* * *
So that was it. School in the normal sense had ended. No more lessons, no more teaching, and no more Emily, seeing as she blanked me the first chance she got. Well Emily could fuck off, Mr Panfold could fuck off, shitty plastic school chairs and coursework could fuck off. With the exception of coming back for exams, we were free. To celebrate this we got drunk, we hid in fields at night, parks, anywhere we could be left alone to make noise and stupid decisions.
The daytime when we were supposed to be studying was spent at the beach, the fantastically warm summer leaving us with little chance of revising. Al didn’t help much seeing as he was on his bricklaying course whether he passed the exams or not, I on the other hand needed five passes at A-E to get on mine, my problem being that I didn’t really care. So beer was followed by cider, whisky, wine, anything we could lay our hands on. We would drink until we collapsed, each successive drink eroding the feeling of being in limbo that we had. Caught between the tides of growing up, and being a grown-up.
Returned With a Box of Eggs
May 1999.
The weeks had flown by, just as the teachers warned us they would. And here I was, totally unprepared, halfway back in a queue of people waiting to go inside and sit my English exam. You could feel the nervousness in the air. I had contemplated not turning up for this one, knowing that the outcome was never going to be good, but the grief from my parents would have been too much. If I tried and failed at least I would have tried. I walked in and took my seat in the pre-fabricated building, K being near the middle of the alphabet put me roughly in the centre of the room.
“You may begin.”
I read through the whole question paper before I started, just like you are told. It didn’t make any sense so I read it again. Bollocks. It still made no sense.
At the front of the room a white plastic clock hung on the wall, with two black hands and a red second hand. Three minutes had passed now. One hundred and eighty seconds. As each second passed gently by there was an audible tick. An hour would be three thousand six hundred of these, a massive amount of time when you’re watching how slowly the second hand actually moves. It may as well have been three thousand six hundred years. Actually isn’t this a two hour exam? For fuck’s sake!
The first sounds of scribbling ball point pens began to fill my ears. People were starting to write and I was still staring at the clock. One by one I watched the people sitting in front of me begin writing, it wasn’t long until it was all of them working away. I let out a perplexed sigh. So everybody knew what they were supposed to be doing apart from me? Surely there was somebody in that room as stuck as I was, they’d have to be sitting behind me though, where I couldn’t see. Maybe it was most of them. Could it be that the people with surnames before mine in the alphabet were finding it easy, and everyone from K back was struggling? It wasn’t likely. I’d need to start writing too. I read the questions again, they made no more sense the third time.
The room started to warm up, a result of the immense pressure we were all under and maybe in small part because of the beating sun on the dark felt roof. I needed to do something, anything, even if it was just to take my mind off being trapped in that room.
Then after a moment I realised what was wrong. It wasn’t the fact that the exam paper had accidently been printed in the wrong language, or that it was missing the explanatory diagrams. It wasn’t even the pressure of passing an exam that I’d already worked out wouldn’t make an ounce of difference to getting into college.
It was something far more simple than all of that. The door was shut, and I was shut inside this hot room. I looked around and other people seemed to be suffering too; ties had been loosened and shirt sleeves rolled up, some were using the piece of workings out paper we’d been given to fan themselves. The same panic I’d felt at the estate agents on my work experience began to build in me again, a deep tightened feeling inside that seemed to rise from my gut, making me feel nauseous. I needed out, now, any way I could. Even if it meant getting up and walking away. I daren’t look at the clock again in case it was bad news, for all I knew it might not have moved at all since the last time I checked.
My heart pumped harder, moving the chemicals that were causing this terror quicker round my body, ensuring that every part of me was saturated in fear. It was too much. I was going to have to go. Now. I shifted in my seat and grasped my unused pens, what else was left to do? Maybe we were nearly there, just check the clock. Ten minutes had gone. I need out! Now!
A draught came from behind me, the welcome breeze cooling my sweat. One of the adjudicators, a teacher I’d never had, had opened the door at the back of the room. Thin, clear air washed away the stifling heat we’d been sitting in. I could make it to the end like this, it was never going to be enjoyable but two hours of this I could take. There was just that small issue of actually answering the exam paper. I knew I would fail if I tried to answer it properly, how are you supposed to think of an answer if you can’t understand the question to begin with? The choices were either do nothing, which hadn’t really been working so far. Draw pictures all over the paper, just to make it appear like I was doing something, although my drawing would probably have been more embarrassing than my attempts at actually answering the paper. The third option was to write, but to write what I wanted to. Unfortunately that was the best of three bad options.
