Black Day at Bad Rock

Christopher Fowler

 

 

‘I’d honestly assumed that they’d stopped press­ing singles years ago,’ Fowler wrote to us, when we asked him to contribute to In Dreams. ‘I don’t ever remember buying one, even as a kid. Far from being subversive, I’d always considered singles to be a mass-market pocket of the music world designed mainly for bands to mime to on Top of the Pops. So my immediate reaction was to make an apology and a polite refusal. Then I thought about the “deliberately wide frame” and remembered something that happened to me, a bad memory I’ve blocked for years. I’m writing it out now as weirdness-therapy.’

 

Christopher Fowler is a movie publicist who has overcome the rejection of his first proposed poster line (for the reissue of My Fair Lady, he wanted the ads to read “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain . . . again!’) to work on campaigns for projects as diverse is the Bond series and Peter Greenaway movies, his favourite strapline being ‘Kiss Your Nerves Goodbye’ for Evil Dead 2. Like F. Paul Wilson, Fowler has chosen to contribute a piece of fictionalised autobiography. We think it is every bit as bizarre and magical as his short stories, collected in City Jitters and The Bureau of Lost Souls, and his Edgar Wallace meets M. R. James in the nineties London novels, Roofworld and Rune. He claims that this is his first fiction which isn’t horror, but considering its deeply authentic evocation of schoolkid angst in the early seventies, we’re inclined to disagree.

 

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I

 have this irrational desire to kill Mick Jagger. I’ve never told anyone about this until now. To explain why, I have to relate a story. Most of it is true, but one part isn’t. Just for protection, you under­stand. You can figure it out for yourself.

 

At every school there’s always one kid everyone hates and shuns. I was that kid. Obviously I hadn’t intended to be. It had just worked out that way. It didn’t help that I was stick thin and wore glasses with sellotaped arms and hung out in the library when I should have been caving in heads on the rugby pitch. Pens leaked in my shirt pockets. I was born unfashionable, from scuffed Oxford toecaps to short-back-and-sides. I still owned and wore a clean cap. I was a classic hopeless case. Worst of all, I knew it.

 

The sporty set had a low tolerance level for kids like us. A boy called Yates in the year below me announced that rugby was for thickos and got hit in the face with a cricket bat. It knocked his nosebone right back into his skull.

 

This school was a posh school near posh Blackheath, the only posh bit of shit-ugly South London. I lived miles away, in chip-paper-strewn Abbey Wood, gateway to teen delin­quency. The neighbourhood kids were neurotic, doped-up, walking scar tissue, groomed for early failure. Hanging out with them wasn’t an available option. My mother, a study in thwarted gentility, faded, thrifty, lower-middle-class, never expected much from life and certainly didn’t get it, but she expected more of me. My dad was the Invisible Man. He left all the major decisions to his wife, preferring to devote the whole of his adult life to revarnishing the door frames, a job he had still not finished when I last went home. I got to the posh school because I got good exam marks. Most of the other kids were paid for by their parents.

 

School was a train journey to a different planet. Blackheath was full of dark antique shops and damp tearooms, and liked to call itself a village. Ideally, the shopkeepers would have built a moat around the place to keep out the trash.

 

The time frame may slide a little here, but I think this happened at some point in the very early seventies, when the ‘village’ was still full of crimson painted boutiques selling lime green miniskirts and military tunics. Trends weren’t so obviously motivated by marketing then. They seemed to evolve in a happy coincidence of mood and style. Bonnie and Clyde had been playing on and off at the local fleapit since 1968, and much to the horror of our elders everyone at school imitated the doomed gangsters as closely as possible. Me and Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns, the kid I sat next to for eight years without running out of things to talk about, went up West and stole two guns from Bermans & Nathans theatrical costumiers with a forged letter purporting to be from the Dramatics master. The guns were fake, but were cast in metal and came in real leather holsters, like Steve McQueen’s in Bullitt, which was good enough for us.

 

The music around this time was mostly terrible. Of course, now everyone thinks it’s great. But it really wasn’t. Marc Bolan wanking on about fairies and Stardust, Groundhogs and Iron Butterfly sounding like somebody masturbating in a roomful of dustbin lids, Jethro Tull hopping about on one leg playing a flute for Christ’s sake. About the only bands I could bear to listen to were Mott the Hoople and - the great white god Jimmy Page - Led Zeppelin. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ received some major suburban bedroom turntable time. It was an antidote to the local disco, where everyone sat at the corners of the room nodding their heads and grooving along with little spastic gestures of their hands. The girls wore floor-length crushed velvet maroon dresses and had long kinked hair, pre-Raphaelite virgins on cider and joints. The generally accepted idea of a good time was getting very, very stoned while carefully listening to the screaming bit from Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’. The sixties had finished swinging and the seventies hadn’t started doing anything. My formative years. If my parents had only waited a while before having kids I could at least have been a punk.

