Educating Peter (20 page)

Last night, I realised, Peter had been drunk for the first time.

Not wildly drunk, maybe. Probably not even drunk enough to lose his inhibitions. But drunk enough to feel better about himself and to never think alcohol tasted horrible again, or at least not to let that be a factor in stopping him consuming it.

As the most tenuous, unrelated of guardian figures, I had a uniquely divided perspective on this revelation. One portion of me worried on behalf of Jenny. Another felt morally outraged that teenagers seemed to be drinking at younger and younger ages these days. Another told that part to shut up, be realistic, and remember the night in 1989 when me and Matthew Read had downed five cans of Special Brew each and walked up the street adjacent to our secondary school, twanging car wing mirrors. Another part forgot that Peter was fourteen at all and felt the
urge to pat him on the back and treat him to a pint of the hair of the dog that bit him. Another part felt a little like Janet, the fifty-year-old subject of a case study from
Adolescence: The Survival Guide
.

‘We were delighted that he suddenly wanted to talk to us again,' Janet had explained about her teenage son, Chris. ‘We would have long conversations about his friends, his problems, the state of the world, the existence of God. The only thing was he wanted to wake us up and have these talks sitting on the end of our bed at one in the morning when he'd just got home from an evening out with his friends.'

I could see Janet's point: it
was
irritating how teenagers only seemed to want to open up to you when you were most irritated with them. But, ultimately, I had it easy. Peter hadn't woken me up. Neither, mercifully, had he tried to get me into a conversation about the existence of God or shown me any of his poetry. It wasn't my responsibility to show him why drinking was wrong, and when and where he could and couldn't be overenthusiastic about life. I was, I had to remind myself, teaching him to
embrace
rock and roll, not to run and hide from it. Besides, alcohol seemed to be having an entirely positive effect on him, if you ignored the smell of his jacket: during the hour that I walked along the King's Road with him, retracing the steps I'd taken with Jenny Fabian, pointing out where record shops, cafés, bookshops and boutiques with names like Middle Earth and Granny Takes A Trip used to be, I didn't once lose him to a silent, melancholic reverie or hear him use the word ‘nnghhh' as a form of communication.

No: moral outrage and responsibility be damned. Peter seemed to be seeing unusually clearly and it was my job, as his teacher, to make the most of this by putting the correct objects in his immediate vision. For the moment, I wasn't going to question him about last night's experience; I wasn't even going to comment on it. I was going to ride on the crest of my gothic friend's receptive post-booze rapture and use it in a manner that served both myself and our adventure in the most convenient manner possible. And I was going to start by asking him a question that I'd been meaning to ask him for several weeks – a difficult question that would always be harsh to spring upon any innocent human being, but, nevertheless, a question that I felt, now more than ever, to be a crucial element to our studies.

‘Do you fancy going to Nottingham?'

‘
SO, WHERE IS
it, like, exactly? I've never really been there. My mum has. I know it's somewhere up north, but not that far north, and I know they said it was the most violent city in England, after London.'

‘You mean you really don't know? How can you know what the capital of Kenya is but not know where Nottingham is? I didn't know where Nairobi was when I was your age, but I knew where Milton Keynes was.'

‘But that's different.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, you grew up in the Eighties. And you were in Nottingham.'

‘So?'

‘So they probably didn't teach you stuff like that, I guess.'

‘But you said you didn't know where Nottingham was. So how can you know what kind of stuff they didn't teach me when I lived there?'

‘I dunno.'

‘Anyway, don't worry about it. It's sandwiched between Leicester and Sheffield.'

‘I
think
I know where they are.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Anyway, why are we going there?'

‘It's a surprise.'

‘It's not another groupie, is it?'

‘No.'

‘What's plating?'

‘Ha! So you did read the book!'

‘I dunno. I kind of, like, looked at it . . . but not much.'

‘Ha! Your teachers were right – you are an enigma . . . Plating's what hippies called giving someone a blow job.'

‘No way!'

‘Way.'

‘Gross!'

