All Growed Up Read online

  ‘Do you like my Gloria Vanderbilt?’ she asked us one by one.

  I bought everyone a Coke because we are all too good livin’ to drink. The four of us got up on the dance floor and boogied to ‘Billie Jean’ and, although I failed to pull off any authentic Michael Jackson moves, I noted that Lesley really knew how to shake her body down to the ground. At the pre-arranged moment, Heather and Aaron departed loo-ward, and I invited Lesley to join me for another Coke in the privacy of the small bar beside the emergency exit.

  ‘Do you like my Gloria Vanderbilt?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s lovely on you, so it is.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty pounds with twenty per cent off.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t get that in the Club Book.’

  ‘What’s a Club Book?’

  There were a few moments of silence as the DJ introduced Spandau Ballet in a transatlantic accent. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Do you know the way, er, when someone likes someone …’ I spluttered, ‘and they’re already good friends, and they, you know, don’t quite know how to ask them out, so they don’t …’

  Lesley nodded and her eyes widened in her lovely way, and I knew she understood.

  ‘Well, what would you do if someone like that asked you out?’ I continued, looking at her and nodding slowly, as if doing so would translate my bumbling into an intelligible request.

  Lesley’s eyes lit up and she smiled her beautiful smile. ‘Oh, I know what you’re gettin’ at, Tony,’ she whooped.

  I nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘You want me to ask Heather from Portadown to go out with you, don’t you? I’ll ask her when she comes back from the loo.’

  ‘No! No, not Heather.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the other Heather?’

  ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘Not any of the Heathers!’

  ‘Well then, who?’

  I looked at Lesley and smiled. Spandau Ballet were singing ‘True’. After a few seconds, her eyes opened even wider than usual.

  ‘You mean me?’ she asked, as if the possibility had never even crossed her mind.

  ‘Yes, of course I mean you,’ I said, and I took her hand.

  ‘All right then,’ said Lesley. ‘But I thought you fancied one of the Heathers.’

  ‘Nope. Sure I’d never be bored with you,’ I said.

  ‘This much is tru-who,’ crooned Spandau Ballet.

  ‘I’m thrilled,’ said Lesley, and I think she really was thrilled, even though she knew I was just a wee lad from up the Shankill.

  We got up on the dance floor but the DJ faded up ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police. We slow danced, even though it was a song all about breaking up and hating each other and it wasn’t very romantic at all, really. But we didn’t care. We had our first snog that night in Lesley’s kitchen while the kettle boiled. I ran my fingers through her hair and knocked one of her red earrings across the room as if I was winning a snooker tournament in Pot Black on BBC2.

  The following week we went on our first proper date as a couple to see Octopussy in the Coleraine Palladium. Unfortunately, the cinema had little in common with a James Bond movie, apart from the occasional bomb threat. The Coleraine Palladium was like the London Palladium, but without heating or customers. Lesley snuggled up to me in the freezing cinema and laughed at my Roger Moore impersonation when they stopped to change the reel in the middle of the movie. Our carry-on seemed to irritate a man in an anorak sitting on his own in the row behind us, and he tutted several times at my superb imitation of 007, but we didn’t care because we only had eyes for each other. When the movie was over we went to the Carrig-na-Cule Hotel in Portstewart for a romantic meal and I bought Lesley a Chicken Maryland and profiteroles with my student grant. After that, we went for a walk along the promenade in Portstewart. I had borrowed Aaron’s headphones so we could plug in both sets and listen to Cliff Richard’s Love Songs cassette together. We strolled along hand in hand, ignoring the icy wind and listening to ‘Constantly’, and finally we popped into Morelli’s for a poke.

  ‘You’ll have to come to Belfast,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have to come to Bellaghy,’ replied Lesley.

  When a couple visited one other’s homes this meant they were serious and didn’t care about their house being too small or their big brother embarrassing them.