 

I did have a few friends, but they were all like me, shunned and/or regularly duffed up. The other kids had a collective noun to describe us. Weeds. We were the school Weeds. Do you have any idea how humiliating that was?

 

We mostly spent our spare time dodging our classmates, revising Latin, sneaking into double-billed X movies like Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Plague of the Zombies, and reading Ian Fleming novels. Everyone was talking about Bond having his balls tortured in Casino Royale I think it was, and Jane Fonda’s see-through clothes in Barbarella. Also, there was this Swedish movie called Seventeen which had female pubic hair in, but some of us thought that was going a bit too far. Nobody in my class ever got to speak to an actual live girl because it was an all-boys school where strapping chaps played lots of healthy contact sports in shorts. (I found out much later that those contact sports involving our revered head boy and the gym master extended to the shower room after games. Years later I heard they were running an antique shop together. A fucking antique shop. I’m not making this part up.)

 

Homework was four hours a night minimum, caps were to be worn in the ‘village’ on penalty of death and the boys from the nearby comprehensive, whose parents voted Labour and were therefore common, used to pick fights with us every night at the bus stop. The one time we had a chance to meet girls was when our sister school teamed up for the annual joint operatic production, and obviously only dogs and germs signed up for six weeks of vocal strangulation in the company of Die Verkaufte Braute.

 

For the weaker members of the pack it’s always a strange, cocooned existence on the sidelines of the action. We enviously watched the other kids as they honed their social skills, getting their hands into drunk girls’ shirts while they danced to ‘Ride a White Swan’. We weren’t like them. We were still making Aurora model kits of mummies and werewolves. None of us were rebels. The school had a good name. The head and his teachers, tall and stiff and imperious in their black gowns, stalking the corridors like adrenalised vampires, were grudgingly respected because they kept their distance and occasionally maimed their pupils. We’d seen the movie If, in which Malcolm McDowell machine-gunned his teachers, and it just wasn’t us. We spent our time discussing The Avengers, Monty Python and the lyrics to the songs in Easy Rider.

 

One day, all this changed.

 

Mike Branch, the relief art teacher, arrived. He was about thirty years younger than any other member of staff, and came for the summer. Of course, everyone instantly liked him. He was handsome and funny and mad-looking. He let you smoke in the kiln room. His hair was over his collar. And he wore jeans. To schoolboys who were expected to wear regulation underpants, this was nothing short of frankly amazing. He asked us to call him Mike, and explained that as long as he was around, classes would be very different from what we were used to.

 

The first time I saw him, he was lounging with his brown suede boots on the desktop and reaching a long arm up to the blackboard to wipe the masters of the Florentine Renais­sance away with his sleeve.

 

‘I want you to forget the heavy stuff for a while,’ he casually explained. ‘We’ll be concentrating on the Dadaist movement.’ Then he wrote ‘Rebellion in Art’ across the board in red and threw the heavy chalk block clean through a closed window. There was a crack of shattering glass and we all came to attention, filled with borderline-homoerotic admiration.

 

‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ said Branch, sliding his legs from the desk and rising. ‘We’ll be working hard. But we’ll be taking a new approach.’ And with that he revealed the school record player - a big old wooden thing, never known to have been removed from the office of the headmaster - plugged it in, and began to acquaint us with his personal taste in rock.

 

Suddenly Art became the hot class to take. Branch’s periods were unpredictable and (something unheard of in our school) actually interesting. We created Anti-Meat art and Self-Destruct art and Death-to-the-Ruling-Class art. The other teachers tolerated our displays because technically speaking they weren’t very good, which made them less of a threat. Besides, as pupils we were Showing An Interest, thus achieving a prime educational directive. The fact that we would have donated our kidneys for vivisection if Mike had asked us hadn’t passed unnoticed, either. The other teachers realised that they could learn something from watching the art class.

