Kiss My Name (4 page)

“But you want to play cricket!” Colin pointed out.

“I don’t mind either way, Colin, so I’m not voting for either.”

“Top Gun it is then!” Nicky said euphorically, she came over to me and gave me a high five, which I was pretty pleased about.

Colin wasn’t having it. He had never taken defeat well.

“That’s not fair! Joey cheated.”

“No, he didn’t,” Nicky argued, “he just didn’t vote!”

“Well, I’m not going to see stupid Top Gun! I hate Top Gun.”

“You’ve never seen it,” Nicky was at lengths to point out.

“I don’t care. I hate it.”

Colin stormed off up the path, striding along with his head down.

“Col, hang on!” I called after him, “where are you going?”

“To call for Bez and Holmy, see if they’ll play cricket with me.”

I ran over to him. I had promised to look after him.

“Come on, Col. Please come to Top Gun with us. I’ll buy a box of Dolly Mixtures for you with my pocket money if you come.”

“Why would that make it better? Joey’s Mum buys ice cream, popcorn and Kia Ora, but I still don’t want to go. Anyway, I hate Dolly Mixtures.”

“Any toffees you like then.”

“I want to play cricket, Muscleman. Please come and play cr
icket. That Nicky’s a silly cow! Let her go to Top Gun with Joey’s Mum.”

“Col, I want to see Top Gun.”

“Go some other time.”

“I don’t want to, Col. I want to go now.”

Colin took a long look at me. He wasn’t the smartest ten year old in the world, but sometimes, just by looking, he could tell whether it was worth pushing me or whether it was time to leave things be. This time, he opted for the latter.

“That’s OK, Si. I’ll get a cricket set from ours, call for Bez and Holmy and I’ll see you at home later on.”

“OK.”

I put my hand into my pocket, dug out a 50p coin and flicked it over to him.

“Thanks!”

“Get yourself a fizzy drink, not Top Deck shandy though, Col, a soft drink. Cricket can be thirsty work, especially for a top batter like you!”

Colin smiled, “I’m like Beefy Botham, Si. I can bat and bowl!”

I smiled back, “I know you can.”

“See you later, Muscleman.”

“See you Col.....oh and Colin...”

“What?”

“If Bez and Holmy aren’t in or if it starts raining, you’ll go straight home, won’t you?”

“I will, Muscleman. I will.”

Colin ran off and I turned back around and headed back to Joey and Nicky.

“Is he OK?” Nicky asked. She was only the same age as Colin, but she had a much older head on her shoulders. I guessed bereavement forced maturity on her.

“He’s fine,” I reassured her, “he’ll be happier playing cricket. He wouldn’t sit still in the cinema. Joey, can you tell your Mum that it’ll just be the three of us now.”

Maybe I should have felt guilty about letting Colin go off, on his own, but I didn’t. The only emotion I remember feeling was excitement. Excitement about seeing Top Gun and excitement because there were only three of us now and I knew that if Nicky sat in the middle, I’d now be guaranteed a seat next to her. That popcorn bucket sharing vision was a step closer to reality. The guilt came though. It came like one of those waves that rises up to the promenade and drags helpless passers by into the swelling sea. It was unavoidable, attaching itself to my back like a monkey and twenty five years later I still can’t shake it off.

SIMON–August 1986

“Hiya Mum!” I said cheerily as I came through the front door, keeping it open to wave goodbye to Mrs.Neill and Joey, who had dropped me off.

“Hi Simon! How was Top Gun?” Mum asked from the kitchen.

“How did you know I went to see Top Gun?” I queried as I closed the front door and went through to the kitchen to join her. I’d gone to the cinema straight from Joey’s house, so was perplexed as to how Mum knew.

At that stage, Mum was going through her perm and peroxide period. Her hair was long, blonde and big. Tall at the top, wide at the sides and frizzy just about everywhere. Most of the time Mum’s dark roots were showing too. I remember playing I-spy in the car once and Colin did ‘B’ for black, ‘the colour of the insides of Mum’s hair’.

“Colin told me you were going. He came back for his cricket stuff earlier. He was moaning about you going, said you all should have gone to play cricket.”

Cricket, with hindsight, was a terrible option. Mrs.Neill’s weather forecast had been correct, it had poured down. As soon as we came out of the cinema we were witness to an almighty downpour, we had to pull our T-shirts over our heads as we ran to the car.

“They won’t have had much chance of playing cricket! When did it start raining?”

“About half an hour after he grabbed his stuff. I thought he would have come back in moaning, but no doubt he’ll come back in when he’s hungry, looking like a drowned rat.

I’m just doing your tea, how many ‘Fish Fingers’ do you want?”

