Cox 1983

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-598-7
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji's voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it's a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible. 1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cox, Tom

Leseproben

Parents

‘Fucking hell, I was a right miserable bastard back then. Look at me in this photo here. What a young git. I never should have had that bloody moustache.’

‘I think you look nice.’

‘You must be mad. That’s why you’re still with me. Anyway, yeah, that holiday in Cumbria. It was a weird house with all rooms around this big hall and then this cockpit at the top and there was us and Deborah and Richard and Sue and Jerry and Steve and Penny and all the kids and Steve made a soup with a chicken carcass and there was the woodsmoke and the combination of both made the whole place smell brilliant and we listened to that Dick Gaughan LP and it was just the perfect ambience. But it was bloody freezing and the owner in the house next door kept the heating controls locked and wouldn’t turn it on properly, so Jerry got his toolbox out and sorted it. Richard and Deborah went out for a walk in a blizzard then came back about twenty minutes later, being followed by a load of Herdwick Sheep, which scared Deborah out of her wits. Four of the sheep wandered all the way into the kitchen, by which point Deborah was upstairs hiding behind a copy of the .’

‘No, you’re thinking of a different holiday in the north west. You’re talking about the Forest of Bowland. That was the one with the sheep, and the big hall, and when Benji played a trick on you and locked you out in the snow. That was a few years earlier. This was Dentdale. The one with the big white cottage and the icicles and Mother Shipton.’

‘Ah, right, yeah, Dentdale. With the viaducts and the mills. We got there, it was the middle of nowhere on his massive bastard hill in the snow, and I got really ill straight away. Breakfast TV had just started and Jeremy Paxman was on it but everyone said he was too posh so he wasn’t on it for long and Richard kept making me these hot whisky and lemon and honey drinks to make me better. Every time we got the fire going, the room would fill with smoke, so we had to open all the windows and the Cumbrian wind blew in and it just got even colder.’

‘I remember you were sweating a lot and I could see your sweat freezing on the bed sheets. There were these big cold York flagstones on the floor. It was just like being outside. I don’t know how we’d stand that kind of cold now, we’re such wimps. I also remember bringing some hazel catkins in and seeing that there’s a female flower that’s next to the catkin that’s absolutely microscopic and pink. That’s the main thing I remember about that holiday. What about this picture, of the road? I don’t remember where that was taken.’

‘You would have taken it from the passenger seat because you hadn’t passed your test yet. We were in all that snow, on this treacherous lane way above everything that Steve took us on because he liked frightening everyone. That’s his car in front. We were on the way from Dentdale to Mother Shipton’s Cave, over near Knaresborough. I told Benji about her, that she was a witch and she’d predicted the Great Fire of London and the end of the world, and he wanted to know if the End of the World would be because of the radiation and how she had known about radiation in the 1500s. Apparently she said the End of the World would happen in 1991, and Benji said that would be fine anyway because he wouldn’t be here by then. He was always saying stuff like that. He had some strange certainties about his mortality for a seven-year-old. Anyway, Mother Shipton was wrong about the world ending in 1991. Or she wasn’t. It depends who you ask.’

‘A lot of those stories about Mother Shipton’s prophecies were made up by some bloke in the 1800s. Yet another case of men being the ones who rewrite history. Benji got quite obsessed with Mother Shipton after the holiday. He borrowed a book about her from the library and started drawing pictures of her when we got home, a little comic strip. I just remembered something else, which was really strange, and I haven’t thought about it in yonks. Mother Shipton had a moth named after her, and when we told Benji he thought we meant just one moth, not a species of moth. So then he drew Mother Shipton with her moth. Then when we got back from the holiday in Dentdale, the first thing I saw when I opened the door was a moth flying around the porch, even though it was February. But I don’t think it was a Mother Shipton moth.’

‘That’s right. That was it. And Benji rode off on his bike to his den on the gob pile but it had been wrecked by that rough lad down the road. The Barrowcliffes’ kid. What was his name?’