 

One day, Branch placed a single on the turntable and played it. I was fist deep in a gore-sprayed papier-mâché duck when ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones came on. I’d never really liked the song. It already sounded dated when it was first released. Too dirge-like. It reminded me of ‘House of the Rising Sun’. But Mike had a special reason for playing it.

 

‘For the climax of our season of Anti-Art,’ he said, strolling between my paint-spattered classmates, ‘you are going to Paint It Black.’

 

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. He turned to look at me. He had these deep-set blue eyes that settled on you like search­lights, looking for truth.

 

‘A day of artistic anarchy. The idea is to take all of the work you produce this summer and paint it matt black. Then you’re going to glue it all together, along with anything else that looks suitable, stick the record player in the centre, and stand it in the middle of the quadrangle.’

 

It seemed a bit stupid, but nobody argued.

 

‘What if someone tells us to take it down, sir?’ asked the pudding-basin-haircutted Paul Doggart, fellow Weed, a boy who was born to say sir a lot in his life.

 

‘You don’t take it down. You don’t obey anyone’s orders until the stroke of noon. Then I’ll appear and we’ll play “Paint It Black” from the centre of the sculpture. The art will last for the duration of the song, and then we’ll destroy it.’

 

‘But won’t we get into trouble, sir?’ pressed Doggart.

 

‘No, because I’ll forewarn the other masters. They’ll be turned on to expect some unspecified action of guerilla art.’ (Yes, embarrassing as it may seem, people really spoke like this in the early seventies.)

 

So, preparations were made, the date was set for the last day of term (the third Tuesday in June) and we painted everything we could lay our hands on and added it to the pile. Clocks. Chairs. Tyres. Lampshades. Toys. Clothes. Tailor’s dummies. Car exhausts. A washing machine. And all the time, the damned song played until it wore out and had to be replaced with a new copy.

 

Mike Branch strolled around the artroom, shifting from table to table, stopping to watch as Ashley Turpin, a fat kid with almost geological facial acne attempted to get black paint to stick to a brass candelabrum. The master nodded his head thoughtfully, running his thumb beneath his chin as he considered the sheer anarchy of his loyal pupil’s work. Finally, with lowered eyebrows and a crooked smile, he turned his attention to the boy. ‘Extremely groovy, Turpin,’ he said. Turpin, who had previously shown no promise in any area of scholastic endeavour beyond ‘O’ Level Body Odour, was pitifully grateful.

 

Identified to other classes by our laminated badges (black, circular, blank - oh, the nihilism) we suddenly found our­selves behaving like some kind of creative elite. Me and the other despised and shunned creeps had finally found our cause. For the first time ever we were part of a team, and the fact that the Sport Kings all hated us worked in favour of our anarchistic behaviour.

 

We began to be bad. I mean bad as in modern bad, good bad. By the week before end of term, we were discovering the non-artistic applications of ‘Paint It Black’. Minor league anarchy. Having pizzas with disgusting toppings delivered to masters COD. Gluing their wipers to their car wind­screens. Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns upped the stakes by removing the wheels from the French teacher’s moped, painting them black and adding them to the sculpture.

 

Then someone found a masters’ home address list. Crank calls to the wives, made from the caretaker’s phone by the dining hall. Then obscene calls. Anyone who whined that it was wrong was ditched from the group and returned to the status of a Weed. His badge was ceremoniously taken back. To wimp out on the rebellion was to fail as a human being. The Sport Kings stopped thundering up and down the pitch to cast jealous sidelong glances at the Black Brigade. (Funny thing, we only had one kid in our year who was actually black, Jackson Raboi, and he wasn’t interested in anarchy at all. He wanted to be a Conservative MP.)

 

Of course, the shit soon started coming down on us. Efforts were made to find the culprits. There were extra detentions, cancelled privileges. But end of term pranks were to be expected, and up until now we weren’t far beyond that.

 

On Monday, the day before term ended, the day before B-Day, we stepped up the action and went too far. (You saw this coming, didn’t you?) It’s blindingly obvious now that some of the group didn’t appreciate the subtleties of Mike Branch’s orchestrated artistic protest, but had just joined for the party attitude. One of these B-stream holdbacks threw some kind of concentrated acid over the geography master’s car. It stank and made an amazing mess, melting clean through the bodywork. Incredible.

