Playing Out Read online

  ‘But all the neighbours are here now.’

  ‘Except the Forsyths.’

  ‘They’d never… !’

  But I’d not put owt past the Forsyths. Last month one of them was up for biting off someone’s ear.

  At the moment, though, I’m still thinking about Andrew’s dad, even though I don’t want to, but talking to him just then, just when the party was reminding us of the seventies and all, well, it seemed sort of right to me. It brought lots of it back in a flash. Mind, faces round here have changed. Even the ones that were here in the seventies, they’ve changed. We’re all a good sight more haggard. Time’s been having its revenges and all our bairns—the bairns who in the seventies were in their polyester Incredible Hulk T-shirts and pigtails and played with Bionic Men and Sindies—they’re all grown up themselves now. And I mean, really, God knows what they’re up to. They don’t tell you owt.

  There’s a lot of drink at my party. The whole night comes to me in snatches and bits I don’t recall. At one point I’m drinking out of a paper cup for some bloody reason, and I’m sitting on the stairs with that Peggy, Sam’s mam, and all I can think is, but I never bought any paper cups! The party, Peggy’s saying, dead seriously—and we’re the best of mates by now—the party has run away on its own steam and we must be ready for anything to happen.

  Peggy starts some long, daft story about a baby left in her care since last Christmas. She reckons it fell out of the sky in a shower of feathers, but she’s more pissed than I am and, quite honestly, I’m starting to think that everyone at my party is bloody daft or mad. And suddenly there’s Elsie tottering out of the downstairs toilet, pissed as a hatter and clutching a bottle of Pils.

  ‘Hee hee! I’ve got the Lord in me!’ she screams at us on the stairs and she looks friggin’ manic.

  Quick as a flash Peggy yells back, ‘Ay, and I’ve had him in me an’ all and he was crap!’

  We piss oursels laughing and Elsie doesn’t get it, which makes it funnier. She staggers down me hallway and falls flat on her face. We cackle a bit longer, waiting for her to get up. Which she doesn’t.

  The next thing I remember sees us all sitting round Elsie’s cooling corpse on my Redicut rug in the living room. It’s past midnight and the music’s off now. Like a bloody vigil. Some bugger’s found me emergency candles and everyone’s sitting round Elsie’s body, watching Tom stooped over her. For some reason I’m the only one talking.

  ‘If we have a power cut,’ I’m saying, ‘one of you buggers is gonna buy me new candies. If I’m caught short in a blackout . .

  And then I look at Elsie, along with everyone else.

  We all look shattered, in our party clothes. No one looks as white as Elsie. She’s got an even dafter look on her face than usual.

  ‘I wouldn’t give her the fuckin’ kiss of life. I’d kiss me own arse first.’

  Yes, I know. I’m ashamed of it all now and all the lasses have reminded me of the horrible details. Mind, we can still have a laugh about it.

  I can see everyone gasping and watching Tom rub Elsie’s hands and breathe warm, foisty air into her face. Honestly, it’s better than the Paul Daniels show and Elsie’s that Debbie Magee, his tart.

  Then she’s got a pale-blue glow all around her and she sits up like a fuckin’ zombie.

  Whey, I scream liked I’ve never screamed before.

  That starts some of the other lasses off, who think I’ve seen something they haven’t seen. Jane’s nearly hysterical by the time Elsie has coughed three times in a row and started to sing in a really high-pitched voice that Ken Dodd song, ‘Happiness’.

  ‘Happiness. Happiness.

  The greatest gift that I possess.

  I thank the Lord that I possess the greatest gift and that’s happiness.’

  Then she passes out again and Tom cries out at the top of his lungs, ‘Praise the Lord!’

  No one round here’s that religious, so no one adds anything to that, only dirty Simon, Sheila’s husband, pipes up, ‘Are we all doing turns then? Cause we’ve got wor karaoke tape we could bring round for yers, if yer like. It’s a fuckin’ hoot.’ So they do and the party’s going on till dawn.

  Joanne and Andrew haul me up to bed eventually, while it’s all still going on. Through the floorboards I can hear Jane belting out ‘I Will Survive’ and then ‘Agadoo’ with Nesta and then she comes up with Fran to check on me and I’ve been sick on me dressing table.

