growing pains
This story was recently published in New York and Lisbon.
I went over to Kennedy’s house after school to have dinner and play video games.
Virtual Racer had just been released on the Sega Mega Drive II and was considered the dogs bollocks. It was all the talk in classrooms that stank of body odour, flowery perfume and pickle onion crisps. On a back row, us lads would whisper best times to one another like love confessions. When the teacher’s back was turned, we talked about our moves through the gears. We called each other liars and said we’d do each other in if we didn’t get a loan of Virtual Racer. The game had 3D cars, well good racetracks and drivers that moved when you pressed buttons on the controller. It was an epic game. For once, people shared their dusty game cartridge for a couple of nights. Records needed to be broken. No one could believe how fast you could go on the racetrack.
I went to Kennedy’s house after school because our mum’s had bonded over dad’s who spent more time at the pub than at home. My dad was thin and Kennedy’s heavy. We learnt young the difference between spirits and pints through matchstick thin men with swollen red faces and men who looked well pregnant. When we went to top bench in the park on Friday nights to get on it, we would call a shot of vodka a Gabe, a can of Skol larger, a Steve. Bottles of cider and cans of gas, weed and bottles of 20/20, we didn’t have a name for any of that. It was all kicking off at top bench on Friday nights. School friends took forty-minute buses from the estates just to be a part of it. Sometimes you got a snog off girls. If the council estate girls turned up, you could get way more than wet lips, if you had a bit about you.
Because our dad’s liked to get pissed up at the pub and smash things when home, there wasn’t much money left to go round. Especially when they got let go from a factory that shut down and joined the dole queue with loads of other dads. The factory had made stands for high-end brands to place expensive bottles of perfumes on. This was funny to me. No one I knew ever bought the real deal first hand. You could get a counterfeit in town at the Sunday market under the bridge for a fiver.
All the lads I grew up with wore JOOP! HOMME perfume. A mate’s older brother with Liam Gallagher curtains promised me it got him at least sticky fingers whenever he went out on the town with the lads. I always thought it was because he drove a Nova Scotia 1.4 litre injection and had skunk weed, wore Jarvis Cocker NHS glasses. But I wasn’t about to argue with him about it. Heard he had a flick knife and wasn’t arsed about using it on any dickhead who wanted some.
Kennedy and my mum both worked double shifts at the local Co-op supermarket. A couple of mates with druggy parents never robbed it when mum was on duty. They said it was because we were mates. Those two always bummed smokes off me at lunch, did my head in. While my mum was on an evening shift scanning loafs of bread and pints of milk, tabloid newspapers and off brand vodka, I got to go round to Kennedy’s house for my tea and stay until her shift finished. We never did any homework at Kennedy’s. Not once. Every time I went round Trisha, his mum, would cook us something epic. It didn’t matter if I’d been over three nights in a row. Quality grub, every time, served up on a plate steaming hot. It was well good.
‘Love your mum’s cooking,’ I said, shovelling food into my mouth.
‘Must have hollow legs the way you go about the plate.’
‘You could do with a little less on yours.’
‘Don’t start. You know I put it on easy.’
‘Sorry, mate.’
‘Dick.’
Together, we would sit cross-legged on worn carpet and scoff down food. We looked like two buddha statues I once saw on the shelf at a friend’s house. He had stoner parents. They’d been to India on some sort of pilgrimage, come back with new words and long hair and books about bendy sex.
