[Previous chapter] [GCSEs: Summer 1999]
I don’t remember what (if anything) I was predicted to get for my GCSEs. But I hadn’t stuck around in The Cathedral City (or even in The Suburban Culdesac) to find out what grades I’d got in person. Summer meant visiting North Wales, which I did—without seeing Tigwillow, who I no longer received letters from or sent letters to; and who I may not even by then have recognized from the crumpled old photograph that, like some American GI marooned on a Japanese Imperial island, long after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I still kept in my wallet. I went to The Greek Pub in The Oldest City in North Wales with my ex-best friend Mel and his real friends, where we got the oldest looking one of them (Ron) to buy a round of pints, which we would later refill under the table from pre-bought cans of Carlsberg Special Brew (which Ron had also bought, with our pooled money)—I think you’ll agree, Prospective Employer, that this shows admirable Ingenuity and Thrift in terms of Managing a Budget.
My older brother had failed to complete his A-levels in North Wales, and had mostly done something else for the year and a half we’d been in England. He would thus be encouraged by my North Wales aunt and uncle, and by my mother, to move back in with us in The Rural Culdesac in Southern England, and to start his A-levels again in The Cathedral City, at the same time—and, alarmingly, in the same academic year—as me. My older brother would subsequently make friends with many of the boys and girls I’d failed to make friends with over the past two years. And also with Kent, who soon preferred my older brother to me—finally confirming beyond doubt my long-held suspicion that he was A Bad Friend. So I was once again living in The Shadow of My Brother. If only one of them, for the time being: because my younger brother was only 11, and still quite small.
I wasn’t sorry to reach the end of my time at The Posh School in The Cathedral City. They presented me with a big history book, inscribed with congratulations from the headmaster for “general achievement”; but everyone else who got one of these seemed to be credited with a specific achievement, so the receipt of this apparent honour (while unexpected and not unpleasant) did nothing to help me understand what, if anything, I might be for.
At the school leaving do, on a boat off The South Coast of England, a girl I’d sat next to in one of my classes and occasionally disagreed with about which Manic Street Preachers album was the best (she incorrectly favoured “Everything Must Go”; I correctly favoured “The Holy Bible”) asked me to dance. But I didn’t want to dance, and I didn’t know how. Later that evening, completely unprovoked, Kent shouted at some passing fishermen, implying with little tact and even less grace that they had A Bad Job; so they neatly turned their boat around, passed close by us again, and threw a dead fish at him. But the dead fish didn’t hit Kent—because the dead fish never hits the boy who shouts at the boat—it hit the girl who’d asked me to dance. And I did want to dance with her then, even though she was wrong about which Manic Street Preachers album was best. (But I still didn’t know how, so I didn’t.)
I made a leaving book for people to sign—because everyone else was doing it—and entitled it “How To Pretend You Have Friends”; which I thought was very Clever and Funny, but which was, with hindsight, probably more Weird and Annoying. I wrote a poem on the first page, with the same title, and I don’t think many people read it. Most of the comments that y classmates wrote in my book were along the lines of “I’m sorry I never really got the chance to get to know you” or “I’m sure you’re a really nice person”.
But they weren’t really. And I wasn’t really.
Grades
Art: A*
Business Studies: B
English: A
English Speaking and Listening: B
English Literature: A
French: A
D&T: Graphic Products: A
History: B
Maths: A
Science (Double Award): B B
I was pleasantly high in a phone box in The Nearest Village to The Little Hippy Festival in East Anglia when my mother read out my grades over the phone. I’d travelled down from North Wales by train with Mel and his real friends, and was cadging cider, hash, and meals from them, because I had no money, being at that time Between Jobs. I could tell right away by the tone of my mother’s voice that I’d exceeded her expectations; but I thought the grades sounded… okay, not great; but about right. (Apart from Maths and History being the wrong way around.) My mother started talking about me one day going to “Oxbridge”, but I immediately began to Manage her Expectations in that regard, because I didn’t even know where that was; but I knew the poshest kids at The Posh School all wanted to go there, so that was enough of a deterrent for me.
Please don’t misinterpret this, Prospective Employer, as evidence of Bigotry or (perhaps worse?) Inverse Snobbery on my part: I assure you it was much more a case of me instinctively Knowing My Place.
[Next chapter.]
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