The Life of Lee (25 page)

How were we to know, without night-vision goggles, that we had in fact crawled into a giant, extra-itchy, skin-shredding pile of industrial-sized rolls of fibreglass? Before running away, I took a quick glance up at the huge illuminated hoarding on the side of the factory. It bore the name of a fibreglass company and a picture of a woman in a swimsuit waving at me as a boat swished past behind her at speed. But if she’d been where we’d just been, she would not be wearing that swimming costume because, like us, her entire body would be covered in angry welts.

Once the swelling had gone down, everything was forgotten and, of course, we resumed our night-time factory excursions – right up until the time we climbed into the back of a nail-varnish factory. Sitting amongst the barrels of varnish, we found that the waft of the fumes was highly intoxicating, drawing us in, making us see far more pleasant images than mere lumps, I can tell you.

My friend Don, for example, before falling over in a fit of giggling, mumbled that I looked like a giant rabbit with big goofy teeth and pointy ears. Out of my tiny mind, I slowly lurched around in the dark, much to the amusement of all the others. I’m told people laugh at anything when they’re well and truly varnished. I felt as though I
was walking on air, but they informed me three days later when we all finally snapped out of it that I was traipsing around imitating a spaceman, arms akimbo, taking giant steps for mankind and making lots of bleeping noises. As far as I was concerned, I was on the moon. But I think we all went on a little journey that night, a much longer trip than we’d anticipated.

We were all still there, as if sat round Pete Docherty’s house on a Sunday morning, when the factory clunked to life the next day. Someone with half a wit about him did shout ‘Run!’ But it sort of sounded like, ‘Rrruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnn!’

Of course, it was those incidents that brought us together. Just as an army unit must be first broken before they can be put back together, bonding them even closer, the same could be said of our group. We just looked out for each other.

Take the notorious Battle of Basildon. It had started out as a simple night out for a group of kids attending a well-known nightclub in Basildon. But that night would eventually lay the foundations of my personality – in solid, reinforced concrete. It was an occasion that I was made not only to pay for, but never allowed to forget. I truly believe it has been a major psychological driving force throughout my life and my career (if you call what I do any sort of career).

Even today, and probably for evermore, the events of that evening are burnt into my memory – because, when it came to it, I ran. I ran away, leaving my friends to endure a pasting so bad that one of them suffered a brain injury
and was hospitalized for months afterwards. Others were beaten so bad they looked like one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings during his Blue Period, or Mike Tyson’s sparring partner after telling him in a clinch that he had done his wife big time.

Running for it cut against everything that had been engrained in me by Granddad Evans, my dad and the kids I hung around with. It was instilled in me from an early age: you never run, you stand and fight, face up to whatever it is.

But I ran.

Not only was I racked with guilt, but I was made to suffer for it. I swore to myself after that incident that I would never run from anything ever again, and I haven’t – since then I’ve never ducked from any risk, any challenge, any fight, anybody or anything. There are always major lessons in life, and that was one of mine.

Anyway, back to the beginning of the story. It was ridiculous really to want to go to that disco, but when you’re a teenager, you yearn to be an adult. One of us got the news that a popular Basildon nightclub for adults was now holding a teenage night. Lots of clubs were having them. Thinking we might pull a few birds, the whole group of us dressed in our best stuff, which was then high-waistband trousers and DMs. We were bathed in so much Brut, the fumes could have peeled paint at fifty paces.

In addition, we poured gallons of talc into our underpants, hoping that if a bird put her hand anywhere near it, she would have the sweet smell of Johnson’s. However, it only resulted in a huge white patch that showed through
your trousers in the ball area. If you patted it, it would send a plume of refined talc into the air, creating a dust cloud so massive it could have blocked out the sun’s rays and triggered a new ice age.

We caught the bus and went on to the top deck. After all, we were teenagers and that’s what they do. There was the usual loud bantering between excited lads, and you could already feel the tension on the bus as we were venturing into hostile territory: Basildon.

