All Growed Up Page 4

  I sprinted back down the beach to seek help but the beach seemed longer on foot and once again I was sweating and panting and developing a painful stitch in my side. I ran as fast as I could but the soft sand seemed to deliberately slow me down, like in one of those nightmares where you’re running away from exterminating Daleks but you’re paralysed and can’t run at all. Just as I was about to come up in the world I was on the verge of disaster again. What would I say to my father? Sorry, Daddy, the Portstewart Provos hijacked the Simca and drove it into the sea?

  I was beginning to regret the knickerbocker glory, but just as the exotic dish seemed like it might make a violent return I spotted the lights of a huge hotel close to the beach. I ran up the steps to the Strand Hotel, past a sign advertising a disco in the basement, and arrived at the reception desk, upset and dishevelled. A middle-aged woman with a big hairdo, glasses and make-up like Sybil in Fawlty Towers looked me up and down. I half expected Basil to arrive on the scene.

  ‘My daddy’s Simca is sinking in the sand and the tide’s comin’ in and he’ll kill me!’ I spluttered pathetically.

  Shaking her head and without speaking to me, Sybil lifted the telephone and dialed a number. After a few seconds the person picked up.

  ‘Young William, love, there’s another one stuck on the beach here. Can you sort this wee crater out, hey?’

  Within half an hour a helpful farmer arrived on a tractor with a towrope. Young William looked about sixty years old. I wondered what age Old William might be. My rescuer reminded me of the workingmen in the foundry earlier today, except he had a country accent that sounded almost Scottish and he smelt of farm rather than oil. Of course, by this point I had sweated so profusely that I smelt worse than any farm.

  If only I had brought my Hai Karate aftershave with me, I thought, at least I could mask my BO a bit.

  ‘Youse boys from Belfast think youse know everything but youse boys from Belfast know nothin’,’ said Young William kindly as we made our way towards what I feared would be the first Simca submarine.

  Thankfully the waves had only just begun to lick around the front wheels of the precious family car. Young William appeared unconcerned, and within minutes the endangered vehicle had been hitched up and towed to safety. I thanked him at least a dozen times and felt wick that I had no money to give him.

  ‘Just you be more careful next time, young sonny ma lad,’ he said as he departed in his big green tractor. It seemed to me that this Massey Ferguson was Thunderbird 2 sent by International Rescue and Young William was actually Scott Tracy himself, now on his way back to Tracy Island, rather than to feed the pigs near Aghadowey.

  With what little physical and mental energy I had left I managed to find a little petrol station called Larkhill where an old man put the petrol in for you. I offered him 90p – which, minus the cost of a knickerbocker glory, a Russian Tea and a game of Pac-Man, was all I had left from my train fare change – to buy a drop of petrol which I prayed would be enough to bring me back home to Belfast.

  Thankfully the journey home was uneventful, and when I finally arrived back under the comforting shadow of the Black Mountain I turned up the car radio to blast out Tight Fit’s ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. As I sang along to the ‘awhimaways’ my mind drifted from my interview to my beach trauma, to Byron and Marty, knickerbocker glories, student life and Bo Derek. Arriving home I was subjected to a further interview by my parents on what the professor had asked me and what I thought of the university and if I had made any wee friends and why were my good brogues full of wet sand and when was I going to get my head out of Cloud Nine and wise up a bit. When I finally got to bed that night I dreamt that I was a student with books under my arm, walking through the longest bus shelter in the world and listening to Joy Division on a Sony Walkman, and the tide was coming in and Young William and Bo Derek were coming in a floating DeLorean to save me. In spite of all the drama of the day, the whole experience simply made me want to become a student more than ever. I was determined to study hard and pass my A levels and go to the New University of Ulster. I was going to get off Cloud Nine and become confident and an intellectual and dead mature and all, so I was.

  3

  BREADBOY NO MORE

  For the next four months I continued to dream of becoming an undergraduate with blue jeans and big books. Following my brief encounter with Byron Drake, I decided that I needed to extend my musical and literary repertoire in more credible directions. I borrowed the biggest, longest and heaviest book I could find in the whole of the Shankill Library. It was called War and Peace and it was by a famous author called Leo Tolstoy, who was a sort of C.S. Lewis of Russia. Then I bought a cassette by a serious New Romantic band called Spandau Ballet. Most of their lyrics made no sense, proving that they were really, really deep. I bought an extended play Spandau Ballet record called ‘Instinction’. This was my first twelve-inch single purchase since ABBA’s ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’. The difference between my two twelve-inches was that no one understood ‘Instinction’, proving that it was music for the more cerebral music fan. The only ABBA song I had difficulty deciphering was ‘Bang-A-Boomerang’ on their Greatest Hits album and I was pretty sure Benny and Björn were not attempting to affirm their intellectualism on that particular track.

