49. The Bit Where The Writer...

... gives a speech to a character that explains the nature of the town very neatly indeed.

Chorus.

I guess this is the bit where the writer gives a speech to a character that explains the nature of the town very neatly indeed. So, huddle down with me. What do I remember? Being taught to drop kick by my dad’s mate in the pitches round the back of the YMCA. In school, I’d never been taught what a scrum was, like it was knowledge born to the Welsh like original sin, and I was put in second row and down I went and I kicked the ball back because I thought you had to win the ball had no idea the game was to push over the top of it or whatever – see I still don’t really understand – and the coach called it and we all stood up and he said who the hell kicked the ball and I looked around and everyone else looked around and we all shrugged and the coach looked angry behind his bushy moustache with red raw eyes and I was just thinking nobody fucking explained to me anything about this stupid fucking game but I stayed silent and played in-the-know and I thought about the time my dad’s mate taught me how to drop kick on the pitches behind the YMCA one afternoon when we went down there to watch Wales play baseball. My dad’s mates were all tradesman like him but for some reason he was the only one without his name on the side of his van. The others would all pull up at the football, at the Albion, at Kimberly Park, a fleet of transits, the rows broken up the odd raggedy arse estate car crammed with paint pots and stirring rods. The names: Burns, Needham, Davies, Davey, Cavey, Popham, Pritchett, on and on, but no Moses. Just white with rusty freckles across the nose grid. Every Saturday I’d stare out at them, final score on the radio my dad flicked on for me while he went for a shower before he dropped me home and walked over to the clubhouse. We lived over the other side of town then, in a the tin houses, two storey prefabs of corrugated metal looking down a knoll. Our neighbour was an old man, Mr Kreuger, and we weren’t allowed to walk across his embankment as kids even though it wasn’t his embankment it was owned by the council but everybody avoided it as if it was his. At the bottom of the knoll was a tree and a rope swing but we couldn’t go on that either because the Rosses put it up and they were mean, mean as fuck, and were the ones who had the untidy front yard over the way and sometimes had the police turn up and would be aggressive to strangers and didn’t like people using their rope swing even though it was just a length of rope tied to a tree that belonged to nobody. Beyond the tree was my nan’s house, the hub for the extended family. When she was gone, we moved, but I’m sure we would have moved anyway around that time. My parents wanted better schools for me, so that’s where we headed, the other side of town. Up the hills. That’s where the merchant houses were built in the nineteenth century, up there so they could sit on their porches and watch their money come into the docks. We went to a nice terrace on the edge of the Gaer, a pre-war estate with clean streets and white window frames. Other houses around there were either flats now or nursing homes. They were the big ones. We didn’t have a big one. We had a happy one, though, even though it took a while to get used to my bedroom looking out over the largest cemetery in the country with its weeping angels and towering gothic memorials. My grandad used to visit us in his little red panda, my dad’s dad, an ex-miner and piano player who brought me books like Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles which I read looking out over the gravestones, and my dad would play his Stevie Wonder 8-tracks and my grandad would play his Beethoven 78s. Just before my grandad died, when I was ten, I bought him a leatherbound copy of Moby Dick with horded pocket money, and when he died I kept it and read it myself which made it more like his parting gift to me and as I’d saved to afford it, it was like a lesson in thrift or economics or something leaning in to the value of great literature. After the funeral my mum asked why I hadn’t cried and I said because grandad was old and that’s the way of things. I mulled on my response and that night in bed I pretended to cry. I pretended to cry to myself. We played a lot of football in the cemetery behind my parents house – largest in the country, did I say that? – but it was weirder for a while because my grandad was there now, buried in the northern corner near the back of our house. When I was in Uni, for a while I was having sex with this Australian girl called Jackie (the least sexiest name of anyone I ever had sex with), and one night we were smoking in bed and she decided that was a good time to tell me she was psychic and had the gift to talk to dead people and that there was this old guy in the doorway and it was an old guy she often saw loitering in my vicinity and even though she was clearly fucking bonkers I put out the cigarette unfinished because it made me feel sad that my grandad would see me smoking as he’d definitely not approve. Perhaps he was watching me play football in the cemetery all those years, standing at the side of the clearing near the chapel wall we used as a goal (the architecture meant it had a perfect posts and crossbar for a five-aside). We played football and we were all half decent. Luke had trials for Sheffield Utd and ended up playing a few games for Cardiff youth team. But we got to that age where curiosity became a thing. Your vision opens up at some point. When you realise the world is not you, but you are in it. We noticed the older kids who used to hang out at the bottom end of the cemetery near the woods and once we looked down on them doing a Ouija board on a grave as the sun melted down behind them and I was immediately in their orbit. Looking back, it was half a summer, half of that, even. Half of that again. There was Craig, the group leader if there was one, the black guy who wore a bandana and showed me how to do a bicycle kick although