Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Six – QUESTIONS
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: 1979 Ladbroke Grove – ROISIN
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: 1979 Ladbroke Grove – ROISIN
It’s May 1979. Mrs Thatcher comes to power. Roisin is thirteen and living in what she calls The Hippy House. All the kids in her class call it the hippy house and over time the name has stuck. There’s an irony in the title of course, because hippies are out and punks are in. Or coming in. Punk and Mrs Thatcher. A powerful combination. Rule Britannia!
The election has an impact even on the hippy house. Feminism is alive and well but it’s a hard gig to stay consistent with, especially with Dylan, Dougie, Charlie and Sham in tow. Men seem to be a necessary evil in 1979 and more than that perhaps they are the ones who are actually keeping the dream alive? It may be a nightmare but it’s the only nightmare we have. Gender politics are fine for drunken debates but at the end of the night if you’re falling into bed with the enemy, sooner or later you realise there’s a gap between politics and pragmatics.
The Hippy House is located in Westbourne Park/Ladbroke Grove. You might call it a squat. It’s a big white ‘posh’ type house on four levels including a basement which was lying empty and has been reclaimed by those who don’t think it’s right that rich people should have all the good stuff and then waste it. It’s a bit more upmarket and a bit less frenetic than the old days at Agamemnon Road. More privacy. Commune living has migrated into multiple occupancy. Not really hippies then. Just an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Like all the good parties, it won’t go on forever but everyone is committed to making sure it lasts as long as it damned well can. And in this scenario someone has to stay in all the time. You can’t leave the place empty or you could come back and find it reclaimed for capitalism. So there’s an element of co-operation. But the group of people who live there are becoming increasingly disparate. It’s not a haven for feminism, that’s for sure, but anyway Roisin thinks that even Mary is getting a bit fed up with feminism.
Mary’s fed up with everything these days. She’s the one who stays in most. Doesn’t like going out. Doesn’t like doing anything. Patrick calls her ‘the vampire’ because she is rarely seen out in the day time. At nearly ten years old, Patrick is getting too big for his boots. He’s way beyond a ‘handful’ and well on the way to being ‘out of control’. Not that anyone really notices. He knows how to keep his head down and serve his best interests. He gets what he wants and lives how he wants. Proving to Roisin that despite feminism, it’s still a man’s world!
To do a roll call of the cast in 1979, let’s run through the inhabitants of the Hippy House from the top floor down:
Top floor - Dylan and Dougie. And yes, they are a couple. An odd couple mind you. Dylan is like something out of the Village People and Dougie is a punk rocker. Their point of musical contact is TRB (that’s the Tom Robinson Band to the uninitiated). It’s lucky they are on the top floor because their music can be LOUD. They tend to take it out onto what might be known as a roof terrace, if we were being polite and aspirational. Dougie and Dylan are many things but polite and aspirational are not two of them.
Middle Floor – This is party central. No one lives here per se, it’s where folk come to hang out. It’s a mess. It is variously: art studio, roller rink, party house, games room, dormitory. The kind of den everyone wishes they had but since it’s the kind of place no one takes responsibility for it’s actually just a skanky, smelly, messy hovel most of the time, with graffiti which is definitely not good enough to be ‘art’ daubed on the walls, stained cushions on top of patches of carpet and butt ends in dead drink cans everywhere. It’s not the place to do your homework, let’s put it like that!
Ground Floor – The business part of the house. Let’s face it, this is where the deals are done. Where you get your drugs. Charlie, Carol and Sham live here. Sham is a guy. A weird guy. He travels a lot, let’s put it that way, and when he’s not out in India getting stuff, he’s in the house travelling on the substances he’s brought back with him. He travels in body and mind and ‘could have been a contender’ in the field of psychiatry but it’s all too heavy and restricting man and even anti-psychiatry requires more conscious effort than Sham can put into anything.
Charlie and Carol are a kind of a couple though Roisin’s sure that Carol is a lesbian. Or a feminist, or a lesbo-feminist. Or just another victim of Charlie’s business enterprise. Scratch the surface and Charlie is no more than an old-fashioned capitalist who’s making his buck on the blackest of the black markets, hoping to make a mint and get out quick. He’ll probably be living in one of these houses, legit, all to himself in five years’ time. If he’s not bought up a villa and moved to Spain. Or banged up inside if he gets greedy, or stupid, or unlucky. For the moment, though, Charlie is what every really successful dealer needs to be – in it for the money.
Basement – This is where Mary, Roisin and Patrick live. Sham spends a fair bit of time here, migrating between the first floor and the basement with alarming ease. Mary and Sham have some good arguments. Their relationship is difficult to define otherwise. But on election night, while Roisin tries to eat her dinner, Sham and Carol and Mary are all in the kitchen of the basement having an argument about the relative merits of a woman prime-minister. One of those pointless arguments since retrospect will prove all of their variously ill-thought out opinions wide of the mark. Proving, as Roisin is all too well aware, that you can never anticipate what will come next in life. If you can’t go with the flow you have to roll with the punches.
It’d be fair to say Roisin isn’t happy in The Hippy House. The last year, she’s suffered a lot at school because of her family ‘circumstances’. She’s at Holland Park School which is known for its free-thinking ways but someone should tell the kids there that a liberal education means that you should actually be accepting of difference. Roisin’s had a rough ride so far in the two years she’s been at the school, especially since they moved into The Hippy House, last summer. At the beginning Roisin thought it would be all right to take kids home. That was when the games room was a great den to hang out. Before it was trashed to oblivion. By which time the other kids found the goings on there too weird and kind of scary. And when something’s weird to a proto teen, they let you know about it.
The bald fact is Roisin is being bullied at school because she doesn’t fit in. It’s mainly verbal but she has to learn to fight back.
The first one that really hits home is the taunt, ‘Your mum may be called Mary but you were no immaculate conception.’
Roisin has learned better than to say anything about her father. She doesn’t even think about him that much any more. She doesn’t have a poster on her wall and she’s beginning to think the whole thing was another of Mary’s mad cons. It’s hard even to believe that Patrick has a father and she knows Liam exists. But at thirteen, Roisin has learned that you have to live in whatever present hell exists, not go hoping for a better future or hankering after an idyllic past. Nothing exists except the present and the present is rubbish.
‘You live with a bunch of smelly hippies.’
Roisin has never thought hippies were cool. But hippies are definitely not cool in 1979. If you want to be cool, you’re a punk. But real, unsanitised punks are kind of off as well. Okay stick a safety pin through your cheek and put a bin bag on over your clothes, but hey, LIVING like a punk; not washing, etc. – that’s just dirty, smelly hippy life.
