The Fandom of the Operator

8

Everything changes. And the present soon becomes the past and is gone.

I awoke to find that there was silence in our house. It was Thursday, yet there was silence. I was seventeen years of age.

Uncle Jonny came no more to visit. My father had died the previous year. A trapdoor he was standing on gave way beneath his feet. Few men can predict with accuracy the day and the hour of their passing. My father did. He knew the exact minute when he would die.

The judge had told him.

I did not attend the Daddy’s trial. There were no spare seats in the public gallery. My mother had reserved them all for herself and her personal friends. They all had banners with them and specially printed badges that they wore. These appealed for justice to be done.

No clemency, they said. And Hang the blackguard high.

Whether the Daddy was really guilty of all the charges laid against him, I cannot say. Certainly he murdered the ice-cream man, but that fellow had it coming. The Daddy had warned him on numerous occasions not to park outside our door and ring his damnable bells. He had told him what he could do with his chocolate nut sundaes and where he could stick his Cadbury’s Flakes, and what would happen if he didn’t move his van to places far away. But the fellow persisted. It was a free country, he said. He had a special licence, he said. He could park wherever he pleased, he said. Move or die, the Daddy said. The ice-cream man stayed put.

In the months leading up to his murderous assault upon the vendor of iced sweeteries, the Daddy had, as they say, lived on his nerves. He was a troubled daddy. He eschewed good food and dined on drink alone. He developed strange compulsions. He would spend hour upon end sniffing swatches of tweed in the gents’ outfitters. He became prone to outbursts of uncontrollable laughter. He bethought himself a Zulu king and dressed in robes befitting. He became obsessed with the idea that an invisible Chinaman called Frank was broadcasting lines from Milton directly into his brain.

His plea of insanity was ignored by the court. And rightly too, in my opinion. I did not consider the Daddy to be mad. Perhaps a tad eccentric – but then, who isn’t?

Upon that fateful night, the ice-cream man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the story of most of our lives. My daddy had just too many things all preying on his mind. The ice-cream man’s bells pushed him over the edge. And if the bells weren’t bad enough, the fact that my daddy caught the icecream man sexing my mummy was.

The French have a special term for this kind of crime. And the perpetrator often gets off scot-free in their courts. But that’s just typical of the French. We’re far more civilized here.

So, I suppose, fair do’s, the Daddy got what he deserved. And I, for one, was glad to see the back of him. I really enjoyed the street party that was held to celebrate his hanging. But I do feel that the court should have left it at that. Punished him for the crime he had committed, without bringing in all that other stuff, which seemed to me to be done for no good reason other than spite.

The counsel for the prosecution called a special witness: a research scientist who worked for a government department, which didn’t have a name, or did, but it was a secret. This special witness gave evidence that my daddy had been directly responsible for all manner of terrible crimes against mankind and the planet in general. Climate changes; the extinction of a breed of rare miniature sheep; Third World famine. He even blamed my daddy for the rise of rock-’n’-roll.

I heard this all from Dave, who, having recently become very close with my mother, had got a good seat in the public gallery.

When I expressed my doubts to Dave regarding the scientist’s claims, Dave had shaken his head and no-no-no’d me into silence. The scientist had brought in a blackboard, Dave said. He had drawn equations on it. Dave said he had explained in terms that even the layman could understand how all the equations pointed to my father being the culprit and there was no room for error. So said Dave.

“It’s a new science,” Dave said to me. “Based upon the discovery that we human beings do not actually think with our brains. Our brains are, apparently, receivers and transmitters, which receive information from our surroundings and transmit it to a distant point in the universe; then instructions to proceed in this or that endeavour are transmitted back, or some such, in so much and so on and suchlike. And things of that nature generally.

“And half of the rubbish that’s going on in the world is all your daddy’s fault,” said Dave.

I pricked up my ears at this, which got a cheap laugh from Dave. But what he said rang a distant bell with me. I thought back to that time when I’d been hiding in the restricted section of the library (a section that had recently been removed to an unknown location) and had overheard those two young men talking about this very thing.

Curiously, there was no mention of this scientist’s evidence in the newspaper coverage of my father’s trial. The press just stuck with the business of the ice-cream man being run through the backside with my daddy’s Zulu asagi.

