Christian O’Connell - Radio Boy

‘Well …’ said Artie. ‘We’ve been promised a school radio station for ages. Why don’t we ask again about it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Holly. ‘No more being fobbed off. We’ll show them the petition again. And you can present. You’ll be back on the radio in no time. I mean, no one else in the school has your experience, do they? I’ll make a list of action points.’

Holly is super-organised and loves making lists.

That’s what friends do. Lift you up when you’re down. And offer you out-of-date cakes.

The wafting aroma of pony poo told me I was nearly back home at 27 Crow Crescent.

Dad’s car would be caked in the stuff after taking my sister to some awful pony gymkhana. For those of you lucky enough not to know what a gymkhana is, it’s like a strange kind of sports day for ponies. All watched and cheered on by people with names like Tamara and Fenella.

One day last summer I was made to go to one of these events and help out. Worst day of my life. I was forced to wear a high-visibility jacket that would have been too big for a giant, and run the car park. It got even worse when Katherine Hamilton, the girl of my dreams, turned up with her mum. No girl is impressed by anyone in an oversized high-vis jacket. I couldn’t hear them laughing in their car, but I could guess they were, just from the small clues. Like the finger pointing at me, and them being doubled over in hysterical laughter.

My sister’s pony is called Mr Toffee. Mr Waste of Money would be more accurate. This super-sized pet gets better shoes than me. If you look up the word ‘pony’ in the dictionary, it should say ‘angry, pooing motorbike’. Why would any sane human want to sit on an animal that can go crazy and run off at any moment? They are huge beasts, yet will head for the hills at top speed at the mere sight of a packet of crisps. Sometimes they just decide to throw you up in the air and break your bones for the pure fun of it.

I could see Dad out the front of our house de-pooing his car. My sister was nowhere to be seen of course. Probably counting her new rosettes and making space for them on her bedroom wall. Dad’s car is not a BMW like Artie’s dad’s. We had to sell our decent family car for a second-hand one to fund Mr Toffee’s stable fees. So now we travel around in an estate car from the olden days all so Mr Toffee can sleep in luxurious five-star accommodation – with en suite hay. I’m talking wind-down car windows. It’s the colour of sick. Dad says it’s ‘golden sunrise’, but, trust me, the only way you’d ever see a sunrise this colour is if the world was ending and the sun was throwing up into the sea.

Whenever Dad picks me up from school, I ask him to park a few streets away so no one can see him. Often he will think it’s ‘hilarious’ to wait for me right outside the school gates, playing nursery rhymes at full volume and yelling at me, ‘Got your favourites on, Spike!’ Dad’s very funny. To himself.

I think he does all of this because his job is sooooo boring. He’s the manager of the local supermarket, but he used to be cool once, a very long time ago. He was a drummer in a band and that’s how Mum met him. Mum makes us all feel a little bit sick when she starts telling ‘our story’.

‘Your dad was in the coolest band in town; everyone was talking about them being the next big thing. One night after a show I invited myself backstage and we kissed.’

I’ve seen photos (no videos as they hadn’t been invented back then; I think people drew on cave walls) and maybe it was a different time, but you don’t see many famous bands these days with all the members wearing eyepatches.

‘We were called the Pirates you see, son. That was our gimmick. If you liked a girl in the crowd, you lifted up your eyepatch, like I did when I spotted your mum,’ Dad would confide, creepily.

It turns out they weren’t the next big thing or even the one after that. Sadly, the Pirates broke up on the cusp of being signed to a major record label at the age of just eighteen. Mum says we aren’t to ask Dad about what split the band up (‘it could upset him’). But I heard them talking about it late one night. They’d been at a party and Dad had bumped into the Pirates’ former lead singer, Tom Dibble, who now runs a tanning salon in town. It was the first time I’d ever heard my dad swear. After playing Count the Swear Words (seventeen, including one I didn’t understand; Holly did when I told her – she said her mum called her dad it once when he shrank her favourite jumper), I finally found out what broke up the band.

It would appear that Tom, the Pirate singer, took the rock-and-roll behaviour too far. Despite having a girlfriend, he thought it would be no problem to have a spare one. The only problem was that the spare one turned out to be my Aunt Charlotte. Dad’s sister. When she discovered she was the bonus girlfriend, she came home in tears and Dad had a fight with his Pirate bandmate in the middle of a show. Oh, wouldn’t you have wanted to see that? Two pirates fighting live on stage – walk the plank, Tom! As the other pirates tried to break up the fight, the microphone got smashed into Pirate Tom’s teeth. A tooth was knocked out and into the drink of an audience member.

Tom really did look like a pirate after that, it would seem.

Despite much dental work, the Pirates had ended up with a lead singer with a slight but very audible whistle when he sang. The record deal never happened and they split up a few weeks later. Sometimes Dad is all fun and laughter until certain songs come on the radio and it will take him to his dark Pirate times. Then he starts staring madly into the distance, mumbling to himself the words of the band’s biggest hit, ‘Pirate Party in My Pants’.

‘ Pirate … party … pirate p-p-p-p-PARTY. ’

Now Dad looked up from cleaning pony poo off the wing mirror of the old-mobile.

‘You’re back early. Everything all right, Spike?’ he asked, unaware that the information I was about to give him was going to change our lives forever.

‘Not great,’ I said. ‘I got fired from hospital radio.’

Dad put his serious face on. Frowning and everything.

‘Sorry, son,’ he said. He stretched his back. ‘That must have been awful for you.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘life sometimes isn’t very fair. But I’m telling you now, if you really want anything, there will always be setbacks along the way. What’s important is how you handle them. No one gets anywhere without struggling.’ Dad looked at me, seriously. ‘Every day I wonder what could have been with the band. If we’d worked things out better, or if I’d taken up the offer to join the Dead Giraffes …’

After The Pirates broke up, Dad was offered a drumming spot in another band, the Dead Giraffes. However, disillusioned with fame and fortune, he joined the trainee management scheme at the supermarket he now runs. He’s done well.

Not as well as the Dead Giraffes though, who went on to have five number-one hits in thirty different countries.

‘But … how do I keep going?’ I asked, bringing him back from one of the thousand-yard stares that goes with him reminiscing about his drumming glory days.

‘Simple. Get back on the horse.’

‘The horse?’

‘I mean, find another show,’ said Dad. ‘Get back on the radio somehow.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I pointed out. ‘Although Holly wants to make the school finally start its own radio station …’

‘That’s the spirit!’ said Dad. ‘Or just do it yourself. You watch all those kids with online shows, but it’s not just videos. There are online radio stations too, Spike, playing much better music than all that pop rubbish you hear now. I love this one called New Music Is All Rubbish. It’s a brave new world out there on the interweb. Why don’t you launch your own one? Do the Spike Show .’ Dad’s serious face changed into his excited one. Which is maybe scarier.