The following week was the last of the school year. Everyone at Burnside was talking excitedly about Christmas and the summer holidays. 1986 and the fourth form lay ahead of me. But I didn’t care about any of that. All I thought about was when I would next be hanging out with Skye and her friends. Joanne Price might bully me. My other classmates might ignore or overlook me. But none of that mattered because I had another existence, a secret world that I was part of and which no one else at school knew anything about.
As usual, I got an excellent report from school. Although I’d been increasingly distracted over the past few weeks and had barely kept up with my homework, this hadn’t been enough to reduce my grades. Mum and Dad both beamed with pleasure when they saw my report. I was pleased too. It seemed I could live a new and exciting life with Skye’s gang and still get good marks at school. Everything was perfect.
I didn’t hear from Skye or anyone else during the week, so I just went to the usual spot in the Square that Friday night. As before, I was the first one there, but soon the other members of the group arrived. We hung around in town for a while, browsed through some of the record shops, and finally headed back to Skye’s place. This week Skye had a couple of joints on her, plus Darren had brought some cans of beer. This meant Skye was in a much better mood. I watched her holding forth in front of her friends, telling jokes and recounting funny stories with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other. She was happy and in her element.
The only time she got annoyed was when Obie arrived home unexpectedly. His motorbike roared up the driveway and soon after he appeared in the lounge doorway.
He gave us a sardonic smile. ‘What are you kids up to?’
‘Nothing,’ Skye said.
‘Drinking beer?’ he said. ‘You got one for me?’
‘Piss off.’
‘You’re too young to drink anyway.’
‘I said, piss off.’
‘Maybe I should tell Liz what you get up to.’
‘Go and fucking fuck yourself!’
The group sniggered at this outburst from Skye. I thought for a moment Obie was going to get angry, but he just laughed and walked through to the hallway.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqgcZkQShom
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I didn’t see Skye and the gang at all around Christmas. We all, of course, had to spend at least some time with our families. On Christmas Day, Mum, Dad and I drove out to Nana’s, where Mum cooked lunch and we sat around afterwards opening presents. But during all this, my mind was somewhere else. I was thinking about the feeling of vodka sliding down my throat, the smell of burning marijuana, the twinkling sensation of being stoned.
On the day after Boxing Day, Skye rang and said she was bored and that I should come over to her place. I cycled over immediately. It was a hot afternoon and my back was sweaty by the time I arrived. Liz and Jade were out, but Obie was at home and blasting some kind of heavy metal from his bedroom. Skye and I hung out in her room and smoked the remaining quarter of a joint. It was a small amount of dope, but more than enough for the world to shift around me, as if a frosting of magic had descended over everything.
Skye said she wanted to draw and pulled out several sheets of paper, along with some pens and pencils. She cleared a space on the floor, and we lay on our fronts and sketched away. I’d forgotten what a good artist she was. I kept glancing across and watching as she first drew a girl, and then dark, billowing clouds and spectral figures. The phantasmal forms encircled the girl – she looked small in comparison to them. She seemed under threat, as if sinister forces were about to overwhelm her.
By comparison, my picture was hopeless. I didn’t find dope especially conducive to drawing. I had plenty of ideas, but not much ability to translate them into anything that looked good. I drew a castle, but when that didn’t turn out very well, I tried a dragon instead. That didn’t work out either as my dragon ended up more pretty than ferocious, more like a family pet than a monster.
‘I’ll put some music on,’ Skye said. ‘What are you into?’
I hesitated. I didn’t think Skye would like any of the bands I listened to. ‘Um, I don’t know. Just this and that.’
‘Like what?’
‘I quite like the Thompson Twins.’
She screwed up her nose. ‘The Thompson Twins? I’ll have to get you into some decent music.’
She fumbled in the mess under her bed, located a tape and stuck it in a tape deck. It was more of her weird music. I heard jangly guitars and a woman singing in a wailing voice. Everything sounded echoey and unpolished.
‘Siouxsie and the Banshees,’ Skye said. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s OK.’
‘OK? It’s fucking great.’
‘Yeah, I meant it’s good. I like it.’
I didn’t exactly like it, although I didn’t completely dislike it either. We carried on drawing for a while and after a couple of songs the tape finished. Skye rummaged under her bed again and pulled out a new cassette.
‘You’re going to like this one,’ she said. ‘The Cure.’
Yet more jangly guitars emerged from the tape deck. The sound seemed thin and not as filled out as with the bands I usually listened to. But the tunes were good. In some ways the songs were like ordinary pop music, but just played and recorded in a strange way. The singer’s voice was soft and trembly. It sounded as though he wasn’t a very good singer, but there was still something captivating about him, something sad and fragile.
I found myself being drawn into the music. I could only make out some of the lyrics, but they all seemed suggestive of bleakness, sadness and longing. They matched the singer’s voice perfectly. His vocals and the words seemed to be conveying a single vision.
And then a switch flicked in my brain. Suddenly I understood. The band were trying to express the same sad and fearful feelings I knew so well. The band members had felt the way I felt, and they were trying to tell me this through their music. They were actually singing about what was going on in my head.
It was the kind of realisation that seems so significant when you’re stoned but doesn’t seem as profound later on. And yet, for me at that moment, it was the first time music had had this impact on me.
Skye studied me. ‘You like this?’
‘Yeah. It’s cool.’
‘They’re a bit poppy for me.’
I was immediately disappointed. Why had Skye introduced me to this band if she was only going to criticise them?
She must have noticed me looking dejected, because she hurriedly said: ‘But they’re still good, though. I meant they’re a good starting point for you. They’re like the gateway.’
She stood, searched through the myriad pictures plastered on the walls, and took down a photograph that looked as though it had been torn from a magazine.
She handed the picture to me. ‘This is the singer. Robert Smith.’
He was an extraordinary-looking figure. A huge mop of teased black hair sat on top of his head, and he was wearing eyeliner and red lipstick. He looked a bit like a vampire and a bit like a scarecrow.
‘He looks pretty crazy,’ I said.
‘I know. I like how Siouxsie looks best, though.’
She plucked a magazine from the floor, sat back down next to me, and leafed through it until she found a photo of Siouxsie Sioux. I had seen a couple of pictures of her before, although I’d always thought of her as someone only people older and weirder than me would be interested in. In the photo, she was dressed in lace and leather and was staring intensely into the camera. Her face was painted white, her eyes were shrouded in black, and she had the same sort of mad hair as Robert Smith.
Skye jabbed her finger at the magazine. ‘This is the NME. From the UK. You can find out about all the cool bands here.’ She flicked through the pages. ‘Here at the back you can see all the gigs. It’s amazing.’ She ran her finger over columns of listings. ‘If we were in London right now we could see the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nick Cave. I reckon you can see something any night you like in London. I can’t wait to get over there.’
‘You’re going to London?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘When?’
‘Soon as I can. Better than being stuck in this dump, eh?’
I mumbled something in agreement, even though I’d never thought about leaving Christchurch, let alone New Zealand. Christchurch was my whole world at that point and I couldn’t see anything beyond it.
And I didn’t want Skye to go to London either. I wanted her to stay where she was. I was only just becoming friends with her and I didn’t want things to end yet.
‘You can come and visit me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘When I’m in London. You can visit me.’
‘Oh cool.’
‘Then we can go and see the Cure live. It’ll be great.’
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