 

News of the attack spread around class like wildfire. Paul Doggart blanched beneath his pudding-basin haircut and threatened to leave the group, but didn’t because there was nowhere else to go, and even Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns was impressed. Nobody dared own up. We were given until noon the next day to produce a culprit, or the whole brigade would be kept back while everyone else left for the summer. But by now there was an All or Nothing atmosphere in the group, and we stayed solid. When the head took his record player back, someone brought in their own hi-fi system. The damned song played on.

 

There was never much studying done on the last day of term. Leisure activities were tolerated. We were allowed to bring in - wait for it - board games. I shit you not. And we could wear casual clothes, so everyone made an effort to look hip. Recently I found an old photograph of us Weeds together, taken on that final morning. You’d think we’d been dressed by blind people. Poor old Doggart.

 

Mike had arranged a double art period for his brigade of rebels. All of the black-painted stuff was arranged in chunks around the room. The record was playing as high as the volume would allow, the sound completely distorted. The artroom was christened The Rock Shop. (I know it’s embarrassing now but at the time you’d narrow your eyes and go, Hey, if anyone wants me I’m at The Rock for a Study Period, okay?’ - highly cool.) It was in a separate annexe of its own, and inside it seventeen maladjusted kids were free to do whatever they liked.

 

The party really started when Yates Junior brought in his mother’s hidden supply of mixed spirits (the woman must have been an incredible lush, there was about six litres of the stuff). There were joints, courtesy of Simon Knight’s brother, who was possibly the most corrupt customs officer in Britain, which is really saying something, and there was acid, although I didn’t have any. Everyone went into the kiln room to smoke (force of habit) and soon you could get high just by opening the door, walking in and breathing.

 

Everyone knew that the gym teacher was a queer because he brought this skinny hairless dog to school. A Mexican thing, big eyes, ugly little teeth. He never watched us in the showers or anything (the teacher, not the dog) because he was too scared of losing his job, but he had this stupid mutt. Had being the key word, because Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns came up with the great rebellious artistic act of luring it into the kiln room with a piece of bacon. The old art master had always warned us that the inside of the kiln, on full power, was hotter than the surface of Venus, so we decided to test it. A scientific experiment, like sending Laika the alsatian into orbit with no hope of ever getting him back. The idea was to dip the dog in slip clay and bake it, then paint it black and add it to the sculpture.

 

The kiln was squat and wide with these thick stone walls, so you couldn’t hear the dog whining once the door was shut. After about an hour we unsealed it and found that the only thing left was a small patch of blackened sticks. Doggart started moaning on about cruelty to animals, so we covered one side of his body with glue and pressed him against the artroom wall until his skin stuck.

 

Then we began to assemble the sculpture. Forming a chain, we passed the sections out into the school quadrangle, a pathetic damp square of grass surrounded by rain-stained concrete walkways. As the sculpture rose above the height of a man, an interested crowd gathered. The gym teacher asked us if we had the authority to do what we were doing and we said yes, so he went away. I figured he hadn’t found out about his dog yet.

 

At a quarter to twelve the sculpture was fifteen feet high and we still had a load of stuff to add. Table legs, television sets and dolls’ arms poked out from the twisted black heap. The record player was wired up, but we were going to be late for our noon deadline, mainly because we were all so ripped that we were repeating each other’s tasks. The assistant headmaster, a sickly wraith-like creature who looked as if he hadn’t slept since the day Buddy Holly died, asked Simon Knight if he’d been drinking and Simon said no, which was true, although he had dropped acid. Behind his reasonable, innocent exterior he was tripping off his face. Of course, back then the teachers didn’t really know what to look for.

 

The big moment arrived and we were still building the sculpture. Most of the school had turned out to watch. Everyone knew that something special was about to happen. The event had been whispered about for weeks. There were all kinds of rumours flying around - most of them far more imaginative than what was actually planned. Even the Sport Kings were here. Then the headmaster appeared to see what all the fuss was about. He stood at the front of the crowd with his bony arms folded behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh, a look of thin tolerance on his face, tapering towards displeasure.

 

This was our brief flicker of fame. All eyes were on us. We were the kings. The bollocks du chien. The members of the brigade stood back while Brian climbed into the sculpture and started the record player. The opening guitar riff heralded Mick Jagger’s voice, a voice which always sounded as if he was leaning obscenely into the microphone mouthing distilled insolence. We looked around for Mike. Our Mike, the leader of the Black. No sign. Then we noticed the headmaster.

