Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Read online

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ said Neil. ‘Apparently, “palare” is a secret language that gay people used to use, and that’s what the song’s about.’

  God help me, I thought, it’s definitely time for a new best friend. Still, Neil and I went way back. We were probably about six when we met. He was the new kid in school and the teacher gave me the job of looking after him and being his pretend friend while he was settling in and making proper friends for himself. But Neil never really did settle in and make proper friends. It was pretty much just me, and I guess I had that job for the next seven years, although I stopped thinking of it like that after a while. He never fitted in at school, or anywhere else, for that matter. It was as if he’d just beamed down from space, or something. Neil was plain at odds with the world. A tetrahedron in a round hole, was how he put it in one of his more reflective moments. People generally didn’t like him, and he had a unique gift for getting on the wrong side of people without trying. But if you got to know him, then you’d realise he was the sweetest, most caring person you could ever meet, without a malicious bone in his body. He was just very, very odd and a bit annoying.

  One time, for instance, we were in my garden, and my cousin Jo was there. It was the summer, and my mum had brought us out a jug of fizzy squash. Jo was a couple of years older than us, and mouthy, the way some girls are at that age. When Neil was in the toilet she told me that she was finding him a bit creepy, thinking that he fancied her and was trying to impress her with all the weird things he was saying. Neil was just being Neil, and at that age probably hadn’t even started thinking about girls, but back then Jo thought that all boys were trying to get off with her. After he came back from the toilet, Neil said something really odd about the leaves on the trees being fish, and you could tell they were fish because you could see them wriggling about. In those days, Neil always went on about fish, thinking it was really surreal. And Jo just says, can she pour her glass of squash over Neil’s head. And Neil says, sure, all right, he’d be delighted. So she picks up her glass and literally pours it all over his head. Then he’s just sitting there with sticky orange squash in his hair for the rest of the afternoon, until my mum finds him and makes him wash under the tap before he goes home.

  I could go on. Every so often, something that strange would happen, and half the stuff he said you could tell he thought was clever, but it was just rubbish. And it would wind you up and you’d want him to fuck off. But sometimes it would all click, and he would be really funny, and everything he said actually would be as clever as he thought it was. And that made it all worthwhile, because those moments were priceless, they really were. But right then, attending a boys’ school and having your best friend get really excited about the next single by a gay pop star that was all about how gay people talked was not priceless. And to be honest, I just wasn’t in the mood, and certainly didn’t want a whole evening of it, especially not a Friday evening. At thirteen, I was just becoming aware of the specialness of that night, and the idea that it was meant to be spent in the pursuit of thrills of one form or another. Problem was none were currently on offer. At least not for me. As for Neil …

  ‘Chris, I’m afraid I won’t be able to hang out with you this evening.’

  ‘No problem. Don’t worry about it.’ It was a problem, of course. If I didn’t have anywhere better to be, then why should Neil, especially since the fact that I didn’t was obviously his fault?

  ‘Yeah, sorry. It’s just that Scott and that lot have asked me to go round and play Dungeons and Dragons after tea.’

  ‘Really? Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’m not really, but I just wanted to check it out. ’Course, I know it’s going to be wizards and elves and that, but I like the idea of having a game where you get to make things up. I just think it’s a shame you can’t have one where instead of fighting ores and wizards, you go to the shops and get a part-time job in Sainsbury’s and stuff.’

  ‘I guess. Don’t think it would catch on, though.’

  ‘Well, it should. Then maybe people would learn to think a bit harder about the choices they make in life, that they don’t have to go to work and just buy stuff all the time, that there are other things to do.’

  ‘Everybody’s got to go to work, Neil,’ I said.

  ‘Not if they’re an artist or a musician or something – then their work is play.’

  ‘Yeah, well, in the real world, not everyone gets to be one,’ I snapped back. I was probably feeling a bit defensive because I still wasn’t playing onstage with Joe Satriani.

  ‘Everybody’s an artist.’

