Faces Off

By Merlin Cullinan

The novel unfolds as a compelling five act drama. Each of the first four acts probes the lives of a distinctive character in turn, exploring their mindset, their inner dreams and aspirations, and the fascinating face they put on for the world to see. We see at first hand what goes on behind the rigid mask that they each present, and, as the story unravels, how their attitudes and behaviour come to be shaped by a set of intriguing circumstances, both within and outside their control.

Along the way, we encounter disturbing vignettes of a contemporary world that celebrates fame and wealth, and shows only contempt for those struggling to keep their life together from day to day. The turbulent characters in the novel present some harsh insights into the realities of winning or losing in Western societies today.

The final act throws light in the darkest of places, and uses it to tear off the actors' masks. It lays bare egos and selfishness, victimhood and survival, as it portrays the complexities of being human in a modern world. It sets a turbulent scene of conflicting ideas and values, virtues and sins, where there can only be one winner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785071058

Book preview

Act One

He first entered their world when he was twenty two.

Meanwhile, in the other, parallel world, life had run on in its cocooned dreams of nostalgia and promise, Princess Anne marrying Mark Phillips ten years before, hawkers of memorabilia trying to move their mugs and t-shirts quickly into the numbed hands of well-wishers. Marriage, fairy tales - that was what it was all about, and now crisply captured in colour, on TV, not like for the generations before, all black and white and monotone voices, like something off Brian Inglis’ All Our Yesterdays. Shakespeare’s winter of discontent would seem like a British summer bank holiday these days, what with what was coming their way and all. Disaster everywhere, military, economic, ecological, political, yeah, even fashion.

So in many ways it was really only life as usual, pretty much everywhere, except maybe this time for the price of oil. It all depended on social statistics – when you were born, how old you were, what accidents of time and relationships had brought you into being for this brief candle-life. People moaned, but most of them were now hooked on being signed-up members of the affluent society, and anyone who was threatening to take that away was going to be in trouble. Maths for most of these people wasn’t their best or first choice. They still preferred compelling stories, narratives, pictures, and they had fallen strongly for the idea that now there could be nothing more than abundance, more wages, money, bigger houses whose value would always and forever rise beyond even their own sunsets and on to their grand-children’s. Hey Ho.

This was a tacit political promise that couldn’t be delivered, but like the ends of rainbows, no-one was really going to stand up and say so. There would be a new Father Christmas voted in sometime soon, and then everyone could get back to partying and bed and the telly. Critics called it all vulgar and lost, this so-called society. Most of its inhabitants just said bring on more of the shallowness, the slick, the materialistic, only not with words of that many syllables. All that’s what we have been missing and we want it all – now. But the medieval mix of maleness and suspicion continues to flow through the country’s arteries – two of the few things hanging on in a world of transfusion. Time was more and more about the present, not really some non-existent nostalgic past. Now the country had a future based on today and tomorrow. Forget boring yesterday. Life is all about our fulfilled tomorrows, today, like as if some huge corporation that believed its own slogans really was delivering now. It was England.

∞

Who cares about the people the world has left behind? You don’t think about the people who didn’t get on the bus because it was full, do you? For the bus driver the world looked the same as it ever was, almost, but with bits of smoke and mirrors thrown in from new tower blocks behind old pubs. For observers who weren’t focusing on the road ahead, there was another kind of change. There was less time being spent now, like the Italians still did, on big collective family gatherings and reasons to all be together, except maybe for Christmas. It was about smaller units these days, people choosing who they wanted to spend their time with. It was an early sign of the move to worshipping individualism, like that move from the transistor radio blasting out to the solo indulgence of the Sony Walkman and all its descendants. The idea was to create a whole new private world in your head and keep the other one firmly outside. Tiny cracks in the walls of places like working men’s clubs were starting to show through. Sure, there would be a few traditionalists keeping a version of their places alive for a few more years, some even trying to transit from being bigoted male moaning places into family entertainment centres, this in a world where the very idea of family, the nuclear family, was now going nuclear in other ways. Maybe that suggested it and summed it all up – transit – like the ubiquitous Ford Transit van, the white steel horse that millions abused to shift their life from one gear to another, one business to another, burning off inefficient Leyland trucks and cars at traffic lights all over the country.

