‘School holidays, is it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Didn’t tell you, did I? The name’s Dermot. My mother was from Cork, so she used to say. Course she was off her head, she could have been from Mars for all I know. Didn’t know my father, he fucked off to Belgium before I turned up. Belgium! Who goes to Belgium?’ He had a drink and thought about it. ‘That’s my family history done. Who are you then?’
‘Mick Aston.’
‘Mick? That’s what you’d call a sheepdog. We can work with it though. Could be Mickey, could be Michael, could be Mike. You’re stuck with Aston, though. You not drinking that?’
He pointed at my whisky and I shook my head. He downed the drink.
‘Tell you what, tell you what I think. I think we need to get out of here. Out of this fucking business park. You up for it? We can go into town and have a real drink.’
‘I have a course to finish.’
‘Well finish it then. Finish it now. You can always do another course. You might not see me again. What have you got to lose?’
‘My job. My liver.’
‘There are other jobs out there. I can get you a job.’
‘Selling burgers?’
‘Not fucking likely. You don’t have the skill set. You don’t have the aptitude. We can use the van to get to town.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘I’ve had a drink. There’s a difference. Having a drink is sociable. Getting drunk is disgraceful. I don’t get drunk.’
The barman eyed him warily.
‘I get rat-arsed,’ Dermot told him. I get arrested. Nice place, hope it takes off. You’re fucked if it doesn’t. You coming?’
Of course I was. I didn’t know what to make of him but it’d be an interesting night. You’d have thought that after Dr Morrison I’d know better, but after Dr Morrison I really didn’t know what I knew.
‘Good man. Fair play. We’ll take the van. You’ll need to be careful in there.’
‘Why? The fat fryer?’
‘No, fuck that. We can dump that. You’ll have to watch out for the mirrors. There are the wing mirrors, the driving mirror, might even be some shiny surfaces in there somewhere. I doubt it, it’s filthy. I honestly doubt it. But there might be some chrome or something.’
‘I don’t mind mirrors,’ I said. Dermot smiled evilly at the barman.
‘Oh yes he does,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like them at all. And now he doesn’t know whether he likes me or not, either. Confusing old world isn’t it? Come on then.’
I followed him.
I
That afternoon we got ridiculously drunk. I don’t remember much about it. I remember abandoning the burger van halfway down Broad Street in Birmingham. Dermot had, as he’d promised, dumped the deep-fat fryer on the pavement at the business park. We’d left it there, leaking grease and steaming.
‘Off we fucking go then,’ said Dermot, scampering gleefully off into the afternoon crowd. We had a few in the first open bar we came to.
After that my memory skips like a vinyl record. I remember a staircase leading down to some toilets far beneath a dingy club. I remember being brightly sick over a flashing fruit machine. I remember it paying out three jackpots in a row in response.
I remember being in a bathroom with a long mirror of polished metal, Dermot beside me, holding my hand out. His small hands were too strong to resist, like the rest of him.
‘You can touch it,’ he said, meaning the mirror. ‘You can touch it.’
Our blurred reflections looked back at us, mine terrified, his delighted.
‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Touch it.’
A pair of post-punk punks – all polychromatic hair dye and studded leather – arrived in time to hear that. They moved to flank us.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Dermot.
‘Pair of queers in the bog,’ said one. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Where?’ asked Dermot, looking around theatrically.
Something about him made them leave. He looked for a moment like a werewolf, without any transformation. He was suddenly all violence. They backed off, hands up and palms forward. If they’d been dogs they’d have rolled over. The door dragged itself shut behind them.
‘Pair of cunts,’ he said. ‘Not going to touch the mirror, then? Come on. More drinks.’
We had more drinks. How do you become afraid of mirrors? Easily. Here’s how it happened for me.
II
In 1983 all sorts of things were changing. There were new sorts of amusement arcades and new sorts of amusements. We were living in the most immoral decade since records began. We were moving into the age of image.
I was moving into the final year of a three-year course in software engineering. This was at a tiny college two miles from Borth, which is a small town on the wet Welsh coast in the middle of nowhere. The campus held a few residential blocks, a blocky little student pub, and a three-storey H-block style building that held everything else. It had been built in the seventies, and designed by an architect with a fondness for the T-square and a big gap in his imagination. The computer rooms held out-of-date green-screen workstations linked to an ancient server. The server was tended by unspeaking drones in lab coats. They gave the impression of depthless knowledge; they never provided evidence of it. The server had its own room, locked with state-of-the-art locks for that time. Large windows with embedded wire mesh let you look in and see the server at work. It was the size of a pair of double wardrobes, with enormous switches and great tangles of cables. Banks of reel-to-reel recorders spooled miles of tape in all directions. The technicians would feed punched cards into slots, pull levers, and run for cover as processing began.
Borth college didn’t run many courses, and it didn’t attract many students. It didn’t attract any good ones. I went there because the entry requirements seemed to consist of turning up. This turned out to be true. It was all subsidised by government handouts and charitable donations, otherwise it would have closed down three weeks after it first opened.
The computer courses were run on the ground floor, and so all of the windows had to be barred. This was Wales in the early eighties and green-screen workstations could fetch a few pounds. On the middle floor they ran hairdressing courses. On the top floor the experimental psychologists watched mice run through mazes. In those days higher education took very little of your time and didn’t cost you all that much. I had a lot of spare time on my hands and nowhere to spend it. The campus was situated in a wet wasteland. What seemed to be huge distant mountains were actually small mountains, quite close by. It rained three days out of five. There was a single bus stop, and the bus went between the campus and Borth twice a day each way. If you went there at night you had to get a taxi back, and there were no taxis. Now there are no taxis anywhere in Wales. They were all removed. Now there are only tacsis. There’s lufli.
I made friends, out of necessity. There was nothing else to do. For three years there was only the company of other students.