  Apparently, before I fell asleep, I was crying and saying that I wanted Eric—me bloody boss!—inside me again like he was when I was seventeen and he was twelve.

  I’d never say that unless I was paralytic and I reckon I was because I never made it to the shop for work the next morning.

  THE FURRIER THE BETTER

  How was I to know she was married to the man who owned my lighthouse? Adele will never forgive me, but I had no choice. I was coerced. I was oppressed. But Adele won’t listen to reason. She of all people should sympathise with a pure and simple case of oppression. But still she won’t forgive me for doing what the wife of the man who owned my lighthouse made me do. After all, she neglected to tell me they were her parents.

  I wouldn’t care, but it was all Adele’s fault in the first place. She made me go on Kilroy with her for moral support.

  That began the sequence of events which culminated in the appearance of furry emerald crocodile skins on the bowed backs of every rich bitch in this country and beyond. Adele holds me responsible for all of it. Because of me she has even more high-street targets for her buckets of pig’s blood.

  But let me backtrack. Let me fill you in. I want to savour each fragment of my decline. At the time I was barely sensible. In my current penury I can take it much slower and convince myself that there really wasn’t anything else I might have done.

  Well. Here goes.

  Adele was my best friend and she campaigned. I was going to defend her immediately by saying she wasn’t your average campaigner with dreadlocks, Alsatian on a string and irony stuffed uselessly up her arse, but fuck it: she was. She was still my friend and, occasionally, when she could afford the train and boat fares, would come out to visit me at my lighthouse.

  It was extreme north. You know all those frostily exotic place names they mention on radio shipping forecasts? So exotic you could never visit them because you know for a fact that these counties, these regions, have no ground to speak of? Well, I lived in the thick of those. I was a small pinprick in an ocean of thrashing, icy chaos and I loved it.

  Boats passed by occasionally, passenger ferries which hunched their shoulders and nudged through the storms. Mostly Scandinavians off shopping for the day on Tyneside where things were cheaper. I’d be out walking on the wet black rocks surrounding my magnificent home and there’d be rows of bright blonde heads on a ship going past, waving their Top Shop carriers at me. They speak ever such good English.

  Would it be immodest to call myself, a humble lighthouse keeper in the middle of nowhere, a sex symbol? Well, it’s over now so it doesn’t matter. But those Scandinavians would wave at me. Hold their new frocks up over the ship’s edges, under their chins, for me to admire.

  And sometimes the ship would briefly dock and out would tramp Adele with her Alsatian and little haversack, come to stay a couple of weeks. Off the ship would sail again.

  All I saw otherwise was the fishing boats. I was meant to train my incredible lamp, beam its bluff ebullience in the fog for the fishers’ benefit. But those rude bastards always know exactly where they’re going. I was virtually redundant. Not that I would let on to the owner of the lighthouse. He thought I was being quaint. Only recently I realised that his wife made him keep me there. She was after the fabulous furred crocodile, well before I even became aware of its precarious existence. Me and my lighthouse: we were set up.

  When Adele came she would bring lots of booze, mung beans, vegan supplies, and a whole heap of pamphlets tortuously written by the permanently irked. There was always some
cause or other.

  On one visit she said to me, ‘I envy you being out here alone. Because you can hide your head in the sand from what’s going on in the real world. The horror on our streets.’

  Adele knew all about the horror on the streets. She gathered up money for marine life in shopping malls, sprayed paint—and latterly pig’s blood—at fur-draped matrons, and took Cup-a-Soups to prostitutes at midnight.

  I tried to point out that actually, I was doing the very opposite of hiding my head in the sand. Rather, I was right in the thick of it. I stuck my neck right out, in the wilderness, isolated in my splendid tower, and took what the world at its most tumultuous might chuck my way.

  She scowled. ‘And that’s very male. Stranded up here on your massive prick, you’ve no idea what the real world’s like.’

  I suppose she was right. On Kilroy I caught up quickly with what people were like. And it was awful.