  Within weeks everyone at university was saying what a lovely couple we were. Several of the Heathers from Portadown said that we suited each other very well because we both had very dark black hair. Clive Ross commented that we looked almost like brother and sister, which worried me as this sounded slightly incestuous. Byron Drake congratulated me on finding a fellow virgin to do nothing with, and Aaron Ward said we were made for each other because ‘she’s nearly as big a header as you, wee lad’. We may have started out like Mork and Mindy but it was clear that Lesley and me were transforming into Pammy and Bobby Ewing. At last, I had a real live girlfriend. We were coortin’, so we were.

  11

  WESTY DISCO ON TOUR

  ‘It saves lives, so it does!’

  This was how one RUC officer described the Westy disco – or the Ballygomartin Presbyterian Church Youth Club, to call it by its full name – and the police in Belfast knew a thing or two about life and death.

  ‘Well, it certainly does that, so it does,’ everybody agreed.

  Every Saturday night for more than ten years, four hundred teenagers had crammed into an ageing Nissan hut at the corner of the West Circular Road to dance to the Bay City Rollers, boogie to ‘Saturday Night Fever’, and wave their arms in a New Romantic way to the Human League. The police had begged the church to keep the Westy open all year round to keep the kids of the Upper Shankill off the streets and safe from riots, shootings and paramilitary recruiting sergeants. But the youth-club leaders needed a wee break during the summer, and there were far too many other distractions in July and August. Our side built bonfires and paraded on the Twelfth of July and the other side banged bin lids and marched on the anniversary of Internment. Both sides supplemented the political and cultural celebrations with summer riots, when we hurled projectiles at our neighbours across the peace walls and called them various categories of bastards. It wasn’t a proper summer in Belfast without a riot. Once you felt the warmth of the summer sun on your face you knew it was time once again to go out in your figure, get your nose sunburnt and hate the other side even more passionately than usual. In a Belfast heatwave, plastic bottles filled with suntan oil were often accompanied by glass milkbottles filled with petrol. Summer on the peace line was just like the battle between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire on the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi, but with no cuddly Ewoks. Belfast didn’t do cuddly in the summertime.

  The Westy also held activities on Tuesday nights to complement the disco dancing, snogging and alcohol smuggling that took place on Saturday nights. While Saturday nights were reserved for dancing to Duran Duran and Michael Jackson, Tuesday evenings included a youth club choir and old-fashioned ballroom dancing lessons, like on Come Dancing on BBC2. On Tuesday evenings we were given the opportunity to learn first aid and some people got a chance to do the Duke of Edinburgh. Due to this busy programme during the winter months and the obvious competing activities in July and August, the annual Westy Disco summer holiday had been instituted. At first, the trips were modest enough, to Corrymeela and Edinburgh and London, and they were subsidised by nice Americans and Dutch people who loved peace and wanted to give us a break from war-torn Belfast. But after a few years the trips became more ambitious, and eventually we had to save up and fundraise to go to Europe, which was east of England. Some of us had never been further afield than the caravan site in Millisle before embarking on the adventure of a Westy Disco summer holiday. Some of the members had never even been on a plane before, and there was a big difference between a Shankill black taxi and a jet plane.

  First we went to Ostend in Belgium, where we spent the week on a beach with sand and A
mbre Solaire and in Oncle Willy’s Bistrot significantly reducing the Belgian beer supply. My cousin Mark and I went to disco bars and I danced to Chic and got ‘Lost in Music’. I couldn’t get a Belgian girl, but I got to sample some Belgian chocolates and chips with mayonnaise and snails in garlic instead. The snails tasted like rubbery whelks, but at least I didn’t boke them back up. Everyone thought Belgium was brilliant, or nearly everyone.

  ‘Belgium’s ballicks!’ said Philip Ferris.

  The following year we travelled to Jersey with the cows and castles, where you could pick as many strawberries as you wanted for a pound. We spent the week on a beach with sand and Ambre Solaire and I got tickets for an Elvis Costello concert and he sang ‘Oliver’s Army’ and it was class! I had a big row with my father in St Helier when I accused him of slabbering because he was drinking too much, and he gave me a good hiding and I huffed the whole way through the wartime tunnels of the German underground hospital.

