twenty-one

We were sitting in the living room one evening, shortly after I'd finished my 'o' levels, watching a programme about the breeding habits of sea shrimps. I was meant to have been on a 'date' with Deborah - in other words nipping round her house for a quick shag whilst her mum and dad were out admiring a neighbours new conservatory. Unfortunately there had been a problem with the putty in some of the windows so the trip had been postponed on safety grounds. Deborah was unattainable (and in a foul mood) and I was stuck at home with the 'old folks' watching two giant prawns batter each other to death for the right to own an imitation plastic shell in a Californian oceanographer's laboratory.

"I bet the one on the left wins," I said.

"No the other one's bigger," said John.

"Yea, but the little one's quicker."

"Be quiet, I can't hear a thing," said mum, who wasn't even watching the TV, but browsing through a magazine. I guessed she'd just come across an article that had irritated her. Lots of articles in magazines irritated her, especially articles on beauty, make-up and that kind of thing.

Mum had once done a beauticians course (although, to look at her now, you would never guess). I'm not being cruel. I'm not saying she looks like the back-end of a bus or anything. In fact she normally looks quite smart, very smart. But when I think of a beautician, I always think of a girl in her early twenties with a fountain of peroxide curls piled up on her head, eyes held wide-open by a stiffened ring of eyeliner and lipstick so thick it shifts and wrinkles when she talks. I think of someone who actually believes that choosing a face cream that contains 'free radical scavengers' is important.

Mum is naturally cynical and hates stuff like that, all that fake science, all those soap that are biologically proven to be kinder to your skin and keep you looking younger longer. It's almost impossible to believe she ever completed a beauty course. Mind you, it was a long time ago - in the very early seventies. I'd just started infants school. And mum, finding that she had a few hours free every day, had gone and got a part-time job in the chemists shop.

I can remember her bringing home a mannequins head which she used to practice applying make up to. We were living in a flat then, on the third floor of a four storey block, and the head used to sit on the window sill of the front room, liberally smeared in lipstick and eye-shadow. I used to hate looking at it. But coming home from school I would always force myself to peer up, past miles of concrete and glass, to see that face leering down at me.

Some of the ladies from mum's beauticians course came round to the house once and I remember feeling lost in a forest of thighs, flares and swirling skirts. I remember a lot of smoking and laughing and building a tower of corks that smelled of vinegar, which John knocked down, and some very loud music and mum dancing hand in hand with another women, jerking like a machine out of control, jitterbugging I guess. And when everyone had eventually left the house I remember a lonely silence and mum unwakeable on the bed whilst me and John watched television and pretended to smoke the fag-ends out of a shell-shaped, glass ashtray I've never seen since.

Although mum duly completed her course, I don't think her heart was ever really in the beauty business. Although the chemists where she works now does sell make-up, I think she's much happier dispensing cold sore cures and hand cream. She's more of a functional person. She doesn't like anything too outrageous.

On her beautician's course mum did learn the basic principles of make-up that prevailed in the early nineteen seventies (I can just imagine her studiously copying down five golden rules of glamour from a blackboard). However, whereas others might use them as a guideline or a base for exploring new ideas. For her the rules have an unchallengable authority and permanence. The rules are right, all else is wrong. And if anyone should break them, she takes it as a personal insult. Hence everything in modern magazines seems outrageous to mum. The clothes are too expensive or too bright or too ridiculous for words. 'Who would wear a thing like that?' she says. 'And the make-up, well they don't even understand the basic principles.'

When we were in our late teens, one of her favourite tricks was to thrust a picture of some ravishing eighteen-year-old model into your face and ask what you thought of her make-up.

On this particular evening, just after the giant prawns had finished their battle for the plastic shell (one sitting smugly inside whilst the other floated morosely round the tank pretending it didn't really want to live in it anyway), mum handed us a picture of one of the most ravishingly beautiful young women I've ever seen. The girl was sitting with her legs apart, a tasselled skirt rolled back to reveal all but the very tops of her thighs. She had ample breasts and her nipples poked pertly through a far-too-tight top, whilst a wisp of dark hair hung over hungrily narrowed eyes as she parted her pouting lips with the tip of her tongue.

