* * *
When the end of the week finally came and I got my £100 in cash, I made sure to give my mum what I owed her before I had a chance to spend it. Then I hid half of the remaining £80 in my sock draw and rushed round to meet Al.
There was no time to waste, we were off down the pub.
How The Fuck Does a Man Get Pregnant?
October 1999.
It wasn’t long before my life became focused on the weekend. Day after day the monotony of work wound me up like a coiled spring, so that by Friday night I would explode into the pub. I wouldn’t even acknowledge anyone until I’d necked two pints. Alcohol to Al was like water to a dried up sea sponge; he was attracted to it, constantly on the lookout for the next opportunity to get drunk, and sometimes I could even have sworn it was attracted to him. A chance encounter meant Al was now also working full-time, having bumped into a local builder in the village called Trev. He’d asked in passing if he needed a labourer to help him on Saturdays. The idea of quitting college and getting a job was something Al had already considered, a lot of which was down to seeing me with a pocket full of money every Friday. When Trev replied with, “What are you doing wasting time in college? You want to get a job and learn while you earn son, that’s what I did,” the deal was nearly done. £30 a day cash and the fact that Trev had a nice big house quelled any lingering doubts Al might have had that he was making the right decision. That meant the pair of us always had the money to get hammered. I would drink until I couldn’t see, using alcohol to blot out all the inadequacies I placed on myself. I became a confident, extrovert, social whirlwind of a person. The person wasn’t real but I adored him nonetheless.
Having been turned away from a whole host of pubs, the nearest one we could find that would serve us without I.D was a two mile walk, then slightly more than that as we zigzagged our way home again. The White Hart in Hemford was one of those traditional style pubs, which sit in the centre of a village and predate everything around them. All wonky floors and wobbly tables, and ceilings you have to tilt your head to get under. On the outside it had its black oak bones on show. The air was always thick with the comforting smell of spirits and cigarette smoke; there was a pool table, a fruit machine, and best of all a bar with Stella on tap plus a whole host of random bottles we would dare each other to try. Pernod, Tequila, Gin, Whisky, Schnapps, Amaretto............you name it we threw it up in people’s front gardens, on that lonely introspective walk home.
We met James there. Eighteen and from two years above us at school, he became a regular pub acquaintance. The first impression I had of him was that he was about as laid back as it is possible to be without actually being asleep. He spoke slowly with a chilled out tone, like everything in the world was always great; and once he had a few drinks in him he was infectiously enthusiastic. What he wore perfectly matched his personality. In the warm evenings he’d throw a pair of shorts on and meet us at the pub, which was only at the end of the road he lived on. If it was raining when he left the house- a hooded jacket and a pair of shorts. Even in the bitter icy wind he’d wear shorts. I never once saw him with his legs covered up. The rest of his wardrobe consisted of t-shirts with pictures of either surf boards or VW Camper vans on, that went perfectly with the dark brown ponytail that stretched halfway down his back. I was jealous of James being able to dress how he wanted. Both only being sixteen, Al and I had to wear jeans and shirts to make ourselves look older; the riskiest my clothes ever got was when I wore trainers instead of shoes, and even that was only because I’d forgotten to clean the mud off them from walking home the weekend before.
The three of us would sit and drink and put Oasis songs on the jukebox, chatting bollocks the way you only can when everything is still in front of you. Then one Friday night out of the blue, our social triangle became a square and the course of all those years to come was changed forever.
Like most chance meetings down the pub it started with an argument, in this case over who was the toughest movie star of all time.
It began when Al, for no reason whatsoever, and in a loose impersonation of Arnold Swarzenegger, shouted, “Get to the chopper!” In James’s ear.
James replied with a, “Yippee kayee motherfucker!” In the second of a series of terrible impersonations that were to nearly get us barred from the only pub Al and I could get served in.
“Who the fuck was that?” Al asked.
“Bruce Willis you schmuck,” James retorted. I don’t know why he used to insult people in Jewish, he didn’t look like a Jew, though I never took the time to ask him if he was.
“Yeah ain’t exactly Arnie,” Al said, before repeating, “Get to the CHOPPER!”
“What you think Arnie is tougher than Bruce Willis?” James said from what looked like quite close to the edge of his permanent state of calm. I laughed as I watched the pair of them from outside of their stupid argument.
“Course he is, look at the size of him.”
“He’s not really that tough though is he? Seeing as he was pregnant in one of his films.”
“What do you mean he was pregnant in one of his films? He’s a man, how the fuck does a man get pregnant?” Al said.
“You’ve not seen Junior then?”
Al looked at me for support. I’d so far stayed out of it but I had to join in now. “James is right,” I said, “he was pregnant in Junior. I don’t know if he had sex with another man or if they put the baby in there somehow but he was definitely pregnant. I’ve never seen it but I remember seeing the advert on TV.”
“Fuck. I love Arnie. I’m never going to be able to watch his films in the same way again, knowing he was pregnant.”
“I’ll be back....” I tried to console Al. “For my ultrasound!”
“I guess that means Bruce Willis is tougher than Arnie,” Al admitted dejectedly.
A second later a voice from the table next to us said, “You haven’t seen The Jackal then?”
We all looked over.
“Who are you?” Al asked.
“That’s Kyle, he lives in Kirk-Leigh. Don’t tell me you’ve not met him,” James replied on his behalf.
Kyle was a big bloke, not fat big, well he was fat, but mainly he was just big. Even though he was sitting down I could tell he was excessively tall. As he looked down on the tops of the heads of the people sharing his table, it looked like he’d been given the wrong chair. Fuck knows how he could have lived in the same village as me without me noticing. He slowly looked the three of us back and forth with his rounded yet strongly featured, almost caveman-like face, then put down the pint glass that his fingers stretched nearly all the way around. “What’s your name mate?”
“Al.”
“Nice one Al,” Kyle replied in a strong London accent. He stood up in his smart denim jeans and tight grey designer shirt, and walked round to where I was sitting. I was right when I thought he was tall, he must have been six-foot-five.
He reached out with his shovel sized hand and shook mine.
“Luke,” I said.
“I’ve seen you two a couple of times in the village, you’re younger than me aren’t you?”
“Sixtee-”
Al quickly cut me off with a loudly whispered, “Shut up mate.”
“I’m nineteen bruv, I was in the same year as James,” Kyle said. “So what was I saying? Oh yeah, Bruce Willis kisses a man in The Jackal, proper kisses him. So he’s not that tough. If you want tough you want Jean Claude Van Damme.”