Roisin has always tried to be neat and clean in an attempt to deny the clear evidence of her chaotic domestic situation. She’s ordered, she’s punctual, she keeps her head down and tries not to draw attention to herself in class. It doesn’t work, though. Somehow it seems she just exudes a difference. And while the notion of punks are fine to her classmates, living in a house without a washing machine (that’s just ‘dirty’) and while the notion of drugs and rock and roll are great, the fact that your mum is a chain-smoker who slurs her words and has hand tremors even when she isn’t drinking and can be guaranteed to ask inappropriate questions and is spaced out and never leaves the house, that’s NOT rock and roll. It may be reality rock and roll but Holland Park kids want the fantasy drug culture, not the reality. And in the Hippy House – reality bites.
We’ll not even go into how Mary gets the money to fund her by now obvious drug habit. Sham could tell you. He helps her in the no-money economy. Roisin doesn’t think Mary’s a prostitute or Sham’s her pimp but that’s because Mary’s her mum and Sham is a boyfriend of sorts. And Roisin knows better than to judge anyone else’s personal morality.
‘Your mum’s a druggie slag,’ is the least eloquent of the taunts she’s regularly exposed to and by summer 1979 Roisin is glad to be leaving school behind, even though the prospect of seven weeks without anywhere to go five days a week is nearly as bad.
She gets through the summer somehow. A lot of it is spent with Mary who is trying to clean up her act. Even Mary has seen that life as she’s living it now is unsustainable. So there are many long hours where Roisin feels like she’s turned into a drugs counsellor, a relationship counsellor and an emotional punch bag. It’s tough for a thirteen year old. It takes its toll.
Aren’t there good times? Yes. Some. Funny times. Times like when Roisin takes Mary out for the day to Hyde Park to stop her drug cravings. And Mary falls into the Serpentine. It’s not really funny because it turns out she’s dropped a tab before they go and Roisin is seriously unamused at having to deal with Mary tripping, both literally and psychologically, in an unenclosed public space. But they have a laugh before the drugs kicked in. That’s the thing about Mary and drugs. You have little windows of what pass for normality and sanity, before everything gets weird and crazy and out of control.
After the rollercoaster summer with Mary still struggling to ‘kick’ her many habits, when September comes Roisin is, strangely, quite happy to be getting back to school. She’s convinced this year, Third Year, is going to be different. And she’s right. A lot has changed in the summer. There’s a new music teacher. A young, cool woman who isn’t a Miss or a Mrs or a Ms, but simple Katie Grace. And most of all, there’s Drew. Now, Drew’s been there since first year, in Roisin’s class. But he’s never noticed her before. Things are about to change.
Drew and Roisin find themselves in the same music class with Katie Grace. And they find they have a lot in common. Roisin has never been that bothered by music before but over the autumn term of 1979 music becomes everything to her. From being something always there in the background, it becomes something she can make choices about. It’s funny, but if you’ve grown up with the Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, The Stones, and many more far weirder sounds, you don’t really get the chance to develop your own tastes any more than if you were locked into a world of Mozart, Sibelius and Wagner.
Between them, Katie Grace and Drew introduce Roisin to a whole new world. Strangely enough, it’s Drew who opens a new world of music to Roisin while Katie Grace (the music teacher) opens another door. She takes the Third Year to the West End. To see Evita.
Roisin’s never been to a theatre before. Evita is playing at the Prince Edward Theatre and she manages to blag the fiver for the subsidised school trip on a Thursday night in September. On the way there she’s doing her usual thing of sitting alone and Drew comes up and sits beside her, which causes a bit of consternation among the more ‘popular’ girls. Drew is Holland Park’s Third Year Adonis. He’s naturally blond. courtesy of a Scandinavian mother (rumours are she’s a model), and tall. He’s never been known to have a zit and he exudes a level of confidence which means that the girls all want to go out with him but none of them have the nerve even to get their friends to do the ‘my friend wants to go out with you’ line. Drew seems to be above all that. Everyone has been waiting, cause Drew looks like the sort of guy who will make his own choice but no one expected that choice might be Roisin. However, it’s Roisin he sits next to on the bus.
And it’s Drew who does all the talking. He talks mainly about music. Not about the musical, but about Two Tone music. Roisin’s heard of it but not really into it. She doesn’t have the cash to go out and buy singles and she doesn’t have the space or freedom to listen to the radio much and since Patrick broke her tranny in the summer, throwing it off the roof, she’s not really up on what’s what. So while Drew bangs on about The Undertones, The Clash, The Lambrettas and The Jam, Roisin listens and learns a lot. And can’t believe Drew is talking to her. To HER.
So by the time they get to the theatre, Roisin is pretty overwhelmed already. The plush seats and atmosphere just enhance things. There is an air of impending excitement which is not just to do with the show. Drew makes sure that he’s sitting next to Roisin and as the lights go down there’s the sense that he’s brushing against her, trying to pick up her hand in the dark.
Then two amazing things happen, in Roisin’s memory, almost simultaneously. Firstly, Drew takes hold of her hand and, at the same time, her dad comes on stage in front of her.
Okay. It’s not really her dad. It’s David Essex, doing a more than passable Che Guevara impersonation as he has done every night for more than a year on the Prince Edward stage. But to Roisin, this is the first and only time she’s seen her dad live. She clutches Drew’s hand hard in response, barely aware of the sweatiness, and by the end of ‘Oh What a Circus’ it looks like Roisin and Drew are destined to be the third year topic of hot gossip at Holland Park School. The couple of 1979.
Roisin is blown away by Evita. She hadn’t forgotten about her dad, more that she’d given up on the dream as life got in the way and he didn’t seem to be a part of present reality. In the dark theatre, it’s like having a history lesson and a family reunion all at once. But she knows she has to keep some of her emotion inside at least for the present. She knows what can happen when you let your secrets out and having just found Che again she’s not about to give him up.
On leaving the theatre at the end of the show, Drew (and the rest of the class) assumes that Roisin’s high spirits have more to do with the ‘action’ on the purple velvet armrest between her and him, while Katie Grace imagines that she’s scored a musical triumph all of her own – a breakthrough with a student who has previously been reserved and difficult to read.
Back on the bus Drew and Roisin sit together holding hands, not caring that anyone can see them. And when they get back to school and everyone is leaving he’s fixed up a ‘date’ for them the next night, to see a band at the Marquee. Roisin is glad that at least she’s unlikely to have problems getting out and staying out late; no one in the hippy house tends to notice either her or the clock. So she’s confident in saying yes to a plan to meet Drew outside school at seven thirty. He puts her further at ease by pointing out that the tickets are ‘on him’ as he has an ‘arrangement’ with an uncle who works at the Marquee. And as everyone gets into the chaos of rising to leave the bus and it’s dark and no one is paying attention, Drew closes in on Roisin and kisses her – her first proper kiss.
