Streakers Read online

  I flopped back onto my bed and massaged my eyes.

  I got into this dream analysis stuff about six months ago after watching a television programme about it. At first, I just looked up a few things that were in the dream and tried to suss out what my subconscious was trying to tell me. I did this a couple of times a week, usually after a weekend when I didn’t have much on. When something easily identifiable was in my dream, like a person I knew, analysing the dream helped me work out what I really thought of a situation, or what my true feelings were for that person. Often things that had been on my mind for ages, not necessarily problems, I felt comfortable with and stopped thinking about them so much.

  I also became fascinated with other people’s dreams and I got punters in the bar to tell me about theirs. One regular, who was having marital problems, said he had had a reccurring dream for years, about flying high off buildings and swooping through the town centre at night. He had seen a counsellor with his wife while they were trying to work things out and the counsellor had said it was connected to him owning his own business and the power he had. I looked up flying dreams and they can also indicate sexual potency and a temptation to women.

  That’s the great thing about dreamwork, there’s no right or wrong answer. Dreams tell you the truth about who you are, though, and the more honest you are, the more accurate the result. I’m right into it now and use everything I can remember to get the best analysis.

  Last night’s dream was so important because it was number fifty in a sequence I’ve been recording. This is the number they recommend you analyse to get an accurate picture of your entire psyche. Only problem is, last night’s dream had hardly any of the reccurring elements of the regular dreams. Hopefully, it’ll be a one-off, or all I’ll know about myself will be next to nothing.

  The phone rang again.

  I went into the living room and answered it.

  ‘Alex?’

  I didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Yeah, who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Brian. At the pub. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I need your help.’

  Two part-timers hadn’t showed up yet and there was already a queue outside.

  I agreed to go in and bring Sam with me.

  I made a coffee and opened the living room blinds.

  It was overcast and drizzling.

  I lay down on the sofa, wishing I hadn’t agreed to go into work.

  ‘Check the back pages out.’ Sam was standing over me, in his running shorts and vest, dripping wet. ‘News of the World and Mirror.’

  I sat forward feeling worse than when I first woke up.

  The Sunday Mirror was offering a £500 reward for Sam’s identity, while the News of the World had dedicated the whole back page to him and had some blurred photos, probably taken with someone’s mobile. The combination of being hung over and having Sam in my face had my head spinning. I gave him the good news about work and went to get dressed.

  We headed down the bank towards town, Sam in a denim jacket and woolly beanie, me in my green parka with the hood up. The trees were nearly all bare now and I couldn’t help wishing that summer was on its way, rather than leaving. Hands in pockets, we jogged the last half-mile.

  We came in the side entrance, took our jackets off and went into the bar.

  It was 1 p.m. and the same crowd as yesterday were in, singing and chanting for The Faccome Flash, who had become an even bigger hero overnight because he had put Faccome on the back pages of all the nationals: increasing TV revenue for the return leg… tourism’ll be up next summer… he’ll come to the rescue again, no doubt.

  There were four of us flat out, plus Brian, who was wandering around with his dishcloth.

  Sam caught my attention and we nipped out back.

  ‘Can you believe this?’ he was saying, pacing around.

  ‘Unreal. You could have any female in there, married or not.’

  Sam wasn’t listening. ‘Yeah, yeah, look Al, I’m going to do it again.’

  ‘They’ll be watching for you next time, Sam, think about it.’

  ‘If we plan my escape properly, I could get away. Imagine’

  The whole town had gone stir crazy in a little over twenty-four hours because he had ran across a football pitch in the buff. The papers were offering cash rewards for his identity. If Sam pulled it off again, he would be so famous it would be untrue.

  I snatched a cigarette out of my box and lit up. ‘Every time you escaped, the bigger you’d become. A myth. A legend.’

  ‘It’s got to be the return leg at Darlington on Wednesday.’

  ‘Tricky,’ I said, exhaling. ‘Their ground is built for the premiership. Security’ll be tight. I’ll tell you what, though, if you did, they’d make a film out of it. Imagine!’