“Jean Claude Van Damme’s pretty fucking tough,” I said, nodding in agreement with Kyle. He reached out and gave me a touch with his clenched fist. It must have been a London thing. “He doesn’t even need a gun, he’d kick you to death in the face.”
“You fucking know that! Anyone who chooses to kick people to death instead of carrying a gun is properly hard.”
“He used to be a ballet dancer,” James said smugly.
“What?”
“Before he made movies he was a ballet dancer
. That’s how he can get his legs so high when he kicks.”
“Fuck off, there’s no way he’s a ballet dancer.” The bold features on Kyle’s face began to cowl. “Look at the size of him, ballet dancers are all skinny like women.”
“I know he’s not a ballet dancer now,” James said. “But when he was younger he was, he used to wear a dress and do little spins on stage and that.”
“Pirouettes?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah pirouettes,” James replied.
“Fuck off! You’re winding me up. There’s no way he used to be a dancer. People wouldn’t pay money to have him star in their movies if they knew he used to wear a dress and spin round a stage on his toes.”
“That’s why he doesn’t need a gun, because his feet are so strong. He can kill you with his super strong toes, from doing all those little spins.”
“Nah bollocks. You lot are taking the piss out of me.”
The three of us started laughing. I didn’t know if he used to be a ballet dancer or not, I didn’t really care; but Kyle did, and the more we laughed the more he thought we were winding him up. Al coughed, choking on his cigarette as he wiped tears from his eyes. James’s hair, which he’d let hang loose for the night swayed back and forth as his head rocked in joy. And I laughed because Al was crying and James had girls’ hair.
In an instant Kyle turned really angry, like fighting angry. “I’ve had enough of this James, you must think I’m some sort of....”
“Come on then you lot!” the landlady Trudy shouted from the bar. “Stop arguing about nonsense and one of you get some drinks in. Carry on like that and you’ll all go home.”
Nice one Trudy. I didn’t know where that was heading, but I know I could feel the tension die down at the table when she spoke. I sat with James while Al and Kyle went to the bar, Al was far from small but he disappeared completely from view when Kyle was stood in front of him. James seemed a little put out by what had happened, he didn’t say it, but I could tell because he didn’t say anything at all, just sitting there looking at his glass and playing with his hair. Luckily by the time Al and Kyle returned with the drinks, things seemed to have blown over, and the four of us spent the remainder of the night learning everything about each other that we wanted to know.
Kyle had moved to Kirk-Leigh at a similar age to me, to live with his mum when his parents had split up. The reason I’d not noticed him before is because he’d left the school in the same year I’d started there. He was into garage music, the same as we were, only he got mix-tapes from the events in London as they happened, whereas we made do with whatever was in the charts at the time. Mostly Garage Nation, which James referred to as Gay-rage Nation, a bit rich for someone who listens to house.
It wasn’t long before Kyle became a full-time addition to our table in the pub, sharing the walk with us when the weather was good, and forcing taxi drivers to put his garage tapes on when it wasn’t. It was just a shame he and James sometimes had to work weekends, leaving us with a gap at the table and a personality or two short. When it was all four of us though we argued and drank, taking turns to side with each other as we fought little battles over everything on our nights. Every one of us trying to upset the pecking order that naturally had six-foot-five Kyle at the top, followed by James who was oldest, then Al and I squabbling not to be at the bottom.
They were great times at that pub, in fact they were probably all that got me through the week working at the same company as my dad, the irony of it being that I spent all the money I ever earned from working on alcohol to forget the horror of work itself. We were all in the same situation though, none of us wanted to get up early every morning and with the exception of Al none of us was actually doing a job we wanted to do; but then even Al was fed up of working by Friday. I suppose that desire to block things out was the reason Kyle and James smoked cannabis, and was why Al and I were so quick to take it up too. It did make for some surreal moments; I remember laughing more in one night than I probably had in my whole entire life. The only downside I found being that the final, post pub spliff we smoked seemed to make the walk home take ten times as long.
See the Planes Fall Out of the Sky for Ourselves
December 1999.
The White Hart held an annual New Year’s Eve party. We were nearly a man down but Kyle had phoned in sick at the last minute when, unsurprisingly, no one had been willing to swap shifts with him. We never met as a group during the week, we were all too busy with work.
We’d been there on Christmas Eve for a last drink together before the few days you are expected to spend at home as a family. The Christmas tree was still standing in the corner, its flashing fairy lights competing in earnest with the lights of the Simpsons fruit machine next to it.
For New Year’s Eve the pub was transformed. Banners proclaiming ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR’ and ‘HAPPY NEW MILLENIUM’ hung from drawing pins in the beams above us; and over the bar, poorly drawn with felt tip pens on a succession of taped together pieces of white paper, was a sign that read ‘HERE’S TO THE NEXT 2000 YEARS!’ I could see it was supposed to be a joke, but the cynic in me read it as a reminder that everyone in the pub would be dead in a hundred; best to make the most of the time we had. I ordered a double Jack and Coke to go with my pint.
We were in the beer garden under the yellow street-lit shadow of the enormous monkey puzzle tree, smoking and drinking. You could smoke inside, but with all the talk of the millennium bug we wanted to be outside when the midnight bells chimed to see the planes fall out of the sky for ourselves.
The tree seemed to have caught Al’s attention as he ignored the rest of us chatting away. “Why do you think they’ve bothered with that Christmas tree inside?” he asked, staring up. “They might as well have used this.”
James put his drink on a picnic table and disappeared into the pub for a minute. When he came running out again he was holding the gold star from the Christmas tree. Before any of us had a chance to ask what he was doing he put the star between his teeth and jumped into the tree.
He climbed carefully, branch by branch, through the tree that had stayed defiantly green while those around it had turned brown. He was careful with his hands not to grip too tightly to the pointy evergreen leaves, instead doing most of the climbing with his feet as he wound his way higher and higher. When he reached about halfway up he stopped, unable to climb any further, and crouched down where we could no longer see him in the dark.
A middle aged couple came out into the garden both holding a flute of champagne, the man placing what was left in the bottle on the picnic bench next to James’s glass. They were surprised to see the three of us staring into the tree.
“What are you all doing?” the woman asked. It was hard to see her face in the dark, I could however make out the large white breasts barely contained in her top.
“Our mate’s up the tree,” Al replied.
“What’s he doing up there?”
Thinking quickly that we’d better not grass James up for stealing the decoration off the Christmas tree, I said, “Don’t know, none of us know, I think he’s just pissed.”
The bloke laughed, “Is he stuck?”
“Nah he’s just fucking about. James’s always like this, he’ll be down in a minute,” Kyle said.