“Do we have tomato sauce?”

“Yes.”

“Good, I hate ‘Fish Fingers’ without tomato sauce.”

“How many do you want then?”

“Two, please.”

“Just two?”

“Mrs.Neill bought us popcorn and a drink before the film and then a choc ice during the interval. I’m stuffed.”

To my great delight, I did get to share a bucket of popcorn with Nicky, Joey didn’t like popcorn so he had a bar of chocolate instead.

“She doesn’t half spoil you, doesn’t she?” Mum said.

“Who?” I said as I was thinking about Nicky.

“Joey’s Mum.”

“Yeh, I suppose so.”

“I think it’s because her girls have grown up, so she knows Joey is the only one left to spoil. Plus, of course, they have the money to spoil their kids because his Mum and Dad both have good jobs. Shows the benefit of working hard at school that, Si.”

“Like you and Dad did?”

Mum and Dad had one “O” level between them.

“Yes, but you can learn from our mistakes, love.”

“I’m never going to be a lawyer, Mum, I’m not all that clever.”

“You might surprise yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“You will eat your tea though, won’t you?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Anyway, you still haven’t told me about Top Gun! You’ve been dying to see that. Was it as good as you expected?”

“Yeh.”

“Is that it, ‘yeh’? It’s like getting blood out of a stone with you men! I should have had girls. They know how to chat properly.”

“Mum, it was really good!”

“How was it good? What was it about? What did you enjoy about it? Come on, Simon, spill the beans.”

Mum managed to coax out of me all the details about Top Gun and for once, a real, detailed conversation ensued for a few minutes, until I was distracted by the sound of my Dad’s ladders being positioned against the side of our house. Moments later, my Dad entered the kitchen through the back door. It was ‘House Rules’ that we all had to enter via the back door, unless we had been dropped off, when we were told to enter via the front door, so we could wave goodbye, after remembering to say ‘thank you for having me’ to our hosts. Politeness was hammered into our bodies like nails into wood.

“What a day!” my Dad said as he took his shoes off on the back door mat, “sunburnt this morning, then soaked this afternoon! I tell you, it could only happen in England!”

Sweeping statements were a speciality of my father’s. Dad was a bubbly, outspoken man. He was only quite a small man, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in personality and width. Dad was extremely broad, almost square, ironic given he matched the shape of the Mr.Man who shared his surname.

“What’s for tea?” he asked.

“Braising steak for us, fish fingers for the boys.”

“Is Colin upstairs?”

“No, he went out playing cricket earlier and he’s not come back yet.”

“I’m pretty sure rain will have stopped play by now.”

“Yes, I’m sure it has,
” Mum said, “he’ll be mucking around in some puddles with his friends or playing on someone’s Commodore. I’ll ring around if he’s not back in half an hour.”

“I thought he was sticking with you?” Dad said to me as he took his wet top off and threw it so it landed on the floor by the washing machine. In the summer, he was always tanned, every sunny day he would clean windows without his top on, to impress the ladies, no doubt, as he had a pretty muscular torso for a Dad.

“He was with me this morning, but I went to see Top Gun with Joey and Nicky.”

“Why didn’t our Col go with you?” Dad asked.

“We wanted him to, but he wanted to play cricket. We voted on it and he lost.”

“You should have just taken him then.”

“I tried to,” I lied knowing that I hadn’t really bent over backwards to persuade him, “but he just went off in a mood saying he was coming back here to get his cricket stuff.”

“He’s a stubborn sod, that lad. I’ll have words with him when he gets back. He just can’t wander off on his own every time it takes his fancy. If he’s left here with you, he should come back here with you, simple as that....anyway, I’m off to have a shower, clean myself up before tea. Is the immersion on, love?”

“Yes,” my Mum replied, “and there are fresh towels in the airing cupboard.”

At that point, it was just another typical, relatively mundane early evening. The reason I remember every word, every action, so clearly though, was because it was anything but. It turned out to be the start of a dramatic, traumatic, horrific, life changing forty eight hours. I wish I had dragged Colin to Top Gun or even gone to play cricket for twenty minutes before it lashed down. I wished and wished for so
many things after those forty eight hours, but nothing changed. My brother had gone and I would mourn his loss forever.

SIMON-August 1986

The evening that followed my trip to Top Gun became increasingly tense as my Mum and Dad’s concern about Colin’s failure to return home grew. My Mum was the first to panic. By seven o’clock she was asking my Dad whether he thought that they should be phoning around his friends to establish his whereabouts. My Dad played it all down at that stage, telling my Mum to relax, but by eight o’clock, he agreed that it was time to start phoning around.

