The Life of Lee (28 page)

‘You are!’ Enid shouted before disappearing inside and slamming her front door. ‘Who else would talk to themselves like that in the middle of the street?’

She had a point.

24. Fairground Attraction

It would be another few agonizing weeks before I would quite literally smack into Heather again – with such force that I knocked her to the ground. I might have said that landing on top of her would be a very fortunate place to end up, but as we lay there in a crumpled heap on the grass, our faces just inches apart, it was embarrassing rather than erotic. The only thing between us was a crushed see-through plastic cup she’d been holding. Just before the fall, it had held a full half pint of coke, which was now taking the form of a massive patch down the front of her white dress.

After a few seconds on the ground, Heather’s eyes must have focused. I watched as her huge, ebony, saucer-like pupils shrank down into two pinholes as she realized who I was. ‘What the bloody … ? Oh no, I know you, don’t I?’

So how did we wind up on the ground, with Heather furious with me once more?

In the early eighties, the economic crisis was affecting most of the country. The local council in Billericay thought it a good idea to promote local business by staging a concert in a huge field at the end of the town called Sun Corner. There was a fair there, with side stalls and a disco that would start up later in the evening.

I’d made up my mind not to go, even though it was the talk of the town. Nothing like this had ever happened in Billericay before and everyone was really excited, but I needed to finish some college work. My mates had been calling, asking me to come out, but I was in no mood to go anywhere.

I’d endured months with no money. It didn’t make it any easier that my brother Wayne, who was now working as a hod-carrier, would every Friday sneak up behind me and taunt me by waving in my face the wad of money he had earned that week. He thought I would find it funny, but I was just feeling sorry for myself.

I had to make art college work, as I’d failed at everything else. If I flunked art school, there were few other prospects for me. It was at a time when if you went for any interview, there would a line of at least a hundred people also wanting the job. Perhaps they should have advertised for crowd-control operatives.

If I didn’t have a piece of paper with at least some semblance of a qualification on it, then I might as well have found the nearest scrap heap and jumped on top of it. Plus, at home I was made to feel as though I was lucky being able to do something that I loved.

Dad didn’t add to my confidence as he thought I was a bit of a drop-out. I think, if he’d had his way, I would have been working down the pit at the coalface like Granddad, who shortly after retiring coughed his way full pelt into an early grave, God rest his soul. I think Gran only buried him because she couldn’t stand the noise. I had to prove to Dad that I could make something of myself, even if it might be with a pencil rather than a pick-axe.

Despite all that, I’d managed to get a summer job in Scarborough, the North Yorkshire seaside town. After days of pacing our hallway looking at the phone, I’d plucked up enough courage to call Scott, who owned the Bell pub. I’d helped him by doing odd jobs around his pub a few years back when Dad was doing a summer season there, and he told me if I ever needed a job, there would be one at his pub.

So I’d called him up and he’d said, like a jolly game show host, ‘Come on down!’ Now it would be only a matter of days before I was in Scarborough. I was very glad. I was seventeen, and my loans had already grown so big, they had me round the neck and in a very nasty armlock, frog-marching me towards the debtors’ prison.

In spite of having less money than a Robert Maxwell pension fund, I was persuaded to go to the fair by a couple of my mates. Their tactic was simple: they refused to leave our front step unless I came out. I’d been working hard, so perhaps I did need a couple of hours off. Plus, they told me there was the prospect of winning a goldfish, and that was a challenge I couldn’t refuse.

It was my last dart. If I got this one in, I would win untold riches – well, the aforementioned goldfish, anyway. I was shaking and the dart was slippery from the sweat between my fingers as I took aim at the dartboard. It’s not easy to concentrate while being egged on by two mates and about sixty goldfish, all of them peering out from clear plastic bags full of water hanging up around the stand like baubles on a Christmas tree. You could see the poor things crossing their fins, urging me to save them from their
little watery penitentiary. If I could save one poor limbless aquatic creature from this polythene Abu Ghraib Prison, I would.

I threw the dart and we all watched its flight through the air: me, my two mates and all the fish, wide-eyed with optimism, mouths agape. I think I even saw a fish take a large gulp of water to calm its nerves.

