Losing Friends

The Story of Sam Part I.

Our pasts are a river from which we are lucky to stumble, drenched and
nearly drowned. Looking back at my life I feel a great heavy sadness,
as if the weight of experience is too much to carry, the sheer density
of it slowing me down and making it difficult for me to move.

At the same time, though, there is a sense of surreal wonder, like
peeping into a fairy grotto or seeing the ancient magic of some
forgotten sight. The people have become characters, the events stories,
all suffused with the otherworldly light of memory, like souls in the
underworld, all lost in time, waiting to be brought back, waiting to be
given meaning.

I look back upon my teenage years and can see how different they were
to those of the people around me, how some of the things that happened
bit my skin like the sting of the lash. We may not like our past, but
it is something we may never escape, we are always the result of our
experience.

I was fifteen when it started. I went camping with two friends in the
Lake District and when we got back I didn't hear from one of them for
weeks. I kept ringing up his house but his mother would just tell me
that he wasn't in. One morning, about a week before I had to go back to
school at the end of the summer holidays, I got a phonecall from
him.

"Hi Mark it's Sam."

"Hiya! Where have you been?"

"My life has become something of a soap opera."

"'Cos we've been doing fine now, without you baBEE."

"I'm in a young person's secure unit. I took an overdose of pills and
took a walk down the quayside. If I hadn't bumped into a policeman I'd
be dead."

"&;#8230;Right&;#8230;"

I remember how the hallway where the telephone was suddenly seemed so
empty, the light freezing through the glass of the front door. Later he
told me he'd taken the overdose before he went out and washed it down
with vodka. He said he'd really wanted to die. He'd only just turned
fifteen, one of the youngest in the year. It knocked the bottom out of
everything for me.

Things that had meant a lot to me suddenly began to mean significantly
less. Losing friends shouldn't mean literally that.

Sam and me had too much in common for me not to feel inescapably bound
into this. It was almost as if a part of me had decided to commit
suicide. We were both subject to alienation, neither of us living up to
the standards of Newcastle manhood, both picked on and ridiculed, both
outsiders. Whereas I would never cry in public, unwilling to drop my
guard, Sam was easy to make cry in public as if the world overwhelmed
him, swamping him.

I'd know Sam on and off for five years. When I was ten my teacher at
the time told my Mam that the school I was at couldn't do anything more
for me, that I had a reading age of about sixteen, that I was far more
able than the people a year above me. He advised her to move me to
somewhere I could be stretched more. My parents followed this advice
and told me never to tell anyone why I moved schools. I suppose they
didn't want me to be conceited or start to act like a clever shite, a
charge they would level at me for the rest of my adolescence.

The decision was taken to move me to a school at the other end of the
West Road, about forty minutes walk away. While at my beloved redbrick,
multicultural, inner city school the primary emotion was encouragement,
an almost patronising joy that you were achieving something. At this
school the biggest part of the ethos was disappointment. Everyone was
always disappointed. Everything done wrong was always letting yourself,
or the school or your family down. It was the kind of school where your
presentation and spelling mattered more than what you actually wrote.
My primary school was a gigantic, sprawling, decaying Victorian
building, high ceilinged and filled with unexplained alcoves and dead
ends, the different layers of paint on the walls half a centimetre
thick, looking like a cracked gobstopper where it was chipped,
different colours of institutional paint like layers of an onion. The
schoolyard was surrounded by six-foot gothic railings that had somehow
survived being melted down for munitions through two world wars, the
streets around full of rubbish and redbrick terraces with backyards.
This new school nestled surrounded by it's green fields, squat and flat
roofed, all glass and cream brick with flowers along the front, set in
an area of bungalows and detached and semi-detached houses, the front
gate clogged with cars at home time.

I hated it.

I hated it so much I actually began to piss blood. Not great big clots,
just a thin stream of pain that sent razors through my penis and
stomach. I remember the misery of those pale blue afternoons looking
out the window and being told off, the dinner times of solitary
wandering, scuffing my shoes across tarmac while others played football
and ran about.

It was here that I met Sam first. Mr French, the teacher who I, seven
years later had the satisfaction of spitting on from a moving train,
sat me at a desk with Sam and a kid called Stephen Pratt who was the
son of a vicar and was plump and sandy haired and smelled of baking
bread.

On that first day my Mam told me she had cried her heart out because
they never even let her say goodbye to me before they whisked me off
along the corridors. I remember her telling me that night that all she
could think was 'what have I done to my little lad?' She spent the day
at my cousin Susan's, crying and worrying while I sat in that alien
classroom trying not to shake.