‘Yeah.'

‘Ugh.'

‘This traffic's really pissing me off.'

‘Mmmm.'

‘Do you want me to put something else on the stereo? I expect you've had enough of
The Best Of Wings
now, haven't you? Put one of yours on if you want.'

‘I dunno. I'm a bit bored with most of that stuff.'

‘Do you want to play Stone, Paper, Scissors?'

‘Alright. Ha. Wicked. I won. Paper wraps rock.'

‘I never understood that. What damage exactly is
Paper doing to Stone by wrapping it? Surely a stone can't suffocate.'

‘Hmmngh. When Raf and me play it we have another thing. As well as Stone, Scissors and Paper, we have Telephone Box. That traps everything inside it, except Stone, which can break its windows.'

‘But how do you imitate a telephone box with one hand?'

‘Like this.'

‘Mmm. Impressive.'

‘There's Sparrow as well, which pecks Paper to death, but gets its beak blunted by Stone.'

‘And who wins out of Sparrow and Telephone Box?'

‘Sparrow. It builds a nest in the handset.'

‘Ooh. Painful. Do you and Raf ever feel like you have too much free time on your hands?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘So what made you change your mind?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘About drinking.'

‘Oh . . . Er. Well, it was just like, I dunno, after I'd had more than one can it just tasted better. And stuff just kind of seemed . . . I dunno, funnier? It's just like the space hoppers. Normally that would have been funny, but last night it really made us piss ourselves. And this morning I woke up and Raf had put this can of Silly String under my head as a pillow and it was . . . I dunno. Just ace. I don't think I'd do it, though – y'know, like really getting drunk – unless I was with my mates.'

‘But you're with your mates a lot, aren't you?'

‘Hmmgh. I suppose.'

I'D INITIALLY WANTED
to take Peter to Nottingham because I felt it was important, at this stage in our studies, to show him that not too long ago I, too, was a music-mad teenager, striving for direction, meaning and the most obscene t-shirt logos known to man. Taking him on a guided tour of my own personal musical evolution, I sensed, could only give him a greater understanding of my teachings and a greater respect for my wisdom. Here, among the endlessly sprouting
Big Issue
salespeople and theme pubs of my hometown, he would be reassured to find the landmarks of a time when I was just like him, only with even less symmetrical hair. Then, I hoped, he would put two scruffy, moody teenagers together, notice the similarities, and come up with the natural assumption that, from this point on, everything I said about rock and roll, food, the opposite sex, alcohol, crisps and life itself could only be the gospel truth.

That was my main reason for taking him to Nottingham, anyway.

There was one additional incentive.

A few weeks previously, I'd read a report in a broadsheet newspaper about the worryingly ‘teenage' qualities of the current generation of twenty-some-things: my generation. According to the report's conclusions, people in their twenties were finding it increasingly hard to shake off the tastes and habits of their late childhood and were shirking responsibilities that previous generations had considered an obligation – responsibilities such as marriage, house buying, home cooking, remaining financially independent and refraining from listening to sadistic dance music at unsociable volumes.

As a married twenty-seven-year-old who hadn't prevailed upon his family for monetary support in more than a decade, and whose principal form of socialising revolved around the local golf club, I couldn't help feeling a little put out by this, not to mention somewhat jealous. It wasn't fair: even after hanging out with one of the teenage ranks for the best part of a summer,
I
didn't feel like an adolescent. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been bored, never mind the last time I'd been bored enough to listen to sadistic dance music at unsociable volumes. Yet, as this report would have it, I was the exception to the rule, and in spite of my best intentions I began to show signs of envy and mistrust. Could it be possible, I wondered, that my friends weren't telling me something – that they didn't
really
spend their free time filling out direct debit forms and striving to track down reliable plumbers, and that
instead, behind my back, they hung out in packs around the entrance of Kentucky Fried Chicken, smoking and giving one another wedgies?

‘What are you up to tonight?' I asked Steve and Sue Golden, a couple of days after reading the report.