The other thing that was ingrained and bloody hard to wash out was that word class, and we aren’t talking school here. Class rules and expectations were still so embedded you often couldn’t see them in superficial looks. Class still drove behaviour, attitudes, perspectives, language, and your own lot were the first and quickest to point out your transgressions, where you stood, or thought you stood. Then the newer elements of colour came into the equation, upsetting the long parade of history book stalwarts, Drake, Wellington, Churchill, all whiter than white, well, maybe with a bit if ginger thrown in, the pale heroes of the setting red empire. ‘Know your place’ could have been the country’s motto for many years to come, with only one kind of final way out of the system, the one that involved a box.

On that small island geography played its part too. There were real and imagined differences between the counties making up the mainland, and then all the other sub-dividers, northerners and southerners, cocky Cockneys and Geordies, idiots and yokels and any other number of localised differences from village to village reflected in language, accents, quirks, all fuelling different levels of resentment, fear, low self-esteem and anything else that tried to tear apart the idea that somehow there was still a contented group out there waving the Union Jack. The only jolly good fellows were those that turned up at every Last Night of the Proms, the dickheads.

The place was many nations now, a tangled web, or other phrases dimly remembered from having that largely impenetrable Shakespeare shoved down your throat at school. No-one was passing his stuff around behind the toilets or in old brown paper bags. In some ways there was more to do than ever before, and then it seemed like less. Telly was still OK, records and drinking OK, but there was still a lot of really dreary stuff, poncy art exhibitions and people banging on about opera and ballet and books that were impossible to read by writers who didn’t have a life. Sometimes it was really exciting and then suddenly it all felt like a permanent wet February Sunday afternoon round your grandma’s with its death-clicking clock and homemade tasteless cakes on doilies.

You couldn’t get back in your own place for bloody DIY mags and half-finished botch-up jobs someone had started and then left someone else to clear up, tarting up the rooms like they were in some palace, when you could have just changed it all with a few posters and Bluetac, or paint others would puke at in your bedroom if you were still unlucky enough to be living at home. Calling a mate was another minefield. Your sister thought it was great and free to spend hours on the phone talking to all her sissy friends to discuss how the last breath they had drawn had been. It was called being connected. But if you tried that yourself the response was an immediate order to get off the line or pay the bill. The phone for many was still an evil device allowing escape into other domains that potentially weakened the insularity and control that could be extended in the house owner’s totalitarian regime. The old man, the one you were supposed to look up to, simply tolerated the preferred child, the real favourite, in everything she flaunted to do. Favouritism, really, was totally the wrong word in that place. And the father figure was a sick joke with a physical temper.

∞

If you weren’t trying it on in some bar to get the bloke to serve you an under-age round so your mates didn’t think you were a loser, then you were in one of the coffee bars with a jukebox and a pinball machine, hoping there was enough change around to select some decent Hendrix B-sides instead of either silence or some weird loop trying to drive you away armed with Jim Reeves and Val Doonican, or Ken Dodd and Rolf Harris supposedly performing songs. Machines dedicated to chill out were decades away.

