Caryl Phillips - The Lost Child

In the mornings they left us alone to run around in the boggy fields that were surrounded by crumbling stone walls. In the afternoons we were taken down to the beach, where some of the younger kids started digging to Australia, which was a really popular game, but I used to wander off and stare at the worn-out donkeys giving rides on the beach, or gawp at the big dipper at the funfair or the tubby ladies sitting in deck chairs in their baggy bathing costumes. My favourite thing of all was to listen to the military band that would strike up in the bandstand at exactly three-thirty every afternoon, although I could never work out why they always finished off with a sing-along of “O Come All Ye Faithful” given that there was still five months to go until Christmas. After that I’d go back to the beach and take off my plimsolls and socks and stand right where the water stopped rushing, so that the sea licked my toes and I could pretend that it was a dog that I owned who would never leave my side. And then it would be time to go back to Silverdale.

There was an older boy and a girl in charge of our dormitory. Peter and Rachel. They said they were eighteen, and it was clear they fancied each other as they were always smiling when they were around one another. Peter liked T. Rex, and he used to whistle their songs. I could tell that he thought he looked like Marc Bolan, but his hair was too short, and he wore glasses. However, he did put glitter on his face, and I liked that. I can’t speak for the others, but I had a soft spot for Rachel, who had beautiful hair and a pink woollen bobble hat that set it off nicely. I used to like to be around her whenever she was in the dormitory talking to us, but if I looked too long at her, I could feel myself colouring up. She’d tell us to make our beds, but mine was always made. When it rained and we had to sit inside and play board games, I’d always try and sit near her, but it was no use. It was obvious that if it wasn’t Peter, it would be some other older lad that was going to come along and snatch her up before I had a chance, but I tried not to feel too cheesed off. Rachel looked at me a lot. Well, at everybody really, but she was the first person that I can remember who smiled at me and maybe meant it.

“All the Young Dudes”—Mott the Hoople

The thing I remember most about the summer after we went to Silverdale was Mam descending into a kind of madness. I’m not sure if I can explain it any better than that. “All the Young Dudes,” was always playing on the radio. It was a pop song that sounded like something you’d play at a funeral. I liked it a lot and became a bit obsessed with it. The song was always snaking through my head, rolling around from one ear to the other, and it made me think of a woman dancing and slowly turning her hips. I suppose that’s the sort of thing that fourteen-year-old boys think about, or at least this fourteen-year-old used to think like that. Our Tommy never cared much for pop music, and so he probably never even heard the song. The Munich Olympics would come later, but the summer started out the same way that every summer started out, with Tommy spending every waking hour kicking a ball up against the garages. There were only six of them to serve all the flats, but then again the council was not stupid. They knew that most people on the estate wouldn’t have a car, and those that did would be happy to just park it on the road. The names of the cars back then sounded so glamorous. They still do. Cortinas, Capris, Avengers, Zodiacs, Zephyrs. However, the cars on our estate were never new, but if you had a car, it meant that you were doing alright. That said, most people who had a car had more sense than to pay the council fifty pence a week to rent a poxy garage, especially when the rent for a two-bedroom flat was just under four pounds. I knew this because it was my job to take the rent book and an envelope of money down to the council office every Saturday morning. No bloke in his right mind was going to pay an extra ten bob a week for a garage when he could take that cash and get blathered down The Squinting Cat and still have change.

After the two weeks we spent at Silverdale, Tommy came back, and after he’d eventually told me some of what went on there, he just clammed up, and he wouldn’t talk anymore. For the whole year he always looked like he was about to bawl, and I could tell that he wasn’t his true self. Twelve months later, and not much had changed with our Tommy, who would get up in the morning and take his football and go and boot it up against the garage doors until it got too dark, or until one of the neighbours got riled and shouted at him and told him to fucking stop it or he’d have him. Oi, cut it out. The noise is fucking killing me. Which is pretty much what Mam would say to me as she got ready to go out. Except she wouldn’t swear, of course. Ben, can you turn off that radio now? It’s doing my head in. We have got a telly, you know. That summer I remember she started to wear a kind of garish pink lipstick, but I don’t remember her ever doing her fingernails. Go on, turn it off, for heaven’s sake. I’d usually just turn it down, and that would put an end to her complaining. We were good at making truces and not letting things get out of control, but there were times when she’d just get on my tits. However, more often than not, I’d say nothing and just pick up the transistor and go and sit with it in the kitchen and wait for my song to come on again. Derek Evans had broken Mam’s heart when he gave her back the key to the flat. These days I didn’t have any idea who she was going out with. I did, however, know that our Tommy would be down the road kicking his football up against the doors of the empty garages and keeping his own counsel.

“School’s Out”—Alice Cooper

Our Tommy disappeared the same summer that they had the Olympics in Munich, West Germany. I used to watch every day, mainly the athletics and the swimming, and I remember all the excitement over Mark Spitz and Dave Wottle and Lasse Virén, and then the sudden confusion when the athletes were killed. I was confused too. Towards the end of the summer our Tommy eventually stopped kicking his ball up against the garages, and he started up training again at Scott Hall Juniors. Then one stormy night he was away at football practise, and he never came back. I didn’t know what to do, as Mam was out, so I lay in bed listening to the wind and rain and tried to get my head around who our Tommy might have gone to stay with. He had his football mates, and I thought maybe he’d gone off with one of them, but I didn’t know them, and I didn’t much care to either. Brian, Luke, Graham: I just knew their names, but we didn’t have a phone in the flat, so he couldn’t call us up to let us know where he was, and anyhow, I doubt if his football mates had phones in their houses. Derek Evans usually ran him back home from training in his car, but I had no idea how to get in touch with that prat, so I just lay on top of the blanket and stared at the wall.

Eventually it started to get light out, and I looked across at the empty bed, where his pillows were standing to attention in that odd way that our Tommy liked to leave them. I heard Mam outside on the balcony, and then I listened to the noise of the key in the lock and the banging of her coming in and kicking off her shoes. I got out of bed and opened the bedroom door, and she looked at me as though it was somehow wrong of me to be seeing her like this. I just blurted it out, and she stood there for a minute, trying to take it in. Well, where is he then? She was asking me, as though I knew, but that was the whole point of telling her: I had no idea where he was. Wasn’t she supposed to be the mother? Get ready for school, she said, and then she went into her bedroom and closed in the door behind her.