Mary George of Allnorthover

Camptown had always been a provisional sort of place. It benefited from leading elsewhere, accumulating, by chance, all the historical features expected of an English town. Its name had an ancient derivation from its role as a Roman staging post, half-way between the capital and the more useful and significant Camulodunum on the coast to the north. By the thirteenth century it had acquired a city wall, not as a place worth protecting in itself but as part of the frontline against the Danes. The small, orderly grid of Roman streets had been consolidated and extended. As the roads improved, more traffic passed through on its way between London and the coast. These journeyings back and forth rubbed against the town and created a kind of static through which people got stuck. The railway threw out an arm towards it. Manufacturers and merchants trading in wool, wheat, salt and corn settled on the outskirts, building substantial villas and funding civic works. Camptown broadened and put on weight without gaining character.

Remnants from each era could still be found, leaking through bland new surfaces. The hillock that lay just beyond the fence of the High School’s playing fields was a prehistoric burial mound, hemmed in by housing estates. A Roman villa had been excavated by the river and fragments of its concrete (mixed from stone and lime) and its tesserae had found their way to the British Museum, along with the skeleton of a baby thought to have been a foundation offering to household gods. Newling Hall, the mansion that now housed the art gallery and museum, had a fine Jacobean staircase, carved in the Spanish style. It was regularly hired by film crews who spent days repeating a single scene: the sweeping exit of a woman in a trailing gown or the clanking descent of a cavalier. For safety reasons, the staircase was never polished between hirings. All other floors in the public parts of the building were covered in linoleum.

Holidaymakers sometimes turned off the bypass in search of tea or a bed and were glad of a few sights to make the extra miles worthwhile. There was the small medieval cathedral that made Camptown technically a city, now dwarfed by the new civic hall, for which the derelict Corn Exchange had been demolished. Nobody came to see the cathedral’s architecture although they would make a thorough tour of the building before seeking out the Sheela-na-Gig, one of the few examples to be found in East Anglia. Carved on a pillar in a shadowy corner to one side of the pews, her wildness, her voracious eyes and spurting breasts, her fingers opening her vagina wide between splayed legs were intended to shock parishioners out of temptation. Somehow, she did just this.

Camptown had been damaged by bombs that had missed either London’s docks or the coastal defences, or had been jettisoned. The gaps this left in the High Street had now been filled with large commercial premises. The old shop fronts with their ornate masonry, ironwork and curved glass made way for the flat frames of display windows. The town made room for municipal resources: a multi-storey car park, a library, a theatre, a swimming pool, a bus station, a new hospital. These efficient buildings were oddly cramped and dim inside, with small windows and fussy arrangements of interior walls. They cut across streets which would have been too small to contain them, creating odd alleyways and dead ends. People who’d lived in Camptown all their lives found themselves getting lost and going to the swimming pool to pay a parking fine because these civic façades were all so alike.

Camptown had become awkward and diminished. Its constant, incidental and half-hearted replanning made it a difficult place to wander about in but Mary and Billy, who often found themselves with time on their hands, could pass several hours doing just that.

A fortnight after Tom Hepple’s return was the last day of term. They left school at four and made their way through the ‘top end’ of Camptown, the point at which the High Street frayed into new roads leading to housing and industrial estates, and the multi-storey car park. Beyond this were the expensive Edwardian villas with broad curved drives, ivy and wisteria, and long gardens edged with old trees: chestnuts, magnolias and limes.

There was no shade in the street so they walked slowly and kept stopping. First at a corner shop that would sell them beer and then at the bus-station newsagent which was tiny and grim, but sold them tobacco and cigarette papers. They came to the park playground. The metal bars of the merry-go-round 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 new, something they’d want to know, some raw, fast hard music, so tense and regimented there was nothing to do if you wanted to dance but jump up and down. The girls found this particularly hard, having grown up on the undulating rhythms of funk and soul. They stopped mid-sway, interrupted. The dancefloor that had been theirs a year ago, was now dominated by boys bouncing violently off one another.

The room was soon filled by a crowd that swirled stiffly round between the bar, the stage, the toilets and the door, some breaking away to dance, drink, kiss or smoke. Everything was dim, even the music, muffled and distorted by ancient speakers. The drinks were either plastic pint-glasses of pale lager or concoctions of something dull and something vivid – cider and blackcurrant, gin and orange, rum and peppermint.

