* * *
Al was round at a ridiculous time on the Saturday morning, if he’d come round any earlier he would have caught my dad before he left for work. I was also up early, we had things to do. Al looked surprised when I opened the door as I saw him walking up the drive.
“Ready?” he asked, opening the garage door.
“Yeah Al. You?”
“Yes mate, let’s go.”
We set off. It wasn’t particularly heavy to carry and was definitely a lot easier going than when you had two BMX bikes as well. Crossing the main road would normally have been the hardest part, waiting for a gap to cross big enough for both of us and a canoe. Except this was Kirk-Leigh, and there were never any cars.
“You go first,” Al said as we knelt down and lowered it into the water for the first time. Under my knees in the mossy ground, tiny green crabs scurried about. I rustled the moss with my hand to give them a chance to escape before I sat down. Then I slid my feet into the canoe, lifting my body up and shifting myself over until I was properly sat in it, Al holding it steady all the while.
“We know it floats then,” Al said as I demonstrated how stable it was, by rocking to and fro.
I paddled out into the water, surprised at how fast I could go. It soon dawned on me I’d not done this before, I was fourteen years old and I’d never even been in a canoe.
“Go on Lu!” Al shouted as I headed out further and further. I had no idea how deep the water was but it didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to sink, we knew that much already, so what difference did it make how far I went out?
“I’m going to Haywich!” I shouted back, eyes firmly fixed on the docks in the distance that I had looked at so many times before. The soft waves of the backwaters wobbling me in the boat as I fought my way to the other side. When suddenly I didn’t seem to be moving very quickly, I looked back at Al in the distance and realised I was quite a long way out.
“Go on Lu!” he shouted. “Bring me back a souvenir.”
But I wasn’t going anywhere. No matter how hard I paddled it was as if the water was going against me, I struggled and struggled before turning myself around and heading back to the shore.
“What happened Lu? I thought you were going to Haywich?”
“I was mate, there’s like a current out there or something, I got to a point where the water was coming towards me, see where the water’s hardly moving there?” I pointed. “It’s not like that when you get right out, it’s like loads of little waves, non-stop.”
“Let me have a try.”
We swapped places. Al looking up at me from the water as I passed him the paddle. “So what do you want from Haywich?”
“Something to eat mate,” I joked, “I’m fucking starving.”
“AIDS burger it is then,” Al said as he pushed himself from the shore, before shouting, “Haywich here I come!” As he paddled away.
I watched him as he did exactly as I had, paddling out at full speed and full of optimism. It wasn’t long before he looked very small, very far out from shore. I wondered if he’d gotten further out than I’d been because he looked so small, then I reasoned that he probably looked further away because he is so small. When I was looking back I was looking at the whole of Britain. He got a little smaller still, then he seemed to stay the same size.
“Al!” I shouted to him as he paddled frantically.
“What?!”
“Have you hit the current yet Al?”
“Think so!” he called out. “It won’t let me go any further.” He paddled back looking exhausted, until he reached me sitting on the shore.
“Do you see what I mean? One minute you’re going really fast then suddenly the water starts fighting back and you can’t move.”
“Tell me about it,” Al replied. “I believe you now.”
“You know what it’s like? It’s like when you go to the airport and walk on one of the conveyor belts. It’s like accidentally walking onto the one going the wrong way.”
Al laughed, “Yeah I suppose so Lu, or when you’re in a shopping centre going down on an escalator and you try going back up again.”
“You’ve done that as well mate?”
“Blatantly. Everyone’s done that at least once. Even the security guards probably do it when the shops are shut.”
“I bet that’s all they do,” I said.
“Yeah that and sit in their offices looking at porn.”
The pair of us laughed. “Yeah Al, bunch of wankers.”
I looked down at Al in the canoe, then over at Haywich in the distance. Almost everything was perfect for us to finally make it to the other side. We were just in need of one thing. An engine.
Worm-like Varicose Veins
May 1998.
I was never last to be picked in PE at school. Looking back I can say proudly, and truthfully, that there was always one person left standing on the shelf after I was. I think on rare occasions there might even have been two.
Mr Keegan (yes this was his real name, and no he wasn’t related) blew the whistle to motivate us into running onto the field, sending a flock of resting seagulls high into the air, squawking their disapproval as they landed again in the public park adjacent to the school. My concentration waned when I realised the tide must have been high, perfect for taking out the canoe.