“James!” the woman shouted up.
“What?”
“Are you coming down James? You won’t get any beer up there.”
Al and I both took a sip of our pints, with an audible Mmmm to remind him what he was missing.
“I’ll come down when I’m ready!”
The five of us stood there in the dark watching James, while he watched us watching him. Then the five became eight.
“Where’ve you been?” three blokes I loosely recognised from previous nights asked the couple we’d met earlier.
“James is stuck up the tree.”
“James James?” one of them asked.
“Yes, me James!” he shouted down.
“W
hat’s he doing up there?”
Before any of us had a chance to answer, not that any of us really had an answer, the landlady of the pub walked into the garden.
“What’s who doing where?” Trudy asked.
“Nothing.” Those of us that weren’t laughing answered almost at the same time.
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me, why are you all looking at my tree? Has one of you done something to it?”
“No Trudy, no one’s in the tree,” Al replied in his usual speak first, think later kind of reply when he’d had a drink.
“Right who’s up the tree?!” she demanded.
“No one’s up the tree,” Kyle said.
“Al just told me somebody’s in my tree.”
“I didn’t, I said no one’s in the tree.”
“So when I find out who it is, I’ll know you were lying Al and you’ll be barred.”
“James is up the tree,” Al said.
“Nice one Al,” James called down.
“Right James, you get down here!” Trudy shouted impatiently.
“I can’t. I’m stuck.”
“If you made it up there you can make it back down again,” she said. She probably had a point.
“Honestly I can’t get down, I don’t even know how I ended up here.”
Trudy wasn’t standing for his lies. She knew full well that James knew full well how he’d gotten up there.
“If you’re not down in ten seconds you’re barred from this pub for life!”
“Ten seconds? Do you want me to just fall down?”
“Right, that’s it. You come down here and you can leave, I’m not having you talking to me like that in my own pub.”
“So I’m barred from the pub?”
“You are and it’s your own fault. I gave you enough chances.”
“If I’m barred then I’m not coming down,” he said, “I might as well stay up here.”
That was it, the group of us that had accumulated out here to watch him burst out laughing; we couldn’t stop even when Trudy gave us all dagger eyes.
“I don’t think he’s coming down Trudy,” I said, trying to keep a straight face amid the tears on my cheeks. “Do you want me to start a little fire underneath to try and smoke him out?”
“Yeah chuck me up a smoke!”
“Don’t you chuck him anything up!” Trudy shouted, but it was too late, Al had already thrown his box of Benson and Hedges up. A little flame appeared in the tree and was then replaced by a glowing red dot.
“You’re barred as well Al!”
“What?!”
“I told you not to do it, now leave my premises!”
Al frowned, and quickly finished the last of his pint. He handed Trudy the empty glass and walked out through the five foot high side gate of the beer garden, slamming it behind him. Then he turned and watched us, like a floating decapitated head, from the other side of the gate that hid everything below his neck.
“I thought I told you to leave!” Trudy shouted at the floating head.
“I have left Trudy, I’m not on your land anymore.”
“That’s not what I meant. You know what I meant!”
Kyle and I instinctively knew what to do, walking over to Al and standing right next to him, only on the privileged side of the fence.
“Alright Al bruv, fancy seeing you here,” Kyle said. “Do you want a drink?”
Al smiled and nodded.
Trudy’s lips scowled into an angry frown. “If I catch anyone giving him a drink tonight they’ll be barred too, I’m not joking I’m close to kicking all of you out.”
Yeah go on then I thought, ban all four of us just for having a laugh, we’ll just spend our money elsewhere. Bollocks! No we won’t. Al and I can’t get served anywhere else!
“James!” I walked over to the tree and called up. “Come down!”
“He likes it up there Lu, let him be a squirrel if he wants,” Kyle laughed.
I walked over to Kyle, still stood next to Al who was secretly rolling a spliff on the other side of the fence. “If we get barred mate we can’t go out drinking anymore,” I whispered, “me and Al can’t get served anywhere else. It’s alright for you two, you’re over eighteen.”
“Yeah come on James!” Kyle shouted up. “You’ve had a laugh. Come down and I’ll get us all some tequilas.”
“James is barred,” Trudy reminded us. “He’s still coming down though.”
“See!” James said. “I might as well stay here.”
“Just apologise to Trudy and come down. Come on bruv, you’ve been up there all night,” Kyle said.
Trudy sighed, “An apology isn’t going to cut it this time.”
“Oh come on Trudy, it’s not like he’s broken anything,” Kyle said.
Then I smelt the sweet smell of cannabis burning behind me.
“Al mate, what the fuck? She’ll be able to smell that,” I whispered to him.
“Fuck it. I’m already barred.”
I stared him in the eyes so he’d be able to tell how serious I was. “We’re going to get you two unbarred, otherwise where else are we going to go?”
Al walked off down the road to finish smoking.
“Come on Trudy,” I said, “they’re only having a laugh. There’s no need to kick them out.”
She scowled at me too. “If you think this is funny Luke then maybe you shouldn’t come back either.”
Kyle looked at me and I could tell immediately what he was thinking; this is going to take a fucking miracle to get sorted. I replied with my eyes to let him know he was right....
What a nightmare. How the fuck was I supposed to get through a week at work without The White Hart to look forward to every Friday night?
But How Do You Describe Ecstatic?
February 2000.
In February James moved into his own flat, above a row of shops in Frampton. It was massive inside, with two big bedrooms on the top floor; and a kitchen, front room and shower room below. Every room was filled with dated second hand furniture that had been there when he moved in. The walls were decorated in bland peeling wallpaper someone else had chosen, and the carpets were heavily patterned in strong old-fashioned colours; admiral blue and crimson red. The front room where we spent most of our time had two tatty pink and green flowery sofas and three matching flowery armchairs; for the benefit of our eyes James tore pictures of Beetles and Campers from his VW magazines and stuck them to the walls. He was the only person I knew who had their own place. Compared to the small bedroom I still shared with my brother it was magnificent, and I couldn’t wait to get my own space for myself.
We started going back to his after the pub to continue drinking, smoking weed and listening to music until we fell unconscious. To fill the time we would each sit on our own chair or sofa in his vast front room and slag each other off. It felt good to have the piss taken out of you. It meant you’d been accepted. I’d have hated to have been left out.
“Your mum had a water birth with you didn’t she Al?” I said to him one night, trying to keep as straight a face as a drunken person can.
“What the fuck’s a water birth?” came the reply. Bollocks, I was planning to follow up with She told me when the midwife saw you come out she thought your mum had shit herself and tried to throw you in the bin, now I was going to have to explain the science behind it.