The editor of the Brentford Mercury excelled himself.

ICE CREAM, I SCREAM, EYES STREAM

I had that front page stuck up on my bedroom wall for years.

So, as I say, it was now very quiet in our house.

I didn’t miss the Daddy. I’d loved him, for he was my daddy, but I’d never liked him very much. I blamed him for all the bad traits I now possessed. Whatever you learn in your childhood stays with you for life. It colours your opinions: it structures your thinking. You are programmed when young. You can never alter your basic programming.

I can’t blame the Daddy for all the mistakes I’ve made in my life. That would be absurd and irresponsible. But I blame him for most and that is enough for me.

So, as I say, and I’ll say once more: it was now very quiet in our house. And as I’d always loved quietness, I was grateful for it.

And, as I said, everything changes. The present soon becomes the past and is gone.

The borough was changing. The old streets were coming down and new blocks of flats were rising to take their place.

This was now the nineteen sixties. Change was fashionable. And I was fashionable too. I was a mod.

And I was a homo.

That might come as a bit of a surprise to you. It did to me, when I finally found out what the word meant. I was rather disappointed about that, I can tell you. I’d thought that it must mean something really, really bad. I didn’t expect it just to mean that. I’d been doing that for years. I went to an all-boys school and everybody did that. We did that whenever we got the opportunity. Doing that took our minds off the fact that there weren’t any girls around for us to do that to. And when you did that to boys, you couldn’t get them pregnant, so you didn’t have to marry them. So I quite liked being a homo.

Ultimately I didn’t stick with it, though.

You could say that I tried to be a homosexual, but I was only half in Earnest.[6]

But things were definitely changing.

I wandered down Moby Dick Terrace one day, wearing-in my new Ivy Shop loafers with the gilt bar and low-level Cuban heels, to discover that Mother Demdike’s hut had gone. Workmen were laying the foundations for a new three-up, two-down, with an indoor lavvy. I asked one of the workmen what had happened to the witch’s hut and indeed to the witch herself. But the workman told me that he knew nothing about any old witch, he was just laying the main drains.

He was a nice-looking workman, with tight jeans that flattered a pert little bum. I asked whether he’d like to come out to the pictures some time. The workman took umbrage at this and called me a poof to my face. And he said that he’d give me a kicking if I didn’t clear off pretty sharpish.

I have always found homophobia offensive and I don’t take kindly to threats of violence. I took the workman quietly aside and discussed the matter with him. And then I hurried on about my business.

But I wondered over Mother Demdike and her hut. I recalled the hag telling me that one day she and her kind would be gone and forgotten. Gone, as if in a dream that vanishes upon waking.

And indeed she was gone.

Dave was also gone for a while. To a young offenders institution. They say that if you want to learn how to be a real criminal, then prison is the place to go. If you’re not a crim when you go in, you’ll certainly be one by the time they let you out again.

It isn’t utterly true. Criminals in prison can’t really teach you very much. Because, let’s face it, if they were any good at being criminal, they’d not have ended up in prison, would they? Their advice and their criminal knowledge really isn’t worth much at all. The only criminals whose advice is worth taking if you wish to pursue a life of crime are those who have never been caught. And those criminals will never give you any advice at all. Because they will deny to their dying breath that they are criminals.

Because how can they be classified as criminals? They’ve never been convicted of a crime!

Dave came out of the young offenders institution full of all kinds of rubbish. Theories on how you could commit the perfect crime. I argued with him that there was no such thing as the perfect crime. Silly, I know, but I was a teenager.

Actually, if you’d like to commit the perfect crime just once in your lifetime, I’ll tell you how to do it. It’s a secret, so you’ll have to promise me that you won’t pass it on to anyone else. Do you promise?

All right, I’ll tell you what to do.

What you need to have is a bank account that’s in credit to more than one hundred pounds, a hole-in-the-wall cash card and a sombrero. If you have these, then this is what you do.

Put on your sombrero,[7] go to the hole-in-the-wall when there’s no one around, insert your cash card and order up one hundred pounds. When the money appears through the little slot, very carefully ease out the middle twenty-pound note, leaving the rest where they are. Then wait. After a couple of minutes the cash machine will take back the money. It will credit one hundred pounds back to your bank account. Leaving you with twenty pounds in your hand. This is of course illegal, so I would be committing a crime if I encouraged you to do it. Or in fact even told you about it. So I won’t.

