Sweet Sorrow Read online

  ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen!’ said Mr Hepburn, back on the mike. ‘It seems that we have time for one last song after all! I want to see every single one of you on the floor, every last one of you! Are you ready? I can’t hear you! Remember, dance around the sawdust, please. Here we go!’

  The song was ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie, scarcely less remote to us in time than ‘In the Mood’, but clearly a great thing because now everyone was on the dance floor: the theatre kids, the moody pottery kiln kids, even Debbie Warwick, wiped down, pale and unsteady on her feet. The lab technicians poured out the last of the dry ice, Mr Hepburn turned the volume up and, to whoops and cheers, Patrick Rogers pulled his shirt off over his head and whipped it through the air in the hope of a starting a craze – then, when this didn’t catch on, put it back on again. Now the new sensation was Lloyd clamping his hand over Fox’s mouth and pretending to snog him. Little Colin Smart, sole male member of the Drama Club, had organised a trust game where you took it in turns to fall back into each other’s arms in time with the music, and Gordon Gilbert, destroyer of trombones, was on Tony Stevens’ shoulders, embracing the glitter-ball like a drowning man clinging to a buoy, and now Tony Stevens stepped away and left him dangling while Parky, building maintenance, poked at him with the handle of his mop. ‘Watch this! Watch this!’ shouted someone else as Tim Morris began to breakdance, hurling himself onto the floor, spinning wildly into the sawdust and disinfectant, then leaping to his feet and wiping madly at his trousers. I felt hands on my hips and it was Harper, shouting something that might have been ‘love you, mate’ then kissing me noisily, smack, smack, on each ear and suddenly someone else had jumped onto my shoulders and we were all down in a scrum, the boys, Fox and Lloyd, Harper and me and then some other kids I’d barely spoken to, laughing at a joke that no one could hear. The notion that these had been the best years of our lives suddenly seemed both plausible and tragic and I wished that school had always been like this, our arms around each other, filled with a kind of hooligan love, and that I’d talked to these people more and in a different voice. Why had we left it until now? Too late, the song was nearly over: ooh-ooh woah-oh, ooh-ooh woah-oh. Sweat plastered clothes to skin, stung our eyes and dripped from our noses and when I stood up from the scrum I saw for just one moment Helen Beavis dancing by herself, hunched like a boxer, eyes squeezed tight singing ooh-ooh woah-oh and then, behind her, movement and the sudden hauling open of the fire-exit doors. The atomic brightness poured in like the light from the spaceship at the end of Close Encounters. Dazzled, Gordon Gilbert tumbled from the mirror-ball. The music snapped off and it was over.

  The time was three fifty-five in the afternoon.

  We had missed the countdown and now we stood, silhouetted against the light, dazed and blinking as the staff shepherded us towards the doors, their arms outstretched. Voices hoarse, sweat chilling our skin, we gathered our possessions into our arms – hockey sticks and coil pots, the rancid lunch boxes and crushed dioramas and rags of sports kit – and stumbled into the courtyard like refugees. Girls stood clinging tearfully to their friends and from the bike sheds came the news that all the tyres had been slashed in one last mad, pointless vendetta.

  At the school gates, kids clustered round the ice-cream van. The freedom we’d been celebrating suddenly seemed like exile – paralysing and incomprehensible – and we loitered and hesitated on the threshold, animals released too soon into the frightening wild, looking back towards the cage. I saw my sister, Billie, on the other side of the road. We barely spoke to each other now, but I raised my hand. She smiled back and walked away.

  The four of us began our last walk home, turning the day into anecdote even before it was over. Down by the railway line, in amongst the silver birches, we could see a haze of smoke, an orange glow from the ceremonial pyre that Gordon Gilbert and Tony Stevens had built from old folders and uniforms, plastic and nylon. They whooped and hollered like wild things but we walked on to the junction where we had always parted. We hesitated. Perhaps we should mark the occasion, say a few words. Hug? But we baulked at sentimental gestures. It was a small town, and it would require far more effort to lose touch than to see each other constantly.

  ‘See ya, then.’

  ‘I’ll call you later.’

  ‘Friday, yeah?’

