I could never believe the end of this story. It was told to me three days after the events leading up to the end had happened. I believed that the previous occurrences took place before the inevitable end happened because I was there. I saw all of them take place; I even played my own part in this little tale, it was just the twist. The twist was the one thing I never saw and couldn’t believe. I was a stubborn 13 year old boy at the time and my lack of belief pretty much ended a friendship.
It was summer in 1994. One of my best friends, Elvis Lewis (yes, that was his first name, his father was a massive fan of The King) had just moved house. They had finally escaped out of their tiny flat and somehow got hold of an old council house on the estate where I lived. The estate that I lived on was in the shadow of the block of flats but it didn’t matter; my friend was now only a couple of doors down from me instead of thirty floors up.
We had begun spending this summer around each others’ respective domiciles as the weather had been terrible. We had amused ourselves by playing Super Nintendo games to death. Every game each of us owned, we played and completed. We were becoming bored.
One Thursday afternoon we saw another boy from the estate walking down the road. This boy was only one year older than us but he had been caught in the sweaty, clammy grip of puberty. He had acne populating his cheeks and chin, long greasy blond hair, a flannel shirt, torn jeans and Doctor Martin boots. Kids had many names for him: Grunger; Dyke; Tramp; Queer; Hippy; Greaser; but myself and Elvis new him by the name of Nigel Fenton. Nigel Fenton was picked on by the kids who were spending their days listening to the music of rave, populated by such artists as DJ Sy or DJ Druid; and he was worshipped by the kids who were listening to Nirvana, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Pearl Jam. He had insisted that his name was ‘Soundwave’ at twelve years old, and by thirteen could already play ten chords on a cheap old acoustic guitar. No one called him Soundwave though. It was either the insults or the standard name of Nigel.
Elvis and I were standing on the corner, crunching on blue ice that had been sold to us under the guise of ‘Mr Snow’. It was a long ice pole that was dyed a variety of bright chemically colours, and though the day was not particularly hot, and the sun had been fighting with the clouds like a small man at a rock concert trying to get a view of the stage, Elvis had insisted on buying a range of these poles. I was eating a blue one and Elvis was eating a green one when Nigel walked by. We called out his name and he looked out from under his slick of blond hair and clumped his way over to us. We offered him a red flavoured ice pole and he took it. We began talking with him and he said that he had been on holiday with his parents to Cornwall and had had a ‘fucking shit’ time. He peppered his sentences with expletives as if he had just discovered them and needed to catch up on fourteen years of not using them.
As we were ending the conversation I spied the one and only Goth girl we knew walking down the road. This girl was strange. Julia Wesnick-Wilson. Though some people liked Nigel Fenton and others hated him, the one person who brought everybody together was Julia. No one liked the Goth girl. No one understood the Goth girl. Dressed in black, face white, black lipstick; black and pink hair and huge boots she lumbered around the estate like a lost dinosaur. Rumours were abound that she was a slag; frigid, or worse (this was spoken only when a chosen few were listening) a witch.
I cannot tell a lie. I started it. I raised my melting ice pole and pointed it towards this beast and said ‘Look! It’s Julia!’ Elvis turned and looked and so did Nigel. First it started with just cat calling her name. She ignored it. Then it became sarcastic wolf whistling, at which she threw a few dozen choice hand gestures our way, the finally Nigel shouted a long string of obscenities that described in glorious teenage detail what sexual practices he would do to her mum and what Julia let her dad do to her. This was the final straw. Julia’s mother was dead and her father was a raging alcoholic. Julia slowly turned and stared at our triumvirate. The clouds started to cheer and rain started to fall. Julia started moving towards us. It was like a train picking up speed. We turned and ran towards the safety of Elvis’ parents’ house.
