Radio Boy

I cycled to Artie’s house and when I got there Artie’s dad, Ray, aka ‘Mr Cake’, answered the huge oak door (with bronze cake-shaped door knocker) halfway through eating a bun.

‘Spike! You look sad – everything OK? Come in.’ I think that’s what he said anyway. It was hard to fully understand with all the cake in his mouth.

‘I’ve been sacked from my radio show,’ I said glumly. Just saying those words out loud caused a pain in my heart like I’d never felt before.

‘WHAT! Why? Did you play some of Artie’s records and put them all to sleep?’ Mr Cake said, still chewing that bun.

‘I don’t have any further comment at the moment,’ I answered. I’d heard troubled celebrities say this when hassled by the paparazzi. Mr Cake laughed out loud at this and a load of crumbs came flying out.

Sure enough, Artie was upstairs in his headphone heaven. His parents had converted the loft into a hangout for their only child. Up there was a massive TV about the size of our dining-room table and a pinball machine. The walls were lined with hundreds of records. Artie’s collection was more like a record library. Radio stations would have less. Most stations only seem to have one CD actually, as they just play the same songs over and over.

I walked over, yanked one of his headphones dramatically away from his ear and yelled, ‘THEY SACKED ME!’

Then I collapsed on to his bed. Artie stopped the record he was listening to. This he had to do with care and precision. You’d think he was a nuclear scientist handling plutonium and any sudden movement might blow the whole world up. Really, though, all it involves is lifting a needle from the record on the turntable. All in the time it takes to get your shoes on. When he could have just pressed PAUSE on his phone.

‘Spike, what are you talking about?’ Artie said as he stood over me.

‘Apparently, no one listens to my show.’ I put my head in my hands. I told him exactly what had happened, sparing no details. The owl took it all in. Then spoke.

‘So … you just give up now? Where’s the fight in you? Gone, just like that? Can’t mean that much to you then.’

‘I’ve been fired. From a volunteer job on hospital radio. How will I ever be a radio star now?’

‘By not giving up,’ said Artie.

‘Who’s giving up?’ said a voice from behind us.

My other best friend had arrived. She has a habit of appearing out of thin air. It’s as if she lives in another dimension and is beamed into our world from time to time. Her earth name is Holly. Elf-like in appearance, with piercing blue eyes that see right through you. My mum once said – a bit cruelly – that her ears stick out so much she ‘looks like a monkey’.

However, no one would ever say anything like this to Holly’s face as that would be a HUGE mistake. Holly may not be one of the super-popular girls at school, but she is seriously tough. A brown belt in karate, she even takes part in big competitions and is unbeaten in eight fights. I once asked her why she didn’t use her skills on the kids at school when they made monkey noises behind her back.

She looked at me intently and said, ‘The first and most important lesson Sensei Terry teaches you is when not to use martial arts; it’s about self-control, Spike.’

No idea what that meant. If it was me, I’d have karate-kicked Martin Harris, the school bully, all the way down our high street. Of course, it wouldn’t be me because you couldn’t pay me to go to Sensei Terry’s karate class. Despite all my mum’s attempts to get me to ‘join in’, I don’t like any kind of activity that involves sport or being in a group. Apart from AV Club. But that’s different.

I’d also say Holly is probably the smartest out of all of us. Top of the class in science. I think she even knows more than the teacher. I don’t know any other kid who can use a soldering iron. She used it to repair the AV Club printer. Her dad, Timothy Tate (‘Please, Spike, call me Tim’), is an inventor. Just not a very successful one. All around their house are empty bits of circuit boards and the wiry guts of computers. In the shed, it’s like a graveyard of his failed inventions.

Personally, I liked his singing kettle that stopped singing when it was boiled. Sadly, it only ‘sang’ one song so people got fed up with it and it was voted Most Irritating Product of the Year. This was made worse by the fact that the number-two place on the list was taken by another of his ideas, a pillow that cut your hair as you slept. This ended up on the teatime news, with buyers of the Pillow Barber complaining that not only were random bits of their hair missing, but also bits of their ears too. Two hundred Pillow Barbers now rest in pieces in the shed under a blanket, as if hiding their shame from the world.