  ‘No, they’re not!’

  ‘They are, they just don’t know it.’

  Jesus, looking back on it, he was only thirteen and he was saying stuff like that! Incredible. Maybe he’d read it somewhere, or heard it on The Late Show or something – I don’t know.

  ‘Chris, I’ve just had a thought! Why don’t you come and play Dungeons and Dragons tonight?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t. I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad. What are you up to?’

  ‘Uhh … family meal.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘No, not really, but I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Well, I’ll give you a ring over the weekend sometime, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘OK, seeya!’ And with that, he sprinted across the road, closer to the oncoming traffic than was sensible, and off in the direction of his house. I looked around for someone else to walk with, but there was no one I knew, just anonymous older boys in the white shirts and black jumpers of our school uniform. So I walked home alone.

  The sun was low in the sky on the late January afternoon as I followed the soft bends of the suburban streets of Sholeham. Quireley, that’s the suburb where I lived. Can you think of a softer, less threatening name for a place? Quireley. Quire-t-ley. Not posh or anything, lower middle class. But safe. Very, very safe, or at least that’s how it felt. I’d been allowed to walk to school by myself since I was eight, my childhood pretty much free of any fear of paedophilia snatching me away into due woods, pre-teen drug addiction or drive-by shootings. A couple of videos in school about staying away from men in Ford Escorts who wanted me to eat their sweets and see their puppies, and that was it. Maybe we were the last generation whose parents weren’t scared into locking us up in our homes for our entire childhoods to be dulled into obesity by PlayStation. Well, I suppose there was the Commodore 64.

  I remember the sky as blue blending to gold as the sun went down. No doubt I could see my breath in front of me on that winter day as I made my way through the various Cresstons that made up much of Quireley. Cresston Road, Cresston Gardens, Cresston Crescent, where I lived. The safest, most suburban of all the streets in Sholeham, and therefore the world, or so it seemed.

  You know, the funny thing about Sholeham is – well, there’s nothing funny or even unusual about it, that’s the thing. It’s a relatively large place that isn’t particularly notable in any way, even though it dates back to Roman times or something. I mean, name three famous people who come from Sholeham. Or one big rock band that started here. A famous landmark. Anything at all. The football team does all right, second division, but that’s it. Well, you see my point, don’t you? For a town of this size, it’s remarkable in that it’s spawned virtually nothing of note, nobody who’s achieved anything at all in any field. Not even a decent serial killer.

  So I suppose it’s only fitting that all this stuff with me and Neil and music and the band started here in Sholeham, exactly because it could have happened anywhere in England. Anywhere that’s nowhere, that is. And Sholeham is the capital of nowhere. Most of this country is made up of nowhere, or nowheres. What I mean is have you ever been on a slow train, on a journey that seemed to go on for ever, and watched all the stops go by, towns you’ve never heard of, and wondered about them? Well, from my experience, for what it is, whenever I’ve had to step
off the train into one of these places, I’ve found they’re all the same. They have a small, pedestrianised shopping centre, where there’s a Woolworths, and that’s where everybody buys their music, or at least the music that Woolworths lets you buy. There’s a nightclub that everyone goes to, even though it’s shit. And there are houses, lots of houses, that young couples move into, then breed, and grow families, and the children of these families grow into teenagers, and a proportion of these teenagers one day decide that they want to make music just like the music they bought in Woolworths, and so they learn instruments, and form bands, and get ideas, and have their hearts broken. Sholeham’s just like all these places, except it’s bigger: there’s an HMV, which has a wider selection than Woolworths, and an Our Price, though that’s gone now, of course, and there’s a range of shit nightclubs you can choose from. Other than that, it’s really just the same.