The following night, the first date goes without a hitch. The band rocks, Drew rocks and Roisin is still on a high when she wakes up on Saturday morning. At which point she has time to think about the other great event of the week. Evita.
She blags some money from Sham (a rare enough occurrence) who is there in the kitchen cutting up some drugs and is obviously expecting a fair return so can afford to be beneficent. Mary hasn’t surfaced yet, even though it’s eleven thirty and the unusually avuncular Sham bungs Roisin a twenty pound note.
‘Go get some food or something,’ he says.
Roisin decides to go into town. She knows Sham won’t tell Mary about the money, he won’t remember. And he won’t remember it was for food. Patrick lives like this all the time. He’s skilled at seeing who is most out of it and blagging cash or ciggies from them. Aged ten, Patrick is already a seasoned smoker of tobacco. He hasn’t moved onto weed yet. He likes to keep his wits about him, Patrick does.
But Roisin doesn’t like asking for things and relies instead on the rare occasion, like this morning, when someone notices her and gives her a boon. So armed with the twenty pound note she’s off to shop. She spends the morning mooching round Oxford Street and Carnaby Street. Finding out, more than buying. Finding out about Two Tone music, about the clothes and the style and the whole ethos of the world Drew inhabits. She’s about to undergo a radical transformation. She decides against buying a couple of singles and buys a new, but cheap, transistor radio instead – with headphones. And then, in Carnaby Street, while looking at the Two Tone gear, she comes across a Che T shirt. And of course she buys it. It’s a choice between a T shirt and a poster but she’s wise to the problems of the poster and the T shirt means she can take Che with her wherever she goes. She can wear her dad close to her heart.
She has some money left and influenced by the whole Two Tone thing she gets a haircut. She’s grown out of the rough and ready unisex pageboy style she adopted previously and she’s not had a haircut since. Every so often Mary, or someone else in the house would threaten to ‘style’ her but for the past couple of years it’s just grown and grown. She’s certainly never had a ‘real’ haircut from a salon before. So she blows her money on getting a sharp, shortish cut, which she hopes will prove to Drew that she’s going to be a Two Tone girl to his Two Tone boy.
She’s worked out that with a little bit of careful adjustment she can get her clothing looking right but the hair, you can’t cheat with that. So on Monday morning Roisin fronts up at school, re-invented. She has her Che T shirt on under her school shirt, as it will now be most of the time, and her sharp new haircut swings about her face for all the world to see.
Without this, everyone would have been talking about Drew and Roisin. With it, they are the only topic of breaktime conversation. Roisin has arrived! Of course, no one thinks it will last. But it does. Roisin has rarely enough had anything in her life worth holding on to and she’s not going to let Drew slip away.
At The Hippy House the new haircut and revamped wardrobe merit some passing comment but no one really cares. The focus of most interest at the moment seems to be on Mary. She’s been struggling for a while but in October 1979 she hits some kind of a crisis and everyone spends a lot of time trying to ‘deal’ with it in their own particular ways. None of them very effective. Roisin leaves it to them and takes her eye off the ball. She’s just relieved that she has a life outside the house and is only there when she has to be. She spends every moment she can with Drew and in the next month sees more of his parents, the Scandinavian mother and photographer father, than she does of Mary and Patrick and the rest of The Hippy House inhabitants. She feels like her nightmare is becoming a dream, like there’s something to live for at last, as long as she keeps the reality of ‘home’ out of the equation.
Drew and Roisin talk about everything. Everything but one thing. She doesn’t tell him about Che. It’s not that she doesn’t trust him but she doesn’t know how to talk about it. Not to a boy. Not to the object of her affections. But that October she does tell one person about Che. She tells Katie Grace.
Katie Grace is by far the coolest teacher you can imagine, even in Holland Park where the teachers pride themselves on being cool. She’s not American but she’s lived in America and she has a kind of twang to her voice which is almost an American accent. It’s rumoured she lives with a rock star but no one knows which one. And one day, it’s a day when Drew is off sick and Roisin has to deal with school on her own, Katie Grace takes some time out to sit and talk to Roisin about her ‘options’. Roisin can’t remember quite how it happens but somehow the conversation gets on to Evita. Oh, yes, Katie Grace is telling Roisin that she has a lovely singing voice and has she considered singing lessons and they move on to talking about musical theatre and somehow, in amidst all this, Katie Grace is finding out about Roisin’s ‘background’ and lack of a father and Roisin tells her. She’s sworn to secrecy of course but Katie Grace is the kind of person you can swear to secrecy with some degree of surety that she understands what you mean – Roisin tells Katie Grace that she is Che Guevara’s love child.
And Katie Grace doesn’t act all funny. She takes it. She asks a few questions which Roisin is able to answer, about how her mum and Che met, etc. and then at the end she just says ‘Cool’ and carries on talking about the school musical which this year will be Grease and asks will Roisin take the part of Sandy?
The fact that Katie Grace takes on board Roisin’s parentage somehow makes it easier for Roisin to go back to Mary, which she’s meant to do for a while now, and ask more. It’s late October and Mary is unwell. Should that read ‘unwell’. Anyway, she’s not well and not up to Roisin’s questioning about the past. Mary has spent the last fifteen years trying to block out the past and right now she has no sense of future, a pathological hatred of the past and a numb indifference to the present. So she’s not really wanting an inquisition on Roisin’s father.
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, Roisin,’ is the response to the question Roisin can’t even remember specifically asking. It was a variation on the ‘why’ she used as a four year old – ’Is the man on the poster my daddy?’
‘What do you mean?’ she responds to Mary.
‘Grow up, Roisin. How could Che Guevara be your dad?’
‘But you’ve told me he is. You told me how you met. You said….’
‘And does Santa Claus exist, you stupid bitch?’
Roisin doesn’t know what to do with this information. She doesn’t trust Mary. She’s right not to, of course. Mary is behaving irrationally and you can’t rely on anything she says when she’s like this. She seems to live to hurt at the moment and Roisin just wishes she’d never started the conversation. But she can’t let it go either. Maybe in hatred, or madness, there is truth.
‘So what about what you told me about the airport and….’
‘I don’t want to talk to you, Roisin. Get out of my face. If it wasn’t for you I’d not be in this fucking mess. You’ve fucked up my life enough… just leave me alone…’
And Mary goes into one of her rants, reaching for the pills and threatening to kill herself, and the subject of Che is put on one side in favour of Roisin finding Carol and suggesting that perhaps this time it’s serious and someone really needs to help her mum, and it needs to be an adult.
So it is that on the twenty-eighth of October 1979, Mary is admitted into hospital for the first time. Attempted suicide. The topic of Che is closed. For now.