I can still feel that sensation somewhere inside of me, only just
contained, always ready to seep out and or break its shackles. Sat on a
plastic chair that would seem absurdly small now, dressed in a red and
blue Adidas tracksuit of the kind that came into fashion from Camden
outward years afterwards, blonde hair like a mat, face still chubby and
round, it felt like I was going to disappear. My body felt hollow, like
a cloud of smoke. Looking around the rows of unfamiliar faces doled
around the classroom I knew that things would never stay the same
again, that there was no stable past to remain relaxed in. Just a
little change and nothing would make sense, nothing would ever be the
same again. I felt so alone that I was prepared to do anything to be
accepted, everyone else knew each other, had done for years. Within
that classroom there was a vast web of shared experience that hung
across it, draped over everything except me, me outside not even
looking in.

I remember Sam then, the air of withdrawal, the feeling that beyond his
smudged glasses, behind his eyes, there was something else, something
beyond. I can hear him telling me about the snakes at the bottom of his
garden, at his first school in Bracknell in Berkshire. I hear us
talking about the possibility of radio waves travelling through space
and never stopping.

"Imagine a planet where the first radio waves have just reached, like a
voice from God, and the aliens there decide to structure their world
around them, making them into weird Victorians, still in love with the
Empire and the music halls because it's taken the radio waves that long
to reach them."

Same was bright even then but in a way that didn't translate into
school work, as if already his thoughts were too different, or at least
too difficult to fit into the strict middle-class aspirational
pettiness of the school.

After December Mr French put the class into sets, top, middle, bottom.
I was in top, Sam in middle and we stopped talking. Me, in my rush for
acceptance, found Sam too vulnerable, too odd. All I wanted was to fit
in and that was difficult enough.

It wasn't until secondary school that we drifted together again,
neither of us much different to how we had been, just more needy of
each other, of someone on the outside too.

I used to go over to his to play on his Commodore 64 after school. We
would talk about Twin Peaks on a Wednesday morning in Science. We spent
time together. He leant me D.S.M.III.R, which he stole from his Dad's
loft. We sat together in lessons. And then he was nearly dead.

Thinking back, the oddest thing was that it didn't seem weird at the
time. I suppose I was used to death and it's proximity after all the
other things that had happened or maybe I just knew that life would
never be simple. Regardless of the reason, I just incorporated the near
suicide of a close friend into my view of the world that was just
beginning to come into focus at that time. It seemed like the most
natural thing in the world to find out that a friend had nearly
succeeded in taking his own life.

Frighteningly my life just carried on. The day after he rang me I went
down to Virgin in town, walking across muddy moorland surrounded by
busy roads, a story grey sky above, to buy the new Carter U.S.M. album.
Sam and me had gotten into music together, ready for something to
validate our difference to everyone else. We would tape things off the
radio for each other, swap N.M.E. articles, have singsongs on quiet
evenings. Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine had been the first band
that we had fallen for, like a first love that would always have a
place in our hearts. From South East London, they sang about council
estates and muggings and dole offices, which I recognise as punk social
realist clich? now, but at the time it was revelatory. I sat and
listened to that album in the front room, looking listlessly at the
homework I hadn't touched for the entire six weeks holiday. I listened
to it on my Walkman as I walked through the empty streets at night,
only the occasional car for company. One of the songs was called
'Suicide isn't Painless'. The only lyric I remember is

"Suicide isn't Painless / It just hurts like fuck."

The Manic Street Preachers had just released their cover version of the
M*A*S*H theme tune 'Suicide Is Painless' that year, as a validation of
their position that suicide was every individual's right and also a
defensible statement. Carter U.S.M. had a long running spat with The
Manics via the N.M.E. and Melody Maker, saying that you can't make
suicide seem like an acceptable option, or a glamorous one. Jim Bob
from Carter maintained that stars have a responsibility to their fans.
Another song on the album was 'Lean On Me, I Won't Fall Over',
containing the words

"&;#8230;Stop punching walls / Don't cut yourself / Shift the burden
onto somebody else."

The music press had been full of photographs of Richey James from The
Manics, after he'd carved the words '4 REAL' into his arm using a
razorblade while talking to journalist Steve Lamacq, who'd doubted
their commitment and honesty. The photo, arm red with blood, the edges
of the wound showing through yellow, the look of achievement in
Richey's kohl rimmed eyes, had proved dangerously seductive, making
self destruction seem gloriously expressive and heroic.

Looking back Carter seemed to be saying that there was nothing pure or
glamorous in being fucked up, that the way to be was someone trying to
be okay. I suppose they saw it as their duty to stop people adopting
negation as a fashionable stance.

All of this seemed madly personal to me. I felt somehow responsible for
what had happened to Sam. I felt as if I'd let him down somehow. I
remember saying to him on the phone that we'd had such a good time
camping and then&;#8230; He answered that what he'd done had nothing
to do with anyone, not his Mam, not me, not his Dad. He said that he
just did it because there wasn't anything else to do. This made me feel
incredibly sad and redundant and I remember walking around in a daze,
gazing up at the sunlight as it filtered through the trees. I told my
Mam and Dad what had happened, that Sam had nearly died, as they sat in
front of the television.

