‘At least he hasn’t got his dick out this time. Nesta would die. How’s your bus driver, Liz?’ Jane tried to ask this lightly.
‘He’s not my bus driver. He’s all our bus driver. I mean, he belongs to all of us. And he says he wishes he was coming out with us tonight. We all look terrific, he says.’
Then the bus pulled away and Fran cried out, ‘Bless his heart!’
They started the evening off with a bottle of Bulgarian red in the graveyard just off North Road. Vince and Andy passed it between them on a park bench, wincing and taking the wine like medicine.
‘It’s cold and it’s rough,’ said Andy, ‘but it’ll get you pissed.’ He looked proudly at Vince and the way he had dressed him up. Late-eighties grunge, Andy called it, a faded tartan shirt left undone on top of a green fisherman’s jumper. Green faded, ragged jeans. It was as if Andy had set inverted commas around Vince’s one-time scruffiness and made it wonderful. They looked smart together, Andy thought; Vince all scuffed and slouchy, Andy sharp and made up like someone out of Depeche Mode.
‘I won’t make myself too ill.’ Vince glanced thoughtfully over the smog beyond the gravestones. ‘I’m going back home tomorrow. I’ve got all next week’s lessons to prepare.’
‘Oh.’
‘I can’t miss any more days.’
‘You’re sounding like a grown-up.’
‘Mm.’
‘Do you realise how much you’ve talked about coursework and marking and schedules today? You can’t help it. It’s already sucked you in.’
This, for Andy, was an outburst. Vince said, ‘It’s inevitable, I suppose.’
‘The old Vince wouldn’t have bothered. He’d have just told his class to write something nice about themselves or paint something. You’ve turned into a real teacher.’
‘Maybe I have.’
‘Just… oh, it doesn’t matter.’
Vince could sense that Andy was reining himself in. He was keeping hold of the bottle and picking at its white label, very bright in the gloom. Vince could feel the first of the wine fumes knocking about in his head.
Andy said, ‘But doesn’t it make you feel weird? Going back to the same school? Living with your dad again?’
‘Of course it’s weird. I’m treading water. Magnificently well, but I’m treading water all the same.’ He lit a cigarette so fiercely that it broke, gaping hot smoke in the open air. He threw it away. ‘I’m stagnating.’
Andy ripped the label off the bottle in one piece. That one point of brightness was gone, crumpled in his fist. ‘Do you think it’s a realistic thing to do? Coming back to Aycliffe?’
‘Probably not.’ Vince felt vulnerable in front of Andy, and uncomfortable, as if this was the final, impossible intimacy. ‘The truth is, I was scared. Scared of doing anything else.’
‘Thought so,’ said Andy simply. He said it as if being scared of the world and everything in it was an ordinary way to be. This annoyed Vince. It always had.
‘Anyway,’ Vince tried to change the subject, ‘I’ve never felt very realistic. But I did once think I’d end up doing something better than staying in Aycliffe. I used to imagine that I was being filmed during every moment of my life. I was acting out the part of someone else, called Vince, in a long, long film with no edits.’ Andy smiled at him, as if he was making it all up for his amusement. But when Vince thought about it, what he said was absolutely true. He spent years thinking that he was in a film. Every now and then the film would end and the credits would roll over a shot of him in some significant pose, the camera slowly pulling backwards into the clouds. He remembered once lying on his back on a hillside in Durham. From there he could see all the swamps behind the cathedral. He was eight and had run away from his dad, who was there for a bikers’ weekend. The helicopter shooting him backed steadily away into the sky as the cast list rolled upwards, leaving him just a speck in the distance. And he never got to see the name of whoever was playing ‘Vince’.
Andy said, ‘It’s no wonder.’
‘What?’
‘You are like you are. You’ve got the biggest and the most damaged ego of anyone I’ve met.’
Something in Vince flared up. How dare Andy, who spent his days hiding under a duvet, tell him anything about ego?
To Vince it seemed the only natural way to grow up, that very deliberate alienation he had practised. Andy was chuckling as though it was something sweet. Vince wanted to say it was just a way of making the world seem funny, even when it was hurting you. The world can be abrasive, but not profoundly disturbing. If you can regard it as a mildly off-putting illusion, then you can spend your time undermining and subverting that illusion.
‘Here.’ Andy thrust the bottle at him. ‘Drink the rest and start being less coherent.’
They wandered through the gravestones towards the jagged railings. As they did so Vince was thinking (although he never mentioned it, so as not to upset Andy) about planes in space. They were walking upright, vertically. It was too obvious to mention. Yet they were cutting diagonally across a dark field crammed with bodies lying on their backs, staring upwards.
He wondered what they thought about him and Andy, all those bodies. They would be as impassive as Andy that morning in bed. He as dead as they, they as alive as him. He made himself mordant, zombielike, Gothic, on purpose.
Here they were prowling an acre of recumbent forms, deliberately picking over those who, in a lifetime, would have been acutely aware of their own singularity, would have had worries of their own. Here they could no longer afford to be so choosy. They had thrown in their lot. Looking up in regret, maybe envy, surely with mixed feelings, these bodies couldn’t condemn love? Not when they could sense it so