As I’ve already said, me, Holly and Artie are the only members of the AV Club. None of us will ever be one of the cool kids at school. Life has just decided it. I’m not saying we aren’t all great kids (as my mum is always telling me), but being ‘cool’ is like being an A-list star in those celebrity magazines. These A-listers may not be the smartest or even the prettiest, but they are the chosen ones and they get to walk on the red carpet.

Holly always says, ‘Who cares? We’re not one of the pinheads. Good.’

I’m not so sure. Sometimes I quite fancy a walk on the red carpet. I’d secretly hoped the radio show might bump me up a few letters in the celebrity alphabet to at least the O-list or the M-list. This would mean the girl of my dreams who I was going to marry, Katherine Hamilton, would not only talk to me, but not mind being seen talking to me. She’s red carpet. I’m the kind of carpet your nan and grandad have that looks like someone’s been sick on it every day for the last fifty years.

Artie, Holly and me go way back. Our mums have been friends since they met in birthing class. They bonded instantly over a love of gossip, fixing other people’s lives and elasticated maternity pants. The three of them are a powerful union. The league of mums.

Anyway, back to the story unfolding in Artie’s room.

‘I’ve been sacked from my show,’ I said to Holly.

‘Well, proves what an idiot that programme controller is,’ she said. ‘That’s why he isn’t working in a proper radio job. Running his fake station. Loser.’

‘Um. Yeah,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t mean you’re not a great radio presenter,’ continued Holly. Her head jutted forward to really drive the point home.

The three of us chatted it over before I had to ask one final question.

‘Please be honest: do you want me to resign?’ I said.

‘From what?’ said Artie.

‘The AV Club. I’ve been fired from an unpaid radio job. I’ve brought shame on you both.’

Holly rolled her eyes. ‘Spike. If you quit, then you’re not my friend any more. Only losers quit. I’ll kick your backside if you do and put you on your mum’s ward.’

‘But radio’s my thing,’ I said. ‘The only thing I want to do. The only thing I’m good at. What am I meant to do now?’

‘Well …’ said Artie. ‘We’ve been promised a school radio station for ages. Why don’t we ask again about it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Holly. ‘No more being fobbed off. We’ll show them the petition again. And you can present. You’ll be back on the radio in no time. I mean, no one else in the school has your experience, do they? I’ll make a list of action points.’

Holly is super-organised and loves making lists.

That’s what friends do. Lift you up when you’re down. And offer you out-of-date cakes.

The wafting aroma of pony poo told me I was nearly back home at 27 Crow Crescent.

Dad’s car would be caked in the stuff after taking my sister to some awful pony gymkhana. For those of you lucky enough not to know what a gymkhana is, it’s like a strange kind of sports day for ponies. All watched and cheered on by people with names like Tamara and Fenella.

One day last summer I was made to go to one of these events and help out. Worst day of my life. I was forced to wear a high-visibility jacket that would have been too big for a giant, and run the car park. It got even worse when Katherine Hamilton, the girl of my dreams, turned up with her mum. No girl is impressed by anyone in an oversized high-vis jacket. I couldn’t hear them laughing in their car, but I could guess they were, just from the small clues. Like the finger pointing at me, and them being doubled over in hysterical laughter.

My sister’s pony is called Mr Toffee. Mr Waste of Money would be more accurate. This super-sized pet gets better shoes than me. If you look up the word ‘pony’ in the dictionary, it should say ‘angry, pooing motorbike’. Why would any sane human want to sit on an animal that can go crazy and run off at any moment? They are huge beasts, yet will head for the hills at top speed at the mere sight of a packet of crisps. Sometimes they just decide to throw you up in the air and break your bones for the pure fun of it.