“Lu’s saying your mum’s a whale mate, she’s so fat she had to have you in the sea,” Kyle said, before adding, “Isn’t that right Lu?”
I watched Kyle and James laughing at the wrong ending to my joke, and Al getting increasingly pissed off. That was all I’d set out to do. “Er....Yeah mate,” I lied as I joined in the laughter, but at my half of the joke.
Kyle left to pick some weed up from a bloke he knew in Frampton; when he returned he had a mischievous look on his face. He began rolling a joint as soon as he sat down, and once he’d smoked his share and passed it on, pulled out a little bag of pills from his inside coat pocke
t. He held them up in front of us with a big grin. I went over to have a closer look. There were four white paracetamol sized tablets, on one side they were totally smooth and on the other they had a recessed logo of a dove.
“He didn’t have any change for the weed and all the shops in the high street are shut, he gave me these for a tenner. Who wants one?”
“What are they? Ecstasy?” Al asked.
“Yeah, why you done them before?”
“Never,” Al replied. “What are they like?”
“They’re ecstasy tablets. They’re like ecstasy.”
“So you’ve done them before?” James asked.
“I haven’t done them, but they’re only E’s aren’t they?” Kyle took one carefully from the packet and swallowed it, washing it down with his beer. “Loads of people take them.”
He handed the bag to Al, who took one. Then James, who held one up in front of his eyes to inspect it, looking closely at the logo before swallowing it. Then it was my turn. I knew that people had died from taking them, but people died doing a lot of the things that I did every day without giving a second thought to. Anyway, everyone else had taken one, I wasn’t going to be the odd one out. I put any thoughts of death to the back of my mind and swallowed the last pill. It tasted disgusting, a mixture of hairspray and chemicals that I couldn’t put a name to.
The four of us carried on chatting as we collectively tried to ignore what we’d just done. Every few minutes Kyle would ask us if we were getting anything; I didn’t know what I was supposed to be getting, so I wasn’t sure how I would even know. As I continued to work my way through our supply of beer, I started to think the pills had been duds. Maybe Kyle had done it for a joke, just to wind us up. It seemed like something he would do.
Then after about half an hour a strange warm sensation began to pass through me. It started in the back of my neck and spread slowly, in waves, through my body and out to the tips of my fingers and the very ends of my toes. I felt slightly numb, my muscles relaxing. Tension left me that I didn’t even know I’d had, a constant sense of unease we are born with; it had gone now, dissolved into the soft room around me.
I took another look at my friends. Through life you gain the ability to tell what someone is thinking by their face, especially people you know well. You can see sadness, happiness, anger, fear; a whole range of expressions, sometimes more than one at once. As they gazed back at me I saw something new. It was a look that described how I felt, of complete calm and acceptance. Nirvana, if there is such a thing. I could see James and Kyle were so different, the people they really were now residing on the outside of their skin. The way they looked, dressed, spoke, everything; where Al and I could almost have been brothers, they were opposites in nearly every way, but that didn’t matter now just like it hadn’t mattered before. In fact nothing mattered. I can’t remember who broke the silence first, but none of us spoke in proper sentences, it was mostly a combination of deep sighs and singular superlatives as we fought to understand what was going on. I tried to describe in my own head how I felt. But how do you describe ecstatic?
The garage tape we’d been listening to ended. James walked over to the stereo, took it out, and replaced it with a different one. As I heard the first beats of the drums a wave of nostalgia came over me. It was rave music now, early nineties hardcore that I remembered hearing coming from people’s cars when I’d walked to primary school, or from the bedrooms of my friend’s older brothers back in Branningham.
“We live to dream/We....we live only to dream,” came a soft, hypnotising male voice over a harder drum beat. “We live to dream/We....we live only to dream.”
“I’ll take you HIGHER! I’ll take you AWAY!” A female vocal screamed, the hardest piano I’d ever heard shouting behind it in symphony.
The whole experience changed in an instant; my body tensing in time to an intense rush that took over me, all my other senses fading so I could concentrate solely on the sound. It felt like the music was playing inside my head, as though it was being played just for me. In fact it was so perfectly tailored to how I felt that surely only I could have made it.
“I’ll take you HIGHER! I’ll take you AWAY!”
Reclining back into my chair my eyes shut on their own, and a giant machine appeared in my mind. It resembled a polygraph, the size of a car and with big wiry metal fingers that normally sketched out the tell-tale line. Only this one was different. A roll of sheet music came out of the machine at a hundred miles an hour and the fingers crashed onto it with every key of the piano, cutting at the strings of my heart as they did. Giant musical notes flew across the sky in time to the song. The machine was translating the music for me to see. I knew it wasn’t real, what I didn’t know was that the mind was capable of such wonderful things.
I lay there forever, listening to song after song, every one of them sending my brain off on twisted tangents and throwing unbelievable images at my mind. Then eventually I must have fallen asleep, or landed on some other planet altogether, if there is any difference between the two. When I woke the same morning, still lying back in that chair, I knew something had changed in me. Like retuning the strings of an old guitar, the sound receptors in my brain had been realigned. Garage music that had meant everything to me, suddenly meant nothing.
I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, in fact most of the time it didn’t even feel like it was my life; it felt like it was somebody else’s. What I did know was that I wanted this feeling again. I wanted it forever. The right music, those tablets and the right people, I had never been so sure of anything in my life. I wanted to immerse myself in it. The way only someone with nothing else could.
The tape was called Daze of Happiness. One of a handful of promo tapes by a local DJ that James had somehow gotten hold of. Two plastic circles and a length of thin tape; it made more of an impact on what was to come in my life than I could ever have known.
Some Red Carpet Has a Regal Quality to it
March 2000.
Having been pestered since we’d moved house, my parents finally gave in and let me live in the garage. It meant I had my own room for the first time in my life. The garage sat all on its own at the end of the driveway, halfway down the back garden. Made of bricks and with a proper wooden front door with a letter box and door-knocker (a remnant of the doors previous life), it almost looked like an actual house; albeit a very small one. Inside were bare brick walls my dad had painted beige. Beige because marks don’t show up; like a pre-stained white. A similar amount of effort had gone into the floor- a thin layer of second-hand red carpet laid straight onto the concrete beneath. Some red carpet has a regal quality to it. This one didn’t.
Kyle appeared randomly on the warm Saturday afternoon I moved in. It was unusual for him to just turn up. I was painting at the time.