  ‘See ya.’

  ‘Bye.’

  And I walked back to the house where I now lived alone with my father.

  Infinity

  I used to have a recurring dream inspired, I think, by a too-early viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of drifting untethered through infinite space. The dream terrified me then and now, not because of the suffocation or starvation but because of that sense of powerlessness; nothing to hold on to or push against, just the void and the panic, the conviction that it would never end.

  Summer felt like that. How could I hope to fill the infinite days, each day infinitely long? In our final term, we’d made plans: raids on London to prowl Oxford Street (and only Oxford Street) and some Tom Sawyer-ish expeditions to the New Forest or the Isle of Wight, rucksacks packed with lager. ‘Binge camping’ we called it, but both Harper and Fox had found themselves full-time jobs, working cash in hand for Harper’s dad, a builder, and the plan had faded. Without Harper around, Lloyd and I just bickered. Besides, I had my own part-time work, also cash in hand, behind the till at a local petrol station.

  But this only burnt through twelve hours of the week. The rest of my time was my own to – what? The luxury of the mid-week lie-in soon wore thin, leaving just the fidgety sadness of sunlight through curtains, the long, lazy, torpid day stretching ahead, then another and another, each day a bloated, bastard Bank Holiday. I knew from science fiction, rather than from Science lessons, that time behaves differently depending on your location, and from a sixteen-year-old’s lower bunk at the end of June in 1997, it moved more slowly than anywhere else in the cosmos.

  The house we occupied was new. We’d moved out of the ‘big house’, the family house, shortly after Christmas and I missed it very much: semi-detached, all squares and triangles like a children’s drawing, with a bannister to slide down and a bedroom each, off-road parking and swings in the garden. My father had bought the big house in a misplaced fit of optimism, and I remembered him showing us round for the first time, rapping the walls to confirm the quality of the bricks, spreading his hands flat on the radiators to experience the glory of central heating. There was a bay window in which I could sit and watch the traffic like a young lord and, most impressively of all, a small square of stained glass over the front door; a sunrise in yellow, gold and red.

  But the big house was gone. Now Dad and I lived on an eighties estate, The Library, each street named after a great author in a culturally fortifying way, Woolf Road leading into Tennyson Square, Mary Shelley Avenue crossing Coleridge Lane. We were in Thackeray Crescent, and though I’d not read Thackeray, I knew his influence would be hard to spot. The houses were modern, pale-brick, flat-roofed units with the distinctive feature of curved walls inside and out so that, seen from the planes circling the airport, the rows would look like fat yellow caterpillars. ‘Shitty Tatooine,’ Lloyd had called it. When we’d first moved in – there were four of us then – Dad claimed to love the curves, a more free-form, jazzy expression of our family values than the boxy rooms in our old semi-detached. It’ll be like living in a lighthouse! If The Library estate no longer felt like the future, if the table-size gardens were not as neat as they used to be, if the occasional shopping trolley drifted across the wide, silent avenues, this would still be a new chapter in our family’s story, with the added peace of mind that would come from living within our means. Yes, my sister and I would be sharing a room, but bunk beds were fun and it wouldn’t be forever.

  Six months later, boxes still remained unpacked, jutting out against the curved walls or piled on my sister’s empty bunk. My friends rarely came to visit, preferring to hang out at Harper’s house, which resembled the palace
of a Romanian dictator, a two-jukebox household with rowing machines and quad bikes and immense TVs, a samurai sword and enough air-rifles and pistols and flick-knives to repel a zombie invasion. My house had my mad dad and a lot of rare jazz on vinyl. Even I didn’t want to go there.

  Or stay there. The great project of that summer would be to avoid Dad. I’d learnt to gauge his mental state by the noises he made, tracking him like a hunter. The walls were of a Japanese thinness and as long as he was silent, it was safe to burrow deeper into the fug beneath the duvet, the air in the room like the water in a neglected fish tank. If there was no movement by ten, then Dad was having one of his ‘stay-in-bed’ days and I could go downstairs. In our prosperous years, flush with bank loans, Dad had bought a home computer from an ad in a newspaper, a filing-cabinet-sized box made from, I’m sure, Bakelite. If Dad remained in bed, I could happily waste the morning in the corridors and airlocks of Doom and Quake, as long as I was ready to jab at the monitor button when I heard him on the stairs. Computer games in the daytime filled my father with an anger that was barely rational, as if it was him that I’d been shooting at.