"Now," mum said, "you're not telling me you find her attractive?"

"I suppose I might," I said, with measured sarcasm.

"I wouldn't say no," said John.

"In your dreams," I said.

"Grow up," said mum.

"I've been thinking," said dad. It's always a bad sign when dad starts a sentence like that. I could see mum bristle, having already been irritated by the lax make-up of the models in her magazine. "I've been thinking, maybe I should teach Peter to drive."

I was silent for a moment, partly because the comment had nothing to do with prawns and/or beauty, partly because I'd never considered the possibility of learning to drive, but mainly because my dad was not exactly the world's best driver himself.

He was the kind of driver who in perfect conditions would dawdle really slowly down a country lane with a string of traffic trailing behind him, and yet in snow, ice and hail would pull out of a blind corner into the path of a speeding juggernaut.

In fact, the only thing that was worse than Dad's driving, was his parking. Once dad brought home an aerial picture of the biscuit factory. You could spot his Renault a mile off, parked at an angle to all the other cars like a bent tooth in a comb. Him offering to give me driving lessons was like a one-legged man offering to help you out with your hurdling technique. However, Dad was undeterred by the silence which had met his suggestion.

"It seems a sensible idea," he said. "At least that way he'll never be out of a job. If the worst comes to the worst. He can always sell hot pies from the back of a van."

"Or biscuits," sniggered John.

"Heaven help us," said mum. She didn't say it nastily though - not with the needle-sharp, dream-bursting spitefulness that accompanied her darker moods.

In fact, mum was relatively happy at that time. My hair had been dyed back to something approaching it's natural colour and John had just got into Bath University to study Maths. Having at least one son who was at University had given her something to boast about at the few social occasions she and dad still got invited to. Hence she wasn't half as bitter and twisted as usual. What's more, she was so busy nagging John to revise all the time, her attention was turned away from me for a while. So much so, she even allowed me to keep my earring.

Actually, since John had got his place at university, both mum and dad seemed to be making an effort to be nicer to me. They were trying to compensate, I guess, for me not being so clever as him. Because, of course, it was obvious that what I too really wanted to do was wear boring jumpers and study mechanics and algebra, and merely played the guitar and dyed my hair stupid colours because I lacked the confidence to pursue my academic dreams. By being different they thought I was avoiding competing directly with John and hence risking failure. It never occurred to them that playing guitars and dressing up was fun. They couldn't understand that writing songs and being doted upon by foolish young girls was perhaps, to me, more attractive, than doing endless equations and being the star of the local amateur astronomy society.

The trouble is when parents look at their sixteen-year-old sons all they see is a two-day-old baby, its destiny all planned. And when the blinkers finally slip away, seeing that look of defiance in their son's eyes is like finding an empty pram outside the newsagents. I only popped in for a paper and when I came out he was gone. They are overcome by self doubt. Where did I go wrong, they wonder? What could I have done differently?

More often than not, parents simply cannot cope with the incongruity between the boy who actually is their son, and the boy they imagined, extrapolated from that two-day-old baby like a line on a graph, as if the development of the individual was defined by one of the equations John was so fond of (2x times y = destiny squared).

Gathered round the cot they murmur things like, "look at his hands, just like his Uncle Bill" (who, of course, was always known as William until the moment his first nephew or niece was born). "I can tell he'll be a rugby player!"

And when they discover the boy prefers painting to rugby, the disappointment is almost unbearable. Uncle Bill's rugby shirt (which has been so carefully preserved in the cupboard to be presented on that sixteen birthday) remains folded among moth balls. Instead the boy wants a set of water-colours. So that's what they give him, tenderly wrapped, together with a card full of professed love, from Uncle Bill and Auntie Sheila. But, as the gift is handed over the eyes scream, traitor, traitor! If you weren't destined to be a wing three-quarter, why did God give you those shovels for hands? And as a huge teenage fist wraps round a slender brush, they imagine wistfully a giant man with baby blue eyes, mud-covered, charging through the opposing forwards like a bowling ball striking out ten skittles.