Mary and Billy split up as soon as they were in the door. Billy, indifferent to drink, wove his way through the crowd to stand close to Terry Flux and close enough to a bass speaker to feel it booming through him. Mary inched her way to the bar, waited half an hour, bought three vodkas at once rather than try to go back again, poured them into one glass, rolled a cigarette and set off towards the stage just as Gravity came on.

Gravity were a Camptown band and their lead singer was a local hero, known as JonJo. JonJo was somewhere in his twenties which made him several years older than most of the audience. He was skinny and pale. His fine red hair was greased into a lank crest, acne scars broke the surface of his white make-up, and his nipples and ribs stood out beneath the cheap gold-lurex woman’s top stretched across his sunken chest. Altogether, he looked like a pantomime version of one of his father’s battery hens out on Factory Farm.

JonJo glided through school, with even the teachers turning a blind eye to his lipstick and bangles. In each musical transition, he had found a model that required only some minor adjustment to his style, achieved with beads, glasses, frills, a trilby or a leather waistcoat. He remained himself: flamboyant, effeminate, suave and lewd but sexless, just as the band’s music barely changed, its raw ineptitude and fantastical lyrics somehow always just fitting the bill. Boys acknowledged his glamour but didn’t want to look like him, while girls enjoyed his interest and proximity but were undisturbed by desire.

Gravity were so unrehearsed and drunk that their set quickly went to pieces. It sounded as if each member were playing a different song: the drummer was ahead of everyone else; the bass player was locked in a duel with the lead guitarist, both playing faster and more elaborate riffs; and JonJo lurched around the creaking stage, singing more or less to himself. The boys in the front loved it. Then they grew bored and began joining Gravity on stage. One grabbed JonJo’s microphone and began singing a Rolling Stones song, ‘Sweet Virginia’. JonJo shouted ‘Hippy shit!’ but danced round him and joined in on backing vocals. This was a song everyone knew. The rest of the band got behind them, more of the boys clambered up on stage and soon half of the room were singing along. Terry Flux smiled. No one would admit to having loved the Stones now but very few had tried to sell their records back to him. He predicted that within two years, early to mid-period Stones would land in ‘Collectables’.

Billy had circled back to Mary and they leant against each other, laughing and singing in an exaggerated twang. The band fell off stage and Terry Flux, who had fished around in his boxes and found that very Stones album, ‘Exile on Main Street’, filled the room with ‘Let It Loose’, a wild, tumbling down song Mary secretly loved. Most of the people in the room stood still, and looked at the floor or the ceiling.

Mary was hot and happy, being there with Billy and the song and the room, and then the boy, Daniel, appeared, pushing through the crowd, and they smiled and said nothing because nothing could be heard, and he put his hands on her shoulders so definitely that she reached up and kissed him before she met his eyes.

Terry Flux rescued his audience by filling the last hour of the evening with hard punk, The Buzzcocks’ ‘Love You More’, The Vibrators’ ‘Baby, Baby’, the same old love thing but rawer than ever.

When Daniel offered to walk Mary to the bus station, she didn’t want to lose the chance to cross town with him by admitting that the last bus had gone. On leaving The Stands, they put their arms around each other, clutching hard, and then walked awkwardly on, perhaps afraid that any adjustment would shatter their strange confidence. Mary pushed her free hand into her pocket, clutching her glasses, not in case she needed them but as if she thought they might suddenly appear of their own accord. Rather than try to see where they were going and afraid, in any case, of being seen, she kept her head down. Daniel’s hand on her shoulder couldn’t keep still but traced her bones as far as he could reach, back and forth and round from the nape of her neck to her collarbone. It was all she could do to grasp his jacket enough to hold on.

They turned into Camptown High Street which though dark, was busy. It was eleven o’clock, closing time, and the six High Street pubs were simultaneously disgorging their customers. Gangs of boys shouted names, football chants and snatches of songs, and softly punched one another. Older men as if in bloom with their beerguts, jowls and burst veins, shook each other’s thick hands and tottered off to their cars. There were proud, stiff couples and limp, bored couples; giggling trios of girls who linked arms to hold each other up; and solitary men who went to the same pub for years and sat at the bar, side by side, speaking only to borrow a newspaper or order a drink.

In daytime, people were hemmed onto the pavements of the High Street by heavy traffic. Now, they walked in the road in their twos, threes and fours. The occasional mini-cab or lorry had to slow down and negotiate. The town centre was mostly unlit. There were no neon signs or brilliant shop windows. Even Blazes, the town’s nightclub, made do with a carriage lamp over the hand-painted sign in its mews archway. Only the biggest and oldest pub, The Market Place, was lit. Its stout plaster exterior carried a string of bulbs, like beads of sweat, just below its thatch. It was the drinking place of land and money: farmers, bankers, accountants, estate managers, stud owners, game keepers.

