fourteen

Upstairs in my room we plugged our guitars into Bob and jammed for a while, whilst discussing our money-making plans.

"We need something to sell," I said. "Something that people want."

Of course, there were plenty of things you could sell at school to make money (everything from wank mags and flick knives to condoms and angel dust). However, selling cigarettes was probably the biggest business. You could buy twenty cigarettes for a quid and sell them for ten pence each - an instant profit of one hundred percent. There was no shortage of eager buyers, twelve and thirteen-year-olds showing off how hard and grown up they were by giving themselves bad breath and lung cancer.

Although cigarettes were the most traded commodity at the school, an illicit currency that guaranteed you a certain amount of status and wealth, dealing in them was not particularly advisable. At Manor Park, sales of cigarettes (as well as speed, glue, lighter fuel and anything else you could spray into a plastic bag and sniff yourself senseless with) were pretty much controlled by a gang of fourth and fifth year lads who came off the Downside Estate. I remember I encountered the ferocity of the gang (indirectly, thank God) in my very first week at 'the big school' (which was what all us first years used to call Manor Park Comprehensive).

As I grew older, Manor Park gradually diminished in size and complexity, and by the time I left it seemed rather small and shabby. However, during my first week there, the school seemed impossibly complex and imposing. At first I felt totally lost and confused, unable to place my position within a maze of subjects and rooms and teachers and timetables, of big kids and little kids, who smiled and pushed and spat and made friends with you seemingly at random.

I remember I started at the big school on a Tuesday morning. And by Friday lunchtime, I was still confused and uncertain where to go, unable to find room R2 where the timetable told me I was to be taught humanities by Miss Watson as a member of group L1. As I wandered despondently along, trailing my new sports bag through the dog-ends and sweet wrappers that littered the concrete of the playground, I noticed a group of kids had gathered by the wall of the science building.

By then I was used to seeing groups of kids milling together, to observe fights, beat someone up or look at high-definition 'adult' playing cards. However that group was different. Everyone's faces were filled with shock and dismay. And some of the girls in the group were crying - big girls with proper breasts and make-up and everything, blubbing their eyes out. And I knew, just knew, that something terrible had happened.

I crouched down and elbowed my way through blazers and smelly grey skirts and trousers to the front of the group to see a sixteen-year-old boy lying, foetuslike, on the floor. He had scruffy, sandy hair, freckles and what I later learned was called a 'Chelsea smile'. That is to say, each side of his face - from his lips to his ears - had been sliced open with a Stanley knife. The boy's mouth gaped like the belly of a gutted fish, and I was so close I could have reached out and put my hand inside his head. As he writhed on the floor, the boy cupped handfuls of blood and flesh, which dripped between his fingers like chopped tomatoes and splashed onto the concrete by the toes of my shoes.

No one did anything for a while except stare, but then another boy with a dangly-cross earring and a pubescent moustache pushed me out of the way and took his shirt off and wrapped it round the cut kid's face. Moments later, two teachers appeared running from the staff room and took the boy with the slashed face away. I don't know what happened to him after that as nothing official was ever said about the incident. But rumour had it that he was trying to muscle in on the cigarettes and solvents market and one of the Downside gang had cut him as a warning to others (so, suffice to say, they were not the kind of people you would choose to compete with!)

However, there were other mechanisms for making money at school. Perhaps the most bizarre of these was carried out by Bent Bob, a boy whose intellect and inhibitions had been impaired by a clumsy doctor and a poorly-designed pair of forceps during his birth, and who was given to performing acts of breathtaking depravity. Bent Bob had an enormous physique (bigger even than that of Barry Slater). He was so large he could fit fifty-seven ten pence pieces beneath his foreskin, a feat he would regularly perform behind the sports hall for the amusement and disgust of a small crowd and the financial benefit of his sidekick, a weedy half-Italian bloke called Antonio.

Bent Bob would insert anything into any orifice. He would stick coins up his nose and would slide a stainless steel Parker Pen right up his bum. And of course once a kids pen or coin and been buried within the intimacies of Bob's body the owner would rarely want it back. Having said that, Antonio didn't seem to have any qualms about handling anything no matter where it had been (I swear, I once saw him eating a pack of smoky bacon crisps and plucking coins from Bent Bob's foreskin with the same hand!)

There were, of course, girls who used more conventional means to make money with their body's. The only one I ever experienced was the infamous Sandra Burgess. She boasted she'd had a fuck at twelve with one of her dad's work mates from the frozen food factory. And she hadn't looked back since. For fifty pence, Sandra would let you have a feel of her tits and for a quid she would let you feel 'everything'. A hand shandy was two pounds fifty.