  I studied diligently for my English A level but I struggled to revise with any sense of purpose for my Maths and Physics exams. The careers advice from Belfast Royal Academy was ‘Do Science!’ and although I was much more interested in studying History and Politics to help me understand the world better, I ended up studying Maths and Physics at A level because I got an A in these subjects in my O levels. My parents did not dare contradict the headmaster’s advice that my future lay in science alone, but I put up sufficient resistance to be allowed to continue with English because it was my favourite subject and I had won school prizes in English for being so good at it, so I had. Due to my unusual combination of subjects I ended up in a very small English A level class with just five other classmates. The educational advantages of a smaller classroom were enhanced considerably by the fact that the other five pupils were attractive girls. Our teacher was Mr Dyson, a brand new young teacher who was so enthusiastic about William Shakespeare and Jane Austen that I actually looked forward to going to his classes. Mr Dyson talked to us and listened to us like we were adults and he gave the impression that school might be about enjoying learning and not just about passing exams. Mr Dyson wrote proper poetry and laughed at me when I tried to impress him by using too many gargantuan words in my effervescent essays on ‘the metaphor of the moor’ in the work of Thomas Hardy.

  During these months I focused almost entirely on the future. It was the best approach to take when you lived in a city that was always looking to the past. Soldiers and paramilitaries and children and shoppers continued to die on the streets every week, and a few days after every awful killing came the sad sight of suffering families walking behind the coffins. I didn’t care which flag they put on the coffin; all I saw were the heartbroken mothers and weeping wives and small children with tears and snatters clutching wilting flowers and walking behind dark hearses in the rain. Every funeral I saw made me more of a pacifist but I noticed it made many people hate the other side even more. I was weary listening to the same old arguments on the television news. Scene Around Six felt like it was being repeated more often than Columbo. The only fact Catholics and Protestants seemed to agree on was that ‘themuns started it’. I closed my ears to the men who justified or condemned one slaughter but not another. I refused to listen to ‘ah, but what about when yousens did that to us’ again and again and again. This ugly clamour faded into the background when I surveyed the faces of shattered families shuffling behind those coffins in the rain. Sometimes I wanted to climb up on to the dome of the City Hall and scream down at the whole city, ‘What about your bloody children?’ But I realised that such language would be inappropriate for a Sunday School teacher and I was afraid I might slip and fal
l off the dome and end up in the Royal for stitches.

  While the rest of the world was more interested in Margaret Thatcher going to war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, the Troubles went on and on, and unemployment in Belfast went up and up. The DeLorean Motor factory in Dunmurry closed down and everyone was completely scundered. When they shut down the big Enkalon factory in Antrim it seemed as if the whole of Northern Ireland would soon be shut down. Every night on Good Evening Ulster Gloria Hunniford told us who else had lost their jobs. Even the shipyard in East Belfast, where they built the most famous ship that ever sank, was laying off hundreds of workers. My parents were worried that Mackie’s would be next and feared they would end up on the dole and we would lose the green Simca and our house and everything. The spectre of unemployment made my successful education more important than ever.

  At long last, the day of my A level results arrived. To gain a place on the Media Studies degree course I needed a minimum of two Cs. On hearing this news in the sixth form common room, Timothy Longsley felt compelled to comment that this proved I was destined for a ‘Mickey Mouse course at a Mickey Mouse university’. I replied that Media Studies was not a ‘Mickey Mouse course’ and there was nothing wrong with Mickey Mouse anyway because Walt Disney was a genius, so he was.

  Having received loads of As in my O levels, expectations were high that I would exceed the requirements, but as I had failed to make a significant breakthrough in my understanding of mechanics in the months leading up to my Maths and Physics exams I wasn’t so certain. The news of my eleven-plus and O levels had arrived by post, but on this occasion I could phone the school office and be informed of my results by a human being. I had butterflies in my stomach when the clock struck nine o’clock and I reached for the telephone. My parents were at work in the foundry and my big brother was watching cricket on the television while my wee brother played in the backyard on the new skateboard that had replaced his punctured spacehopper.

