six

Music shops are like a magnet to me. I can never walk past one without stopping to gaze through the window at the rows of guitars and brightly coloured effects pedals - those enticing electronic rainbows of flangers, overdrives and delays. More often than not I cannot resist the temptation to step inside for a quick look round. Just five minutes, I tell myself, just to see if there's anything interesting inside; a vintage Rickenbacker perhaps or maybe a Paisley patterned Strat.

An hour later I'll still be there playing the hell out of some fluorescent-pink, flying-V copy through an UltraMetal distortion pedal, with no intention of purchasing either. Finally I will return the guitar to the patiently smiling shop assistant, making some excuse about the balance of the body or the finish of the frets. Then, feeling that I owe the shop something, I will buy a Jim Dunlop plectrum, medium strength, elephant grey.

I have a rusty, dented Holborn tobacco tin at home that some forgotten relative gave me when I was small. In it I have more than a hundred plectrums, all different shapes and colours; soft marble-patterned nylon, electric blue bakelite with serrated edges, hand-carved walnut even.

Those plectrums are a bit like a collection of musical bus tickets. Plastic ephemera reminding me of journeys I have taken with my guitar. I only have to clasp a certain plectrum between thumb and forefinger and start strumming and I instantly remember exactly when and in which shop I bought it.

Then as I'm playing with that particular plectrum, something strange happens. The plectrum becomes a key. It's as if the colour of that seemingly insignificant plastic triangle, the texture of it pressing into the ridges of my thumb, opens a door to long-forgotten songs, solo riffs and chord sequences, and without thinking I can play perfectly a tune I haven't played for years.

And once that door is open I wander through and my thoughts drift back to the circumstances of my life around the moment that particular melody was learned. Some plectrums I avoid. They remain buried at the bottom of that old tobacco tin, untouched. For there are always certain moments in your past you would rather not dwell upon (although some of those moments, I will have to touch upon later).

My favourite plectrum is one of the first ones I ever bought. It is a large black Gibson one. It's soft enough to strum with but hard enough to pick out a solo run or two on my trusted old acoustic guitar. Because the plectrum is so large, it's easy to grip. It keeps my fingers fresh and it lets me play in comfort for hours. Also, that plectrum reminds me of the countless Saturday afternoons me and the Kid (or plain old Tony Mallon as he still was then) spent hanging round the town in general and the music shop in particular.

It was not until around the time that I first met Tony, that my mum allowed me to wander round town by myself. At that time we lived on an estate about a mile and a half from the town centre. Every Saturday morning we used to drive into town in the Cortina to get the weekly shopping from Sainsbury's, my mum and dad arguing in the front and me and my brother, in grubby T-shirts and vicious moods, fighting in the back. We both loathed shopping and would rather have been at home watching cartoons on TV or playing football in the back garden, but my mum insisted that we all went shopping together. Partly this was because she was worried what havoc we would wreak in the house when she was out. Also, I think, she had this vision of us being the perfect family. She saw herself as being the captain of some harmonious shopping teams. In her dreams I think she probably pictured me and my brother as two golden haired angels, both careful and tidy, floating up and down the aisles, filled with family pride and shopping know-how. She wanted us to learn everything there was to know about the ripeness of vegetables, and the value-for-money of various products, and the perfect route to take our trolley though the supermarket so that the hard groceries would be placed in a layer on the trolley's wire base and the softer fruits and fragile foodstuffs carefully arranged on top.

Secretly, I think mum would have been happier with two girls. Me and my brother were useless shoppers, though not for want of trying. We would scuttle back and forth between the bakery department and the freezer and chilled food cabinets like soldier ants as my mother slowly sauntered down the supermarket aisles like a queen with the trolley. Wearing one of her garish brooches, a folded silk scarf draped over her shoulders and a wide hair band, decorous as any crown, mum would stroll through Sainsbury's as if she were merely visiting out of gracious curiosity rather than because of any fundamental requirement for nutrition.

My mum was a terribly picky shopper. No matter how hard we tried, it seemed we could never satisfy her. We always got the wrong type of cheddar, the Irish mild instead of English medium mature, or the wrong size packet of cornflakes, or bacon rashers with too much fat on, or apples that were too expensive.

We would bruise the bananas by flinging them into the trolley and drop family size tins of baked beans on top of the eggs so that all the shells were cracked, or burst bags of granary bread flour or pots of black cherry yoghurt on the conveyor belt at the checkout. Then my mum would start shouting at my dad, and me and my brother would edge a short distance away to pretend we were the kids of the quietly smiling couple at the next checkout. No, we were not the happy, enthusiastic shopping team my mum wished us to be.

My dad was no help at all when it came to shopping. He would wander absent-mindedly through Sainsbury's, the floppy collar of a checked shirt hanging limply over the frayed neck of his favourite blue jumper, all loose threads and leather elbow patches. With the jumper he invariably wore a pair of corduroy trousers, beige and baggy. Those trousers sagged so low beneath his ample waist it appeared as if at any moment they might fall about his ankles.

