The following two chapters are extracts from Collecting Faces
Being Seventeen
It was my birthday. My dad folded up a tea towel and told me to hold it over my eyes. It smelt
a bit; that kind of moldy smell when something has gone from wet to dry too many times. He
led me blindfolded up the garden. There, dampened by the rain, stood a white 70s Capri
saloon with brown and cream dog-tooth upholstery and a furry wheel. Dad had made a
paper bow decorated with tiny pictures he’d drawn of me on the open road in black ink and
stuck it on the top.
“Don’t you like it?” he said.
“I hate it!”
“You’re lucky to have a car. When I was your age...”
“I know! You had to walk everywhere with no shoes on. It’s a Kevin car.”
“It’s a car. Don’t be ungrateful.”
I wanted to be seen sat upright smirking at my own good fortune in a red soft-top like Earl’s,
not hanging my head in beetroot shame. The keys hung in the hall and the Capri sat rusting
in the rain at the top of the garden waiting for me to pass my test.
After a spell at an intensive driving school, Earl got his license. The spring months morphed
into summer and we spent days driving out to the flat plains and uninterrupted horizons of
the Norfolk countryside to park in lay-bys and snog to the crackle of the radio because we
had nothing better to do. With no hills to interrupt it, the sky loomed large.
“Pull over here.”
“Where?”
“There on the right, by that gate.”
The car came to a standstill in front of field ablaze with acidic yellow flowers whose tiny
petals craned upwards to drink down stray sunbeams from the vast milk colored clouds.
Earl took the key from the ignition, got out and pulled back the hood. He jumped back in
beside me and lit two cigarettes. We reclined our seats and lay beneath the duvet of the sky.
“There’s a day moon,” pointed Earl
“Where?”
He took my hand and raised my finger to the sky.
“Follow your finger. Just there, where the clouds are thin.”
“The moon’s meant to be out at night.”
“The moon’s always there. You just can’t see it. Only when the sky is dull enough.”
Earl took the cigarette from my hand and stubbed it out in the car ashtray. He lent over and
kissed a trail from my earlobe to my lips. We fumbled awkwardly over the gearstick and
handbrake. I pulled his t-shirt from his jeans and fiddled with his belt buckle. His hand
reached on top of mine. He picked it up and moved it away. Then he sat up and put the radio
on.
“Do you think we’ll still live here on the millennium?” I said.
Earl tapped his hands on the steering wheel.
“If the world doesn’t end.”
“It’s not going to.”
“I don’t know where I’ll be. It’s ages away. I’ve got to get my exams first.”
“How old will we be then?”
“Twenty four.”
“Fuck! Twenty four! That’s old. D’ya reckon we’ll be married?”
Earl looked across at the gate.
“It’s unlocked.”
“So?”
“Stay there.”
He pushed and pulled the rusty gate until it swung open. Then revved his engine and tore
crisscrossing scars across the field. Stalks of bleeding oilseed rape crunched under the
wheels and petals screamed to the ground. He threw back his head, stepped on his pedal as
laughter
ricocheted between our mouths.
“Someone’s coming!” he screamed.
In the adjacent field we saw the top of a tractor glide above the hedgerow.
“Go!”
We spun out through the gate and onto the road. Earl drove us home with the wheel in one
hand and a spliff in the other. We wound down the windows and shouted ‘wanker’ at anyone
with ears as we drove past too fast for them to ever catch us.
I thought being 17 was good. I thought we could rip the roads as speedily as we liked. I
thought Earl and I would live forever; death was the preserve of others. I thought smoking
was good for us. I thought my parents were idiots. I thought the farmers’ field didn’t matter.
It would grow back. I thought it was OK to have parties in other people's houses when they
were away for the weekend. I thought it was no big deal that my friend was sleeping with the
dad of a boy in her class. And his friend. I thought the Beatles weren't the best band in the
world. I thought Guns N' Roses were. I thought spending my taxi money on cider and
walking home late and alone was an ingenious plan. I thought I'd never stop loving Earl. I
thought my bottle-orange hair looked good. I thought I'd pass my driving test first time round.
I put things in my pockets without paying. I thought that was ok. I thought if you only nicked
from chain stores it didn’t matter. I thought I’d never be caught.
