Did We Ever Think to Flip the Record?

The town I was born and raised in is one of two halves; the flatland to the south of the river and the hill on the other side. An on-off friend I had in my formative years (I'll call her Aubrey) once remarked that the further up the town people lived the more well-to-do they were, and although we were barely thirteen when she said it - and in the slyest and snidest of tones for her house was two streets above mine - if truth be told, she wasn’t far off the mark.

Small town, small minds, about sums it up, for whenever I hear of the various cliques passing judgement on others, I can’t help but balk at the hypocrisy. Uptown, downtown, location makes no difference when snobbery and its inverted twin are conjoined. So much for the close-knit community spirit they like to pretend exists whenever the news crews come to town, delving, as they invariably do, into the history of the place, or in an attempt to promote some niche ill-attended event.

Sure, the locals do look out for their neighbours, but what the journalists fail to reveal in their surface reports and saccharine articles, is that unless your face happens to fit the finely detailed mould of the scrutineer, it’s most frequently done with the cold, hard eye of derision.

Even my mother who had a pleasant word for everyone when it came to passing the time of day, would issue her warnings about me getting too friendly with kids from certain backgrounds, and most notably those from the council estate south of the river. She’d encourage me to stick with those whose home-owning, working, responsible parents were most like herself and my dad, and whose families she consequently knew to be ‘decent’. The teachers’ daughters, and those who rubbed shoulders with the local dignitaries, were not to be refused, of course, but if ever I happened to be invited to one of their parties, or on a play-date, how could she possibly compete when it came to buying a present, or deciding what dress I would wear, when my father only brought home a labourer’s wage and their mums only ever shopped in Jenners?

Mum was comfortable with Aubrey; her parents were neither toffee-nosed nor anywhere near the gutter, same as she warmly accepted another girl who lived a couple of streets further down whose mother had been sadly widowed in her thirties, but who worked part-time as a domestic help and owned her own house. It wasn’t a detached house like Aubrey’s, or a semi like ours, but a perfectly acceptable ground-floor flat in a two-up two-down with its own front garden.

Jane (as I’ve decided to call her) was my best friend in High School. I would have said this of Aubrey too, except no sooner had we started our secondary years, than the two of them had a fight there was no coming back from. Furthermore, Aubrey was always the kind to pick up and drop friends on a whim, and we were only close from time to time. Besides, she only took up with me in the first place after she’d ditched the girl who, from here on in, I shall refer to as Coley Howell.

I hardly knew Coley at all – how could I? She came from south of the river and had therefore attended the downtown primary school. I did, however, know her by sight as she was type of girl the kindlier maiden aunts of the lost generation would euphemistically describe as having ‘trouble with her glands’. A bit of a loudmouth, I reckoned, dressed in outsize denim and looking oppressively tough. In fact, when Aubrey told me she used to pal around with her, I’d been gobsmacked. I couldn’t blame her though when she gave me her reasons for snubbing her – didn’t like how she always wanted to hang around the furniture shop at night, flirting with all the young Asian guys. We were only thirteen at the time and the way Coley acted did seem a little too advanced.

The following year I got to know Coley better, for she ended up in my chemistry class, plonked down on the bench between me and this girl I’d already teamed up with for working in pairs.

‘Don’t know why I’m even here. Don’t understand any of this. Can I copy from you?’

‘Help yourself,’ I told her. ‘But don’t blame me when you get it wrong too.’

‘But you’re brainy,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows it.’

‘Not in science.’ I laughed. ‘Don’t know why I’m here either.’

She had puffball hair and a plethora of badges pinned to her denim. I’d cut and lightened my own hair by then, and a grudged kind of tolerance had developed between myself and my mother on the once-thorny subject of make-up, but I’d never have got away with coming to school dressed like this, or doodling on my books, far less inside the covers, inappropriate slogans scrawled between love hearts, moustaches and interesting body parts drawn on the pictures of pop stars that glossed back and front. I suppose Coley liked to shock, and she succeeded with me a bit, but I envied her too, like in the daring, upfront way she spoke to the teacher. A quiet man with constantly flickering eyelids, I sometimes wondered who was in charge.

‘Like my new badge, Sir? A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Good eh?’

It was the first time I’d heard the quote and I loved it. I wanted that badge for myself, but a certain reservation – perhaps a fear of being mocked – stopped me from asking where she’d got it, and I’d sat through the rest of the class trying not to feel too small and childlike beside her, replaying the latest Top 40 in my head, thinking about the cosmetics I’d buy come the end of the week, and failing to take almost anything in.

‘By the way, Sir, I won’t be here on Friday.’

‘Oh, why not?’