‘Lee. Benji didn’t think we knew about the den. I was always finding tins of spaghetti hoops and rice pudding that had gone missing, and I saw a couple sticking out of his rucksack, but I never mentioned it. I thought it was resourceful of him.’

‘It’s good for a young lad to have a den. I had loads when I was that age. I’d sit in them with my Davy Crockett rifle, waiting for Red Indians, as we called them then. Then developers built the high-rise flats over them. The dens, not the Red Indians. Anyway, not long after we got back from that holiday we saw Colin moving his stuff into Ethel Troutlock’s place.’

‘Was it really then that Colin moved in? I thought Ethel was still alive at that point. But I don’t remember all that much about her, really.’

‘No, she died in late autumn. I remember because there was mist over the pond across the road that morning and Benji was playing conkers. I’d found him using kebab skewers to make the holes and I told him he was going to stab himself and grabbed them off him and did it for him instead. Ethel had been a bus conductress when she was young on some of the first buses in Nottinghamshire. She had her own weird names for vegetables, some old family thing. She called courgettes ‘courgyjets’ and carrots ‘orange noses’. I remember one time she heard a Black family had moved to Ironfield and she moved all the valuable stuff in her front room so you couldn’t see it from the window. It turned out that the Black family was Marvin Morris, who I used to teach, and his mum and dad and sister. His mum was a nurse. His dad had been the manager at the hardware shop in Sneinton. I used to give him lifts to school sometimes.’

‘You’re making up stories. I don’t remember that. How do you remember this stuff?’

‘Honest truth. It all happened. He was a brilliant boxer, won tournaments, but one of the most peaceful kids you could ever meet. He would have never started a fight at school. He was a bloody good lad, Marvin. Anyway, that was a lot earlier. Colin moved in, and suddenly we weren’t the weird ones on the street anymore. All his instruments and hats and paintings and aeroplane parts and those robots he had. Cars slowing down on the street, watching it all happen. I remember people in the village thought we were from another planet because we had a herb garden, so fuck knows what they thought of him. I can’t imagine he ever went to the pub. I used to go in there to buy cigars. It would all get dead quiet when I opened the door, and then someone would say “How’s your ?” and everyone would piss themselves laughing. It was like walking into a cave full of early, part-developed human life. You expected to see pictures of woolly mammoths scratched into the walls. Colin wouldn’t have lasted three minutes in there. I think he’d had quite an interesting life in the sixties, been in a band, I can’t remember their name now, and directed a little film and all sorts, but then he’d fallen a bit on hard times, which probably is why he’d ended up next door to us. He wasn’t part of the hippie generation, though. He was much older than us. He would probably have been sixty by then.’

‘No, not that old. Forty-something? Fifties at most. Fifty looked different back in the early eighties to how it does now. He had one of those faces, like a wise old woodpecker. It did seem strange that he ended up there. I think it might have been something to do with a woman. That’s ringing a bell, but maybe I’m wrong. I asked him if he might like to bring one of his robots into school to show the kids and he gave me a long explanation about why he wouldn’t be able to, how di?cult it was to move them, which led to a very long lecture about exactly how he’d made all three of them, put all the wires and metal together, which I didn’t understand at all. It would have been great, though, and nobody would have had a problem with it. It was that kind of school. Someone would have seen a frog at the weekend and then you’d spontaneously have a whole day of learning about frogs because you could. Such imaginative kids. Miss Buttons would push all the chairs together around a table with a huge sheet of paper and everyone would add their own drawing to it until it became an epic story. Benji’s contribution would usually have an alien or some kind of strange creature from the woods he’d made up – probably something he’d dreamt up on of our walks in Derbyshire. He’d be drawing on this big piece of paper with a felt-tip in one hand and with the other he’d be twiddling Paul Hashimoto’s hair, which was this incredibly shiny jet-black hair, and Paul would be sitting there, entirely placid, like it was...