Life's Lottery (9 page)

However, the M thing starts to grow in your mind. It’s not so much the decision that bothers you – though you still aren’t sure – but the actual showdown. How are you going to manage it? Who goes first? Is this like scissors-paper-stone, where you count to three and come out with it? If so, then it’s fine if you both come out with the same thing. But if there’s a split decision, if one of you wants the open road and the other wants to settle down, it could get nasty.

More and more, you want just to carry on – living together, when you’re both in London, going out together, thinking maybe about a family when you reach that unimaginable age of thirty (this year, gack!). It’s perfectly comfortable and works for both of you, so why change?

Why change anything? You like things as they are.

It’s the same with the house. You’ll never move back, and Mum and Phil certainly won’t have kids to take over the three extra rooms, but you like the idea of the family home being there. It’s as if, because the site is preserved, your childhood and adolescence are accessible to you, still there on some level. The marbles are still buried so you’re not a proper grown-up. And that’s what you want.

Which would be worse? If you voted for a split and Chris wanted to get married? Or the other way round? If you voted for a split and Chris agreed, would you still feel you’d been chucked? If Chris voted for marriage and you agreed, would you feel trapped? Whose idea was this six-month guillotine anyway?

* * *

The house goes. Mum caves in and accepts meagre compensation. She and Phil pool their savings and buy a smaller place in Sutton Mallet, a little way out of town. With the housing boom, they find themselves back on the mortgage hook in their fifties, working harder at Phil’s business to make payments. James says they should have fought on but Mum always hated conflicts. Sean Rye, Laraine’s old boyfriend, is now bank manager. He eases things a little for Mum, but James reports he’s firmly in the Hackwill camp and probably gets a kickback for forcing the deal through.

The house isn’t knocked down at once. There’s a delay in the road-widening. It sits empty. Windows are broken by kids.

James reports this is Hackwill’s real victory. Taking the house and not doing anything with it is worse than knocking it down. He says he is going to take the war to the enemy. Then, he sends you a cutting from the local paper. Robert Hackwill’s Jaguar was stolen and driven into a ditch. There’s a picture of the councillor looking stern next to the crash site, and a report of his speech against joy-riding thugs. In the picture, you see James leaning against a fence in the background, grinning. A band of hippies, including Graham Foulk, another of Laraine’s exes, squats your vacant house. Hackwill condemns the invading wasters.

You’d worry more about James’s war but the decision deadline is coming up.

* * *

You love Chris. Don’t you? And, despite straying, she you?

Think about it.

Which do you decide?

If you decide to vote for marriage, go to 108. If you decide to vote for a split, go to 121.

W
hen your Eleven Plus results come through, your parents think there has been a mistake. So does Mr Brunt. After negotiation, to which you are not party, you are called on a Saturday morning for an interview with Mr Brunt and an Exam Person.

None of the other children in your class who have failed is treated this way. You’ve a feeling you’ve been found out. The Exam People saw into your mind and knew you were deliberately getting sums wrong or picking the wrong word in a string from which you had to chose the odd one. Shane and Mary passed, and are on their way to Dr Marling’s and the Girls’ Grammar. Vanda and Paul failed as easily – Paul, whose dad works on a farm, picked ‘goat’ as the odd one out from ‘cow, goat, lion, chicken, pig’ – and are going, along with almost everyone else, to Hemphill. Your resolve to go with them, so strong that you picked ‘chicken’, is taking a battering. Grown-ups are making a fuss, as if this were as important as the custard row.

Your parents seem to think it their right that you to go to Marling’s and wear a silly cap, do a hundred hours of homework a week and be keelhauled by prefects. They elaborately do not blame you for your failure. They take you to the school for your interview and keep on at you in the car. ‘If they ask you why you want to go to Marling’s, say you want to work in the bank,’ Dad says. ‘Just don’t get nervous,’ Mum puts in. Mum thinks you panicked under pressure and says it’s ridiculous to decide a person’s entire life based on how they feel on a random day in early spring when they are eleven. Dad just huffs and insists you say (pretend) you want to work in a bank. That would be a lie. You now think the Exam People can tell when you are lying. When you grow up, you want to walk on the moon like Neil Armstrong.

