Episode 5 The house that wasn't home

I was still staying in contact with a few Turrets acquaintances. Former five-a-side pal Garry had offered some relief from the horrors of Shrapnel the previous summer with his 'Evil Kenievel' and Scalextric', and when the second year at Shrapnel concluded, I was up early to make the fifty yard dash to his house, only to be told by his mother he was down the garage again with his step-dad, Garry was now a part of my junior school past. I turned and walked up the hill toward Terry's.

“...Wotcher.”

Things hadn't changed in Tel's terminally time-warped head.

“...Coming over the rec?”

I smiled, pleased to re-enter a less complicated universe. The days fell easily into a pattern with Terry that summer. With his 'Shoot' pull-out table and a series of rolls of the dice, we created our own alternative First Division battle, hoping to rouse our White Hart Lane footballing heroes from their coma with our voodoo. The thrill of repositioning the cardboard tag indicators a couple of places higher or lower on the table after the latest round of dice rolls would be enough to bring tears to my eyes. Then the equipment would be packed away in the drawer, to be retrieved only upon my calling next day.

While Tel's domestic life was other than blissful, most of the furniture having gone to pay his father's gambling debts, his garden was a bohemian paradise, brimming with unkempt paths and bushes from where I could spy on his stereotypically oppressed mother, stretched out on a lounger and offering her lean, cigarette-addled form to the sun. On August afternoons, the shadows cast by the trees lent an enchanted Shakespearean still to the occasion. As well as three dozen copies of 'Shoot', Terry leant me a pair of cricketing whites which I made sure I was wearing when Maureen was around. We were alone in the kitchen one day when 'Three times a lady' came on the radio. Maureen looked at me strangely and asked me what I thought.

I told her it was a load of soppy crap.

“...Aaah, just wait 'til you're courtin', Lennie!” she gushed.

I felt pleased she considered me capable of such achievements. In fact she was a little premature in her reckoning. But when I finally did get a girlfriend, I still didn't like slow discs.

Within a month of starting back at Shrapnel, my friendship with Terry was as if it had never existed. We never saw each other again and he never asked for his 'Shoots' back. It's not hard to see how kids like Terry go off the rails. I met 'dad' a few times. An unfriendly, desperate-looking man with a cockney accent transplantation reject. No wonder Maureen was always a bit valium-ridden and put upon. If it wasn't the strain of bringing up two kids virtually single-handed, it was the uncertainty of knowing whether she'd have a home in which to do so the following week. When I said goodbye to Terry that final weekend, I was leaving a world where I knew we could never be brothers. He was a good friend, but by October, I didn't really miss him. He put a sporting block on the reality of a life I couldn't relate to enough to sympathise with. Locked inside his football dreamland, where he would maybe one day make good, though he almost certainly didn't...