Semi-Detached (20 page)

I found
myself wondering, was Clare perhaps the better-looking of the two? No, no,
impossible. They both had rather, well, square faces and strong jaws, but Janet
was divine. I was intoxicated. Not that we talked much. We weren’t encouraged
to talk. We had complicated steps to learn. Janet looked demurely down, and I
loved that
,
though she was probably just keeping her feet out of my way.
She was quite practically minded. I was full of admiration. Admiration and
infatuation; this was perfect.

The
waltz encouraged us to hold on tight because, as we gained confidence, we could
sort of pull the girl, I mean Janet, up close and spin around to the twirly
bits of music. This required us to be deliciously firm, though I suspect
neither Fischl nor I was as strong as Janet and Clare. They were both stars of
the high-school hockey team. Gotley said they looked a
little stocky
with it, but then what did he know?

I
invited Janet to a party at Jaques’ on a
Saturday night. It was near by.
After a
day moping around I got into my pink shirt and blue hipster
brushed denims and drank a
half pint, hiding from schoolmasters in a
local pub. I waited to ring the doorbell in Shenfield Road as close to the
agreed time as I dared.

I stood
breathing heavily, waiting in the yellow light from the pebbled hall window by
the rose beds. There was bumping inside and the door opened. And there she
was: my passion.

Or was
it?

Was it
her sister Clare? I quickly switched off the engine of ecstasy.

But no,
hang on, it was Janet after all. She was dressed up and looked and smelled
different. I switched it all back on. This was harder work than I had imagined.

We
escorted Janet and Clare to the school disco in the pavilion. The school stage
crew had hired in a
lorryload of late-sixties disco lights. I found it
swooningly hedonistic. I still associate colour-wheels, swirling psychedelic
gloop, drifting around the walls in splodges of specimen-tray glamour with the
promise of unparalleled decadence. Everything became fluidly groovy. Even the
girl’s short, polypropylene dresses seemed to pulsate with organic promise. But
it was so dark and mysterious and loud that
we had even more difficulty
than usual telling our partners apart.

The
music was stomach-wobbling. During ‘Je t’aime’, the panting Jane Birkin and
Serge Gainsbourg hit, I took the opportunity to clasp Janet even tighter than
in the waltz. I tried a kiss. There was a
hiatus when our teeth clashed,
but after that we rammed our mouths together until our lips grew sore. Over the
next few weeks, I stayed hot, but Janet cooled. Was it because, away from the
dance floor, we had nothing in common at
all? Or was it because both
Janet and Clare were determined to stick to kissing and used those strong
hockey-player’s arms to pinion wandering hands? Or was it because I still
couldn’t work out which one I was yearning for? They were quite serious really,
like so many girls. We wanted to wag our tails and lick them and then run off
back to the rest of the boys.

So then
I was out of love. It was a
bit of a
relief really. Never mind
the ballroom dancing, there was still the mixed folk club, and the joint
historical society. We trotted off to those and met less sporty girls with
glasses and funny hairdos — more like ourselves in fact. And if the historical
society seemed a bit heavy. then we organized a
medieval banquet to
lighten it up. Despite rather too many apples and a surfeit of cold chicken,
the chair-girl from the high school wore such a
low-cut gown that we
elected to have another feast. Only this time it would be a Roman orgy. The
girls thought this was a fantastic idea. Good girls. It was chicken in togas
instead.

I liked
being with girls, but I probably liked being with blokes a
bit more.
Blokes were funnier and grubby for a
laugh. ‘Did you get a
hand
up her skirt? Cor.’ We may have joined the film club and the debating society
and talked about apartheid and Jean-Luc Godard, but we preferred Gotley
enthusing about one-handed wrestling with a bra-hook.

Clearly,
a steady relationship got in the way of real fun, and every Saturday night
there was now a
party in some blank bit of Essex hinterland. Romford had
its brewery. Ilford its camera film. But Upminster was the quintessential suburban
playground where all the parties happened. Somebody who knew somebody called
John had definitely been invited. So we would gather in the late afternoon at a
friend of a
friend’s to listen to most of ‘Albatross’ played badly on a
cheap electric guitar and would then lope off into the indistinguishable
streets to negotiate entry. That was the plan. Often the friend of a friend
would have forgotten the exact number, or even the exact street, so we would
cover Upminster, trudging up mock-Tudor avenues, keeping a careful look out
for a tell-tale red light or a
glimpse of pyramid hair or a reefer
jacket in a
porch.

