Читать книгу The House is Full of Yogis - Will Hodgkinson - Страница 13

While Nev was off in Florida, I made a new friend. Sam Evans lived in Hammersmith, West London, in a flat. All of my suburban chums lived in houses – not big houses, but houses nonetheless – so a flat seemed terribly cosmopolitan. You walked up a flight of stairs to enter the living room, where Sam’s mother Erica slept on a bed that folded out of the sofa. Upstairs was Sam’s room. He had a poster of Judge Dredd, a Commodore 64 computer and a large bookshelf with grown-up novels; apart from Tom, I had not come across a boy who had read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Animal Farm. I poked my head into Sam’s sister’s room. It was phenomenally untidy: clothes piled everywhere, ashtrays – shocking in itself – and posters of David Bowie on the walls.

‘Your sister looks cool.’

‘Are you joking? Let’s go downstairs and get Mum to make us some French toast.’

Erica Evans, who was American and wore oversized glasses and bright yellow dungarees, worked for something called the Institute For Psychic Research. ‘We’re all psychic,’ she said in a matter of fact way as she worked through a pile of papers on the dining table. ‘It’s just a question of unlocking the power within.’ I told her about the Ouija board episode. ‘Yeah, you get some pretty restless spirits with Ouija,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Ghosts are dead people who haven’t resolved their issues in this world, so they cling on to the living. Best not to mess around with that shit.’

Sam picked up a plastic bag full of white powder that was sitting on the top of a bookcase and said, winking at me, ‘Are you selling cocaine again, Mum?’

‘I realized this morning we had run out of washing powder and I didn’t have time to go out and buy some more, so I asked one of the gay guys downstairs if I could borrow some. He was wearing incredibly tight jeans, and I swear, he had no penis whatsoever. I couldn’t stop staring. I hope he didn’t notice.’

I was incapable of contributing to this conversation.

It got worse, or rather, better, when Erica had to go out, presumably for a combination of cocaine selling, ghost hunting and the examining of tiny penises. Sam’s flat had a video machine and he suggested we watch a film called The Man Who Fell to Earth. ‘David Bowie plays an alien. Fancy it?’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘It’s got, like, a blowjob scene, but it’s no big deal.’

‘Cool,’ I said, with a shrug. What was a blowjob?

It was like moving to a foreign country for the afternoon.

The television was on the floor, under the stairs, which meant that the best way to watch it was lying down. Perhaps a family’s discipline could be measured by the height at which they relaxed. At Will Lee’s house, with the exception of the beanbags in the attic, stiff wooden chairs with high, straight backs kept you at a minimum of two feet off the ground at all times, which seemed unfair considering his mother was under five feet tall and had to climb onto them. In our house everything levelled out at a conventional foot and a half. At the Evans’s, sitting above carpet level was for the unenlightened.

The film was made up of a series of exotic images, none of which I understood but which stayed with me for years afterwards: David Bowie watching a bank of televisions; wandering around an arid, distant planet; painted figures performing a ritualistic dance in a Japanese restaurant; and a sex scene with the aforementioned blowjob, something that before then I didn’t actually know existed. As the months passed those images kept playing back at me, ever more jumbled and confused but still with vivid flashes, and always associated with the first time I saw Sadie Evans.

It was some time near the end of the film when she came up the narrow stairs and into the flat. She must have been about fourteen, the same age as Tom, but she looked older. She had lank reddish hair cut to her shoulders and pale, pimple-flecked skin. She was wearing denim jeans, a denim jacket, a studded belt and a Motorhead T-shirt. She hovered over us, hands on her hips.

‘Who said you could watch my Man Who Fell to Earth?’

‘Who said I couldn’t?’ Sam replied, not looking up at her.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said with a curl of the lip, ‘that I’m in a good mood.’ She kicked her brother in the ribs. Sam yelped and called her an idiot. She cocked her head at me and said, ‘Who’s this?’

‘I … I … I … I’m … Wuh-whu-whu … Will.’

‘You will what?’

‘That’s his name?’ said Sam, eyes raised heavenwards.

For some reason this appeared to annoy her, as she stomped off to her room. But halfway up the stairs she stopped, looked at me, and winked. She took the last remaining steps at a slow, steady, sashaying pace.

Half an hour later, the telephone went. It was Mum, telling me it was time to come home: Nev had returned. I left the flat as if in a trance, with only a hazy impression of taking the tube for the three stops from Turnham Green to Richmond, walking up the alleyway at the side of the station and bashing into a man who told me to watch out where I was going, then crossing Queens Road and getting honked at by the oncoming traffic.

I had met girls before. Not many, but I had, and I knew what they looked like and how they sounded. What was it about Sadie, a girl I had known for a total of twenty-six seconds, which caused this strange feeling?

Who could I talk to? Tom was out of the question. Will Lee was unlikely to be of much help. A boy that spent after-school sessions classifying fossils could not be expected to know the mysteries of love. Nev would surely know what to do and what to say. He had intimate knowledge of difficult women and it looked too as though once more he had the strength to take on his paternal duties. After I had crashed through the back door and opened the fridge to glug orange juice straight from the carton, I saw the family, sitting around the table, looking at me expectantly.

Nev was no longer a spectre of ill health. He was looking young and fresh in jeans and a colourful T-shirt that said Welcome to Florida, The Land of Sunshine. He was tanned and he had filled out, the edges taken off his angularity. He gave me a stiff hug before presenting a gift: my own Sony Walkman. This was welcome indeed. It meant I no longer had to steal Tom’s and risk a beating. Nev got Tom an electronic baseball game. Now I would get to risk a beating for stealing that instead. Nev also had Levi’s for both of us, explaining that Rick, the man he had been staying with, worked in the jeans business and gave them to him at a discount.