Instead I’ll continue with my tale. The Daddy was dead, I was an uncommitted homo (because now I’d left the all-boys school to seek employment). Mother Demdike was gone and all but forgotten and Dave was back from the young offenders institution.

It was Thursday. And it was seven o’clock.

I met up with Dave at the launderette.

“I can’t believe that you still get a feed out of this,” I said to Dave, as I watched him watching the washing going round and around.

“A feed?” said Dave. “Speak English.”

“You still enjoy this stuff,” I said. “It still excites you.”

“One day,” said Dave, “you’ll appreciate it for yourself. Oh God, there’s a spin cycle coming up. Don’t talk to me till it’s over.”

I kept silent and left him to his pleasure. I went outside and lit up a Passing Cloud.[8]

They don’t have Passing Cloud cigarettes any more. Few folk remember them now. Wills made them. In a flip-top pink packet, in two rows of ten. Oval, untipped cigarettes, with Big Chief Passing Cloud on the front, smoking a clay pipe. I never understood about that. But we had some really classy fags back in those days. Balkan Sobranie, Spanish Shawl, a perfumed cigarette, Three Castles, Capstan Full Strength.

Those were the days.

And, frankly, I miss ’em.

Presently Dave emerged from the launderette with a pale, young face and a bit of a sweat on.

“That was nice,” he said. “I missed that in the nick.”

“Didn’t they have a launderette in there?” I asked.

“No,” said Dave. “You had to wash out your undies in the slop bucket.”

“Were you ‘the Daddy’ in there?” I asked. “Did you have ‘bitches’?”

“I think you’re in the wrong decade,” said Dave, shaking his shaven head. “We had snout and screws and vicars with long hair who taught us how to turn dolly pegs on a lathe.”

“Will you be going back, do you think? Or, having paid your debt to society, will you henceforth be a model citizen?”

“I liked the food,” said Dave. “I think I will become a repeat offender.”

“Each to his own,” said I. “What shall we do tonight?”

“We could break into the sweet shop and steal humbugs.”

“Not keen,” I said. “There’s a dance on at the Blue Triangle Club. Pat Lyons and the Second Thoughts are playing.”

“Is it booga-booga music?”

“It’s Blue Beat, I think.”

“Let’s go, then. I’ll nick some parkas from the cloakroom.”

We went to the Blue Triangle Club.

Every other day of the week, the Blue Triangle Club was a YMCA sports and social hall. But Thursdays were different. On Thursdays there were bands – real bands with guitars and amplifiers. Most of the bands had Jeff Beck in them. You couldn’t really have a band back then if Jeff Beck wasn’t in it. He was “paying his dues”, which was what you did in those days if you wanted to become famous as a musician. You didn’t go along to auditions that were being shown as a TV series, you learned your craft. You paid your dues. And you ultimately became Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck played lead guitar with Pat Lyons and the Second Thoughts on Thursdays. I don’t know what ever happened to Pat Lyons. Obviously he never paid enough dues. Because he never became Jeff Beck. I heard that he became a butcher, as did Reg Presley from the Troggs, before he gained a temporary reprieve when some nineties band took one of his songs to the top of the charts again and he got some royalties in. Spent it researching crop circles, I understand.

But Jeff Beck did become Jeff Beck and he played some blinding guitar that Thursday night at the Blue Triangle Club.

Somewhere, amongst my personal effects, exists my Blue Triangle Club member’s card. It’s blue and it’s got my name on and it’s triangular in shape. My membership number was 666, which meant a lot to me at the time.

“Got any pills?” asked the bouncer, barring our way into the club. “I’ll have to search you.” The bouncers were so very big in those days. And they were bouncers then, not door supervisors. Harry was huge.

“Turn it in, Harry,” I said. “We don’t have any pills.”

“Would you like to buy some, then?” asked Harry.

“Now you’re talking,” said Dave. “Got any purple hearts?”

“Shilling each,” said Harry.

“I’ll take a quid’s worth,” said Dave.

