I must confess that I was fed up. Really fed up at all this. I shouted ‘Oi!’ at the top of my voice and at that very moment, the record that was playing finished and I found that I had the attention of everybody in the room.
They turned and they stared and then they screamed. Well, the girls all screamed. The blokes kind of gasped. That softy Paul Mason, who used to be in my class at the Grange, and who I was unimpressed to see had come dressed as a pimple, simply fainted. And then there was a lot of pushing and shoving and shouting and a good deal of backing away.
I hadn’t noticed that the Doveston was there. His costume was so convincing that I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway. He hadn’t come as Pamell at all. He had come as Lazlo Woodbine, private eye. Trench coat, fedora and vacuum-cleaner nozzle. He stepped forward and looked me up and down. I smiled back at him and said, ‘What do you think?’
The Doveston extended a finger, ran it down my cheek, put it to his nose and sniffed.
‘It’s tomato ketchup,’ he said. Then, turning to the starers and the gaspers, he said, ‘It’s all right, it’s only tomato ketchup.’ And then he turned back to me and he glared. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re up to?’ he asked. ‘Coming down here with your head all covered in tomato ketchup and frightening the shit out of my guests?’
‘But you said I was to come as something trendy.’
‘So you came as a tomato ketchup bottle?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve come as President Kennedy.’
Now what happened next made me angry. In fact it made me very angry. It was all so undignified. The Doveston grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me from the room. He frogmarched me into the kitchen, rammed my head into the sink and turned on the taps. Once he had washed all the ketchup from my hair and face he straightened me up, thrust a tea towel into my hands and called me a twat.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’
‘Coming as a dead bloke, you twat.’
‘But you’ve come as a dead bloke.’ I dabbed at myself. ‘And that John Omally has come as Parnell, he’s a dead bloke and—’
The Doveston cut me short. ‘I was going to say, coming as a dead bloke before I had a chance to introduce you properly. I knew you’d come as Kennedy, I saw you nick the ketchup botde from the Plume Café and I put two and two together. I was going to play “The Star-spangled Banner” on the record player and pretend to shoot you as you came down the stairs. But you’ve screwed it all up now.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.
‘And so you should be. Would you care for a beer?’
‘Yes I would.’
My first beer. I will never forget that. It tasted horrible. Why do we bother with the stuff, eh? Whatever is the attraction? I didn’t like my first beer at all; I thought it was foul. But I felt that as beer was so popular and all adult males drank it, I’d better see the thing through. I finished my first beer with difficulty and belched.
‘Have another,’ said the Doveston. ‘I don’t mind if I do.’
The second tasted not so bad. The third tasted better.
I swigged down my fourth beer, went ‘Aaaah’, and smacked my lips.
‘It grows on you, doesn’t it?’ said the Doveston.
‘Pardon?’ I replied.
‘I said it grows on you.
‘Oh, yeah.’ I shouted too, as the music was now very loud indeed and the hustling and bustling in the crowded kitchen made it almost impossible to talk.
‘Go and dance,’ the Doveston shouted. ‘Enjoy the party.’
‘Yes. Right.’ And I thought I would. After all, it was my party and there seemed to be an awful lot of girls. I pushed my way back into the hall, rubbing up against as many as I could. There were girls here dressed up as princesses, page boys, panel-beaters and Pankhursts —mostly as Emmeline Pankhurst (1858—1928) the English suffragette leader, who founded the militant Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903.
I squeezed by a girl who was dressed as a parachute and elbowed my way into the front sitter. The joint was a-rockin’ and I was impressed. There were popes here and pilots and pit lads and pastry chefs. Even a couple of Pushkins. Whoever Pushkin was.
I was about to get in there and boogie when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Hey, homes,’ a voice shouted in my ear. I turned. It was Chico.
‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes,’ I shouted. ‘I’m President Kennedy.’
‘President who, homes?’
‘Eh?’
‘Forget it.’
I looked Chico up and down and all around. He had a bath towel over his head, held in place by a fan belt. He was robed in chintzy curtains, secured at the waist by a dressing-gown cord. His face was boot-blackened and he wore upon his chin a false goatee fashioned from what looked like (and indeed turned out to be) a pussycat’s tail.
‘Who are you supposed to be?’ I shouted.
‘Che Guevara,’ he shouted back. The light of realization dawned.
‘Chico,’ I shouted. ‘That’s Che Guevara, not Sheik Guevara.’
‘Curse this dyslexia.’
Oh how we laughed.
Chico had brought the new gang members and he hauled me outside into the street to make the introductions.
‘Your costumes are great,’ I told them. ‘You look just like Kalahari Bushmen.’
‘But we are Kalahari Bushmen.’
Oh how we laughed again.
Chico winked in my direction. ‘I also brought one of my sisters.’
‘Not the one with the moustache?’
We would no doubt have laughed again, but Chico chose instead to hit me. As he helped me back to my feet he whispered, ‘Just for the benefit of the new guys, no offence meant.’
‘None taken, I assure you.
And then there was a bit of a crash as someone flew out through the front sitter window.
‘Neat,’ said Chico. ‘Where’s the booze?’
I gaped in horror at all the blood and broken glass.
My parents wouldn’t be happy about this.
The Doveston appeared in the front doorway. He came over and handed me another beer. ‘Don’t worry about the damage,’ he said.
‘But—’
‘Here,’ said the Doveston. ‘Have this too.’
He handed me a large fat cigarette. It was all twisted up at one end.
‘What is that?’ I asked.
‘It’s a joint.’
My first joint. I will never forget that. It tasted... W O N D E R -FUL
I drifted back towards the house and was met by two girls dressed as pixies who were patting at a big and soppy Labrador.
‘Is this your dog?’ one of them asked. I nodded dreamily.
‘What’s its name?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘When I got it I thought it was a boy dog and so I named it Dr Evil.’
‘Oh,’ said one of the pixies.
‘But it turned out to be a girl dog, so my mum said I had to call it something else.’
‘So what’s its name?’
‘Biscuit,’ I said.
The pixies laughed. Rather prettily, I thought. And I was aware of the pale pink auras that surrounded them and so I smiled some more and swigged upon my beer and sucked again at my joint. ‘Try some of this,’ I said.
I suppose things really got into full swing around eleven o’clock. Up until then only one person had been thrown out through the front window and he had got off lightly, with nothing more than minor scarring for life. The bloke who’d climbed up onto the roof wasn’t quite so lucky.
I didn’t actually see him as he plunged past my parents’ bedroom window onto the spiked railings beneath. I was in the double bed with one of the pixies.