PARTONE
1995
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT
(NIRVANA)
“Why don’t they bloody shift Remembrance Day to July?”
Since we’d formed shuffling, scruffy lines around the cenotaph, Brenner had bitched non-stop. “It would make a hell of a lot more sense than holding it in November. I’m freezing my fucking nads off here.”
Drizzling rain, of the old-fashioned, relentless, British variety, poured insult onto injury. Brenner, Phil, and I hunched our shoulders, pulling frayed cuffs over icy hands stuffed into trouser pockets. We endeavoured to look cool. Cool in the he-could-be-the-bass-player-from-Blur sort of way, not cool in the it’s-bitterly-cold-I-wish-I’d-brought-my-anorak sort of way. Coats were for losers, like the smart posh kids lined up in the row in front of us. None of whom shivered.
“Yeah, Brenner. Couldn’t agree more.”
In my experience, sarcasm was lost on him, but I tried anyhow. “They should have shown more consideration when they ended World War One on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, shouldn’t they?”
Shit, that wind was fucking cold. Siberian. “They should have carried on annihilating each other for another six months, so future namby-pamby generations didn’t have to freeze in a school playground for half an hour, once every year. I mean, compared to this, trench warfare must have been a piece of piss.”
Brenner had been one of my best mates since playschool, but, bloody hell, he was thick sometimes.
“TheSecondWorld War ended in the summer though,” pointed out Phil, my other best mate, obviously feeling pretty pleased with himself. “Brenner’s right. We could mark that date instead.”
Christ, he was a fucking retard, too. “Maybe the reason we don’t,” I enunciated, as if explaining to a pair of three-year-olds, “Is because Remembrance Day was a thing since before the Second World War actually, y’know, happened?”
“Oh.” Phil’s head jerked in a quick nod. Or perhaps it was a shiver. He gave me a sharp nudge, followed by a snigger. “Nips alert at three o’clock. Looks like Claire Evans is fucking freezing too.”
The message passed down the line, and it wasn’t long before almost all the sixth form boys had completed their daily assessment of Claire Evans’ tits. They didn’t do much for me, to be honest, but no one else needed to know that. So I sniggered along with the rest until Mr Cresswell told us to pack it in because the vicar had begun the service. Instead, I stared at the back of the neck of the tall, well-built kid obstructing my view of the cenotaph. Thick blond curls flopped over the collar of his sensible grey woollen coat, clean and silky. Nice, even if his hairstyle was from a boy band circa 1985. Remarkable for a kid our age.
The vicar had reached the part about how ‘they shall not grow old as we that are left grow old’. In the vicar’s case, he’d grown very old indeed. As he warbled on, I pondered the meaning of life; how some blokes like him lived forever, whereas others, like Brenner’s dad, didn’t. That poor sod had dropped dead of a heart attack at his mum’s fortieth birthday knees-up three years ago. Which had put a damper not only on the party, but on the remainder of Brenner’s fucking childhood.
I’d stick pins in my eyes before I confessed to my mates, but I kind of enjoyed all this remembrance, churchy shit. I liked the familiar rhythm of it; the tragic, floppy-haired young war poets with their rows of crosses and fields of poppies. Their corners of an evergreen England tucked away in some godforsaken hell hole. On crisp, frosty mornings, the poignant, drawn-out melody ofThe Last Postreverberating around our decrepit school buildings could usually make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
But not this crisp, frosty morning.
The poor kid dragged kicking and screaming out of the ranks to perform the honour this year looked like he was shitting himself. Somewhere in his house hung a framed certificate showing he’d passed Grade Two trumpet, which made him the most qualified pupil in the school to attempt the solo. One hundred and fifty of his teenaged peers fell silent, praying he’d fuck it up. You could have heard a pin drop.
And fuck it up he did. Fucking splendidly. As he stepped up to the mic, raised the shiny brass bugle to his quivering lips and gave it a blow, the wonderful wetphbbbbtof an explosive diarrhoeal fart echoed in stereo around the quad.
And all the sixth form boys pissed themselves laughing.
The kid stumbled through it, God knows how. With an urgent snap of his fingers, Mr Cresswell deployed reinforcements to restore order in the form of the PE teacher, Mr Tucker, and a fucking evil geography teacher called Miss Simpson. It helped that we were old hands at Remembrance services; everyone knewThe Last Postinvariably preceded the two minutes silence. And even a bunch of teenage toerags like us understood the necessity of respectingthat. But pulling ourselves together in time? Bloody difficult. Especially when Richie Tanner on the back row mimicked the echoing fart with another drawn-out ripper of his own.
That two minutes silence lasted longer than a morning of double French with Mme Tripot. Phil’s shoulders jerked up and down like he was having an epileptic seizure. Fuck knows what Richie Tanner had eaten for dinner last night, but his fart was a corker. Three-day-old dead cat, from the stink of it. Brenner snorted and failed to disguise it as a cough, earning him a wicked glare from one of the posh lads farther down the line. Brenner reciprocated, accompanied by enough hand gestures worthy of the deaf woman who stood behind the newsreader on the telly, not that she’d have recognised any of my best mate’s inventive sign language.
As the seconds wound down at a fuckingleisurelypace, I did my best to block them all out by focusing on the lush hair of the guy in front of me, because the alternative was to vent the bubble of hysterical laughter welling inside and earn myself another bloody detention.
I lay the blame for what came next squarely at the door of the nameless stonemason who’d engraved our school cenotaph. Oh, and the inbred population of Stourbridge, too, for having such fucking idiotic names. And also, the British military in general, for adopting the wordseamanwhensailorormarineor fuckingnaval soldierwould have done the job just as well. Because if you repeat the wordseamanoften enough in front of a bunch of hormonal, hyped, sweaty teenagers, it’s only going to end in tears.
“We remember with thanksgiving and sorrow those whose lives, in world wars and conflicts past and present, have been given and taken away.”
It was about time we traded this vicar in for a new model, I decided, as he babbled on. I loved my wartime history, and I was all for helping the aged, but there must have been younger guys out there desperate for the gig, possibly with less monotonous voices too.
“And from our own parish, let us remember Ordinary Seaman Johnson….”
A giggle in the ranks to my left. From the depths of the rows behind, an anonymous tosspot cackled, “Oi! There’s nothing ordinary about my semen!”
Decorum hurtled on a downwards slope after that. Phil’s shoulders started up again, and Brenner shuffled his feet. I stared so hard at the back of the blond head in front of me, I could have drawn it from memory.