Bad Blood (24 page)

Clive and I, in the back seat or sandwiched between our parents in the lorry, were made to know our place. We were the passengers, they were in charge. Except that it was all tied together with string. Once, on a winter Saturday, coming back from Wrexham in the dark, my mother from the passenger seat – always in character, fanciful and far away – said dreamily what a pretty pattern the headlights were making, flickering on the hedge as we passed. My father had started on an indulgent reply (how like her, how impractical, just as well she didn't drive) when he suddenly did a double-take and braked hard. The engine was on fire. We all scrambled out and stood shivering at the roadside while he first opened the bonnet and then hastily shut it again when the flames leaped out. He made off at a sprint to a garage a mile down the road, and we stood in the circle of firelight and watched the car burn. It wasn't until another passing motorist stopped and shooed us away that we realised our danger. It might blow up: this was a more serious breakdown than usual. But then my father arrived with the garage breakdown truck and a fire extinguisher, and eventually we were ferried back to Hanmer, leaving our Standard Vanguard on the forecourt covered in foam.

After that we went out in the lorry for a while, until my father acquired a new second-hand car to work to death. The car-that-went-on-fire became a family story in which somehow my mother's fey remark supplied the comic point, not my father's sketchiness as a mechanic and definitely not our narrow escape from being barbecued. Our family life may have been a fragile construct, my parents may have been making it up as they went along, but they were good at improvising – at least so far as their story went.

They always closed ranks and pretended that everything was solid, normal and natural. Here we have the family of the period: self-made and going places. Only when you look more closely can you see that this housewife is pathologically scared of food, hates home, is really a child dreaming of pretty things and treats; and this businessman will never accumulate capital, he's still a boy soldier, going over the top again and again. Their obsessions had met, fallen in love and married; they completed and sustained each other. In the pictures of their austere wartime wedding, he has only just grown a moustache in order to look old enough to give orders and she is smiling like a star. Their insecurity and hopefulness are disarming, if you think of them as a couple. But I didn't, back then. They left
no room
. Family life was the open-plan living-room, the family car. It was like a nightmare council house on wheels.

Still, Grandma gave the lie to the notion that marriages were made in heaven; Bill too, with his
Strange Customs
; and my mother's friend from before the war, Ivy the divorcee, was compounding her offence by seeing a new man and planning to marry again. Ivy did more than anyone to liberate me from domestic claustrophobia, for reasons of her own, for she needed somewhere for her daughter Gail to go in order not to cramp her style. And so Gail, my old Hanmer school enemy, came to be included (by arrangement with my mother) in some of our Saturday outings.

Gail was admitted into our family circle, while everyone else was kept out, because she was in no position to inform on us and her mother was in no position to criticise my mother's housekeeping habits. I remember looking across at her with a kind of wonder one damp afternoon, as we sat on stones in the mountains at Llangollen sharing our soggy banana sandwiches, while my parents and Clive sat veiled by condensation in the
car. It seemed so improbable that she was really there, as though she'd stepped out from behind a mirror. Her hair was fawn, mine yellow, her eyes green, mine blue, her skin pale olive and moist, mine pale pink and dry, but she was seething with resentment and that was why we recognised one another. Tentatively, we talked our way on to common ground. She loved animals, I loved books, but her animals were mostly phantasms – the pony her mother couldn't afford, the dog she couldn't have because local farmers shot pet dogs on principle, the iguana she couldn't have either because you only saw them in the reptile house at the zoo.

Learning to swim was the first important thing we did together. Gail was good at gym and athletics, but like me she'd been put off swimming by high school excursions to Whitchurch Public Baths – small, steamy, stinking of chlorine, with cracked tiles and deafening echoes, the gym mistress counting to three and pushing you in. Now, in the summer holidays, she and I went down to the mere like other Hanmer kids (who didn't much speak to us since we'd passed the eleven-plus), changed on the bank among the goose and duck droppings, and fooled around in warm water that smelled of rain until we found we could float and then swim – although in a style that horrified the gym mistress when we went back to school. Even now, if I say to myself ‘dog-paddle' I can see Gail's head sticking up out of the soupy mere water in her rubber bathing hat, her eyes hard as pebbles with determination, her eyelashes glued together with the wet, while she paddled furiously and hardly moved at all. I kept pace and did the same, we both learned to dog-paddle and soon it was easy to swim whole lengths, even in the horrible baths.

