Sinister: RSC

Dear Sinister, You might remember a few posts ago (ok probably not) where I mentioned having not sent a thing I wrote about a pub in Birmingham. Well, in a fit of 'I should really be doing something else' this evening I reread said thing and finished typing it up. The reason I didn't send it when I'd finished writing it, and the reason I didn't finish typing it out was that I went completely off it, and the thing is, I'm not sure if I like it all that much now either. But nonetheless, these ideas have been swimming round my head since this time last year and so I should probably get them out, even if it's not in a format I'm entirely comfortable with. Catharsis etc. Apologies also for the vast length of it too, it's significantly longer even than one of my average Sini posts. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry. Make of it what you will. Love, Kieran 1. The Ravenscroft Social Club doesn’t allow black people on the premises. That’s one of the rules. I vowed never to go there again after I found that out. Or at least I use that as an excuse not to go, cynical of me, but in truth I always felt an outsider there, as a member of the audience dragged onstage to become part of the act. Clubs like the Ravenscroft (I can barely getting away with calling them clubs anymore) have been so satirised, parodied and even celebrated as part of a kind of innocent cultural nadir, and it shocked me how close these knowing critiques got to the reality. Or perhaps not. It can work in reverse, the lads down the pub, quoting Enfield’s ‘lads down the pub’ sketch, which quotes the lads down the pub. It was all too much for me. Of course all this came later. The first time I went there was for an amateur pantomime, Aladdin. My brother and I were unimpressed. The room was smokier than we were used to, and smelt of stale beer, we weren’t used to that either. I wont pretend I remember more than that. 2. Clubs like the Ravenscroft are on the wane, a bit of a joke, a dark, cluttered anachronism. Outside, the paint is flaking off in big, dusty chunks, illuminated by orange security lights. The equally dusty windows are barred with rusty cages, the walls crowned with rolls and rolls of barbed wire, far too much. As if they had bought a whole job lot of barbed wire, without quite knowing how much was actually for sale. 3. They don’t let Asian people in either; I’ve been assured of that. It’s sort of funny, because the Ravenscroft is now in a predominantly Asian area; all tight little roads crammed with council houses. A front door that steps right onto the pavement. My Gran lives there too; she’s one of the Ravenscroft’s regulars. She’s finally buying her house from the council, an investment! Of course all this came later, people like my Gran were the mainstay of the local populace when the Ravenscroft opened and made its rules; her and my granddad. I don’t know if those rules have ever been challenged or brought into question, “But no black people would ever want to go there.” Said my mum, who hates the place. She didn’t come along to the pantomime. ‘True, true,’ I thought at the time, but it isn’t any excuse. That rule is one of the most wrong things I’ve ever encountered. And yet… and yet it doesn’t seem to matter, the place is falling apart, going bust, only propped up by an ever shortening cast of regulars. It’ll be gone soon, perhaps they all will. An odd little footnote, a quirk. 4. I don’t remember my granddad much. He had a stroke when I was only small and lived spent after that. Remember the clips about carers they would show on Comic Relief, the ones they’d keep repeating when all you really wanted was more Lenny Henry? Well that was my Gran for a few years. When we used to visit them he would sit there on a threadbare brown settee, watching old westerns on channel four. Always old westerns and always channel four. Did he have them on tape? I don’t ever recall seeing one on TV at home. We used to sit behind him, on his bed (because he couldn’t get upstairs) and my dad and Gran would talk about their extended family. My dad is an only child, but he has hundreds of cousins, and my mum has an elder sister who never had children. As a result I have neither cousins nor uncles, but a wealth of second cousins, and great aunts and uncles, most of whom I’ve never met, but those are the people my Gran and my dad would talk about. On the walls (though it has been changed now) was wood-effect wallpaper. Wood effect wallpaper! And on the wall behind where we would sit was one of those paintings so hilariously featured on recent nostalgia shows, a girl in a blue dress standing, forlorn, crying against a because her dog (also pictured) had broken a vase. By the TV he used to watch was a big jar full of five pence pieces. For us. They were the old style coins, the bigger ones, a whole dusty jar full. Useless. 