  Now, running my fingers through my knot of memories, looking for more threads, I find myself coming home to an empty house. Empty other than our old beagle, Bess, who gets off the chair she’s sneaked onto long enough to wag her tail ‘hello’ before skulking off again for more illicit furniture squatting. Named after a dog in a book, I think. Now that my sister’s going to sixth-form college, that’s the way it usually is after school. Mum won’t be home until half five, Dad not until half six. What do I do between coming home and tea? I don’t know, probably watch some kids’ TV that I’m beginning to feel too old for and eat crisps. What am I watching? I can’t remember; what was on back then? Masters of the Universe? No, I think that was earlier. Grange Hill, no doubt. That’s always on.

  Shit, I don’t know what I was watching, and of course it doesn’t matter, but the point is that with a lot of this stuff, I’ll say it happened in such and such a month and one event followed another, but I’m going to get a lot of it wrong, I expect. Things I say happened on the same day probably didn’t at all. Maybe I’m even getting my years mixed up on some things. Some places probably aren’t quite the way I remember them. But I’m pretty sure I’ll get the gist of it all, I mean the spirit in which things were done, or at least how I perceived them at the time. Or maybe I’ll get a whole load of stuff wrong, maybe nothing I have to say really means anything or is any use to me or anybody else. But this knotted bundle that clogs up my head is driving me crazy. I’ve got to sort it out. Separate all the threads. Find the ones I need. Throw the rest away.

  I pick up the thread I’m following. It vibrates with the sound of footsteps on the path. Soon my sister will open the door, not eat her tea, get changed and go out clubbing, to my mum and dad’s dismay. But they can’t do anything about it really; she has a part-time job, it’s her money she’s spending. And they secretly both understand it’s all part of growing up, it’s inevitable; she’s got her head on straight, and deep down they know nothing bad is going to happen to her. It’s all going to be OK. But they wouldn’t be good parents if they didn’t pretend it wasn’t and worry that she was wrecking her life in some vague, unspecified way. And me, I’ll sit on my own, playing my records, dreaming of Satriani and missing Neil a little bit. Wishing it was Thursday, Scouts on Thursday.

  My sister pops her head round the door. ‘All right,’ she says, without affection. ‘Mum not back yet?’

  ‘No, not yet.’ It’ll be several years before I think of her as a person, with a name, Nicki, instead of just as this vague blur of bleached-blonde hair and make-up called my sister. ‘I'll be wanting to watch Neighbours in a minute,’ she says.

  ‘All right,’ I mumble, as all teenage boys should. Neighbours. Now who was in it back then? Scott and Charlene would have left. Dorothy Burke. No, before her, surely? Bouncer. Forget it. That thread ends there.

  3

  I met Ben at eleven o’clock, Saturday morning outside McDonald’s in the High Street. Like me, he was wearing the teenage metaller’s uniform of a denim jacket – an affordable substitute for the leather jackets we could only dream about. He had more patches sewn onto his, though, and most of them were for bands I’d only vaguely heard of – Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple.

  ‘Wotcha,’ he said, the established metaller greeting at our school.

  ‘Wotcha.’

  It was funny, up until this point I wasn’t even sure he was one of us – a metaller, I mean – but just looking at him, I could tell that he had tasted of metal’s goodness to a level I had previously not known to be possible. I felt rather puny in his presence, like a novice confronting a master wizard in one of Scott and his spazzy mates’ Dungeons and Dragons games.

  ‘So what’s the plan then?’ asked the wizard of his pupil.

  ‘Dunno, really. Um, what time’s your brother going to be round?’

  ‘Dunno, mate. Probably about two.’

  ‘Um, well, we could get something to eat, then go round the record shops for a bit,’ I said, hoping that would satisfy the wise one to whom I had become apprenticed.