Long before Wayne and I had arrived as kids in Essex, there had always been a rivalry between Basildon and Billericay. I found it odd at first that any time Basildon was even mentioned, kids you were having a perfectly normal conversation with about, say, marbles, would suddenly lose theirs. Boys as young as twelve would start snarling, ‘I fucking hate Basildon.’ As they vented their spleen on the neighbouring town, their fists would be clenched at their sides, all the while staring spaced-out and wide-eyed into nothingness, like those weird ankle-munchers from
Village of the Damned
. Then they’d just as quickly calm down and snap out of it, acting as if nothing had happened. ‘Sorry? What did you just say?’

No one knows what really started it, but apparently there has always been a history of fights and trouble between the two towns, both of which are made up from the London overspill. If you were in their high street and the kids in Basildon found out you were from the next town along, you were mincemeat. And if you happened to stumble into a pub in the middle of Billericay and one of the locals got even a sniff you were from Basildon, it would be only a matter of seconds before you were
dismembered and your body parts sold off for spares at one of the many local car-boot fairs.

Whenever the two towns came together, there was always trouble, so we lads were in no doubt that if anyone found out we were from Billericay, there was going to be mayhem. It was the equivalent of being dropped behind enemy lines. It would be even more galling for the boys of Basildon that our mission was to disrupt the supply of girls – in other words, to see if we could pull any. Basildon being a much bigger town than Billericay, they would have a lot more birds than we had. The trouble was, they had a lot harder boys there, too.

The bus journey only took half an hour, and although I had butterflies, I dared not let them show. As usual when nervous, I was playing the idiot and doing something stupid like making faces into that square hole with the mirrors in that the driver uses to keep an eye on the top deck.

We had a great night at the club. It felt so good to act all grown-up – although we knew we weren’t. We acted like men, hanging out, drinking the only thing they served, cherryade and Coke. We held our drinks as if they were gin and tonics in a plastic beaker and leaned against the bar, posing for the teenage girls who milled around the dance floor. Now and again we thought one of them might be looking up at one of us boys from under her heavily hair-sprayed fringe that was flapping up and down to the rhythm like a piece of corrugated panelling on a windy day. ‘She just looked at me … I think.’

What is it with girls and their fringes? They spray enough lacquer on their fringe to fill a skip, so that it
becomes a reinforced, hardened wing, a fashionable shield that hangs rigid down and across the spotty forehead, a rock-solid mix of frozen-in-time strands of stunned hair and chemical spray. It always looks like they’ve spent the morning in the prosthetics department of
Star Trek
, turning into a Klingon.

Girls couldn’t care less about any other part of their body or even the world. But the fringe – prepare to meet thy doom if you so much as go within a light year of it. And God help them if it rains. Even in a light shower, you always see girls make a sort of awning by cupping their hands and holding them just above the fringe over their forehead, protecting the all-important front bit of their heads, just before making the frantic, death-defying run from one shop to the other.

At closing time, we filed out from the club in amongst the crowd of teenagers, out into the street. We never pulled any girls – surprise, surprise – but we were still grinning from ear to ear, so happy that we’d had our first night out at a real club. It was just us, friends, all by ourselves; this, we felt, was going to be our gang for the rest of our lives. The mood was high as we skipped along the pavement, making our way to the stop just around the corner from the club to catch the bus back to Billericay.

But then everything started to go wrong.

After reaching the bus stop just off the main drag of Basildon High Street, we looked around and noticed that the street was strangely quiet. Somehow you could feel the menace in the air. Standing at the bus stop, we must have looked like a bunch of chickens waiting for slaughter.

It’s a strange feeling when all your survival instincts kick in; it shoots right up your spine to the back of your head, your legs go all wobbly and your face turns white as the blood drains away and mans the muscles like soldiers to the turrets at the ready.

I think it was Don who whipped his hands out of his pockets and looked up. He was a small, skinny kid and always reminded me of Jack Wild, who played the Artful Dodger in
Oliver!
He was the one who saw it first. ‘Watch out, you lot. Look!’ He nodded up the road and took up a kind of fight or flight position, leaning on the furthest point of the bus stop away from what was coming towards us. His head was darting in all directions, searching perhaps for somewhere we could run. The laughing and joking stopped, and we all looked at him. We could hear it in his voice, but we could also see it in his face – it was definitely something bad.