One lad, called Colin something-or-other didn't pay up after she'd bestowed that particular favour upon him, so she slashed his hard on with a coin she'd sharpened on the lathe during metal work. Apparently there was blood everywhere. He ran to the school nurse's room with his prick hanging out, flopping blood down his trousers and screaming all the way. Of course, he wouldn't admit how it had happened. So for Sandra it was business as usual (and, from what I gather, still is).

"We need to sell something that isn't going to hurt us or anyone else," said Tony. "Food, sweets and stuff like that."

"They already sell sweets cheap at the tuck shop," I said.

"So we need to think of something they don't sell at the tuck shop."

"How about bubble gum," I said. Bubble gum had been banned from the school because kids used to stick it beneath desks and chairs and in each other's hair, and chew it during football practice, then get bundled over and practically choke to death on it.

"It's possible," said Tony. "The trouble is we'd only make half a pence on every piece of bubble gum."

"We could sell loads though," I said.

"We'd have to sell two hundred bubble gums to make a pound," said Tony.

"Oh," I said, as Tony paused to complete a quick calculation in his head.

"Two hundred pounds would be forty thousand bubblegums," he concluded.

"That is a lot of bubble gum," I said.

"Yes," said Tony. "It's too much. And besides we'd need loads of money to buy it to start with." Tony put his guitar down and scrunched his eyes up. I laughed.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm thinking," said Tony.

"You look more like you're having a big crap," I said.

"Don't be stupid," said Tony. "I'm trying to concentrate."

After I'd finished laughing at the pained expression on Tony's face, I too shut my eyes and let my mind go, chanting to myself, there must be something we can sell, there must be something we can sell, there must be something we can sell. And as I repeated those words a picture began to form in my mind.

I was in the garden and I saw a selection of coloured shapes, all different colours like flowers, except they weren't flowers. Flowers had soft edges and the things I could see were much more regular in shape - squares, rectangles circles, piles of them in bright colours, all reds and blues and yellows. And suddenly I realised just what I was seeing, and I knew I'd found a possible solution to our problem.

"I've got it," I said. "I've got it."

"What?" said Tony, blinking his eyes open. "What is it?"

"I know what we can sell," I said, beaming like the proverbial Cheshire cat. "I know what we can sell"

Tony returned my enthusiastic grin with a small suspicious smile, as if he didn't believe I could really have thought of something saleable that wasn't stupid and/or impractical but half-hoped that I might have.

"So, what are we going to sell?" he asked.

"Aha," I said gleefully, tapping my nose. "You'll just have to wait and see." I got up and went over to the door. "Come on," I said beckoning Tony to follow me.

Reluctantly, he gripped the top of the big orange bastard and hauled himself to his feet.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"To the garden shed," I said. "To find the answer to your prayers!"

We had only a small garden then, which was mostly lawn. So there was no great necessity for garden tools. Hence the shed's main function was as a refuge for dad. It was the place he used to go when he fancied getting pissed on Guinness, had had a fight with mum or simply felt like being alone. The shed also made a useful third man when you were playing one-on-one football.

After months of practice, I had perfected the art of shed-passing. I would draw my opponent (normally Gavin from next door) wide to the rose bed on the left hand side of the lawn. Then I'd thump the ball off the slightly open shed door, run past him to collect it on the right of the lawn by the privet bush, and slam it first time past the goalie (sometimes my brother, but mostly Gavin's brother Charles).

Once I managed to lob the ball over Gavin's head and volley the rebound off the shed before it touched the ground, left-footed between the silver birch saplings. I only managed to do that once, but by God what a goal it was.

Anyway, the reason I got so excited about the garden shed was that I'd remembered that in there were these huge boxes of biscuit samples (the multi-coloured shapes I'd envisaged whilst up in my room). The samples were of the three-in-a-pack variety, the sort you could buy for ten pence from a basket by the till in a cafe. And every month dad was given a box containing loads of them to hand out to prospective customers. But dad wasn't very good at giving things away, so he just used to put a few in his briefcase and leave the rest in the shed. Hence it was full of box upon box of Garibaldis and chocolate digestives just sitting there going stale.

Tony couldn't believe it when he saw them all.

"Bloody hell," he said "Where did you get all these biscuits from."

"What biscuits?" I asked

"These ones," said Tony delving into a box and clasping great handfuls of coconut rings.

"I don't see biscuits, Tony," I said with great solemnity (mimicking Brian Phillips). "No Tony, what I see is a nineteen-sixty-six Epiphone Casino!"