I sighed a little for my bestest friend. “You’re on probation,” I said. “You’ll be in trouble if you’re caught popping purple hearts.”

“Are you going to grass me up?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then, a quid’s worth for my friend too.”

“Nice,” I said, trying to look like I meant it.

In truth I’d never taken any drugs. When people offered them to me, I accepted gratefully and pretended to pop them into my mouth. But really I pocketed them, took them home, sorted them out, packaged them up and generously handed them around when the time was right. So my friends thought I was pretty “right on”. But in truth I was afraid of drugs.

I’ve never cared for being out of control – which is to say, not being in control of myself. I like what thinking I do to be of my own volition. I like to be the master of my own self. I took the quid’s worth of purple hearts and appeared to toss them down my throat.

Dave made short work of his.

We paid our entrance fees, had our hands stamped with ultraviolet paint for our pass-outs and entered the Blue Triangle.

The joint was not exactly a-jumping. A few embarrassed-looking girls in droopy dresses half-heartedly slopped about the dance floor, circumnavigating their handbags. A few young blokes in full mod rigout lounged at the bar, too young to get served, too cool to admit that they couldn’t.

Dave made for the bar, ordered drinks, was turned away and returned without them.

“In prison,” he said, “we drank piss and got right out of our faces.”

“What?” said I. “You drank your own piss?”

“Certainly not,” said Dave. “Do I look like a pervert?”

I shook my head, for in truth Dave didn’t.

“We drank the piss of Goldstein the shaman.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Goldstein the shaman grew Peyote cactus in his cell. If you eat Peyote buttons the drug comes out in your piss stronger than when it went in. It’s something to do with the acids in the human digestive system.”

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“It is,” said Dave.[9] “I wonder if it works with lager.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“No,” said Dave. “You’re probably right. So, shall we chat up some girls? What do you think?”

I cast an eye over the womenfolk. There was a particularly pretty blonde girl chatting with a big fat friend.

“There’s a couple over there,” I said. “But I don’t like the look of your one much.”

“They all look the same in the dark,” said Dave, wise as ever for his years. “I think these purple hearts are kicking in. How do my pupils look?”

I stared into his eyes. “Well,” I said, “that’s interesting.”

“Have they dilated?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But it would appear that both of your pupils are now located in your right eye.”

“No?” Dave covered his left eye with his hand. “Damn me,” he said, “you’re right.”

“This might affect your chances of chatting up that big fat girl.”

“No probs,” said Dave, reaching into his pocket and bringing out a pair of sunglasses. “I was going to put these on anyway. They make me look like Roy Orbison.”

“Who’s Roy Orbison?”

“He’s the lead singer with a band in Acton. Jeff Beck plays bass for them on Tuesdays.” Dave put on his sunglasses. “How do I look?” he asked.

“A bit of a nelly. Those are women’s sunglasses. Does Roy Orbison wear women’s sunglasses?”

“I don’t know,” said Dave. “I’ve never seen him.”

Drinkless, feckless, young, dumb and full of commercial enterprise, Dave and I set out to pull.

Dave, the uncrowned king of the chat-up line, marched straight over to the fat girl and introduced himself. “Black’s the name,” said Dave. “Count Otto Black, swordsman and adventurer, and you, I believe, I have seen in the movies.”

“Me?” said the fat girl. “Me in the movies?”

“Come on,” said Dave. “Don’t be shy. I’ve seen you in a film, haven’t I?”

“No,” said the fat girl. “You haven’t.”

“Oh,” said Dave. “I could have sworn you were Robert Mitchum.”[10]

The fat girl tittered foolishly, which meant that Dave was “in there”. The blonde girl, however, maintained a stony silence.

“Don’t mind him,” I said to her. “He’s stoned out of his face. We both are. We’re wild ones. Live fast, die young, that’s us.”

“Then don’t let me keep you,” said the blonde girl. “Feel free to die whenever you want.”

“My name’s Gary,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Mine’s a gin and tonic”

“Are you a Red Indian, then?”

“What?” said the blonde girl.

“Well, when they christen Red Indian babies, they baptize them in the river, hold them up and then name them after the first thing the mother sees. Like Standing Bear, or Sitting Bull, or Passing Cloud, or Two Dogs Sexing.”