In one sense it’s a relief having Mary out of the way for a couple of days. She comes back on the first of November but she doesn’t seem much better. And she doesn’t want to see Roisin. Certainly doesn’t want to talk to her.
Roisin is pissed off with Mary. It’s not that she wants to punish her mum but she doesn’t want to be punished any more either. She just wants to live. She’s nearly fourteen and life should be fun, right? She shuts out life at The Hippy House and concentrates on Drew. He’s her reality now. He’s happy to be so. And they all said it wouldn’t last! It’s been six weeks now and those six weeks feel like six months and the six months feel like a lifetime; a whole life that has been different to anything Roisin has ever experienced before.
On the second of November Roisin and Drew go to the Marquee again. It’s about the fourth time they’ve been there since they started going out but this time it’s to see The Jam. Drew is really excited, cause he’s really into The Jam. He thinks Paul Weller is as close to God as you can get. And if Drew’s excited, Roisin’s excited. So they are both excited, in the uncool cool manner of fourteen year olds trying to be eighteen year olds. It’s a ‘secret’ gig, where The Jam perform as ‘John’s Boys’ and Drew and Roisin are lucky that Drew’s uncle works there or they would never have got in. The concert is just incredible. They hear ‘To be Someone’ live for the first time together and they agree that Paul Weller is the poet for their generation. He’s going to change the world. He defines the angst of young people and there’s nothing more important or significant in the world at that moment than the lyrics penned by Weller.
And at the end of the gig when it’s announced that The Jam will be touring round the UK between now and the end of the year, Drew and Roisin make a pledge. A decision. The kind of impulsive decision that only thirteen and fourteen year olds can make; they’re going to follow the band on their tour.
They don’t think of the practicalities. Well, Roisin doesn’t. It’s possible that Drew has things better planned, because he’s used to life having to be planned. Roisin is used to chaos and she’s happy to just ‘do it’ because she doesn’t have any real consequences to think about. If Drew thinks they should do it, they should do it. They will do it. They do it.
Drew and Roisin run away together at the beginning of December. It’s a Tuesday. They say they are going to school and they never turn up. No one at school pays much attention. Drew has concocted sick notes for them both to cover them the rest of the week. He’s told his parents he’s going on a geography field trip for a week. They bought it. God knows how. Anyway, it gives them a decent head start. And no one at the hippy house notices Roisin’s not there for days. They all have other things on their mind. Things have escalated and instead of being back in the normal hospital, Mary has been admitted into the local mental hospital. You’d think that the others in The Hippy House would be concerned about Mary but it seems they’re just worried that someone will come checking out their credentials and so there’s a lot of movement of their stock in trade and this pulls focus from Roisin’s lack of presence.
Drew and Roisin hitch the length of the country to see The Jam play. On the ninth they’re in Dundee and by the eleventh they’re in Leeds. And it’s the thirteenth before anyone really misses them. When Drew fails to come home from the fictional geography field trip all hell breaks loose in London. Drew’s parents try to find Mary, but no one in The Hippy House is answering the door. His parents are terrified that Drew might be in there with Roisin. The residents are concerned the irate couple outside might be undercover cops. Drew’s parents are at the end of their tether and don’t know what to think but, since they are parents, they think the worst. They call the police.
Meanwhile, Drew and Roisin are full of lyrics and living their lives through the songs ‘Thick as Thieves’, ‘Saturday’s Kids’ and ‘Eton Rifles’. Nothing else matters or exists for them. They have lost all sense of consequences, even though Drew knows something will have to be faced when they return.
They oh so nearly pull it off. On the thirteenth The Jam are playing at The Rainbow, so Drew and Roisin show back up at Drew’s house for some food and a change of clothes (long overdue) just as the police are about to head off to The Hippy House.
The police don’t want to make much of it. The kids are back, they’re safe. Job done. It’s up to the parents to sort things out. At Drew’s house there are all the predictable scenes: ‘we’re disappointed rather than angry’, ‘you’re grounded’ and all the schemes caring parents try when they realise that too late they’ve bolted the stable door. They have no real sanctions left and they don’t know what to do about it. They didn’t think this would happen till he was sixteen or seventeen at least and they can’t work out how they’ll deal with the next four years till they can pack him off to a good University. They’re having to catch up fast and they don’t want Roisin to be part of the deal. They may not have got inside her house, but the outside façade was enough to prove that she’s ‘no good’ for their boy. And behind it all is the burning question they want to ask but dare not, for fear of the answer – have Drew and Roisin been having sex?
Banning orders will of course just fuel the flame of young love. No one is going to stop Drew and Roisin being together. Nothing will stop them having sex if they’ve already done it. So after much heart-searching and embarrassment and a family ‘conversation’ which ends with Drew swearing blind he and Roisin haven’t had sex: he ‘respects her too much’ followed by ‘we’re not that stupid’ and ‘we just wanted to see the band play live’ which is more or less convincing if not reassuring, it is agreed that Roisin and Drew can still see each other but that they have to be ‘honest’ to their parents.
Roisin gets off far lighter of course. She turns up at home expecting Mary to go off on one about something, though she can’t predict what exactly it will be, to discover that Mary isn’t even there. That’s when Roisin learns that Mary is in the local mental hospital – suffering from ‘depression’. Roisin almost laughs at the irony that no one has even noticed she’s not been there. It would be sad if she didn’t have Drew but she has Drew and she has a chance to escape from this hell of a life and so she feels a great sense of power and elation that her way out of The Hippy House is assured if only she can keep Drew for the next couple of years, so that when they are sixteen they can fulfil their plan to quit school and live together.
Roisin spends a lot of time wondering if she should have sex with Drew. She’s got to make sure she does everything she can to keep him interested after all. He’s not been pushing her. They’ve spent nights snuggled together in a sleeping bag but it was too cold and they are both young enough to still be embarrassed about their bodies too much to do anything other than a bit of groping. The embarrassment is stronger at the moment than the pull of the hormones but Roisin knows this won’t last for ever. She decides that if he wants to, they’ll do it on her fourteenth birthday. At least she’ll make the offer.
When it comes to the bit, though, it doesn’t happen. It’s a night of surprises but not that particular surprise. Drew arranges to meet Roisin at seven o’clock and they go into town to The Rainbow, to see The Jam one more time. They relive their life on the run and as Drew walks Roisin home after the gig the topic of conversation roams freely from the worst breakfast they ate while away, to the political situation (fourteen year old style) and just before Roisin is about to drop the bombshell about how she’s going to give herself to Drew for her birthday, he asks, ‘Roisin, do you know who your dad is?’
