L Darts ch 10

Chapter 10

The Poet was standing amidst a jumble of his own making; his own
clothes, shoes, notebooks etc. He was like Kevin Costner in A Field of
Dreams. There must have been a baseball diamond under there
somewhere.

"Pants," he said loudly and with intent.

"I don't know," I said, looking around, "they could be anywhere. Why
all the mess?"

"No," said The Poet, "pants. Do you want to borrow some?"

I looked at me and I looked at Seven. We were still naked. As the day
we were born. I said pants would be a good idea and The Poet handed us
both a pair and we slipped them on.

"Hang on," I said, pulling out the elastic and looking down. "Are
these clean?"

"Are you kidding?" said The Poet. "The clean ones are going with
me."

"I told you," said 16, "he's going to Japan."

"That's right," said The Poet, bending low and then straightening
clutching an airline ticket pouch as if it were a torch and he was a
statue of liberty. "Two tickets for All Nippon Airways."

"All Nippon?" I said. "Hadn't you better start in one place? Don't run
before you can walk."

"Two tickets?" said 16, picking up on a salient feature I had
missed.

"Yes two," said The Poet letting out a banshee wail. He had started to
palpitate quite visibly. His whole body was beginning to blur with
movement. "I won them from a peel off label on the back of a jar of
teriyaki sauce. Two return tickets direct from London Heathrow Airport
to Tokyo Narita Airport."

"Two tickets?" said 16 again. He was pacing the room. He ascended a
mountain of socks. He descended through a ravine of ties. He stopped in
a ox-box lake of accessories and kicked snow from his heels. "I'll be
fucking blunt," he said. "Can I come with you?"

"Ah," said The Poet. His palpitations had been increasing by the
second and now they reached a boiling point. The whole room was
shaking. Seven grabbed onto a wardrobe door and his new dirty pants
slipped around his ankles. Pictures slid from the wall and crashed to
the floor. A slagheap of old shirts wobbled threateningly in one
corner.

"POET!" I screamed. "Do something. You're going to destroy us
all."

If anything, The Poet only palpitated more. Screaming did that to him.
I should have known. Ominous looking cracks ran up a load-bearing
anterior wall.
I thought it would be the end of all civilisation. I imagined the
headlines. "TODAY THERE ARE NO HEADLINES. CIVILISATION HAS ENDED." But
then 16 clicked his fingers.

"Shit," he said. "I can't come. I can't come after all. I've got exams
all this week. Mum would never let me go."

The Poet stopped palpitating.

The room was still.

Seven bent and pulled up his pants and I watched him, watched that
arse and I thought how lucky I was not to be in St Tropez.

"One ticket for me," said The Poet, as still now as a mouse on
vacation in a very still resort, "and one ticket for the south-east
Asian I'm bringing home with me."

"You're bringing one home?" I said.

The Poet nodded. "That explains all the mess. Don't you understand?
I've cleared out a drawer. I'm going to have a south-east Asian of my
very own."

16 put his head innocently on one side. "Do you think a south-east
Asian will want to live in one of your drawers?"

The Poet whooped with delight and leapt on the bed. He hopped from
foot to foot and whooped some more. "The south-east Asian will live
with me stupid. The drawer is just for his clothes. The drawer is just
for his clothes."

16's face went red and he turned to Seven, perhaps recognising a
possible ally. "Have you seen An Indian in my Cupboard? That's what I
was thinking. That little boy. He has an Indian who lives in his
cupboard. And a cowboy too I think."

Seven scooped 16 in his arms and lifted him onto his broad shoulders.
"It's a great film he said. One of the best."

"That's what I thought," said 16, beginning to smile. "One of the
best. An Indian in my Cupboard. One of the best films of all
time."

I looked at 16 and Seven. Then I looked at The Poet who was still
whooping it up on the bed. I thought suddenly that I was lucky to have
friends like these. Very lucky indeed. The world would never be so bad
if I was surrounded by such people.