‘Martin!’

‘That
you, Graham?’

‘Yeah.
Is this the party?’

‘Yes.
Can you get us in? Have you got an invite?’

‘Yeah,
but I’ve got this lot with me already.’

I was a
long way from home, a hanger-on. And Graham was undoubtedly only a
peripheral
member of the ‘Upminster Fun Gang’ anyway. If it all went to plan, then Martin
saw Alison whose party it was and we pushed on in, past the blokes leaning with
one foot up on the wall in the hallway who were knocking ornaments on to the
floor with the back of their coats, on into the living room, where it would be
dark except for a single lamp with a
shawl thrown over it which was
threatening to ignite. The smell of singeing was hidden by the joss-sticks,
there to provide a
whiff of Kathmandu. The radiogram was turned up so
high that the plywood sides were rattling. Some girls had put on Tamla Motown
and were dancing together. Later, some boys would put on Deep Purple and dance
together too, fingers in belts, arms akimbo, swinging down towards each other’s
crotch in a
way that might have impressed a
Zulu but was
steadfastly ignored by Upminster girls, who didn’t really like heavy music
anyway.

At some
point there would be an argument, because Bez wanted to play some ‘real music’.
After Mike’s precious Deep Purple had been scratched, they would reach a
compromise and put on Pink Floyd and lie there in a drunken stupor on the floor
until the room had emptied, apart from the two girls who had been sitting on
the sofa against the wall all night waiting to go home. It was bliss.

I
usually stayed in the kitchen. It was the only place you could see. It was the
place where all the drink was deposited. The cheapest party-ticket, brandished
at the door, was a bottle of Hirondelle, which cost under a
quid —
reputedly a
mixture of Corsican wine and sulphuric acid — and it knocked
you out.

We made
occasional forays into squats, or parties in huge houses, like Wendy’s at the
end of the road in Epping, where the upper levels would be full of young men
vaguely wobbling back-combed billows of hair to freaky music. I loved to go
into these dark rooms, in search of the inner sanctum of hipness. It was quite
possible in the late sixties and early seventies to grow a large head of hair,
wear excessively wide flares and aspire to be more moody than any one else as a
lifestyle option. ‘Don’t hassle me, man,’ could be applied equally to domestic
chores, moving one’s legs out of the way or engaging in any form of discourse at
all.

I
remember one squalid homestead, where everybody was huddled in a
corner
of the basement room. What were we doing there? It was just another party. We
went to sit ourselves down and do a bit of head-waggling of our own, but someone
spoke up from the haze on the other side. ‘Hey. man, careful over there. The
water bed exploded.’ We stepped gingerly over an enormous damp patch..

Or what
about the visit to my brother in Colchester, where he was at the hippest of all
universities — Essex, so freaky that Mrs Thatcher specifically singled it out
for verbal assault. Here indeed was the epicentre of unstraightness. Imagine my
excitement. The whole place was
en fête.
It was an enormous party of
huge darkened rooms. In one, severely dressed, bearded men were dropping big
pipes, just to hear the sound they made. It was a
‘happening’. On the
whole, little actually seemed to happen at the happenings I went to. They all
demanded reserves of patience. There was an initial buzz. Gosh. This really is ‘other’,
but when you got used to it, it became just a
bit too extenuated and
unimaginative, like a
Hawkwind concert.

I
suppose it was the drugs. Anybody seriously into drugs has to accept that life
is mostly anticipation. All that waiting around, knowing that any minute or
half-hour, or possibly sometime early the next day, someone ‘holding’ might
bother to turn up. But we weren’t a
drug party scene. How could we be?
There was scarcely enough to go around Kensington Market at the time let alone
Upminster.