I could see Dad out the front of our house de-pooing his car. My sister was nowhere to be seen of course. Probably counting her new rosettes and making space for them on her bedroom wall. Dad’s car is not a BMW like Artie’s dad’s. We had to sell our decent family car for a second-hand one to fund Mr Toffee’s stable fees. So now we travel around in an estate car from the olden days all so Mr Toffee can sleep in luxurious five-star accommodation – with en suite hay. I’m talking wind-down car windows. It’s the colour of sick. Dad says it’s ‘golden sunrise’, but, trust me, the only way you’d ever see a sunrise this colour is if the world was ending and the sun was throwing up into the sea.

Whenever Dad picks me up from school, I ask him to park a few streets away so no one can see him. Often he will think it’s ‘hilarious’ to wait for me right outside the school gates, playing nursery rhymes at full volume and yelling at me, ‘Got your favourites on, Spike!’ Dad’s very funny. To himself.

I think he does all of this because his job is sooooo boring. He’s the manager of the local supermarket, but he used to be cool once, a very long time ago. He was a drummer in a band and that’s how Mum met him. Mum makes us all feel a little bit sick when she starts telling ‘our story’.

‘Your dad was in the coolest band in town; everyone was talking about them being the next big thing. One night after a show I invited myself backstage and we kissed.’

I’ve seen photos (no videos as they hadn’t been invented back then; I think people drew on cave walls) and maybe it was a different time, but you don’t see many famous bands these days with all the members wearing eyepatches.

‘We were called the Pirates you see, son. That was our gimmick. If you liked a girl in the crowd, you lifted up your eyepatch, like I did when I spotted your mum,’ Dad would confide, creepily.

It turns out they weren’t the next big thing or even the one after that. Sadly, the Pirates broke up on the cusp of being signed to a major record label at the age of just eighteen. Mum says we aren’t to ask Dad about what split the band up (‘it could upset him’). But I heard them talking about it late one night. They’d been at a party and Dad had bumped into the Pirates’ former lead singer, Tom Dibble, who now runs a tanning salon in town. It was the first time I’d ever heard my dad swear. After playing Count the Swear Words (seventeen, including one I didn’t understand; Holly did when I told her – she said her mum called her dad it once when he shrank her favourite jumper), I finally found out what broke up the band.

It would appear that Tom, the Pirate singer, took the rock-and-roll behaviour too far. Despite having a girlfriend, he thought it would be no problem to have a spare one. The only problem was that the spare one turned out to be my Aunt Charlotte. Dad’s sister. When she discovered she was the bonus girlfriend, she came home in tears and Dad had a fight with his Pirate bandmate in the middle of a show. Oh, wouldn’t you have wanted to see that? Two pirates fighting live on stage – walk the plank, Tom! As the other pirates tried to break up the fight, the microphone got smashed into Pirate Tom’s teeth. A tooth was knocked out and into the drink of an audience member.

Tom really did look like a pirate after that, it would seem.

Despite much dental work, the Pirates had ended up with a lead singer with a slight but very audible whistle when he sang. The record deal never happened and they split up a few weeks later. Sometimes Dad is all fun and laughter until certain songs come on the radio and it will take him to his dark Pirate times. Then he starts staring madly into the distance, mumbling to himself the words of the band’s biggest hit, ‘Pirate Party in My Pants’.

‘Pirate … party … pirate p-p-p-p-PARTY.’

Now Dad looked up from cleaning pony poo off the wing mirror of the old-mobile.

‘You’re back early. Everything all right, Spike?’ he asked, unaware that the information I was about to give him was going to change our lives forever.

‘Not great,’ I said. ‘I got fired from hospital radio.’

Dad put his serious face on. Frowning and everything.

‘Sorry, son,’ he said. He stretched his back. ‘That must have been awful for you.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘life sometimes isn’t very fair. But I’m telling you now, if you really want anything, there will always be setbacks along the way. What’s important is how you handle them. No one gets anywhere without struggling.’ Dad looked at me, seriously. ‘Every day I wonder what could have been with the band. If we’d worked things out better, or if I’d taken up the offer to join the Dead Giraffes …’

After The Pirates broke up, Dad was offered a drumming spot in another band, the Dead Giraffes. However, disillusioned with fame and fortune, he joined the trainee management scheme at the supermarket he now runs. He’s done well.

