Kiss My Name Read online

  SIMON – August 1983

  It was a Friday evening and, as ever, I was walking Colin to Jiu-Jitsu. We were almost at the Community Centre. Colin thought he looked tough in his suit, but in reality, he just looked cute. The fact that he held my hand as we walked there would also have impacted on his toughness. Colin was three years younger than me but he was small for his age, whilst I was tall, stocky and a little overweight. To an outsider, the age difference would have appeared larger. We talked as we walked.

  “What belt are you now, Colin?”

  “White belt.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s better than beginner. They don’t have a belt.”

  ”So did you have to pass exams to be a white belt then? Did you have to do good rolls and blocks and stuff?”

  “No. Mum just had to pay them the money for the suit.”

  “So what belt will you be when you pass some exams?”

  “Blue.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Simon, I don’t know, I just go to learn how to defend myself.”

  “From who?”

  “From anyone, Simon. I’m only small, so I need to learn how to look after myself.”

  Just as Colin was explaining his reason for attending Jiu-Jitsu we arrived at Euxton Community Centre.

  “Right, in you go. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

  “Are you not coming in, Simon?”

  “Not today. I’m going to pop round to Joey’s for a game of Subbuteo.”

  “OK. See you later. Don’t cripple any of his players like you do with ours!”

  Colin ran into the Community Centre. The ‘crippling’ that he was referring to, was due to us playing subbuteo at home in the small bedroom we shared. There was barely enough room for a subbuteo pitch and two single beds, so I kept kneeling on the players, cutting them off from their base by snapping them at their ankles. I knew this wouldn’t happen at Joey’s, his Mum and Dad had put the subbuteo pitch on a table in their second lounge, so it was impossible for me to kneel on them.

  Realising time was of the essence, I ran from the Community Centre to Joey’s. I ran everywhere as a child, as an adult, when you aren’t working, you set your own time boundaries, you go shopping until you decide that it is time to leave, you go to the pub until you decide that you’ve had enough, but as a child, your parents determine your time allocations, they decide when you go to bed, when you eat, when you need to pick your brother up from Jiu-Jitsu, so in those precious moments of space, you have to act quickly. Everything I did felt like it was rushed. This Friday evening was no different. I had less than an hour at Joey’s, so the sooner I got there the better.

  As I turned into Joey’s road, I could hear voices from his drive. I peered over his hedge and Joey was running around in demented circles like he was a balloon that someone had let go of before tying a knot in him. Nicky, the girl I had met the previous month, was there too, not paying a great deal of attention to Joey, amusing herself by doing cartwheels on the lawn. She had a skirt on so every time she cartwheeled I could see her white knickers. Seven years later, that may have been interesting but back then it meant nothing. I was more interested in Joey’s odd behaviour.

  “Joey, what are you doing?” I asked as he wafted an invisible object away from his head.

  “There’s a wasp chasing me! I hate wasps!”

  I think Joey suddenly realised that the wasp was no longer a threat. He stopped still. I was panting a bit from my run as I walked onto the lawn.

  “Have you been running?” Nicky asked as she attempted another cartwheel.

  “Yes.”

  “You sound puffed.”

  “I’m OK.”

  I wanted to acknowledge that I knew her Mum had died and that I felt truly sorry for her, but at ten, it is difficult to express such things, so I just quickly mumbled,

  “Sorry to hear about your Mum.”

  It felt awkward but Nicky had obviously grown accustomed to talking about it.

  “It’s OK. She was in a lot of pain. I miss her, but my Daddy looks after me.”

  “Nicky’s come to stay here for a couple of weeks,” Joey explained, “my Mum and Dad thought it would be a good idea, to give Uncle Arthur a break.”

  “Do you know how to play subbuteo?” I asked Nicky hopefully.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a football game, with little men you have to flick around the pitch.”

  “No, never heard of it, but I like football. Do you have Nottingham Forest in subbuteo? They are my favourite team.”

