The Life of Lee (8 page)

‘I dare you to lick the end of this twelve-volt battery.’ I saw a kid do this once, and as his tongue touched both pins of the battery, one side of his body jumped and his face contorted as if he’d had a stroke. Still, he earned a huge roar of approval and laughter from the gathered crowd. In fact, he couldn’t wait to do it again.

Another time, when I was about ten, I was hanging around with some lads at one kid’s flat. His mum and dad had gone out, and he produced a can of lighter fuel. His trick was to stand in the middle of the lounge, fill his mouth with gas from the can and blow it out of his mouth into the path of a lighted flame. This would then explode inches from his face, making it look like he was fire-eating.

Someone pointed at me and dared me to do it, a challenge that I, of course, accepted without hesitation. This was typical; as a child, I had no idea about an obviously
dangerous situation. I was an idiot, a chicken brain, a banana head, a void, a dribbling dullard. That seemed to be my role in this world, that was my job. That’s why he asked me. He knew I was odds on to mess it up. There was the fun right there, watching Lee the retard set fire to his monkey face.

I happily let the boy holding the can of highly inflammable gas jam it into my mouth. It worried me slightly as I had no control over how much gas was being forced into my face. My cheeks filled out quickly and felt as if they were about to burst.

But that didn’t matter to me. I was more concerned at getting the laughs. The giggly mood in the room started to build as more and more gas went in and everyone gleefully anticipated what might happen to Propane Boy. I even began pulling funny faces, which was a defence mechanism, of course. I was, in fact, petrified, but luckily no one noticed. They seemed to find it increasingly hilarious as I sucked in more and more of the high explosives. Then a lighter was flicked on in front of me and a group of keen faces gathered in for a closer look.

That’s when I got all confused. Perhaps I got carried away seeing them all staring at me. It felt good. For once, I was the centre of attention. I was in with the crowd, not standing on the outskirts of it. They were right there, right then, my friends.

But I panicked and stupidly opened my mouth too soon. The gas ignited in a deep whooshing sound and, instead of blowing out, I sucked in. I felt the hot flame draw into my wind pipe and chest. My eyes widened, and I just stared, stunned, into space, unable to do anything,
frozen to the spot, mouth wide open, as I exhaled the blue flame and it wafted up my face.

Every kid in front of me dropped to the floor and rolled around with paralysing laughter, holding their stomachs in pain, as they watched first my eyebrows then my fringe singe and melt into powder. I was the Twisted Firestarter – but not in a good way.

Another favourite stunt was ‘The Jump of Death’. Finding an abandoned motorbike and making it work again was the hard part. The easy part was finding some poor lemming with the brain density of a garden sieve willing to lay down his life for ‘The Jump of Death’. That would be me.

It was quite simple. ‘Evans, you’re in “The Jump of Death”.’

‘Oh, all right then.’

Our proper, perilous, death-defying leaps were much more dangerous than Evel Knievel’s – he had it easy! It was all done behind closed doors, so to speak. A discarded door was dragged over and hastily raised up at one end on a pile of breeze blocks. That formed the take-off ramp.

Then, the bone-rattling, wobbly bucket of bolts was driven full pelt by some mad hormonal fifteen-year-old across the back fields towards the rickety door ramp. He would launch himself and the heavy metal rust bucket into the air and hope to clear the line of petrified kids who had been volunteered for ‘The Jump of Death’ and were lying on their backs beneath. The object was to add another kid to the end of the line after each attempt, and try to beat the record for the number of lads cleared.

That was great in theory, but everyone knew that in practice, when the bike eventually clipped the final kid, the next chosen numb-nuts to lie down at the end of the line was going to get a motorbike full of sump oil right in the mush. That would, of course, be me, as I was always chosen as the last mug in the line.

So I would lie there, staring up at the sky, tensing up as the bike’s screaming engine got closer. Everyone was just waiting for me to get it, but it was still an almighty shock to be on the receiving end of a darn good thumping from a trailing back wheel. As it brushed past my head, it left a skid mark longer than Lewis Hamilton’s across my face, much to the amusement of all the other kids either lying next to me in the line or standing around watching.