And instead of losing their virginity they spend the next three hours with Roisin telling Drew everything she knows about Che Guevara, which turns into just about everything about her past, about Mary and Agamemnon Road and the whole shooting match and, before they know it, it’s two in the morning and Drew realises that he’s bust his curfew and that his parents are going to skin him, so he runs the half mile between his and Roisin’s house, running from one world to another to face the music.
The election has an impact even on the hippy house. Feminism is alive and well but it’s a hard gig to stay consistent with, especially with Dylan, Dougie, Charlie and Sham in tow. Men seem to be a necessary evil in 1979 and more than that perhaps they are the ones who are actually keeping the dream alive? It may be a nightmare but it’s the only nightmare we have. Gender politics are fine for drunken debates but at the end of the night if you’re falling into bed with the enemy, sooner or later you realise there’s a gap between politics and pragmatics.
The Hippy House is located in Westbourne Park/Ladbroke Grove. You might call it a squat. It’s a big white ‘posh’ type house on four levels including a basement which was lying empty and has been reclaimed by those who don’t think it’s right that rich people should have all the good stuff and then waste it. It’s a bit more upmarket and a bit less frenetic than the old days at Agamemnon Road. More privacy. Commune living has migrated into multiple occupancy. Not really hippies then. Just an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Like all the good parties, it won’t go on forever but everyone is committed to making sure it lasts as long as it damned well can. And in this scenario someone has to stay in all the time. You can’t leave the place empty or you could come back and find it reclaimed for capitalism. So there’s an element of co-operation. But the group of people who live there are becoming increasingly disparate. It’s not a haven for feminism, that’s for sure, but anyway Roisin thinks that even Mary is getting a bit fed up with feminism.
Mary’s fed up with everything these days. She’s the one who stays in most. Doesn’t like going out. Doesn’t like doing anything. Patrick calls her ‘the vampire’ because she is rarely seen out in the day time. At nearly ten years old, Patrick is getting too big for his boots. He’s way beyond a ‘handful’ and well on the way to being ‘out of control’. Not that anyone really notices. He knows how to keep his head down and serve his best interests. He gets what he wants and lives how he wants. Proving to Roisin that despite feminism, it’s still a man’s world!
To do a roll call of the cast in 1979, let’s run through the inhabitants of the Hippy House from the top floor down:
Top floor - Dylan and Dougie. And yes, they are a couple. An odd couple mind you. Dylan is like something out of the Village People and Dougie is a punk rocker. Their point of musical contact is TRB (that’s the Tom Robinson Band to the uninitiated). It’s lucky they are on the top floor because their music can be LOUD. They tend to take it out onto what might be known as a roof terrace, if we were being polite and aspirational. Dougie and Dylan are many things but polite and aspirational are not two of them.
Middle Floor – This is party central. No one lives here per se, it’s where folk come to hang out. It’s a mess. It is variously: art studio, roller rink, party house, games room, dormitory. The kind of den everyone wishes they had but since it’s the kind of place no one takes responsibility for it’s actually just a skanky, smelly, messy hovel most of the time, with graffiti which is definitely not good enough to be ‘art’ daubed on the walls, stained cushions on top of patches of carpet and butt ends in dead drink cans everywhere. It’s not the place to do your homework, let’s put it like that!
Ground Floor – The business part of the house. Let’s face it, this is where the deals are done. Where you get your drugs. Charlie, Carol and Sham live here. Sham is a guy. A weird guy. He travels a lot, let’s put it that way, and when he’s not out in India getting stuff, he’s in the house travelling on the substances he’s brought back with him. He travels in body and mind and ‘could have been a contender’ in the field of psychiatry but it’s all too heavy and restricting man and even anti-psychiatry requires more conscious effort than Sham can put into anything.
Charlie and Carol are a kind of a couple though Roisin’s sure that Carol is a lesbian. Or a feminist, or a lesbo-feminist. Or just another victim of Charlie’s business enterprise. Scratch the surface and Charlie is no more than an old-fashioned capitalist who’s making his buck on the blackest of the black markets, hoping to make a mint and get out quick. He’ll probably be living in one of these houses, legit, all to himself in five years’ time. If he’s not bought up a villa and moved to Spain. Or banged up inside if he gets greedy, or stupid, or unlucky. For the moment, though, Charlie is what every really successful dealer needs to be – in it for the money.
Basement – This is where Mary, Roisin and Patrick live. Sham spends a fair bit of time here, migrating between the first floor and the basement with alarming ease. Mary and Sham have some good arguments. Their relationship is difficult to define otherwise. But on election night, while Roisin tries to eat her dinner, Sham and Carol and Mary are all in the kitchen of the basement having an argument about the relative merits of a woman prime-minister. One of those pointless arguments since retrospect will prove all of their variously ill-thought out opinions wide of the mark. Proving, as Roisin is all too well aware, that you can never anticipate what will come next in life. If you can’t go with the flow you have to roll with the punches.
It’d be fair to say Roisin isn’t happy in The Hippy House. The last year, she’s suffered a lot at school because of her family ‘circumstances’. She’s at Holland Park School which is known for its free-thinking ways but someone should tell the kids there that a liberal education means that you should actually be accepting of difference. Roisin’s had a rough ride so far in the two years she’s been at the school, especially since they moved into The Hippy House, last summer. At the beginning Roisin thought it would be all right to take kids home. That was when the games room was a great den to hang out. Before it was trashed to oblivion. By which time the other kids found the goings on there too weird and kind of scary. And when something’s weird to a proto teen, they let you know about it.
The bald fact is Roisin is being bullied at school because she doesn’t fit in. It’s mainly verbal but she has to learn to fight back.
The first one that really hits home is the taunt, ‘Your mum may be called Mary but you were no immaculate conception.’
Roisin has learned better than to say anything about her father. She doesn’t even think about him that much any more. She doesn’t have a poster on her wall and she’s beginning to think the whole thing was another of Mary’s mad cons. It’s hard even to believe that Patrick has a father and she knows Liam exists. But at thirteen, Roisin has learned that you have to live in whatever present hell exists, not go hoping for a better future or hankering after an idyllic past. Nothing exists except the present and the present is rubbish.
‘You live with a bunch of smelly hippies.’
Roisin has never thought hippies were cool. But hippies are definitely not cool in 1979. If you want to be cool, you’re a punk. But real, unsanitised punks are kind of off as well. Okay stick a safety pin through your cheek and put a bin bag on over your clothes, but hey, LIVING like a punk; not washing, etc. – that’s just dirty, smelly hippy life.