Your parents sit outside Mr Brunt’s office, as if waiting to be punished, and you’re sent in. The Exam Person is called Mrs Vreeland, and has glasses that look like plastic bird’s-wings with windows in them. Mr Brunt smokes cigarettes throughout the interview, which makes the room stinky. It is Mrs Vreeland who talks to you.

First, she takes out your test paper – you recognise your name neatly printed at the top – and looks it over. You see red ticks and crosses by your answers.

‘Cow, goat, lion, chicken, pig,’ she says. ‘Why is chicken the odd one out?’

You didn’t expect to have to explain why you gave an answer.

‘Because it’s a bird,’ you say.

Mrs Vreeland looks at Mr Brunt.

‘And what are the others?’

You can’t say ‘Farm animals’, because no one would believe you thought lions were kept for meat or milk.

‘Animals,’ you say, mumbling.

‘Mammals?’

You nod. Mrs Vreeland looks at Mr Blunt again and writes something down.

‘You don’t like mathematics much, Keith? Sums?’

You shake your head, no.

‘What’s six away from twelve?’

That’s easy. ‘Six.’

‘Not five?’

You remember that’s what you put in the exam. Mrs Vreeland makes another note and puts your exam paper in a folder.

‘Are you afraid of anything, Keith?’

Almost everything, you think. Prefects.

‘No.’

‘We want to help you. You haven’t done anything wrong. You aren’t being punished.’

You don’t say anything.

‘Draw me a picture,’ she says, giving you paper and a pencil. ‘What do you like to draw?’

‘Outer space.’

‘Draw me an outer space picture. Draw me a grown-up in space.’

As you work on the picture, Mrs Vreeland talks to you, asking who your friends are (Shane and Paul), what you would like for Christmas (a bigger bicycle), if you have brothers and sisters (yes), what you like on television (
Doctor Who, Captain Scarlet
).

‘Keith, what do you want to be when you grow up?’

If you say you want to work in a bank, read 20 and go to 66. If you say you want to be an astronaut, read 20 and go to 21.

A
t Dr Marling’s, you excel in Latin and French. You get bashed about a bit on the rugby pitch but develop a lifelong passion for cricket. You find most schoolwork stimulating and engaging. You make new friends: Mark Amphlett, Roger Cunningham, Gully Eastment. You realise the kids you knew at primary school were put off by the way your mind skips ahead; at Marling’s, others can keep up with or outpace you. Everybody hates the uniform and writhes under the tyrannical rule of prefects. You bond for life, as if you’d been through a war together rather than suffered double geography on Thursday afternoon.

‘That school’s certainly bucked him up,’ you overhear Dad saying.

You resent that. The school hasn’t changed you. You’d have changed anyway. You’re growing up.

You take part in school activities: trips to France, plays, junior cricket fixtures. In your year, you are a star. It makes you a bit uncomfortable, but flamboyant eccentrics like Michael Dixon and Gully draw most of the fire. You’re just a regular bloke.

The school puts on
Henry IV, Part 1
. Michael buries himself under cushions and a false beard as Falstaff, but you get all the reviews as Hotspur. You enjoy your death scene and re-enact it whenever you’re asked.

Some people think you’re a prig. When Stephen Adlard offers you a cigarette in Denbeigh Gardens, you instinctively quote, ‘Bobby Moore says, “Smoking is a mugs’ game.”’ You cringe at your self-righteousness but have no desire to suck nicotine death. There’s a little pressure on you to be less perfect but you don’t feel like anybody’s ideal so there’s not much you can do.

Maths and physics are as hard for you as for anybody. Your languages skills are a fluke, the way your brain is arranged. You are top in Latin and French, and third or fourth in English, history and art.

At thirteen, it occurs to you that single-sex eduction is a bad thing. By then, Marling’s is on a countdown to extinction.

Read 18, go to 24.

B
lit blurt
…

* * *

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing the first time they saw a spider.

You were quite young, in town, on your own, a little out of sorts.

It was nothing you could put your finger on, but you were dissatisfied. It might have been your health. You were coming down with flu. Or it could just have been life, playing its usual tricks. You were frankly in a rut.

You were wishing. Not for what you got – good God, no, never
that –
but for something. A change, of course. A shake-up.