5. He looks a bit like Samuel Beckett in the photographs I’ve seen. The same darkness and light in the eyes, same sharp point of flicked back grey hair. The same look, past the camera and at the photographer. He was Irish too, all my grandparents were. The only thing I can ever remember him saying was when he and my Gran visited out house, I must have been very small and he said: “Don’t push your luck,” to me. Very Beckett. Of course all this came later. At the time he didn’t look like anyone, wasn’t like anyone. In my Gran’s front room – the one she never used (and still doesn’t, to my knowledge), was a dresser full of his trophies, for darts and snooker. My brother and I always liked them. They were the plastic type, mostly, with thin circles of velvet on the bases that I couldn’t stand the touch of, and a little gold plastic darts or snooker player on top. Some had little holographic squares that gleamed different colours in the light as well, those were our favourites. They look tacky now, but they were great at the time. He must have liked them too, to have a whole dresser full – I don’t think they were that hard to win. 6. When he went into hospital I wouldn’t go and visit, everyone else did. “This might be the last time you ever get to see him.” My mum said, the ‘might’ was unrealistic. I couldn’t give an answer to that, but I still didn’t go. 7. The night my other granddad died was eventful. Unable to sleep I came downstairs to the toilet (our bathroom is on the ground floor, unlike most), more for something to do than out of an actual need. The phone ringing stopped me in my tracks. At the time our phone was in the kitchen, it was one of the old style ones you had to put your finger in and turn to dial a number. Being only young at the time I barely realised that a phonecall in the early hours of the morning didn’t bode well, so I decided to let it ring until whoever it was went away. But they didn’t. After several minutes deliberation I picked it up. A woman’s voice I didn’t recognise asked for my mother in a sombre tone. Still I didn’t sense anything particularly unusual. Waking her up reminded me of Christmas morning, waking my parents up early and excited. She told me to go back to bed and I heard her do downstairs and then come back up shortly after. The light in my parents room clicked on and then off again and I heard small noises coming from inside. The next morning, my mm woke me up to tell me that granddad had died. Her dad. I cried for ages, he was the first person I’d eve lost. We were close, he only lived up the road. 8. When my granddad died, the one who’d had the stroke, it was different. He had been too distant for too long. We had all known he had gone into hospital to die. My dad was pragmatic about it, I suppose, he couldn’t be anything else – I don’t think they were ever very close. I remember my dad talking to him, loud and slow, as if deliberately copying the cliché – it can work in reverse like that. But my granddad wasn’t distracted from the western he was watching at all. Westerns! I didn’t go to the funeral either, I think only my dad did, the rest of us were at school I think. I do remember all of us (as we were then) in the car, picking up my Gran from the church, St Anne’s – my mum and dad met there for the first time at a church disco. We were taking her to a little gathering at the Ravenscroft Social Club. There was a little buffet set out when we arrived, and an empty DJ booth at the back, with one of those big light boxes that turn on big slabs of coloured light, chunky triangles or red, yellow and green, playing in a ‘random’ sequence that a child could identify. My brother and I sneered when no one was looking, together we silently knew that we didn’t feel anything, but it would be wrong to show it. How long had it been since we were last there? I remembered the smoke in the air, though no one I could see was smoking, and the smell of alcohol, though no one had yet started drinking. Later, amid boozy condolences and recollections I, staring down at the table noticed the veneer worn away in the greyish light, and where drink had seeped in and cracked the wood underneath, long, straight splits. His drink? Doubtful. Possible. 9. The interior is much like similar places you’ve probably been to. Dark, smoke faded burgundy wallpaper, dark wood, cigarette burned seats. A few snooker tables up the front and a couple of garish fruit machines. A disco ball! A sticky dance floor in the middle, but nobody dances there anyway. A smell of cheap fags, cheap booze interwoven with everything. That’s all it is, a big room full of that. 10. You can tell when the Ravenscroft’s golden age was by the records they play – songs years old that were unfashionable when they came out, haven’t aged well. Perhaps I’m being unfair, it’s all relative. I think my real resentment of the place started that day, after the funeral I didn’t attend. Before that it was just another hazy memory with vague discomfort attached to it, along with the quad bikes on holiday and hitting my chin on the side of the swimming pool because I was so nervous about jumping in that I tried to grab hold of the side mid-jump, a lesson indeed! 