seven

After dad lost his job, our meal times were never the same. My mum never dared mention anything to do with money, my dad hardly talked at all, let alone about biscuits, and the food was appalling. In fact the only relics that remained from our former dinner times were the scowls that me and John exchanged over our egg and chips or beans on toast.

I felt sorry for my mum. She hated her job at the chemists shop (considering herself to be above handling haemorrhoid cream, cheap lipstick and condoms). She would arrive home exhausted each night to a kitchen full of steam and grease, me and my brother and charred frying pans. And discover dad in the garden shed, out of his skull on Guinness, or worse than that, lolling on a stool in her beloved kitchen spewing out slurred instructions on how to make a cheese omelette.

No wonder she lost her temper so often, their shouting and banging filling the darkened bedroom night after night. Me and John would lie there shivering because the central heating had been turned off, and try to laugh at our parents' absurd and predictable arguments. She blamed my dad for losing his job and for the trouble I got into at school, for piss on the toilet seat and broken teeth on her comb, for cat-sick on the carpet and all that anger wasted on everything out of reach. Sometimes, as I lay there in bed, the night filled with shouts and accusations, their anger and frustration would flood into me and I would swear to the wall that if only I had a machine gun that moment I would gladly shut them up for good. But I hated it more when, at two or three in the mornings, the shouting actually did stop and mum and dad withdrew to their separate retreats - dad to his decrepit duvet and pillow in the shed and mum downstairs to the kitchen - leaving me and my brother to lie in terrible silence.

Once I crept downstairs through that silence to discover mum sat in the kitchen, her sobs soundlessly falling in treacle-black darkness like lumps of unkneaded bread dough, her hands limp in her lap. I tip-toed across the room to cast a tentative arm across the tremble of her shoulders. But, half-an-hour later when her sobs showed no signs of stopping or her hands of moving I left her with a goodnight kiss and a promise that, in future, we would cook and clean like never before, then trudged upstairs to dampen the sheet beneath the pillow with silent tears for her and for dad who had not talked about biscuits for a year and had no more money left for Guinness.

Occasionally, I would stay the night at Tony's house. And I used to envy the serenity that reigned there, the calmness of his mother, and imagined with adolescent naivety how much happier my own mother would be if she too were living alone. I didn't know then that Tony's mum's apparent calmness was due to a thrice-daily cocktail of tranquillisers she'd taken ever since one windless Wednesday afternoon in October 1976 when she'd attempted to quell her loneliness by slitting her throat with a bread knife in the bath. You would never have guessed. She seemed so content always with her comfortable polo-necks and distant smiles.

Around that time, Tony's uncle (the one who ran the security firm and played golf with the headmaster) had given him a cheap electric guitar. It was a second-hand Satellite Stratocaster copy, and his mum used to let us play it through her hi-fi system. When I told Dad about Tony's Stratocaster he loaned me £35 to buy a spruce-top steel-strung acoustic guitar we saw one Saturday morning in the window of a junk shop in town (Dad was still in the first flush of redundancy then, when the five grand in the bank seemed a fortune and he truly believed he would soon be reinstated at the cutting-edge of biscuit design).

When I stayed over at Tony's, I used to take my guitar along. We would take it in turns to strum it or play lead on the Stratocaster through the hi-fi. The hi-fi didn't like having the electric guitar plugged into it, and with the bass and treble controls turned full on we were able to coax out some serious feedback and distortion. Since the fiasco of that assembly, when that nutter Slater had trashed the drums, we had been banned from ever rehearsing at school again. But me and Tony didn't care. We both agreed that anything to do with school was shit.

We decided to stop having our hair cut and start playing acoustic. We wore flowery shirts and cheap sunglasses with round black rims and coloured lenses (Tony's blue and mine crimson). We even stole some of Tony's mum's ethnic beads to wear, whilst we sat cross-legged on the floor and strummed our way through the Floyd and Hendrix songbooks and other mellow sounds we'd composed ourselves.

Well, our hair grew longer and our songs stranger. Then one lunchtime at school I saw an ad up on the music room notice-board: For Sale, Electric Guitar, reasonable condition, £40. I sold the acoustic to a lad called Jonathan who was in my Technical Drawing group, and begged another ten quid off my dad (about half of what he had left in the building society at the time, although I did not know it then). The day I bought that electric guitar was one of the most exciting days of my life. It was second only to the day Sandra Burgess had led me into the woods up by Eastlake Hill on the way home from youth club. However this part of the story's not about that, it's about my first electric guitar.

It was a Les Paul copy, manufactured somewhere east of India. It's body had been stripped of the original finish and sprayed with matt black car paint. The paint had soaked into the wood and it was so heavy that if I played standing up for any length of time I had to hold the guitar tight in to my waist and support its lower edge on the buckle of my belt (an imitation bronze skull and cross bones inscribed with the words 'death or glory').

All that remained of the guitar's scratch plate were empty screw holes. The tone control knob was missing and the volume control seemed to be permanently stuck fully on. The original pick-ups had been removed and replaced with a single, black humbucker. The action was set so low that if you attempted to play any note above the fourteenth fret the string buzzed like an angry wasp or just went click against the pick-up like a death-watch beetle larva.

Basically, that first electric guitar I had was not fit for firewood, but the happiness of knowing it was both electric and mine, blinded me to its many faults. I have owned some great guitars since then. But none has filled me with such excitement as that cranky black Les Paul copy did. I thought it was fantastic.

Shortly after I had got my guitar, Tony and I decided to club together and buy a proper amp. We each had fifty pounds. Tony's fifty was winnings from a trip to the dog track with his Uncle, who'd given him a tenner to put on a bitch called Deadly Desire, who'd come in first at six to one. My fifty had been accumulated at a somewhat slower rate in a post office savings account - a fiver a Christmas to be precise - courtesy of my aunt (dad's sister) who had no children of her own, just a poodle named Patrick.