“Oi this is the bollocks bruv!” he enthused, letting himself in through the gate at the side of the house. “Means you won’t have to put up with your mum shouting at you any more for waking her up when you get home from the pub.”
I never did finish telling you what happened on New Year’s Eve did I? When we finally left, two minutes after the midnight bells rang (which James was still in the tree for), Al and James were both banned from the pub for life. It was only when, the following day, Kyle and I marched the pair of them back there to apologise carrying flowers and chocolates, that the ban was lifted. I think Trudy was relieved to see the two of them so soon, doing the right thing. I don’t think she ever wanted to ban any of us, she just had to show she was in charge, and what else could she do? The only other punishment I can think of would have been to stop serving us beer and only let us have white wine spritzers or something, but then how do you enforce something like that? Maybe she could have had some pink t-shirts printed with ‘I HAVE TO WEAR THIS BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT’ across the front and forced people to wear them when they wound her up. Knowing us lot though, that would have just become a badge of honour. Plus I don’t know
how it would have looked to punters walking in for the first time, to see a pub full of blokes in pink t-shirts drinking white wine spritzers.
Anyway, Kyle had just pointed out that I would no longer have to put up with my mum shouting at me when I got home from the pub.
“Cheers mate,” I replied, turning down the stereo in the corner. “It’s almost like having my own place.”
“What are you doing? Painting?”
I looked down at the paintbrush in my hand, then the tin of blue paint in the other, before locking eyes again with Kyle. “Er, yeah mate.”
“Fuck that. Have some of this then I’ll give you a hand.” He closed the door behind him and pulled out a bag of weed. I rested the paint and paintbrush on a piece of cardboard and sat down next to him on my bed, which was the top half of the bunk beds I had been sharing with Dean. Kyle began skinning up while I searched through the box of tapes I had at the end of the bed; Garage Nation (obviously garage), Sun City (garage), Ayia Napa (also garage).... Nope, ah, Dreamscape, 1992, Seduction on one side, Sy on the other. I put it on Seduction side facing out; though it didn’t matter, the stereo had two play buttons that faced different ways.
I got up and opened the door of the garage slightly to let the smoke out. Jack was there holding Whisky in his arms. He grinned mischievously as he tried to throw the cat in through the doorway, I quickly shut it again and opened the window.
“I’ve met this bloke Paul down the pub,” Kyle told me through a smoky exhalation. “I don’t think you know him.”
“Little bloke? Dark hair? Always seems to be moving about?”
“That’s the geezer. Have you spoken to him?”
“Not properly. I met him out in the beer garden one night.” Kyle handed the spliff to me, I could tell it was strong from the first toke. “Fuck knows what he was talking to me about.”
Kyle laughed, “Yeah we’re definitely talking about the same Paul. Anyway, he’s invited me to a rave next weekend. He’s alright with me bringing someone along. I thought you might be up for it?”
“Yeah mate. What about Al?”
“No can do. He’s only got two spare seats in his car. I thought I’d ask you first.”
“Oh right, no worries,” I replied, “Whereabouts is it?”
He laughed again but with a kind of sarcastic snort mixed in, “It’s a rave geez, no one knows where it is.”
“Oh yeah. I’m well up for it mate. Are you gonna get some more of what we had last time?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “They’re already on order.”
As quick as that I had gone from my first experience of ecstasy to being invited to a real rave, on top of finally having my own space. It was going to be cramped in there, with the front third still being used as a garage to store my motorbike and my dad’s tools; but it was my space and it was perfect. And, although I was technically living in a garage, I would tell everyone I kept my motorbike in my bedroom. In my mind I was independent, I could make noise, come and go when I pleased, do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It was the base I was to use for the next stage of my weekend life.
Like One Giant Entity All Thinking and Acting Together
April 2000.
Rave day finally came around. I was nervous, an excited nervous, but most of all I couldn’t fucking wait. I knew it was illegal, but every second of every day we are governed by countless laws. Breaking just one of them felt like a small victory.
We met at the pub first, Kyle and I both dressed in trainers and jeans with short sleeved shirts. He’d had his hair cut, shaved all over into a dark fuzz. It made me wish I’d had mine done too, at the time it was between styles- unkempt and messy over my ears. Paul arrived dressed for raving in a pair of cream combats and a white t-shirt, then introduced us to his girlfriend Kate who was a fit little blonde also in combats but with a stripy multi-coloured jumper on. I watched Paul as he moved almost constantly, checking his phone every other second to make sure he had signal or doing laps around the pool table. Even when he did finally stand still, his body seemed to tense and contort like it was trying to use energy he shouldn’t have. If you’d never met him before you might have thought he was angry, he was far from it though.
Kyle had gotten hold of doves again. I was glad they were the same as last time, it meant I knew what to expect. We held off dropping until Paul’s phone rang, making do with alcohol to get us in the mood. When the call finally came we all took one, except for Paul who took two. Designated driver and all.
“You two happy with some old skool hardcore?” he asked us via the rear view mirror as we set off. We both nodded. We were in a red 1990 mk2 Golf GTI, and as the MC introduced DJ Slipmatt through the speakers, I wondered if the tape had come with the car. I shifted around in the back, keeping as far to the left in the seat as I could to allow room for Kyle’s massive frame. No one spoke.
As we wound twisting back roads, through tiny villages that I hadn’t known existed, I waited for that same strange energising feeling from last time to come. It didn’t take long. Gazing through the front window, the streetlights on either side began to merge together into two unbroken white lines; inside the car the green hum of the dashboard blurred as my eyes fought to process both moving and stationary light at the same time. A voice in the back of my head reminded me it was too late to go back, here it comes it said. Here it comes. I half shut my eyes and let the chemicals saturate me, the ecstasy soaking into my brain tissue and resetting my mind. All negativity in the world dissolved.
When we got there we had apparently covered thirty miles. It didn’t feel like we’d been driving long enough to travel that far. But then I had lost all concept of distance or time.
A thin, tree lined farm track led the way into the dark. We parked at the rear of one of the lines of cars that occupied either side. As we walked the dark route through the trees, I began to hear the sound of bass in the distance. It got louder as we got closer to it, and the louder it got the more I was aware of the drugs in my body, as if one were feeding off of the other.
At the end of the lane, where the bass became proper music, we found a massive barn on the edge of a field. At the door were a pair of people dressed for a night stood outside, wearing woolly hats and thick winter coats. It was a fiver each to get in, Kyle and I both paid ten to cover the petrol in the car. I only had a twenty and the girl gave me Kyle’s ten pound note back, passing it to me with a pink gloved hand. The tall, dreadlocked man stood next to her then handed us each a bottle of water before opening what must be the most understated door in the world, revealing a barn come to life.
