairs and out into the street and running, running, the pounding in my head exploding like so
many shells on a battlefield.
I did not return to the house until that afternoon, spending the rest of the morning wandering around the streets and parks. The wine and seeds from the night before were still poisoning me; I retched in drains and litter bins, disgusted pedestrians avoiding my gaze. I must have looked a fright: catching my face in a shop window, I saw the red encrustation of the eyes, the hanging bags of a middle-aged man under my teenage eyes.
When I tentatively turned the key in the lock, scared that Nodge would still be there, the house seemed changed, charged with a different electricity. I took a deep breath and marched upstairs, preparing myself. As I hoped, all trace of Nodge had gone. There was just a dented pillow and rumpled bedclothes.
I did not see him again for a week after that. It was half-term holiday and whereas normally we would have been on the phone every day, there was only silence. Then, on the first day back at school, I was walking from my house, turned the corner in the direction of the grammar and there was Nodge across the road. We both stopped momentarily, then waved and grinned, and I crossed the road to where he was. No reference was made to what had happened that night. If anything did happen, that is. It was hard to be sure, but the circumstantial evidence was disquieting enough to my teenage mind, which reflexively, enthusiastically joined in the general schoolboy derision towards poofs and queers. Anyway. Nothing was said, not then, not ever again. It was as if it was in both our imaginations and sometimes even now I doubt that it happened.
Chapter Thirteen: Vronky’s Special Day
We’re in my house. Veronica has been living here because she hasn’t got any choice. Her new flat has the builders in. It’s got rot in the roof, a supporting wall in the wrong place and seven walls in need of repointing. But the khazi still faces the back window, in top feng shui style, so that’s all right. That should stop the money energy being sucked out of the house then. All the money apart from the twenty grand it’s going to cost her. Us.
What made her buy that place, that disaster, against all common sense? Because Veronica is stupid. Just like I’m stupid, just like Tony, Nodge and Colin are stupid. But we have very particular zones of stupidity, very different ways of being idiotic. Our cleverness is all in different places too. That’s why we can never make sense of each other.