That summer, Earl and I stole 25 pairs of Levi jeans and hid them in the attic of his big
house. Shops didn’t have alarms. You just walked in and walked out again. Sometimes there
were security guards. But we were younger than them, we could run faster. We always got
away. We were infinite, invincible, infallible. We thought nothing could ever catch and dock
our wagging teen tails.
Winter came and Earl’s mum went into the attic looking for the Christmas decorations. She
blew her top before leaving a sack of pristine jeans outside the local charity shop. The next
day she called my mum to tell her I’d been bad.
I sat on our pink sofa, my knees curled up under my chin and looked everywhere but in her
eyes.
“Why did you do it? Don’t we give you enough? And what about Earl? He’s got more than
enough”
“It’s not like that,” I mumbled.
“Look at me! This is my fault isn’t it?”
“No.”
Mum paced up and down the room, pausing to straighten the photos on the mantelpiece and
plump cushions on the sofas.
“I shouldn’t have taken the job. I should have stayed home.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that.”
“I’m going to call your father.”
“Do you have to?”
“He needs to know.”
“I don’t want you two arguing about it.”
“We’ll be civil.”
My dad came round and they sat me down in the kitchen and shut all the doors so I couldn’t
escape. They both shook their heads in disappointment and ping-ponged a game of ‘why?’
back and forth across the table. I didn’t know what to say. Earl didn’t need to steal, I think he
just wanted to feel like someone who did. He wanted the danger of getting things a different
way. I didn’t have an excuse. Maybe I was just following him, or maybe my quick fingers had
grown out of a blistering sadness that my parents had fallen out of love and into different
beds.
“It’s all your fault” I screamed, “I hate you!”
At the time I thought my crap car and my parents’ divorce were two monumental
miscarriages of justice that could only be carried out against me. I thought they could never
be surpassed. They were the most unfair things that could ever happen to anyone. I thought
it couldn’t get any worse. But something was about to happened that would dwarf them;
shrink them down to glittering specks on the horizon of my past.
Eels
“It’s me.”
“Will you be ready in ten minutes? I’m about to leave mine.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you got the map?”
“Yes, and directions from my Dad.”
“Tent?”
“All packed. “
Half an hour later the doorbell rang. Earl was stood on the path in a green lumberjack shirt
unbuttoned at the collar and neatly combed hair. He held his car keys in one hand and
flicked the wheel of his silver zippo lighter excitedly in the other.
“Ready?”
We ran to Earl’s car. Every inch of the tiny boot was already stuffed with bags, tents and
beer. We strapped my things on top. The boot wouldn’t close so I ran into the house to fetch
a ball of string and we tied it shut. The car was full of smoke and a tiny cassette recorder
wedged between the two front seats pumped out a crackly medley tape of The Cure and
Lenny Kravitz. In the backseat, three of Earl’s friends were squashed with their knees in
ripped jeans touching their chins. Their greasy hair was cut in curtains , they had big feet on
the end of gorky legs and noses that had grown too large for their faces.
I sat in the front seat with a map of Britain and my Dad’s carefully written directions spread
out on my lap. The flat plains of Norfolk gradually rippled into the rolling hills of the West
Country. No-one seemed to think it was dangerous that Earl was swerving from one
motorway lane to the next whilst passing spliffs back and forth. As his eyelids grew heavier,
we all just laughed louder. We never thought we’d crash, even though a girl we knew had
died turning the corner of a country lane too fast the year before.
The traffic slowed. We joined a queue of crawling vehicles. Green fields peppered with tents
rolled down from the road to the valley below. The sun shone and wisps of cloud swirled
across a deep blue sky. People with nose rings and dreadlocks hung from the wound-down
windows of battered camper vans and converted buses.
We pitched four tents in a semi-circle. One of the gorky curtain-haired boys put a flag on a
stick so we could find our way home in the sea of tents. We stretched an old black sheet
across the semi-circular clearing to create a communal covered area, like a cave leading into
four tent doors. The day before I’d been to the cash and carry with my Dad’s friend and
bought crates of beer, cheap cigarettes and two huge plastic buckets of penny chews in the
shape of little pink shrimps and fried eggs. We all sat under the sheet, out of the sun, and
talked and smoked and drank and ate sweets and listened to the live music pumping in the
distance. Our skin was freckled like toddlers but inside we felt like adults. We’d arrived.
