Sweet Sorrow(4)

‘Nah, I’m going to get a full-time job, sir. I’ve given myself ’til September, then—’

‘I still remember those volcanoes. The cross-hatching was superb.’

‘Long time since those volcanoes.’ I shrugged and, unexpectedly, mortifyingly, realised that some switch had been flicked and that I might cry. I wondered, should I scamper further up the monkey bars?

‘But maybe you can do something with it.’

‘With volcanoes?’

‘The drawing, the graphic design. If you wanted to talk to me about it, once the results are through …’

Or perhaps not climb the monkey bars, perhaps just push him off. It wasn’t far to fall.

‘Really, I’ll be fine.’

‘All right, Chaz, all right, but let me tell you a secret –’ He swung in and I could smell lager on his breath. ‘Here it is. It doesn’t matter. Stuff that happens now, it doesn’t matter. I mean it does matter, but not as much as you’d think, and you’re young, so young. You could go to college, or go back when you’re ready, but you have so. Much. Time. Oh, man …’ He pressed his cheek winsomely against the wooden frame. ‘If I woke up and I was sixteen again, oh, man—’

And blessedly, just as I prepared to leap, Miss Butcher found the strobe light and jammed it down for a long, long burst and now there was a scream and a sudden surge of movement in the crowd, a panicked circle forming as, in the flickering light and to the sound of ‘MMMBop’, Debbie Warwick coughed and spewed magnesium-white vomit, splattering shoes and bare legs in a series of rapid snapshots like some hellish stop-motion film, her hand widening the arc like a finger pressed to the end of a hose, until she was left hunched and alone in the centre of a circle of kids who were laughing and screaming at the same time. Only then did Miss Butcher switch off the strobe and tiptoe into the circle to rub Debbie’s back with the very tips of the fingers of an outstretched arm.

‘Studio 54,’ said Mr Hepburn, clambering down from the bars. ‘Too much strobe, you see?’ The music was paused as kids scrubbed at their legs with abrasive paper towels and Parky, building maintenance, went to fetch the sawdust and disinfectant that were kept close at hand for parties. ‘Twenty minutes to go, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr Hepburn, restored to the decks. ‘Twenty minutes, which means it’s time to slow things down a little …’

Slow songs provided a school-sanctioned opportunity to lie on top of each other while still standing up. The first chords of ‘2 Become 1’ had cleared the floor, but now a series of panicked negotiations was underway at its edges as, courtesy of the lab technicians, a small amount of dry ice belched out, a cloaking device, settling at waist height. Sally Taylor and Tim Morris were the first to kick through the fog, then Sharon Findlay and Patrick Rogers, the school’s sexual pioneers, hands permanently plunged deep in the other’s waistband as if pulling tickets for a raffle, then Lisa ‘the Body’ Boden and Mark Solomon, Stephen ‘Shanksy’ Shanks and ‘Queen’ Alison Quinn, hopping blithely over the sawdust.

But these were old married couples in our eyes. The crowd demanded novelty. From the far corner, there were whoops and cheers as Little Colin Smart took Patricia Gibson’s hand, a corridor opening up as she was half pushed, half tugged into the light, her spare hand covering as much of her face as possible like the accused arriving for trial. All around the hall, boys and girls began their kamikaze runs, the suitors sometimes accepted, sometimes repelled and sent spinning off, smiling hard against the slow handclaps.

‘I hate this bit, don’t you?’

I’d been joined on the bars by Helen Beavis, an art-block girl and champion hockey player, tall and strong and sometimes known as The Bricky, though never to her face. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Lisa’s trying to fit her entire head into Mark Solomon’s mouth.’

‘And I bet he’s still got his chewing gum in there—’

‘Just knocking it back and forth. Little game of badminton going on. Pok-pok-pok.’

We’d made a few self-conscious attempts at friendship, Helen and I, though nothing had ever taken. In the art block, she was one of the cool kids who painted big abstract canvases with titles like Division, who always had something drying in the pottery kiln. If art was about emotion and self-expression, then I was merely a ‘good drawer’; detailed, heavily cross-hatched sketches of zombies and space pirates and skulls, always with one living eye still in the socket, imagery ripped off from computer games and comics, sci-fi and horror, the kind of intricately violent images that catch the attention of an educational psychologist. ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Lewis,’ Helen had drawled, holding some intergalactic mercenary at arm’s length, ‘you can really draw a male torso. Capes, too. Imagine what you could do if you drew something real.’

I’d not replied. Helen Beavis was too smart for me, in an un-showy private way that didn’t require the validation of book tokens. She was funny, too, with all the best jokes muttered in a low voice for her own satisfaction. Her sentences contained more words than necessary, every other word given a twist of irony so that I never knew if she meant one thing or its opposite. Words were hard enough when they had one meaning, and if our friendship foundered on anything, it was my inability to keep up.

‘You know what this gym needs? Ashtrays. Fitted flush at the end of the parallel bars. Hey, are we allowed to smoke yet?’