Roisin has always tried to be neat and clean in an attempt to deny the clear evidence of her chaotic domestic situation. She’s ordered, she’s punctual, she keeps her head down and tries not to draw attention to herself in class. It doesn’t work, though. Somehow it seems she just exudes a difference. And while the notion of punks are fine to her classmates, living in a house without a washing machine (that’s just ‘dirty’) and while the notion of drugs and rock and roll are great, the fact that your mum is a chain-smoker who slurs her words and has hand tremors even when she isn’t drinking and can be guaranteed to ask inappropriate questions and is spaced out and never leaves the house, that’s NOT rock and roll. It may be reality rock and roll but Holland Park kids want the fantasy drug culture, not the reality. And in the Hippy House – reality bites.
We’ll not even go into how Mary gets the money to fund her by now obvious drug habit. Sham could tell you. He helps her in the no-money economy. Roisin doesn’t think Mary’s a prostitute or Sham’s her pimp but that’s because Mary’s her mum and Sham is a boyfriend of sorts. And Roisin knows better than to judge anyone else’s personal morality.
‘Your mum’s a druggie slag,’ is the least eloquent of the taunts she’s regularly exposed to and by summer 1979 Roisin is glad to be leaving school behind, even though the prospect of seven weeks without anywhere to go five days a week is nearly as bad.
She gets through the summer somehow. A lot of it is spent with Mary who is trying to clean up her act. Even Mary has seen that life as she’s living it now is unsustainable. So there are many long hours where Roisin feels like she’s turned into a drugs counsellor, a relationship counsellor and an emotional punch bag. It’s tough for a thirteen year old. It takes its toll.
Aren’t there good times? Yes. Some. Funny times. Times like when Roisin takes Mary out for the day to Hyde Park to stop her drug cravings. And Mary falls into the Serpentine. It’s not really funny because it turns out she’s dropped a tab before they go and Roisin is seriously unamused at having to deal with Mary tripping, both literally and psychologically, in an unenclosed public space. But they have a laugh before the drugs kicked in. That’s the thing about Mary and drugs. You have little windows of what pass for normality and sanity, before everything gets weird and crazy and out of control.
After the rollercoaster summer with Mary still struggling to ‘kick’ her many habits, when September comes Roisin is, strangely, quite happy to be getting back to school. She’s convinced this year, Third Year, is going to be different. And she’s right. A lot has changed in the summer. There’s a new music teacher. A young, cool woman who isn’t a Miss or a Mrs or a Ms, but simple Katie Grace. And most of all, there’s Drew. Now, Drew’s been there since first year, in Roisin’s class. But he’s never noticed her before. Things are about to change.
Drew and Roisin find themselves in the same music class with Katie Grace. And they find they have a lot in common. Roisin has never been that bothered by music before but over the autumn term of 1979 music becomes everything to her. From being something always there in the background, it becomes something she can make choices about. It’s funny, but if you’ve grown up with the Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, The Stones, and many more far weirder sounds, you don’t really get the chance to develop your own tastes any more than if you were locked into a world of Mozart, Sibelius and Wagner.
Between them, Katie Grace and Drew introduce Roisin to a whole new world. Strangely enough, it’s Drew who opens a new world of music to Roisin while Katie Grace (the music teacher) opens another door. She takes the Third Year to the West End. To see Evita.
Roisin’s never been to a theatre before. Evita is playing at the Prince Edward Theatre and she manages to blag the fiver for the subsidised school trip on a Thursday night in September. On the way there she’s doing her usual thing of sitting alone and Drew comes up and sits beside her, which causes a bit of consternation among the more ‘popular’ girls. Drew is Holland Park’s Third Year Adonis. He’s naturally blond. courtesy of a Scandinavian mother (rumours are she’s a model), and tall. He’s never been known to have a zit and he exudes a level of confidence which means that the girls all want to go out with him but none of them have the nerve even to get their friends to do the ‘my friend wants to go out with you’ line. Drew seems to be above all that. Everyone has been waiting, cause Drew looks like the sort of guy who will make his own choice but no one expected that choice might be Roisin. However, it’s Roisin he sits next to on the bus.
And it’s Drew who does all the talking. He talks mainly about music. Not about the musical, but about Two Tone music. Roisin’s heard of it but not really into it. She doesn’t have the cash to go out and buy singles and she doesn’t have the space or freedom to listen to the radio much and since Patrick broke her tranny in the summer, throwing it off the roof, she’s not really up on what’s what. So while Drew bangs on about The Undertones, The Clash, The Lambrettas and The Jam, Roisin listens and learns a lot. And can’t believe Drew is talking to her. To HER.
So by the time they get to the theatre, Roisin is pretty overwhelmed already. The plush seats and atmosphere just enhance things. There is an air of impending excitement which is not just to do with the show. Drew makes sure that he’s sitting next to Roisin and as the lights go down there’s the sense that he’s brushing against her, trying to pick up her hand in the dark.
Then two amazing things happen, in Roisin’s memory, almost simultaneously. Firstly, Drew takes hold of her hand and, at the same time, her dad comes on stage in front of her.
Okay. It’s not really her dad. It’s David Essex, doing a more than passable Che Guevara impersonation as he has done every night for more than a year on the Prince Edward stage. But to Roisin, this is the first and only time she’s seen her dad live. She clutches Drew’s hand hard in response, barely aware of the sweatiness, and by the end of ‘Oh What a Circus’ it looks like Roisin and Drew are destined to be the third year topic of hot gossip at Holland Park School. The couple of 1979.
Roisin is blown away by Evita. She hadn’t forgotten about her dad, more that she’d given up on the dream as life got in the way and he didn’t seem to be a part of present reality. In the dark theatre, it’s like having a history lesson and a family reunion all at once. But she knows she has to keep some of her emotion inside at least for the present. She knows what can happen when you let your secrets out and having just found Che again she’s not about to give him up.
On leaving the theatre at the end of the show, Drew (and the rest of the class) assumes that Roisin’s high spirits have more to do with the ‘action’ on the purple velvet armrest between her and him, while Katie Grace imagines that she’s scored a musical triumph all of her own – a breakthrough with a student who has previously been reserved and difficult to read.
Back on the bus Drew and Roisin sit together holding hands, not caring that anyone can see them. And when they get back to school and everyone is leaving he’s fixed up a ‘date’ for them the next night, to see a band at the Marquee. Roisin is glad that at least she’s unlikely to have problems getting out and staying out late; no one in the hippy house tends to notice either her or the clock. So she’s confident in saying yes to a plan to meet Drew outside school at seven thirty. He puts her further at ease by pointing out that the tickets are ‘on him’ as he has an ‘arrangement’ with an uncle who works at the Marquee. And as everyone gets into the chaos of rising to leave the bus and it’s dark and no one is paying attention, Drew closes in on Roisin and kisses her – her first proper kiss.
The following night, the first date goes without a hitch. The band rocks, Drew rocks and Roisin is still on a high when she wakes up on Saturday morning. At which point she has time to think about the other great event of the week. Evita.