I was the only kid who never got a turn on the bike. After it had hit me, I couldn’t really see much. But my souvenir of the day was to go home and explain to Dad why I had a faceful of tyre marks that made me look like a miniature Maori tribesman. I was always the butt of everyone’s bullying, but at least I was part of the gang and wasn’t being ignored. A lifetime of feeling like an outsider had made me pathetically grateful for the attention.

So that was life with the lads on the Lawrence Weston. As you can see, scientists in search of proof of the Chaos Theory needed to look no further than the everyday existence on that estate.

7. Nanny Norling

We kids never had any money. But that forced us to come up with ever more inventive ways of finding it. We had a first-class education in the fine art of fund-raising as we spent our days and nights roaming the streets of the Lawrence Weston.

Len and Faith’s paper shop was part of a parade of local shops on the estate. Next to the paper shop, there was a small supermarket, then a butcher’s, and a fish and chip shop, which was a real cash cow for us kids as they would give you the money back on returned bottles.

We duly obliged by climbing over the back wall into the yard where they kept crates full of returned bottles. We would pass them over the wall to other waiting kids, then stroll round the front of the chip shop and, without batting an eyelid, inform the manager that we had a lot of returnable bottles. You could only do it once a week, otherwise the manager would get suspicious.

After getting the money, we would wait until just before closing, when we would go in and ask whoever was serving if they had any ‘scrackling’, which is stray batter that has fallen down to the bottom of the fryer and is dredged up by the cook in a huge spoon and kindly put in a cone of paper. They didn’t mind as it was only fat and it would normally go in the bin anyway. Then we would sit on the
wall outside, boasting to the other kids riding around on their bikes that we had not only made money that day, but also got a free meal.

Of course, a meal consisting of pure fat nowadays would be considered so unhealthy. Just looking at it, Madonna would scream in horror, collapse and shrivel into a steaming pile. But we loved it!

Across the street from the parade of shops was the Giant Gorham pub. It was certainly a rough place, but it had such an atmosphere that we’d get our entertainment every weekend by just hanging around eating crisps and mimicking the drinkers inside. We all sat there with the bottles of Tizer which one of the kid’s parents had bought us to keep us happy outside while they got pissed inside.

For us kids, it was really exciting sitting about outside until eleven at night, watching people struggle out of the pub with blood pouring from their noses! Every weekend the Giant Gorham would put on entertainment. The resident band would have to back anyone unfortunate enough to be booked there to entertain the mostly drunk and disorderly dock-workers. After the guest acts had either died on their arses or been dismembered and sold off for parts, it was time for some of the locals to get up and have a go.

We would sit in the car park outside, enveloped in the beery cloud that emanated from the pub doors, drinking, eating, listening and watching the huge frosted-glass frontage. Through that, we could see the wobbly outline of animated figures inside who were lit up by coloured flashing lights. Every week, the usual suspects would
climb on to the stage and have a go at singing with the band. It was not a pretty sight.

Then every now and then towards the end of the night, the doors would swing open and out would fall one of the locals, mumbling drunkenly and staggering up the road. For us, the big prize was Paddy. Paddy lived about a hundred yards from the pub and was well known to us kids as ‘The Slot Machine’. He would stumble out of the pub at the same time every Saturday, as his strict wife ordered him to be home by twelve.

He would crash out of the doors and stand in the middle of the car park, swaying and rocking, like a sapling in a tornado. As he tried to focus on the route home, he would suddenly be surrounded by us kids. In order to get the slot machine to pay out, you had to say the magic words to Paddy: ‘’Ere, Paddy, you ain’t got no money!’

To which he would shout back, slurring his words: ‘Ieeev goh looooaaads a mawneee!’

All the kids would then buzz about his legs like manic flies. He would wave his arms around in the middle of us, like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, trying vainly to swat us.

‘You ain’t got no money, Paddy, you spent it all,’ we would taunt.

‘I’ve got millions!’ he would rant, delving deep into his trouser pockets and pulling out handfuls of change to show us the evidence in his clenched fists. ‘See, you bastards!’ He would then hurl the change, spraying it right across the car park floor. ‘There, look, I’m loaded!’

