And the only reason she really had was that the fucking restaurant sign was broken.
I think my jaw actually did, at that moment, drop, just like in the cartoons. There was a brief, neutral silence. Then I picked up the baton again.
Well, thank you for that bulletin. It’s refreshing that my looks and my personality didn’t enter into the equation. But what I’d like to know is, what has that got to do with anything here? We’re not talking about why we agreed to get married.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about, said Veronica under her breath.
We’re talking about why we can’t spend today together. Do you understand? It’s not my fault when you were born. I’ve known these people for more than half my life.
Veronica, with a distinct air of triumph, slowly and deliberately puts the tape recorder back in her bag.
And you’ve only known me six months.
Yes.
So it’s simple mathematics.
I think to myself, yes, it’s simple mathematics. But I say, No. It’s just that I don’t believe it right to drop all your old loyalties the moment you, um… you… I am about to say fall in love, then see immediately that it would make what I’m saying still more incomprehensible to Veronica. The moment you get a new girlfriend.
This comes out even more wrong. I try and work out a way to pull it back, but it’s too late. When Veronica speaks again it comes out clenched, armoured.
You’re going to be late.
The knife hits the toast again. She isn’t eating it, just buttering it again and again and again. I stand where I am. She’s right. I am going to be late if I don’t leave soon.
I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry. I know that sounded like I’m saying you’re just a new girlfriend. And you’re obviously not. You know what I feel.
Clearly not the same way you feel about your friends. You love them.
Yes, but the love you have for your friends… it’s different.
When Veronica speaks again, her voice has changed. There’s exasperation, there’s bewilderment, but less anger.
I just think it’s weird… And a bit… sad. You all trying to hold on to some memory. It’s ludicrous, trying to re-create, or hold on to, what’s gone.
We’re not trying to re-create it.
Then what are you trying to do?
I look back at Veronica blankly, searching for the answer, surprised that I am unable to locate it.
Anyway, says Veronica, I bet it wasn’t anything like as perfect as you think it was. The further the past gets away, the more people colour it in.
No. I hear the sound of my own voice and am amazed at the intensity of it. It was real. We just decided that we wouldn’t forget, that’s all. It’s a matter of –
A matter of what? Life and death?
No. Not really. It’s a matter of… of…
My voice trails away.
Veronica mutters at me scornfully, It’s habit. That’s all it is. A bad habit that you can’t shake off. It’s obvious.
I try not to think too clearly. This is what I do when I want to hide from my thoughts. I concentrate on the clock. Unpunctuality bothers me. My car keys hang from a hook on the wall just by the window. I unsling them and jiggle them in my hand. A series of beeps sounds. It’s a device on the keyring that helps you find them when they’re lost. The beeps sound when you whistle, but also for no reason at all. It gets to be annoying.
Everything’s a habit. Nothing’s obvious, I say.
I say it just because it sounds good, or just to say something, anything. Then I see that both statements are true, absolutely true.
I throw the bag of golf clubs over my shoulder, then jiggle the keys some more. I’m still hoping that the rift can be healed. But a charge of resentment and incomprehension still arcs invisibly between us.
I move towards the door. There are steel-corner repairs to the heels of my shoes and they make a rhythmic click as I progress towards the newly stripped paintwork of the doorway. I debate with myself whether to try to give Veronica a kiss, but the certainty that it will be shrugged off deters me. My mouth opens emptily for seconds before I finally speak. The words that come out sound ridiculous and entirely inappropriate.
Happy birthday then.
For it is indeed Veronica’s thirtieth birthday today, on this, the very sacred and historic day of remembrance, 14 August. I begged and pleaded with her, tried to explain that to move her birthday celebrations forward one day wasn’t the end of the world, that I’d make it up to her, that it was only minutes hours and seconds. So we celebrate tomorrow instead of today. What was the big deal? But she won’t listen, she won’t see.