When
the beer ran out we moved on to the cheap Riesling, and the herbaceous borders
ran with puke. It was almost a
ritual. The early part of the evening was
spent commiserating with some poor girl whose friend had had to be helped into
a
quiet room. ‘Don’t go in there, Alison is lying down.’ Alison,
fourteen, had celebrated her first introduction to alcohol by drinking half a
bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine and a pint of cider. ‘She shouldn’t mix. Take
things easy, silly girl. No, don’t ring her mother.’ Wise words but later, the
Party Seven gone, and, somebody having stubbed out their cigarettes in the
half-finished cans of Guinness, we usually risked the rest of the ginger brew
ourselves, on top of five pints of beer and the remains of that Blue Nun.

Sometimes,
I woke up in the middle of playing fields, wondering what arrangements I might
have made to stay the night. What
time was it? Where was that
party
anyway? Wasn’t I supposed to be staying there? I was miles from home.

It was
then that the wastelands of outer London became their strangest; the houses
with their black windows, under the constant yellow glow of the street lamps,
looked false. I turned a
corner once and found a
whole cul-de-sac
under six inches of water in the middle of the night, nobody around but me; the
street a
shallow canal reflecting the unearthly, inhuman dormitory
glare.

Once,
maybe twice, it was my turn. I brought the whole party back to Epping.

‘We’ll
stay in the back room,’ said my parents firmly.

‘No,
no. It would be much better if you went out.’

‘This
is my house. What is that you intend to do, that I can’t be here?’

Well,
of course, they wouldn’t want to know The boot was on the other foot in the
door. What was I going to do to keep out those blokes who arrived and said, ‘I’m
a
friend of John. John said I could come.’ John was handy. There was
always a John, somewhere. And it was those friends of the non-existent John who
wrecked the place.

‘I’m
going to make them food.’

‘No,
no. They won’t want food.’

‘They
must want to eat. If they eat it will stop people getting drunk.’

Dear
God. They want to get drunk, that’s the point. The more food provided the more
they have to grind into the carpets. What does she think this is? A dinner
party?

Sometimes
entire houses were trashed. It was common for banisters to come loose, for fires
to be started in the kitchen, for white carpets to be stained an indelible,
purplish-red, for precious porcelain models of shepherdesses to be decapitated,
for prize-winning gardens to be trampled and razed. In the worst cases,
furniture was stolen and people were taken away in ambulances. It was not
possible to explain what fun this was to an adult. Better, much better, for an
interim period to elapse in which some restoration was accomplished.

How
many times had I helped some panic-stricken school friend, standing pale and
horribly wild-eyed after everyone had been kicked out and the lights turned
back on to reveal the horror. ‘Christ! My parents will be back in a
few
minutes. Help me get some of this sick off the carpet.’ Usually, I was staying
the night. I would be sleeping on the sofa. I would have to try to blend into
the bamboo wallpaper while the leading member of the Upminster Fun Gang, a
storm trooper of joint-trashing himself, cowered before sober reality.

‘What
on earth has been going on here?’

‘It’s
just a
little mess. We put salt on the worst of it.’

‘We
trusted you, and this is how you repay us.

‘There
were some gate-crashers.’

‘Did
you call the police?’

Stupid
men, fathers, sometimes. Somebody else, a
neighbour probably, had
called the police, yes. But they were long gone. Often, it was only my being
there that stopped it spiralling upwards into a
family court.

I
settled down on the sofa. ‘No, no, I’ll be fine here, honestly.’ And I slept,
not even bothering to take my boots off, turning over to block out the muffled
recriminations coming from somewhere upstairs.

Whose
house was it where I spent the night trying to cope with the mysterious noise?
I switched off the light, pulled the blanket over my head and after a
few
seconds the rattling sound started, somewhere in the room, not loud, but insistent.
Finally I could stand it no longer, got up and switched the light back on and
it stopped, instantly. I waited, switched the light off and stumbled back to
the sofa in the dark. It started again. This happened three times before I
found the hamster cage behind the curtains. It was three in the morning. He
sat with his paws raised and an inquiring look in his black dewdrop eyes in the
bottom of his wheel, waiting, politely to get back to his nocturnal exercise.