The first thing that hit me was the sound, it was deafening. Proper, banging hardcore that pumped from speakers either side of a big stage at the front of the building. An MC strode back and forth riling the people that filled the room.
“Oi oi! Who’s rushing?! Who’s on ecstasy?!” he shouted at them as they blew their whistles back.
Rings of light, every colour of the rainbow, spun up the walls all the way to the roof. Lasers fired from both sides of where the DJ stood on the stage, directly at hundreds of mad strangers jumping up and down in time to the bass. Every time the music peaked they put their hands in the air, like one giant entity all thinking and acting together. I felt an excitement build in me as a big bass line dropped. The whole crowd went mad, jumping up and down in unison. Paul ran towards them and we followed. It pulled you in like gravity. Nothing ever felt so right. I wanted to explore, to see everything, touch everything; yet I was a prisoner of the sound. Instead we danced and danced and danced. And the sweat poured.
The energy we used seemed never-ending, as we moved to become part of the blur surrounding us. Joining with the honest people, being who they were supposed to be.
Hours passed as I basked in the night. Flitting between some distant universe, and a place that has no name.
Then Kyle appeared and with sweated breath whispered in my ear, “Lu.” He lifted his shades and I
watched as a childlike excitement grew in his eyes. “There’s an aeroplane over there.”
I looked. There it was in the corner, a light aircraft half covered by a sheet. This wasn’t just any old barn.
“We could take it mate,” I replied, beaming. “We could fucking fly somewhere.”
“We should Lu,” he grinned, “I can be the co-pilot.”
We were infantile. We were fantastic.
“By the way, why are you wearing shades?” I asked.
“I’ve got epilepsy.”
“Don’t worry mate,” I said putting my arm around his shoulders, “I’ll look after you.”
The strangers we shared the night with looked normal, like us. In my head I imagined they were squatters, environmentalists, anti-capitalist demonstrators, the people you see on television setting fire to faceless corporations in financial London. Surely they couldn’t spend their week wearing uniforms or suits. I later learned from Paul that they were like us; a friend of his who helped to organise the events lived a second life, commuting into the city during the week to work as an editor for a film production company, though he didn’t tell me which one. Responsibility it seems, transcends all social groups.
The rising of the sun bought an end to the best night of my life. Another car journey, this time to some softer house music closed the deal. Only a sickening feeling built up inside me, like a hangover but more perverse and with a deep sense of paranoia. Last night had been filled with strangers smiling, but now I couldn’t stop the winter leaves falling from the trees. We were offered to continue the party back at Paul’s house, but I needed my bed.
Paul dropped us off at the post office in the village, then we walked like zombies, silenced, until we reached my house.
“Phat night bruv,” Kyle said. I looked at his pale white face and ill sunken eyes and wondered if I looked the same.
“Yeah mate,” I replied, “was the bollocks.”
I sneaked down the side of the house and crept into the garage, where I was greeted by the one blue wall that I’d managed to paint before Kyle had turned up on that Saturday. It made me chuckle as I crawled under the bedcovers. It was twelve straight hours before I re-emerged.
The Reluctant Gold Piece of Crap
May 2000.
Spending my whole life with at least one member of my family was beginning to take its toll on me.
At school I’d had an escape during the day, but any problems I had at home now followed me to work. I still loved my dad but familiarity was definitely breeding contempt. He’d always had an air of mystery about his life when I was younger, going to this exciting place I’d never been, to make things that most people couldn’t. Watching him being told what to do took some of the shine off, although I didn’t respect him any less. My mum often asked me when she got me on my own, whether my dad slagged her off at work. He didn’t, he used work as his escape; only I got the impression that with me there it wasn’t quite the escape it used to be. I’d known within the first few weeks that I couldn’t stay working there, but with nothing else to do I put on a brave face and carried on doing the easy jobs they trusted me not to get wrong, all the while trying to force myself to care about something which I knew I never could.
I returned home from work one day with my dad to find someone had dumped an old MG Maestro outside our house. As we pulled up I was surprised to see Kyle sat in the driver’s seat.
“Alright Lu, come and check out my car,” he grinned proudly from ear to ear. “What do you think?”
“Er, yeah. It’s alright mate, nice colour,” I replied.
He pointed to the tiny badge on the back- 2.0 16V. It was somewhat overshadowed by the fact the car was painted granddad gold. “Jump in then.”
I lowered myself into the beige upholstered front passenger seat and drank in the car; you could smell the previous owners from the last twenty years. A musty, stale smell that lingered in the nostrils. Nice I thought, winding down the window.
“I only got it this afternoon, two hundred and fifty quid from the garage round the corner,” he said, wheel spinning down my parents’ road.
We did a nostalgic pre-ABS skid at the end and finished up only slightly over the give way lines onto the main road. A gap in traffic barely big enough was followed by another wheel spin and we were off again. I put my seatbelt on.
“I’m gonna go and see if Al’s in.”
“You never told me you had a license mate,” I said
“I didn’t did I?” Kyle laughed. “If the police pull us over just tell them that I did. If they can stop me.”
We skidded sideways round the corner into Al’s road, pulling up a little way before his house, presumably so his parents wouldn’t see Kyle driving the car. They were a lot more likely to ask questions than mine. I waited in the car while Al was fetched.
“Alright Lu,” Al said as he got in the back.
“Mate.”
Wheel spin number three confirmed that was going to be the order of business for the day.
Al laughed as he hurriedly put his belt on. “This has got some guts in it. Where’d you get it from?”
“That garage on the main road bruv, two hundred and fifty quid,” Kyle replied. “I thought we could go up the cricket field for a smoke.”
It didn’t take long to get there, ignoring the speed limit signs and driving as fast as the car would go. We stopped in the empty gravel car park and Kyle began rolling a spliff.
“So how was work Lu?” he asked.
“Shit mate.”
“How come? The working with your dad thing?” Kyle said, burning the hash with a lighter and sprinkling it over the tobacco. He’d wound the window up to keep the wind out and the smell of burning cannabis quickly filled the car.
“Pretty much.”
“I don’t know how you do it Lu, working with your dad all day,” Al said. “I’d go fucking mad.”
“I haven’t got a choice. I’m looking for something else but there’s nothing out there at the moment.”
Kyle wound his window down and lit the spliff. “I’ll get you a job at the care home if you want. Like I said before they’re always looking for people.”
“I would do mate but you work weekends, I like having weekends to myself. Anyway, it’s not just working with my dad that’s the problem, I could handle that if it weren’t so shit at home.”