 

His displeasure had changed to - well, not pleasure but something approximating it. ‘If you’re looking for Mr Branch,’ he said in a clear Scottish Presbyterian voice that rang across the square, ‘you will not find him here. He left the school last night with no intention whatsoever of return­ing today.’ He pronounced the ‘h’ in ‘whatsoever’.

 

The headmaster triumphantly turned on his heel and led the other teachers back to the common room. And the record stuck. It stuck on the word black. The repeated syllable taunted, and the derision began. The Sport Kings just drifted away, snorting to each other, too bored even to beat us up. Suddenly we were Weeds again. It was as if the natural order had been restored, as if everyone had been returned to their correct status, with us back at the bottom, and the holidays could now begin.

 

‘No intention whatsoever.’ It was the ‘whatsoever’ that hurt, as if he’d been ready to bottle out all along. The last of the Sport Kings were hanging back by the bike sheds watching us, evidently planning to crack a few Weed heads after all. We didn’t care about them. We were too choked even to talk.

 

Brian ripped the plug from the record player, snatched off the record and returned to the artroom close to tears. He tipped over a table and threw a chair across the room, then so did a couple of the others, and suddenly we were smashing up everything in sight. I guess none of us had expected to be betrayed at such an early point in our lives. Perhaps if we could have had sex right then, nothing more would have happened. But we hardly knew any girls, so we had to make do with violence.

 

Paul Doggart was still stuck to the wall. We’d forgotten all about him. He started making a fuss about wanting to leave, but he couldn’t get out of his clothes. His blazer and trousers were cemented fast to the white-painted concrete. So was his fat left cheek. His bellyaching went against the general flow of energy so we spray-painted him black with the leftovers in the cans, hoping that it would shut him up. Of course this had the reverse effect, so someone (to this day I don’t know who) finally obliged by putting a foot against the wall and tearing him free, Doggart came away, but not quietly and not in one piece. His cheek left a grisly triangle of flesh stuck to the concrete.

 

The last time I saw him he was stumbling between the tables clutching his face, crying in hoarse angry sobs. By the time we had finished in the artroom, paint was dripping from the walls and there was broken glass everywhere. We knew someone must have heard the noise by now and didn’t dare open the door, so we went out through the windows.

 

Our adrenaline was really pumping. Using the knives from the artroom we slit every tyre in the car park as we left. I cut the fingers of my right hand to the bone at the second joint because I was gripping my knife so hard.

 

That night most of us met up and went to see Woodstock, but by this time all those twangly Country Joe and the Fish peace songs could only leave us cold. A bridge had been crossed. An unspoken bond had been forged between us.

 

It’s funny how moments can change lives.

 

Doggart nearly died. The black paint infected his wound and the damage to his face became a whole lot worse. He had a load of skin grafts over the next seven years. And his mind got all screwed up. Nothing he said ever again made much sense. I think his old mum tried to sue someone, but was forced through ill-health and lack of funds to give up the case.

 

I visited him in hospital once. I remember walking along a wax-tiled corridor, shoes squeaking, pushing open the door at the end. He was lying in a darkened room, unfriendly eyes staring accusingly from a mess of taut, shiny skin. I sat by his bed for a few minutes but there was nothing much to say. As I made to leave, his right hand grabbed my wrist, I suppose he was trying to thank me for coming to visit him. I gave him a Get Well Soon card from the members of the B-Brigade. A fold of plain paper, blank shiny blackness. So hip.

 

Most of the brigade was expelled, of course, but the school took no further action. They had too many paying parents to risk getting a bad name. As I said, it was a posh school. Most of the Old Boys were masons. Money changed hands; word never got out. With the time I had spare I attended art college. Cue further tears from Mother.

 

Years later, someone heard what had happened to Mike Branch. It turned out that he never was an art teacher, relief or otherwise. He’d played in a band once, opening for the Stones. That was his sole claim to fame. He’d walked into our school with credentials that no one had bothered to check. Then, the day before our big event he’d simply walked away again, gone to the North to do something else. Somebody told me he’s in property sales now. That sounds about right.

 

Still, I wonder if he had the remotest notion of the effect he had on us. He changed the lives of seventeen boys. Thinking about it now, I find it incredible that we trusted someone who regularly wore a turtleneck sweater and gold medallion beneath a brown patch-suede jacket, but there you go. I owned a mauve two-tone shirt with huge rounded collars that fastened with Velcro, a fashion crime I com­pounded with the addition of yellow hipster bellbottoms.

 

Personally speaking, I blame Mick Jagger.

 

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