TRUCE

Sad to say, I never had a friend till I went to school and Martin. There were my two older brothers but no friends at the family nursery. Maybe the racial bar did it. Perhaps being a son of the owner was the cause. Or maybe just because I was shy. But once at school opportunities slowly grew as I settled in and it became my life and my primary society. Richard LeFevre was a good friend and alley but he came later.

No: I couldn’t class him as my first ever friend. Richard came as part of a pair: Richard and Martin. Martin and Richard: the two demon cartoonists. Or was that Martin and Duncan? Most of the early seventies is lost now to holes in my brain, but I guess I must have got to know Richard through Martin. That would be it.

After Martin and me had that falling out over love, Richard endured, almost to the very end of my school days, the last of the good life. We lived in the same small village and he was an only child. We were a marriage of convenience in a way.

As a young teenager he worked in a pub, before opening time. I’d hang around with him, maybe help a little. The strong smell of stale beer grips my senses even now, ushering up those long term memories again. That’s real beer. Not gay beer.

But back to Martin. One time he found himself invited back to my parent’s home in London and my weekend residence away from school. I’d been to his in Pinner by then. His room was a sea of wealth and destruction, broken and unbroken toys all jumbled up together obliterating his bedroom floor. In London, toys were in shorter supply but we had a dressing up box. Theatrical parents I suppose. Now all the kids have them. They have everything.

I still remember Martin standing in the windowless corridor between our bedrooms at the very attic of the house, dressed as a wench, his blond hair resting on the shoulders of his blue serving maids dress. He might have been nine or so, I can’t remember. But however you looked at him he had the face of a boy. Not good looking. Just ordinary, apart, that is, from those large, dark, conversational eyebrows.

And to think we fell out over love. On the Saturday evening I locked the door to my room and jumped into bed with him. He didn’t seem to mind. It seemed to me to be an exciting thing to do at the time. I just jumped into bed with him. That was all. I never knew why my mother was so furious at being barred entrance to the room. Maybe she knew more than I did, even back then. It just seemed like an exciting thing to do.

One day in school Martin announced to me with hyper solemn eyebrows that he had news, and come play time we would have to talk. Well it was love. Her name was Caroline. She was in our class. I’d barely clocked her before, but soon I was in love with her too. I didn’t want to miss out on the being in love thing, even though I had and I wasn’t. I didn’t get anywhere with her either. We were just kids playing after all but she soured it, or rather I did. And that was that. That was that.

Years later, in our early teens the Caroline affair and I suppose more so the bed hopping event, had their corollary, with fairly good natured poof jibes coming from the Martin/Duncan axis.

And then finally I remember Martin asking me about my first real girlfriend, Francesca, with a kind of wonder in his voice, like I’d actually got me one. The jibes were never spoken again like they’d never been spoken before. Like they had never been. And that was that: after seven years, a truce. But that’s all it was. All it ever was.

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