Sweet Sorrow(7)
‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen!’ said Mr Hepburn, back on the mike. ‘It seems that we have time for one last song after all! I want to see every single one of you on the floor, every last one of you! Are you ready? I can’t hear you! Remember, dance around the sawdust, please. Here we go!’
The song was ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie, scarcely less remote to us in time than ‘In the Mood’, but clearly a great thing because now everyone was on the dance floor: the theatre kids, the moody pottery kiln kids, even Debbie Warwick, wiped down, pale and unsteady on her feet. The lab technicians poured out the last of the dry ice, Mr Hepburn turned the volume up and, to whoops and cheers, Patrick Rogers pulled his shirt off over his head and whipped it through the air in the hope of a starting a craze – then, when this didn’t catch on, put it back on again. Now the new sensation was Lloyd clamping his hand over Fox’s mouth and pretending to snog him. Little Colin Smart, sole male member of the Drama Club, had organised a trust game where you took it in turns to fall back into each other’s arms in time with the music, and Gordon Gilbert, destroyer of trombones, was on Tony Stevens’ shoulders, embracing the glitter-ball like a drowning man clinging to a buoy, and now Tony Stevens stepped away and left him dangling while Parky, building maintenance, poked at him with the handle of his mop. ‘Watch this! Watch this!’ shouted someone else as Tim Morris began to breakdance, hurling himself onto the floor, spinning wildly into the sawdust and disinfectant, then leaping to his feet and wiping madly at his trousers. I felt hands on my hips and it was Harper, shouting something that might have been ‘love you, mate’ then kissing me noisily, smack, smack, on each ear and suddenly someone else had jumped onto my shoulders and we were all down in a scrum, the boys, Fox and Lloyd, Harper and me and then some other kids I’d barely spoken to, laughing at a joke that no one could hear. The notion that these had been the best years of our lives suddenly seemed both plausible and tragic and I wished that school had always been like this, our arms around each other, filled with a kind of hooligan love, and that I’d talked to these people more and in a different voice. Why had we left it until now? Too late, the song was nearly over: ooh-ooh woah-oh, ooh-ooh woah-oh. Sweat plastered clothes to skin, stung our eyes and dripped from our noses and when I stood up from the scrum I saw for just one moment Helen Beavis dancing by herself, hunched like a boxer, eyes squeezed tight singing ooh-ooh woah-oh and then, behind her, movement and the sudden hauling open of the fire-exit doors. The atomic brightness poured in like the light from the spaceship at the end of Close Encounters. Dazzled, Gordon Gilbert tumbled from the mirror-ball. The music snapped off and it was over.
The time was three fifty-five in the afternoon.
We had missed the countdown and now we stood, silhouetted against the light, dazed and blinking as the staff shepherded us towards the doors, their arms outstretched. Voices hoarse, sweat chilling our skin, we gathered our possessions into our arms – hockey sticks and coil pots, the rancid lunch boxes and crushed dioramas and rags of sports kit – and stumbled into the courtyard like refugees. Girls stood clinging tearfully to their friends and from the bike sheds came the news that all the tyres had been slashed in one last mad, pointless vendetta.
At the school gates, kids clustered round the ice-cream van. The freedom we’d been celebrating suddenly seemed like exile – paralysing and incomprehensible – and we loitered and hesitated on the threshold, animals released too soon into the frightening wild, looking back towards the cage. I saw my sister, Billie, on the other side of the road. We barely spoke to each other now, but I raised my hand. She smiled back and walked away.
The four of us began our last walk home, turning the day into anecdote even before it was over. Down by the railway line, in amongst the silver birches, we could see a haze of smoke, an orange glow from the ceremonial pyre that Gordon Gilbert and Tony Stevens had built from old folders and uniforms, plastic and nylon. They whooped and hollered like wild things but we walked on to the junction where we had always parted. We hesitated. Perhaps we should mark the occasion, say a few words. Hug? But we baulked at sentimental gestures. It was a small town, and it would require far more effort to lose touch than to see each other constantly.
‘See ya, then.’
‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Friday, yeah?’
‘See ya.’
‘Bye.’
And I walked back to the house where I now lived alone with my father.
Infinity
I used to have a recurring dream inspired, I think, by a too-early viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of drifting untethered through infinite space. The dream terrified me then and now, not because of the suffocation or starvation but because of that sense of powerlessness; nothing to hold on to or push against, just the void and the panic, the conviction that it would never end.
Summer felt like that. How could I hope to fill the infinite days, each day infinitely long? In our final term, we’d made plans: raids on London to prowl Oxford Street (and only Oxford Street) and some Tom Sawyer-ish expeditions to the New Forest or the Isle of Wight, rucksacks packed with lager. ‘Binge camping’ we called it, but both Harper and Fox had found themselves full-time jobs, working cash in hand for Harper’s dad, a builder, and the plan had faded. Without Harper around, Lloyd and I just bickered. Besides, I had my own part-time work, also cash in hand, behind the till at a local petrol station.