‘The slight indentation on your index finger shows you’ve had a stolen DVD in your hand over the last twenty-four hours. You’re nicked.’
‘It’s a fair cop, guv’nor.’
I smile contentedly as he pops the machete down and hands himself over. No, I think Detective Inspector Carr would be horrified with what a real detective does.
I would always be reading and I’d always get an Agatha Christie for Christmas, ripping open the wrapping paper squealing with joy and running past the just-opened shin pads and football boots to start reading Murder in the Vicarage without delay.
I hope my literary tastes are more superior and highbrow now. Some of the books on the A-level curriculum are still up there on my list of favourite books, Brighton Rock and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for instance. Graham Greene is still one of my favourite authors. I loved reading, but the one thing I loved more than reading was reading out loud.
When the teacher would say, ‘Today is Shakespeare. Would anyone like to read out loud?’ while all the other kids in the class would all of a sudden find something totally fascinating to stare at on the floor, my hand would shoot up. My arm would ache in the socket hoping desperately to be the chosen one. But who did she pick? Philip Fucking Granger. Christ! He couldn’t even read. Why choose him? I had a much better reading out loud voice. I could conjure up worlds and emotions with my voice alone. I would actually inhabit the characters on the page, bringing them to life. It was so unfair.
So we would have to sit there while Philip butchered the dialogue and spluttered over some of the easiest words in the English language. He might as well have done a shit on Hamlet’s head. It was appalling. I had some satisfaction in hearing his boring voice drone on, though. On the playing fields he was always picked first and would never pick me, and here he was tripping up, getting disorientated, feeling self-conscious. English was my playing field and he’d just pulled a muscle.
One lesson I tried so hard to be good at was Art and Design. I loved performing in the school plays, I loved reading books, so to make up the trio and be a true creative force to be reckoned with I had to be able to paint well, sculpt well, create beautiful things. In other words be an artiste. Teachers would act differently to my scholarly shortcomings. Mrs O’Flaherty would sneer, Ms Dando would pity me, Mrs Wilson would be a bit more proactive with her criticism, particularly in my pottery lessons. With a cry of ‘Start again!’ she would violently bring her rolling pin down on my vase, my ash tray, my clown figurine, my tree, my mask – anything really that I’d made that lesson out of clay. They were shit, but aren’t teachers meant to guide you and nurture you and not demolish your whole lesson’s efforts with the swoop of a rolling pin in front of your peers?
What really got me was the way she never hid the fact that my work was shit. I remember her genuine disappointment when she opened the kiln to find Kelly Hubbert’s sculpture, a beautiful, thought-provoking piece, cracked in a heap and my ‘mouse in a shoe’ monstrosity intact next to it.
‘Why wasn’t it yours?’ she cried, with genuine grief, staring at me with accusatory eyes as if I’d tunnelled into the kiln personally and smashed up Kelly’s masterpiece.
Despite this, I did like Mrs Wilson. She was a hippy with flame hair and would wear long flowing dresses and scarves and let us listen to music while we ‘created’. She was a good person with a good heart, not like Mrs O’Flaherty who didn’t have a heart, or feelings. They’d been cruelly removed when she’d had that dreadful bowl cut inflicted on her. Mrs Wilson had given up on my art, which frustrated me because I really wanted to be good at it, but some things you have to let go.
In Art and Design and PE, I became one of those kids that parents of the good pupils say ‘holds the others back’. Artistically, I didn’t have IT, whatever IT is. Yes, I was disappointed, but I was also realistic. Yes, they may be able to paint beautiful pictures and sculpt statues, but can they recite verses of Shakespeare and Keats off the top of their heads? I can’t do that either, but you get my point. I was never jealous of the Kelly Hubberts in my class – though someone must have been because a few days before her deadline she had her artwork stolen from the class.
‘There are some sick people out there,’ Mrs Wilson told us. ‘Now if they’d taken Alan’s they would have been really sick in the head.’
I rest my case.
* * *
Dad’s success as manager of Northampton Town Football Club had meant that we could move from the Moulton Leys Estate to the village of Overstone which, although quaint, was miles away from the school and didn’t do much to assuage my feelings of separation. What friends I did make at school all lived miles away, and like every other teenager I always imagined that everyone else was having an amazing time and throwing wild parties while I was stuck in a shitty little village where the only exciting things to do were to water your hanging baskets and moan about ramblers. My parents totally understood this need to feel more integrated, and whenever there was a party at ‘The Farm’, they would faithfully drive me there. I must have had some friends because in my memory between the ages of 14 and 16 I always seemed to be going to parties, but then again there is a big difference between being lonely and feeling lonely.
The Farm was an outbuilding near Weston Favell Upper School that people would hire if they were having a party. From the age of 14 to 16, it seemed every Friday someone would be celebrating something, and so we’d put on our chinos and waistcoats and head on down to sip on a soft drink and listen to the sound of Yazz. The dance-floor was so uneven that when you jumped up as you did during ‘The Only Way is Up’, the floor would jolt, causing the stylus to veer off Yazz onto Big Fun. I don’t think I ever got to hear the ending of that song.
Every parent booked The Farm apart from Michelle Douglas’s, who booked out Danes Camp, which was a leisure centre with a swimming pool – as it said on the invite, it was going to be ‘A Pool Party’. Everyone was so excited. Michelle told us that there would be a buffet near the pool, but if any food went in the pool it would have to be cleaned out, costing her parents an extra £200. As kids, we don’t know we’re born. The Farm was so tedious, week in – week out, and here we were being offered an amazing pool party with food, so how did we repay Michelle Douglas’s parents? We grabbed armfuls of sausage rolls, cocktail sausages, those cheese and pineapple things and jumped in the pool – ensuring that the Douglases were in fact £200 out of pocket. Baps, sausage rolls, hot dogs, all bobbed past as we frolicked in the water. It was like swimming in an underwater Greggs.
Obviously, word got round the other parents about the Douglases pool/food fight party, and within weeks we were all back at The Farm. There was a menace there. It wasn’t drink or cigarettes, and it definitely wasn’t drugs, it was … the Bushwhackers. The Bushwhackers would bang on the windows while we were in there, and make threatening gestures and swear at us. Rumours that it was Michelle Douglas’s parents furious about their daughter’s pool party were quickly dispelled.
Only a few details were known about the Bushwhackers. They were allegedly from Northampton School for Boys, they had weapons and they could hide for hours in the long grass waiting for someone to come out of The Farm doors. They used to terrify us. Just one bang on the window with a stick would have had us all fleeing to the other end of the room, girls wailing and boys shouting whilst still running in the opposite direction. ‘Come on then, I’ll take you on.’ I’m sure that whoever it was found it all terribly hilarious.
At one party they abducted Stacey Higgins. Everyone was in tears. Should we call the police? Should we venture outside and try to find her ourselves? We all waited by the window eagerly hoping to see what the Bushwhackers would do with this innocent girl’s body. Then we spotted her – getting off with a spotty lad behind a wheelie bin. Stacey had used the Bushwhackers as a ruse to sneak out of The Farm and get a groping and a bit of tongue action. We were outraged at her defection.
The attacks by the Bushwhackers, although harrowing at the time, proved a timely distraction for me especially as the sounds of Stock, Aitken and Waterman began