Metroland (8 page)

Toni and I got off at Wembley Park, changed platforms, and went back over the area. Then we did the same again.

‘Christ, there’re so many of them,’ was Toni’s eventual comment. Thousands of people down there, all within a few hundred yards of you; yet you’d never, in all probability, meet any of them.

‘Well, it’s an argument against God, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. And for enlightened dictatorship.’

‘And for art for art’s sake.’

He was silent for a while, awed.

‘Well, I take it back, I take it back.’

‘Thought you might. There are others, but this is the best.’ Toni silently got back on the next Baker Street train for his final run over the stretch.

From then on, I was not only interested in my journey, but proud of it. The termitary of Kilburn; the grimy, lost stations between Baker Street and Finchley Road; the steppe-like playing-fields at Northwick Park; the depot at Neasden, full of idle, aged rolling-stock; the frozen faces of passengers glimpsed in the windows of fast Marylebone trains. They were all, in some way, relevant, fulfilling, sensibility-sharpening. And what was life about if not that?

11 • SST

Things never changed for you. That was one of the first rules. You talked about what things would be like when they did change: you imagined marriage, and sex eight times a night, and bringing up your children in a way which combined flexibility, tolerance, creativeness and large quantities of money; you thought of having a bank account and going to strip clubs and owning cufflinks, collar studs and monogrammed handkerchiefs. But any real threat of change induced apprehension and discontent.

For the duration, things changed only for other people. The school swimming master was thrown out for queering up boys in the changing rooms (‘ill health’, they told us); Holdsworth, an amiable thug in 5B, was expelled for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master’s Humber Super Snipe; the children of neighbours did amazing, incredible things, like joining Shell and being posted abroad, or souping up bangers, or going to dances on New Year’s Eve. The house equivalent of such disturbances was that my brother got a girl friend.

Psychic blows normally come from other directions, don’t they? Like a son growing taller than his father, a daughter’s tits bursting out beyond her mother’s marginal convexities, siblings fancying one another? Or from jealousy – about possessions, about lack of spots, about academic success. There was very little of this in our family: our father was taller and stronger than both his sons; Mary evoked compassion
rather than lust; and all three of us children had an equitable handout of goods and facial bad luck.

In fact, when my brother got a girl friend, it wasn’t really jealousy I felt. It was straight fear, quickened with a little hate. Nigel brought her home the first time without any proper warning from the Front Seat. Suddenly, half an hour before dinner, there was this girl in among us – shiny sort of dress, handbag, hair, eyes, lipstick; just like a woman in fact. And with my brother! Tits? I asked myself in furtive panic. Well, you couldn’t really see, not with that dress. But even so, a girl! My eyes stood out like chapel hatpegs. I knew, too, that I could rely on Nigel not to miss my fearful response.

‘Ginny, this is my father,’ (our mother was slaving in the kitchen to produce ‘just an ordinary supper’) ‘and this is my little sis, Mary. This is the dog; this is the telly; this is the fireplace. Oh, and this,’ (turning to the chair in which I was sitting) ‘is the chair in which you’re going to be sitting.’

I got up, sheepish and enraged, having a go at smiling.

‘Oh, sorry, kid, didn’t see you. This is Chris; Chris Baudelaire – he’s adopted. He doesn’t stand up when he meets girls, but that’s probably just an attack of spleen.’

I stuck out a hand and tried to make up for lost ground.

‘What did you say her name was, this chippy of yours?’ I asked; but somehow it didn’t come out as witty and ironic; just gawky and ill-bred.

‘Jeanne Duval to you,’ he replied, despite warning glances from our father. ‘And next time, Chris, you don’t put out the hand until it’s offered, OK?’

I sat back in my chair again, as an act of aggression. Nigel sat ‘her’ on the sofa next to him. Then they both got the sherry treatment. I stared at the girl’s legs, but couldn’t find any fault. Not knowing what to look for didn’t help. Her stockings seemed all right too – no holes, seams straight, and despite a low sofa tipping her backwards, there wasn’t a touch of stocking top (which I yearned for, and yearned to disapprove of).