‘I’m going for a D&C.’

I hadn’t the foggiest what that was, but from the way the teacher’s eyelids began to flicker at ten times the speed they normally did as he all-too-briefly acknowledged her words then quickly dismissed the class, I guessed it had to be something gynaecological. Some grown up woman’s operation, and there was me not long since started my periods!

My then obsession with make-up, and with the music charts, didn’t quite extend to my friends, their interest being less deep. A bit of eyeliner and lip-gloss was Aubrey’s lot, and Jane’s mum (although she’d never have said it in my presence) refused to let her daughter go out ‘looking like a tart’. We all watched Top of The Pops, of course, everyone did, and we all had our pin-ups, but I was the only one whose bedroom walls could barely be seen for posters, and who taped all the songs in the Chart Show every Sunday, finger at the ready on ‘pause’ for when the tracks neared their end to cut out the presenter’s voice. It was a practice I’d started back in ‘76 aged nine, and I’d kept the cassettes, stored in order. I also kept a book of chart positions, so it didn’t come as too great a surprise when, in March 1982, I entered Radio 1’s Top 3 Prediction contest and won.

Certainly, I was delighted. The prize of a £10 record token would buy me two LPs, or one and five singles, and, even better, I’d had my name on the radio – the Tuesday lunchtime show which I always taped just in case. And, this time, I couldn’t help but replay it, over and over in the living room after tea, right until the news came on and my mother went ‘quack’.

This familiar, but profound expression which emerged from Mum’s mouth like a swear-word was a cringe-fest to say the least, but with none of my friends around, and still on a high from my win, for once I saw the funny side, even more so when the ‘quacks’ came thick and fast as I rolled about the floor in tears of laughter. And yet, my minor success did have a downside. Why, oh why, did it have to be this week? The week with the lamest Top 3 in chart history? The Goombay Dance Band at number one, The Lion Sleeps Tonight at number two, and with that wrinkled old Spanish crooner, Julio Iglesias bringing up the rear, did this really have to be the one I’d won? How embarrassing to think that people at school might get wind of this, and take my 'calling it' as a sad (and very wrong) reflection of my taste in music.

I’d tell no one, I thought as I’d walked back to school after lunch, except maybe Jane. She didn’t have many records and I wanted to buy her that Shakin’ Stevens one she was always singing. Aubrey didn’t come into it. She’d ditched me a few weeks beforehand after bad-mouthing Jane and quoting Bucks Fizz about there coming a time for me to make my make my mind up between them. I got as far as the cloakroom.

‘Carol! You’re famous! You were on the radio! You won the Top 3 Predictions.’

There was Coley sat on the floor with her transistor radio and her downtown friends gathered round.

‘You gonna buy me a record, since I’m the one that told you? Iron Maiden, Run to the Hills. Proper music that.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

I could hear them laugh as I walked away, convinced they were laughing at Goombay-Dance-Band-Spanish-crooner-loving me.

I did buy Coley the record, though. I mean, why not? I got the Duran Duran I’d wanted for ages, and after picking up Jane’s Shakin’ Stevens, there weren’t too many 45’s I was bothered about. I had them all on tape anyway.

‘Here,’ I handed her the vinyl in the corridor the following Monday as her mates stood mouths agape. No laughter this time, I noticed, and when it came to Chemistry, there was certainly more of an open vibe on her part, an eager linking up as a pair, and when put in threes, she’d quip about the other girl – ‘always in that same stupid jumper, wish she’d do something with her hair – like it just hangs there.’ I reckoned mine did too, but that was okay, she said, at least I’d made the effort to lighten and style it.

Jane left school that summer, and because she worked all day and met her boyfriend every night, I hardly saw her after that. Aubrey, who like me, had to stay on until Christmas, decided, rather than put up with the ‘freaky, geeky prefect-badge-wearing set’, to forgive my apparent disloyalty and hold out her prickly olive branch, at least, as she put it, until school was done. But even she wasn’t around all the time, so it was during the summer, whilst at a loose end, I decided to take a walk by myself. A few of the girls I knew less well sometimes bathed in the river, and because I’d hung out with them once or twice and was generally accepted, I headed down there in my tighter than tight red satin shorts and orange bikini worn under a button-me-down white sleeveless shirt.

Ok, so they weren’t around. Might as well cross the old iron bridge, I thought, stop at the downtown shop for a drink. I knew where it was. Mum had brought me on a walk or two as a kid which saw us passing through the estate but not stopping. All those identical streets and dreary, chimney-smoking houses, washing hung out in the rain, whites gone grey, gardens full of broken, rusted machines, not a flower in sight. Foul was how she’d described it. The dogs and what they did on the pavements, the people’s language, their exaggerated accents, the stink.

