Brooksy
By Jane Hyphen
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I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to Dire Straits but when one of those songs unexpectedly enters my consciousness it’s rather like a punctuation mark, it shakes you up, breaks up the day somewhat, it changes the pattern of your brainwaves. The dull, hard edged lyrics, the sublime guitar arrangements, there's not really anything else like it and it takes you right back to another time.
In my case this is secondary school. Nobody at my school listened, none of us listened to the teachers, we once locked our art teacher in a cupboard and laughed while she had a panic attack. We were horrible but that’s state schools in Birmingham I guess. And nobody listened to Dire Straits, nobody, but many were passive listeners, subjected to it on car journeys by their fathers and it became hard wired into their young, malleable brains. A group of boys in particular used to sing the lyrics, play air guitar to the riffs and laugh, take the piss about how much their dads love Dire Straits. It was clear that somewhere deep inside they loved it too.
One of these boys was called Brooksy. He was made of glass, slender and elegant with translucent skin like one of those Italian glass animals. He was so familiar to me that we could almost have been related, third cousins or something, maybe we were related, who knows, when you grow up in the same place as your parents and their parents, it’s not all that unlikely. We had the same sense of humour, we could get silly in front of each other quite comfortably. I was prone to getting to the extreme end of silly at times, Brooksy didn’t flinch, as long as we dealt in humour, our friendship was easy. However on serious matters we were awkward around one other and overall we were not close but we just had a sort of invisible closeness which only we knew about.
I remember an incident when one of one of the boys in class mentioned something about the occasion when Brooksy’s father, Mr Brooks was helping him build a bird table for Scouts and something went wrong and he ended up seriously injuring his eye. I observed Brooksy as he became very uncomfortable and obviously felt some sort of guilt over his dad’s eye. I saw during that conversation that he was quite vulnerable beneath all that humour and pisstaking.
Apart from our shared sense of humour my two main memory branches of Brooksy relate to Dire Straits and the story of the bird table and his dad’s eye injury. For this reason, for me, the sound of Dire Straits will be forever strangely affiliated with DIY. Not just ordinary DIY but in the vein of Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing, the music makes me think of woodwork perfection; immaculate mortise and tenon joints, dovetail joinery, faultless carpentry. It’s the music you play when you want to achieve some sort of godly engineering, some divine craftsmanship. If you were going to introduce some sort of artistry and embellishment, maybe a bit of carving then you might listen to the curvaceous tones of the Sultans of Swing. Although that could easily go wrong I think, those bends are sort of distracting, they take you to some sort of edge, you could be tipped off balance, an accident might occur.
The quiet bond I had with Brooksy was shattered when he and I were fifteen and he asked me out, he got a friend to do it for him over the phone. I wasn’t keen on his friend, he was a show-off with a stupid name, Julian, so my back was up as soon as I heard his voice on the phone, ‘Will you go out with Brooksy?’ I said no, ‘I like him as a friend but...no.’
It wasn’t the same after that, exchanged looks were tainted, the humorous banter between us stopped. I couldn’t have gone out with Brooksy because he wasn’t cool enough, I didn’t want to go out with boys I loved instead I wanted to go out with boys who were popular and trendy. We left school, I went to catering college and became an imbecile for a couple of years and then made up for lost time, gave up alcohol, got my head down, engaged in some self-education, learnt about punctuation, got a job, ‘Down in the tunnel trying to make it pay.’
I forgot about Brooksy almost altogether until his name came up in conversation some years later. My mother was talking about a family friend who was in my year at school and how he’d been depressed and hadn’t got over his mate’s death in a motorcycle accident. Then she said I might have known his mate, Brooksy. I muttered something sympathetic while something died a little inside me, the thing is it’s still dying.
Of course Brooksy would love motorcycles, he was just the sort of boy who would relish the relationship between man and machine and the freedom that comes with it. Of course being made from glass he was vulnerable. There was a sort of fate attached to this revelation which I felt somehow guilty for being ignorant of, it was as if I should have somehow seen it coming, maybe even stopped it. I wonder now what were his final moments like, was he speeding, was he drunk? Did he experience that same energy you get from listening to Mark Knopfler’s guitar arrangements while on his motorbike. That fired energy we all crave but we know it will damage us if we take too much at once. Did he take it to the max, take it too far, take risks, was it in some way his choice?
I’ll never know but now that my children are a similar age I feel so sad for his parents as well as myself. None of us expect, at that age for events to conspire in such a way that some of our friends will never get to do ‘The Walk of Life’. Sometimes I think he would have been such a better boyfriend to me than the ones I chose. Sometimes I hold his memory against me, feel his glassy body like a mirror and I can see myself, my own life and try and be grateful for what I’ve had.
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Da Da Da
Da Da Da, ich liebe dich, du liebst mich nicht, Da Da Da
Do you remember that one! & & &
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I'd ditch the first 3
I'd ditch the first 3 paragrapsh, but the rest is the walk of life. yeh, I found it funny my mate's dad like Dire Straits. Dirge I thought. But I was never into music. Brooksy made of glass. Doomed. Dire, I know, but brilliant.
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Some interestingly written
Some interestingly written musings, Jane. We so often know so little about people we have slight contact with, and looking back, we must have so often been shallow in our understadning of classmates, and we and they wanting to give an impression rather than share what we really felt or feared or didn't understand. As you imply at the end I think, seeing or hearing of a life cut short, makes you aware of what you have had and responsibility in its use. Rhiannon
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I liked the description of Brooksy.
Motorbikes are scary. Before we lived together my partner rang me to say he was in the road after crashing his in the rain. His leg was never the same. The person who fixed our windows' hand wouldn't work and he said it was from a teenage motorbike accident. A doctor who worked in A&E had since told him that whenever it rains they call it motorbike weather. He said whatever you do, don't let your son have a bike?
paragraph 4 has some repetitions?
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I know! He gave my son a long
I know! He gave my son a long lecture but it went in one ear and out the other. Son is more sensible than me on roads, but still don't think I'd be ok with him having anything except a tank. An electric tank, though
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Music can take you right back
Music can take you right back in time, not always in a good way
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You're so right about music
You're so right about music taking you back Jane, I experience so many memories with music and scents too.
I remember being at a house party back in the early 70s and feeling very depressed because everyone was with a partner except me. Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack was playing and it makes me want to cry each time I hear it...life is strange isn't it?
Your story must be so familiar to many readers. It was so sad hearing the news of Brooksy at the end, shows we never know where life will lead us next.
Jenny.
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Please share/retweet if you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Picture Credit: https://tinyurl.com/ycxnglst
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Beautiful and heartbreaking.
Beautiful and heartbreaking.
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This is our story of the week
This is our story of the week - well done!
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Congratulations - wonderfully
Congratulations - wonderfully written. The description of Brooksy as a breakable glass animal is beautiful and effective and a sad precursor. You've caught so well that thing that happens, when music at the time doesn't do a lot for you, and then later it captures that time so well. And maybe you get to appreciate the skill and artistry involved more. I also loved the reference to becoming an imbecile for a couple of years. Yep, I definitely ticked that one off the list!
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Great story Jane. Never
Great story Jane. Never really got Dire Straits! Did you know that Mark Knopfler wrote Private Dancer and then gave it to Tina Turner to record? Poor old Brooksy...
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