"What a silly lad," said my Mam. "I always thought his Mam and Dad were
a bit strange with him. Oh that poor lad."

My dad seemed to think it was some kind of infection. "Look son, Ah
divvn't want to see you doing anything stupid as well."

"Of course not Da, Ah wouldn't even think about it."

"Aye, well y' better not either. It'd kill me an' your Mam if anything
ever happened to you and your sister."

"What made him do something so stupid?" My Mam said, shaking her
head.

"Don't know," I said before walking out of the living room then out of
the front door too.

I came home around nine, walking down the street on one of those
evenings between summer and autumn, had some crisps and finished my
Maths homework.

A week later IO went back to school as if nothing had happened, inching
slowly down the street toward the ugly, square lumpen building, coarse
shouts and braying laughter floating around me, everyone still in last
years shirts and trousers, hurriedly putting on ties or hurriedly
taking them off depending. Lost first years, trainers new and bags
unscuffed, looked around them like meercats. Abuse and greetings mixed
in the air where the first Autumn leaves were already being blown,
along with sweet wrappers and fag packets.

Over the weeks that followed people asked where Sam was and I lied that
he was sick in hospital, not telling anyone what had happened. All the
teachers knew and parried the questions too. In some lessons I sat all
alone, a Sam sized hole next to me. Although all of this felt strange,
at no time did I feel like this shouldn't be happening, like something
was wrong with the world, the way things were turning out. At the time
it seemed a perfectly normal life for a fifteen-year-old, nothing out
of the ordinary.

About a week after I went back to school Sam rang, asking me whether I
wanted to go to the climbing wall at Eldon Square with him and his Dad.
I sort of squirmed, uncomfortable because I hadn't seen him since The
Lake District and I also hadn't met his Dad before. I was still
crushingly shy at that age, and frightened of new situations that I was
obligated to.

"On come on man," he said over the phone, his accent neutral, still not
having picked up a Geordie accent after all his time here.

"Well, Ah suppose so."

"It'll be good man, y'know. I'm only out for the weekend, staying at my
Dad's in Darlington."

"That'll be nice for you."

"Well, y'know, I get to drink and stuff. It was dead funny watching my
Dad get pissed with his girlfriend. Him and his girlfriend had a couple
of bottles of wine and he was stroking the bottle and singing to it,
telling it how much he loved it. I was fucking pissing myself."

"How's life inside?

"Well, y'know, it's okay. It's okay."

Only later did he begin to discuss his experiences 'on the inside' I
remember sitting nervous, fidgeting in the living room, the first bars
of the 'Look North' theme tune booming from the television, the family
in silence as my Dad ate his tea, the smell of fish fingers and brown
chips and salt. The living room always had to be silent while my dad
watched the news after he got in from work, or he would his, teeth
gritted "Let us eat me tea, man." It was like he needed at least a
couple of hours grace to adjust to not being at work.

Sat on the edge of the sofa, glancing covetously out of the corner of
my eye at my Dad's chip sandwich, slathered in tomato sauce, the ring
of the doorbell still made me jump.

"That'll be Sam," said my mother sipping a cup of tea, forearms red,
permed hair beginning to recede around the temples, face weathered. I
just sat there, a strange sense of nausea in my stomach. What would I
say? Would he be different, altered? I was scared of being awkward, not
knowing what to say, scared that it would be a different person
standing on the doorstep.

"Well go on then, divvn't keep him waiting", said my Dad in the
strange, authoritarian way he could lend to even the simplest sentence.
"Go on man!"

My Dad had a way of talking that made it seem as if no one could ever
do anything quickly enough for him, like the whole world was
lazy.

"Yeah, yeah alright I'm going." I stood up and could feel my father
bristling behind me. My mother picked up a pile of ten pence's from the
mantelpiece next to her chair, holding them out in the palm of her
hand.

"There you go son. Get yourself a drink or something afterwards."

The porch in front of our house had about a foots height above the car
length driveway, and I opened the door to find myself looking down at
my friend as he hopped from foot to foot on the metal foot wiping
grill, framed against the already cold and dark air.

He looked the same. He looked exactly the same, face still dusted with
acne, hair still dirty blonde, knuckles still large and chunky, head
still slightly stooped, stance still awkward. I could see the Carter
U.S.M logo on his T-shirt.

"Hiya." Something was different but it wasn't his voice.

"Where's your glasses?"

"Contacts. Me Dad bought them as a present."

I slammed the front door behind me, automatically checking my pocket
for the keys I had ceremoniously been given on my twelfth birthday. Sam
was already off and away out of the front gate towards his dad's
waiting car, throwing words over his shoulder. "My Dad's picked some
hitch hikers up on the motorway."

I was dazed. Something returning can be just as shocking as something
going away.

Continued In 'You Try Explaining Nothing', Story of Sam Part II