“Are they still arguing all the time?” Kyle asked.
“Don’t mate, it’s getting worse, my mum’s getting a divorce apparently. My dad’s moved into Jack’s old room and Jack’s moved in with Dean. Dean’s well pissed off, with me in the garage he finally had a bedroom to himself.
“What does your dad think of that?” Kyle asked, handing me the spliff. I took a big drag and held in the calming smoke.
“He’s bought himself a Dictaphone that he carries around with him all the time. When my mum tries to talk to him he’s like ‘May 3rd, 2000. 7:45 pm. Yes Jan, what do you want?’”
“You’re joking mate,” Al said, trying not to laugh too hard at how I lived.
“No I’m serious. My mum knows that if she says the wrong thing it can implicate her in court, so she just gives my dad a proper dirty look and storms off.”
A wide smile crept over Kyle’s face, “Respect. Sounds like something your dad would do.”
I found it quite funny too sometimes, bits of it at least. The divorce could only be a good thing, an end to the shouting matches we’d grown up with. For my brothers and I though, we knew a time was coming where my dad would live somewhere else.
“What about you Al? Work going alright?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah mate really well. It’s hard work moving tons of sand around every day and digging holes but the money’s good. Plus I bumped into a lad who’s still on the same course I was at college and they’ve learnt fuck all. Half of them have dropped out and got labouring jobs like me.”
“You not getting bored of it?” I asked, letting Al have his turn holding th
e spliff.
“Nah mate. I’m working somewhere new most weeks, and I’ve already learnt how to put footings in and build walls. There’s years of stuff to learn in the building trade. You’re fucked at the end of a forty hour week though.”
“I couldn’t do it for four hours a week,” Kyle laughed.
“Beats wiping old people’s arses,” Al quipped.
“I don’t have to do that anymore,” Kyle retorted. “I run the shift now, someone else does all that for me.”
“You’ve been promoted from arse wiper to arse wiper supervisor then?” Al joked. Two out of the three of us laughed.
“So how long you been driving then Kyle?” I asked.
“Since lunchtime today, about six hours so far.”
“Six hours?”
“Yeah I was on the bus coming back from work and we went past the used car place. I spotted this on the forecourt so when I got off the bus I walked back and bought it.”
“Have you had driving lessons before then?” I asked.
Kyle laughed, “Nah, funny story bruv. I stalled it twice as I left the garage, the bloke I bought it from gave me a right funny look.”
“When did you learn to drive then?” I asked.
“I already knew what all the pedals did. The rest I taught myself this afternoon. I had seventy-five out of it on Carlton bypass earlier, it’s got to do more than a ton. I’ll take you down there when I’m not so stoned, we’ll see what it goes up to.”
I looked to Al in the back. He gave me that yeah I’ll pass on that one look I was hoping for.
“Cool,” I said.
“What about changing gear?” Al asked.
“Changing gears is easy.” Kyle wound the window up so he could roll another spliff. “Not stalling when you pull away is the hardest part, I just give it loads of revs now and drop the clutch. You can have a go if you want Al.”
I looked around to see if there was anyone else about. There wasn’t. There hardly ever was in Kirk-Leigh; you were left to your own devices most of the time.
“You’re gonna have to go in the back Lu, while I give Al his driving lesson.”
The three of us moved around until Al was in the dangerous seat.
“Right. So start it,” Kyle said. “Then push the pedal on the left all the way down, that’s the clutch.”
Al did as he was told. “Now put it in first and slowly let the clutch up. You might need to rev it a bit so it doesn’t stall, that’s the pedal on the right.”
Al slowly lifted his left foot up until the car rocked a little. We didn’t go anywhere so he pushed the accelerator down and lifted his foot fully off the clutch.
“Why isn’t it moving?” Al asked as he buried the accelerator to the floor, the front wheels digging two long slots into the car park.
“You need to take the handbrake off Al!” I shouted. Kyle quickly put the handbrake down and we shot off across the field. I looked over at the cricket pavilion and wished I was sitting on it, watching all this from a safe distance.
“Right now take your foot off the accelerator,” Kyle said. Al lifted his foot off it as if it was a hot coal. “Not all the way off, just push it down enough to keep us moving.”
We sped across the field at five miles per hour, Al quickly spinning the steering wheel to full lock in a last minute swerve a hundred feet before a row of bushes. As we headed back the way we came, crossing the cricketers beloved crease, Kyle said, “You need to put it in second gear now.”
“How the fuck do I do that?” it was the first thing I’d heard Al say since we pulled away. I looked at his face from the back seat; he was wired by the whole experience, eyes wide with panic.
“Put the clutch down again like earlier, put it in second, then take the clutch up,” Kyle said.
“Where’s second?”
“Put the clutch down,” Kyle repeated. Al put the clutch down. “Now look at the gears.” Al and I both looked down. “There’s second,” Kyle said, pulling the gear lever back. “Now let the clutch up.”
Al lifted his foot straight off the clutch as if it was a switch, and the car shot off down the gravel path that led round the cricket field.
“Right now slow down before you get to that bit where the track goes round the pavilion,” Kyle said.
Al took his foot off the accelerator but the car carried on going too fast.
“You need to brake a bit Al, before we go round that sharp bend. It’s the pedal in the middle.” Al slammed the pedal to the floor and the car skidded sideways for a second as all four wheels locked up. He quickly took his foot off the brake again.
“Slow down Al! We’re going to go into that ditch!” Kyle shouted. Al pushed the brake down for a second but the car just skidded before lurching off again.
I’d thought I wanted to be sat down watching from the pavilion earlier. Now I’d have paid good money to have been a spectator. I looked out of the window and contemplated opening the door and jumping out.
“Kyle mate I can’t get it to stop.”
“Fucking turn the engine off or something!” he shouted.
Al turned the key off in the ignition and the car started slowing down. But not enough. As we reached the corner Al yanked at the steering wheel; it clicked as the steering lock engaged and stopped turning. We slid bonnet first into the ditch, before stopping dead, the three of us jerking forward like dummies in a slow motion crash test before ending up exactly where we’d started. The weed, having not been issued a seatbelt, ended up in Kyle’s foot well.
“Everyone alive?” I joked.
“Shit. Sorry mate I’ve killed your car,” Al panicked.
“You nutter! That was funny as fuck, come on let’s go and see what you’ve done to it,” Kyle laughed.
I opened my door in the back and noticed there was now quite a big drop to the ground. The front of the car firmly wedged in the ditch.
“We’ll have to push it back out again,” Kyle said.
