The History Of Us

by Philip Leslie

Overview

The History of Us is a beautiful exploration of love and obsession, based on the stories of a group of friends growing up in Norfolk and told in reflection focused on the incredibly close but conversely fractious relationship of the two central characters. Told in three parts, The History of Us, explores the relationships between the two and a close friend, bonded by love, but also by a single tragic moment in their shared lives. As the book unfolds, we hear many whispers, which shift our understanding of that tragic day, and ultimately, of course, our perceptions of the characters, and theirs of each other. Although we are offered a kind of resolution in the final pages, there remains a sense of ambivalence and unease that disturbs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781907461033
Publisher:	Legend Times Group
Publication date:	11/19/2005
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	659 KB

About the Author

Philip is the author of The History of Us published in May 2009. He is also the author of the prize-winning Brought to You by the Makers of Norriss Toothbrushes, which was also adapted for the stage and performed in both Edinburgh and London. He also works with BBC Radio Drama and is a musician and published composer.

Read an Excerpt

The History of Us

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By Philip Leslie

Legend Times Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Philip Leslie
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907461-03-3

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CHAPTER 1

Look what I've found, Alison.

This photograph. It's us at sixteen play-wrestling in my nephew's sandpit. I'd not seen it for years, had I. And do you know where it was? It was caught in the pages of my first Inspector Poole script, which I discovered jammed behind the radiator in my study. Instantly: the jangling sunlight, the hair-drier breeze laden with thrips and dandelion fluff, the clamour of next door's kids, my brother hurrying into the garden with his instamatic pressed to his face, paparazzi-style.

How was I to have known Martin coveted you? Unwittingly I gave you to him. I grabbed you around the middle and lifted you, and you kicked out and bicycled and managed to overbalance me onto the hot sand, just as the camera clicked and he got your famous legs.

'Famous? Show me that. Now remind me about me. This girl I'm looking at.'

That's easy. Build: essentially lissom with the standard issue squidgy places. Height: above average. Hair: dark, shoulder-length, always perfectly sleekly groomed as if you were in an ongoing shampoo advert. Face: deadpan pale, ineffably pretty. Eyes: aluminium grey, huge. Voice: you'd been raised to eschew the local accent and to enunciate. I loved your voice. I miss it tremendously.

'Appearance?'

Smart but casual. No great interest in fashion.

'Did this girl have any hobbies?'

Books, the cinema.

'The very solo pursuits they advise you not to put on a CV, along with chess and self-abuse.'

Books and cinema are on mine. My interest in Who's Who is 'staring out to sea while staring in to see'. Can't get more solitary than that.

'How long had we been friends at the time your brother snapped us?'

Oh, since for ever. I can still remember when I met you. Our mothers were chatting outside your house. They used to do that at one time. I spotted you in your front garden and strayed in to see who you were and what you were doing. After that, mainly because of our proximity as near neighbours, we were rarely apart. You were invited on holidays with us and I accompanied your family to the cottage you rented in Dorset. We were glued together, even through the trials of puberty. People often wrongly assumed we were a couple.

'Describe the you I'm looking at.'

He's a fraction taller than the girl, slim, with a mousy mop. Not particularly smart, definitely casual. As for his voice, his parents had no preference as to how he spoke, only that he spoke sense. Although his local accent had vanished, undermined by elocution lessons and years of parroting other accents. His interests included amateur theatre and staring at the sea – or into blank space, whichever happened to be handy at the time. He was something of an artist too; a draughtsman rather than a painter. Mainly stage designs which his mother sometimes used, although he drew you once.

'And the stamping ground of these good friends –?'

– was Gorleston-on-Sea, a sprawling accumulation of housing estates to the south of Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. We lived at the southern end of the town, on an enclave of 1960s bungalows a short stroll from the seafront. Our nearest pub was a 1930s Art Deco former hotel situated halfway along Marine Parade within beer-mat-frisbeeing distance of the sea. In spite of its attractive curved-brick central bay, its assorted projections and period asymmetry, its once-fashionable strata of brick, painted concrete transoms and Crittall, The Links was incomprehensibly bulldozed in the late nineties to make room for five architecturally unremarkable executive-style dwellings. I added my voice and household name to the protests, but the decision to raze it had already been passed. I shed a few tears. I know a lot of people who did.

Back at the start of the eighties, just before those Reagan-Thatcher argy-bargy years, you and I could be found in The Links most evenings.

'"Pint of bitter, please." That was you as the narrator in Return Journey. Surely there can't be many people who learnt to order beer from reading Dylan Thomas.'

Except we could usually only afford half pints, taking miniscule sips to make each one last an hour. When we were so destitute that even an eighteen-pence cordial was beyond our combined means, we'd exile ourselves to the seafront, loitering with no intent, or waging guerrilla attacks on the sea with stones. Or else we'd take your celebrated timorous taupe terrier for long walks.

'Oliver. I loved my boy Oliver.'

When the weather was bad we'd sit in one of the concrete shelters, as snug as a pair of OAPs. We'd sit there in the dark, too, waiting for navigation lights to pass across the blackness. We pretended they were sprites, lost souls, inconceivably far-off stars. But the prosaic mercantile truth was equally inspiring. Our game was imagining how far those ships had travelled or where they were bound.

