The Only Living Boy
The Only Living Boy
There were three others in the camper-van: Auntie Anne, as I called her, Will and his sister Elaine, who was seventeen. When we crested the hill, Uncle Geoff’s MGB GT was parked on the grass outside the cottage.
The front door admitted straight onto the living room, which had a three-piece suite covered in faded flowery chintz, a dining table with an oilcloth over it and an open fire with a kettle on an iron stand that you could swing over the flames.
‘Just the same,’ Will said and when I turned I saw he was carrying a record player and some records.
‘Where’d they come from?’ I asked.
‘Elaine’s.’
‘Let’s see.’
He gave me the LPs. There were four of them. Bridge Over Troubled Water, which everyone in the world owned a copy of; Songs From A Room; Bread’s On The Waters; and America by, well, America.
I had wondered sometimes why Will got to bring a friend on holiday and Elaine didn’t. If I had asked him about it he would have said it was because she had no friends, but I never asked. It turned out Elaine did have a friend and she was arriving on Monday. She was called Libby.
We were playing Monopoly, the three of us. The Simon & Garfunkel LP was playing. Elaine was cautious and hung on to her cash to cover any large rent demands she ran into, which was what had just happened: £600 for two houses on Will’s Mayfair.
‘Tee-hee-hee,’ Will went.
‘Don’t gloat,’ Elaine snapped, shuffling banknotes. ‘Not a problem, as it happens.’
Paul Simon was declaring that there were times when he was so lonesome he took some comfort with the whores on 7th Avenue.
‘What a pseud,’ Will scoffed. ‘He couldn’t just go to the whores because he was feeling horny.’
‘In fact,’ I said, ‘‘Feeling Horny’ was the original title of ‘Feeling Groovy’. But they had to clean it up for radio. ’
Later, ‘The Only Living Boy In New York’ played and the chorus – So here I am, the only living boy in New York – came in like a force 9 gale and knocked me sideways.
‘What age is your friend?’ I asked Elaine.
‘Libby?’ she said, like this was an unexpected turn in the conversation. ‘Seventeen.’
At breakfast that first Sunday, Uncle Geoff asked us if we wanted to take a turn at the wheel of the MG. Elaine was included in the invitation, but she didn’t seem interested. Perhaps she thought driving cars was boys’ stuff.
Outside, the sunlight was clear and airy and the sky as wide as any continent.
‘You drive, Mark,’ Uncle Geoff said. ‘Visitors first, eh?’ He opened the driver’s door and ducked in to slide the key in the ignition. Rather than squeeze into the rear bench seat, Will opted to hang around on the beach until it was his turn. I glanced at him, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. While he trudged over the marram grass to the sands below, I lowered myself into the driver’s seat. I was tall, and could have done with a shoehorn.
Once I was installed, it felt more like being in a cockpit than a car. I studied the array of chrome-ringed dials on the black instrument panel, patted the steering wheel and swung the gear lever from side to side. I looked across when Uncle Geoff appeared in the passenger seat and he beamed back at me.
‘Engage the clutch,’ he said. ‘And move through the gears. That’s right.’ He asked me to put the gear lever back into neutral and then told me to switch on the engine. It turned over with a cough and settled into a warm, throaty sound.
I looked at Uncle Geoff, who nodded. I engaged first, gingerly released the clutch and set off, the engine revving as I progressed through the gears until it reached a sweet roar at thirty miles an hour.
‘Like it?’ Uncle Geoff asked.
‘I love it,’ I said and gently put my foot down.
Monday morning, the sun had gone and the sky was washed over with grey. We were back on the beach with the MG, Will first this time. When my turn came, a mizzle began. Soon, enough raindrops were pattering on the windscreen for Uncle Geoff to tell me to put on the wipers. Up where the lane from the road comes down to the beach, I was turning the car through a circle to go back when an orange Maxi drove onto the sands and turned with me. Between the sweeps of the wipers, I saw a girl in the passenger seat, misted by the condensation on her window. For a moment or two after I straightened to head for the cottage we drove along side by side. The Maxi’s passenger seat window was parallel with my side window and I looked over to see this girl with long blonde hair looking back at me. Her face was expressionless and in a few seconds she looked away.
When I drove up and parked behind the camper-van and the Maxi, Uncle Geoff jumped out and pumped Libby’s father’s hand. ‘No problems finding us?’ he asked.
‘What a lovely spot,’ the other man said and laughed. ‘Talk about getting away from it all. ’
Libby was standing beside her father. She was tall and wore a strap-top, jeans and desert boots. Will was looking at her and I was looking at her, but she carefully avoided looking back. The five of us went up the path to the cottage, scrunching the rounded pebbles beneath our feet. I studied a pair of maracas hanging from one of the belt-loops at the back of Libby’s jeans.
As we came through the door, Elaine went ‘Oh!’ and jumped up from the sofa. She said, ‘Hi’ to Libby and then laughed in the nervy way girls who like Maths too much sometimes do. She crossed the room and linked arms with her friend. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you where we’re sleeping.’
That afternoon, we went and played hopscotch on the sand. Libby was a sure shot and progressed up through the squares relentlessly. When she landed her stone in square ten, watching her hop up to it – one foot, two feet, one foot and so on – was all pleasure. She came back at twice the speed, hurtling towards Will. When she sailed through square one and home, Will caught her.
‘What’re you doing?’ she asked, stepping away from him.
‘Catching you. ’
‘I wasn’t falling. ’
Later, we changed into our swimming gear and went over to the Strand. Unlike Elaine, Libby wore a bikini. Elaine was smaller and softly curved, but Libby was long and slim, elegant. She jumped over the waves until she was up to her hips in the water, dived forward and began to swim. She seemed to be going for the horizon.