Dad was quite a tall man but, because of his crouched stance, appeared to be shorter than he really was. He had this habit of leaning forward as he wandered along in his Hush Puppies with his head lowered and held to one side, his eyes fixed at a constant focus on his surroundings but his thoughts elsewhere, like a camera without film. He looked as if he were constantly searching for clues to help him answer the questions that so occupied his mind, or else straining to hear the voice of some invisible whispering dwarf by his side.

My mum had longsince given up any hope of making dad a useful member of her family shopping team. Each week he would take it upon himself to collect a bottle of cherryade, four cans of Guinness (to drink whilst watching Grandstand), a packet of dry-roasted peanuts, a tube of Colgate minty blue gel toothpaste and the cat food for Carlos our black cat. Then he would head straight for the biscuit section.

Dad used to work for this massive biscuit manufacturer. I'm not absolutely sure quite what his job title was but his work appeared to revolve around finding out what kind of new biscuits people might like to eat and then developing them. My dad was something of a biscuit expert. In fact, biscuits were his life. They were all he knew and all he wanted to know. And he couldn't help sharing his knowledge with everyone else who happened to be shopping of a Saturday morning.

Dad would stop old grannies in the aisle and tell them about the machine that put the icing on the biscuits they were buying. He would help young toddlers choose the chocolate biscuit with the thickest filling and advise their parents on the particular flavour of ginger nuts they might prefer.

Some shoppers presumed that he was employed by Sainsbury's as some kind of biscuit adviser and patiently listened to what he had to say and, I'm sure, certain of them even found his biscuit chitter-chatter quite entertaining. There were, of course, others who did not want to know about biscuits. Mostly they would politely ignore him as one ignores a madman singing to himself on a crowded street. However, he did run into one or two problems after he became clinically obsessed with Crocodile Crunch Creams.

Crocodile Crunch Creams (or Crocs as we affectionately referred to them) were the finest biscuits dad had ever designed, and won him the coveted 1980 golden digestive medallion for original British biscuit design. In each packet of Crocs were two whole biscuit crocodiles, the body's of which consisted of five, individual lemon-cream biscuits, each a different shape; representing the crocodile's head, front legs, belly, back legs and tail. At first, dad would linger by the biscuit section, and whenever someone purchased a packet of Crocs he would simply rub his palms together and smile and delightedly murmur wise choice, wise choice. After a while he could not help himself but tell each person who bought a pack of Crocs that it was he who had designed them.

A few shoppers were genuinely impressed with his design and quite interested to hear how he had dreamed up the Crocs concept one evening whilst eating a bowl of lemon sorbet and watching a Tarzan movie on TV. But then one Saturday morning my father started an argument with a man who said he preferred crispy coconut rings and told him he could stuff his Crocodile Lemon Creams where the sun don't shine.

My dad was not normally a violent person. However, he was under some strain at work at the time and hit the man in the face with a twin pack of Garibaldis. He was fined two hundred pounds plus costs and was banned from every supermarket in town and every Sainsbury's store in the country, much to my mum's dismay.

After that mum went shopping by herself at the new hypermarket about ten miles away. It had a much bigger car park and was slightly cheaper than Sainsbury's, but mum always complained about the quality of the vegetables and make personal comments about the appearance of the girls on the check out.

Before mum got home, she used to transfer all the shopping she had bought from the new hypermarket into Sainsbury's bags, pretending to herself as she unloaded them from the boot of the Cortina that the neighbours didn't know she had been banned from shopping there. My dad didn't care. He stayed at home with me and my brother and told us all about his marketing strategy for a new type of chocolate-coated shortbread or some such thing that he was working on.

My dad was always bringing home new kinds of biscuits for us to try. Not just one or two packets, but sackfuls of them. I'm sure that's what used to give me my terrible spots. Then, in the early nineteen eighties my dad was made redundant. The biscuit factory closed down its biscuits development section and rode out the recession on old favourites such as custard creams and digestives.

When dad lost his job, my mum went to work in a chemists store in town. She often had to work Saturdays which meant my dad was forced to go and do the weekly shopping. And me and my brother always went with him to make sure he didn't get into any more biscuit-related breaches of the peace.

Because of his conviction for assault, Dad had found it very hard to find another job, and, as a result, had become very depressed. Just keep him away from the biscuits, mum used to say to us, whatever you do don't let him near the biscuits. Dad pretended he wasn't interested in them anymore anyway. He would walk down the hypermarket's biscuit aisle with his head held low, not venturing so much as a look at them, his Hush Puppies sulkily dragging after the shopping trolley. Occasionally, some new type of biscuit would appear among the rows of chocolate chips and ginger nuts and dad would be unable to prevent himself picking up a packet and casting his professional eye over it. His eyes would fill with excitement for a moment then flare with anger as if a match had been struck behind each iris. But soon the brightness would die to cold, black nothingness, his shoulders drooping, like those of a dropped centre forward who is forced to watches his team mates score as he sits track-suited on the substitutes bench.