The three of us pushed the front bumper skyward until the car was level again and tried pushing it backwards out of the ditch. When the front wheels touched the road it stopped moving.
“What the fuck? The brakes are still on,” Kyle said.
“I think it’s cos it’s still in gear,” I said.
Kyle put the car into neutral while Al and I stopped it from rolling forwards again.
Then, between the three of us, although giant Kyle probably had the strength of two men on his own, we managed to push the reluctant gold piece of crap from what should have been its final resting place.
“There’s nothing even wrong with it!” Kyle laughed. “There’s some mud stuck in the front but it’s not even dented. Two hundred and fifty quid and it can survive a crash without anything happening to it.”
The three of us laughed as we picked out bits of grass from the grille.
We got back in the car. Kyle turned the key and it purred quickly into life just like before.
“Look at that! She’s fucking indestructible. Two hundred and fifty quid!” Kyle said, as he recovered all the joint smoking paraphernalia from between my feet.
“Your turn now Lu. Show Al how to drive properly yeah?”
“Er, I’m alright,” I replied. “Maybe another day mate.”
Getting the car out of the ditch the first time had been hard enough. I wasn’t in the mood to do it again.
Bright Green and A Hundred Feet Tall, In The Middle Of the Sea
June 2000.
We’d started going to Club Z, a new nightclub that had opened in the upstairs of the Solitude Bar opposite Wanton pier. I remember being underwhelmed the first time I went; queuing with Kyle, James and Al to go into a hidden entrance at the back of the bar, I wasn’t expecting much, just somewhere that served drink later than the pub. The facade was deceptive. Once through the door the building opened up like a cavern, a massive main room with a curved bar at one end and the stage the DJ worked from at the other. Dancing filled the space between. Above was
a vaulted ceiling that hung big black chandeliers that contrasted perfectly with the sporadic splashes of graffiti on the interior walls. It was sublime.
The music was anything they wanted to play. One weekend could be drum and bass, followed by trance the next; or if the DJ felt like it he would play a hardcore record followed immediately by a garage tune. It was run by local people for the love of the music, and that reflected in the laid back atmosphere. They knew what they were doing, the bar stocked as many bottles of water as it did beer.
We would party until one in the morning when it would all get too much and we’d wander away from the dance floor to find a dark corner to hide in. There was a small area of seating at the back of the club away from the noise, illuminated only by UV lighting. We would all sit close together and talk about how wonderful we were feeling, and sometimes people we didn’t know would come over and tell us they felt wonderful too. You wouldn’t get a seat here tonight though, there was barely room to stand.
Paul who had taken me to my first rave, and his brothers, were putting on a beach party to celebrate the summer solstice. Apparently it was going to be the lightest Saturday of the year. It started at midnight so everyone was to warm up at Club Z, before walking the mile or so down the beach to the party, a few at a time so as not to give the game away.
“Paul wants you all off your nut before you get there,” I’d been told by one of the organisers at the club. “If he sees even one bit of white round your pupils you ain’t fucking coming in,” he’d joked. Probably.
That wasn’t going to be a problem. Kyle had sorted us out some pills. Triangular and with a green tinge to them, they were twice the size of the pills we’d had before.
“Check these triangle bennies out, and they’re fucking green,” Kyle had said, obviously proud of what he’d managed to find. “Proper trippy apparently.”
I’d had reservations. If someone had wanted us to swallow them then why had they made them triangular? I took one anyway at the club and it soon bought me round to his way of thinking. Fuck these were strong pills. We left when we were told to and walked the wide concrete path that ran parallel to the beach. The North Sea to the left of us and beach huts to our right. To begin with we had the soft yellow glow of streetlamps to guide us. When they stopped, we continued on under the full light of the half moon.
A few minutes into our walk we turned a corner around the sea wall, and the party came into view- a small orb of changing colours in the distance.
“This is going to be wicked dudes. I’m starting to get a proper buzz now,” James enthused.
Kyle gave him a fist touch. “You know that bruv.”
I knew I was still getting something off the pill I’d taken, but I’d made the mistake of drinking too much and drowning out the buzz with alcohol. It was hard work even walking in a straight line. I was contemplating taking my other pill when Al said, “I need to go for a piss. Wait here I’ll be two minutes.” Before running off behind a beach hut.
The rest of us stood by the sea wall and Kyle handed round cigarettes.
As I lit mine, from the corner of my eye I saw the shadow of something out at sea, like a bright green blur that disappeared when I looked straight at. It looked like the outline of a dinosaur; obviously it wasn’t a dinosaur, but that’s what it looked like. Bright green and a hundred feet tall, in the middle of the sea.
“Nice one Kyle, these are some banging fucking pills,” I said. In the dark I could just about see him smile back. Then Al reappeared and we floated on.
“Whoa! Hold on, there’s a fence there!” Al shouted.
The rest of us froze. Then one by one we started waving our hands in front of us in the darkness, looking for the fence.
“Found the bastard!” I heard Al’s voice again.
In the night I watched the outline of his long gangly leg, as he lifted it as high as he could over the obstacle in front of him, before twisting his skinny hips in an attempt to swing his other leg over. In slow-motion the whole dance went wrong as he lost balance and fell into a heap on the path.
“Shit are you alright Al?” Kyle called out as he ran over.
“Watch out Kyle! Don’t you trip over the fence as well!” I shouted.
The three of us slowly moved towards Al as he sat there on the floor, waving our arms in front of us and taking infinitely small steps until, tired of just displacing air, our hands finally reached him.
“Are you alright Al?” Kyle asked again, trying to make out his face in the dark.
“Yeah mate, just tripped over whatever that was back there.”
“Er....there wasn’t anything back there man,” James said.
“There was, I saw it. I wouldn’t have made you stop if there wasn’t anything there,” Al said, clearly annoyed. “Do you think I just fell trying to climb over nothing? I’m not totally stupid.”
“No of course not Al. I’m not saying you hallucinated seeing a fence then tripped while trying to get over it.”
“Good.”
“I’m just saying that if there is a fence then the rest of us must have superpowers because we just walked straight through it without even feeling it.”
“Right, I’ll fucking show you where it is, come on.”
“Good luck with that you two, I’m going to the rave. I didn’t come out tonight to play spot the fucking fence,” Kyle said. “You coming Lu?”
“Yeah mate,” I replied, “let’s get on it.”
“Come on then Al you can walk behind us, we’ll go on fence patrol,” Kyle said. Al let out a kind of disgruntled sound I hadn’t heard someone make before and the four of us set off again. Kyle laughed, “Fuck me Al. You walk as bad as you drive.”