She blags some money from Sham (a rare enough occurrence) who is there in the kitchen cutting up some drugs and is obviously expecting a fair return so can afford to be beneficent. Mary hasn’t surfaced yet, even though it’s eleven thirty and the unusually avuncular Sham bungs Roisin a twenty pound note.
‘Go get some food or something,’ he says.
Roisin decides to go into town. She knows Sham won’t tell Mary about the money, he won’t remember. And he won’t remember it was for food. Patrick lives like this all the time. He’s skilled at seeing who is most out of it and blagging cash or ciggies from them. Aged ten, Patrick is already a seasoned smoker of tobacco. He hasn’t moved onto weed yet. He likes to keep his wits about him, Patrick does.
But Roisin doesn’t like asking for things and relies instead on the rare occasion, like this morning, when someone notices her and gives her a boon. So armed with the twenty pound note she’s off to shop. She spends the morning mooching round Oxford Street and Carnaby Street. Finding out, more than buying. Finding out about Two Tone music, about the clothes and the style and the whole ethos of the world Drew inhabits. She’s about to undergo a radical transformation. She decides against buying a couple of singles and buys a new, but cheap, transistor radio instead – with headphones. And then, in Carnaby Street, while looking at the Two Tone gear, she comes across a Che T shirt. And of course she buys it. It’s a choice between a T shirt and a poster but she’s wise to the problems of the poster and the T shirt means she can take Che with her wherever she goes. She can wear her dad close to her heart.
She has some money left and influenced by the whole Two Tone thing she gets a haircut. She’s grown out of the rough and ready unisex pageboy style she adopted previously and she’s not had a haircut since. Every so often Mary, or someone else in the house would threaten to ‘style’ her but for the past couple of years it’s just grown and grown. She’s certainly never had a ‘real’ haircut from a salon before. So she blows her money on getting a sharp, shortish cut, which she hopes will prove to Drew that she’s going to be a Two Tone girl to his Two Tone boy.
She’s worked out that with a little bit of careful adjustment she can get her clothing looking right but the hair, you can’t cheat with that. So on Monday morning Roisin fronts up at school, re-invented. She has her Che T shirt on under her school shirt, as it will now be most of the time, and her sharp new haircut swings about her face for all the world to see.
Without this, everyone would have been talking about Drew and Roisin. With it, they are the only topic of breaktime conversation. Roisin has arrived! Of course, no one thinks it will last. But it does. Roisin has rarely enough had anything in her life worth holding on to and she’s not going to let Drew slip away.
At The Hippy House the new haircut and revamped wardrobe merit some passing comment but no one really cares. The focus of most interest at the moment seems to be on Mary. She’s been struggling for a while but in October 1979 she hits some kind of a crisis and everyone spends a lot of time trying to ‘deal’ with it in their own particular ways. None of them very effective. Roisin leaves it to them and takes her eye off the ball. She’s just relieved that she has a life outside the house and is only there when she has to be. She spends every moment she can with Drew and in the next month sees more of his parents, the Scandinavian mother and photographer father, than she does of Mary and Patrick and the rest of The Hippy House inhabitants. She feels like her nightmare is becoming a dream, like there’s something to live for at last, as long as she keeps the reality of ‘home’ out of the equation.
Drew and Roisin talk about everything. Everything but one thing. She doesn’t tell him about Che. It’s not that she doesn’t trust him but she doesn’t know how to talk about it. Not to a boy. Not to the object of her affections. But that October she does tell one person about Che. She tells Katie Grace.
Katie Grace is by far the coolest teacher you can imagine, even in Holland Park where the teachers pride themselves on being cool. She’s not American but she’s lived in America and she has a kind of twang to her voice which is almost an American accent. It’s rumoured she lives with a rock star but no one knows which one. And one day, it’s a day when Drew is off sick and Roisin has to deal with school on her own, Katie Grace takes some time out to sit and talk to Roisin about her ‘options’. Roisin can’t remember quite how it happens but somehow the conversation gets on to Evita. Oh, yes, Katie Grace is telling Roisin that she has a lovely singing voice and has she considered singing lessons and they move on to talking about musical theatre and somehow, in amidst all this, Katie Grace is finding out about Roisin’s ‘background’ and lack of a father and Roisin tells her. She’s sworn to secrecy of course but Katie Grace is the kind of person you can swear to secrecy with some degree of surety that she understands what you mean – Roisin tells Katie Grace that she is Che Guevara’s love child.
And Katie Grace doesn’t act all funny. She takes it. She asks a few questions which Roisin is able to answer, about how her mum and Che met, etc. and then at the end she just says ‘Cool’ and carries on talking about the school musical which this year will be Grease and asks will Roisin take the part of Sandy?
The fact that Katie Grace takes on board Roisin’s parentage somehow makes it easier for Roisin to go back to Mary, which she’s meant to do for a while now, and ask more. It’s late October and Mary is unwell. Should that read ‘unwell’. Anyway, she’s not well and not up to Roisin’s questioning about the past. Mary has spent the last fifteen years trying to block out the past and right now she has no sense of future, a pathological hatred of the past and a numb indifference to the present. So she’s not really wanting an inquisition on Roisin’s father.
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, Roisin,’ is the response to the question Roisin can’t even remember specifically asking. It was a variation on the ‘why’ she used as a four year old – ’Is the man on the poster my daddy?’
‘What do you mean?’ she responds to Mary.
‘Grow up, Roisin. How could Che Guevara be your dad?’
‘But you’ve told me he is. You told me how you met. You said….’
‘And does Santa Claus exist, you stupid bitch?’
Roisin doesn’t know what to do with this information. She doesn’t trust Mary. She’s right not to, of course. Mary is behaving irrationally and you can’t rely on anything she says when she’s like this. She seems to live to hurt at the moment and Roisin just wishes she’d never started the conversation. But she can’t let it go either. Maybe in hatred, or madness, there is truth.
‘So what about what you told me about the airport and….’
‘I don’t want to talk to you, Roisin. Get out of my face. If it wasn’t for you I’d not be in this fucking mess. You’ve fucked up my life enough… just leave me alone…’
And Mary goes into one of her rants, reaching for the pills and threatening to kill herself, and the subject of Che is put on one side in favour of Roisin finding Carol and suggesting that perhaps this time it’s serious and someone really needs to help her mum, and it needs to be an adult.
So it is that on the twenty-eighth of October 1979, Mary is admitted into hospital for the first time. Attempted suicide. The topic of Che is closed. For now.
In one sense it’s a relief having Mary out of the way for a couple of days. She comes back on the first of November but she doesn’t seem much better. And she doesn’t want to see Roisin. Certainly doesn’t want to talk to her.