  The most ambitious and memorable trip so far, though, had been the previous year’s trip to Romania, behind the Iron Curtain. When Irene Maxwell heard that we were going to Mamaia she got very excited because she thought we were going to Sweden to meet ABBA. I had to explain that there was no such place as Mama Mia, although I admitted to sharing her disappointment. When it was announced that we would be going to Romania some people were very unsure if it was safe to go to a country with soldiers everywhere, but my father explained that it would be just like Belfast but with more sunshine, earthquakes and communists. This did not reassure everybody, and a few of the regulars stayed behind in the relatively less totalitarian environment of West Belfast. We spent a week on the Black Sea coast in Mamaia on a beach with sand and Ambre Solaire and I had a go at waterskiing and bought a wooden chess set carved by peasants for practically nothing. However, Mamaia was very different to our previous holiday destinations. The tourist hotels were in a compound surrounded by a fence and guarded by policemen with guns. One night towards the end of the week I was not allowed to enter the compound. My overuse of Ambre Solaire coconut oil and many hours of sunbathing had darkened my skin to the extent that I must have appeared local, and the police assumed I was trying to sneak into the tourist hotel to ask someone to sell me a pair of Western jeans, which was strictly forbidden. The police spoke to me sternly in Romanian and I replied as best I could with a ‘no comprende’. After a few tense moments, the police officers noticed that my big brother and cousin Mark had collapsed in fits of laughter at the prospect of my impending arrest and imprisonment in a communist state. In the end, they smiled as if I was a pitiful child and let me go. I declined all the offers from the locals to buy my jeans, but I smuggled an extra Bible into the atheistic country and gave it to my room maid with a wee tip and a smile. If the police that had almost arrested me were to find out about my illegal Bible smuggling I was certain I would be jailed for years for my faith, like Saint Paul and thousands of Christians in Russia and China. Romania was a very strange country. We could only buy proper Coca Cola and Mars Bars with dollars in ‘dollar shops’, and although these stores sold some Western goods there was no sign of any Tayto cheese and onion crisps anywhere and this caused a degree of cold turkey to set in among the members of the Westy Disco. None of us had survived this long without a packet of Tayto cheese and onion before and it made us all feel homesick. Irene Maxwell was the most homesick of all. Irene had an unfortunate Belfast habit of referring to anyone whose name she had forgotten as ‘Thingy’. This habit became much worse when she travelled abroad because anyone whose name she couldn’t pronounce ended up also being called ‘Thingy’. One night, in a bar with real live palm trees beside the lagoon, Irene and Heather Mateer went on the prowl for Romanian boyfriends, but they soon fell out after they both attempted to seduce the same fella.

  ‘Like, what’s your problem, wee girl?’ asked Heather. ‘Sure the one with the friggin’ turn in his eye was yours.’

  ‘I wanted Thingy,’ complained Irene. ‘Thingy was yours!’

  Irene’s affliction only got worse when she had been drinking Vodka and Coke, which she did a lot when we were abroad and her mammy couldn’t smell her breath. At times Irene would give up on whole sentences and just say ‘thing’.

  ‘Like, it’s not my fault if you can’t even say his fuckin’ name, so it’s not,’ argued Heather.

  Heather had a beautiful way with words.

  ‘But Thingy was a boke,’ complained Irene.

  ‘Well yours had a face on him like a Lurgan spade.’

  ‘I fancied Thingy!’

  ‘What are you like, wee girl?’ shouted Heather.

  ‘I know,’ wept Irene. ‘But my nerves is bad over here and I’m sweltered and them bloody mosquitoes is eatin’ me alive and I miss my mammy and all and … ya know, like … like … thing!’