  But most days, I’d hear him stir at around nine and shuffle to the bathroom, positioned on the other side of my bunk. No alarm clock was as effective as the sound of my father weeing near my head, and I’d leap up, quickly pull on the previous day’s clothes and slip downstairs with ninja stealth to see if he’d left his cigarettes. As long as there were ten or more, it was safe to take one and quickly zip it into a pouch in my rucksack. I’d eat toast standing at the breakfast bar – another feature of the house that had lost its novelty, eating on stools – and leave before he made it downstairs.

  But if I failed, then he’d appear, sticky-eyed and with the creases of the pillowcase still visible on his face, and we’d jostle awkwardly between kettle and toaster, slipping into our act.

  ‘So is this breakfast or lunch?’

  ‘I think of it as brunch.’

  ‘Sophisticated. It’s nearly ten—’

  ‘You can talk!’

  ‘I didn’t get to sleep ’til – could you use a plate?’

  ‘I’ve got a plate.’

  ‘So why are there crumbs every—?’

  ‘Because I’ve not had time to—’

  ‘Just use a plate!’

  ‘Here’s a plate, here it is, in my hand, a plate, my plate—’

  ‘And put the stuff away.’

  ‘I will when I’ve finished.’

  ‘Don’t leave it in the sink.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to leave it in the sink.’

  ‘Good. Don’t.’

  And on and on, banal, witlessly sarcastic and provoking, less a conversation, more the flicking of an ear. I hated the way we spoke to each other, yet change required voices that neither of us possessed, so we lapsed into silence and Dad turned on the TV. There might once have been a delinquent pleasure in this but truancy requires that there’s somewhere else you ought to be, and neither of us had that. All I knew was that Dad didn’t like to be alone, and so I’d leave.

  Most days I’d ride my bike, though not in the slick, modern style. I wore jeans, not Lycra, on an old racer with drop handlebars, a clattering rusted chain and a frame as heavy and unforgiving as welded scaffolding. Low on those handlebars, I’d patrol The Library and lazily circle the cul-de-sacs, Tennyson and Mary Shelley, Forster then Kipling, up Woolf and round Hardy. I’d check the swings and slides in the recreation ground for anyone I might know. I’d cycle down pedestrian alleyways, swoop from side to side on the wide, empty roads on the way to the shops.

  What was I looking for? Though I couldn’t name it, I was looking for some great change; a quest, perhaps, an adventure with trials undergone and lessons learnt. But it’s awkward to embark on an adventure on your own, hard to find that kind of quest on the high street. Ours was a small town in the south-east, too far away from London to be a suburb, too large to be a village, too developed to count as countryside. We lacked the train station that might have turned it into a commuter hub and also the legendary prosperity associated with the region. Instead, the economy relied on the airport and the light-industrial business parks: photocopiers, double-glazing, computer components, aggregates – whatever they were. The high street – called High Street – had a few buildings that might have passed as quaint: a timber-framed tea room called the Cottage Loaf, a Georgian newsagents, a Tudor chemists, a mediaeval market cross for the cider drinkers, but they were blighted by the dust and fumes of the busy road that ran alongside narrow pavements, leaving shoppers pressed flat against the leaded windows. ‘Going up the shops’ was the town’s great pastime, and anyone looking to donate an overcoat to charity would have been giddy. But the cinema was now a carpet warehouse, trapped in the time-loop of an endless closing-down sale. Areas of outstanding natural beauty were a twenty-minute drive away, the Sussex coast a further thirty, the whole town contained within a ring road that encircled us like a perimeter fence.