I began to put down a story about taking the exam. I wrote about the anticipation of walking into the room, the way we had queued in single file and alphabetical order. I wrote of how the warm weather had caused the teachers to open a door at the back of the room, and how up until that point we, as a collective group, had sweated away in a pressure cooker of overwhelming expectation. I continued on about how cool air blew through the room, giving us just a taste of the freedom we’d left outside. The breeze curling the edges of my exam paper up as it took a short cut through the building, on the way to meet up outside with its friends who had taken the long way around. If the paper would take off, I wrote, and fly out through the door, I would have no choice but to chase it. And if it didn’t stop until we reached the sea, or maybe whichever piece of land came after that, then that was only meant to be. Surely a real piece of literature written now would be more worthwhile than yet another over analysing critique of a hundred year old book? And if not then at least it would help me make it to the end of the two hours. I churned those words out, page after page. Sweating and writing until I was rudely interrupted by the end of the exam.
It wasn’t the last one I’d have to take, but it was by far the one I’d been most dreading, the rest being not nearly as stressful. With them all over, it would be some time before I received my results.
The only thing left was to join in the shenanigans on the last day of school. I knew some of the kids in my year had gotten tins of paint ready and were intent on redecorating the inside of the toilet block. Rumour had it there were some fireworks going about too. It all turned out to be in vain however when we turned up for what should have been our last day, and were told that the day before had actually been our last day, and we had been mislead to prevent us causing chaos. One of the lads who lived nearby went home and returned with a box of eggs, which he handed out to anyone who thought they could hit the school with one. It wasn’t long before the police arrived, at which point Al and I went to the beach.
It Was Just A Way to Pay for Beer
July 1999.
Al’s mum and Tabitha had known each other for years, so when Tabitha mentioned she needed some work doing, our names were immediately put forward. No small liberty taken seeing as we hadn’t been consulted on the matter, although it was the summer holidays now. Well not so much the summer holidays as the gap between finishing school and starting college, so she’d rightly assumed we didn’t have anything else to do. This suited my mother as well, it kept us out of the house during the day and gave us something to concentrate on that didn’t involve drinking. To me it was just a way to pay
for beer.
For £60 a week we would be working the land attached to Tabitha’s house, a massive pile at the top of the village, hidden behind a cover of green so you could just make out the roof as you passed by on the main road. Given the choice I’d rather have spent six weeks in the fields on my motorbike, but even that took money for petrol, and at least we were going to be out in the sun.
As is usually the case with new jobs we started on a Monday. I didn’t know what to expect but I definitely wasn’t expecting what I saw. On the road I lived on there were houses down both sides, Al’s was the same. Tabitha’s house on the other hand had its very own road that it sat at the end of. A vast imposing white Georgian building, with thick pillars at the front and more windows in just one side than in the whole of my house, it was definitely one of the biggest houses I’d ever seen. Surrounding the house was a huge square garden, itself surrounded by tall trees.
Al nervously rang the shiny brass doorbell alerting her that we were there. After a short wait she appeared behind the glass of the black front door and asked us to come round to the tradesman’s entrance. Al and I looked at each other naively, before we learned what a tradesman’s entrance actually was when she followed up with, “The door at the side.”
She was waiting in the doorway when we got there, a Superking cigarette hanging from her wrinkled old lips. Her time weathered face was framed by long thin black hair, the fringe cut short and straight, over brown eyes that showed little interest.
“Good morning Tabitha- I’m Al and this is Luke, how are you doing?”
“Follow me, I’ll show you what needs to be done,” she quickly reminded us we were there to work and not chat.
She led the way to a block of garage like buildings to the rear of the house.
“I need you to go through these and sort out what needs throwing away,” she said, flicking through a vast set of keys in her hand. She walked over and unlocked the door to the first building. After Tabitha had unhooked the padlock, Al helped swing the door open to reveal every single piece of available space was used up. I could see why she’d got us in. There was dusty wooden furniture; chairs stacked on top of each other, upside down and the right way up; taped shut cardboard boxes and black bags full of who knows what. Leaning against the wall were paintings, absolutely loads of them, of old stuff that no one wants to look at any more; boats and fields and trees, all under a thick veneer of dust.
“Bring it all out and I’ll tell you what to do with it,” she rasped over another cigarette.
Al lifted a flowery chair from the top of the pile and placed it on the grass. Gouges in the dark varnish showed the true yellow colour of the wood, and in the corners cobwebs hung like ropes on a suspension bridge, keeping the legs square.
“Put that over there Al, that can go back in, get me one of those black bags next.”
I leaned into the mess and picked up an old dustbin bag, a massive spider with a thick black body ran out and made me jump.
“Poof!” Al shouted. Tabitha laughed with him, a rattly smokers laugh.
“Yes, that’s rubbish like I thought it was, put it over there so it doesn’t get mixed up and end up going back in.”
I carried the black bag full of empty milk cartons and plastic bottles over to where she had aimed her thin finger, wondering how it had ever ended up in the garage in the first place. Tabitha looked at her gold watch and suddenly seemed agitated. “Right, I can’t stay here all day, I’ve got a friend to meet.”
Al went to say something, but was cut off by Tabitha’s next sentence, “If you don’t know what to do with any of it, leave it to one side and I’ll take a look when I return. You can have an hour for lunch at one in case I’m not back but I probably will be.”
And with that she walked back to the house, leaving me to assume she’d answered whatever question Al had wanted to ask.