The pecking order for football was this: Those who loved football upfront where the best goal scoring was done, then behind them in midfield those who equally loved football but either weren’t good enough to play upfront or weren’t popular enough to deserve a share of the goal scoring glory. It was the secondary job of the strikers upfront to spend each second they didn’t have the ball shouting at the overenthusiastic midfielders to get back to where they belonged, every time they took it upon themselves to move too far forward. Then the losers and/or people who didn’t really care’s place back in defence. To make matters worse, ours was one of those schools that had people who actually wanted to go in goal, and not only that were good at it. Far better than the usual tactic of putting the most useless kid, who is also the one who runs away from the ball in a position where he needs to do the absolute opposite. I took my place in defence and waited for the ball to come to me.
I watched everyone running around chasing the ball, relieved every time it came near me and one of my team tackled the opposing player before it got so close that I might have to actually touch it.
“You’re lazy Luke!” Mr Keegan shouted, running towards me in hideously short shorts that did nothing to hide his worm-like varicose veins.
“I’m not!” I snapped back, staring him in his old grey face.
“You are, you do nothing but stand there and watch, it’s small wonder you actually managed to make it to the pitch.”
I thought about Al and I, cycling to school every single day, turning up to the school gates and seeing other kids getting out of their parents’ cars. Then all the time we spent walking, or canoeing, or in the pillbox, or down the beach. The only time I ever sat still was when I was at school and even that wasn’t out of choice. In fact, come to think of it, he was working for the very institution that made me do it.
“Bollocks am I lazy.”
Mr Keegan’s face turned bright red as he screamed at me, “Go! You’re excluded! Get out of my lesson! You can’t talk to me like that on my playing field.”
It was bollocks though, as was the way he could talk to me however he wanted on his playing field, and me being forced to stand outside the changing room door, which was outside, and locked, for forty minutes in my shorts and t-shirt like a twat.
When I got home from school they’d even gone to the effort of ringing my mum and telling her what I’d done. Surprisingly she took my side, in that she didn’t think I deserved to be called lazy either. That didn’t stop her and my dad having a right go at me though.
Man I hated being told what to do.
Where Numbers Go On Forever
June 1998.
As we w
ere coming to the end of our penultimate year at school, we were informed we would be doing work experience to prepare us for the real world.
It was up to us to put forward suggestions for what sort of placement we would like, based on what we wanted to do when we left school. Assuming they wouldn’t be able to find me something riding motocross bikes, I remembered back to something my mum had said when I was younger. “Buying and selling is where the money is, son,” she had told me. Nothing is more expensive to buy than a house I thought, so I requested two weeks in a local estate agents. If I couldn’t get someone to pay me to ride a motorbike, I’d need the money to buy one myself. A fortnight away from that pointless grey box mostly filled with strangers, getting to see behind the scenes of how businesses work, maybe even being treated like an adult for once. I felt excited and only a little nervous, having had to start a new school and meet literally hundreds of new people, the prospect of going into a poxy little office didn’t scare me. I only hoped I’d be allowed to do some of the actual work, as there was probably going to be a lot that was too big a responsibility for me.
I knew I had made the perfect choice, even when Al told me he’d gotten into the primary school he went to as a kid. Two weeks of going down the slides and helping them with colouring in seemed like a total waste of time to me, although it was so close to where we lived he could cycle home for his lunch breaks, the lucky bastard. I was given a start time for the Monday, and took an early bus from Kirk-Leigh to Carlton. My excitement however was short lived when I was immediately sent home again, jeans and a t-shirt apparently not being smart enough clothing for me, even though I wasn’t being paid. I made it back for about half past ten, properly dressed in what was basically my school uniform but with one of my dad’s ties. I don’t know why he owned any ties, I never saw him wearing them. He bought overalls home to be washed every other Friday evening so I knew he didn’t wear one to work.
“That’s better Luke,” the manager Neil said when I rolled up for the second time. He was shorter than me, with a shaved head, he looked about thirty. “Luke this is Sarah, she’s only here today then she’s off on holiday for the rest of the week.”