I lay with my head on Earl’s stomach.
“Are you sleeping in my tent?” I whispered, “I’ve got my dad’s double sleeping bag, you can
share it if you like.”
Earl ran his fingers through my hair like he was stroking a cat in his lap. “I’ve already agreed
to share with Richard, he’s got a blow up mattress.”
“Oh.... Ok. “
That was weird. Earl was weird. He wasn’t like other boys. He didn’t seem to want to do the
things that other boys did.
Night fell and we walked though fields of stalls selling falafel in pitta, chips fried in dirty oil, tie
dye t-shirts, wooden pipes, jester hats, plastic batons that light up fluorescent green and pink
when you snap them in half and t-shirts that turn a different colour as you sweat. Blokes
stood in shadows whispered ‘hash for cash?’ as you passed and then shouted ‘something
stronger?’ if you didn’t stop.
We found a tent playing rave. I stood on a wooden crate by a speaker that throbbed so loud
you could almost see the air shake. I did a big fish, little fish dance in my white t-shirt and
denim cut-off shorts. Threads of frayed cotton hung down and brushed around my brown
thighs. A man with a hairless concave chest and a celtic band tattooed around his skinny
arm, poured a bottle of water over his face then mopped it with his scrunched up t-shirt. He
stuffed half of his wet t-shirt into his back pocket, the other half hung down like a tail. He
started to dance again. His mouth pouted like he was blowing a candle out across the room.
His feet stomped as he ran on the spot. His hands drew wave shapes in front of his face and
his dripping t-shirt tail flicked up and down behind him. His hair hung in brown rat tails
around his boney shoulders. His cheeks where hollow, he smiled at the air above his head
as his eyes rolled back.
I turned to talk to Earl. He wasn’t there. I looked for the curtain-cut boys. They were gone
too. Strobe lights started. Everything fragmented. The flashing grew faster. Everyone danced
a stuttered dance. It hurt my eyes. I left the tent and jostled through the crowd that were
bottle necking through a cattle grid into the next field.
The field was full of wigwams and the air thick with petiole oil. Dream catchers and wind
chimes hung from guy ropes. I bought a beer from a man selling cans out of a bucket of ice.
I sat on the grass and crossed my legs. I took off my red baseball boots to shake a stone out
from the toe. The cloudless night was starting to chill. I pulled my t-shirt down over my knees
and look up at the clear sky thrown with stars. Next to me, some people had dug a circular
pit the size of a paddling pool in the ground and filled it with water to create a giant bowl of
earthy soup. They’d taken their clothes off, climbed in and were slidding over one another
like muddy eels. At first they were recognisable as people with different faces, but as the
mud caked into the folds of their skin and the shells of their ears they all looked the same.
Like brown plastercine morph men and women they contorted from individuals into one. The
only clean bits were the whites of their eyes, shining like glass moons in a dark sky. Their
limbs interlaced, tangled and slipped as they rolled and morphed from many into one multilimbed creature basking in the bog. I took a sip from my beer. I didn’t really like beer but I
drank it anyway because that was what you were meant to do at festivals. Giggles and
whoops emanated from the pit. The eel men grew hard as they writhed over homogenous
muddy flesh. My jaw was slack and my watching eyes grew wide. Someone nearby was
playing the bongos naked. As the beat grew faster the mud eels wriggled harder. Then one
looked at me with his moon eyes and stopped wriggling. His muddy lips broke into a shining
white smile. He stood up and beckoned me with a dripping finger.
“Come in!” he called.
“No thanks.”
“C’mon, throw off the shackles of convention,”
“No thanks.”
The morph man rose from the swamp. His dick stood away from his body. His wet limbs
reflected the flicker of candles around the field. I tensed. He was coming my way. I pulled on
my boots to go. He scooped a t-shirt from a pile of clothes on grass and used it to wipe the
mud mask from his face. He walked towards me smiling.
It was Earl.
© Rebecca Atkinson