I spent the whole evening hating Ginny (what a stupid
name for a start). Hating her for what she was doing to my brother (like helping him grow up); hating her for what she was going to do to my relationship with him (like ending the few boyish games we still played together); and hating her, most of all, for being herself. A girl, a different order of being.

The evening was full of humiliating reminders that I was still a kid. I didn’t get wine with my dinner (I didn’t like wine, but that was hardly the point) and my glass of orange squash mocked me unbearably. I tried ignoring it at first, but found it grew louder and more contemptuous in colour as the meal progressed, until, by the time the matching orange pudding was brought in, it was practically flashing out
I-M-M-A-T-U-R-E
like an illuminated sign, and I gulped it down in one draught. My attempts to assert bonds of adolescence with my brother went unanswered; my appeals to holidays, shared japes, my God even SF, were all rebuffed. The culminating moment came when I turned to Nigel and began

‘Do you remember when we …’

but got no further as he broke in with a forcefully languid

‘Can’t say I do, kid.’

At which this girl, this Ginny, simpered. Christ, she was obnoxious. I scarcely looked at her all evening; I certainly didn’t listen to the little she said; enough that I hated her. She simpered, she pouted, she played up to the Front Seat, she made hypocritical noises about the food. Wait till I told Toni about
her
. We’d mince
her
.

‘My brother brought his new chippy home last night,’ I told Toni casually, as we sipped our milk during break the next morning with the habitual, affected disgust of gourmets (you never knew, there might be someone watching). He frowned his eyebrows together and twinkled his eyes. Here came the SST test.

‘Soul?’

‘No, absolutely none, I’d say. No more than most, if you ask me. Still waters running shallow is what it looked like.’

‘Suffering?’

‘Well, her father’s dead, I managed to get that out of her,
but when I started asking if it was suicide they all pretended to be fantastically épated and shut me up. She toadied like a hot bitch to my mum, which may of course mean that her own beat her as a kid.’

‘Yeah, or it may just mean she wanted to grease up.’

‘She’s certainly got some Two-S coming to her though.’

‘How?’

‘Going around with my bro.’

‘Do you think he’s tried it on?’

‘She sat next to him on the sofa.’

‘Collar test? Hair test? Eye interchange?’

‘All negative. We didn’t have the telly on, unfortunately. I tried to push for
Wells Fargo
, but no one seemed keen.’

Toni and I had worked out an infallible television test. No one can watch a kiss – at least, a long-drawn-out oil-drilling sort of kiss – without somehow giving away what they feel. You couldn’t observe directly, but by sitting close to the telly and staring at the reflection in the screen, you could usually spot coarse reactions: my brother crossing his legs, my mother jumpily deciding to count the stitches in her knitting. If you wanted a finer focus, you had to rely on dangerous tricks, like leaping up to get a glass of orange, or reaching across for the
Radio Times
. Then, briefly, as you turned, you might catch heaving nostalgia (my father), embarrassed boredom (my mother), technical interest (Nigel), or querulous puzzlement (Mary). Visitors were equally transparent, despite away manners.

‘Tits?’

The final part of the triad, the part to which we brought all our worldly perceptiveness.

‘Didn’t see hide nor hair. Perhaps – and I’m being generous – a couple of verrucas.’

‘Ah.’ Toni relaxed his eyebrows, satisfied and relieved. He hadn’t missed anything after all.

12 • Hard and Low

Toni and I spent a hefty amount of time together being bored. Not bored with each other, of course – we were at that irrecoverable age when friends can be hateful, irritating, disloyal, stupid or mean, but can never be boring. Adults were boring, with their rationality, their deference, their refusal to punish you as severely as you knew you ought to be punished. Adults were useful because they were boring: they were raw material; they were predictable in their responses. They might be wet and kindly, or sour and vicious; but they were always predictable. They made you believe in advance in the integrity of character.

‘What shall we be today?’ Toni and I would sometimes ask each other. It was a direct denial of adult status. Adults were always themselves. We, by popular insistence, were not yet grown up, not yet formed; no one knew how we would ‘turn out’. We could, at least, make a few trial gestures on our own account.

‘How are you going to turn out?’

‘Like a jelly?’

‘Like a light?’

‘Like a Sandhurst cadet?’

We hadn’t yet turned out. Being protean was our only consistent shape. Everything was justifiable. Everything was possible.