Thump! In it went, right in the red. Yes! I would now be the proud father of a goldfish. I was going to be a dad! I decided on the smallest one, as I took that to be the youngest. That way, I would save more of the fish’s life. As the stall owner handed over the fish with a look of disdain, I announced to the world that, ‘Thou, o gold fish, shall from this day forth be known as … Torpedo. Or Torp, for short.’ Well, I wasn’t going it call it ‘Pedo’, was I?

I decided on a little celebratory fish dance rather like a dolphin when it rides along on its tail out of the water. That trick always reminds me of how Mum and Dad used to look every time the cheap carpet at our Bristol flat rode up and a large speed bump would appear spanning the entire length of the lounge. To flatten it, Mum would do a sort of Michael Jackson moonwalk across the carpet but with both feet together. I don’t think Jacko was in danger of losing his crown as the King of Pop.

As I held my new-found friend Torpedo aloft in his little watery bag and performed my now ever-more exuberant dolphin-carpet-dance, I quite literally fell head over heels into Heather again.

I didn’t see her coming as she walked with a couple of her friends behind me. So as I moon-danced, I thumped into her. The force of the collision knocked us both down
on to the grass. There we were lying together, her lovely white dress now sporting its attractive new Coke stain.

I said the first thing that came into my head. ‘Did you know your eyebrows look like two furry caterpillars kissing when you get all angry?’ I’m afraid that’s all I could think of.

‘Yeah?’ she snarled in reply. ‘Hang around and you might see what they do when I punch someone.’ I took that as a sign that she was still angry.

I looked up at Torpedo. Luckily, he hadn’t sustained any injuries in the fall. As the string from the bag was wrapped firmly around my fingers, he hung there looking embarrassed between our faces.

I looked at the fish, then back at Heather. ‘You’re not going to let a fish come between us, are you?’

‘Is he with you?’ Heather asked, spitting out grass and rolling her huge eyes.

‘Who are you talking to, me or the fish?’ I tried joking with her.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Heather tried to get up – she wasn’t having any of my nonsense.

‘I’ve just won him,’ I blurted out.

‘What are you talking about? Get off me, you idiot!’ Fuming by now, she looked down at the Coke stain, which only made her more livid.

‘I called him Torpedo. What do you reckon?’ I was desperate to keep her attention.

‘I reckon you’re a bit weird.’ Her face began to soften a little. She even gave a little smile. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was completely hypnotized.

But she soon snapped me out of it. ‘So!’ Heather
shunted me off her quite firmly. I rolled across the grass, still holding Torpedo in the air. I quickly jumped to my feet and tried joining her two friends as they bustled around her, brushing her off, but they gave me a look that told me maybe I should step away and perhaps jam my fuzzy head in the Waltzer for a while.

I didn’t actually join in this activity, of course – that would have felt wrong. Plus, I got the impression that if I’d tried to brush Heather’s dress, one of her friends would have seriously smashed my face in. So I contented myself with jumping around like a cat on a hot plate making all kinds of hand gestures and pointing frantically at bits of grass and dirt.

I was panicking. I knew I was out of my depth completely, but somehow I felt compelled to stay near her. Usually on such occasions, if I was within a five-mile radius of a girl, I would break out in a sweat, my acne would swell roughly to the size of the Pyrenees and I would begin stammering faster than a stuck DVD.

But this time I felt calm. I just stood there with my tongue hanging out to one side like a recently tranquilized chimp, staring at her. Blimey, she looked good. I’d never seen such a figure – her long legs seemed to go right up to just above her head some place …

I was interrupted.

‘Lee, come on, mate. We’re over by the shooting gallery.’ One of my friends had come over to get me, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I just had to stay with her.

‘Yeah, I’ll see you there in a minute – as soon as my brain starts working again.’ I spoke to him in a trance-like state. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked off.

My immediate concern was that I had messed up my chances with Heather. After all, I had been dreaming of this very moment for a month. Here she was right in front of me and, like a fool, I had made her angry. I was annoyed, frustrated at myself; I kept going over and over it in my head.

‘Can I buy you another Coke?’ I asked, without thinking, just for something to say.