I never got the hang of it because I couldn’t conquer the fear of landing on my head. There were some girls. The guy whose dad was foreman of the cemetery. A guy called Glenn who was funny and bright. The girls were Kirsty and Kelly and Christine and Kristy or something. Soft goths. They had cider. One Friday they invited us up to the locks where they met other kids the same age and got pissed under a bridge. First time I got pissed. I threw up in the dry dock. Glenn walked me round getting air in my lungs and then sent me on my way with my mates and I slipped in trying to tell my parents I was slurring because I’d landed on my head trying to perfect the bicycle kick but they must have known the score, smelled the score on my breath, because otherwise they would have surely taken me to casualty fearing concussion. We were just kids, and it’s hard to think about being ten years old, and looking up at these other kids who were sixteen or seventeen but at the same time were all we needed to see. I doubt we’d even noticed the gravestones before, noticed them for what they were. We never thought of the dead until my grandad was buried there. We were without superstition, and these other kids, Craig and Glenn and the girls, they came at the right time for the awakening. But then we were open to anything. You have to be taught that the cemetery is the porthole to another dimension – you are not born with this knowledge – a place where you can converse with the dead and they listen and everything is good. Gravestone as telephone. Yes, you learn that later. You witness death, it hits you, like it did Craig, he told us, when his dad died on lookout on the rail tracks, and suddenly you stop treating the headstones as goalposts. Then you come down the hillside, tumbling down the bike track, like Craig did, and you scream and holler with the tears welling up in your eyes, and the rest of us can’t quite figure out what has got him so upset but we know why he’s a mess but not why he’s having a go at us and why the cemetery is no longer a place to play football. For Craig playing football in the cemetery now was disrespectful to his father. Even though his father wasn’t buried in that one. Not even buried anywhere near us. And so we stopped altogether, or at least when Craig was around, although in truth I was out of love with it. I was in love with one of the girls. She had a small pointed nose and hooded green eyes and she was the most beautiful thing I’d even seen. I forget her name, but it was Kirsty or Kelly or Christine or Kristy or something like that. She would share her cider with me, sips mostly from her can, but then we used to unplug the lead letters from the tombs and suck on them, get high, our lips going grey and our teeth getting tacky like with coke. But I also got close to Glenn. He had been the quiet partner in the Craig show until Craig’s family tragedy and it all got a bit too reckless and Glenn stepped away from Craig an inch and we’d even start to see him turn up without him which was unheard of before. Craig was now stepping back himself, back from the open air and Glenn said he was spending more and more time at this other guy’s house playing Shinobi and smoking weed. Glenn turned up one evening with some of this weed. He’d been to the Shinobi house. He said he was still friends with Craig when someone asked him half as a joke but he didn’t seem to take it as a joke as he protested the basis of the question and he said of course they were still friends he saw him only last night and held up the cellophane bag of dusty dried grass like it was Medusa’s severed head or something. Here now we had different levels of playing it cool. Some were excited, some leaning back in the dirt like they were in the Velvet Underground having their picture taken. The girls were coolest. They always were. Always are. Glenn rolled a joined, meticulous like he’s watched in the Shinobi house although nobody showed him how to do it you were just supposed to know how to do it and not knowing, not having the original knowledge, was the uncoolest thing there was. Best to keep quiet and wait it out than say you can’t roll. Glenn rolled and it was tight at one and and loose and crimpled at the other, and soggy in the middle, but it lit and it stayed lit and was passed around. That first hit choked me up and I coughed like an old man for half a minute, but the second on the next pass was fucking wild and we slid off to giggletown. I wasn’t mayor of giggletown, that honour went to one of the other boys, but I was definitely like its transport minister or something. Rolling on our backs looking at the grey blue dusk sky hanging there over us like a tarp, one of the boys unpicking the spelling of his surname like it was a stand-up routine revealed to him by God himself. After a while Glenn started talking about the meaning life, how important it was to get out of New Port, how all of this, all of us, should mean nothing to each other as collections of atoms, but only as furniture in a memorialised experience, and then I clocked over his shoulder Kirsty or Christine or Kelly or Kristy was snogging one of my mates which sent a shiver down my spine, not because he was, like, eleven years old and she was, like, seventeen, and he had his hand on her boob and she was fine with it, but because I guess it was fine if Glenn was right about us being furniture and not people. But contemplating this I felt sick, and I went into the woods fifty yards or so to throw up as my legs went thin and knock-kneed and my heart beat kickdrum mad. I was sweaty. God, it was pouring out of me. Like the ephedrine. Yes, it was like that. The whitey, they call it. Because you go white like a sheet. I was trying to hold it together, but learned subsequently the only way back to living colour is the eject button, and best thing to do is find a spot, crawl to a spot, lunge at a spot, and let it all out, hope it doesn’t go all down you, then lie there next to the ejection for twenty minutes or so and you’re back in the game. Of course, best technique is not