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How Not To Be a Boy. Robert Webb
Читать онлайн.Название How Not To Be a Boy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786890108
Автор произведения Robert Webb
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
I take the shiny record from its sleeve and savour the smell of the vinyl even though I dislike this song with some energy. There was a nervous moment in Woolworths when I picked it up for the first time to check the back of the sleeve: ‘Please let the B-side be just an instrumental. Surely it’s just an instrumental!’ And lo – Stock, Aitken & Waterman did not let me down. I impale ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ on the central upright of the record player and the B-side wobbles down onto the turntable. This is sweet. Tess Rampling is surely going to want to have sex with me when she sees the way I stick it to Rick Astley.
What I’m doing here in my teenage bedroom is planning an end-of-term, school-hall sketch show. My form teacher, Mrs Slater, says that the correct term is ‘revue’, but I don’t much like the word: it sounds square and not something you would see on the telly. I can’t imagine Rik Mayall saying ‘revue’. At a pinch, Stephen Fry might say it, but there are limits to how much I get to copy Stephen Fry without attracting peer group ridicule. Bad enough that I’ve started to pronounce ‘grass’ to rhyme like a southern ‘arse’ rather than a native Lincolnshire ‘lass’. No, it’s a sketch show. I write a dozen sketches, cast myself in all the best parts, with friends taking up the feed-line slack, and then put on a show in the main hall at lunchtime. The ostensible value of this is to encourage team-spiritedness and raise money for charity. The actual reason, of course, is to get Tess Rampling to want to have sex with me.
The sketches this time include ‘The Price is Slight’ (TV game-show parody), ‘Glue Peter’ (children’s TV show parody), ‘The GAY-Team’ (parody of children’s TV action drama, also apparently watched by American adults) and, of course, my lethal take on ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ in which I will mock Rick Astley’s dancing while lip-synching to rewritten lyrics of the song which I’m about to pre-record over the instrumental.
Some of these sketches are less than fully formed, both technically and morally. ‘The GAY-Team’, for example, is currently no more than the desire for four of us to jump out in front of the curtain in Hawaiian shirts, brandishing hairdryers. What happens after that is currently anyone’s guess, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to draw the line at doing ‘the gay voice’. I suspect the other boys in the team will want to do ‘the gay voice’, but in my sophisticated opinion, doing ‘the gay voice’ has no place in the comedy of 1987, even in Lincolnshire where literally no one is meant to be gay.
Obviously I will get Matthew Finney to ‘black up’ to play B. A. Baracus. That’s different. Finney is very short and even weedier than me. So he really only has to stand there wearing dark-brown make-up and say ‘Murdoch, you crazy fool’ or possibly ‘Murdoch, you crazy homosexual’ and we’re on to a winner. I see no reason why this might cause offence: although it’s possible that there are gay people in Lincolnshire, it is not possible that anyone is black. Apart from my brother’s friend, ‘black Steve’. (I mean, there are a lot of Steves so what on earth else could they call him?) And black Steve won’t be watching, so obviously there’s no problem.
I look out of the bedroom window and think about Matthew Finney. I foresee that Finney will resist the make-up for some reason. Probably because he’s a shocking little racist who didn’t even go on the Drama trip to see Woza Albert! Yes, that’s it. I turn from the window and start to punch an invisible Finney in the face for being such a racist. ‘No, you don’t like that, do you, Finney? You can dish it out but you can’t take it!’ I get into quite an involved fight with Finney, who is surprisingly agile and keeps head-butting me in the ear which is really annoying. He throws me to the ground and grabs me by the throat. Desperate for breath, I seize an old Rubik’s Cube from under the bed and gash Finney in the eye with an unsolved corner. He reels back and –
Mum knocks on the door and pops her head round. ‘Everything all right?’
It’s good that she’s started knocking, but she hasn’t yet got into the habit of waiting for an answer.
I look at her from the floor, panting and slightly aglow. ‘Yeah, fine thanks.’
‘I heard . . . choking sounds.’
‘Yeah, Matthew Finney was trying to strangle me.’
‘Righto.’ She adopts a relaxed smile and it takes her half a second to scan the room for evidence of actual danger as opposed to ‘Robert doing that thing he does’. She has a word for it.
‘Pretending?’
‘Yup.’
She nods and makes to leave, and then: ‘Fish fingers!’
‘Brill.’
She glances at the Rubik’s Cube I’m still holding and then goes, closing the door slightly too casually.
Buoyed by the thought of fish fingers for tea and grateful that this was a mere ‘pretending-intrusion’ rather than a full-scale ‘wank-intrusion’, I get up and turn back to the gramophone.
It can’t be easy for Mum, I think. Pretending is not Normal. Normal boys have real fights, not pretend fights. Nor are they virgins at fifteen. Nor do they write comedy sketches or keep a diary. And if they did keep a diary, they probably wouldn’t write things like:
Slater said in MS today [Media Studies] that Wogan is going to be on 3 nights a week instead of 1. I said ‘he must be feeling under-exposed’. She really laughed but no one else did. They think I’m just up her arse. Tess didn’t hear it, obviously. Thing is – if he does it 3 nights a week he might be bored of it by the time I’m famous so I get to be interviewed by Anneka fucking Rice or something. I’m joking but it’s a real worry.
Massive weird thing. Last night Mum was going out and coz I was going to be left alone with Derek, everything was suddenly horrible. She asked me why I looked all massively sad and I said ‘nothing’ for a bit and then completely lost it and cried my eyes out like a baby. Like a fucking BABY. We went in here and she gave me a cuddle, rocking me sort of from side to side and it was boring but also good really. She asked me again and I just said I didn’t want her to go and Derek would just be watching his nature programmes about clubbing baby seals to death and that it was stupid of me and not to worry and all that jazz. She went out anyway but Christ knows why I went so mental.
I load a portable tape recorder with a blank cassette and press ‘Play’, waiting for the leading hiss to turn into the regular hiss, then ‘Stop’. If I’m honest, I can’t be sure if the recording quality of a boy singing in his bedroom over the instrumental version of a single played through a 1960s gramophone into the tiny external microphone of a cheap tape recorder and then eventually played through the speakers of a cuboid school hall is going to be – pristine. Neither, if I gave it a moment’s thought, am I necessarily as good a singer as the international recording star Rick Astley, especially with my zero interest in singing and my recently broken voice which I still can’t get the hang of. Why does it have to be so fucking deep? Dad’s fault. Still, what I lack in technical expertise will, I feel sure, be more than made up for by stupid dancing. Everyone likes my stupid dancing. And then there’s the new lyrics which have an undeniable verve, if not sophistication. I look at the chorus:
First I’m gonna swing my hands
Then I’m gonna twist my feet
Then I’m gonna turn around:
I’m quiff-ey!
Then I’m gonna burst my zits
Then I’m gonna shake my bits
Like I’ve got the shits:
I’m getting a stiff-ey.
I frown at these last two lines. I mean, it’s brilliant – obviously it’s all brilliant – but I just worry a little that the logic of having the shits and getting a stiffy doesn’t really follow. Am I saying that Rick Astley is aroused by diarrhoea? Is that really what I want to say? But no, surely