Educating Peter (24 page)

‘Did you see that?' he said. ‘It was this really cool Jimmy Eat World shirt. Long-sleeved! One I've never seen before. This guy who looked like the kid from
Third Rock From The Sun
was wearing it.'

‘No,' I said. ‘I missed it. I was too busy trying not to run over that guy in the road.'

‘What guy in the road?'

‘That one there. The one lying down.'

‘Oh yeah. Shit. Is he dead?'

‘No. I think he's just passed out. You can see his hand twitching towards that can of Red Stripe.'

‘Oh yeah.'

‘He's a big fella.'

‘Yeah. I don't understand how people get that fat. I don't know why, but I never seem to get on with fat people.'

‘Perhaps that's because they're jealous of you, eating all those crisps but never putting on any weight.'

‘Mmm. I dunno. Hey. It was really funny . . .'

‘Hold on. This is a tricky bit . . .'

‘Shit. Did he—'

‘Nearly run into the back of me? Yeah. He did. Ridiculous, isn't it? Riding a bike when there are all these defenceless cars around. Very dangerous. Especially when you're giving a croggy to a goth girl.'

‘A what?'

‘A croggy.'

‘What's one of them?'

‘You know – where you have someone on the back of your bike.'

‘Oh. We call them seaties where we come from.'

‘That's a bit crap.'

‘No. Croggy's crapper.'

‘We'll agree to disagree on that one. Anyway, carry on . . .'

‘Yeah. So . . . it was really funny. One time when we were doing Physical Ed at school, there's this fat guy – Colin? – and I don't really get on with him, but Raf does, and it's so funny 'cos Raf starts using him as this human trampoline, and throwing this really small kid – Nero? – at him and he just keeps bouncing off.'

‘What? The fat kid was lying on the ground?'

‘No, just like leaning against the wall. But he still had a lot of, er, bounce.'

‘So why don't you get on with him?'

‘Oh, he said
The Crow
was a shit film.'

‘But I said that too, when I first met you.'

‘Mmmm. Yeah. I guess. But that's different.'

Outside Reading train station, the t-shirts, rucksacks and sleeping bags were queuing up around the block. Sandwiched in between them were some of the sleepiest, most starey eyes you could find outside of a hypnotist's convention. Surely it would take a week to clear all these people, and at least twice as long to rejuvenate their spirits. Some of them yawned, some picked unidentified granules from their armpits, some just stared at the vehicles on the adjacent road longingly, like eighteenth-century savages contemplating space travel. I felt certain that, in two or three years, Petter would be among them.

It suddenly struck me that I'd never seen queues this long – moreover, that I'd never really been fully exposed to this end of the festival experience at all. I'd always left festivals a little bit early as the result of an argument with a girlfriend, or a stolen wallet, or a stomach problem, or a Levellers headlining slot. In short: I was always a bit of a wimp. Now, though, I could hardly say I regretted it.

Slowly – because we were walking against the vast flow of human traffic – Petter and I made our way back to the festival site from our city centre parking spot. It felt odd, being cleanly showered in the middle of all this organic body paste, and I'm sure our shiny skin would have elicited funny looks if the punters travelling in the opposite direction had possessed the energy to dole them out. There was a pungent aroma in the air – a mixture of pot and potty – and to take my mind off it I indulged Petter in a game of Spot The Band T-shirt (Slipknot won). Part of me wished Roland was here: it had always been one of his favourite pastimes.

Now I might be speaking a little rashly here, having never cleaned up in the wake of a nuclear war, but there's nothing quite like seeing a festival site the day after a major rock event. Even a freshly evacuated Evel Knievel run could not have matched it for wanton devastation. Of course, it isn't quite so shocking if you've been
at
the festival and experienced the deterioration of your body in tandem with that of the turf beneath you. But Petter and I were thrust into this apocalyptic panorama straight from the everyday, sweet(er)-smelling outside world, and it hit us hard.

Well, it hit
me
hard. Petter seemed to quite enjoy it.

‘This is so cool!' he exclaimed. ‘They didn't even ask us to pay at the gate.'

‘Well, they couldn't, really, could they? I mean, what would they have said if we'd asked who was playing? “An old baseball boot with a hole in the toe, supported by an empty baked bean can with a dead Rizla stuffed inside.”'

