burned to the touch. A couple of toddlers playing listlessly in the sandpit were hauled away by their mother, and then Mary and Billy had the place to themselves. They kicked off their shoes and sat for a while with their feet in the sand, until Mary noticed all the crisp packets and baked dog turds.
The see-saw was in the shade so they lay down on either side of its central pivot, more or less balancing each other. Mary drank her beer quickly and drew hard on her cigarette. She gripped both tightly in her hands. Dreamy Billy flopped on the see-saw with one leg trailing to the ground, his long fair hair spread out behind him, his cheeks the same faint pink as his old t-shirt. His purple corduroy flares were just as faded and all in all, Billy looked bleached or at least most delicately tinted. A roll-up sat loosely between his thumb and forefinger. Mostly, he just let it burn. He had pushed his other thumb into the neck of a bottle of beer and let it dangle.
‘Valerie says Christie Hepple brought his brother into the Arms last night.’ Billy’s big sister worked behind the bar of the Hooper’s Arms on Allnorthover’s High Street. Billy pushed himself up onto his elbows, tipping the see-saw, raising Mary into his line of vision. ‘What is he to you, anyway?’
‘Not to me … to my father.’ Mary tipped her head back. ‘Come on, you know! The scandal!’ She was shouting. She swung her legs round and jumped up. Billy crashed back but stayed where he was.
Mary came over and knelt beside him, her head close to his but looking the other way. She spoke quietly now. ‘It’s not the truth you know, Billy. It’s just the story. Why should he have stayed after what they said. How could he?’ She got up and walked over to climb the slide which, like everything in the playground, left traces of rust and flakes of old paint on whoever touched it. At the top of the steps, she turned, braced herself on the bars, pushed up and upside-down, her legs straight in the air.
‘Do it with your glasses on!’ shouted Billy. Mary stayed where she was till her face went crimson and then lowered herself onto the slide. She came to a stop half-way down and stayed there. Billy came over and handed her her beer.
‘Are you scared of him?’
There was a long silence before Mary replied. ‘I don’t know … I recognised him and then I didn’t. I don’t remember really, except that he always seemed so gentle, bonkers but gentle. But I feel I’m being sucked in.’
‘Into what?’
‘I hate that fucking village.’ Mary stood up and ran down the rest of the slide.
It was later that afternoon that Mary saw the boy from the party again. She and Billy had wandered on to Flux Records, a corridor of a shop on the High Street, squeezed between a Wimpy Bar and an estate agents’. Flux Records was lined with deep shelves divided into new and secondhand. Beyond this, the arrangement was subtle, unalphabetical and subject to change. The secondhand section began with bargains, the music no one wanted to listen to or even remember listening to. That year, the indulgent and bloated were being thrown out: the last esoteric whisperings of Gong, the bombastic concept albums of Led Zeppelin, the slick disco productions of Donna Summer. Many of these had been bought at full price in the same shop only two years before and now, the manager Terry Flux bought back what he had room for, without irony, at a fifth of their original price. To make space for these rejects, the other secondhand records were promoted. Jazz and Psychedelic, Ornette Coleman and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, moved into ‘Rare Grooves’ while the rawest, weirdest experiments of a decade ago, Can and Velvet Underground, arrived in ‘Collectables’.
Terry Flux believed in cycles and his system worked. At the front of the new side of the shop, under ‘Just In’, were the same cut ups, bizarre names and banner slogans, the same difficult cleverness and anti-finesse to be found among the ‘Collectables’. That summer, no one wanted to listen to anybody famous, so Terry Flux bought records by people he’d never heard of and sold them on their obscurity with such success that the ‘Just In’ shelves were retitled ‘Punk/New Wave’ and other new releases were shuffled along into ‘Current’. Among all the black, white and red of newsprint-collage covers, there were a few singles in new coloured vinyl – bubblegum pink and cobalt blue packaged in transparent plastic. They were as simple and luminous as children’s toys and the customers, mostly still at school, liked to turn them over and over in their hands.
Billy pushed through to the ‘Psychedelic’ section, oblivious to his difference from the crowd, who wore either black or clashing acid colours, blazers with safety pins and chains, and hair that was at least short, if not shaved or spikey. Mary made her way towards a girl whose blurred outline she thought she recognised, only to find when she got close that it wasn’t who she thought it was at all. In her embarrassment, she edged quickly backwards and trod hard on someone’s shoe. She wheeled round to apologise and her head collided with a loud crack with the head of the boy, who had bent down to examine his bruised foot.
‘Sorry! Oh, it’s you …’ they said, one another’s echoes. The boy stood before her, one hand clasping his nose and his right foot rubbing against his left calf. It’s almost the shape he made when asleep! Mary thought and then panicked, He knows I thought that, he knows I watched him sleeping, he knows I walked into this shop thinking about him. His face, which she had liked very much, seemed impossibly lovely now. He moved his hand and blood trickled from his nose, through his fingers and dripped down his shirt. Mary opened and closed her mouth, reached into her pocket, fished out a dirty handkerchief and shoved it into his hand. He nodded and mopped his face, eyes wide with humiliation or pain. It was then that Mary became aware of how airless the shop was, how many people were crammed inside it and how sweaty they all were. ‘Air …’ she managed, before squeezing past him and out of the door.
‘Mary?’ She looked up and there was Terry Flux, small, grey and middle-aged. ‘I saw you come in and wanted to catch you.’ He continued. ‘I’ve had something in I thought you’d like. It was selling fast so I held one back, in case.’ He was holding a new single in a paper bag. Mary didn’t bother to ask what it was.
‘Thanks, Terry. How much?’
‘Call it two quid and see you down at The Stands.’ He took the notes she offered and went off smiling, an inextricable combination of kindness and business sense.
Just as Billy came out to find her, Mary noticed flecks of Daniel’s blood on the tips of her fingers. She made them into an omen, a sign of something, and then put her fingers into her mouth.
By seven o’clock, the hard light had lost its glitter. Camptown faded into flattened perspectives and dull surfaces, making people peer, as if it were already the dusk that wouldn’t come for three hours more. The town’s modest brightness had already been smothered by accumulations in the atmosphere that no change of pressure came to release: lead particles from petrol; pale powder sloughed off by the exhausted fields; and trapped acids from the chimneys of the industrial estate. The old brick of the High Street was as grey as the concrete of the new shopping mall. Filmy windows reflected nothing.
A week earlier, flyposters had appeared, not pasted to walls or sellotaped in windows but spiked on railings, wedged between fence posts, blowing across playgrounds and paths in the park. They were the size of a page in a notebook and were scrawled on in thick black felt-tip pen: ‘SUPPORT GRAVITY GRAVITY SUPPORTS U’ with, in smaller letters underneath, ‘Fri at 7’. The teenagers from the town and surrounding villages, now making their way into The Stands, needed no further information.
The Stands was a bar tucked under the town’s football stadium. The black plastic letters plugged into its white chipboard door said ‘Camptown FC Social Club’ but the football club did its drinking elsewhere. The Stands was the only place in Camptown that would serve underage drinkers. It was a low-ceilinged, windowless, long, narrow room that had a scuffed stage at one end and a bar at the other.
Terry Flux, who moonlighted as a DJ, had set up his coloured lights. He kept a careful eye on the crowd, many of whom appeared to be in the first stages of metamorphosis, with an earring or a safety pin, newly cut and spiked hair, a t-shirt scribbled with swear words and slogans. He reassured them with something familiar but not entirely passé, before surprising them with something