Paper dissolving slowly into mush

It was about four-thirty in the day of my life. That is, it was if a day were to last the seventy-five years they said it would. I should have been sleeping and building up my reserves for the day ahead. In other words, educating myself for when I actually woke up and could use it all. But it was a restless sleep, filled with dreams of the day that I couldn’t wait to start. So I got up early. Only people who have something to do get up that early. What I had to do was exciting, something that couldn’t wait. What woke me up were the wafts of stories from the back of the school bus told by those years older, the hypnotism of beats from cars that sped past, their noise fading like a siren, but more urgent; I was roused by the stolen drags from my uncle’s cigarette, the thieved can of beer from Dad’s garage, the quiet promises that boomeranged from my head that something, somewhere, somehow was better and I wasn’t involved.

As far as I was concerned, that attitude was pretty normal. It certainly was for a lot of people I knew and, more than any, my best friend at the time, an aggressively rebellious lad from school who was called Flamer on account of his blazing red hair. He lived just down the road from me and, once we’d got our heads round our shared sense of exclusion, our games of football and tennis became cover for our escalating curiosity.

On one such occasion Flamer came round to call at my house along with a small bag of equipment. Today it was fishing.

“Right, we’re off Mum.”

“And you’re going to be with Herbert?” (Flamer’s real name. Poor lad.)

“Yeah, he’s here now.”

“Ok. See you later.”

We left the house into the April air that had the first tastes of a warmth that barely suppressed the chills of winter and existed only in the mid-afternoon, and rode on our bikes through a village that was buzzing with the sounds of rusty, reactivated lawnmowers until we reached the pond across the road from the pub. The returning geese and resident ducks sporadically interrupted our conversation as we steeled ourselves to break the law.

“Ok, have we got enough money?”

“Yeah, give us it.”

“You’re not goin’, Flamer.”

“Why not?”

 “’Cos you’ll fuck it up.”

“Well you go, then.”

“I will.” I knew I had to, but every second I waited made the next one stretch further. “Just give us a minute.”

I rotated the coins in my hand, pretending to wait for a particular moment that was more prudent than any other by virtue of some arbitrary fact, feeling the cold flame of nerves consuming increasing amounts of heat in my chest and trying my best to reason that the worst outcome would be that I could put in the change and then be discovered, thereby losing the money. I was locked in a futile battle, in that I needed to be calm and relaxed to do it yet became more wound up as I stood there for longer building up the necessary guts to start out. I tried to talk myself through it. In reality, all I had to do was go round to the back of the pub and enter by the door to the car park, put the money in the machine as quickly as possible and press the button firmly so that the cigarettes would be delivered, but I knew then that the coins, drenched in my clammy sweat, would struggle as if magnetised to repel themselves from the slot and that one of them would drop straight through, unrecognised, as the fifty pence piece did, and that those looking through the glass-panelled door would burn my back stinging with the pressure, and I’d just have to put it back in and don’t turn around, don’t look back whatever you do, just hit the button and wait until nothing comes out it’s fucking sold out shit just hit the next one and grab them as the door behind me opens and get out, go, go, go, just go.

“Go, fucking go!”

And we went, flying down the road and off, the adrenaline like electricity along wires in my heavy legs, the excitement better than the entire packet full of nicotine to which it was inextricably linked could ever be as we flew down the hill, stupid in the perception of the enormity of our crime. For this reason, we didn’t stop until the next village, continuing down a road shrouded in trees that were still bare, buds straining at the branches’ tips with light filtered through the bony fingers, the passing air colder, as if the heat were sieved through those wooden hands. We slowed when we got to the bridge over the motorway, leaning on the railing and sucking in the air thick with heated tarmac and exhaust fumes that had a hint of molasses, looking east to see the bridge clear in the pastel blue of the bottom of the sky. And then we smiled at each other before wheeling our bikes into the woods at the side of the road below the bridge to enjoy the luscious bounty.

“John fucking Player? What the fuck did you get them for?”

“’Cos they’re cool, man. Look at the packet – all black wi’ just that cool symbol on. An’ I don’t wanna smoke them poxy Silk Cut any more. They’re well weak.”

So we luxuriated in the smell of those cigarettes lit with the harsh sulphurous tang of stolen matches and revelled in the short-lived giddiness and lingering sickliness that they produced, too enraptured by the pleasure of the forbidden to recognise the unpleasantness of it. The smoke was too thin to be a liquid, but seemed too thick to be a gas, so I slurped it down and let it cascade easily out of mouth and nose, a movie star in one non-movement, the smoke the evidence of my person exuding cool in a now visible substance.