  ‘You mean down St Anne’s?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I hadn’t meant that at all, of course. I’d meant HMV and Our Price in the High Street. I’d never even been to St Anne’s, much less heard about any record shops that might be down there. The suburban roads of Quireley and the High Street were practically all I knew of the town I’d spent my entire life in, apart from occasional visits to the sports centre and the swimming baths. But the wizard knew more. He knew about the other record shops, and I would have to follow him, without letting on that I really knew nothing.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘Shall we go in then, or what?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  We went under the golden arches, and for only the second time in my life I bought fast food with my own money. It was that bygone time – the end of childhood, when fast-food restaurants were bright, magical places, before you had started to notice the food on the floor, and the surliness of the staff, and the never-ending screaming of the babies, or had been so zealously informed about their role in the destruction of the rainforest, what their food did to poor people’s health, or the sparseness of the wages they paid. In those days you could eat there and feel good, instead of guilty and worried someone will see you when you leave.

  ‘So what bands you into, then?’ asked Ben as we sat down. Obviously I did not have enough patches on my denim for him to glean that information, and for that I felt ashamed.

  ‘Oh, thrash metal mostly,’ I said. ‘Pantera, Megadeth, Slayer. Also Metallica, Iron Maiden …’

  ‘Yeah, they’re good bands,’ said Ben. ‘Do you like any of the older stuff, like Sabbath, Led Zep?’

  ‘Yeah, I like them too.’

  ‘Have you heard Physical Graffiti? That’s a fucking amazing album.’

  ‘Not sure,’ I said; ‘I think I have but not all the way through.’

  ‘Jimmy Page’s guitar playing is fucking mental on that album.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, nodding my head like a toy dog in a car window.

  ‘Do you like Hendrix?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re good. I like their earlier stuff, anyway. Good band.’

  Ben looked at me with his eyes wide. ‘Hendrix aren’t a band, you monger – he’s a bloke!’

  I sank about a thousand feet inside. ‘Oh, Hendrix! I thought you meant someone else. Yeah, I thought you meant …’

  ‘Yeah, like fuck you did.’

  I felt still more ashamed. I’d failed my master already, and he’d caught me trying to deceive him. I was also curious as to what a monger was, although already I was pretty certain that I did not want to be thought of as one, especially by Ben.

  ‘I’ve got to educate you, man,’ said Ben.

  God, yes you have, I cried inwardly, tell me everything.

  ‘Come on, let’s get a move on,’ he said, standing up from the padded seat of the McDonald’s booth. I hadn’t finished, and was going to make an issue of it, before thinking better of it. That wouldn’t be cool. It would be babyish.

  ‘Wanna get my hands on some
vinyl,’ said Ben, apparently to himself, as I followed him out.

  I walked beside Ben down the High Street, trying to give the impression of knowing where we were going, until he took a sudden and unexpected right that left me waiting by myself by the traffic lights.

  ‘This way, you monger!’ he called out to me, waving sarcastically from some feet away.

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied, smiling a silly apologetic smile.

  ‘You will be. Jesus. What’s wrong with you?’ he said as I caught up. ‘Do you like Hawkwind?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, they’re good.’

  ‘You haven’t heard them, have you?’

  ‘Yeah, well … no.’

  ‘They’ve got an album of theirs I want in Weasel’s. In Search of Space. It’s got “Master of the Universe” on it.’

  That made me think of something funny. Maybe Ben would also think it was funny. ‘You mean, like He-Man?’

  ‘No, not like fucking He-Man!’ Ben slapped me round the back of the head. I looked for affection in the gesture but could find none. ‘The song came first. It’s been around for bloody ages.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know it.’

  ‘Right, here’s a trivia test for you. What famous bassist and lead singer of another band started out in Hawkwind?’

  ‘Ummm … I don’t know, who?’

  ‘Come on, think!’

  ‘I really don’t know, sorry.’

  ‘Lemmy!’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘And what band’s Lemmy in?’

  ‘Hawkwind.’

  ‘No, you monger, what band’s he in now?’

  ‘Umm … I don’t know, sorry.’

  ‘Motörhead, stupid!’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I knew that,’ I said, in a small voice I couldn’t will to be any bigger.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ Ben said gruffly. I knew he was irritated with me now. I had to find a way to please him somehow, but I was feeling too ashamed to think of anything right then.