I spun around and couldn’t believe my eyes. A massive bolt of fear ripped through my body. I was frozen to the spot as we all watched a parade of what must have been the whole of Basildon’s teenage population gradually begin to fill the entire street. I thought for a moment that maybe we’d just missed a carnival. But no one was smiling.

They were big, small, wide, long, all shapes and sizes, their numbers at least four or five thick. Streaming around the building, the Bad Lads’ Army of Basildon just kept on coming. They were led, I noticed, by this one huge lump of a kid who marched out front like someone had just taken his toys away. His face was red with fury, but I couldn’t work out why he looked so angry. He walked
with such determination. Eyebrows narrowed to a point, it looked like he had just used a pencil sharpener in the middle of his forehead. This lad’s face had the appearance of a well-used claw hammer; in fact, I thought that young fella hardly had a head at all, just a huge fat neck with a couple of eyes pitched on the front of it.

The marauding Basildon street fighters filed around the corner towards us. The cool summer night air that had felt so fresh after leaving the club earlier had now became thick and hard to breath. I realized that there was no carnival, that this lot were here to make us the entertainment tonight. My heart jammed itself into my throat. Maybe it was doing what I was doing: looking for a way out.

If that wasn’t enough to get the bowels rumbling, from around the opposite corner of the building appeared another lot, easily thirty strong, maybe forty. The two crowds of kids marched onwards, merging into one big bustling group like some Chinese Olympic display team.

Now as one mass, they drummed a beat towards us at the bus stop. Then, as they got to a couple of feet away, they suddenly stopped. We stood there rooted to the ground, stunned at the long line of kids packing the whole width of the street. They were now so close to us, we could hear them breathing. All this lot just for us? It was as if the town had a special bell or a big horn someplace, like you see in the films, perched high on a tower made of bamboo that someone had run off and sounded, making a call to arms and bringing out anyone who was able to fight. It was as if every kid born in the last seventeen years had turned up for a reunion punching party,
‘For the good old days.’ I wasn’t sure, but I think I spotted a young Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

Their ranks contained kids of all different sizes, large, small, young and old. They’d even brought a few girls along as spectators. They stood at the back or out on the edges, chewing down on gum like cows grazing. Others were puffing away on smokes, cheer-leading and egging on some of the hard nuts to get stuck in.

‘Go on, Darr, hit that one there! Go on, Darren!’ When the boys in the group started edging forward, it prompted more goading. Various voices here and there in the crowd began picking out targets amongst us. ‘Hit that little bastard over there, Kev,’ said a voice. ‘Let’s ’ave ’em,’ shouted another.

One of the girls pointed at me: ‘You!’ I looked at her. ‘What you staring at, eh?’

I tried to answer. ‘You just said “you”. I thought you meant me.’

But she jumped back at me. ‘He’s staring at me again. Stop staring at me. Get that weirdo, Barry, get him!’

‘But you keep talking to me …’

Then hammer-head-flat-face fella stepped out in front of the crowd and bowled over to my mate Colin, a short, stocky kid with lively fuzzy hair combed into submission down each side of his head. His boyish face had a lovely button nose. Colin wasn’t considered much of a fighter at school, but this night would propel him into folklore because he was just about to launch himself at claw-hammer kid. It was hammer time.

It was a ridiculous conversation that started the whole thing off.

‘You ’it mow brovver last week, dincha, mate?’ the Hammer Head – the boy with the brain of a tool – ground out menacingly through his teeth. After listening intently, Colin breathed a huge sigh of relief – we all did. It was obvious this was just a simple misunderstanding.

Colin turned to look back at us. He smiled and flapped his hands around as if to assure us we had all worried unnecessarily and he would explain everything. So he turned confidently back to the hammer-head fella. I have to admit, I thought Colin did a pretty good job explaining: ‘I wasn’t ’ere last week, mate, none of us were.’