Being disaffected daughters brought us together and, once together, we could leave our parents to take care of themselves.
Just before she was thirteen Gail was a bridesmaid at her mother's Register Office wedding and this seemed to us both a rite of passage. She and I now formed a kind of miniature generation in ourselves, we were furiously impatient to be teenagers. I could never have thrown myself into the part with such conviction without her. She did away with the defects of loneliness, not its private intensities – which I suppose is one way of describing how friendship works.

Swimming was wonderful after failing to learn to ride a bike and climb ropes. And I could do it alone, too, as part of my communings with Hanmer's muddy essence. Lying to my parents, I'd claim a date with Gail and make off down the fields to swim all by myself. Once, wrinkled brown Mrs Jones, who lived in one of the oldest Mere Cottages, where the floor was made of earth and she'd sit by the fire with a swan on her lap for company, came out and shook her fist at me, and threatened me with drowning. I trod water and waved back. Poetry for the Young.

Whenever I went round to Gail's house, her mother Ivy was on a stepladder with her hair in a scarf and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, expertly manoeuvring the edges of the next pasty sheet of wallpaper into place, matching up the neoclassical scrollwork or the groves of bamboo. Now that she was married again Ivy also had a council house, at Horseman's Green. Here she set about home-making with restless idealism. She redecorated the whole place with embossed wallpaper in different pastel patterns, and she enjoyed doing it so much that as soon as she'd finished she would pick away at a corner, strip a room and start all over again. Gail's new home was always making, never made and that suited her fine, for she had been an only child with a single parent much too long to take kindly to this new set-up.

Her stepfather pretended she didn't exist. He was called Mr Ward, a quiet man with a blue-collar job who kept himself to himself. His passion was breeding budgerigars in the back garden. Gail crossed budgies off the list of living things she loved – although she had a bit more time for the sleek black mynah bird who lived by the back door and could imitate to mocking perfection Ivy's smoker's cough and the infant lisp of her new little sister Denise. ‘Mummy'th thilly', the mynah would whisper if you got very close to his cage. Gail agreed.
She was one of those child stars who find it hard to grow up. She'd been an unqualified success as a little girl, with her ringlets and her pretty clothes and physical graces; now she set about being an awkward adolescent with redoubled zeal – she wouldn't be reconciled to losing top billing.

We were made for each other, born again as best friends. Together we were teenager incarnate. When we were torn apart at night we attuned our psyches via Radio Luxembourg and held our breath on the Top Twenty countdown to number one in case our idol had been toppled by some saccharine trash left over from before the revolution. We hedged our bets. Out of pin-ups and clippings we pieced together a composite hero – a monster of narcissism to match our discontented dreams. He had ennui to spare for me, animal passion for Gail, softness and hardness, pale suede skin and a heavy dark mane, and vacant, hungry, wolfish eyes with bambi lashes. His knees buckled with lust when you let go his strings and he clung to the mike or (was it?) his guitar for dear life, keening, ‘Jus' take a walk down lonely street, jus' put a chain aroun' my neck an' lead me anywhere, don' be cruel . . .' He was mostly Elvis, but then Elvis was nobody, anybody's. His slack mouth, his lewd, fat tongue and that flickering sneer were all spoken for, long before the
Zeitgeist
stuffed him full of tutti frutti and he was crowned king of kitsch.

