Someone You Shouldn’t’ve

The winter of '78, the long way round, and a record that knew more than I did.

The projector ran hot at the back of the sixth-form classroom and the screen wobbled more than it should. Twenty of us, give or take — the ones who'd walked. Outside the windows the snow had that blue look it gets before noon, like it was holding its breath. Somebody had dug up reels of Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, and they ran them back to back because there were no lessons and no plan and the roads were closing, and someone in an office had decided film was easier than sending us home in the dark.

In Silent Movie the only person who speaks is Marcel Marceau. A mime. He gets the one word in the whole picture, and he uses it to say no. We laughed at that the way you laugh when a thing is funnier than it has any right to be.

I’d walked it that morning, two or three miles, no buses, the drifts standing past the gateposts. Let myself out of the house without putting the kettle on. There was nobody to tell I was going. I kept forgetting that, and then remembering.

They fed us early and let us go. Bright by then, hard and crisp, the cold that makes your teeth ache if you grin into it. David and I were meant to go to his. We got as far as the top of his road and turned round. We were going to Julie’s.

You went to Julie and Jane’s for the records, and endless cups of tea. Jane was going out with Glenn, who fronted the Spasms, and the house ran on 45s — the good stuff, the stuff you couldn’t get the lads at school to listen to. I’d tried on most of a new self that winter through that front door: what I wore, what I’d own up to playing, the Chesterfield punks, the Tupton punks, and me somewhere between them.

The lane from Holmgate out to theirs off Ashover Road snows in easy. Country lane, really. One strip had been cleared and the banks stood either side higher than a car. We saw him coming too fast — a wide old sixties thing, the kind that still had wings. One of us said it — he's not going to stop — the way you say a thing half a second before it proves you right. He skidded level with us, the brakes not enough to hold it on the ice. The back end swung round slow enough to watch. For a moment I thought it had missed me. Then the wing caught me and put me into the bank head first, legs in the air, the whole white world up my sleeves and down my collar.

I came up brushing myself down. The car had stopped a little way on, slewed half across the lane. The driver wound the window down and asked David if we were all right. David said we were. The back wheels couldn’t get a grip in the snow, so we put our shoulders to it and pushed him out, and he went.

David was looking the other way down the lane. “That was lucky,” he said. “He could’ve hit us.”

I started to say it. Did you not. I got as far as looking at him. Then I brushed off the last of it and we walked on.

Julie’s mum loved me. That was the trouble. She’d have had me at the table every Sunday, would’ve signed the papers herself. *I wish you were going out with Robert* — she’d said it once, to Jane, about Glenn, said it kindly and in front of me, which is the kiss of death. Julie had me round her little finger and knew it. I’d have walked eight miles through snow for her. I more or less did.

The 45 was on when we got in, or it went on — Pete Shelley up high and bright over a tune far too cheerful for what it’s saying. Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve. Julie singing along, not to me. Jane drying her hair. The drive not dug out. They were shocked we’d come all that way, and pleased, the way people are pleased by a thing they’d never have done themselves.

I knew what the song was about the way Julie meant it — the way it meant me, standing there with snow melting into my collar. It wasn’t only about Julie. I let it be about Julie.

We stayed till the light started to go. Eight miles I did that day — up on top of the banks where the lane carried traffic, down in the eighteen inches where it didn’t. The hook came with me the way they do, going round on its own, bright and stupid and exactly right.

I let myself in. The hall was cold and stayed cold. I didn’t put the kettle on. The tune kept going round, and I didn’t sing.

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