  Years later, when I heard friends speak sentimentally and lyrically about their place of birth, of how they’d been shaped by Northumberland or Glasgow, the Lakes or the Wirral, I’d find myself envying even the most hackneyed, stereotyped expressions of ‘belonging’. We had no sense of identity, no authentic accent, just a kind of cockney learnt from TV, applied over a slight country burr. I didn’t hate our town, but it was hard to feel lyrical or sentimental about the reservoir, the precinct, the scrappy woods where porn yellowed beneath the brambles. Our recreation ground was universally known as Dog Shit Park, the pine plantation Murder Wood; for all I knew those were their names on the Ordnance Survey map, and no one was ever going to write a sonnet about that.

  And so I’d walk the high street, looking in windows, hoping to see someone I knew. I’d buy chewing gum in the newsagents and read the computer magazines until the newsagent’s glare drove me back onto my bike. I must have looked lonely, though I would have hated anyone to think this. Boredom was our natural state but loneliness was taboo and so I strained for the air of a loner, a maverick, unknowable and self-contained, riding with no hands. But a great effort is required not to appear lonely when you are alone, happy when you’re not. It’s like holding out a chair at arm’s length, and when I could no longer maintain the illusion of ease, I’d cycle out of town.

  To reach anything that might pass as countryside it was necessary to cross the flyover, the motorway thundering alarmingly beneath like some mighty waterfall, then cycle across great prairies of yellow wheat and rape, past the corrugated plains of poly-tunnels that sheltered the supermarket strawberry crops, then crest the hills that encircled us. I was no great nature-lover, not a bird-watcher or angler or poet, I couldn’t name a tree if it fell on me and I had no favourite view or dappled glade, but solitude was less shaming out here, almost pleasurable, and each day I dared myself to travel further from home, expanding the circumference of places that I knew.

  The first week, the second, then the third passed in this way until one Thursday morning when I found myself in the long grass of a wild meadow that overlooked our town.

  The Meadow

  I’d not been here before. Bored of the ascent, I’d dismounted and noticed a footpath to my right, shady and blessedly flat. I’d wheeled my bike through woodland that soon opened up onto a sloping pasture, overgrown to waist height, the brown and green spattered with the red of poppies and the blue of … something else. Willow-herb? Cornflowers? I’d no idea, but the meadow was irresistible and I heaved my bike over the wooden stile and ploughed on through the tall grass. A grand timbered mansion came into view above me, one that I’d noticed from the ring road, a formal garden bordering the meadow at its lower edge. I had a sudden sense of trespass and dropped my bike, then walked on until I found a natural hollow in which to sunbathe, smoke and read something violent.

  The great expanse of empty hours meant that, for the first time in my life, I’d resorted to reading. I’d begun with thrillers and horror novel
s from Dad’s collection, dog-eared pages waffled from bath or beach, in which sex alternated with violence at an accelerating pace. Initially, books had felt like second best – reading about sex and violence was like listening to football on the radio – but soon I was tearing through a novel every day, forgetting them almost instantly except for The Silence of the Lambs and Stephen King. Before too long, I’d graduated to Dad’s smaller, slightly intimidating ‘sci-fi’ section: scuffed copies of Asimov, Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Though I couldn’t say how it was achieved, I could tell that these books were written in a different register to the ones about giant rats, and the novel that I carried daily in my bag began to feel like protection against boredom, an alibi for loneliness. There was still something furtive about it – reading in front of my mates would have been like taking up the flute or country dancing – but no one would see me here, and so on this day I took out my copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, chosen because it had ‘slaughter’ in the title.

  If I rolled a little from side to side, I could make a sort of military dugout, invisible from the house above or the town below. Straining for soulfulness, I took in the view, a model-railway kind of landscape with everything too close together: plantations rather than woodland, reservoirs not lakes, stables and catteries and dog kennels rather than dairy farms and roaming sheep. Birdsong competed with the grumble of the motorway and the tinnitus buzzing of the pylons above me but from this distance, it didn’t seem such a bad place. From this distance.

  I took off my top and lay back, practised my smoking with the day’s cigarette, then, using the book to shield my eyes, I began to read, pausing now and then to brush ash from my chest. High above, holiday jets from Spain and Italy, Turkey and Greece, circled in a holding pattern, impatient for a runway. I closed my eyes and watched the fibres drifting against the screen of my eyelids, trying to follow them to the edge of my vision as they darted away like fish in a stream.