I'll never forget his face that first December after he had been made redundant when, among the Christmas biscuit selection boxes and Belgian all butter assortments, he discovered a strawberry flavour Santa Claus cream based on his own Croc design. His whole face trembled as if he were about to burst into tears. But he just got up and walked stiffly away, teeth clenched and eyes narrowed.

That evening he lay curled up in a ball on an armchair in the living room, a four pack of Guinness by his feet, a crumpled up letter from the bank manager in one hand, his golden digestive medallion, clutched in the other, and his eyes filled with all the sadness of small boy for whom that year Christmas had been cancelled.

My dad's unemployment had its good points and its bad points. The bad points were that my mum's wages from the chemist's shop barely covered the mortgage on the house, and my dad spent most of his time in the shed at the bottom of the garden, rapidly pissing away his redundancy pay-off. As a consequence there wasn't much money coming into the house and my mum and dad shouted at each other louder and more often than ever before. I had to wear all my brother's highly unfashionable cast-off clothes and the bathroom always stunk of Guinness. Perhaps the worst thing however was my dad's cooking, or rather me and my brother's cooking.

Before my mum started working she spent every afternoon in the kitchen. Previously, when me and my brother arrived home from school, which was about twenty minutes walk away, we were always greeted at the garden gate by some wonderful aroma pouring out through the ventilator fan that was set into the kitchen window. My mum, who relished the sophistication of foreign food, experimented with a great variety of herbs and nuts and spices in her cooking. To walk down the side of the house was to step into a fragrant mist that invaded your nostrils and made your mouth not only water wildly but actually gulp at the air as if it were edible.

In our small back garden stood two silver birch trees that me and my brother and our mates used as goal posts when my mum was out. The trees bent towards the back of the house. This was no doubt in reality due to the way that wind and sunlight and me and my brother and our mates fell upon them. However the trees' uppermost branches seemed to me like hungry hands reaching toward the kitchen as if to clasp the rich vapours rising out.

As I opened the backdoor my mum would be stood there, her brown hair fixed in a bun on top of her head, the sleeves of a bright pink or turquoise jumper rolled up over scrawny white arms, her long plastic apron strings dangling over her bony bottom, stretching the fabric of a dark pair of cotton trousers or pleated skirt as she bent over the cooker to stir a mushroom sauce, test the firmness of some purple sprouting broccoli spears or toss a few cashew nuts into a pan of basmati rice. She would seldom turn round when I came in and we would never say hello to each other in the conventional way.

"What's that?" I'd ask, peering into her frying pan.

"Where have you been?" she'd reply.

"Tony's house," I'd say.

"Doesn't his mother mind you being there all the time?" she'd ask.

"No, she likes me there," I'd assure her.

"What makes you think that," she'd say, her voice edged with sarcasm.

"She said so," I'd say.

"Oh," mum'd say.

For a moment, she'd fiddle with the cooker or stir the contents of a pan, then snap, "Have you done your homework?"

"Some of it," I'd say.

"Well feed Carlos and get on with it then. Your father will be home soon and he'll want to use the table."

"It's all right. I'll do it upstairs in the bedroom."

"You can't do it properly up there and you'll disturb John's revision."

"OK, I'll do it tomorrow morning then."

She'd turn round and wipe her hands on the front of her apron and look me up and down. Then she'd shake her head and tut her tongue against her yellow teeth and glare at me with sharp blue eyes.

"You'll do it before tea," she'd say.

"What is it?" I'd say peering into a frying pan of unrecognisable vegetables and rice on the gas cooker.

"Cat, homework," my mum would say tapping her nose and putting a lid on the pan. "Otherwise you won't be getting any."

Holding my breath I'd open a tin of stinking rabbit or tuna flavoured cat food for Carlos, go upstairs, get changed into jeans and a jumper, then come back down and sit at the dining room table. I'd surround the arrangement of dried flowers that stood in a yellow vase on the table with studious looking piles of books and pens, and scribble a few lines of angst ridden song lyrics in my maths homework book. After a few minutes mum would poke her head through the serving hatch in the wall between the kitchen and dining room, stretching her sinewy neck like a curious chicken.

"Have you done your homework?" she'd ask.

"Just finished mum," I'd say, showing her a page of elaborate calculations I had copied from Tony the day before.

"Very good," she'd say forcing a smile. "Now clear your things away, your father will be home soon."

And indeed, later (after I had had a fight with my brother in the bedroom) my dad would arrive home from work. We would sit down to a delicious meal through which mum would complain about the price of cashew nuts and rubber gloves, dad would explain the subtle difference between a bourbon biscuit and an ordinary chocolate cream, whilst me and John stuffed our faces with risotto and scowled at each other across the table.