Not as well as the Dead Giraffes though, who went on to have five number-one hits in thirty different countries.

‘But … how do I keep going?’ I asked, bringing him back from one of the thousand-yard stares that goes with him reminiscing about his drumming glory days.

‘Simple. Get back on the horse.’

‘The horse?’

‘I mean, find another show,’ said Dad. ‘Get back on the radio somehow.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I pointed out. ‘Although Holly wants to make the school finally start its own radio station …’

‘That’s the spirit!’ said Dad. ‘Or just do it yourself. You watch all those kids with online shows, but it’s not just videos. There are online radio stations too, Spike, playing much better music than all that pop rubbish you hear now. I love this one called New Music Is All Rubbish. It’s a brave new world out there on the interweb. Why don’t you launch your own one? Do the Spike Show.’ Dad’s serious face changed into his excited one. Which is maybe scarier.

‘Where from? I don’t have a studio,’ I replied. He obviously hadn’t thought it through. What my dad said next will go down in history as the dumbest idea ever.

‘Do your show from the shed.’

An innocent suggestion from a dad trying to help out his desperate loser son.

But those fateful words started this whole mess.

‘WHAT? The shed! The buried jungle temple? Where a whole community of spiders with fangs and rats live? Are you kidding me, Dad?’ I yelled.

‘Spike! You’re missing the bigger picture,’ said Dad, warming to his idea now. ‘You’d be your own boss: no one to fire you or tell you what to do. We’d have to keep it a secret from your mum or she’d never allow it. Your mate Holly can get it up and running, I’m sure. Ask Mr Taggart, the AV Club teacher, for some help. I’ll help you too. Don’t do what I did and walk away from your dream. Chase it.’

‘Dad, have you ever heard of anyone doing a radio show from a shed? It’s pathetic. Look, it’s OK, Dad. Keep your shed. It’s got all your paint pots and the lawnmower in and it’s covered in thorns and weeds. I’m going to chill out in my bedroom.’ I left him to his car-cleaning, my head low and dejected. I dragged myself upstairs.

As I climbed the stairs, I bumped into my sister, who’d been listening to everything.

Her eyes narrowed as she said, ‘Oh dear. Little brother’s been sacked and is now launching Loser FM live from the shed?’

Amber was loving this. Remember: her weekend highlight would’ve been sitting on Mr Toffee’s back, being carried around a field, praying the beast didn’t launch her into the air just for a laugh.

‘Not now,’ I sighed, and tried to get past.

But Amber blocked the way. She was dressed in her riding gear and stank of manure and attitude. A fresh red rosette the size of her face was pinned to her.

‘Maybe you could do the show from the toilet? Perfect for your material,’ she kindly suggested.

‘Ha ha,’ I said. I was too tired to think of a comeback.

Her smile widened. ‘Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice you’ve doodled Katherine Hamilton’s name all over your desk.’

‘YOU’VE BEEN SNOOPING IN MY ROOM!’ I yelled.

‘It’s so sweet,’ she replied. ‘The first flush of romance …’

‘I hate you,’ I said. I could feel – with horrified embarrassment – that I was about to cry. I took a deep breath.

Suddenly, Amber’s face softened. ‘I don’t know why you like her so much anyway,’ she said. ‘She’s horrible. She is not the girl you were friends with in primary school.’

I was confused. Was Amber being nice now, caring about me?

I wasn’t confused for long.

‘Anyway, so long, loser,’ she said. And with that she walked off.

As I flopped on to my bed, I heard a key in the front door. My dog Sherlock ran under my bed as if he knew a storm was coming.

Mum was back.

I heard her and Dad talking briefly, and the word ‘sacked’ sounded loud and clear. Then it went quiet. Too quiet. Eerily quiet. My mum swore. Very loudly.

‘The loser! I’ll stick his headphones …’

Technically it’s impossible to do what she suggested to Barry Dingle – the Beyerdynamic headphones are very big – but I’d have liked to have seen her try. Sherlock pushed himself even further under the bed.

