Plot without a story

The note flapped through the letterbox and lay on the linoleum. I pulled open the door, just in time to see a denimed back sauntering up the street. She knew I wouldn’t grass and tell who it was.  I was in by myself, which was quite an achievement for family of seven, excluding mum and dad, who were also part of the family, in fact the sole reason for the family. I knew the note was God’s punishment for dogging mass, and it would be written in green ink and full of misspelled bile, because I’d one like it delivered  before only with better spelling.

I was being bullied from above and below. The note read ‘gie me a packet of Kola Kubes or ill tell everibodi that you own a Donny Osmond greatest hits album, Ppaper lace and Pilot’.

The threat was real enough, person non grata, if I could spell it right, the equivalent of not having a Zippo lighter handy, even if you didn’t smoke.  

My first thoughts were my second thoughts and I thought I’d caught her out because I didn’t own a Pilot album, because that top-ten super group didn’t have one. I’d merely pressed middle and index fingers down on the fiddly record and don’t record button of the chunky cassette recorder when Pilot’s January was playing on the tranny in September and hoped for the best. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially since the cassette recorder was latest high-tech gizmo that belonged to my older brother who was likely to cut your nose off if he caught anybody stupid enough to touch it, especially if it was me. The problem wasn’t him, not unless he was breathing fag smoke and stale booze at you, the problem was one Apollo astronauts faced, you couldn’t just press the buttons for take-off, you had to sit and wait for the right moment when the other person stopped talking in your ear. It was worse if that person was the Hairy Cornflake.

Cornflakes were a staple of every kid’s diet, including mine. If cornflakes hadn’t been invented it was perhaps fair to say that the humble potato would have no friends. And every morning I’d have been eating some variant of the the potato. It would also be fair to say that if there was a square go between the humble potato and cornflakes it would be touch and go. Cornflakes always hung about in gangs. Potatoes were bigger, thicker and sometimes didn’t wash much.

It would be fairly unfair to say the Hairy Potato didn’t have the same cachet as the Hairy Cornflake. And it was shorter than saying Dave Lee Travis.  He was the kind of annoying person nobody wanted for a friend and you kinda hoped he’d join the Hare Krishna sect and devote his life to annoying people, but being on the radio meant he was in your house every day and never shut up about Hairy Cornflakes.

Selective memory was the only memory I could work with as I hadn’t grown tall enough to grow another and if I just got it right and pressed the right buttons between the Hairy Cornflake talking about Hairy Cornflakes and Pilot’s opening bars of January then I’d own that song forever. But I didn’t know how Wendy knew this, as she hadn’t been there, but she did, picking up on my insecurities when I was waiting for life to begin.

In a world of ilks and oiks I was invisible and immortal before cramp from wanking set in on my right hand. I wanted to be on that shuttle to that new life, but was held back by having the wrong kind of hair, a nose like a horse, funny ears and feet. Clothes that went out of fashion as soon as I stepped into them didn’t help. Not so much as hand-me-down anoraks, but square shoes instead of sannies with three luminous stripes. Life without a re-dial button because you had to go to get change and go to the phone box down the street. The only thing I could cling onto was my self-esteem and my music, my Donny Osmond albums.

I knew where she would be, she would be dragging on a fag under the concrete stairs of the house next door, a gang hut without a gang, a hut without a hut, a bin shelter without a bin, but with Wendy in. If you held your breathe it didn’t smell of pish.  

The good thing about Wendy was she wasn’t Wullie. Wullie had bigger tits but was the better fighter of the two. Wendy had greasy dark hair and cultivated dandruff on the shoulders of her denim jacket. Her skin was oily as a bikers and her mouth made room for her teeth by leaving them hanging outside. But she made the most of it, learning how to grog between the gap of her teeth like a silent assassin.

‘You got the Kola Kubes?’ she asked flicking the dout passed me and into Henry’s back garden of waist-high grass and nettles, which were the same as grass only bigger and plants I didn’t know the proper names of.

‘Nah,’ I replied. Now that I’d been outed as a Donny Osmond fan I felt free to step forward and for the true me to emerge. ‘I’m pratted.’ I turned out the polyester pockets of my trousers to show her I wasn’t bluffing.

Wendy sniffed and grogged past my shoulder. I knew that was her thinking, but she did that kind of thing, even when she wasn’t thinking, but she was technically a girl and who knew what they were thinking, certainly not me. Her back bent as she took a step back into the dampness and gloom. ‘I’ll let you aff,’ she said, ‘if you gees a kiss’.

She wasn’t all bad, she had nice eyes with gold flecks. And if I squinted and applied the equivalent of dollops of tomato-sauce of the imagination I could maybe think of Wendy as being anybody but Wendy, perhaps being somebody nice. Then I ran out of imagination.

‘Nah,’ I said, ‘but I will feel your fanny, if you like?’