The ones that weren’t with you that night were trying for that desired hat-trick of girl, petting and sex that your entire peer group bragged about, the extent and richness of their tales usually in inverse proportion to the level of their perceived conquest. In other parts of town there were kids on the street who’d known all about the downsides of that area since they could barely talk. It was a grim reality, not a nightmare. Dirty girls round these parts still wore knickers and said No more often than not, unlike their counterparts who couldn’t refuse because they were too drugged up to remember any negative words or phrases, too tired, or too down to put up a fight. Sex had eventually made its appearance for some as something real by this time, albeit still elusive, but there was a lot of lather about what it was supposed to be other than the dreaded procreation, and what you were supposed to do or not do to avoid crossing hundreds of invisible lines of no-go. Meanwhile, the pictures were full of cheap movies about window cleaners and chancers getting off all the time anywhere, with ever more grateful women. There were loads of dog-eared well-thumbed copies of paperbacks with apparently great insights into what things were all about – a paper minefield of orgasms and death, nymphomaniacs and sado-masochists, few of whom seemed to number among the sixth formers at St Kat’s, but were everywhere in the books. But that was it. You never could tell, really, and then suddenly in the cupboard where they kept the badminton stuff at the Sunday youth club, some specky-eyed spotty girl with a pony tail would be trying to get her hands on your bits, or your hands on hers, and you were mortified and excited simultaneously, the only thing redder than your stiffy being your face, as it felt to you under the resigned watchful glow of the single unshaded light bulb. You wiped the sloppy wet kiss away with the secret ferocity you used to save for the times when your mum would try and clean your face with her rough licked handkerchief.

∞

There were all sorts of bollocks going on about politics, all that stuff that took up endless time on the box, but the lure of the mysteries beneath a long Laura Ashley skirt and a taut smock-top took those dry things off the menu instantly, though you were more comfortable in the shy group that was called your male friends, whatever might have been in dreams.

Strikes, they were around then, but they were about other kinds of jobs, and who wanted one of them anyway, stuck in some factory for life and paying union dues to some Scottish geezer who was trying to bring all those poncy conservatives down? On the other hand, if politics meant turning the nation’s tellies off at half past ten and letting everyone freeze to death unless they had something to curl up to, then the sooner everyone became an extremist the better. Who cared that you were better off than that lot who had been told they had never had it so good in those recent shite years? The point here is, to be said again, that you’re in the here and now. That is, today. You don’t want a rosy new future tomorrow; you want everything today, if not sooner, and a pint of Skol to wash it down with.

You know, you could hire a burgundy-bodied Austin Princess with a mock black carriage top and be in Blackpool for the weekend before you knew it, freezing your bits off and having a laugh at someone’s wedding where the Asti was pouring freely. No way were you marching on some demo about bullshit in a soggy parka with a bunch of Guardian readers bearded up and professing they were perhaps a tad displeased with the Prime Minister’s position on certain matters of state management. Total crap, especially when you could be out hitting twats in football scarves that shouldn’t be supporting puff-London clubs. The principal point of life was to get through the drab bits as fast as possible and get on with the dedicated business of having a good time, at home or abroad, as long as abroad meant having everything the same as you could get at home only with the sun warmer. The foreigners you could do without, but they had to be somewhere, even if that also meant your parents, who had done nothing but abuse that descriptor, but were now going on about having their weird continental food actually at home, for God’s sake.

What you didn’t want was to be anywhere where what was left of the Army was, you know, really fighting with tanks and shit, where proper hard-core foreigners had some issues to moan about. Foreign remained anything hard to like or understand, at least for another ten years, when it would all change again. Obviously then, there was a lot of foreign around. As Ian Rush said when he came back from playing for an Italian club, it was alright you know, but they spoke foreign. Aren’t you right pleased that you speak English like a bloody native and don’t have to catch up with all them other types who speak a load of high-speed twaddle, eh?

∞

Until then, life hadn’t offered much. What you saw was what you got. There had been few alternatives, almost no points of comparison. The way had been long and hard, like staring down some hot straight road in summer, the sun making the tar shimmer, and nothing but white lines and the absence of shadows between you and a long cold drink – no cars, no buses, like the two-lane route wasn’t quite finished and so not yet really open, but it was still the way home, step after step, and you kept wiping the salt from your eyes, wondering how many more paces it would take to get there, like some tiring Roman legion pacing north to an eventually fruitless winter.