11. A dichotomy seems to be emerging regarding whether or not I should hate the place or not. It certainly appeals to the sort of person that I’m not, and can’t even pretend to be (or at least I don’t think so), but you can’t condemn somewhere for that. But it seems to stand, too, for something passed, lost, a culture, an England (a cliché I know, but what else can you apply to that which is already a cliché, a stereotype? How do I go about sneering at somewhere that beats the ironists at their own game? Sincerity without being aware of the original irony is this year’s irony. But this whole parenthesis has become a bit of a non sequitur; cliché does not necessarily beget cliché, such blithely easy rhetoric obfuscates where it seeks to enlighten. But despite that, or perhaps because of it I can’t help falling back on, falling into step with familiar little groups of words. Clichés work better in my head than anything else I can come up with. A poor reflection on the writer perhaps.), but an England which we can’t get back, not just lost, but unfindable. Which isn’t to stop people trying – even now two England flags still hang visible from neighbours upstairs window, one horizontally and one vertically (which orientation is better form?). But the Ravenscroft Social Club irks me. They both want to embody something about England, something English (please excuse the half tautology), but they fail, of course they do, the thing cotton flag is limp and weary, orange under the streetlights, they fail in a quietly drab way (that these symbols, the flag, the club, may once have said something, back in a whimsical England that dwells in the play-worn grooves of those records made by singers whose vocal inflections were called ‘quintessentially English. I won’t name them). But of course, how English is it to fail at that? It’s so ‘English’ to fail at representing the English. The failure of the English flag to unite and represent the English is such an ‘English’ failure. Ha ha ha. This is where the clichés come in again; this is where they’re important. When we use a cliché it covers up our meaning rather than revealing it. We hold that clichés meant something once, that’s why they’re still used, but used to no effect, now stripped of meaning and significance. So it is, I believe with the flag and with the Ravenscroft Social Club. The Club as I see it now, dingy and detached from the everyday, must be defined by its patrons who, outside, lead their own interesting lives. Inside they are stifled by the forced semblance of community, of people they’ve grown old with and stopped understanding. But they still go, presumably for the memories, for what it was and what they were. What was it like there thirty years ago, forty? Much the same I suppose. And that’s the point – it’s why there are no new regulars. But different too. What was it like at the time punk crossed into public consciousness? How did they react to race riots? To the ever increasing Asian population in the area? The context has all changed, back then their rules would have seemed terrible, surely. Keeping their doors closed while so many others were opening them. Could we perhaps admire the fact that they took a stance, however unpopular, even if we don’t admire the things they stood for? But I’m not even sure their rules needed defending. More likely seems the club, a meeting place for the white people of the area, doubtless, tucked away amongst the Asian community. And the rule seemed ok to most of the patrons, and to those (there must have been some!) to whom it caused some discomfort, the situation where questioning it would have seemed appropriate, never arose, or the presence of friends outweighed that unsettling urge. Anything for a quiet life. It’s easy to forget that not everyone is troubled in troubled times. 12. On the way downstairs I noticed three spots of dirt on the white flock wallpaper. Roughly circular in shape and quite well defined spots of brownish grey, muted against the raised surfaces of the wallpaper. The dirt had accumulated from constant hands brushing against the white, a place to steady oneself before turning down the narrow staircase. Two near the top and one at the bottom. 13. The third time I went there was the worst, and last, incidentally. Of course, I didn’t know at the time. It was telling my mum about that third visit that prompted her to tell me the rule about black and Asian people not being allowed in, and I vowed never to go there again. Then came the guilt, wondering whether or not I was just using that to mask my own aversion to the place – which is something abstract, I’ve tried to pin it down, but to little avail. The thought of that dirt on the wallpaper, the three spots, repulses me, and yet I instinctively find my arm rising and the palm resting on the spot, defining yet more that little circle of dust and grease, the perfect place to push onto and guide yourself down the stairs, spots covered with the dirt of the rest of my family as well as my own. Sitting in the Ravenscroft Social Club is that. A grimy history, partly my own, but not a history I recall being part of, or want to be part of. A history of not dancing on sticky dancefloors, or ash faded seat covers