Of course, what we believe we see is always so much stronger than what we actually see. Therefore, there is no such thing as reality. The world exists merely as we all personally perceive it. At sixteen I was well aware of this fact. However, at the age of forty-something, my parents still seemed totally oblivious to it. Nonetheless, in their own clumsy way, they did occasionally try to be nice to me.

When I turned seventeen, the balance of attention-giving duties seemed to shift away from my mum and onto my dad. I imagine she must have said something during one of their endless late night conversations (muffled rumblings from the bedroom or kitchen). 'Well, I can't do anything with him. See what you can do,' or words to that effect.

Dad did occasionally try to talk to me in a man-to-man, father-to-son kind of way. But it didn't really work out. I would tell him things, but he wouldn't really listen. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in what I did, but he was only ever half there - one half of his brain constantly occupied by biscuits. He would ask me things like, "So, how's the guitar going?" And I would start to explain how me and Tony had just written a new song or how Stewy was going to play base with us. He would nod in almost the right places and murmur, "Oh good...Yes, I see....Tony, great....Oh Stewy, yes good." But as the conversation went on he would drift away. You could almost hear his external senses shut down. The nodding continued, but no longer followed the pattern of our conversation. His murmuring became more rhythmic, like a Buddhist chant dictated by some inner pattern of thought, the crumb texture of crocodile creams looping through his head like a tape echo set on a five second delay, round and round, each rotation marked by a murmur, a nod. The nodding would continue even if you stopped talking, sometimes even if you left the room leaving him stood there murmuring softly to himself, giving the impression that he was a couple of ginger nuts short of a full pack. But he wasn't really mad. Just obsessed with biscuits.

When I was about seven I brought home from school the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Before I had even completed the first chapter, dad had taken the book from me. And he read it from cover to cover in a single evening. Now, whereas anyone else would have considered it as a piece of entertaining and inspired fantasy he read it like it were a recipe book, lying awake at night mulling over Willy Wonka's creations.

"What do you think of the ideas in this book?" he asked.

"It's only a story," I said.

"I know that," he said. "But many of the concepts could quite easily be adapted."

During the following weeks dad came up with all kinds of new ideas for biscuits, all kinds of different shapes and flavours. I've forgotten what most of them were, but one of the ideas I do remember was for traffic stoppers - a cross between gob-stoppers and jammy dodgers. The biscuit consisted of a crisp, shortcake-style base in the shape of three overlapping circles fused together lengthways (the prototype he brought home reminded me of a very short cartoon worm). On each of the different parts of the base were three different traffic light-coloured jam fillings; plum for red, apricot for amber and greengage for green. The biscuit was topped with a piece of shortbread the same shape as the base but with circular holes in each section so that you could see the jams underneath.

The traffic stoppers seemed like quite a good idea, but the sweetness of the apricot filling made the greengage seem rather bitter and the biscuit was very awkward to hold. You always seemed to get your fingers covered in jam, and in the end the idea, like most of the other ideas dad had, was eventually dropped (although some years later, after dad had been given the boot, the biscuit company did bring out a selection of crisp classics with traditional jam fillings - and guess which three flavours they used?)

It was difficult talking to dad about anything other than biscuits. Talk to him about football and he'd tell you about the new high-energy sports biscuit he had designed. Talk about TV and he'd discuss the new cartoon character tie-in he was developing. However, in driving, I think we found ourselves on neutral territory. I wanted to learn to drive. He wanted me to learn to drive. And we could spend an hour together without him once mentioning biscuits or me once mentioning guitars.

It was quite a relief actually not to have to struggle through our normal clumsy attempts at conversation - the discussion in the front seat of the car that summer being confined to clutch peddles and gear levers, traffic lights and T-junctions. I did almost slip up one afternoon, when we were stuck at a red light for ages and to break the silence I almost asked, 'Do you remember those traffic stoppers you made, the biscuits with all the different jams?' But, luckily, before I could say it, the lights changed from red to green (or from plum to greengage if you prefer). 'First gear,' said dad. 'Handbrake off and easy on the clutch.' And we juddered out into the traffic, continuing our discussion of stopping distances and pelican crossings.

