Class of 74

Char was new, she’d washed up on the wrong side of the canyon. She’d been told to shorten her name to Char. ‘Like the lord of Iran,’ she had said to the oily man in the Centre. He had stared at her impassively and sent her off with a slip entitling her to a room in number 72. No cars lined the street; it was isolated, furtively squirrelled away from robust civilisation. Overhead cables chopped the sky into polygons, some with laced trainers silhouetted against the grey. The terraces either side flaked, crusted, shed tiles like dead skin, stumbled forwards on degrading foundations and fluttered little white handkerchiefs, or net curtains, out of open windows.

Tiff was not new, she’d lived here all her life. She was a local wonder, a human citizen’s advice bureau. The deckchair oracle, reclining now in her low-walled front yard, drinking from a white mug with the word TWAT on the underside, visible when she lifted it to her lips. Char came upon her, next door to number 72. On the other side, in one of the only front yards with a gate and intact wall, a dog was barking irately.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said the woman named Tiff. ‘You’re moving in.’ She nodded at Char’s holdall. She made statements, not questions.

‘Yes. I just moved to this area.’

‘You mean you were moved here.’

Char didn’t comment on that. ‘The landlord said he’d meet me here.’ Tiff laughed bulbously, and set her cup down on the concrete.

‘We better get you a seat. Name’s Tiff.’ As in, have a … Char thought instantly.

Tiff opened the door to her house and vanished inside. Char could see neat piles of sealed cardboard boxes, all labelled in marker, lining the narrow hallway. The labels said things like ‘dresser’, ‘desk’, ‘linen piles’ and such like, although they were clearly too small for these things. Char waited outside, studied the pair of rusting beer cans in the gutter, imitating Sarah Lucas’s penis. She pushed away the thought that no-one would find that funny around here. Tiff might’ve, if Char had bothered to point it out.

Tiff had some hope at one time in her life. She was with Lexi, who was in a band called Corgi’s Revenge, and who was still in school. Tiff wasn’t musical, but she became the de facto band manager after booking a decently attended show at the Nag’s Head. She thought Lexi was a free spirit and a glorious rebel of wild taste and glittering scorn for convention. She played Tiff music by Suicide and the 13^th Floor Elevators while she smoked butt ends in her room. Tiff was in awe; she’d never heard anything so original. She had that heart-bursting teenage hopefulness for the future that eclipsed her standard-issue teenage melancholy.

At seventeen, Lexi applied for university. Tiff did not, could not, and that was the end of that. It wasn’t that neither of them wanted to be friends, or lovers, anymore, but a combination of shame, pride, and sheer inconvenience made them peel off into different, unequal, directions. Last Tiff heard, Lexi was working as an area manager for some food retailer or other.

Tiff’s job, like everyone else on the street, was getting paid. There was an unspoken agreement: the Centre would pay, just a few questions asked to keep the file hanging together. A narrative of misery kept the wolves from the kerb, the bailiffs from the gate. The people took the remuneration, did their bit for keeping inflation rates down. Not one person could explain why this was necessary; it was as though stating this fact was an explanation in itself, rather than just a description of the state of things. The progress from Victorian moral ideals was non-existent; perhaps that’s always true. The pay was predictably poor, unless you had a chronic illness. It wasn’t worth making that happen, for Tiff, so she had her bit on the side. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, indeed. She had seen it all, heard it all; she was the curator of a museum to human angst. People came to her wailing with all the sickness of their souls. The tales she heard, all coming out over a tiny cup of kindness.

On the deckchairs, Char and Tiff watched the approach of a young man wearing an unwashed sweater. It said University of Life – School of Hard Knocks on the front in cracked applique.

‘Morning Tiff-wah,’ he said. ‘Who’s your mate?’

‘Char.’

‘Hi,’ Char said.

‘What’s happening Lynyrd.’

He was called Lynyrd because he had a skinhead.

‘Ah, just come for some room fillers from you, Tiff. Desk, shelves, lots of books, stuff like that. Gaana make me a study.’