with little iridescent rings on black and yellow cigarette burns, the whiff of alcohol, coarser on their breath, the hair, teeth, fingernails the same sticky yellowish grey. A smile. The slabs of colour on the light box flick on and off, always the same sequence, the same records, the same people not dancing. It was someone else’s history, that they were too proud of, or not quite proud enough of to pass down properly, dying out. We can paint over the spots on the stairs, but the other is a deeper set grime, one that has stripped away the veneer and cracked the wood underneath, his history, their history and mine. The only difference being that I don’t want it. Did they? I presume they would’ve accepted better. I would’ve sought out better. Would I? 14. In the Headmaster’s office, all of us – “You’re not in trouble.” But you always sort of were with him, regardless, a loose tie or half untucked shirt was enough. Is that an unfair thing to say? I was told his wife is ‘very nice’, but aren’t they always? The defining moment, perhaps, if such things even exist, which I doubt was probably standing outside one morning and glancing over to see him standing right directly behind a boy on the steps there who was completely oblivious to his presence, much to the mirth of his better-positioned mates whose barely suppressed giggles eventually gave the game away. Ha. A pretty cheap laugh, really. But would the Headmaster have found it quite so singularly amusing if the boy had been talking about him? Had said what he really thought? Of course not. I see whenever I think of him. It’s an appropriate image. Despite him being my Headmaster for all of seven years I still know nothing about him, other than that his wife is quite nice anyway, which someone else told me. Despite his laborious and measured assemblies which he would deliver in what I think he hoped was grand and eloquent rhetoric, often offset by his hilariously terrible reading skills, despite those and everything else I still can’t imagine approaching him, I’d have nothing to say, even if I had something urgent to say. He would stifle it. Typically that isn’t a slight against someone, because not everyone is compatible, but with him I can’t help thinking that that’s the case with everyone – staff and pupils. Unapproachable because there’s no conceivable angle of approach – as though he’s hiding directly behind his job, behind something, authority, his own sweeping rhetoric or pride and we can see him there behind it and we grin along with it, half out of fear and compliance and half out of the sheer ridiculousness of his being there. Him! And we wait for whatever it is to turn around and discover him there, ending the joke so that he can grin all sheepish and realise it hasn’t been quite as funny as he thought it would be. But crucially that turn never comes; our hints just aren’t strong enough. 15. We were there in his office then, not in trouble. We had all won awards, in fact, mine being the French award. I had gotten the best mark in that years exam. It didn’t feel like much really, ours was a class of seven dossers, me included if I’m being honest and I’d managed to bluff the exam better than the other six. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time. Mine was by far and away the lowest grade receiving a prize that day. That was hardly the point. Or perhaps it was entirely the point, I can’t rightly say. The very idea seemed ridiculous though, disingenuous with the purpose of exams, whatever you think of them, and in direct contrast to all those “You aren’t competing with each other…” speeches that had been so commonplace prior to the exam period. The award, incidentally, was a book token for £7. We were to go out and choose a book, which would then be presented to us on the night. I chose Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ – her best and most humble effort by some distance. Of course all this came later. I went off to the award evening, despite no small reluctance on my part. It was a sad sort of evening. A man I’d never seen before gave a speech congratulating the pupils of the school on not fighting with each other after the events of September 11th. He was a large, self important looking man, wearing a heavy mayoral type chain across his shoulders and later, when my name was called out and I went up to collect my book I could see the exploded blood vessels on his nose, ruddy cheeks and tiny gimlet eyes which he fixed on me with a word of congratulation more perfunctory than sincere, an awkward, clammy handshake. It was a listless evening too, obligation over desire, the going through of well-worn motions. I’m not sure who it’s for, really, that weak little bit of ceremony, the rehashing of bland tradition. I couldn’t see the point. Do we owe the past this much? 16. Afterwards now, on the way home in the car. Despite the chore being finished with, I still wanted to stay fixed in the grey mist shell of my bad mood, my annoyance at having gone through something I saw as a waste of time. Rather that be glad it was over I felt the need to crystallise