Veronica doesn’t move or speak. I gaze at the back of her head, the slight redness in the hair, its fullness against her small shoulders, hulked up by the padded gown. For a moment, I feel like giving it up. Putting the clubs back in the cupboard, phoning Tony with my apologies, showing her what’s really important in my life. For a second, no more, I really want to do it.
You better not walk out of that door.
Why?
She pauses, gathers herself.
You walk out of that door and we’re finished, says Veronica, with a voice as tight as locking pliers.
I feel a gauntlet has been thrown; now it’s about power I can’t back down. I feel angry at the attempt to blackmail me.
Have you had another sign then?
What?
A message from your angel.
Don’t be stupid.
What’s happened? Has he invisibly manifested himself to you bearing a luminous banner. ‘Bugger off while you’ve got the chance, love.’
I turn, without another word, and walk towards the door.
As I reach it, Veronica shouts after me, I mean it, Frankie. Don’t walk out. Then, I don’t understand. Why is it so important? That you would give up…
I don’t hear the rest. I carry on walking out of the door, into the corridor, then into the street. When I glance behind me, I see Veronica framed at the window, in precisely the same position as when I left the room. She does not look up to see me go. Her words echo in my head. Why is it so important? Because it’s 14 August of course. 14 August, 14 August, the motherfucking, cunting, bollocking, 14 August.
Chapter Fourteen: 14 August 1984
I remember it so clearly. I don’t think I remember anything so clearly as that day. Not last week, not yesterday even. 14 August 1984.
And yet, nothing much happened. Not on the outside.
It was half-way through the last summer we were together at school. There was a growing, inarticulate realization among us – Tony, me, Nodge and Colin – that the world, what was always described to us by knowing adults as the ‘real’ world, was reaching out towards us, unknown, exciting, edged with a vague threat of constriction, or potential freefall.
We had all become friends together by then. Tony had discovered that charm as a force had much more potency than threat or malice and had, in due course, charmingly apologized to Colin about what had happened. Colin had been enormously flattered that he had bothered and subsequently became something of an acolyte. The weak, even if only momentarily deferred to, always then flatter the strong. If I hadn’t been so sure of his loyalty to me, I think I might have been jealous.
Colin had by this time grown out of his spots and found a certain kind of defensive confidence, enough anyway to enable him to be functional among the… less incomplete kids at the school. His father had stopped bothering him – having been found dead among the primulas in Ravenscourt Park, a bottle of Special Brew in his hand.
Colin, of course, was crap at sport, but he had found his own niche. This was the year of the BMX bike and Colin was brilliant at it. He could do all the manoeuvres: Cross-up, the Helicopter, the Table Top, the Aerial 360. He had all the gear: the waffle-sole shoes, the race shirts, the leather gloves, the padded shins with the gauze front for airflow. Colin was almost cool, for the first and las
t time. I would certainly say it was the nearest Colin had ever been to happy, at least since our brief childhood together.
Competitive sport had brought Tony, Nodge and me much closer together – running in the case of me and Nodge, football for me and Tony, cricket for Tony and Nodge (they had a highly successful batting partnership). Together with the newly cool Colin, we were the only four in the class supporting Rangers, despite the fact that it had been one of their most successful seasons – the Great Venables final one – ever. In the Canon League Division One, as it was then, they were whupping Arsenal, Spurs, Liverpool, you name them. Big Stevie Wicks couldn’t miss that netting, even if he tried. The artificial pitch we had then was coming up trumps every time, visitors skidding around on it like Torvill and Dean. Mad was it to be alive in such a season.
That 14 August was a hot, hot day. Our short-term collective memory at that point contained: Steven Waldorf perforated with unfair bullets, Zola Budd, Coe, Ovett and Cram in the ’84 Olympics, Morgan Fairchild in Flamingo Road, Victoria Principal, Al Pacino in Scarface, Koo Stark, Yappies before they become Yuppies, and Chris Evert and John Lloyd. Spitting Image had started its first run on TV, vying with Remington Steele. The drug dealers were driving Beemers. Wogan, Harty, The Tube, Breakfast TV. Pia Zadora and her terrific baps were our chief hand-gallop fantasy, among many such fantasies, even though we thought she was a joke, although she made a prize cake of herself in Butterfly.