I knew that I wasn't really supposed to touch the money in my post office account. Each year I would ask if I could break into my savings, and each year I was told, 'save the money for when you're older, then you can buy something you really want.' That year, I unilaterally decided that fourteen was old enough and what I really wanted was an amp.

As the lady in the post office counted out my cash, slipped it into my blue plastic post office book and slid it to me through the gap beneath the security window, I could not help but think for a moment of my aunt's disappointment and mum's fury when they discovered what I had done.

As soon as I got outside the post office I took the money from the blue book, shoved it into the pocket of my jeans and started running as if I had just stolen it. I ran until I reached the park, where I buried the blue book deep in a litter bin full of sweet wrappers, coke cans and newspaper.

As I walked away through the park, I couldn't stop thinking of my mum's face all angry and my aunt all sad. I tried to push the faces from my mind. Auntie Joan would only be upset, I told myself, because she couldn't have any kids of her own, and that was hardly my fault. And mum always shouted at me anyway for things that that didn't particularly matter. So why not give her something to really get angry about? Not that she'd have any right to get angry, because after all, it was my bloody money!

When I got home I hid my bloody money inside my pillow case. I hardly slept a wink all night, knowing it was there. On the way to school the next morning I went back for the blue post office book. But the bin in the park had been emptied.

On the Friday night, before the Saturday that we bought the amp, I stayed over at Tony's. That evening we pooled our money in a kind of midnight ritual, alternately placing ten pound notes one on top of the other until we had one hundred pounds in a pile. Tony put the money into the wallet that used to belong to his dad (who'd had it in his pocket when he'd died). Tony was reluctant to let anyone else touch the wallet, as if alien fingers might sully the purity of his dad's memory. But that day he let me look in the wallet to check that the hundred pounds was safely in there.

Inside, I discovered an expired Visa card and his dad's old membership card for the rugby club. It had a photo of him on the front and a small blood stain in one corner on the back. I'm not sure whether the stain was a result of some injury Tony's dad had sustained in the scrum or whether it had seeped there after his bike had been hit by that lorry, but either way I thought the whole thing was pretty morbid. I hurriedly gave the wallet back to Tony without a word; just a nod and a sad smile. Then we shook hands and both agreed to tell our mums that the amp belonged to the other of us, so neither of them would know we had dipped into our savings to buy it.

We lay in torch light, eating Mars bars and drinking coke, forming with fingers the shapes of rabbits, alligators and crude protrusions in shadows on the wall, and argued about which amp we were going to buy. Me and Tony rarely have massive arguments. I mean, we've never come to blows or not spoken to each other for days or anything like that. But, having said that, we never seem to see eye-to-eye on anything. And I remember, we argued for hours about that amp.

There were two amps within our price range in the local music store, Andy's Music. One was a very old hundred watt valve amp with a separate speaker. The amp itself was bright orange with four input channels, a lot of beer glass stains on top, and more buttons and knobs than the control panel of a space shuttle. The speaker cabinet was a huge four by twelve affair, about the size and weight of a small van.

Our other option was a brand new transistor amp. It was only 30 Watts, but came with a free-foot switch and a years guarantee. I wanted the big amp and Tony wanted the new one.

"Quality is more important than power," said Tony, raising himself up on his elbows in bed.

"Of course it is," I agreed, looking up at him from the floor, where I lay on my back in a sleeping bag. "I never said it weren't. But we need something with a bit of power for playing live. Thirty watts ain't enough."

Tony looked doubtful.

"A hundred watts is a lot," he said. "The hi-fi's ten watts and that's pretty loud. Imagine something ten times louder than that!"

"It don't work like that," I said. "It wouldn't be ten times as loud."

"Why not?" asked Tony.

"Coz sound is measured in decibels," I said.

"Yea I know that," said Tony. "And that big amp would be about a thousand decibels."

"No it wouldn't," I said. "Decibels don't work like that."

"How come?" said Tony.

"How should I know," I said. "I didn't bloody invent them"

"I still reckon it'd be too loud," said Tony.

"The louder the better," I said, sitting up to windmill my arm across the strings of an imaginary guitar.

Tony smiled, but still looked uncertain.

"Quality's more important than power," he said. "And the other amp's guaranteed."

"Yea," I said, "guaranteed not to be loud enough."

We stayed up most of the night, arguing and recounting the money in the wallet and talking about all kinds of things; the state of Barry Slater's mind and Sandra Burgess's fanny.

"Hey, what does Sandra Burgess put behind her ears to attract men?" said Tony.

"Her ankles," I said, giggling. "What's the difference between Sandra Burgess and a cream egg?"

"It costs twenty pence to suck out a cream egg," screamed Tony.

We killed ourselves laughing at that one.

We'd both heard the joke many times before. But we were so excited about the hundred pounds, and the amp and the secrecy of it all, that everything seemed much funnier than it really was. We told a few more Sandra Burgess jokes, then I dropped a really loud fart and we laughed until our ribs ached and our faces went the colour of Victoria plums.

When we had calmed down, we talked about what car we would get if we could have any car in the world. Tony said he'd get a Range Rover like his uncle's. I said I'd settle for a Corvette Stingray. We imagined how great it would be to be in a world famous rock band and be able to walk into a posh garage with really long hair and scruffy clothes and buy a car like that for cash.

Then we got onto more philosophical matters like the way grown ups completely screwed up their lives, but still told you what to do all the time (so as you'd be happy and successful when you grew up just like them). Me and Tony agreed that we definitely didn't want to turn out the same as any of the grown ups we knew (except, perhaps, Mr Mammoth). However, we still couldn't agree on which amp to buy.