to indulge in the first place, but leave it long enough and a distant whitey becomes a symbol of distant weakness, and how you were once young and it’s like having bad mussels or something and the next time will always be better. I’d say, in my teens, smoking whiteyed me out around 72% of the time. This was the first. It was Glenn who found me. He said they’d all been out looking for me. I was glad it was him, because he’d straightened me up that time at the bridge when I drunk too much. But this time he sat me up on a rock – I guess I’d made it as far as the ravine which was as far as the green railings that separated the very bottom end of the cemetery with the park and football pitch the other side of the woods. I was floppy and sloppy but I was coming back around, things were no longer spinning and the trees were no longer bearing down on me in that way they had been, or seemed to be. Glenn straightened me up, said reassuring things low into my ear and ruffled my hair which I hated any other time because I was neurotic about it but this felt right and good and it sent tingles down my spine. He said I was going to be okay and this happened the first time and I was going to be fine and I remember I was just about feeling fine apart from the horrible taste in my mouth and then he kissed me. He kissed me right on the mouth and it was slow, or felt slow, and it felt soft and what I could feel of his body against mine he went rigid as if he was in pain and he stopped and pulled his head back and I don’t think I’d ever noticed how cold and blue his eyes were before and the way he looked straight through me now. I, for my part, was not sure what was happening, or what had happened, but I have never been in any doubt of what Glenn was thinking of next had there not been a noise in the thicket and the girl, the one I had a crush on, emerged from between two bushes and I’m not sure if she saw what Glenn did, but she at least sensed something there in that clearing on that rock and she looked terrified – yes, it was terror on her face at first – and then angry, and Glenn was up and past her and she went after him. I threw up again and that was that. Much better. Walking back, ice cold sweat down my back, I saw the girl I had a crush on scream-whispering at Glenn out on the path away from the others, and he was struggling to keep up with her, waving his arms, trying to explain himself or explain something and she kept saying that she wasn’t fucking stupid and she knows what she saw and I watched in the cool moonlight from the trees as he began to cry and she took his head in to her shoulder and he nestled it in her neck and sobbed all snotty and ugly and she told him everything was going to be okay and for all I know it might have been because I didn’t see either of those two down there ever again. I was disappointed because I really liked her. Even though I can’t remember her name. We didn’t see any of them down there again. That other girl, Kirsty or Kelly or Christine or Kristy, was probably too embarrassed to ever come back seeing as she’d snogged an eleven-year-old. As I say, all in all probably just a few weeks, and that’s what it took for those lot to realise they were too old for hanging around in cemeteries and they should probably go off and get jobs or go to university or something and grow the fuck up. At least that’s how I looked back on it. We just went back to playing football. And after a short period of what I can only describe as collective sadness, me and my mates went back to playing football with renewed enthusiasm and dedication and aggression, as if we’d become men and were ready for men’s versions of things. Not long after, I twisted my ankle playing football in school on the hardcourt at lunchtime and I hobbled off to the embankment that separated the hardcourt from the stream that separated the concrete from the playing fields and slumped rather depressed-looking onto the grass just wondering about how long this sprain was going to keep me from playing and the thought of missing out with my mates gripped me and I thought for a minute I was going to cry but obviously I held it all in but there were other kids on the embankment, ties loose, blazers and jumpers off, basking in the sun, reading, picking at the grass, girls talking about boys and boys talking about girls, boys and girls moaning about teachers, and all of them talking about music. One kid, shoulder length hair, tall, handsome but awkward, gangly, leaning back on his elbows with headphones pranged over his head, Walkman in his hand held upwards careful that it might slip out of his hand like a bar of soap. He looked over at me, maybe saw I was sad, and he leaned across, peeled the headphones back off his head and let them hang around his neck, and he asked if I was okay, and I rubbed my ankle and winced and said I had an injury. What are you listening to? I said, and he said Bowie and on seeing my blank face he came over to me and handed me the headphones. Mo, you’ve never heard Bowie before? he said with a winning mix of incredulity and excitement. And I put the headphones on and he raised a finger while he rewound the tape and we both sat there in silence for a moment as the football went on and kids bellowed and grunted and the conversations went on around us in the lush grass of the embankment and the hubbub of chatter and laughing and the tape stopped and he looked at me with those deep brown eyes of his. He wasn’t known as Vardaman then. He was just Lee. Lee Vardaman. The tape had whirred back to the start and he didn’t say ready but his eyebrows went up and he bit his bottom lip and I made a hand gesture for him to get on with it and pressed down that fat button and fucking hell if that first chord on the acoustic guitar didn’t come down and send me off and next birthday I asked for a guitar and for years after when I was stinking up the house smashing out Ziggy in my bedroom my dad would just suck it all up and smile and say my grandad would be proud watching over me now because he’d been a piano player, if you remember?