That summer, John often complained bitterly that he hadn't been taught how to drive. But as my mum said, he wouldn't need a car at university.

"Yea, John," I said to him. "You just want one of those bikes with a basket on the front."

"Piss off," said John.

"A basket might be useful," said dad, "for putting your notes and files in. When I first met your mother, she used to have a huge one. You could fit anything in it."

"That was the nineteen sixties," said John. "No-one has baskets on their bikes anymore."

"Yes they do," I said. "Trudy down the road's got a pink one with a little bow on the front. Speak to her nicely and she might let you borrow it."

"You're asking for it," said John.

"Just try it," I said.

"Now come on," said dad. "There's no need for that. I think I've got an old saddle bag somewhere. You can have that John."

"There you go," I said. "You can have the saddle bag."

"I haven't even got a bike," said John. "Not since Peter lost it."

"I didn't lose it, it was nicked," I said.

"Anyway," I said. "You can have my bike. I won't be needing it anymore, not once I've taken my driving test."

I passed my test at the second attempt in October (after failing to slow down at cross-roads and not giving sufficient room to parked cars at the end of August). The week after I'd received my license through the post I was round at Tony's place and his uncle dropped by. I told him half-joking that I was looking for a job. He suggested I should go and see a company called Target Group Marketing who were 'looking for a bright young lad to sort out the stock and drive a van.' The company prepared thousands of those leaflets that come through the door with the papers and post in the morning, advertising carpet shampooing services, take away pizzas and cut-price videos. One of Tony's uncle's companies printed some of the brochures that were sent out locally. He gave me a card, Malcolm Mallon, Director, Practical Printing Ltd.

"Drop round in the morning," he said with a wink." Tell them Malcolm sent you. They'll see you're all right."

I never really meant to take the job at Target. However the next morning I had a geography test on volcanoes which I hadn't revised for so I thought going to visit the company would be a good excuse to skive off. Besides which I didn't want to snub Tony's uncle. I knew he'd have rung Target up and told them what a nice reliable young lad I was and that I'd be coming round to see them first thing. It wasn't that Tony's uncle particularly liked me. It was just that because I was Tony's best friend he felt he had a responsibility to me, and if he didn't help me he would somehow be letting down Tony's dead father.

Like many small time crooks, Tony's uncle was in many ways an honourable man. His principles may not quite have matched everyone else's, but he did always stick to them. He enjoyed being in control, sorting things out, fixing people's problems. And he wasn't the kind of person you could let down. If Tony's uncle said I was going to Target on Monday, then I had better go.

I was quite curious about Target, anyway. They didn't have work experience at school and, therefore, I had virtually no experience of what having a job actually involved. Many of my friends had Saturday jobs in shops, and always seemed so grown up and important, confidently counting out change from a cash register. I would have liked to have joined them (suitable vacancies permitting), but mum wouldn't let me. She said I should concentrate on my studies (which generally involved playing my guitar very quietly in my room with a couple of open textbooks on the bed for cover).

In fact, my experience of places of work was limited to my visits to the school secretary's office (with its green filing cabinets, safe for dinner money and typewriter for sending letters home) and a couple of tours round the biscuit factory (with its huge pipes and mixers, a smell of almonds and ladies in hair nets). Target Marketing was therefore like a foreign country to me. I didn't know what to say, who I was going to see or what I should wear even.

In the end I decided to wear my school things for my visit to Target. Partly I wore them to fool mum that I was going straight to school and partly because they were the neatest clothes I had - white shirt, black slacks and polished Doc Martens. In an attempt to look a bit more grown up, I'd borrowed one of my dad's Paisley ties, and hidden it screwed up in a ball in my pocket. I swapped it for my school tie on the bus, studying my reflection in the dust-smeared window to check that the knot was straight. As it was spitting with rain that morning, I'd worn my Harrington jacket, but had taken the button badges off. I don't know quite who I was supposed to be meeting at Target Group Marketing, but I doubted whether it was anyone who was likely to be a fan of either Curtis Cline, CND or the Southern Death Cult!