The Dark Alley Crew

In the summer, like everyone, they go to the theme park. They are best friends, and call themselves the Dark Alley Crew. That’s where they spend their break and lunchtimes, the five of them – in the dark little corner of the Maths block that four years of high school has pushed them into; it’s where they found each other – but today it is sunny and they are out in it, like everyone. There is excitement in the air: the early summer morning feel of going to the theme park that they all remember from their childhoods. The term is over, negotiated. It is the Easter holidays. Freedom.

Jonff is singing. He is singing Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ as they queue for Oblivion. The others watch as he holds an imaginary microphone up to his mouth, runs a hand through the long fringe that every morning he straightens – he denies it, but it is obvious – and reveals large circles of sweat at the underarms of his Power Rangers t-shirt. Emily and Peaky scream with laughter, pointing; Melon and Jess smile tightly and give out apologetic looks to the people who have turned to see what is happening. Jonff. He is the mascot of the group, its larger than life character, and people look at him with tolerant, weary expressions, as if they suspect some sort of joke. The name Jonff is new: it is not the name he has at school. At school he has always been known as Ginger (hard G’s). It was Jess, his best friend, or closest ally, since nursery school, whose persistence made Jonff stick. He grabs Jess now and mimes sex from behind. The others laugh, but reservedly, relucantly. Maybe what disturbs them is the fact that no one actually knows whether Jonff and Jess have sex.

‘That’s it,’ says Melon. ‘I’m scarred for life.’

Jonff pulls his fringe into place and says, deadpan, ‘You love it, bitches.’

The excitement of the morning builds, and sustains. The recurring jokes of the day are established, and repeated constantly – that Jess moonlights as a hooker; that Peaky's battle re-enactments are in fact dogging parties; the word ‘dogging’. They go on rides according to Jess's detailed itinerary, all the while keeping their eyes out for kids from school, but they see none, and feel lucky. Jonff goes into one of his silent moods: he stands at the back of them, hands stiff in his pockets, and looks blankly at the ground. Emily stands with Melon. She is always standing with him, looking up – she is short, and disabled in her left leg – and laughing at everything he says. If you went on his Facebook page, the first thing you would notice is how often she comments on his statuses and photos, and you would wonder how she can be so un-self-aware; but if he notices, it never shows. He is, in a way, the natural leader of the Dark Alley Crew, because he doesn’t look like he should belong to it. He has only been bullied once, really – when in year ten he wore white sports socks under his too-short school trousers, and Wiggy Jones threw him in the skip – but that was an exception, and here he is admired. He differs from the others in that he has friends outside of the Dark Alley Crew, but it is only with this crowd that he is truly wanted, and that is why he is here.

They go to lunch, and sit outside. They lie in the sunshine on a grass verge, surrounded. People come from all over the country to be here. They are the people of the schools of the country, and they have all experienced it, played their various established roles on the playgrounds of Britain. A Coke cup flies through the air and hits Jonff in the face; ice cubes rattle down the front of his t-shirt. A group of younger boys in tracksuits start laughing, revealing themselves as the throwers. They are the same kids who have been throwing Coke containers at Jonff since he was eleven.

‘I fucked your mothers,’ shouts Jonff. It is an odd thing to have shouted. He shouts it as if he is joking, as if it’s some obscure recurring joke that he has with these boys.

The others shrink back. All around them, there are parents with young children.

The boys stop laughing and walk over. The leader stops a few yards away and looks down at Jonff, lying there like a walrus in the sun. ‘You fat ginger cunt,’ he says, and then he runs off and the others follow, laughing. The words hang in the air. Only as they are walking through the crowd do people look away again, and resume talking.

It is not discussed again. They go to the Log Flume and do Nazi salutes for the photo, and Jonff is once more at the front of things. He seems to have forgotten the incident with the boys. Still, the excitement of the morning is gone. Feet start aching. Talk grows sparse. Emily gets slower, and has to sit at every bench they pass. There is not the same sense of possibility anymore, and they concern themselves with smaller pleasures to avoid queuing. They buy doughnuts. They watch a children’s magic show under the protective cover of irony. Jonff, already frazzled by the sun, goes on the electric chair and screams out to strangers in the throes of death.

The heat threatens to make the group – a new group, after all – fall out. Jonff starts calling Emily ‘Peggy,’ for ‘peg-leg,’ and Peaky shoves him, says ‘Watch it, mate.’ Jonff moves to the periphery, poisons the atmosphere with silence, but after a while it is forgotten.

The last ride of the day is the tea cups. The boys spin as the girls scream. Heads roll back, hair flies – they scream louder than they need to and it draws looks, but they don’t notice, or don’t care. They are together, separated in a spinning vacuum from everything else in the universe, and for as long as the ride continues they are winning, gloriously.

The ride ends and they climb out. Coming through the gate, having stopped expecting it, they finally see some faces they know. A group of boys and girls from their school. These are the ones that were always too remote: the ones with skin unaffected by acne; who wear the right clothes and wear them right; the Joe Taylors and Cat Wilkinsons who captain the football teams and host the parties. They look at The Dark Alley Crew and there are nods between boys, smiles between girls; they would never acknowledge each other like this at school.

They head home. They walk back through the park, talking happily about the day. What are they happy about? Maybe the sense, unconscious, that the world lies ahead of them. That they will face it all: marriage, children, work, illness – and face it like anyone else. It is over a year until university, escape, but they have stopped counting down now. It is two years until Jonff, alone in Newcastle and alone in the world, will hang himself in the bedroom of his student accommodation. He will be found a day later, and there will be no note. The rest of the Dark Alley Crew will attend his funeral, although by then they will have been out of touch for over a year. It will pull them back to the town from around the United Kingdom, but they will leave again soon, and soon lose touch. They will forget about the Dark Alley Crew, and life will begin.