Bring me Sunshine

'Are you enjoying your first day?'
'Yeah. It's weird though.'
'You've never lived on a boat before then?'
'I've only ever lived in a three bedroomed semi detached house. I'm not
used to?not living in a three bedroomed semi detached house. I keep
wondering if I've made the right choice.'
'You have, I promise. It won't take you long to realise it. You're 20,
you need an adventure. That's what me and Olly are doing. We're having
an adventure.'
'Where is Olly?'
'He's on air at the moment, doing a four hour programme. Don't worry
about him by the way. If you like football, The Smiths and drinking
lager until things go fuzzy you'll get on with him fine. Do you?'
'Yeah.'
'You'll be cool then. He's one of those people you need to keep away
from chocolate, he talks constantly whether anyone's listening or not,
don't get him over excited! He only ever stops talking to change the
CD. You'll learn how to handle him, trust me, he wouldn't have lasted
five years on this boat if I couldn't live with him.'
'Is Bring Me Sunshine your boat then?'
'I bought all the equipment and installed it so that we could be heard
on the radio clearly, I had to do all that myself, the wiring and
installation, Olly can't even clean his teeth. But he puts hard work in
and he loves his music. He does the best Morrissey impression I've ever
heard. You'll be more in line with his tastes in music than mine. He
quite often gets muddled up between good music and loud music, but he
knows his stuff. The listeners love him, the girls fancy him, the
blokes want to take him for a pint or a kick about in the park. The
fans that I get just want to show me the poems they've written. You'll
get your own fans as well, as soon as you get started.'
'When will that be?'
'Not yet. We still don't know you that well. You could be a psychopath!
And then so could we! No, we're settling you in first, Willow.'
Dean smiles as he says this, which undoes all of the good work that
he's just done trying to make me feel comfortable. He looks at the
water surrounding us, strokes his beard and starts reading his book
-'Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing'. In the quiet we can hear a David Bowie
song coming from the room we use as a radio studio. It's also the
kitchen. I look at the reflections on the water and then at Dean. He
knows his own place in the world and is happy in it; you can tell just
by the way he slouches contentedly in his chair. His beard looks like
it has been effortlessly grown and unlike a lot of people with beards,
his suits him. He is the most relaxed contented person you could hope
to meet, with the exception of Olly. Despite the coldness he is still
wearing the baggy shorts he wore when I met him and Olly at the train
station in Morris-on-Sea this morning.

Morris-on-Sea is a dirty seaside town where Bring Me Sunshine docks
when we go onto mainland. I walked around there this morning, it's not
a very nice place, it was raining and local caf?s were full of people
drinking pots of tea that they didn't really enjoy and eating cooked
breakfasts that didn't look very nice. It's full of graffiti and dog
crap, and kids graffitying and dogs crapping. But it is somewhere that
we can rest our heads when it gets too much being on the water. It's
where two of Olly and Dean's favourite bands live, so they visit them
sometimes, I'm told that they're good company, their music's fantastic
and we always get their latest releases for free which saves buying
them in the shops. I first met Olly and Dean a couple of weeks ago and
today is only the second time we've seen each other. They told me all
about their pirate radio station and how it means freedom and offered
me the chance to join, which I'm more grateful for than anything I've
ever been grateful for before. Bring Me Sunshine means punk rock. It
means beauty. It's walking along a beach at sunset hand in hand with a
beautiful girl. It's taking a hot air balloon ride watching people
getting on with their lives. It's a party with the best friends you've
ever had that lasts forever, where the drink never runs out and no-one
has to leave. It's a TV channel that shows every programme that's ever
been made. A book where every word has been carefully chosen and every
illustration beautifully drawn. It's a high street which has small
shops and bustling markets selling things you want to buy where people
walk around smiling, where the rodent of commercialism hasn't spread
it's droppings all over the place. It's a football match where every
pass is perfectly executed from the outside of the boot and every shot
curls into the top left hand corner. It all sounds so much better than
the stale celebrity obsessed MTV world which I've been brought up in,
the conservative, restricted blandness of where I was this time
yesterday and feared would never escape from.

When I first met Dean I was amazed at how hairy his legs were. I spent
minutes just staring at them, which I think unnerved him a bit. He is
pale, my guess is that he stopped eating so he would have more time to
listen to records. That could be why he's so skinny, he looks like he'd
need a knife and fork to eat a KitKat. He is not an especially good
looking bloke, with messy brown hair, his ears and nose are bigger than
they should be and his eyes are too close together. His appearance
suffers because of Olly, who is very good looking and he knows it. When
I first met him I took an instant disliking to him, as I do to all good
looking people. He is taller, stockier and more confident than Dean,
with better teeth and more importantly, less hairy legs.
'It's not often that it's as quiet as this. When Olly's not doing his
programme he buzzes about like a toddler until he tires himself out and
has to go to bed and listen to noisy music. If he's not doing that
he'll have his guitar out. Do you play?'
'Badly.'
'The same as me and him. He'll tell you otherwise though.'

This is my first experience of night time on a boat. It's probably
about midnight although I've no way of knowing the time so it could be
a few hours either way. Not that it matters. Staring out at the dark
twinkling surface of the water makes me feel peacefully sleepy. Again
gentle music from Olly's radio show filters through to me and Dean, who
continues to read his book and stroke his beard. He is used to this
kind of happiness, this magicality. I'm not. This time last night I was
lying awake in my bed worrying about everything. That is why I have
come onto Bring Me Sunshine, so that I will stop spending my life
worrying, so that I can forget about everything in my past and start
again from scratch. Olly and Dean don't have any problems. That's how I
want to be. They live in an idyllic world of sunsets and vinyl albums,
not one of having your hoodcaps stolen and standing in dole queues. I
want to live in this inspirational world where my only problems involve
tuning my guitar and looking for bottle openers, rather than going to
the chemist for my mums medication and crossing the road from people I
don't like who don't like me. Those people won't even notice that I'm
gone. And hopefully I'll be unrecognisable when I go back. If I ever do
go back.
'I like your beard.' I say, breaking the silence that really didn't
need to be broken.
'Thanks. It's all done with mirrors. Don't look in them. We're on water
miles from land. We only see each other, sometimes we go weeks without
meeting anybody. You'll have to get used to that.'
'It sounds cool to me. I'm not smart, I don't own any nice clothes. You
can't polish a turd.'
'And now it doesn't need to be polished. It'll just get smellier and
scruffier. Do you smoke?'
'No.'
Dean starts rolling his cigarette up.
'If you want to smoke help yourself. The same if you want to read a
book or magazine or have a drink or listen to some music, there are
things lying about everywhere.'
'I'm just happy sitting here until I get bored of the view.'
'You'll never get bored of the view.' Dean says, putting his cigarette
in his mouth and producing a smell that is nothing like the cigarettes
my mum smokes. He might be right though, I don't think I ever will get
bored of being on here.