  Your average television discussion programme is a hothouse. They trawl in the relevant punters, perch them uncomfortably under steaming lights and send in one ringmaster with his microphone and whip for an hour. It’s always uproar and he has to shout to drum up coherence and decent telly. Make the topic anything you like and there’s always uproar. Oddly enough, our show was especially loud. Furs get them hotter under the collar than most things. Teeth and hair flying that morning.

  On one visit Adele came skipping along the rocks to hug me, the ferry with its hoard of Norwegian shoppers flapping their goods and receding into the mist behind her. ‘I’m only here for a few nights,’ she exclaimed. She had hennaed her hair, I noticed, with too much tea. Because of the sea spray as I kissed her I could taste Earl Grey on her forehead. ‘Then I’m going back to the mainland and you’re coming with me. We’re going on the telly.’

  Years ago, before I elected to stick my head in the sand—or raise it above the humdrum clouds, whichever way you look at it—and before Adele was the kind of legitimate campaigner who gets asked to go on TV programmes, we were lovers in college. It was the sort of affair that no longer seemed appropriate once the years of glamorously damp terraces, Mexican rugs, alfalfa sprouts and piss-weak beer on a Thursday night were over with. Thinking about it, though, Adele is still in precisely that culture. She never left it. I did. After graduation I threw out my little Indian hat with mirrors on it, and my long mustard cardy with holes in it, and fucked right off. So maybe there was a future for us after all. Maybe that’s why she kept on visiting. We’ll never know now anyway. In a dank cellar somewhere in a university town this very moment, Adele will be lighting an incense oil burner and cursing my name.

  Which is Terry, by the way.

  And all of it because of the green furred crocodile.

  Furred to sustain it in the wild North Sea. It had evolved for itself a harsh winter coat, fur like that inside a kettle or the pipes lining the interior of my lighthouse. A tough, evil-smelling fur. God knows why they want to traipse about with it on their backs anyway.

  But they bought it. They queued in their thousands for a snippet of my crocodile, earlobe-to-ankle coats, even shoes.

  The first I knew of the crocodiles was when they went round murdering seals on the west side of my island. I did like watching the seals gambol, but they began to die off at an alarming rate. I found them strewn around like badly punctured, bald tyres. Poor things! I thought at first, ironically enough: hunters. But the dead seals’ little suits were quite buggered up in these attacks and a hunter would never do that. And then I thought: Jaws. Instantly I saw myself as Roy Scheider, alone with only an oar to defend me, Upping down the sinking ship’s deck into some ghastly, jagged maw.

  Then, with my golden telescope, from the top of my tower one morning, I observed the killing of the last few seals. Crocodiles. I could hardly credit it.

  They came in packs of five, like Woodbines used to, calling out to each other, it seemed, as they waddled up on the rocks, surrounding their pathetic prey. Who could never run fast, bless them. Seals lollop and attempt to bounce. Chuckling nastily, I was sure, the crocodiles herded them up and took a swift bite out of each. They did it for fun, it seemed, nonchalantly and with a distinct cool. Like blowing up a crisp packet and exploding it with a clap. Their armspan-wide jaws would clash and the seals went pop.

  I watched in, as they say, horrified fascination. The crocodiles were jewelled, and rightly proud of their hardy opalescence. Before each other they preened their shimmering, roughly coated skins and they shook their fur free of water, like dogs. Peering closer, I saw thick, matted green beards and disturbingly elfin ears.

  Resolving never to tell anyone about this spectacle—I didn’t want film crews making nature documentaries on my rock, drinking all my booze—I quickly rerouted my walks to avoid a confrontation with my new neighbours.

  On those rerouted, rather more alert and shifty walks, I would find the odd steaming heap of green shit. And tufts of moulted emerald fur. But I wasn’t going to let evolutionary anomalies chase me out of my home.

  I forgot about them—almost—until Adele arrived to ask me to go on the telly with her. I went out to think it over and took her Alsatian, Foucault, for a quick jog around the rocks. And one of the great hairy bloody things ate Foucault.

  ‘He fell in,’ was all I could tell Adele, proffering her his snapped chain.

  ‘But he can swim!’ she sobbed.