Roisin is pissed off with Mary. It’s not that she wants to punish her mum but she doesn’t want to be punished any more either. She just wants to live. She’s nearly fourteen and life should be fun, right? She shuts out life at The Hippy House and concentrates on Drew. He’s her reality now. He’s happy to be so. And they all said it wouldn’t last! It’s been six weeks now and those six weeks feel like six months and the six months feel like a lifetime; a whole life that has been different to anything Roisin has ever experienced before.
On the second of November Roisin and Drew go to the Marquee again. It’s about the fourth time they’ve been there since they started going out but this time it’s to see The Jam. Drew is really excited, cause he’s really into The Jam. He thinks Paul Weller is as close to God as you can get. And if Drew’s excited, Roisin’s excited. So they are both excited, in the uncool cool manner of fourteen year olds trying to be eighteen year olds. It’s a ‘secret’ gig, where The Jam perform as ‘John’s Boys’ and Drew and Roisin are lucky that Drew’s uncle works there or they would never have got in. The concert is just incredible. They hear ‘To be Someone’ live for the first time together and they agree that Paul Weller is the poet for their generation. He’s going to change the world. He defines the angst of young people and there’s nothing more important or significant in the world at that moment than the lyrics penned by Weller.
And at the end of the gig when it’s announced that The Jam will be touring round the UK between now and the end of the year, Drew and Roisin make a pledge. A decision. The kind of impulsive decision that only thirteen and fourteen year olds can make; they’re going to follow the band on their tour.
They don’t think of the practicalities. Well, Roisin doesn’t. It’s possible that Drew has things better planned, because he’s used to life having to be planned. Roisin is used to chaos and she’s happy to just ‘do it’ because she doesn’t have any real consequences to think about. If Drew thinks they should do it, they should do it. They will do it. They do it.
Drew and Roisin run away together at the beginning of December. It’s a Tuesday. They say they are going to school and they never turn up. No one at school pays much attention. Drew has concocted sick notes for them both to cover them the rest of the week. He’s told his parents he’s going on a geography field trip for a week. They bought it. God knows how. Anyway, it gives them a decent head start. And no one at the hippy house notices Roisin’s not there for days. They all have other things on their mind. Things have escalated and instead of being back in the normal hospital, Mary has been admitted into the local mental hospital. You’d think that the others in The Hippy House would be concerned about Mary but it seems they’re just worried that someone will come checking out their credentials and so there’s a lot of movement of their stock in trade and this pulls focus from Roisin’s lack of presence.
Drew and Roisin hitch the length of the country to see The Jam play. On the ninth they’re in Dundee and by the eleventh they’re in Leeds. And it’s the thirteenth before anyone really misses them. When Drew fails to come home from the fictional geography field trip all hell breaks loose in London. Drew’s parents try to find Mary, but no one in The Hippy House is answering the door. His parents are terrified that Drew might be in there with Roisin. The residents are concerned the irate couple outside might be undercover cops. Drew’s parents are at the end of their tether and don’t know what to think but, since they are parents, they think the worst. They call the police.
Meanwhile, Drew and Roisin are full of lyrics and living their lives through the songs ‘Thick as Thieves’, ‘Saturday’s Kids’ and ‘Eton Rifles’. Nothing else matters or exists for them. They have lost all sense of consequences, even though Drew knows something will have to be faced when they return.
They oh so nearly pull it off. On the thirteenth The Jam are playing at The Rainbow, so Drew and Roisin show back up at Drew’s house for some food and a change of clothes (long overdue) just as the police are about to head off to The Hippy House.
The police don’t want to make much of it. The kids are back, they’re safe. Job done. It’s up to the parents to sort things out. At Drew’s house there are all the predictable scenes: ‘we’re disappointed rather than angry’, ‘you’re grounded’ and all the schemes caring parents try when they realise that too late they’ve bolted the stable door. They have no real sanctions left and they don’t know what to do about it. They didn’t think this would happen till he was sixteen or seventeen at least and they can’t work out how they’ll deal with the next four years till they can pack him off to a good University. They’re having to catch up fast and they don’t want Roisin to be part of the deal. They may not have got inside her house, but the outside façade was enough to prove that she’s ‘no good’ for their boy. And behind it all is the burning question they want to ask but dare not, for fear of the answer – have Drew and Roisin been having sex?
Banning orders will of course just fuel the flame of young love. No one is going to stop Drew and Roisin being together. Nothing will stop them having sex if they’ve already done it. So after much heart-searching and embarrassment and a family ‘conversation’ which ends with Drew swearing blind he and Roisin haven’t had sex: he ‘respects her too much’ followed by ‘we’re not that stupid’ and ‘we just wanted to see the band play live’ which is more or less convincing if not reassuring, it is agreed that Roisin and Drew can still see each other but that they have to be ‘honest’ to their parents.
Roisin gets off far lighter of course. She turns up at home expecting Mary to go off on one about something, though she can’t predict what exactly it will be, to discover that Mary isn’t even there. That’s when Roisin learns that Mary is in the local mental hospital – suffering from ‘depression’. Roisin almost laughs at the irony that no one has even noticed she’s not been there. It would be sad if she didn’t have Drew but she has Drew and she has a chance to escape from this hell of a life and so she feels a great sense of power and elation that her way out of The Hippy House is assured if only she can keep Drew for the next couple of years, so that when they are sixteen they can fulfil their plan to quit school and live together.
Roisin spends a lot of time wondering if she should have sex with Drew. She’s got to make sure she does everything she can to keep him interested after all. He’s not been pushing her. They’ve spent nights snuggled together in a sleeping bag but it was too cold and they are both young enough to still be embarrassed about their bodies too much to do anything other than a bit of groping. The embarrassment is stronger at the moment than the pull of the hormones but Roisin knows this won’t last for ever. She decides that if he wants to, they’ll do it on her fourteenth birthday. At least she’ll make the offer.
When it comes to the bit, though, it doesn’t happen. It’s a night of surprises but not that particular surprise. Drew arranges to meet Roisin at seven o’clock and they go into town to The Rainbow, to see The Jam one more time. They relive their life on the run and as Drew walks Roisin home after the gig the topic of conversation roams freely from the worst breakfast they ate while away, to the political situation (fourteen year old style) and just before Roisin is about to drop the bombshell about how she’s going to give herself to Drew for her birthday, he asks, ‘Roisin, do you know who your dad is?’
And instead of losing their virginity they spend the next three hours with Roisin telling Drew everything she knows about Che Guevara, which turns into just about everything about her past, about Mary and Agamemnon Road and the whole shooting match and, before they know it, it’s two in the morning and Drew realises that he’s bust his curfew and that his parents are going to skin him, so he runs the half mile between his and Roisin’s house, running from one world to another to face the music.
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.