No one looked ready to go home. Even the few who were not at least a little drunk, felt an exaggerated lightness with the relief of the end of the week, and the unaccustomed pleasure of warm darkness. It wasn’t like being on holiday because for most people, holidays were not associated with heat. Nor did they have any special holiday clothes. No one was wearing anything bright and it was too hot for the fashionable shades of purple, ochre, yellow, lime, or the bottom-heavy shapes of pear-drop collars, maxi skirts and platform boots. Even the farmers and bankers were out in plain white shirtsleeves.

Boys in white T-shirts began to circle and call to girls in white dresses. Daniel in grey and Mary in black, kept their silence even when a weeping girl spun into them, stared, laughed and ran off. Each privately burned with shame when a boy clutching a lamp-post vomited just as they passed. There was a couple in a doorway, the girl smoking, her dress unbuttoned; the boy’s hands and mouth on her breasts. Someone shouted ‘You cunt!’ and there was a rush of footsteps and the sound of a windscreen shattering. There was a police car outside Blazes, where two officers were pulling a man up from the gutter, his frilly shirt sprinkled with blood.

Unless summoned, the police kept away from the High Street and concentrated on places like The Stands or the main roads and roundabouts out of town, where they would stop and search whomever they felt like. Billy and Mary were stopped all the time, walking down a lane, driving round on Billy’s bike, or hitching a ride home. Mostly, they just had to give their names and addresses and say where they were going to. The police were sure a hippy like Billy would have drugs on him but they never found them and they were confused by the girl, who didn’t look like the hippy’s type.

The bus station was a cavernous hangar with fifteen bays. Each had a concrete bench and a plastic frame nailed to the wall where there used to be a timetable, above which were faded indecipherable bus numbers. There was one bus, parked under sprinklers that poured water over its soapy bodywork. Daniel and Mary walked towards it, as if wanting to maintain for as long as possible the fiction that they had come here for Mary to go home. A man in overalls, carrying a large brush, appeared.

‘Exempt, see …’ he said, patting the bus with his brush like an elephant keeper. ‘Says we have to keep the windows clean, for safety and that.’ The water gurgled and splashed around their feet. They let go of each other, turned and walked back out onto the station forecourt.

Now that there was no one singing or shouting or running past, Daniel started talking. How would she get home? Mary thought that if she went out to the Malibu Motel roundabout, she could hitch home from there. They walked along the ringroad, Daniel talking in a rush about bands and painters. He was nineteen, an art student at college on the coast. His big sister worked for a gallery in London. He hated provincial life. The country was, in any case, dying, let alone the countryside. And what about Mary? She took the cigarette packet on which he had written his phone number and agreed, quite sincerely, with everything he said.

As soon as they got to the roundabout, a rusting maroon Cadillac emerged from the sliproad and stopped. A window rolled down and Julie Lacey yelled ‘Mary George! You hopeless cow! We’ll give you a lift then.’ Drenched with embarrassment, Mary kissed Daniel’s cheek and let Julie pull her into the car. Julie had a pile of papers on her knee and a large calculator in her other hand. Barry Spence was driving, a cigar between his teeth. Now and then he passed a sheet of paper from a heap on the passenger seat back to Julie who rapidly punched the calculator keys, jotted down numbers and sighed.

‘It’s hopeless, Barry. Whichever way I run it, the depreciation of your fixed assets doesn’t even dent the profit margin. That’s a hell of a bite on your neck, you dirty bitch! What about on-costs, Bal?’ Another flurry of pages was thrown into the back.

As they drove out of Camptown onto the Heath, a tall figure loomed in the middle of the road and Barry braked hard. He leapt out, half angry, half afraid, while Julie squawked and Mary covered her eyes. It was JonJo. He got into the front, collecting up Barry’s papers. ‘I’ll keep hold of these for you, Mr Spence.’ He said it so politely, Barry could not take offence.

‘I’ll drop you at the end of the lane and you can walk to the farm from there.’

JonJo’s white makeup had faded and run, and his skin beneath was just as pale. ‘Thank you so much.’ He lit a cigarette in a plastic tortoiseshell holder, and turned to Julie and Mary in the back. ‘Nice to see you two being friends again.’ He raised an eyebrow.