  “Yes. You can be any team you like, especially here, Joey has more teams than me. Can we all go in and play now? I need to go and pick Colin up from Jiu-Jitsu at seven.”

  “Yeh, come on!” Joey enthused.

  Joey lead the way as we all ran off the front garden and into the Neill’s house. Nicky soon learnt subbuteo. She found it highly amusing that the ball was bigger than the players and thought it would be fantastic if in real football everyone had to use an eight foot ball.

  Through the death of her mother, Nicky became part of our gang that summer. It was no longer just mine and Joey’s tent, it became Nicky’s too. When she returned home after two weeks, Joey’s house seemed empty and life was not quite as much fun. Nicky would soon be back though and each time she returned, the three of us would be inseparable. One summer rolled into the next, we grew older, but if anything our bond tightened. That was, of course, until the fateful summer of 1986. The summer of 1986 had promised so much, but swept over me like a tornado in a region without a Pulse-Doppler radar. I was flattened by something I could never have forecast and was left to sift through the debris in the hope that I would find something special that would encourage me to go on.

  SIMON– July 1986

  Colin was a mouthy little thing. A loveable rogue, my mother used to call him. He was one of those hyperactive kids who could never sit still and watch TV or read a book. He had to be up to something. Mum had put him into Jiu-Jitsu, to try to channel his energies into something positive, but it would have needed to be for 168 hours a week to keep our Colin out of trouble. He was drawn to trouble like a male praying mantis is drawn into sex.

  Colin was a skinhead. He was not a mod or aware of the 2 Tone ska revival, he was a skinhead through necessity. Every three weeks, Mum would arrange for Beverley, her cousin who was a mobile hairdresser, to nip around with her clippers to sort Colin out. If asked, Colin always used to say he liked it short, liked the feel of it when he ran his hand up and down the back of his head, but truth be told, he was prone to nits, so Mum always asked Beverley to come every third Friday.

  As a kid, pretty much like I am now as an adult, I was laid back and not easily phased. Mum and Dad did not know how to handle Colin, he only knew one speed and that was supersonic, so his constant attention seeking used to wear them down. As his only sibling, it became my duty to take care of him. When I was eight, nine, ten, eleven, I didn’t mind having my younger brother in tow, but once I started at Secondary school, I began to seek some independence and having a little brother tagging along everywhere I went, started to irritate me.

  When I was thirteen, Colin was still only ten but he had always been an adventurous soul, so the opportunity to break free from his shackles did not fill him with fear, it just pumped him with an even bigger shot of adrenalin than usual. He was happy to strike a deal whereby I would let him go off to explore without my guidance, but if Mum and Dad ever asked, we would say we had been together throughout the day. At first, everything went to plan. During school terms, every weekend I would go off with my mates and Colin would tell me he was going to meet his. Every Saturday and Sunday, we would meet up at five o’clock at the wooden bus shelter halfway down Euxton Lane, then walk back home together.

  “What have we been doing today then?” Colin would always ask.

  My reply tended to differ depending on what sort of a mess Colin was in. If he was covered he
ad to toe in mud, I’d say we’d been playing footy and we had made Colin go in goal. If his clothes were torn, we’d been blackberry picking and he had fallen into the bushes. Between us, we could invent a scenario for every day. One Sunday, however, I had a new problem. Colin had acquired a new smell, tobacco.

  As soon as I reached the bus shelter, I could smell smoke. At first I was unperturbed by this, smoke wasn’t an unusual smell for a bus station in Chorley, the buses were never the most reliable back then, so the stress of their delay would often be remedied by a quick fag. This particular Sunday though, the smell stayed with us, as Colin and I passed a pebble to each other as we headed home. When Colin ran next to me and passed the pebble sideways, I couldn’t fail to inhale that stale stench, so I trapped the pebble dead under my Gola trainers, picked it up and threw it into the wheat field.

  “Simon, what are you playing at?” Colin asked in an irritated tone.