Then footsteps. Mum was coming up the stairs. No, running up the stairs. Two or three at a time. The whole house was shaking. Carol Hughes had been given bad news and things were about to go NUCLEAR.

‘WHERE is my poor angel?’ Mum asked before she was even in the room.

Now she was here, almost ripping my bedroom door off its hinges. The first thing I noticed was the red, angry face. You could’ve seen it on Google Earth. My mum isn’t tall and not really short either, but she has the power of ten men, according to my dad.

‘Tell me what that SLAP-HEADED coward did! Tell me everything!’ Mum yelled as she stood in my bedroom, hands on her hips, her tracksuit soaked in sweat from her Zumba class.

‘Well … um … he fired me.’

‘Why?’ asked Mum.

‘Apparently no one was listening.’

Mum stared out of the window and started chewing her bottom lip. This wasn’t good. This meant she was hatching a plan.

‘RIGHT! It’s clear to me that what you need now is a new hobby. It’s not going to do any good moping around here, Spike. You have to make some new friends,’ Mum declared.

‘I already have friends and don’t want to join any more clubs, Mum,’ I pleaded.

In the vain hope of moving me up the school popularity rankings, my mum had made me join various clubs. Gymnastics, scuba-diving and Air Cadets. I hated them all.

My gymnastics career ended with me crashing into some parents who had the misfortune to be sitting near my high beam. Scuba-diving ended when I dropped an air tank on to the instructor’s foot, breaking not one but several bones. He swore and said a good selection of the words my dad said that night when I learned the story about Tom, the Pirates’ lead singer.

Air Cadets ended after the first meeting at the community centre when Squadron Leader Gary told Mum that many of his cadets went on to join the air force and fly fighter jets.

‘No son of mine is sitting in a rocket with wings, firing bombs at dangerous people, plus his ears play up just flying on holiday to Spain,’ were my mum’s final words.

Now, though, her mind was made up and resistance was futile.

‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Sensei Terry has a spare place in his karate class. I’m calling him now to sign you up.’

‘Oh, please don’t—’

‘My mind is made up, Spike. I’m only doing what’s best for you,’ she said. This was one of my mum’s classic catchphrases. Along with:

 ‘It could kill you stone-cold dead in seconds’: applied to almost anything and everything, from food that is seven minutes past its sell-by date to swimming within an hour of eating a ‘heavy meal’.

 ‘What would people say?’: again, Mum is constantly worried about what neighbours and friends might say, like when my sister Amber said she wanted to get her ears pierced. This got a record high score of three Mum catchphrases within less than three seconds. ‘You want YOUR EARS PIERCED, AMBER? No way, madam. A dirty, infected needle could kill you stone-cold dead in seconds; what would people say? I’m only doing what’s best for you.’

I could only think of one way of getting out of this. Use my mum’s worry that danger lies round every corner. I think she gets it from working at the hospital.

‘Isn’t karate a bit … dangerous?’ I said, mock-innocently.

But she was wise to me. ‘Sensei Terry is all about avoiding violence,’ she said. ‘He’ll teach you to protect yourself. From murderers and that. Just what you need.’

‘I don’t need protecting from murderers.’

‘You never know,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Holly goes, doesn’t she? So you’ll have a friend there. It’ll be fun.’

‘Fun’. Now there’s a word I’d love to ban. ‘Fun’ is a word parents use to describe something that’s rubbish or boring to try to kid you it isn’t.

No, karate wouldn’t be fun. It would be yet another painful reminder that sport and me hate each other.

These are my two favourite things to do at school:

1. Closing my eyes and imagining what it would be like to throw Martin Harris into a pit of snakes.

The snakes won’t have eaten for a year and will have been told that Martin killed their Snake Dad. Martin Harris is officially my School Enemy Number One. Most of us have a nemesis. Someone who was put on this planet to make your life a misery. You’ve done nothing to them, and leave them alone, but they somehow find you and it’s as if you’ve stolen everything they’ve ever owned. Dad tells me you also get them when you’re a grown-up. The supermarket area manager is his. Though I doubt his nemesis once tried to shove his head down the toilet.