6.
When You Walk Through A Storm…
In 1984, as my adolescence raged with the potent
frailty of a rhino on stilts, I spied, with my myopic eyes, a
fragrant species which seemed to care little for the details of
the ‘trick’ in Phoenix. What kind of twisted creature,
I wondered, could potter through life without any knowledge of
how to get three ‘EXTRA’ letters on the first level
of Mr Do?
They were called ‘girls’, and it
was around this time that the familiar march up to The Annexe
for ‘O’ Level Art slowed to a slouch, as I lingered
at the wire-mesh fence beyond which They played Netball.
One morning, in Biology, a twinkly blonde girl
called Karen Swift raised her hand.
“Miss – what’s oral sex?”
Being one of the more approachable teachers,
Mrs Adams settled the giggles and invited Karen – and her
mate Gail Saltwell – to approach her desk, where she whispered
something to both of them. There was a pause, and then both girls
exploded into a horrified spluttering of “Eeeeeer!”s
and “Oh. My. GOD!”s and “Oh, miss. You’re
JOKING!”s.
I knew what oral sex was. It was when a shapeless,
greasy-skinned woman with too much blue eye-shadow used her head
to obscure the crotch area of a skinny, scraggy-bearded man who
did his best to look distant and dreamy. I was a naïve backpacker
on the blustery trail to young adulthood, and a hedgerow-sprung
copy of The Journal Of Love was my road-map.
Less confusingly, I was the feared overlord
of practically every video-game installed in every public place
within a 5-mile radius of my scraggy comprehensive…
Silver Coin, Tunstall – Mr Do, Mr Do’s
Wild Ride.
Pleasure Island, Hanley – Dragon’s
Lair, Star Wars, Track & Field.
Shipley’s, Hanley – Super Punch-Out,
Xevious, Discs Of Tron.
Chinese Chippy, Hanley – Carnival, Amidar.
Tunstall Chippy, Tunstall – Port Man,
Donkey Kong.
Odd Little Newsagent/Grocer Which Smelt Strongly
Of Curry – Galaxian cocktail.
So, there was Karen Swift, waiting for her chips
(Chinese Chippy), and there was I, safe in my own world, battling
away at Amidar. The cabinet screen was set at an irritating angle
which reflected plenty of glare from the chrome fryers and ovens
behind. It also made it easy to spy on the good folk waiting for
their chips, in between waves. So, I had a quick look at Karen
Swift.
She saw me first.
She was watching the game.
Watching me play the game.
This was such a profound clash of my two major
interests at the time that I almost lost a life.
Karen Swift, who knew what oral sex was, was
standing there and asking me how come I always managed to get
the bonus-screen banana every time. The pressure was strong to
chuckle indulgently and drawl something flighty and aloof. I managed
a shrug and a sniff and mumbled something like: “Just have
to follow the line back, don’t ya?”
She watched for a bit longer, picked up her
chips and, without stopping to invite me back to her house which
she was looking after for the weekend because her parents were
away or something, she left.
A couple of days later at school, Gail Saltwell
caught me on my own in the dinner queue and – a little too
loudly – explained that Karen “fancied” me.
Notes were passed. Mediators negotiated. In one of the most simultaneously
embarrassing and thrilling moments of my life, we were set up
to be in the (4H) classroom after school, one-on-one, while the
matchmakers peered in through the glass window of the door.
So, we did what, I imagine, fourteen year-olds
don’t do these days… Not very much. We went to see
Creepshow and fumbled and snogged to regulation – but, subversively,
on the front row. We went to a Roller Disco – yes, by Christ,
a Roller Disco. But I kept falling over. Luckily, so did she.
All of this meant that we were “going
out” with each other. Once it went overground (desks pushed
together, waiting for each other after school, shameless pencil-case
scrawlings - heart, arrow through it, initials on either side
of arrow), I gained the right to hover on the fringes as she hung
out with her girl friends. At one of these gatherings, I caught
the eye of another boy I vaguely knew. He had been claimed by
a Gothy girl who boasted of watching The Rocky Horror Picture
Show at least once a day. “Help me!” said his eyes.
“I am in purgatory. It smells nice, but I want to go home”.
And there was a brief, magical period where,
perhaps inspired by the Amidar moment, she willingly followed
me into amusement arcades and watched while I played. Dragon’s
Lair was the clincher, there. “It’s like playing a
cartoon”, I told her.
“Hardly. It’s more like negotiating
a restrictive, linear path within an independently generated cartoon
environment”, she thankfully didn’t say.
It was a time of glorious alignment –
I owned the arcades. I had a girlfriend who actually seemed quite
impressed by the ownage. My beloved Liverpool had won the League,
the League Cup and the European Cup. I’d finally convinced
my parents of the, um, educational advantage of upgrading from
16k to 48k. I had a friend whose dad owned a video shop and we
spent many a wholesome evening watching and re-watching Screwballs,
cheering at Bruce Lee films and freeze-framing the head-explode
bit in Scanners.
And then I went away for a few days –
to an ‘outward bound’ course in Derbyshire. On a murky
Autumn afternoon, my caving group lost the map and wandered into
a half-flooded tunnel. I almost drowned in a hole in the ground,
and that evening, I put Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffitti’
on the dormitory stereo and called my girlfriend from the pay-phone
next door, where she told me that she didn’t want to be
my girlfriend any more.
You never wallow deeper than you wallow after
your first break-up. My folks were sympathetic but unhelpful (Mum:
“Aww. I liked her”… Dad: “Plenty more
fish in the sea, son”). Friends dodged the subject, enemies
scratched and niggled – doing their best to keep the wounds
fresh.
One afternoon in November, I missed the mini-bus
which brought us back to school from the swimming baths. The rain
was pummelling down, and I had to dodge in and out of shop doorways
and take breathers under bus shelters. The route took me past
the Chinese Chippy and, well, I thought it’d be rude not
to dry off with a game or two…
I sploshed up to the doorway and sighed at the
cosy culture-clash of English chip-grease and exotic Chinese noodliness.
Turning to ask for the usual “portion of chips” (seven
ten-pences worth of change from a pound note), I noticed a technician
fiddling with the generic Amidar cab – which was shut down.
When he switched it back on, it had turned into Galaga.
He took the Amidar circuit-board and he put
it into a little holdall and he walked away, taking the pain of
my first love with him.
I didn’t think that at the time, of course.
I thought this:
“MustPlayNewGameMustPlayNewGameMustPlayNewGame…”
20th August, 2003
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