  ‘Yes, but there’s all-sorts in there,’ I said darkly. I was hinting broadly at industrial waste, knowing that Adele would understand and come out of her shocked grief with a habitual blast of righteous indignation. The loss of Foucault, however, was a terribly cruel blow, and I saw that I would have to return to the mainland to appear on Kilroy with her, just so she could get through this testing time.

  So, as we left my lofty home on the ferry, over the churning grey waters, I watched behind and toasted poor Foucault with a gin and tonic. I toasted my wonderful lighthouse also, sorry to leave it even for a few days. And below, I knew, beneath the frothy white wake our ship was drawing, the crocodiles were screaming with laughter. Underwater their outrageous hair would stand sinisterly on end, and they’d be pulling Foucault’s wishbone for a laugh.

  I was torn, I must say.

  Under the hothouse lights, when you’re going out live to three million homes, when it’s ten in the morning and everyone’s shouting themselves hoarse in a raucous carnival of vox-pops, you have to know where you stand. There’s no use if, when the man with the microphone comes your way to ask your opinion, you look indecisive and go, ‘Um… er… well, I can see both sides, actually…’

  There’s no time to be equivocal. Not on daytime TV’s fast lane. You can get run over by an outspoken member of the public quick as a flash. You have to be openly biased and play out your part. That involves being nice as pie to each other in hospitality and then going for the jugular on the studio floor. One bloke was telling Adele she was evil for chucking pig’s blood at people. That was when the camera was on him, but afterwards he was horrifically smarmy and waltzed her off to his hotel. And she had my tickets and wallet in her bag. That’s how I came to be stranded on the mainland, but I’ll come to that.

  I couldn’t be partisan. I was only there for moral support. I was sitting next to Adele but when they zoomed onto her for her opinion, she was incoherent with rage (she had just been called evil), and I got asked instead for mine. And I didn’t know. I went, ‘Um, ah… well…’ And everyone groaned.

  Does living at the top of a beautifully whitewashed lighthouse make you a weak-willed and irritating liberal?

  But I could, I could see both sides. When Adele was frothing at the mouth because they said she was wrong for attacking fur-wearers in the street, I thought, Well, she is a bit daft, really. That freezing day she was arrested for it, so cold that her blood iced over in its bucket, she threw it and someone lost consciousness. I couldn’t condone that, not even for Adele. Not on live TV.

  Nor, however, could I condone the ones they got
on to defend the furriers’ trade. A nasty gaggle of trumped-up scarecrows, jangling their bracelets in the front row like Jimmy Savile’s fan club. They all talked in measured, reasonable tones about their right to wear what they liked, about their rights as human beings to be tolerated. One of those in the front row was Monica. While the others ended up shrieking, losing the arguments and the phone-in vote, Monica remained as placid and sweet as a viola.

  On the monitors above us Monica’s forehead shone. She wore heavy dark glasses and her skinny neck stuck straight out of her voluptuous coat. ‘I bet it’s a man,’ Adele hissed when the camera went on her near the start of the programme. From where we sat we could see only the back of her head, but her voice rang out, defending her rights, filling the studio.

  ‘Do you wear leather shoes and eat meat?’ Monica asked someone dressed just like Adele. The other campaigner shook her head violently, looking ill. ‘Well,’ added Monica, ‘I bet you have a dog. I bet you have an Alsatian. Do I infringe your right to have a dog? How is your Alsatian different to my coat?’

  Beside me Adele burst into tears.

  I was comforting her and wishing I’d stayed at home when I saw that the microphone was being waved under our noses again. They wanted Adele’s sobs for public consumption. At last I was irked enough to vent a little spleen. I suppose I came on as exactly the kind of annoyed boyfriend that gets up any woman’s nose, defending his tearful girl. But what else was I meant to do? I said that Monica was a heartless bitch and I’d like to see someone wearing her.

  She threw back her shiny head and laughed fit to make the microphone feed back.

  ‘And another thing,’ I ranted. ‘You lot think you’re so smart with your bloody mink farms and leopard-hunting and God knows what, but where I live I see something unique in its natural habitat. Every day I see fur that you’d spit feathers for.’

  It was a hideous mistake. Monica stopped laughing and turned to look straight into the camera. Disconcertingly, she was smirking from the monitor right above Adele and me. Adele, too, stopped sobbing and looked at me.