  “I was going to ask you that, Col?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re only ten and you stink of smoke. Why?”

  “I’m nearly eleven.”

  “Ten and a half. Answer my question, Colin, I want to know why you smell of smoke?”

  “Oh, that!”

  Colin forced a laugh out more than a little nervously, before replying.

  “At dinner time, I ran into Bez, Mossy, Pegs, Holmy and Boffin over at our den by Astley Park. We were messing about playing chase and stuff and then we got bored, so we gathered a load of branches and fencing and stuff together and built a bonfire. It was wet so it didn’t really burn. It just gave off a load of smoke.”

  It sounded plausible but I didn’t believe him.

  “So you weren’t smoking?”

  Colin gave me his best angelic, innocent look.

  “No! Smoking kills you, Simon, why would I do that?”

  “Showing off.”

  “No, honestly, I was just playing with my mates. Ask them if you don’t believe me!”

  “I might just do that, Colin.”

  “You can.”

  “You’ll never be any good at Jiu Jitsu if you start smoking.”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “Good....what are you doing hanging around with them lot anyway, they’re my age?”

  “No, they aren’t! Bez and Holmy are in my class.”

  “The rest of them are my age, Boffin’s at Parklands with me...and he’s a dick!”

  “No, he’s not!” Colin protested, “Boffin’s hilarious! It was him who started the fire. It wouldn’t start at first so he took his top off, threw it on and was doing some mad, crazy fire dance. You should have seen him, Si, it was so funny!”

  “Hilarious,” I mocked in my deadpan tones, “why can’t you just knock around with kids your own age. Stop setting fire to things and just go with some kids your own age up to Spa to get toffees.”

  “Bez and Holmy are my age,” Colin re-stated.

  “But they’re mad. Why don’t you just play with kids in the road?”

  “Who? Preki, Wilko and Jonesy? I’m not playing with them!”

  “Why not?”

  “They just play war and cowboys and indians or have bike rides around the block.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s babyish.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s kids stuff.”

  “I don’t want to play with them, Si. They’re not cool.”

  “And Boffin’s cool?”

  “Yes.”

  “He isn’t, Col. Luke Booth’s a tit”

  “No, Si, you’re the one who’s being a tit.”

  “What?”

  “At least Boffin wants to hang ‘round with me, not like you. You just want to get rid of me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is Simon. You wouldn’t care if I was dead. In fact, if I was dead, you’d be glad because Mum and Dad would not ask you to look after anyone then. It’d just be you.”

  “Col, you’re my brother, I want to look after you.”

  “Well, why don’t you then? You just leave me, Simon. Every day, you just leave me.”

  Colin was close to tears. I was overcome with guilt and thought I might start blubbing too. I knew he had a very valid point. I tried to justify my behaviour.

  “I thought I was doing you a favour, Col. I thought you liked going off on your own.”

  Colin wiped his nose and his eyes on his smoky sleeve.

  “I did at first, but not any more. I want to hang round with you.”

  “Ok, look, from now on I won’t leave you, Colin. From now on, I promise, I’ll look after you.”

  Colin’s little eyes lit up excitedly.

  “Great! Starting next weekend?”

  “Yes, from next week, you can stick with me and my mates.”

  “Thanks Simon.”

  “It’s OK. You’re my brother, we should stick together. From now on, the two of us are going to stick together like glue.”

  “Like glue and what?”

  “It’s just a saying ‘stick together like glue’, it means we will remain close at all times.”

  Colin smiled a big, gappy smile.

  “I love you, Simon!”

  Colin playfully came over, puckering his lips and stretching out his arms, requesting a hug. I was not comfortable with tactility.

  “Keep away from me, you little poofter!”

  Colin took no notice. He wrapped his little arms around my chest and clung on tightly.

  “No, I won’t. You’re the best brother in the world, Simon Strong. I mean it, the best brother in the world.”