Elvis's sort were shiftless, driven not by ambition but glands. They slouched, spasmed and moaned about fevers and chills, and comedians made jokes about apes that were code for the wrong colour. Elvis was from the wrong side of the tracks, and even more Jerry Lee Lewis, with his ecstatic Southern Baptist last-days babble (Great Balls of Fire!) – poor white, white trash, the sort that blurred the black–white line. What we saw was country boys with
carpe diem
written all over them.
We want it now
. They came from the back of beyond with mud on their souls, they were heroes of outside. When Elvis travestied himself on the screen in
Love Me Tender
, stumbling after a horsedrawn plough behind the credits – and we fell about laughing, for who could resist? – we still saw that the sentimental lie was telling the truth. There was one particular publicity ‘still' we treasured, posed behind the scenes during the making of that first awful movie: Elvis in denim lolling on a canvas chair among tangled cables, looking like one of the crew rather than the star. He had a Coke bottle tilted to his lips, his hair was spiky with grease and sweat, and his other (right) hand with the signet ring hung loose from the armrest, long fingers idly splayed.

I describe this picture as if I had it before me, although it's forty years since Gail and I clawed it to bits with our new long nails. This was the Elvis we loved, the muck-shoveller manqué, and we scorned his clean-cut wholesome rivals – particularly Pat Boone, who was tanned and scrubbed, with a parting in his fair hair and what my mother called a nice, light voice. One memorable day when Ivy and the stepfather took us for a trip to Southport, Gail and I spent all our time and pocket money dashing from one jukebox to another to make sure that Pat Boone's chaste hit ‘Love Letters in the Sand' would be drowned out all over the windswept town by ‘All Shook Up'. The one was sweetness and light, the other inarticulate, insidious bump-and-grind. ‘Please don' ask me what's on my min', I'm a little mixed up but I'm feelin' fine . . .' All the Elvises groaned and whimpered at once, and the waves rushed in and obliterated Pat Boone. And we clung to each other in a shelter smelling of orange peel and piss on the promenade, and shrieked with glee, like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus.

The tide only came right in a couple of times a year at
Southport, but our euphoria supplied the rainbow spray.
Nothing lasts
was what we meant. Rock's idols were prodigal, noisy with nothing, jumping jacks who wanted the world, but most of all to be wanted, so that all their frantic, restless energy drained away and they were yours. Their existence was brittle as a seventy-eight, two-dimensional as a picture, we had to make them real. We wanted to eat them all up, what big eyes we had, if we swallowed them whole we'd take on their powers, they'd be ours, they'd be us. When Jerry Lee arrived for a British tour with his fourteen-year-old wife who was also his cousin, the sin the lost boys sang about came out into the open. Shake, baby, shake. Sex for kids now. ‘Go away,' Mrs Jerry hissed at the reporter from the
News of the World
, through the crack of the door of their suite at the Ritz or the Savoy, ‘Go away, Jerry and I are in bed.' Instead, they were packed off themselves, drummed out of the country for their hillbilly customs of courtship and marriage. There was a lot of huffing and puffing and moral panic over their lack of shame, their backwardness. They didn't know any better. We imagined her bouncing on the five-star bed in her Baby Doll pyjamas. ‘I just wanna be yo' teddy bear,' Elvis sang.

The sex in the songs was a second chance at childhood. In Hanmer and Whitchurch, in theory, you couldn't afford the time to be a teenager, you were supposed to go out to work at fifteen, or if you were still at school you had your sights fixed on the future. A few intellectual tearaways at the boys' grammar school talked about jazz and existentialism, but they were practising for university. Rock was slumming – a dangerous game in the sticks, although from the start it was contained and packaged.

In one of the earliest rock movies,
The Girl Can't Help It
, there's a scene where Fats Domino, seated at the piano, sings
over his shoulder about the holiday joys of Saturday night to an all-white, twitching, bopping audience, some of them in their bow ties and Peter Pan collars no more than thirteen years old at most. Beaming Fats himself is already about sixteen stone, plump-faced and also very young, but as knowing as hell, he comes from a place where time is different. In
The Girl Can't Help It
black and white performers never appear on the stage at the same time, and black and white actors never share the same shot, except in one scene where Jayne Mansfield's black maid can't resist kicking up her heels and rolling her eyes to the rhythm when white-but-grubby Eddie Cochrane appears on television. This gives the new teenage music the seal of authenticity but it also maintains decorum: we
know
we're slumming, just playing. Watching this film was like getting lost in the fun house. There were the boys being cuddly and hysterical, all shut up in playpens. Jerry Lee and Mrs Jerry – Myra was her name – were miscegenating fact and fancy.