  ‘Hello, it’s Tony Macaulay. I’m calling for my A levels, so I am.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said the friendly school secretary. ‘Just let me look it up …’

  I held on to the phone as if I was Captain James T. Kirk on my communicator, waiting to hear from Lieutenant Uhura whether it was possible to beam me up from an alien planet on the brink of destruction.

  ‘You got a B in English …’

  Disappointing – I was supposed to get an A in English.

  ‘An E in Maths …’

  That’s a fail!

  ‘And an E in Physics.’

  That’s another fail!

  ‘Thank you,’ I said meekly, and hung up the phone.

  ‘Well what did you get, ya big swot?’ shouted my big brother.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘One B and two Es,’ I answered humbly.

  The guffaws in the living room drowned out the sound of the cricket commentary from Lord’s Cricket Ground for several overs.

  ‘William friggin’ Shakespeare only got a B in English!’ he roared.

  I was badly shaken, but I realised that I needed to calm down and work out if a B and two Es were equivalent to two Cs. If not, I was doomed to work as a breadboy in the Ormo Mini Shop for the rest of my life.

  ‘Buzzzzzzzz!’ mocked my big brother, now lying on his back on the living room floor. ‘B-E-E, buzzzzzzy bee!’

  ‘Shut yer bake, you,’ I cried. ‘At least I’m not a drop-out like some people. I’m trying to count if it adds up to two Cs.’

  ‘Sure it’s official now. An E in Maths – you don’t know how to count!’

  He ran outside to the backyard to share the good news with my wee brother.

  ‘The big fruit failed! Buzzzzzzz!’

  As my siblings began a celebratory game of ‘keepy uppy’ in the backyard I did the maths once, then twice, and finally breathed a sigh of relief when I worked out I had just made it. I had scraped just enough points to be accepted onto my chosen course at the New University of Ulster.

  It’s a good thing I didn’t want to go to Queen’s, I thought.

  I decided to phone some school friends for reassurance. Nearly everyone had got As and Bs and was going to university in England, though Linda Mulligan cryptically told everyone she got ‘a C and two other very high grades’ and Aaron Ward was similarly nonspecific but sounded even more disappointed than me. Once I was satisfied that I had secured my place at university, however, my heart stopped pounding and I phoned my mother at the wages office in the foundry.

  ‘I got in!’ I said triumphantly.

  ‘Oh my God, wait ’til I tell your father! What did you get?’

  ‘One B and two Es,’ I replied somewhat less triumphantly.

  ‘Buzzzzzzzzzz!’ went my wee brother, who was now imitating the sound and motion of a bumblebee as he flew up and down the hallway on his skateboard.

  ‘I told you I didn’t want to do science but yousens made me do it,’ I complained.

  ‘Well, maybe if you’d done a bit less coortin’ round Glengormley,’ she replied.

  Maybe my mother was right. Maybe Lindsay Johnson had been right all along to obey Jesus and chuck me to revise more for her A levels. When my father arrived home that night he didn’t even mention my grades. He shook my hand formally and said, ‘This son of mine is going to university’.

  Once the disappointment of my grades had passed the realisation that I really was on my way to university began to sink in. Within a few days the official offer letter from the university arrived and I was elated. All my aunts and uncles sent me congratulation cards with money inside and everyone on our street was impressed. Auntie Mabel gave me a big hug and a Kit Kat and my Auntie Hetty said I was ‘a quare smasher’. Mrs Piper warned me to be careful because most students were IRA sympathisers and Mr Black said, ‘Aye, so you think you’re better than the rest of us now, don’t you?’

  Over the next few weeks I would have to find somewhere to live in Coleraine and prepare to move out of my childhood home. In all the excitement, I almost forgot that academic study and soda farl delivery were incompatible, and I realised that I had some important business matters to deal with. Although I had once thought that this day might never come, it was no longer possible to continue with my career as a breadboy.

  On my final Saturday morning as executive assistant to Leslie McGregor in the last Ormo Mini Shop in the world, I was wakened at six o’clock as usual by the depressing news on Downtown Radio. This was followed by the farming round-up on the price of pigs in Portadown and an uplifting new single called ‘Come on Eileen’. It seemed as if Dexy’s Midnight Runners were urging me to pluck up the courage to inform Leslie of my resignation, even though my name wasn’t Eileen. I had planned to inform Leslie immediately, before the delivery of a single bap, but when I arrived into the van I noticed that the master breadman was on particularly cheery form. There was a special offer on the Veda loaves and apparently he had just been given another high-level security briefing by the chief inspector of the RUC.