Will’s face was screwed up. ‘Who goes into the sea to swim?’
I nodded in her direction. ‘Libby.’
When we went back to the cottage, Elaine offered to make everybody tea and scones. Will and I sat on the sofa and eavesdropped on the girls in the kitchen.
‘Should we put on a some music?’ I murmured to Will.
‘No,’ he said, with an ear cocked toward the kitchen, where Elaine was now saying that she wanted to go to university and then get a job working for the government. ‘Okay,’ Will said, so I put on the Leonard Cohen and began to study the photograph of a woman in a towel on the back of the sleeve.
Will stared at the door into the kitchen. ‘She didn’t like me catching her,’ he said.
The sun woke me quite early on Tuesday morning and I heard a sound I recognised, the klok-klok of the maracas. I eased myself out from under the sheet and grabbed my clothes from the chair.
Libby was by the sink in the kitchen, drinking water from a glass. She looked over her shoulder at me.
‘You’re up early,’ I said.
‘So are you. ’
‘Going out?’
She nodded, slung the water and rinsed the glass. She gave me a smile and went out the back door. I followed and speeded up to walk along beside her.
‘You’re going out, too?’ she said. On her belt-loop, the maracas knocked against each other.
‘Well – d’you mind having company?’
‘I’ll tell you when we get back.’
She was wearing clean, white Dunlop tennis shoes that looked smart with their green lining, but once we were on the sand, she took them off and walked barefoot. The light was fresh and new as we marched along. After half an hour we walked out on this little headland – just a sprinkling of black rocks protruding from the coast – and sat down.
‘What’ll you do when you leave school next year?’ I said.
‘Go to a Greek island and be a writer like that woman on the back of Elaine’s Leonard Cohen LP.’
I had always taken the glamorous woman in the towel as the writer’s girlfriend – not a writer. I just guessed that if you became a famous writer like Leonard Cohen your reward would be a beautiful blonde, tan in a white towel. But she was sitting at a typewriter.
‘Aren’t you going to university then?’ I asked.
She looked at me, her blue eyes sparkling. ‘Why would I do that?’
I asked her what she liked reading and she ran off a list: Lawrence, Hardy, Huxley, and Donleavy. I said I liked getting Penguin books because they matched. Even if the spines were different colours – orange, grey or green – they all had the same little Penguin. ‘I’d like to go to Greece and have a girlfriend like that woman in the towel,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘You want to collect your paperbacks and I don’t want to have any possessions. I’m an absolutist, you see. ’
I tried to think what an absolutist might be. ‘You mean you do things to extremes?’
‘Yes,’ she said, stood up and set off.
On Wednesday, Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne took Elaine up to Belfast to see a consultant about the cartilage in her knee.
Libby and I were reading in the garden. We sat on aluminium deck chairs. Will walked past us a couple of times without saying anything. Then he was standing in front of us dangling a set of keys – the MG keys.
‘Want to take a spin to Newcastle and get an ice-cream?’ he asked.
‘With an underage driver?’ Libby said.
‘Scared?’ he said.
She wouldn’t be, I thought; she’s an absolutist.
‘Okay,’ Libby said and stood up. ‘Let’s go. ’
Will drove. Libby sat in the passenger seat and I hunched up on the bench seat behind them. We were driving round Dundrum Bay when the engine died. I could see Will turn the ignition and I heard a dull click.
‘What is it?’ I said.
He grimaced. ‘It’s stalled. ’
We were stationary at the side of the road. Will kept turning the key, but all he got was the same flat click. We got out and stood on the grass verge. Will kicked one of the tyres. Libby was carrying a small, powder blue handbag on a long strap, which she now lifted over her head so that the strap ran from one shoulder to the opposite hip. She didn’t say anything.
A police-car came round the bend behind us.
‘Oh great,’ Will said.
The police officer who emerged had a country look about him. The bulbous toecaps of his lace-up boots gleamed in the sunlight.
‘In bother, youngsters?’ he said.
Will was frozen to the spot.
‘Who’s the driver of this wee car?’ the officer asked.
I watched Will’s mouth drop open like an attic trapdoor. A season came and went and then Libby said, ‘I am. ’
‘Would you just give me a wee look at your licence there, dear?’
Of course. Libby was seventeen. Why wouldn’t she have passed her test?
The officer studied the licence, nodded and returned it to her. He got Libby into the driver’s seat and explained a jump-start to her. He told Will and me that we would push. ‘I can’t afford to be annoying my lungs,’ he said.
We leaned on a wing each and shoved the MG and it sped up as the road dipped and then the policeman bellowed out, ‘Now!’ The car jerked, the engine kicked in and Libby shot away from us and we almost ended up facedown on the tarmac. A hundred yards further on, she stopped and revved the engine. Before we knew it, the police-car was driving past us. He bipped his horn as he overtook the MG and was gone.
Will looked at me, wide-eyed, and gasped. ‘Can you believe that?’ he said.
At that moment, the MG took off again and, like the police-car before it, disappeared around the bend.
‘Hey!’ Will screamed and gave chase. ‘Hey!’
He was wasting his time. She wouldn’t be waiting for us further up the road. She was an absolutist; she did things to extremes.
The world was suddenly empty. I looked at the gorse bushes down at the shoreline, and, across the bay, at the blue Mourne Mountains. So here I am, I thought, the only living boy in New York.
ROBERT GRAHAM – Teaches Creative Writing at MMU Cheshire. His novel Holy Joe was published in 2006 by Troubador, who will be releasing his short story collection The Only Living Boy next February.
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