‘You know,' said Sue, ‘winding down. Doing a bit of cooking. Making the weekly phone call to our parents. Steve wants to go to Pets At Home to get Molly a cat hammock, but I'm a bit too tired.'

‘What about after that?' I persevered.

‘Well,' said Steve, ‘they're repeating
Nigella Bites
on UK Food. I was thinking I might watch that.'

‘And after that?'

‘Er, going to bed, I guess.'

‘Hmm,' I mused, not totally convinced. ‘It's just . . . I heard there was a good nu-metal night going on in Croydon these days. Two pounds a pint all night.'

‘What the fuck are you on about?'

Even my wife could not be held above suspicion.

‘What's that?' I asked her in the wake of a shopping trip to Norwich city centre, eyeing the somewhat familiar long metallic strip protruding from her Top Shop bag.

‘It's a belt. Why?' said Edie.

‘And where will you be putting this belt?'

‘Around the top of my trousers, like most belts.'

‘So it won't be dangling uselessly down your leg?'

‘No. What are you talking about?'

‘Nothing. Just checking.'

‘You're weird.'

Clearly, I was being somewhat paranoid. I remained on guard, though. Okay, so I felt pretty sure that my
best friends weren't attending The
Smash Hits
Awards party behind my back, but that wasn't to say that they weren't whispering about me in an equally treacherous manner for being unusually old and boring for my age. The more I thought about it, the more it began to sound worryingly true. The unswerving penchant for the music of my parents' generation, the golf, the fuzzy dressing gowns, the bowel-emulsifying aversion to nightclubs – perhaps, by normal standards, I
was
freakishly unteenage. I shuddered. Perhaps everyone who knew me thought this about me. Automatically my mind zipped back, microfiche-style, to a moment in 1991 when my golf mate –
my golf mate
– Ashley Bates had called me a ‘grandad' for not dancing to The Shamen's indie dance hit ‘Move Any Mountain'. Perhaps everyone who knew me had
always
thought this about me – even when I was a teenager.

I was being silly. This was rubbish. Unreasonable, obsessive madness. But I just wanted to make sure, and heading back to my old stomping ground and brushing the dust off some memories from my wild years before they slipped away from me for ever seemed like the best way to get confirmation. Also, by getting closer to The Ninny That I Used To Be, I felt I would gain a greater understanding of Peter.

Not that I told him any of this.

‘Let's just say it's a virtual music journey through 1992,' I explained to him, as I pulled up the sliproad of junction 26 of the Ml. ‘Imagine it: Nirvana's
Nevermind
on the listening posts in Virgin Megastore, Smashing Pumpkins on
The Late Show
.'

‘Cool,' said Peter. ‘I don't know what
The Late Show
is. But, like, you mean
Nevermind
will really be on the listening posts in Virgin?'

‘Well, no, I doubt it. But we can do our best to pretend it is. And there'll be other things that really are
genuinely
like 1992. Such as crusties.'

‘What are they?'

‘Let me think of the best way to describe them . . . They're kind of like the human version of some two-week-old toast that's been left out in the rain. Not many of them exist any more, but most of the ones that do tend to linger around the stone lions in Nottingham Market Square. In 1992 they were big news. Some of them were genuinely homeless, but most of them were homeless as . . . well, I suppose as a lifestyle choice. They listened to The Levellers a lot.'

‘Who are The Levellers?'

‘They were a kind of pretend folk band for people who owned combat boots. They had names like Thrug and Sprout, and wrote this song which went “There's only one way of life, and that's your own”. Loads of people dressed identically used to punch the air and sing along to it at my local student nightclub.'

‘Ugh. Weird. But what do you mean? Like, how do you be homeless as a lifestyle choice?'

‘Well, for example, there was this girl who my mate John used to go to college with. Claudia, I think she was called. She lived in one of the biggest houses in Bramcote, which is like this pretty affluent suburb of Nottingham, but on a Saturday she would rub margarine on her hair, put on a combat jacket, attach the family terrier to a piece of string and walk around the Market Square pretending to be called Mucka.'