‘Right you are. Sure you have plenty to do in there.’ He smiled at the joke. ‘Special offer today Lyn, since we have a new friend here. Nine bob for a three-day loan, enough inflatables to fill your spare bedroom.’

Tiff hoisted herself from her deckchair and went into her hallway. She gathered boxes, selecting from different piles.

‘When’s inspection,’ she asked Lynyrd.

‘Prob tomorrow, maybe day after, so our lad in the Centre said.’ He took the boxes, set them on the low wall and handed Tiff a pile of coins. ‘He wasn’t certain, so I’ll set up today.’

‘See you later then.’

‘Bye Char,’ Lynyrd winked over his shoulder as he sauntered away.

‘Here, it’s a full time job, getting paid,’ mused Tiff.

A kind of rising boil sent bubbles up through Char’s consciousness, bursting with realisation at the surface. She was the kind of person who was often told she read too many books, or else watched too many documentaries. She took the ideas, distilled them into soundbites, and impressed her friends. You needed a different kind of intelligence here, she realised. Char, a stealthy anthropologist by circumstance, did not fit in. She was a set dresser, for God’s sake! The job had gone with the theatre. She would get paid for three months, no questions, and her house was paid for too. Next, she’d been told, she would need a doctor’s note. Accreditation of her worthlessness: the more useless you were, the more you got paid. Char needed therefore to foster a disability – bad hand (wandering hand?), perhaps chronic stress, or buy into the school of thought that said the more embarrassing the better, since the exams were more perfunctory. She could go for psoriasis: it was easy to fake, if you didn’t mind rolling around in the nettle bed in the rec.

Tiff supped at her cup, pointing the word TWAT at the world. Clara had bought her this mug, knowing Tiff’s sense of humour. Clara, in fact, was next to join the two women in the crummy front yard. Tattoos of angels and cherubim honoured her arms. A dolphin leapt up behind her ear.

‘Lyn’s been by,’ said Tiff. ‘Bedroom inspection coming up.’

‘Sure. I got paid today Tiff! Only a two hour queue at the Centre.’

‘Did you. What about little Daniel’s…’ she paused and glanced at Char. ‘You know.’

‘Oh, some make-up on his eye was fine. No questions. Green was really sorry about that.’

Green was named green for his tendency to throw up on nights out, or heavy nights in.

‘Won’t be the last time,’ the oracle spoke. Char tried to take it in her stride.

‘Maybe. Anyway, here’s what I owe you.’ Clara did not speak to Char. ‘Are you out here for the funeral?’ she asked Tiff.

Tiff sighed. I suppose, she said.

Clara took a seat on the wall. Gradually, people up and down the terraces came out of their houses and stood in their yards, or sat on walls or the dusty kerb.

Presently a man with long sideburns and a ten-gallon hat came slowly along the street. He was leading a procession. Next there were some children in boots, ponchos and the like. Country music played from a portable stereo carried by a crying woman in a waistcoat and a string tie. The hearse crunched slowly behind. Instead of flowers around the casket, there were spaghetti western accoutrements: saddles, lassos, some animal skulls and more ten-gallon hats.

‘Len loved the wild west,’ explained Clara. ‘Shame he never made it over there. Charles Bronson was his favourite.’

Char was struck by the effort for the costumes, the procession, contrasting baldly with the pride over homes.

‘He really didn’t deserve this.’ Clara continued. ‘He died too young.’

This made Char talk, properly, for the first time since arriving.

‘You are saying that because you think you should. People always say that people don’t deserve death, but we all deserve it just by being born. You haven’t a cat’s chance in hell of not meeting it, and it doesn’t matter if you are good or bad or just normal. Your … Green, or whatever he’s really called, may be a child beater, but it doesn’t mean he deserves death more than the rest of us. It’s a cult, we all buy into it, that each of us are special individuals. We are not. We just are not. All of us, we are a species of animal. You wouldn’t talk about individual … rabbits, or something. It’s a mistake as old as, I don’t know what. Old as people, maybe. There is nothing, nothing that sets us apart from that there wild barking dog.’

Tiff whistled slowly through her teeth. She idly wondered which book Char had got that from.