There, being the place called home, was not the space of comfort and refuge the word conjured up for many. Home was the place where you still had to do time before The Great Escape, a space held together with the mortar of rules, and bricks to block you up in other people’s ideas of what freedom and happiness were supposed to be. Basically, in this compound, you were handed no happiness and given no freedom. The tunnels to the light had not yet been completed. What real freedom might mean had still to be defined, but not confined. Freedom was somewhere different, not here, a light, but in this place all illumination revealed no immediate way out. No This way please, now hurry along, tripping over toes, blinking.

∞

Steven hadn’t had many choices. It wasn’t his fault his father who he reluctantly referred to as Dad had died when he was fourteen. He wasn’t exactly pissed off about it. The next bloke in line had pitched up with his mum before the funeral flowers had wilted, and for a short while it seemed things might even be OK.

Dad One always behaved like he’d signed a pact with the devil as soon as the waters had broken. He took an instant and permanent dislike to two out of the three kids he’d allegedly had something to do with, as though these quasi-miniature versions of his horrible visions of himself had just landed from outer space. A step-father might turn out to be someone who actually didn’t really step on you every step of the way, if you catch the drift, right.

He’d got used to being hated without explanation. The original recipe father didn’t go out of his way to put you down, he just did it on automatic, steering straight ahead at you, with a tireless passion. Dad One was the master at that. He was the one who should really have been called the Step Father. But you know, the follow-up act seemed to pick up on his old ways, like it was in the atmosphere in that house, and after a while it looked like the new arrival was going to be the Clone father, the Shadow father, a right pain in the Netherlands after all.

Steven was the delta all rivers and tributaries of blame flowed into. He had made the unenviable mistake of not pre-selecting his genes, and stood before his unoriginal family like a danger sign on an unfamiliar bit of road, red hair signalling jokers from miles around. Freckles added to the script, as if he had a choice about changing spots. Even when he’d tried that experiment to colour it with a filched pack of Schwarzkopf transformative hair shade, the basis of mockery shifted from hue to length. It was too bloody long or too bloody short, though of course by now it was no longer bloody, well, not for six weeks or so. Without noticing in the mirror, he induced other observations in others, all sharing consistent negativity, brother, so he also moved seamlessly from being a cheeky little short-arse to being a mumpy lanky layabout. The comments were laced and finessed through the confident slurring articulacy of whisky and gin, depending on whose turn it was in the home to slag him off for existing.

The woman he had formerly known as Mum, since Cow Bag was not usually received with much grace, found only words of support for the second bully she had now married. Well, that’s how he saw it. Years later it was, before he heard someone describe these blokes not as one-offs unique to rare families, but as a type, really common in those days if you’d got out and about enough to see behind the facades, and it all suddenly clicked into place – pub comic social giant, at home a bloody fireside tyrant. That was his experience of the idea of fathers to a tee. All smiles and rounds of half and half down the club or pub, and the hanging up of the laughing mask in the hallway, leaving the monster man to take his place in the big His chair by the fire, taking instant charge of the telly channel, demanding service, attention, silence, whatever, king in his pathetic little dominion, only you were one still trapped inside the city walls, allegedly safe from siege – how bloody ironic is that?

So, this accident of birth that had shaped itself into a male form and given the title Steven, arrived in February 1963, mocking Valentine’s sense of irresponsible romance, and fading behind the cliché of knowing exactly where you were when Kennedy was assassinated. Then again, later, after a diet of Beatles albums, it would all be reinvented with John Lennon catching a bullet in New York in 1980, much more important in memories’ milestones than Reagan or the Pope taking hits.