“What are you blathering about?”

“You said your name was A Gin and Tonic. Perhaps your mum didn’t live near a river, so you were christened in a cocktail bar. That would explain it.”

“Fugg off!” said the blonde girl, upon whom the subtle nuances of my sophisticated humour were obviously lost.

“I suppose sex would be out of the question, then?” I said.

“Fugg off or I’ll call the bouncer.”

“Harry’s a friend of mine,” I said.

“Harry’s my brother,” said the blonde girl.

“Look,” I said, because I was rarely put off. Knowing, as most teenage boys have always known, that nine times out of ten persistence will eventually wear down a teenage girl. “I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot here.”

“Take both your feet and walk.”

Having a secret weapon in my bird-pulling arsenal, I chose now to employ it. “I love your perfume,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s Fragrant Night, by Fabergé, isn’t it?”

“It might be.”

“And your lipstick. I love that too. That’s Rose Carmethine, by Yardley.”

“It might be.”

“And your frock is a Mary Quant. And your shoes …”

“You know an awful lot about women’s fashion.”

I leaned close to the blonde girl’s left ear and whispered the words: “I’m a homosexual.” Then stepped back to let them take effect.

The blonde girl stared me full in the eyes. “Oh,” she said. “I, err … do you really like my frock?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The colour really flatters your complexion. You have beautiful skin, if I might say so. Flawless.”

“Thank you. My name’s Sandra, by the way.” And she put out her hand for me to shake.

So I shook it.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, dirty trickster. Yeah, all right, OK. But I was a homo; well, I had been a homo. I was all for having a go at heterosexuality. But it’s actually a great chat-up line. When you confide your homosexuality, the woman no longer feels threatened. She views you differently. And if she finds you attractive, she wonders, just wonders, whether she could “straighten you out”. Women won’t admit to this, of course, but then there are so many things that women won’t admit to, particularly when it comes to sex. And as this particular ploy had proved effective on several previous occasions, I had no reason to believe that it would fail upon this one.

Sandra bought me a gin and tonic. Well, she looked eighteen. Then she led me to one of the tables at the end of the hall away from the stage and talked to me about fashion and boyfriends. I listened to it all, offering sensitive comment when I felt the need arose, but basically letting her do all the talking. Women, I have learned, like this a lot. They like a man who listens, rather than just rabbits on about himself. So I listened and I waited, waited for the question that I knew would eventually come.

“Have you ever been with a girl?” Sandra asked.

Result!

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“You must have thought about it, though.”

I shrugged strategically. It was not a direct question – a direct answer could blow the whole thing. “The band’s starting up,” I said. “Would you like to dance?”

Sandra nodded. And so we danced.

Jeff Beck played a stormer that Thursday night. He was joined on stage by Alan Price, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Bill Wyman, who were all paying their dues.

Sandra got the rounds in all evening, although I did pay for at least half of them. By checking-out time I was rather drunk and she was rather drunk and very stoned.

I know it is an evil thing to slip purple hearts into a young woman’s gin and tonic every time she goes off to the toilet, but I was a teenage boy and few teenage boys have a conscience.

We left the Blue Triangle and while Sandra was throwing up in a dustbin around the back I spied Dave in congress with the fat girl up against the fire door. He gave me the thumbs-up and I returned it to him.

Then I took Sandra off to show her Mr Doveston’s marble tomb by moonlight. It was a favourite place of mine to bring my lovers. I even had a sleeping bag stashed nearby in one of the above-ground crypts, for those who felt the marble rather cold upon their backs.

I think that Sandra was rather pleased with herself afterwards. She had, after all, “cured” me of my homosexuality.

I might just have notched her up as one more easy conquest, but there was something about Sandra that I really liked. It wasn’t her perfume, or her lipstick, or her frock, or her shoes. I determined that I’d change all of them soon enough. But it was something about her. The person that was her. She seemed special. I couldn’t put my finger on quite how she was special. She certainly wasn’t very clever. But she had a certain something. And, as I had always seen myself marrying a posh woman and the whinnying noises she made whilst I was sexing her led me to believe that she was indeed very posh, I decided to see her again.

And again.

And again.

And again.