  We went on a bus tour to Transylvania to see Dracula’s castle but Christopher Lee wasn’t there, and the only bloodsucking I encountered was the love bites my big brother gave his girlfriend in the back seat of the bus on the way home. Once again, I had no success whatsoever in securing a foreign girlfriend, not even a vampiric one. The only Romanian women allowed into the tourist compound were big round grannies who worked very hard all day long. I learned that there was almost full employment in Romania, which was the opposite of Belfast where there was hardly any employment. This was real live communism in action – everyone had a job and they didn’t even attempt to build a DeLorean Motor factory! So all of the grannies worked very hard, sweeping the streets, cleaning the toilets and carrying wood and rubbish.

  I bought a very cheap transistor radio in one of the Romanian shops and tried to find a radio station that played ABBA and Blondie. This proved to be very difficult as the local radio station played only marching band music and the DJ kept saying how wonderful ‘Our great leader and president, Nicolae Ceauşescu,’ was. It was like Downtown Radio only playing flute bands all day long while Big T repeatedly said how great the queen was. There was no proper news on this radio station apart from updates on all the impressive things ‘Our great leader and president, Nicolae Ceauşescu,’ was doing every day. It was the most boring radio programme I had ever heard in my life. It was even worse than The Archers on Radio 4, where English farmers talked about the weather and sheep. No wonder all the hard working grannies looked so sad if this was all they had to listen to after a long day’s work! I was certain it would have cheered everyone up if the great leader and president, Nicolae Ceauşescu, had broadcast Big T’s Country and Western Show on Mamaia radio for just one night. I was convinced that all those Romanian grannies would love Philomena Begley singing ‘Blanket on the Ground’.

  One unforgettable day, my cousin Mark and I went to a fairground. During a ride on the Big Dipper, I noticed that the rails were making a very strange, metallic cracking noise as the cars reached the top of the ride. Ten minutes later, everyone was screaming as one of the cars broke free of the Big Dipper, flew backwards at great speed and landed in the crowd below. The car landed upside down and the crowd rushed over to see if the people inside were all right. They turned the crashed car over and there were six Romanian lads around my age inside and they were all unconscious. I thought they were probably dead, and I vowed never to go on a Big Dipper again. Later that night when I got back to the hotel room I turned on the radio to hear how the injured teenagers at the fairground were doing. If this had been Downtown Radio there would have been an update from the Royal Victoria Hospital every half hour, but the news on Radio Mamaia simply reported that ‘Our great leader and president, Nicolae Ceauşescu,’ had visited Mamaia that day and that everyone loved him and how great he was for the people of Romania. It sounded like Nicolae Ceauşescu was going to be the president of Romania forever and no one cared if six teenagers were killed in a fairground accident. Romania was a beautiful place and the people we met were kind and friendly, but I sensed that there was something not quite right about this country that was probably related to politicans and
violence and power. Even though it was the strangest place I had ever encountered, there was something very familiar about Romania.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Irene Maxwell said in Constanta airport on our final day, ‘they’re all dead on here in Mama Mia, so they are, but it’s just dead sort of, ya know … thing!’

  Even though I was at university now and very rarely made it to the Westy Disco on a Saturday night any more, I still signed up for the annual summer holiday. Actually, I had no choice. As my parents ran the Westy Disco, the trip also served as our annual family holiday. As a result, my wee brother became our mascot on our trips around Europe. He was ten years younger than everyone else and was spoilt rotten with sweets and ice cream as we travelled across the continent of Europe. The trips were exclusive, members-only events, so the lovely Lesley would not be allowed to accompany me – though she never expressed any desire to do so.

  According to Growing Into Love by Joyce Huggett, I had to be faithful to Lesley while I was abroad. I had to practice fidelity like Bobby Ewing with Pammy and not yield to temptation and betray Lesley like JR did with Sue Ellen. Given my previous difficulties in securing a holiday girlfriend – apart from Maria, a beautiful Italian girl I met in London during the summer of Grease – I doubted that I would be presented with any opportunities for infidelity. But I had never been to Torremolinos before. When Uncle Henry announced that the summer trip this year would be to Spain, everyone in the Westy Disco got very excited and began singing ‘Oh this year I’m off to sunny Spain, Y Viva Espaa’.