'Nantucket perhaps. I often wondered if the place was as lovely as the name. Your favourite destination was Archangel.'

Relentless snow and colossal stone buildings crowding around an ice-locked harbour. That's how I've always pictured it, anyway. I never want to know what it's really like. I suspect in reality it's as mundane as Hull or Harwich.

'Much of our river traffic was from mundane-sounding places. Amsterdam. Rotterdam.'

I was invited to Amsterdam once to meet Poole's Dutch fans and the actor who dubbed my voice, but I really couldn't face the journey. Shortly afterwards the fans disbanded their club and started the Morse Appreciation Society in a fit of pique.

'Your favourite memory, please.'

That's difficult.

'Pick one favourite memory, then.'

Southwold, December 1980.

'Apart from when we ... Apart from that.'

Christmas Day 1980. You called on me first thing with Oliver. I'd only just ripped open my presents: socks and Toblerone from you, a pile of paperbacks, a new pen, a couple of LPs, and I'd treated our lungs and my vocal chords to a black plastic cylinder of fifty John Player Special.

'Our parents would have gone ballistic. My other present to you was a diary, which you never used. I stayed for toast and coffee while you got dressed. You were hard work that morning: could hardly bring yourself to talk to me. As soon as we arrived at the beach you pulled away from me and played with Oliver. I leaned against one of the sea defences, watching the waves swipe half-moon shapes out of the sand. For ten minutes you seemed to forget I existed. You gave Oliver so much attention that he had no need for me. Then suddenly you turned and stared, and stared, as if you'd been hypnotised, and walked slowly towards me, and we noticed we were both crying, and I put my arms out and we hugged.'

I told you things you closed your ears to, and you stopped my mouth with a limpet kiss. We drew apart when Oliver was being threatened by a bully Alsatian.

Afterwards we sat in dazzling sunlight in our favourite glazed shelter on the upper esplanade, smoking the ciggies, reciting chunks of Under Milk Wood from memory. It had been my school production in December, and I'd read the part of the first narrator. You, typically, knew the play better than I did. I wasn't thick, I just wasn't perspicacious. You and I could read the same book or watch the same movie and you'd see all sorts of things that I'd miss. I really have to work hard to understand the characters I play. Saying that, Poole is a doddle. He's simply the superhero version of me.

'Acting was your thing. Right from the start.'

If I managed to get the required grades, I intended to train to be an ack-tor at drama school.

'Your mother was right behind you.'

I've never known anyone so passionate about theatre. She directed three, four plays a year.

'Finding roles for you in most of them.'

I'd run the gamut, from an urchin in Oliver to murdered child in the Scottish play to football hooligan in Zigger-Zagger. I think I was probably quite good.

'Although you were far too modest to admit you were.'

Are you implying I was conceited?

'Sometimes you were. If you were high on applause and curtain-calls you could be insufferable. Or when your poem was in the Yarmouth Mercury. Or when you did that big drawing of me.'

That was a good attempt, for a novice. Half life size, charcoal and white chalk and more than a drop of spit. I had you reading a book, prone, with your legs in those bottle-green nuclear-blast-proof tights, raised up and crossed at the ankles. Your hair was spilling over your shoulders and onto the page you were studying. Took me hours.

'Three hours, to be precise. You refused me more than one break an hour, even when I was in agony. I'm sure there's a law to prevent exploitation of life models. Poole would have come to my rescue.'

It paid off, though, didn't it. Mum reckoned I was a genius and showed the finished picture to a local painter.

'Who got it framed and exhibited in Yarmouth Central Library. Local Art 1981. Success went straight to your head. You even phoned the Mercury to do a feature on you.'

And sent them a snotty letter when they didn't.

'Such a bighead.'

That was nothing. You should've been around when I landed my first sizeable TV role six years later (bi-sexual drug-dealing ice-cream seller fleeing Hastings, pursued by the Triad). The day after it was shown I walked along Oxford Street anticipating a rugby scrum for autographs. I'd even bought a pen. I was disappointingly ignored. And insanely jealous when I heard that my co-star had been mobbed by appreciative students while his taxi was stuck at traffic lights.

'Jealousy was your Achilles' heel. You really hated it when I posed for Wilson.'

I'll tell you what really rankled about all that business. You were my model and you posed for him. It felt treacherous, especially when I saw you'd given him the same pose with the book, your face turned to the artist, watching him watching you watching him.

'He was at Yarmouth art college. It was all above-board.'

Wilson was a notorious lech.

'Unfounded. He behaved himself perfectly with me.'

Ogling your body.

'James, James, I got ogled by builders when I cycled to school. When I sat in The Links I got ogled. Even Anne's dad used to look at me strangely. At least when an artist ogles you it's for an artistic end. It's the equivalent of your stage-kissing an actress on camera. You wouldn't call that a real kiss, would you. I'll tell you what annoyed you so much: his drawing was miles better than yours. As it should've been.'