You had always thought of yourself as ordinary. At that moment, as the shade was spreading, you were no longer content with that.

Then, on the Corn Exchange steps, for no reason, you looked up. And saw huge, red compound eyes. A wide face floating in a cloud of black shadow. Extending telegraph-pole legs, thickly bristled with black spines. And nothing was ever the same again.

* * *

…blit blurt.

H
ere’s what happens in 1974. The tripartite educational system that has obtained in Britain since the war is transforming into a comprehensive system. What this means in Sedgwater is that the three main schools are combined. Dr Marling’s Grammar School for Boys, the Girls’ Grammar and Hemphill Secondary Modern become Ash Grove Comprehensive. The new school, which is named after your old primary school, is split between the sites that used to house Dr Marling’s and Hemphill. The Girls’ Grammar buildings become part of Sedgwater College, where you might go if you don’t leave school at sixteen, and where Laraine is studying for her A Levels.

As a fourth-year, you are taught on the site that used to be Dr Marling’s, though mostly in new, prefab buildings swiftly erected on what used to be the tennis courts, rather than in the old classrooms arranged around the central quadrangle. The most unbelievable thing that happens in the change-over is that the tie you’re all forced to wear is designed by overlaying the colours of all three schools to produce a hideous combination of lemon yellow, blood crimson, lime green, violent pink, eggshell blue and dayglo orange. Jason King wouldn’t wear one but a whole generation is compelled to hang these psychedelic eyesores round their necks.

You find yourself back with children you haven’t seen since infants’ school, and are mixed with several lots of kids – notably, the mysterious beauties of the Girls’ Grammar – who are entirely new to you. On the first day, Mrs Barringer, the youngish woman freshly appointed as head of the new school, gets up at Assembly and gives a speech. All bets are off, she says, and we’re starting anew. You are all capable of leaving behind the dead past and making new lives for yourselves. You don’t believe her. You have already found your course, and you are set on it. Nothing can change that.

Go on.

I
n September 1974, you start going to Ash Grove. You really draw ahead of the pack. At first, it’s odd. You’d got used to the other runners. Now there are new contestants, from the Girls’ Grammar. One or two smart kids from Hemphill, even, nip at the heels of the pack, almost catching up. You don’t have to worry about them: they’ve been hobbled. The girls are more worrying. Mary Yatman, whom you’ve not seen since infants’ school, has subdued her monster and become a blonde calculating-machine. If it ever came down to a race between champions, she’d be put up against you. But you can’t ignore Victoria Conyer, who has a bell-like singing voice and a trick memory, or Rowena Douglass, a tiny mouse who threatens to equal your fluency in French and German and is taking Spanish as well.

As you expect, Shane is the first to fall by the side of the track. Without the rigidly enforced discipline of Marling’s, he loses his way. His marks decline drastically and no amount of cramming or extra tuition helps. Almost overnight, he slips from the fast stream and finds himself in with a remedial wedge of Hemphill kids, looking to leave school at sixteen. He joins the Trouble-Causers and disrupts many of his lessons. You don’t see him much at break, since he’s usually off somewhere smoking or hanging around the younger girls he tries to impress with his hardness. The one time you took a serious drag on a cigarette, you coughed your lungs out and swore never to touch one again.

Roger Cunningham soon follows, not quite as disastrously. He is the first of your group to find a steady girlfriend, Rowena. This takes out two runners at the same time: Roger and Rowena slacken and can’t prop each other up. Neither will fail, but they aren’t threats to you any more. Though still under five feet tall, Rowena sprouts enormous breasts, which become objects of much discussion. Roger sprouts a permanent grin but sometimes it is fixed and humourless. Despite what he says, you think Rowena hasn’t let him handle the goods.

You run through your two-year O Level course and score nine passes, none at lower than grade B. Even Mary gets a C in English lit. Shane leaves school and goes to work at the jam factory, assisting the driver of a delivery van. For a while, he is the richest kid you know, with an unimaginable wage packet of £25 a week and the use of the van once he learns to drive. You overcome envy, realising Shane has been sidetracked by the short term. You can put off the gratification of financial independence from your parents for several more years. What is important is to keep running.