We would frantically dive on the floor, fighting each other to be the first to get the silver coins. Paddy would
weave away off home to his wife to explain why he now had no money, leaving us like pigeons pecking away at the tarmac. We would huddle up to compare our riches.

Some of the kids would then run to a call box about fifty yards down the hill and with the change make random calls to people. I listened in to a call a couple of times.

‘Is that Mr Walls?’ they would ask.

‘Mr Walls? No, there are no Walls here.’

‘Well, what’s holding your ceiling up then?’ the boys would shout and put the phone down.

Well, we thought it was funny at the time.

Because we never had any money, trying to find something that might make us a few bob was a major preoccupation on the estate. If it wasn’t tied down, it was gone. And if something was going cheap, it would be already gone by now. Bob-a-job week was always extended to gissa-bit-more-a-job month, and a local character called Nanny Norling was just another way of getting in on some action.

An elderly lady, Nanny Norling lived in the very top flat of the block across from ours, and was to some kids a great source of income. I personally think she may even have been the first cash machine on the estate.

Initially, as a kid of around seven years of age, all I ever saw of Nanny Norling was her ominous, bony hand, the hint of her long, unkempt, grey hair that would wave wildly in the wind around her gaunt, ashen face, and the two small, pea-shaped eyes that would peer over the edge of her window box down towards us as we played beneath the flats.

Someone would notice her window open and, looking up, we’d stop dead still in anticipation as a hand would emerge and begin to be royally wafted around. It was a signal similar to the one they give at the Vatican when they have chosen a new Pope. This was our own, equally important, sign that there was going to be a major food drop.

The hand would retreat back into the open window and suddenly emerge again, but this time bulging with hard-boiled sweets. Then the palm would open like a claw-crane, letting the sweets cascade on to the courtyard below. We would watch them descend through the air, clucking away beneath like hungry chickens waiting for seed to drop to the ground.

We would run to the bottom of the flats, hands up ready to catch them, but alas, more often than not the sweets would smash uselessly into a thousand pieces on the concrete at our feet, rendering them into nothing but powdered sugar. It was the same with another food she liked to drop, fruit. The hand would come out, holding an orange or an apple. The hand would open and the fruit would drop. Even if you caught it from such a great height, it would splatter in your hands. But we still fell for it every time; it was as if we had been trained like chimps on a sort of ‘press-the-button-get-the-banana’ reward scheme.

Some of us kids knew that Nanny Norling was bedridden and so unable to leave the flat. Sad for her, but the advantage to us was that she always needed someone to make the trip to the corner shop for her essentials. So if her hand came out of the window and made a sort of
regal beckoning motion – well now, that’s where the real money was at.

When that happened, by God, the race was on. All hell broke loose – there might be five, six kids, maybe more, running up the stairwell towards her flat. Before you could say ‘The Nanny Bank of Bristol’, we would be banging at her door offering our services in exchange for some cash. It was mostly pennies, but it was still money.

I remember on one occasion, I was hanging around at the bottom of the flats, along with my brother Wayne and a couple of other kids, Tony and Alex, when Nanny Norling’s window suddenly opened and the usual little wave summoned one of us up to see her. We shot a look at each other, like gunslingers waiting to see who would draw first.

I had never been fortunate enough to go on a Nanny shopping trip, as I was one of the youngest and never had the strength or the speed to get up to her flat before the others. But on this occasion there were only four of us, so maybe, just this once, the odds might be in my favour.

I needed no second invitation. I was off, with the three other boys, suddenly realizing I had legged it, in hot pursuit. As I made it to the entrance to the flats, though, I was grabbed from behind and pulled back through the doors, allowing Tony, Wayne and Alex to barge past me. I took off after them, as they fought tooth and nail up the stairwell. Suddenly, Tony lost his footing and fell on the first landing and Wayne and Alex fell giggling in a heap on top of him. This was my chance. Stepping over the hysterical pile, I was suddenly out in front. I had to take advantage of my lead – I knew it wouldn’t be long before
they were on my tail. This was survival of the fittest, and I wasn’t that fit, so I needed to get a real head start.