my feelings, hold on to them as tangible and not let go. I’ve always liked travelling at night though, the allure of the milky, brown-grey, almost purple sky over cities in winter illuminated orange by strings of streelights, a melancholy kind of light, offset by lewd shop frontages bristling neon. Still open. It wasn’t that late. The black tarmac roads glazed sickly orange, streetlights in slick rainwater. It was cold and we were in the car on the way home. I started feeling better, in spite of myself. My brother and I in the back, my Dad driving and my Gran in the passenger seat. We didn’t’ talk. That is, we don’t really. What was there to talk about anyway? What had it been like for her? ‘Nice’ I suppose. Did my Gran’s distance from speech night, and from us, lessen her ability to see the ridiculousness of it? Or was it my own fatal proximity that overcharged my own judgement? Was I condemning the innocent appraisal of talent and achievement (my own included)? I’m unsure. I objected, I think, not to the celebration of achievement itself, but rather the manner which those celebrations took. As if the school, that man I hadn’t seen before, the Headmaster were all saying “This is what we can produce” as if our achievements (my own middling one in French among them) defined us, as a school and as people, as though an exam grade were a characteristic, an end in itself rather than just a means to an end. Were these really the faults of the evening? We all agreed it was an evening for parents rather than the pupils themselves. So perhaps both my Gran and I were right. For her it was an innocent event. A simple matter of watching her Grandson’s be praised in public for what they had accomplished, watching them shake the hand of a man that, though she didn’t know this herself, she knew as well as they did. Whilst I, closer, could see the faults, and the little hypocrisies. As in assemblies where the pupils (us!) were constantly reminded that we were in the ‘top 20% of the country where intelligence is concerned’ and that, mysteriously, this was thanks to the school! Trying to stay annoyed I mulled all this over in the car as we reached a turning that would either take us straight on past the Ravenscroft Social Club or round the corner to my Gran’s house. She broke the silence and said: “Shall we go for a drink?” 17. Inside it wasn’t quite as I remembered it, but the image of the place that night will form my lasting memory. The larger section of the club was cordoned off, in darkness. I could just make out the dull shapes of it in glints of threadbare Christmas decorations. A smaller area at the front, crowded with two snooker tables was in use. Five blokes lounged on the tattered seats sipping pints, occasionally rising to take up a cue. Years of play didn’t seem to have made them any more adept at snooker, it was as though they no longer appreciated the game, no longer felt anything from the competition, but still they played on. My Gran half introduced us and they seemed about as interested in us as we did in them, a nod. A small serving hatch in the corner acted as a bar. We sat opposite, uncomfortable, reluctant. I stared blankly into the darkness, avoiding conversation that wasn’t to be had, partly annoyed at myself for playing up to the sullen teen stereotype, for being what those blokes playing snooker expected exactly. The other two times I’d been here I had felt out of the moment because others around me were enjoying themselves, but this time nobody was, nobody seemed to be, they didn’t seem to know what they were doing there, know what had dragged them through the chilly night to a poorly stocked bar and two battered snooker tables and each other. A sense of community bound up in their silence? Mid November and already a few worn strands of tinsel half heartedly heralded the arrival of Christmas. Afterwards, I wondered if, had I known, about the rule I mean, had I known that, would I have put up a stand in the car, said no, refused to go into a place like that on principle? Could I pass judgement like that on my Gran, a regular there for most of her life? And how self-motivated would that decision have been? It was better, of course, that I didn’t know at the time. Easy to judge the gruff men playing snooker for nothing, easy to mock the naff xmas decorations, but more difficult to stick to what you know, think, to be right, to condemn a part of their past, reject a part of your own, hurt someone, cause a scene. And for what? An outdated principle, probably forgotten or irrelevant to the men inside, held in the shabby décor. Perhaps they were ignorant of the rule themselves, like I was at the time. Easier to go in. Better that I didn’t know. Of course all this came later. We had a drink and then went home, leaving my Gran in there on her own. The next day my mum told me that they don’t let black or Asian people into the Ravenscroft Social Club and that’s when I vowed, that’s when I had my excuse to never go there again. _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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