so I could see Dad’s chest reflected in the mirror as he put on a string vest and the shirt he’d just ironed. Dad’s chest’s as hairy as a cress experiment.) ‘Wish I could be thirteen again.’
Then, I thought, you’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like.
Dad opened up his wallet and took out three pound notes. He hesitated and took out two more. He leant through the doorway and put then on the chest of drawers. ‘A little spending money.’
Five quid! ‘Thanks, Dad!’
‘Don’t spend it on fruit machines, though.’
‘’Course not,’ I answered before the ban spread to arcade games. ‘They’re a total waste of money.’
‘Glad to hear you say so. Gambling’s for mugs. Right, it’s now’ – Dad looked at his Rolex – ‘twenty to two?’
I checked my Casio. ‘Yes.’
‘You never wear your granddad’s Omega, I’ve noticed.’
‘I, er,’ my secret bit my conscience for the millionth time, ‘don’t want to accidentally damage it.’
‘Quite right. But if you never wear it, Granddad might as well’ve donated it to the Oxfam shop. Anyway, my session winds up at five, so I’ll meet you back here then. We’ll have dinner somewhere nice, and then, if the girl in Reception isn’t mistaken, Chariots of Fire is showing at the local flea-pit. Perhaps you can track the cinema down this afternoon? Lyme’s smaller than Malvern. If you get lost, just ask for the Hotel Excalibur. As in King Arthur. Jason? Are you listening to me?’
Lyme Regis was a casserole of tourists. Everywhere smelt of suntan oil, hamburgers and burnt sugar. My jean pockets corked with a crusty hanky to foil the pickpockets, I waded along the high street. I looked at the posters in Boots and bought the summer edition of 2000 AD in WH Smith for 40p. I rolled it up and stuck it in my back pocket. I sucked Mint Imperials in case I met a suntanned girl who’d take me upstairs to one of those saggy houses with seagulls screaming on the ridges, and draw her curtains and lie me on her bed and teach me how to kiss. Mint Imperials’re hard as pebbles at first but they distintegrate into sugary mush. I looked in jewellers for an Omega Seamaster but as usual there weren’t any. A man in the last one told me I should be looking in antique shops. I spent ages in a stationery shop in a trance conjured up by all the perfect pads. I bought a packet of Letraset and a TDK C-60 cassette to tape the best songs in the Top 40 off Radio 1 on Sunday. Nearer the harbour were clumps of Mods, bags of Rockers, a chain of Punks and even a few Teds. Teds’re extinct in most towns, but Lyme Regis’s famous for fossils ’cause of the shale cliffs. The Fossil Shop’s fab. It sells conch shells with titchy red bulbs inside, but they were £4.75 and blowing all my money on one souvenir’d’ve been daft. (Instead I bought a series of thirteen dinosaur postcards. Each one’s got a different dinosaur, but if you put them end to end in order, the background landscape joins up and forms a frieze. Moran’ll be pretty jealous.) The trinkety shops’re full of inflatable octopuses, stunt kites, buckets and spades. There were these pens. If you tilted them, a strip of colour slid away to reveal a naked lady whose bosoms’re two sawn-off missiles. The strip’d slid down to her belly button when a voice said, ‘You gonna buy that or what, sonny?’
I was concentrating on what the strip’d show next.
‘Oy! You gonna buy that?’ The shopkeeper meant me. I could see his blob of gum rolling round his mouth as his jaws opened and shut. His T-shirt had a picture of a giant dick with legs chasing something that looked like a hairy oyster on legs and the slogan, IT’S JUST ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER. (I still don’t get that.) ‘Or just stand there getting turned on?’
I fumblingly jabbed the pen back in its hole and scooted out, deep-frying in embarrassment.
The shopkeeper tossed, ‘Mucky little bugger!’ after me. ‘Buy yourself a dirty mag!’
LYME REGIS WILDEST DREAMS AMUSEMENT ARCADE’s sort of built into the hillside park, on the sea front. Pudgy grim smoking men played this horse-racing game where you bet real money on plastic horses that move round a track. The track’s under a glass shield to stop you nobbling the horses. Pudgy grim smoking women played bingo in a closed-off bit where a spangle-jacketed man calls