We decided to go to the airport in Seven's car. It was a green Morris
Minor with a six foot fibreglass cucumber bolted to the top.

"I sell fruit and veg," Seven said as if this was the answer to a
question that hadn't been asked.

"Tasty," said 16, and took a nibble from the fibreglass tip.

"Hop in," said Seven, "but watch out for the lemons."

"Why?" said 16.

"I'm not sure," said Seven, "they're bitter about something."

We made good time to Heathrow and parked on the eighth level of a
concrete car park. The Poet, unusually for The Poet was very calm, as
if he was walking into his destiny and it agreed with him. Seven and 16
carried the bags and The Poet skipped ahead whistling a tune from an
out of style spaghetti western.

Inside the terminal it was all angular lines and whitewashed smiles.
Boards clicked like cards in the spokes of kids' bikes and people with
tilting heads stood in front of blinking monitors. We joined a
snakeskin queue and finally were asked with rhetorical pleasantness if
we had any firearms? Any explosives? Any drugs? Any hardcore
porn?

We disappointed on all counts and we wondered if The Poet would be let
on the plane at all. But the final question we knocked for six.

Do you have any hard fruits?

Without pause Seven talked at length of his fibreglass cucumber. Its
parturition. Its dedication to legume heaven.

And The Poet was handed a boarding pass.
Happy with ourselves at a job well done we set off. And it was 16 who
spotted them.

At a check-in on the horizon, under the lid of the evening sun, they
were standing like Bonnie and Clyde without the bullet holes, without
the elegiac camera angles. It was Captain Vegas and Leia Organa. Plain
as the nose on your face only not so Roman. We sidled up to them with a
round of cheesy grins on our faces.

"Leia's off to save the federation," said Captain Vegas, wigging his
hips with a distinct lack of his usual aplomb. "There was a message
from Chewbacca on the answer phone when we got home last night. I
couldn't make sense of it myself but Leia says she's got to go. It's
all a bit hush-hush."

I was used to Leia's hush-hush, the strange visitors in the middle of
the night, x-wing fighter pilots and so on, so I only nodded my head.
16, however, had something on his mind. He fixed Leia with a stare and
then The Poet.

"Darts," he said, "what about darts?"

I had forgotten about darts. For the first time in weeks darts had
been far from my mind.

"The team is shrinking and we haven't even defeated our first bastion
yet," said 16. "Not even a bastita."

The Poet fell to the floor.
A chunky guard from an airport security firm appeared from somewhere
and helped The Poet to his feet.

"Is everything all right, sir?" he asked. "You were on the floor." He
said it as if that was an unusual event.

"I forgot," said The Poet, ignoring the security guard, who it has to
be said was the least south-east Asian looking man you have ever seen
and so this was of no surprise. "I forgot. We've got a bye. Next week
we've got a bye. The team we were supposed to be playing have pulled
out. We haven't got a game for two weeks. I'll be back by then."

"Me too," said Leia Organa. "How long do you think it takes to save a
Federation? George W. Bush has been giving me tips."

"You see," said Seven, "you were worrying about nothing. Nothing at
all." And he scooped 16 up and placed him on his shoulders again.
It has to be said, although Seven was numerically less than half of
16, physically he was twice the size.

"Hoorah," said 16 from his lofty position and for once I saw him for
what he really was. He was just a seventeen year old boy who was a
member of a darts team. He was my friend. He looked out for me and I
looked out for him.
And I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

We waved off The Poet and we waved off Leia and then we headed back to
the Castro in the Morris Minor with its six foot cucumber on the roof.
We sang songs and we bought a pizza which we ate with our fingers.
Later 16 went home and Captain Vegas went home and Seven and I went to
bed. He told me more tales from the body of tattoos and I fell in
love.
I fell deeper in love.

It happened that night.

Like I said, it was like a bolt. I meant it.