On that morning – sending up shimmering heat waves even as I woke in the three-bedroom rented council house that my parents had spent most of their life confined within – we had all agreed to spend the day together. It was to celebrate the fact that Tony had passed his driving test that week, the first of us to do so. He was going to pick us up from my house. Colin and Nodge had arrived already and we were all sitting by the bay window watching for him, pulling the nets to one side. The curtains smelt of my home, of my street – clean, neutral but with a faint, barely detectable undertow of chemicalized floral perfume. It was one of those smells you could also taste, and it tasted bitter and sickly at the same time. It was the taste of the past, of parents, of limitation.
We heard a noise from the end of the road that sounded like a powerful motorbike, a swelling, spreading growl. I looked past the rows of terraces to the intersection with the next block. Although it was only ten o’clock, heat was now distorting the air above the tarmac and making the privet hedges across the road billow and shift.
It was a car that was making the noise, a big two-litre metallic gold Cortina Ghia Mark V with tinted windows, a sunroof and the back wheels jacked up. It was growing larger at frightening speed through the heat haze down the centre of the road. Pigeons scattered. A woman pushing a cheap push-chair screwed her head round and glared angrily. Music mingled with the engine noise. I could just make out the low tattoo of drum sound, not enough to identify the track.
The Cortina drew closer. It was coming out of the east end of the road, with the glare of the sun behind it. There was a strip of green translucent plastic across the top of the windscreen. It said Vince on one side and Sue on the other. The paintwork was uneven, flaking off above one of the wheels where it had been rebuilt in fibreglass. There were one or two patches of rust on the bonnet, but where the paint was good it had been burnished to a high sheen, and sunspots glinted and paraded on the roof where the light penetrated through the leaves of the plane trees that lined Churchill Street.
I could see Tony now, his face leaning close to the windscreen. He was wearing yellow tinted wraparound sunglasses and sounding the horn, which gave out the first eight notes of ‘Colonel Bogey’. I recognized the music now as ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’ by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel. That drastic, unstoppable bass.
Tony honked again. He had lit a cigarette, one of those long brown unfiltered Turkish Mahawatts he smoked when he could afford it. The liquorice paper always stuck to his lips and stained them brown. He held the cigarette between his fingers and waved in time to the beat of the drum that thrummed and shook the car from the speakers of the Pioneer stereo cassette player. I pulled myself up from my window seat and yanked up my white Levi’s, laundered lovingly by my mother. She had also shortened the legs for me, but not quite enough, so that the backs of the trousers trailed on the ground if you didn’t keep them hitched. Already white thread was showing through the cloth at the back ankle hem, which frequently caught beneath the flat heel of my black Doc Martens. My T-shirt read ‘Like a Virgin’ and had overlong sleeves. Cut short, it barely met the waistband of the trousers. It was inauthentic, clashed with my soul-boy wedge haircut.
I stood still for a moment, watching Tony in the car beckon to me, a grin stretching across his handsome, suntanned face. Patches of light penetrated through the trees and made puddles of shadow on the crazy-paved footpath.
At that precise moment, a feeling burst inside me like a tiny flare, something that I could not name but experienced as a kind of opening up of portals, a turning towards light. It lasted only five seconds, I suppose, but it left an afterglow that stayed with me the whole day, and that I remembered for ever, a kind of imagined awareness of freedom, of potential, of possibility. Tony is framed in this scene, this frozen tableau in his gold Cortina, intertwined for all my life with that feeling, staring out of the window with his smile, still genuine in those days, still open. Many years later I would turn this picture around in my mind like it was a photograph and ache for those few luminous moments.
