Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [111]
The months in the hospital, the surgery, the physiotherapy, the obsession with physical and mechanical functions, had left me emotionally numb. Clumsily robotic. It was as if the last general anesthetic hadn’t worn off. But, slowly and surprisingly, school woke me up. I started to feel again, to reassemble myself. Often I wished that I hadn’t. At the core of the wreck of who or what I was, there was a vacancy, an absence whose name was Frankie. My rediscovered feelings had nothing to attach themselves to, no purpose. They were like a wardrobe full of a dead man’s clothes. My parents treated me with careful circumspection, as if I were a delicate and rather embarrassing alien visitor from a remote star entrusted to their care.
Because I found it difficult to paint, I was not going to do very well at the A-level exam. My portfolio of drawings (many of which featured a stylized girl’s body in dark imaginary settings) was good, though. Jiffy had a word with his old art college, and they gave me a place.
I left Norfolk for London without a backward glance, with my paltry possessions in a suitcase that looked like leather but was made of pressed and laminated cardboard. I had fifteen pounds, cash, in my pocket and a council grant worth ten pounds and ten shillings a week. George was quietly outraged. It was pretty much half what he earned, and he didn’t get to look at girls with no clothes on.
I loved the late 1960s. We all did. It was like stepping out of a black-and-white movie to find yourself standing on sunlit uplands full of color. But for me, personally, the crucial and life-changing thing was that it became compulsory for young men to have long hair. I gratefully hid most of my face behind Cavalier-style black locks and peered out at the world from between these curtains with greater confidence. In 1969 I was working as a designer for an early “style” magazine near Covent Garden. One of the writers was a very pretty girl who sometimes wore thigh-length maroon suede boots below her miniskirt. Her name was Julie. I was, it seemed, invisible to her, but one day we happened to be leaving work at the same time and she said, “Coffee bar or pub?” It was a hot July evening. The day before, an American called Neil Armstrong had stepped — well, sort of hopped backwards — onto the surface of the moon. This was only slightly less amazing than the fact that Julie Hendry had spoken to me. It was a great deal less amazing than the fact that after a couple of drinks and a meal at an Indian restaurant, she came back to my flat with me.
She was amused that I kept my dope inside the hinged hump of a wooden camel.
“Where’d you get this? Morocco?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
The following summer, word spread of a free music festival near Glastonbury, in Somerset. Julie and I traveled down there with a couple of friends in their wagon, an old post office van painted all over with rainbows and BAN THE BOMB signs. The festival site was on a farm. It was a strange scene; “far out,” in the parlance of the times. A rural landscape a bit like Norfolk: long low hedges, willow and chestnut trees, gently rolling fields, cows. And winding through it an erratic parade of longhairs: guys in headbands and pastel-colored bell-bottoms and stack-heeled boots, barefoot girls in minis or translucent cheesecloth skirts, their faces decorated with stars and flowers. The mingled odors of dung and hashish, the sound of the Grateful Dead on the wind. As we neared the field where the stage had been set up, we saw, just ahead of us, a merry mob gathered around a bald but bearded man dressed in black. I assumed he was some sort of performer because he was attracting a great deal of laughter and applause. Then I recognized him. He was standing on a sort of dais with a densely lettered signboard in front of it.
“Turn away!” he shouted. “Turn ye away from inebriation and fornication!”
“No way, man,” someone called out. “We’ve come all the way from Birmingham for some of that!”
Laughter.
“Turn ye away, for ye stand at the