Al took his t-shirt off as the morning sun began to properly warm up, and the pair of us cracked on with the task we’d been set. First thing was the coffee table, she obviously didn’t need it or it wouldn’t be out here gathering dust. Rubbish pile. But then the chair went in the keep pile and this was better than the chair, maybe the two go together. Don’t know pile.
Framed picture of someone else’s house, keep pile, she obviously likes it as she picked it out from somewhere. But then, it is shit. Don’t know pile. One by one we put things aside for Tabitha’s judgement when she got back, the exception being when I found a solitary old shoe and couldn’t find the other that matched it. Reasoning that it was probably in the central reservation of the motorway where most single lost shoes end up, I put it in the rubbish pile. In the background we heard Tabitha’s car set off down the gravel drive.
“Come on Lu let’s have a look around, she’s not gonna be back for ages.”
We walked off up the garden in search of something new. The work could wait, if it had been up to me the whole lot would have gone in the rubbish pile.
When we reached the end of what to most people would have been a sufficient garden, we found a tall hedge. A wooden archway in the hedge led to a small stables and paddock.
In the paddock were a few horses, two light brown ones and a dark brown one that was almost black. They were fenced off in their enclosure, craning their long necks down to pluck the last remaining threads of grass from the ground. I’ve never liked horses, something about their long faces freaks me out. They’re unnecessarily big too.
“You wouldn’t want one of them bumming you Al,” I laughed. He had a better look at one and smiled, they were obviously male.
“There are baby ones over there Lu, even you’d be able to ride one of them.”
“They’re a different kind of horse I think mate.”
“Oh yeah, I think they’re Shetland ponies,” Al replied, clearly feeling like an idiot. Then a fiendish look crept over his face. “The small ones are girl horses Lu. I’ve got an idea if you’re up for it?”
I laughed again when I realised what he was planning. Tabitha hadn’t been out long, the chances of her coming back were well worth it for what we were going to do. Al walked round to the gate separating the two lots of horses from each other. At the same time I went over to the smaller horses and tried to gesture them towards their dates for the day, while avoiding the oversized human teeth that sit at the end of their strange faces. One of them kicked at the floor with its hoof, sending up a tiny cloud of dust as it gave me a look of contempt. Then it returned to pulling grass from the ground. Al came over to see what was taking so long.
“Just push them Lu, they don’t know what they’re missing.” He shoved one from behind and it reluctantly walked into the bigger horses’ field. “Come on little horse, come and get it.”
The differently sized horses just stood there, oblivious to the fact that they were now in the same field, chewing relentlessly with their wrongly-proportioned faces. It was no use, all of our attempts to get the ridiculously endowed males to mount the smaller females were in vain. In their defence I think I’d have struggled with two pubescent boys leering at me too. Al dejectedly pushed the little girl horse back into the paddock with its ilk, and we walked off to continue the work we had started earlier.
When Tabitha returned at twenty-five past one, she found us sitting on her lawn surrounded by piles of junk, eating pasties and crisps that we’d bought from the local shop. After lunch she went through it with us, one piece at a time, until nearly everything was back in the storage it had started in.
So that was it, the end of the first pointless boring day. She told us then that we weren’t going to be paid until the Friday, so a quick loan off my mum was in order when I got home. I told her I needed money to get through the week. That was half-true, I needed money to buy the beer to get me through the week.
Cold Soulless Eyes That Gave Nothing Away
July 1999.
The incessant ticking of the clock filled the air, every sound a moment we wouldn’t get back. While underneath
stood a smartly dressed figure, staring up at the time.
What were they doing?
I called out, “What are you doing?”
The figure turned suddenly towards me, so for the first time I could see its face. But not a human face....it had a horse’s head! A fucking horse’s head growing from the top of a human body in a perfect black suit.
Oh no.
The horse-man stared at me with cold soulless eyes that gave nothing away, and with every breath he took, steam spiralled outwards from two stretched oval nostrils on the end of his face.
Fear trapped my voice inside me, leaving me barely able to whisper out a, “Why?”
I tried to get out of my seat to run but my whole body was frozen in terror, gravity pinning me down under my own weight. Looking around the room I was in a block of chairs, set out in perfect symmetrical lines that filled the room. Ten chairs long and ten wide, a hundred chairs. In every chair another man in a suit with an equine head, watching me, staring at me. While alone, they blew clouds of steam from the ends of their faces. Where the fuck was I? What the fuck was I doing?
The horse-man at the front of the room started to run towards me, his thin black tie swinging back and forth in time to the crashing of his hooves on the floor. Where his hands should have been another pair of swinging hooves bought the total to four. CLUNK-CLUNK! The legs of my chair carried the vibrations as he ran, his knees barely bending, most of his movement at the hips as he came at me almost robotised. CLUNK-CLUNK! He covered the ground between us until he was so close I could feel the heat from his breath; then I woke up in a cold sweat, just in time for my second day at the new job.