  SIMON–August 1986

  We were round at Joey’s. Joey and I were sitting on his Mum and Dad’s posh, flowery padded sunbeds, sipping lemonade with ice through bendy straws that twisted this way and that like rollercoasters. At the bottom of Joey’s garden was an overgrown vegetable patch and as we enjoyed our lemonades, whilst basking in the warmth of the summer sun, my brother Colin was stood in T-shirt and shorts, in the middle of the vegetable patch, chopping heads off huge nettles with a plastic sword.

  “Your brother’s crazy, isn’t he?” Joey said as he slurped the remains of his lemonade from the bottom of his glass.

  “Not crazy, just hyper,” I replied, sipping my lemonade and feeling pleased that I still had over half a glass to enjoy.

  “He constantly needs to be doing something,” I added, “every morning, I wake up with his little face peering down at me, three inches from my nose, urging me to get up so we can go out to play. My Mum and Dad get really mad with him because he won’t stay still for a minute. Hang on....”

  I was always on the look out for danger when Colin was with me.

  “Col,” I shouted over, “watch out for the sunflowers at the back, Joey’s Dad will have a fit if you chop their heads off!”

  “I’m nowhere near the bloody sunflowers!” Colin shouted back.

  “Language, Col!”

  “Sorry!”

  “Dreading going back to school?” Joey asked, moving the conversation away from Colin, who had been a constant in both our lives throughout the summer holidays. Joey was now at Bolton Grammar, a private school, whilst I was at Parklands, one of the local Comprehensives.

  “Not really. In a strange sort of way I’m looking forward to it. I need a break from him.”

  I pointed discreetly at Colin who was now high kicking the weeds as well as beheading the nettles.

  “I’m not surprised. I love your Colin, he makes me laugh, but I’m sick of him after a few weeks, so I know what you mean. ...How do you think you’ll do this season without Lineker?”

  Joey was a Manchester United fan, I was an Evertonian.

  “Well, if we couldn’t win the title with Lineker last season, it’s going to be tough to win it this year now he’s gone to Barcelona.”

  Joey was doing it again. Moving the conversation away from Colin, I could tell he was bored with everything we did having to incorporate Co
lin, but that had to be the way that summer holiday. I had made a promise to Colin that he could stick with me and that is what had happened. My feelings had gone from ‘this is pretty good’, to ‘this is alright’, to ‘I’m really fed up of this now, but I did promise.’

  I was contemplating a further seven days of babysitting my kid brother, when I heard a familiar voice cry out,

  “Where’s my lemonade, boys?”

  We turned our heads and Nicky was running down the slope alongside Joey’s house. She was dressed in a pink and white summer’s dress and a straw hat that she held on to with one hand as she ran. The times I had met Nicky’s Dad, when he had arrived at the Neill’s house to collect her, I had always found him a mean tempered and intimidating man, but he always did seem to take pride in ensuring Nicky dressed and looked immaculate. She was like a kid from out of one of our catalogues. Joey and I were now thirteen and Nicky was still only ten, but we were both well aware that she would grow up to be stunning. Even then, we understood that hanging around with Nicky was a cool thing to do. Colin saw things differently.

  “Oi, Nicola Moyes! Keep well away from my bloody lemonade!” Colin shouted from the vegetable patch.

  Colin and Nicky had crossed paths a few times before at Joey’s. Colin was always a little wary of Nicky. She commanded everyone’s attention which he didn’t seem to like.

  “Colin Strong, I would rather kiss your brother on the lips than drink your lemonade! I would not want your nasty germs.”

  Nicky spoke quite poshly for a girl from Chorley. The reference to kissing made me feel uncomfortable. I could feel myself going red, so took hold of my lemonade and took a big sip. Joey was on to me.

  “Are you blushing, Muscleman?”

  This was my new nickname. I was a little overweight for my age, so it wasn’t a reference to my physique, it just evolved from the ‘Strong’ surname. I can’t remember who christened me that. It must have been someone at school, but it stuck.

  “No, why would I be?”

  “Because Nicky wants to snog you!”