Sweet Sorrow(35)

‘Oi, leave it out!’ Harper was by some way the most prosperous, middle-class person we knew, his father the Conservatory King, which made Harper the Conservatory Prince, yet he maintained a cockney accent with the discipline of the most committed method actor. We all did, dialling it up or down depending on the circumstances. In the den, we went full barrow-boy. ‘Oi-oi! Stop trying to suck each other off and say hello. Nobody’s here.’

Nobody was another nickname. Surnames were acceptable but nicknames were far more prevalent, a system as complex, ritualised and intricate as anything from the court of the Sun King. Harper had it lucky: because of his noble lineage, demeanour and good looks he was The Prince, and the lustrous, feathery black hair that he flicked perpetually from his eyes made him Head and Shoulders or Tim, short for Timotei. He sometimes wore a necklace made of dusty white, pink and orange coral and this made him Candy or Beach Boy. Fox, inevitably, was Fucks, but he’d once drunkenly confessed to breaking into the golf course and lowering his penis into one of the holes ‘to see what it felt like’ and this confession had turned him into Tiger Woods, or Hole in One or Royal Troon or Lawnshagger or Groundskeeper Willie. A famous lunchtime incident of bad breath had turned Lloyd into Bin-Breath or just Bins, his prominent nose made him Can-Opener or Monkey Wrench or Monkey, his short curly hair made him Bubbles, but all of these were just the starting point for great spiralling flights of abuse that could last for many hours.

‘Pack it in, Monkey!’ said Harper.

‘He started it!’ said Lloyd. ‘Eyeing me up like I was one of his fancy golf courses …’

‘What’s that smell?’ shouted Fox from under the beanbag.

‘Like I was Royal St Andrews …’ said Lloyd.

‘Is it bin day? Has someone put the bins out?’

‘I’m not your caddy, Fox,’ said Lloyd, pressing down with his knee.

‘Pack it in!’ said The Prince.

‘Your hair looks gorgeous tonight,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who does your hair, Prince-y?’

‘Same girl who does your perm, Bubbles, now get off him!’

‘Leave him alone!’ I said.

‘Who said that?’ said Lloyd. ‘Is there someone there? I hear voices.’

‘I hear maracas,’ said Fox. ‘Who’s playing the maracas?’

‘Nobody’s playing the maracas,’ said The Prince.

Nobody, Mr No One, Invisible Man, and there were others. I’d mentioned once that I was named after one of my father’s favourite jazz musicians, Charles Mingus, and this had been corrupted to Charlie Minge, then Curly Minge, then just Minge. Council was another, because I lived on The Library estate, and Bunkie or The Convict, because I still slept in a bunk bed, though this was not to be deployed in the early stage of battle. ‘Council’, too, was something to be earned.

‘Council’s here,’ said Lloyd. ‘He’s really excited to see a house with an upstairs.’

‘My house has got an upstairs, Lloyd.’

‘Top bunk doesn’t count as an upstairs,’ said Lloyd, and this brought a sharp inhalation from the others. Lloyd had a tendency to take things too far. I had a photo of us on Bonfire Night, taken with a long exposure during my photography phase, and while Harper is using his sparkler to draw a love heart, and while Fox is writing his name, Lloyd is scrawling ‘fuck you’ in the night air. That’s how I always thought of him, as the kind of kid who uses a firework to write ‘fuck you’, who hides the stone in the snowball.

Now I had no choice but to pile on top, taking care to grind the point of my elbow into Lloyd’s shoulder, and then The Prince jumped on top of me, using the pool table to maximise impact, and we groaned and dug fingers deep into each other’s armpits and screamed and laughed until we couldn’t breathe. We were all aware of the theory that boys matured more slowly than girls, and contested it loudly, yet here we were: Exhibit A.

It always started with lager, which we drank through a straw because ‘the oxygen makes it stronger’. If spirits were available, the can might then be topped up with vodka or gin and aspirin, which was rumoured to make it more potent and prevent the hangover. Some years earlier, an ambitious young food technician had managed to combine the buzz of alcohol with the mouth-puckering sweetness of the soft drink, in mouthwash blue, stop-light red or tree-frog green, but these were for special occasions. Drugs were a source of debate – Lloyd and Fox were keen but I thought only of the mallet and the cauliflower. God knows, wasn’t the chemistry of the Lewis brain precarious enough? The Prince, like his father, was puritanical about drugs, thinking them hippy-ish and soft. Drunkenness, on the other hand, was larky and boys-y, and anything up to the point of hospitalisation was sanctioned.

But we also put great effort into pushing at the limits of what alcohol could achieve, and sometimes Harper’s den took on the earnest air of a research laboratory. We snorted booze or slammed it, mixed it or chugged it down at maximum speed to get the highs associated with drugs, and when that didn’t work, we raided the kitchen cupboards in search of drugs that weren’t drugs. Nutmeg, the gateway spice, if crumbled and smoked in industrial enough quantities, supposedly had a shamanic effect. Or was that cinnamon, or oregano? The dried pith of an unripe banana? We forced down a bunch of them, dense and waxy, draped the skins on radiators overnight, then gathered the next evening to smoke it silently and earnestly through The Matrix in a sweet, low-hanging fog. Perhaps the bananas were too ripe or not ripe enough, because nothing ever happened and I now wonder why we didn’t just do drugs. It would have been so much easier and cheaper than acquiring all that pith and cinnamon.