It was remarkable what you could find in the wake of a festival. There were the usual festival leftovers, of course: the forlorn, dust-caked bucket hats, the torn-up programmes, the ripped sleeping bags. But, as Petter and I ventured further beyond the main arena and adjusted our eyes to the carnage, the objects on the ground became more esoteric, until finally we couldn't resist putting them into a top ten of unusualness. This process involved a small amount of disagreement, but eventually could be narrowed down to:

10. A tyre.

9. A Downfall box, empty except for a tiny toy squirrel.

8. An Action Man.

7. Two half-inflated footballs, sellotaped together, with eyeballs drawn on them.

6. Three brassieres, hooked together to form a wobbly triangle.

5. A crumpled picture of the American punk band The Strokes with a cut-out of Shannon Doherty's face pasted over the lead singer's head.

4. A Cabbage Patch Doll.

3. Many crushed cans of Stella Artois, arranged to spell the phrase ‘Talk to the hand 'cos the face ain't listening'.

2. A bag of cat litter.

1. A Teasmade.

You had to marvel at the decision-making processes that had brought these objects here. People frequently did surreal things at festivals and revived obscure items from their past – a case in point would be the night during the 1994 festival when, out of nowhere, the thirty tents nearest mine had all shouted, ‘Bob Carolgees and his dog Spit!' in unison – but that still didn't explain why, while packing his rucksack, someone would have thought, I know: I better take some cat litter. Because, well, you never know, do you? I didn't like The Strokes and I thought Cabbage Patch Dolls were hideous, but I still felt sad that they had to die here, defaced and unloved.

Unlike Glastonbury, which was held in a genuinely charismatic place, the Reading Festival site, without all the crowds and the noise, was an eyesore: a few very ordinary fields overlooking some even more ordinary car dealerships and a leisure centre straight
out of
The Alan Partridge Book Of Architecture
. It was all rather frustrating. Over the last few months I'd driven Petter through some truly beautiful, and sometimes spectacular, English countryside: he'd been over the Humber Bridge, he'd travelled the coast road to Hastings, and he'd hung out in a tree in Oxley's Wood. But it was here, of all places, that he walked around with his head up, breathing in his surroundings like an old-time country squire recovering from cabin fever.

‘Look at the size of that mixing desk!' he marvelled, as we passed by the main arena.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘The traditional thing at Reading is to say to your mates, “Meet you by the mixing desk.” It looks quite easy now, but at nine o'clock on a Saturday night it's virtually impossible. Also it's quite dark. You might think you've met your friend, but actually discover later that you've gone back to your tent with a forty-three-year-old Paul Weller fan from Southampton.'

‘When I meet Raf at the weekend sometimes, we say we'll meet each other outside HMV in the West End. But we always forget to say which branch and end up going to different ones . . . Ugh. What's that?'

‘I think it's some kind of bandage.'

‘But that's blood inside it.'

‘Yeah. Horrible. Weird things happen in this field. I camped in this one in 1994. A drug dealer unzipped my tent in the middle of the night and tried to sell me speed. Then the next night, me and my girlfriend had gone to bed and there was this creature outside talking to our friends. I couldn't tell if it was male or female.
It had this voice like someone had swabbed the inside of its throat with meths. Someone probably had. Later it fell on our tent and broke it.'

‘Weird.'

‘No. Just annoying, really. You see that? That's where they had the bungee jump in 1995. I remember one person getting up there and then not being able to go through with it. The whole site was yelling “JUMP!” at him.'

‘My neck's really sore.'

‘Why? You haven't been bungee jumping, have you?'

‘Oh. No. Just headbanging.'

‘Why do you do it, then?'

‘I dunno. There's no real point to gigs if you don't, is there? And it was Slipknot yesterday. It wasn't like I was going to stand at the back and not go into the moshpit.'

‘What do you mean, “yesterday”?'

‘They were here, on the main stage.'

‘You came here yesterday, to the festival?'

‘Mmmm. Yeah. My dad brought us here. Me, Raf, Zed and this girl – Caroline? My dad watched Slipknot, too. I think he quite liked them. But I think he liked Incubus best. He said so anyway. I'm not sure if he'd, like, put them on in his spare time or anything.'

‘Oh. Right . . . I see.'

‘It was really funny, yeah? Caroline had just got back from Thailand and she was still really jetlagged. People kept seeing her and thinking she was stoned. And then we were in the moshpit, and there was this
real mosher there, and him and Raf were, like, lifting one another up and then crowdsurfing. It was really violent. I've got such a cool bruise on my shin.'

‘What, so you camped and everything?'

‘No. We stayed at Caroline's auntie's house in Oxford. Caroline's, like, sooo bayse.'

‘So
what
?'

‘Bayse. You know.'

‘No. I don't know. What does it mean?'