‘Carol, jeez, didn’t expect to see you round here.’

I’d just cracked open my Diet Coke when Coley appeared, also on her own and in the most hideous garment I’d ever seen on a girl our age. Like a navy and white dotted tent.

‘I was thinking of going swimming, but…’

She’d clocked me looking, conspicuous as I suddenly felt in my cool summer threads.

‘I know, I know. Wouldn’t go out like this normally, but can’t wear much else in the heat. Not got much choice… Hey, you don’t fancy coming to mine, do you?'

Now, whether Coley felt as awkward inviting me into her family home, as I felt being there, I still can’t decide, but culture-shock that it was, it was the first and last time. She ushered me through the living room where an elderly lady with a frizz of white hair who I assumed to be her gran and later found out was her mother, sat with her feet in a bowl, dress tucked into her knickers, an overflowing ashtray on the arm of her colour-clash chair. There were children everywhere – only three or four, I suppose, although it seemed like dozens – all running hither and thither, half-naked. And there was a man as well – her brother, she explained, although he looked a lot older – eyes fixed to the telly, volume up. Not one of them paid me the slightest attention - nothing like my own house, for if the drinks and cakes and biscuits weren’t offered round and Mum's conversation didn’t extend to at least a couple of ‘quacks’ I would have been seriously concerned.

Coley, it turned out, was into CB radio, which I knew nothing about, and for the entire time I was in her bedroom, all she did was fiddle around with her dials talking what sounded like a foreign language to whatever random guy happened to be on the airwaves. An eyeball – what the hell was that? Meeting up, I supposed, but I had a far more gruesome picture in mind, a literal gluing of eyes with some great sweaty-hairy trucker-beast, so the minute she suggested a foursome - 10/10 good buddy, over and out. No way would I tell my mum where I’d been. Or anyone. And I didn’t hear from Coley again until after I’d left school.

I’d started work in the newsagents when she called me. There I was, serving behind the counter when the manageress passed me the phone.

‘Carol, my brother fancies you. He’ll meet you tonight at eight. Okay?’

Red-faced as I was in front of my ear-flapping customers, not to mention wary of getting the sack, I got Coley off the line as soon as I could, but only after agreeing – not to a date with the brother, but a meeting with her to discuss it. Can’t say I was too disappointed when she failed to show.

Aged sixteen, because I looked older and could get into the pubs in a neighbouring town, I soon got to know the folk there, and went out most weekends. No big deal then when the brother appeared. Not entirely coincidental, but no skin off my nose. A drink and a chat, a definite ‘no’, an encounter quickly forgotten – or it should have been.

‘Carol _________, your mum’s on the phone. You < inaudible crackle > something, something.’

The following night when I heard my name called out through that nightclub speaker, I thought I must be imagining things. Not a word from those I was with so I chose to ignore it. But Mum was still up when the taxi dropped me off after two, and although I’d seen her fretting before, this time her anxiety levels were off the scale. More bark of the stag than ‘quack’. More painfully squealing hyena.

‘You’ve been with him, haven’t you? That man with all those kids. You do know he’s trying to reconcile with his wife…? That woman was round, that sister of his from that grubby estate. Oh yes, she told me all about it. Came in uninvited, wedged herself into that chair, thought she’d never heave herself out.’

I never did understand why Coley did what she did, or why, over the next few months, she continued to play those embarrassing games, popping up in pubs and clubs and on the street whenever I happened to be with some guy. Wrapping herself around them, pulling them onto the dancefloor, making it obvious she was up for whatever I wasn’t. Not that I cared until I had someone to care about, and then she’d loomed up behind me as I’d got in his car and quite brazenly got in as well. But what this guy did, rather than give her the lift she was begging him for, was to give her such short shrift, it all ended there. 

I haven’t seen Coley in decades. Not since I moved away from my hometown, and when Aubrey, who still considered herself two streets above me, cut me dead for the final time. I do see Jane though. We meet up for coffee or lunch and she tells me what’s new.

‘Carol, do you remember a Coley Howell in our year at school? Can’t say I do, but I met this bloke from the estate the other day who said he’s her brother and that you and her were friends. Think he must be confused. We never did mix with the downtown lot, did we?

‘Oh, Coley, big lass, used to copy from me in Chemistry… and you might remember when I won that comp and I bought you the Shakin’ Stevens?

‘That I do.’

‘Well, I got her a record as well. Had to admire her cheek to demand one. But no, I wouldn’t have called her a friend. Funny, though, how I never played that record through. Not a clue what was on the B-side. Still, I suppose we never thought past our A-sides back then.’