0.4

I mean, low-tech or what?

Still, of course it’s low tech, it’s a tape recorder. An old and battered relic of a time before digital storage and CDs; iPods and MP3s; memory sticks and SD cards.

At least it works. I wasn’t sure it would, it had been abandoned and left to rot in the cupboard under the stairs.

I kinda know how it feels.

Anyway, the tape player is old – it was made by Amstrad, the company started by that rude bloke off The Apprentice. Mum used to love that show. Even went through a phase of saying ‘You’re fired’ for a while when we did something stupid or naughty.

Funny the things you miss.

NOTE – The Apprentice

What was known – ironically – as ‘reality TV’. Entwistle in his paper ‘Manufacturing Nothing: Light Entertainment’ writes: ‘Afraid to see the world around them as a larger picture, people instead reduced their views of the world to the tiny, artificial windows they called “reality TV”. What is certain, however, is that reality played little or no part in such programmes.’

Oh well. I’d better get on with putting this on to tape; the story I have come back home to record. I’ve been making notes for weeks, jotting down the things I remember, the conversations, the impressions I had at the time, just so I could do this. Make this tape. Tell you these things in my own voice.

I’m doing it in the hope that someone will listen and realise that everything has changed.

Changed forever.

That the world they are living in is not the one it has always been. That there are a few of us left who can remember the way things were – the way they were meant to be.

Looking back is easy, but there’s a temptation to fill in blanks. I’m going to try to tell it as it happened to me, all in the right order and everything, without filling in any of the stuff I learned later. That’s why my notes are going to be important.

I’ve worked it through in my head and reckon that tenses are going to be a problem; you know, whether ‘has’ and ‘is’ should be ‘had’ and ‘was’, but the first set sounds better in my head because it’s how things were at the time, and not how they are now.

If that makes sense.

My English teacher would probably throw a fit, but then he’s probably changed too, and it’s my story anyway, so I’ll tell it the way that feels natural, the way that feels right.

I even know the way the story starts, the very moment it all started to change. The crazy thing that Danny said, that summer afternoon. And, yes, Dad, I’m taping over one of your Dire Straits albums. Something you should have done a long time ago.

01

When Danny Birnie told us that he had hypnotised his sister we all thought he was mad.

Or lying.

Or both.

The sister in question is a couple of years older than him and never struck me as the kind of girl who’d fall for any of Danny’s nonsense.

She had to be used to it.

She lived with him.

So she had seen his short-lived preoccupations with stamp collecting, and the difficult withdrawal from his Pokemon addiction. She was even used to his new obsession with becoming the next David Blaine, and the hours he spent practising with packs of cards.

She always struck me as the kind of girl who’s going to be a star. Some people are just like that. You know that they will, as my grandad used to say, land butter-side-up.

There was no way that Danny – who, no matter how hard he tried, would always end up butter- side-down – could have done what he had told us he had.

Danny’s face was pale and thin, with dark semicircles under each eye, and his hair was a dirty brown colour, tousled on top. He was small for his age. Heck, it was my age too – and that’s fifteen and a half, thanks for asking – and I was almost a full head taller than him. And he seemed to exaggerate that smallness by hunching his shoulders and bending his back.

‘You should have seen it,’ he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘It actually worked. I mean, I knew it could work, but still, I didn’t really think it would.’

He ignored our disbelieving looks.

‘I got her to relax. And I guided her into a hypnotic state. I didn’t even need to say “sleep” like they do on the telly. As I relaxed her, her eyes closed and her body went… sort of floppy. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d get her to do when she was hypnotised, to be honest. So I told her that she was late for school – it was well past eight in the evening – and suddenly she flew into a panic, running around, throwing stuff into her school bag and complaining about the alarm clock not waking her up.’

He shook his head.

‘It was priceless,’ he said.

He waited for one of us to say something.

And waited.

There was me, Simon McCormack, Lilly Dartington and Danny. We all lived down the same road in the small village of Millgrove, and we’re all roughly the same age, so we tend to hang out together.

We were in ‘the shed’, the bus-shelter that squats by the side of the village green, and it was one of those long, hazy summer days that seem to stretch out into something closer to a week. To local kids the shed was a place to meet up, hang out, practise some inept graffiti, and generally waste some time.

Across the green from the shed is the Methodist church, and next to that the combined infants and junior school that we all went to before moving to secondary school in the next village over, Crowley.

There’s not a whole lot to do in Millgrove.

We couldn’t get high-speed broadband yet and we were in the middle of a mobile-phone dead spot that meant you couldn’t get a signal within the village itself. We were one of the last generations in the country that didn’t rely on mobile phones, although there were rumours that a new mast was going to help us catch up with the rest of the twenty-first century one day soon.

There’s a tiny playing field where the older kids try out smoking and train for future binge drinking, so we tended to avoid that. Then there are the three shops – a Happy Shopper, a family butcher’s shop and a newsagent.

NOTE – ‘Happy Shopper’

A retail outlet whose name demonstrates the period’s love of oxymorons – phrases that contain contradictory terms. Other examples are: ‘Civil War’, ‘Reality TV’, ‘Constant Change’, ‘Military Intelligence’ and ‘Friendly Fire’.

The shed is pretty much in the centre of the village, near enough to the shops in case we needed supplies, and it has a roof in case of English summer rain.

Simon and I have been friends for years. In all honesty I can’t even remember how our friendship came about. Sure, we have a lot of the same interests and attitudes about things, but all that came later… I mean, it was revealed over time, so there must just be some… I don’t know… instinct for friendship that’s separate, somehow, from all of that.

Without the friendship we’d never have discovered the reason we were friends.

You can drive yourself mad going round in paradoxical circles like that.