‘It's kind of like what you say about people who are well off, but kind of dozey.'

‘Why didn't you tell me any of this before?'

‘What? About being bayse?'

‘No. The festival.'

‘Dunno. Didn't think it was important.'

‘I'm sort of surprised you want to be back here today, after seeing the real thing yesterday.'

‘No. It's cool. I wanted to see if I could find the patch where Raf was sick.'

‘Oh. Where was that?'

‘Just over there, by the burger stall. I guess someone's cleared it up by now.'

As we walked back towards the car, the crowd had thinned out slightly. A few stragglers sat on street corners, perched on empty beer crates and rolled-up sleeping bags, with the look of people who were waiting for something but couldn't quite remember what. I chose not to act on Petter's suggestion that we ‘give them all a lift'. I'd only just valeted the car, for a start, and besides, I was feeling slightly sore at my Nordically named companion. Whether or not he'd made a premeditated decision to withhold the fact that
he was a seasoned festival-goer from me was still very much up for discussion, but that didn't make the truth sting any less. It was ridiculous: I would rather spend a week living the authentic life of an Aberdeen Angus than attend another rock festival, yet there was no getting away from it:
I
wanted to be the one who showed Petter his first festival experience.
I
wanted to have seen him headbang for the first time.
I
wanted to meet Raf. Jealousy overwhelmed me and, in the car on the way back to Crouch End, I did something that no self-respecting adult should do in the presence of a fourteen-and-three-quarter-year-old boy: I sulked.

Sulking, of course, was a wholly pointless activity in the vicinity of Petter. Over the few months that I'd got to know him, I'd found that he was proficiently out of tune with my emotions. He'd never once asked me if I was alright, what I'd been up to the day before, how the sale of my house was progressing, or whether I'd recovered from my bout of laryngitis. I hadn't actually
had
a bout of laryngitis since I'd known him, but that wasn't the point: I still felt upset that he hadn't asked me about it. And now, as I silently negotiated Greater Reading's industrial sprawl, muttering only the most cursory ‘oh's and ‘mnngh's in response to his eulogies about Rammstein's new video and Raf's new footwear, I found that my brooding was having the exact opposite effect to its intended one. He was becoming
more
, not less, garrulous. He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

He was talking to me as if I was one of his mates.

I
was
one of his mates.

Clinically and beautifully, the truth stood up and made itself known. Metaphorically, I shook myself down and threw my funk out of the car window (my internal one, that is; my Sly And The Family Stone tape wasn't going anywhere). What did I think I was achieving by getting in a huff with someone half my age? What, precisely, was I mad about? Six months ago, I would have walked recklessly out in front of a double-decker bus just to avoid someone who looked like Petter. Now we laughed and joked together, shared bags of pickled onion Monster Munch, and knew the names of one another's best friends. I should have been rejoicing, not fuming. Here I was, lucky enough to witness a teenager – a slightly melancholy and spoilt teenager, but when all was said and done a good-hearted, mild, funny teenager – in the prime of adolescence, halfway between wanting to be like everyone else and wanting to be unlike everyone else. Sometimes I felt like I wasn't really close to him; sometimes I felt like my musical lessons went in one ear and out the other. But what right
had
I to be close to him? Who, in the end, got properly close to any teenager? Who, in the end, got any teenager to give them an honest acknowledgement that they were interested in Boring Adult Things? You only had to flick through the writings of Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith to realise that it was hard work. My initial Thunderbolt And Lightfoot fantasy might have transformed itself into a Thundergoth And Gordon Lightfoot reality, but I was doing okay. I'd kept him occupied, and that was a big part of Jenny's point in the first place, wasn't it? And now here was Petter,
in his element (‘element' in this case meaning cleanest AC/DC t-shirt and black nail varnish), and here was me wanting to see him more in his element, and that had to be a good sign, didn't it? I'd forced him into lifts with ageing rockers. I'd cajoled him up trees with folk-loving space cadets. I'd introduced him to a man in tights. Perhaps most fearsomely of all, I'd driven him around the outskirts of Hull. But he was still here, talking to me like I was more than some prematurely middle-of-the-road friend of his family who didn't figure in his day-to-day existence, and that fact alone was enough to make me want to reach out and pat him on the shoulder . . . or certainly enough to reach across charitably and turn Slipknot's ‘Eyeless' up a notch on the car stereo. So that's exactly what I did. And for just a few small moments, before I realised that, even mid-revelation, a hideous racket is still a hideous racket, and, seeing him looking the other way, sneakily turned it back down again, guess what?