‘Why? Do you want to throw another one over me?’ She held up the Coke stain on the front of her white dress.

I immediately went the colour of a ripe beetroot. ‘If I buy you another one then you do know, there’s a lot of sugar in Coke …’

‘So what?’

‘Well, look on the bright side …’ I had no idea what I was going on about. I was flailing badly, on fire and going down.
Mayday, Mayday!
But I did what I always do when I’m nervous – I just kept talking. ‘When your mum puts the dress in the wash, she’ll have free candy floss in her tumble dryer for a week.’

Her face changed, like I had touched a nerve. ‘Goodbye.’

She began to walk away. One of her friends hissed at me, ‘You dick-head!’ She spat out the words, shaking her head with derision and disbelief that I could have said such a thing. Then I remembered my friend Spencer telling me about her mum being ill and thought it must be that.

‘How’s your mum?’ I blurted it out with urgency, just desperate to keep her there.

Heather stopped and turned round.

Her two friends looked as if they wanted to slice and dice me, shave my head and drag me through the streets of Billericay as an example. ‘What have I said?’ I wondered what could be so bad.

‘She died,’ Heather said quietly, then turned back and went to join her friends.

I felt all the blood in my body sink to my feet and begin packing a case to leave me through sheer shame. I thought of collapsing into a heap, curling up into a ball and blubbering like an idiot. But now I felt I needed to redeem myself quickly. I couldn’t leave it like that. I reckoned by then I had nothing to lose and went for it.

‘Look, I really … I really like you – like, a lot, loads. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a month, not since I first saw you with all those feathers floating around your angry head.’

Heather stopped in her tracks and spun round. ‘I know who you are now! It’s been bugging me since I saw you.’ She began to scrutinize my face as I stuttered and stammered my way into a dark hole of shame. I could see the tell-tale signs of the dreaded caterpillars begin to rise up again in the middle of her smooth forehead. You could tell her mind was slotting me into place.

‘You’re that idiot, aren’t you?’

I carried on regardless. ‘I think you’re amazing – no, not just amazing, more than that, oh, bollocks … I’m really sorry, all right, about the bag of feathers. If it’s any consolation, I sneezed for a week afterwards – I had a terrible allergic reaction.’ I began to go into a mock sneeze.

But my words ground to a horrible halt …

LEE, EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! MUST … DO … SOMETHING … NOW!

‘I came out in errrrgh, lumps, eerrrgh, the size of space hoppers. My eyes looked like Alan Minter after a title fight. Look, my ears haven’t gone down yet. Just thinking about it makes me snee-snee-sneezeeeergh!’ I stopped fooling around and looked serious for a moment. ‘I didn’t know about your mum. I’m sorry.’

She pondered for a second. It looked like she was reappraising her attitude towards me and spoke softly. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. My mates are a bit on the defensive – that’s why I’m out tonight. I don’t really want to be, but they just thought I might need to get out of the house for a bit. They said it would help take my mind off things, you know.’

‘Well, I know a really good joke that’s guaranteed to take your mind off things,’ I said, changing tack.

‘Guaranteed?’ She smiled again. I noticed that when she smiled a tiny dimple appeared in her cheek. I instantly, directly and without passing go, fell in love – not just with her, but with that dimple. I could have quite happily run off to Benidorm with that dimple there and then.

‘Parts and labour guaranteed for three years. If the joke doesn’t make you laugh within three years or if any bit falls off it, you can ask for it to be replaced by another one.’

She laughed. ‘Go on then. And I hope no bits fall off it.’

She came a little closer. Her friends stayed where they were, but Torpedo looked interested, so I had a crowd.

I told her my joke, there in the middle of the field surrounded by hundreds of people, side stalls, generators, fairground rides and the noise of the giant disco in the field next door. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been standing in the speaker at a Led Zeppelin gig in a breakers’ yard next to a panel beater with physical Tourette’s. I couldn’t hear any of what was going on around me – all that seemed to be filtered out somehow. All I could see was her beautiful face, so innocently staring at me in anticipation of the joke that I hadn’t even thought of yet. So I did what I always do: said the first thing that came into my head.