In between, from gurgles to pubescent party goings-on, you heard endless stories about three-day weeks, power failures, strikes and other stuff that made no sense other than the telly programmes all changed or disappeared. The neighbours talked about going to the dogs, the country not the greyhounds, useless (is there any other kind) politicians. Eventually, when the numbers fell, coming of age would get you a ticket to vote as one of Thatcher’s children. It would be welcome to a whole noo world again, as the Yanks called everything and anything new all the time. It would be the time to totally grab anything and fuck the rest kind of behaviour. You’d key a Range Rover and give the finger to the pricks that rode in them, but would have died for a BMW M-Sport 3 series. Class had shifting boundaries, and there were more ways to present your idealised self to the brave new world than ever before.

Then, still in the minority, you might not leave the boundary of school at fifteen or sixteen. You might stay on, and spend another two years with teachers getting ready for yet another set of exams, qualifications that were supposed to rocket you into a new kind of space, a university or some fast-track career path, some express way to show that this extra effort in applied maths or economics or history was all worth it in the end, you know, having ideas above your station, and all those other clichés meant to remind you by misunderstanding parents that whatever you tried to do you were just betraying your working-class roots, and you should be proud of that. Oh yeah.

Others couldn’t wait to get out, revving up their scooters and bikes at the gates, leaving cut-up ties strewn across the footpaths, and filling under-age friendly pubs from well before the last term was over, old Alice Cooper records still blaring out their anthems through the smoke and the jokes and the flirting.

Freedom now was in not having warders, er, teachers, except maybe now as your customers and, sir, clients. Even if you were still at the dubious conditioning facility called your house, rather than the optic assisted attitude adjustment centres called The Grapes, or the Crown and Crocodile, you were still one foot out of the claustrophobic world of chalk and cheese and onion pie, dinner at half past twelve and lumpy custard, cold showers and leery-eyed games masters.

Others wanted their own place as much, if not more, than putting all that education behind them and getting on with the real business of living under their own points-scoring system, and not something some bunch of jerks in a ministry came up with to tell you that you were going to be a net contributor to the country’s future economic pin-striped well-being, my son.

Now was the time to begin to look forward to experiencing the real-life experiences of flat-sharing, deniable astronomical long-distance phone bills, the mythology of the never-to-be replaced toilet rolls, disappearing milk, overflowing ash-trays, and pristine, still-wrapped cleaning devices, from dish-cloths to carpet cleaners. These and other delights waited in the wings for the hot-trotting freedom-seekers. Some took to it like the proverbial ducks, and they began to practice their almost natural entrepreneurial skills, suddenly emerging sans satchel and uniforms. There were glammed-up hairdressers, camp accents released in fey cadences, models with pictures coming up on covers where before they had only known taunts and jibes, bands suddenly beginning to build a reputation and a name out of the scratchy old gear they’d started with, tired drum-kits now abandoned in borrowed garages, and those who thought they had real talent starting to look for equals in the ads in Melody Maker: WANTED: Bass Player (must like Jack Bruce) PO Box 345.

Then there were the others, the ones with no plans, the ones who were dreamers or plain lazy or just waiting to be discovered. Some of these always managed to have money coming from somewhere, spending their days in places where cool points could be scored, plotting or declaiming about how their fortunes would materialize, or their fame, often by not giving a toss. Within months, a few would be turning up in their new cars, presents for making it to seventeen or eighteen, triumphant celebrations of survival into the latest version of a coming-of-age with lower limits. Some of the petty crooks and grassers joined the police; others fancied a chance in the Armed Forces. Some set their sights on the Civil Service and the ambition to become an Executive Officer sometime, keeping the country’s bureaucracies fed and fattening. Like with many emerging groups, there were conformists and rebels, shy shadow-dwellers and show-offs, meek and violent-natured types who now shook off schooling like a spring snake. They were all coming out to meet their world from a wide range of viewpoints. Apprentices, nurses, librarians, students in that weird world called tertiary education, trainee reporters rattling up stories about stolen wind-screen wipers and pensioners’ lost purses, thieves, chancers, already professional abusers of the State with encyclopaedic knowledge of how to get the most in benefits and handouts.

As some lined up to join banks in their new