‘What shall we be today?’

‘Why don’t we be supporters of the Firsts?’

It was a seductive idea. We were always searching for new pockets of character within ourselves; and it was always enjoyable to try something finely alien. The Head was continually appealing for boys to waste their valuable Saturday afternoons by going to support the First XV; especially at away matches, when the pressure of six or eight parents from the opposite side baying for victory, plus the disorientation of a train journey to an unfamiliar ground, were always good enough to buckle the morale of our insecure team. On this occasion, Toni and I headed off to watch the school play Merchant Taylors, whose ground was a mere ten minutes’ bike ride from Eastwick.

‘How shall we do it,’ I asked, ‘straight or clever?’

‘We couldn’t be too clever in case Telford reports us.’

‘True.’

‘Mustn’t be too straight, though.’

‘No fear.’

Telford was the brute who ran the First XV, a tyrant in a trench mackintosh who drove a Singer Vogue to away games, and whose tireless exhortations of ‘Feet, School, feeeeEEEEt’ would wail across the frostbound pitch from the opposite touchline.

‘Have to stay away from the side Telltale’s on.’

‘Yeah. I think we’d better do it completely straight at first, only fantastically enthusiastically – up and down the touch, waving our scarves, shouting out the score just in case they forget it. Then, as they begin to lose, we carry on in exactly the same way, so that it gradually becomes more and more piss-taking, only Telltale won’t be able to get us for it.’

It sounded a foolproof scheme. We stationed ourselves on the less tenanted touchline and roared and cheered while School fumbled, missed tackles, dropped the ball, got offside, passed the ball forward while inches from the line, and wheeled their scrum in opposite directions at the same time.

‘Bad luck, School.’

‘Keep plugging away, School.’

‘Hard and low, man, hard and low.’

‘Drive, School, drive. On, on, on. Feet, feet, feet. Oh, tough luck, School. Now’s your chance to get one back.’

‘Only thirty points, School. Wind in your backs second half!’

‘Fall, fall. Die with it!’

This last was the meanest cry available. Whenever the ball went loose, and a frail, tentative inside centre was pretending to wait for it to stop bouncing, but was really keeping a wary eye on the advancing posse of enemy forwards, we would let rip. If the man didn’t fall on the ball, he was manifestly a coward. If he picked it up and booted for touch before the enemy scragged him, he was still manifestly a coward. If he fell on it, the chances were that the primitive techniques of rucking which obtained in schools rugby would leave him quite satisfactorily maimed. Best of all was to get him to fall unnecessarily early, watch him lie there until fully trampled, and then have the ref award a penalty for failing to release the ball on the ground.

As the match wore on, as the following wind made all School’s passes drift forward, the enemy lazily doubled their lead. Toni and I reflected on the pity that School didn’t have anyone of the calibre of Camus or Henri de in their pack. Gradually, we noticed that our men were beginning to play to the other touchline. Kicks, even from our side of the pitch, were invariably directed to the more difficult touch; passing movements went that way too. Once, when a rare piece of blind-side action took place close to where we stood, the School scrum half (Fisher, N. J. – not a person of cultivation) chose to ignore an overlap and booted the ball at Toni and me from a few feet away; it passed between us at ruination-level and carried on for thirty yards or so. Toni and I somehow didn’t offer to run and collect it; instead we stood there, five yards from the steaming line-out, offering vigorous and well-thought-out advice.

‘Run it, School.’

‘No point kicking at this stage.’

‘Time to really put on the pressure.’

‘Final rally. Full eighty minutes, School.’

‘Jump!’

‘Bad luck, School. Now hard in there,
hard
.’

‘Now make this
yours
.’

‘Hard and low, hard and low.’

‘Fall, fall, fall. Die with it.’

Wisely, we thought we’d probably seen the best of the match when there were still five minutes to go; with a final ‘On, on, School’, we scrammed. It would be two days before we saw any of that lot again.

As we bicycled home, the evening thickened enthusiastically; bits of fog began to loiter hopefully by the laurel hedges. Along the Rickmansworth Road, every third street-lamp flickered and flashed into life. Passing through each patch of orange light, we avoided looking at each other; it was bad enough seeing your own brown fingers on the handlebars.