“We off?” Flamer flicked his lit fag deliberately from between the third finger and thumb on his left hand. It exploded against a tree trunk. We mounted our bikes and continued on down the hill, a little satiated and a little calmer after our excursion from the road. We reached the next village and sailed on across the high street, past the church and its wall where we would later congregate provocatively on Friday nights, and left into the fields behind the school where we knew there would be more of us. Almost as soon as we came into the fields we saw Styles, another schoolmate, sauntering towards the exit of the grounds.

Styles was the son of one of the wealthiest families around, both parents owning land inside and out of the city centre on whose rent they relied for their comforts and which provided the capital to continue expanding their sleeping empire. Having bought up several of the docks that had died along with the decline of the city’s main industry, they had reclaimed and redeveloped the land that now housed shopping centres, supermarkets, cinemas and riverside restaurants that ensured that Jack would never be plagued by penury. None of this had been hidden from Styles, who saw it all and understood that it was his slumbering fortune, and he wore a permanent grin along with his designer clothes that now confronted me.

“Hiya,” he greeted me with languid style.

“All right.”

“Now then, Styles,” said Flamer. “Wanna fag?”

“Thank… John fucking Player? What the fuck d’you get them for?”

“Cool packet an’ that. Better than Silk Cut, anyway.”

“Shit the bed, Flamer. Remind me never to send you to buy my fags.”

“How’d you get on yesterday?”

“At the motor show? Yeah, real mad, it was.” He observed a finger through his half-closed eyes and bit at it absent-mindedly. “Yeah, me dad won a race and that, but I was more bothered about these mad Ferraris that was there. Like, a whole section of these old Testarossas an’ three-five-fives.”

“Ah, they’re mint, man.”

“I know. I got to sit in one. This lad who was there was real cool and that – he’s like, about sixteen an’ lives in Cheshire – an’, erm, his dad had a three-five-five, so he drove us about for a while. I got a bit pissed with the kid later an’ all; talking with him about going out to raves an’ shit, ‘cos he goes out in Manchester quite a lot – you know, Hacienda an’ that – an’ he said it’s fucking amazin’, like total madness, an’ so I asked him about takin’ shit and that’s when he sold us these.” And Styles’ eyes widened for once to give a stare of manic surprise that pierced through the cellophane bag that he was holding up between our faces, through my startled eyes, right to the back of my head, down my spine and through my feet into the damp earth.

In the last years of the previous decade, scenes had filled the news of parties in fields. Infectious music filled the background and images of happy people dancing like ten-year olds who’d eaten too much sugar were in the focus of the cameras, which didn’t seem too crazy to a ten-year old pepped up on whatever sugar he could find. “We’re not hurtin’ anyone, and we’re just havin’ a bit of faan,” screamed one of these criminals as she was dragged away by police. “Just lighten up an’ cam and darnce wiv ass!” invited another.

They managed to stop those parties in fields, but the music was already alive and wouldn’t die, continuing to communicate by its existence those same words in rhythm alone. And the parties moved indoors, to the warehouses that no one wanted anyway, where we would go later on as it all continued to continue, and we laughed and smiled and danced for ourselves.

Now to me, it all looked like fun, which was one good reason for doing whatever it was they were doing anyway. But then it became common knowledge that what was so much fun wasn’t necessarily the music, nor the dancing, nor the community and idealism and equality, but the drugs. And so they were the banned curse, the Bad News. But they wouldn’t die either. And when I realised that they were illegal because I wasn’t supposed to do them, I realised that it was the same as the cigarettes that I had stolen or bought that I wasn’t meant to have, or the beer I’d thieved from my dad’s garage, that were all fun because they were fun, and also because they weren’t allowed, and the quiet promises came back and began to be fulfilled. So when Styles held up those small, inoffensive squares of paper, there was no way that I would have any other answer in my mouth.

I moved it around my mouth with my tongue, the coarse paper dissolving slowly into mush. I chewed it into a little ball. I looked at the others that had agreed to do it and then towards Styles, who looked at us all in turn, intensely, as we inspected one another’s mouths and the bits of paper on each tongue, partly just to show off but also to prove you’d done it along with everyone else, so that you were all in it together.

“Congratulations, gentlemen,” said Styles, with a gleam in his eye. “You’ve just done a class ‘A’ drug.”

In a lot of ways, not least of all looking back now, it was a stupid thing to say, but to all of us, excited and grinning and fourteen years old, it made a lot of sense.