Sean Happens 6

Miss Dill and Mr Martin weren’t speaking to each other. It had continued over three or four days. They sent out for takeaways and binned the cups and plates they’d used. Miss Dill routinely applied rouge to freshen her face. But she’d done something to one eye so that it routinely stared ahead and the other eye took time to catch up. She really was two places at once, and nowhere in particular. She fell asleep with a glass of gin still in her hand. An open-mouthed snore followed by a deep juddering rattle.

Mr Martin tried to keep a fresh-face on it when Sean visited. In a Pet-Shop-Boys’ T-shirt, he had dressed down. He wore a white baseball cap to cover the cut on his forehead after he’d fallen up the stairs. He made all the right noises, but they came out garbled. ‘The boy Gabriel is here,’ he said to remind himself or Miss Dill.

None of them seemed to notice, or worse, care, which wounded Sean. He wanted things to go back to normal. He’d come to thank them for the £1000 they’d put through his letterbox, mostly in fifties but with a few one-hundred pound notes.

‘Nobody ever gave me nothing but tuppence,’ his mum said. ‘Yeh’ll need tae go and thank the kind gents.’ She closed her eyes and opened them again. ‘I mean ladies.’

She hid the money from their dad. But he had shrunk and in stages retreated more and more to his room, drinking. He probably wouldn’t have noticed. The hot summer and the stink of dried vomit made him even more unapproachable. He said, ‘the walls and the floors had been moved and they’d need to check behind them for spiders’.

Mum said, ‘he was a waste of space,’ which made Sean feel strangely protective towards him.

The smell of oregano and sandalwood oil on the work surfaces in the Potter’s kitchen reassured Sean that things were back to normal. They’d got contractors in to clean and gut the house and everything was spick and span. It wasn’t quite the grand opening they’d hoped for, but they were more open than they had been.

But Mr Martin continued to sit at the piano in the extension away from them and play something mournful. The same notes rising and falling like waves to wash away their doom.

‘Just ignore him,’ Miss Dill winked. ‘It’ll blow over. He has these phases.’

She made them both a frothy, sugary coffee to compensate. With a sip, she declared it ‘delicious’. She waited until he’d taken a drink before she allowed herself to smile.

‘Head and shoulders!’ She ran her fingers up his back to reinforce what she’d said and whispered in his ear. ‘Then you’ll grow up to be tall—I don’t take to slouchers and grouchers—and be a beautiful man.’   

She’s added a sprinkling of thick chocolate cookies to a thin china plate and pushed them towards him—the kind he liked, but they were dry in his mouth.

‘Did I ever tell you how I met The Spider?’ she asked.

He took a sip of coffee to wash down the cookies before answering. ‘No!’

‘Well,’ cried Miss Dill, ‘I was a quiet and studious boy like you.’

‘The Spider’s father had something to do with Ronald and Reginald and both Krays were her godfathers. So The Spider took delight in wearing his own kind of uniform to our Kensington Grammar. The school head expelled him in our first year in 1971 and pretty much every year afterwards. He had ginger fuzz on his chin and red hair that was a scream. In his Levi jacket and bellbottoms, he tried to act taller by modelling platform shoes. He developed the kind of strut that would have got him a perfect ten on an ice rink. Tight shoulders and tight bum and his elbows flung out as wide as his chest. He was sex on legs.’

‘I watched him through the bars of the school playground strutting past. He always had a gang of younger guys in his wake. None of them grammar boys.’

‘All of the girls in school were as mad for him as they were for Marc Bolan and T-Rex. And he was just as exotic.’

‘It must have been obvious that I too was ogling him, because my brother said, ‘No way!’

‘The Spider gave us that withering look with the curled-up lip that he’d perfected. To be honest, I wasn’t as beautiful as I am now.’

‘I’m just having a good swatch,’ I’d said to Martin. ‘It can’t do any real harm.’

‘Sophistication was outside the school gates and out of reach. But eyeliner and mascara weren’t and easy to steal from the local Boots. I’d a chance to flee from boyhood and I grabbed it like I snatched girls’ clothing. I shed my glasses and let my hair grow long enough to have it feathered and cut in the style and colouring of Ziggy. I was a completely new person. The type of person who got expelled from Kensington Grammar even though I was academically their top student.’  

‘Everyone tells lies and embellishes their story. But this was a time when drugs were appearing on street corner and even in schools because they were associated with being cool. It was mostly hash and big talk. But there was speed, heroin and LSD for those that knew how to ask. That was me. I knew how to ask, how to beg. I wanted and needed a new identity.’

‘I’d been dogged with boys with bad breath and hair cut in short-back-and-sides, who wore Adidas Samba trainers and who were more scared of being caught with me than injecting heroin. I was hidden in that nasty dance and stomped underfoot.’

‘Those lumpy creatures with their Old Spice and voices that learned how to squawk but not how to use their cock kept score of the pretty girls. And I was the prettiest of all, but invisible until The Spider returned from List-D where he was getting forcibly educated. I must have been about fifteen. I could teach him world’s more.’