Sarah had a pretty face, slim and with long blonde hair tied behind her back, and wearing a tight white blouse and knee length black skirt, she didn’t look that much older than me. I tried to picture what she would have looked like with her hair down, out of work. It was unlikely I would ever find out though, as I stood there in my school uniform, wearing my dad’s tie.
“And if you follow me out the back this is Dave.” Dave stood up to shake my hand, he was older than the manager, all his hair was grey and his face had lines in it.
“You’ll be helping Dave today,” Neil said. “Right I’ll leave you two to it.”
I looked down at the desk in front of Dave, on it were a stack of envelopes and two stacks of A4 paper with little pictures of houses on in black and white. On the floor at the end of the desk was a box of sealed envelopes that looked identical to the empty ones.
“So I’m helping you with this Dave?” I smiled.
“Not yet Luke,” Dave replied, “first I’ll show you where the kettle is.”
“Luke’s allowed to use the kettle while he’s here isn’t he Neil?” Dave shouted to the front of the building.
“I don’t know, I assume so,” Neil shouted back.
“I guess you are then,” Dave said. I don’t know why they didn’t ask me, I was allowed to use the kettle at home.
Teas and coffees carefully made, and a hand written note of who has what taped to the kitchen cupboard for next time, I was allowed to move onto the proper work.
“This Luke, is called a mail shot,” Dave said, sitting me down on a spare chair next to him. “All the envelopes are addressed to people on our mailing list, who are all looking for houses.”
“OK.”
“The leaflets have all the details of our latest properties for sale, which of course we want to make the buyers aware of.”
“Of course.”
“So you take one leaflet from each pile, fold them into an envelope and then place the envelope in this box.” He pointed to the box on the floor.
“Then put stamps on them and post them out to people?” I asked.
“We don’t need stamps here Luke,” he said. “We have a franking machine that does all of that for us. Once they’re all done I’ll show you how to use it.”
“Is this something you do every day?” I asked.
“A mail shot? No these go out every fortnight.”
“But you do them?”
“There isn’t a set one of us who does it, it’s just whoever’s got the time usually, and today that’s me. Well us,” he replied.
I started to do what he’d asked me to, Dave watching over my shoulder for the first few envelopes to make sure I was doing it right. One of the leaflets looked more attractive than the other so I chose to put that one on top, the rest of the job pretty much doing itself. It took about two minutes before my mind began wandering, my brain struggling to focus on the task in front of me. Luckily Dave had wandered off well before that. I daydreamed about motorbikes, and canoes, and space; and what Sarah would look like on holiday in her bikini. Then when I’d finished I went and found Dave. He seemed pleased with what I’d done and took me to an even smaller room at the back of the office with smart coats hanging from hooks on the wall.
“So this is the franking machine.” He demonstrated how it inked a box and number in the corner of each envelope.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “So you don’t need a stamp.”
I looked down at the box, filled to the top with un-franked letters. The thought of standing here watching him do them all made me feel quite claustrophobic. There were no windows in this back room and as I took deep breaths, it felt like there was no air.
“So are you planning on doing this when you leave school?” he asked.
I looked down at the bottomless box again, then past him towards the door out of this tiny room, my mouth went dry. “Er....that’s what I was thinking, yeah.”
“I did this for work experience too when I was your age,” he said. “And I’m still doing it nearly thirty years later.”
I pictured spending thirty years in this room with Dave, just the two of us and the franking machine. My heart started pumping panic around my body. I contemplated asking him if we could swap places, so I could stand by the door, but maybe that would sound weird. I’d only been there a half a day, I didn’t want them thinking there was something wrong with me already. But then what if I had to run out, surely that would look even worse. And where would I go? Home? I couldn’t go back to my mum and tell her I’d been unable to even get through one day of work, or my dad, what would he think? All that was left was to stand here and suffocate, and try not to let my head explode.
“All done Luke,” Dave interrupted the turmoil inside my head. “You just need to post them in the box at the end of the street. Go out the front door and turn left, you can’t miss it, it’s the bright red thing.”
I moved slowly past him, so he couldn’t see how desperate I was to get outside.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said.
“It’s no rush Luke,” he replied. “Have a cigarette if you smoke. It’s not like school, you won’t get in trouble.”
I walked out into the fresh air and took the deepest breath I could, the open space immediately calming me down. I had no idea what the fuck had happened to me in there, I only knew I never wanted it to happen again.