The scene unfroze, became fluid, and I moved down the garden path towards the gold Cortina, the engine still revving. There was a splash of petrol under the car that spread into a series of concentric rainbows. Tony reached over and pushed the back door open, and I stepped inside. Despite all the windows being open, the plastic seat was burning. I shifted the base of my thighs, which already felt wet with perspiration.
It’s my uncle’s. He lent it to me for the day.
That was good of him.
He didn’t have much choice. He’s in the Scrubs, doing a two-stretch.
I remember Nodge did not smile or give any sign of being impressed by the car. His imperturbability, his absolute refusal to be even slightly awed, was still half-affectation then; we were all trying on personalities of one kind or another to see what fitted, and Nodge had only fairly recently begun to opt for detachment and laconic, cool amusement. He was more or less pre-political, possessing a sense of judgement but with nothing larger than his private world to exercise it on.
The detachment, in the end, would harden into what he was and become irrevocable. But a sense of choice and possibility danced around us and within us then like the sunspots that slid around the polished windscreen of the old Cortina. We did not understand then about coagulation, the irresistible solidification that would be shown one day to be life’s main impulse.
Nodge very calmly walked around to the side of the car. He was wearing khaki army shorts, some mad cutting-edge trainers that he’d saved six months to buy, no socks, a plain white no-message T-shirt. His clothes carefully pressed, the shorts even having a crease in the front that looked inappropriate, prissy. Sitting down in the back seat on the passenger side, I could see his face in the side-view mirror, which Tony had not bothered to twist into the correct position. Believing himself to be unobserved, his face was open, soft with anticipation and a kind of apologetic joy.
Tony revved the engine again. Only now did Nodge speak, having to shout over the sound of the engine noise and Morrissey singing ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’. Tony had put this on specifically for Nodge’s benefit. Nodge had been singing along with Morrissey’s self-pitying, beautiful whine. He stopped singing and said, Bit of a fucking rust bucket, isn’t it?
We don’t compliment each other, the four of us. We never show that we’re impressed or overjoyed on each other’s behalf. Don’t ask me why. It was the rules. There are always rules.
Colin, who was still slightly pockmarked from his acne, wa
s wearing bad stone-washed jeans and a ripped T-shirt. He looked awkward, but Colin always looked awkward. Clothes never quite fitted, the styles were always slightly outdated. His body language, self-conscious and stiff, added to the overall effect of a misfit. He gave one of his endless slow smiles, which was like a sponge that soaked everything up. You could praise Colin or humiliate him or laugh at him and that same smile would appear, like Muttley in Wacky Racers.
Tony kicked the car into gear and let out the clutch, too fast. The car stalled and threw us forward. Tony started laughing like a maniac. His laugh was the same then as it is now, high, loud, slightly hysterical. His hair was spiky, sticking up on top, but soft, not too punky, after the style of Nik Kershaw or Howard Jones. Tony revved the engine, then shouted above the roar.
I’ve got something, he said, grinning, showing his big teeth like mosaic tiles.
What, I said, is it that you have?
You’ll see, said Tony, theatrically fingering something in his pocket.
The Cortina bucked forward. Now ‘Eliminator’ by ZZ Top was playing, presumably for Colin’s benefit, blasting out of the speakers. The tyres made a terrified sound as Tony took a corner.
None of us knew where we were going, and it didn’t seem to matter. All the windows were open and a hot breeze pushed through the inside of the car. The endless terraces arranged around the main road fell past us, seemed to part for us. The sun beat down on the gold roof.
I felt in my bag, took out some cans of Hofmeister beer and passed them around.
Follow the Bear! said Colin, unamusingly and unsuccessfully trying to ape the TV ad.
Mine sprayed wildly when I opened it, soaking Colin next to me, who whooped with the shock of the cold liquid soaking into his T-shirt. Tony and Nodge in front laughed, and Tony revved the car harder. Although we were on side streets now, it felt like we were going fifty miles an hour. The beer smelt of promise. I heard Nodge shout from the front.