I was livid when it was chosen for his college's exhibition in the library less than one month after my picture was shown. And it ended up on your bedroom wall, didn't it; pride of place next to posters of Japan and Le Genou de Claire, the film by Eric Rohmer our twin-town visitors projected at a meeting of the Rambouillet Society. You refused the offer of mine.

'a) it was far too big, and b) your parents wanted it. I was happy having a photo of it. That went on my wall.'

For about a week. Then it disappeared. You claimed you'd taken it to Lowestoft to show to your grandmother. Really you'd consigned it to a shoebox of odds-and-sods under your bed.

'–!'

Archived along with such treasures as a punk-style collaged invitation to Anne's fifteenth birthday party (at which I observed you snogging with Simon, and an hour later with Darren) and a wristband thrown to you at Wimbledon by Sue Barker.

'–?!'

I looked once.

'When?'

When we were reading in your room and you went to answer the phone. I was poking about hoping to discover your diary. I wanted to find out what you'd written about Southwold.

'I didn't keep it under my bed, Mr Nose. It was wrong of you to look.'

You looked under mine!

'In case you'd acquired any interesting perusal-material without telling me. There was no diary. If there had been, I wouldn't have read it.'

I've always been too lazy to keep a diary. If something's worth remembering, I make a point of remembering it. Poole's lines, for example, or the history of you and me. Only trouble is, I find myself remembering lots of useless stuff as well. I wouldn't say that Christmas 1981 is worth remembering, but I have photographic recall.

'It wasn't the best of reunions, was it.'

Disastrous. Utterly. Especially when you think how symbiotic we'd once been. That time when I suffered all day from stomach pains and I called on you in the evening to discover you tucked up on the sofa with a hot water bottle, debilitated by a painful period. Uncanny, that. Or that time we skived off for the afternoon and met in the concrete shelter without having pre-arranged it. Pure symbiosis.

'Symbiosis my foot! Maybe if you'd kept a proper written diary you'd see, yes, how much in love we were, but also how separate our lives were. I probably spent as much time with Anne as I did with you. And I went out with Wilson for almost a month that last summer before we left Gorleston.'

Pathetic gangling flick-fringed drunken art college layabout waster. I remember the first time I saw him, when he was drawing a giant sexually aroused man (sort of David Hockney meets the Cerne Abbas giant) on the sand at low tide. It was twenty, thirty yards long, so that the further you were from it, the easier it became to read. A woman with two kids in a buggy swooped down from the upper esplanade to tell him if he didn't erase it she'd do so herself because it was crude and disgusting. Wilson smirkily explained it was quite the opposite, it was a celebration of blah-blah-blah – some twaddle he'd read in a book on Celtic mythology and was now regurgitating to make the woman feel intellectually inferior. He was such an arrogant piece of work.

'He needed to grow up, that's all. Did he erase it?'

What do you think? He leaned on the handrail, laughing, while the woman obliterated the cock and balls with a length of driftwood. When he saw me watching, he said, 'I wish I had a cine camera. Project the film backwards and it'd look as though she's drawing.'

A few weeks later he turned up in The Links, but he didn't recognise me. There were more interesting things for him to swivel his eyes at or observe indirectly in the distorting Claude glass of his Guinness-and-bitter.

I remember a lot about him; much more than I care to. I remember the weasel face with that congenital supercilious sneer. I remember the occluding fringe which pointlessly rendered him monocular until tossed or swept aside. I remember the cigarette-kippered contrived slovenliness; the caricature-toff demeanour which developed over the course of an evening from braggart to boor with each additional excessive beer. When sober he could be a lurker, I remember, sidelining himself to the periphery in order to watch and measure us and furtively jot his observations in a notebook none of us was ever permitted to see. Most of all, I remember that in spite of these and other shortcomings, he managed to captivate and eventually pull the darling of Grove Grammar. Quite how, I'll never understand.

'We got talking down the pub one night.'

Where was I?

'In the pub too. It was Darren's birthday. Your rival for my affections was in the saloon with Anne and her boyfriend and me. You were in the lounge next door playing snooker with the gang. You were very drunk, and no less boorish than Wilson. We kept hearing you. "Sink the pink!" Funny, but funnier was knowing you were unaware that it meant something rude.'

Never mind that. Fraternising. Behind my back. With Wilson of all people. Why couldn't you content yourself with Darren? You two got on. He was likeable. He liked you.

'Because the art student was a novelty. He told us about art. The man who kicked off modern art when he exhibited a urinal. What the Tate pile of bricks was about. He got us debating if graffiti is art. Then he asked me if he could draw me. I struck a pose but he explained not here, in his studio. I thought it was wonderful he had a studio. He was using the upstairs of his cousin Sharon's recently acquired chip shop while it was closed for renovation.'

My Plaice. Goes by a different name these days. We bought some chips from there when it was Upon My Sole and there was sand on them. You had a go at the owner when he refused to give us a refund. You turned into Barbara Woodhouse.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The History of Us by Philip Leslie. Copyright © 2009 Philip Leslie. Excerpted by permission of Legend Times Ltd.
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