‘Summat like that.’ Vince was starting to feel daft, as if he’d given too much away. His ears were still ringing and he noticed that they had both slipped further into a broad Geordie accent. As if they were being bluff and easy-going with each other, but in those exaggerated accents there was also a guardedness, a put-on roughness that hadn’t been there an hour earlier when they’d both shrieked themselves raw down at the front as Bowie sang ‘Heroes’.
‘Here’s all the coaches bound for bad lads’ land,’ Andy said. ‘And they’ve left us behind! Bloody typical, that!’ He was soaked to the skin. ‘Listen. Next phone box we come to, I’m ringing Nanna Jean and she’ll book us a taxi for nowt. She’ll pull in a favour and get us in warm and dry before we know it.’
‘Smart,’ Vince said. Actually, he wasn’t sure if he felt he’d missed the boat at all. In terms of the Pinocchio story, he felt that, since the Blue Fairy was nowhere to be found, since she’d gone and never put him right, he’d gone straight from wooden boy into being a donkey. And in the meantime he had never been a real boy. He was cursed into being a doltish, lascivious donkey… Getting vaguely stirred up by the idea of maybe sharing a room with Andy in this nanna’s house. But he’d be happy just to talk to Andy a bit longer. Andy listened to what he was on about.
‘I’ll have to phone me dad, too,’ Vince said, as a box came into view. By now all the coaches had gone by and they were none the wiser as to where theirs had been.
The phone box stood opposite Marsden Rock. This was a rock the size of the Albert Hall, two hundred yards out to sea. In daylight you would see it swarming with a myriad irate seabirds. In the dark all you got was an impression of bulk and seething life. As Andy used the phone first and told Nanna Jean he was coming and bringing a friend with him, Vince shivered and stared at the massive rock, thinking that could be the bad lads’ island there. The place the lights went lurching and bobbing towards.
Vince was being smothered in a reek of perfumes. It was like being a kid again, slobbered over by one of his aunties. All his dad’s sisters made a fuss of him once his mam left home. But in 1984 they all upped and left for Australia, all five of them.
They married five Australian brothers. His dad had never approved, although it was still his dream to go out there some day to visit them. If he had the money he would be hard pressed to say which trip he would spend it on, Australia and his sisters, or the Graceland pilgrimage. When Vince was younger it had always been promised that his dad would take the pair of them on holiday when the time came. It never had. Vince added that lost holiday to the stock of things they had never done together.
He was standing in the doorway of Boots, under the hot gush of the fans, waiting for Andy. I’m really wallowing in the past today, he thought. He watched as Andy laughed with the girl who was serving on the make-up counter. Sometimes Andy could make anyone laugh. He was there buying makeup for himself, so he could do himself up like a Goth. He had explained to Vince that tonight they were going to the nightclub round the back of MFI. Flicks, it was called, although the fake scrawling of the neon logo made it look like Fucks. Tonight it was retro eighties night and, in Darlington, that meant a night out for all the town’s Goths, most of whom didn’t realise that they were being retro. They just liked the music and the dry ice and the Snakebite at a pound a pint.
Andy came back to the doorway and they left the shop. Vince was glad to gulp in the bus fumes of the main street. ‘So you’re dressing up as one of the Sisters of Mercy then?’
Andy nodded. ‘It’ll be excellent.’ At the moment he was in a Take That outfit, one of those cropped T-shirts to show off his stomach, despite the time of year. His anorak was cropped too and it had a fake orange fur trim.
Vince asked, ‘Can you get away with wearing make-up in Dario at night these days?’
‘Course. And I’ll look dead hard anyway. You’ll see.’
Andy was leading them towards Skinnergate, towards the charity shops. Vince understood that the days Andy was up early enough, he cruised the second-hand clothes shops. Inside his wardrobe there were the faint smells of face powder and strong detergent. An old people’s smell, Vince thought, that smell of second-hand shops.
That was what Nanna Jean’s house smelled like, late that night in 1987 when she let them into the hallway. It was from his Nanna Jean that Andy got all his second-hand habits. It was all waste not, want not with them. While both Vince and Andy saw their lives in terms of feast or famine, it made Andy scrimp and save, but Vince pissed everything he got into the wind.
‘Ha’way in, pets,’ Nanna Jean had shouted, lumbering up the hallway, showing them into the parlour, where the old stove was on. The place was full of heat and steam from fresh baking. ‘I’ve put some pies in for the pair of you.’ Vince stood uncertainly by the doorway. Andy smiled at him. ‘Mind,’ Nanna Jean said, ‘if I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.’ She laughed at herself and went off into the scullery to see to things.
She was a huge woman. The tiny dimensions of the house by the docks helped that impression, but to Vince’s eyes, she was a monster. She was