Mum phoned John Berry’s house and then Adrian Holmes’, but neither set of parents had seen Colin. They checked with John and Adrian and a similar story came back. Colin, Holmy and Bez had had started a game of cricket on Parklands school field, but as the rain became heavier, Holmy and Bez became increasingly fed up. Only Colin, who was batting at the time, wanted to continue playing. The other two boys both told Colin that they had had enough, but he was insistent that they played on, telling them it was only a shower. It wasn’t just a shower though and once the rain became practically monsoonal, they told Colin they were going to head home. Colin called them both ‘wimps’, hid his cricket set behind one of the trees and said he was going to find some tougher kids to play with. They both said that this was around about half past two and both headed straight home from there to dry off.

Mum came into my room at about half past eight. I was sitting on my bed reading a copy of Record Mirror. I preferred Record Mirror to any other music magazine solely because it contained the Gallup Top 75 singles and album charts in it. I was a bit obsessive about the album chart in particular and can clearly remember Paul Simon’s Graceland and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet featuring in that edition. I used an A4 pad to collate the album chart information in and keep track of the performance of established artists and rising stars.

             
I knew Mum was coming in to my room to ask me something about Colin. Our bedroom was directly above the dining room, where the phone was and I’d already heard part of the conversations that she was having with other Mums.

“Simon,” Mum said in a serious tone, “Colin isn’t back and your father and I are starting to get worried. I’ve phoned Adrian Holmes’ and John Berry’s and he hasn’t been with either of them since half past two, their Mums have said he was off to call for other kids, do you have any idea who else he may have gone to see?”

“Other than Adrian Holmes and John Berry, he sometimes hangs around with Luke Booth, Phil Moss and Chris Gregory,” I told her.

“Does he? I’ve never even heard of these boys. They’ve never been to any of his parties,” Mum said sadly, as though she was annoyed with herself for not knowing her son better.

“They’re older than him, Mum. They’re all at Parklands with me. He hasn’t been hanging around with them much recently, because he’s been with me, but I know he used to.”

Mum looked understandably confused
. Mum thought he had always been with me and my friends, so I don’t think she could quite comprehend when he had befriended these older boys. She was becoming too anxious to try to resolve that particular puzzle though. She just wanted to know where he was.

“Do you know their phone numbers, Simon?”

“No, but I can tell you where they live, so you should be able to find their numbers in the phone book.”

Mum ended up ringing them all, but all their parents said that none of the boys had seen Colin. By half past nine, it was beginning to go pretty dark, so Mum sent Dad out in the car to look for him. Forty five minutes later, Dad returned home,
without Colin. From my bed, I could detect the frustration and anxiety in Mum’s voice as she said to Dad,

“Where the hell can he be?”

              As it was now completely dark, they rang the police. Until Mum made that phone call, I thought they had been worrying unnecessarily. I knew Colin better than them, knew what a little terror he could be and had been convinced he would nonchalantly walk through the door, wondering what all the fuss was about. That phone call to the police underlined the gravity of the situation. I started to blame myself. I should have stayed with him. I had promised Colin that I would. What if something awful had happened? If it did, it would all be my fault.

             
I’m not sure how to describe my subsequent meltdown, perhaps you would call it an anxiety attack or just fear taking hold, but it was like the polar opposite of waking up from a nightmare. When you wake from a nightmare, after a few seconds, you realise it was just a dream, it was not real life. This time it was real life, Colin had disappeared and for all we knew, he could have been run over, abducted or even murdered. I started shaking and crying.

“Mum! Mum! Mum!” I shouted through my tears.

I heard my Mum running up the stairs and then she came through into my room.

“What’s the matter, Simon? Why aren’t you asleep?”

“You know why I’m not asleep. Colin’s disappeared, Mum! Disappeared because of me. If he’s dead, it will all be my fault. I left him, Mum! I should never have left him.”

My Mum, like the kind hearted, caring mother she was, and still is, put her own fears and concerns to one side to help me through mine.

“Simon, calm down, love,” she hugged me tightly, “there’s probably a simple explanation for all this.”

“Like what? It’s nearly eleven o’clock and Colin’s still not home.”

“I know, love, but he’s probably just called around at a friend’s and forgotten to ring to say he’s stopping the night. You know what Colin’s like, Simon, he’d forget his head if it wasn’t screwed on!”

I wanted to feel comforted. Mum was speaking in re-assuring tones, but it still didn’t seem right.

“Why did you call the police, then?”

“Because right now, love, we don’t know where he is. The police will help us find him. Let’s not start thinking something awful has happened yet, love. When the police get here, we’ll tell them everything that’s happened and let’s see if they can bring him home safe and sound.”

“But what if they don’t?”

“Simon, let’s not think like that. They will, love, I’m sure they will.”