  ‘Imagine!’

  We jumped up and down, hugging each other. We were going to be famous, loaded, women falling at our feet, TV interviews, film premieres, book deals, guest appearances…

  The bar suddenly went quiet.

  We walked along the passage and out into the bar.

  The front door was wedged open with a wheelchair. The person sitting in it with their hood up was getting soaked with rain. Talking resumed at a low level. Sam nudged me and I spotted Suzie Sellhurst. She was the mother of the lad in the wheel chair and she made her way through the crowd and stretched up and scribbled out her husband’s name on the sponsored walk poster and wrote her own. She nodded at a few of the regulars on her way out.

  Sam looked along the line of pumps at me: there would be a sponsored streak poster on that wall before Wednesday night.

  3

  The lad in the wheelchair was fourteen year old Christopher Sellhurst. He had a tumour on his brain and spinal cord. A year ago he underwent major surgery, which had left him slightly disabled down the left hand side of his body. Since then, his condition had worsened and his family had been raising money for a treatment that was only available privately.

  Last week, his father, Jack Sellhurst, dropped down dead.

  Sam’s night-in-shining-armour idea sounded great when we were in the bar. It gave us a real purpose to streak that we were sure would capture everyone’s imagination. By the time we got back to the flat, though, we knew we couldn’t do it. There just wasn’t enough time to organise sponsorship before Wednesday’s match, and the chances were, Sam would get caught, so if we said he was streaking for charity, it would be us that would benefit most from the publicity and not the charity. We sat up late, trying to figure out a way to drum up sponsorship and collect it, without revealing Sam’s identity.

  Monday morning.

  The dream was the same as before, except when I ran down the pitch and veered off to the right, Jack Nicholson was walking across the pitch carrying something. I couldn’t remember what, but I’m sure it was in a clear plastic bag.

  When you see a famous person in a dream it can mean that ‘you are observing a part of yourself that might hold that particular talent’. Being repeatedly chased in dreams means ‘your subconscious is trying to make you aware of some important quality you need to realise and express in your life. Whoever is chasing you is the personification of that quality’. So, my subconscious – which previously had been guiding me along nicely – suddenly felt that Sam had an urgent quality that resided in me, and Jack Nicholson and I share a particular talent. Super. So another fifty Jack Nicholson dreams and I should be onto something.

  I gave the Jeremy Kyle Show a miss, got ready and headed down to my mother’s for some breakfast.

  It was overcast, cold and windy.

  I cut through town, past the playing fields and school and headed in the back way. My mother’s house is an end terrace, two along from Sam’s mother’s.

  My uncle Tommy was huddled next to the back door smoking.

  Tommy’s fifty-five, five-ten, with brushed back, light ginger and grey hair, like a Teddy Boy’s, which he still dries by sticking his head half in the oven. Tommy has three vices: smoking – twent
y a day, probably less – forty, no filter; drinking – only a couple – at least six pints a day; gambling – Saturdays, odd one during the week if I’ve got a fancy for something – every day. He once bet the full house-keeping on Norwich to beat West Ham. It was a Wednesday night and as his unsuspecting wife lay in the bath, Tommy paced the living room with the radio on low, phoning me every ten minutes. Norwich scraped a 1-0 win and Tommy lived like a king for a week.

  Since his wife died a few years back, there’s been no one to keep an eye on him except my mother. God only knows how much damage he does to himself now sat in front of his TV late at night.

  Tommy was wearing a pair of old Rockport boots Sam had given him, blue worn out tracksuit bottoms and a three-quarter-length brown leather jacket from the charity shop. He turned around as I jumped over the fence into the garden.

  ‘Morning, shit-face,’ he said, discreetly nipping his roll-up.

  ‘Morning, handsome.’

  I gave him a cigarette and he snapped it in half and we lit up.

  I unzipped my parka and sat on the garden bench.

  Tommy sat next to me, elbows on his knees. His face was gaunt and unshaven, the scar around his neck bright red with the weather. He got that when he was twenty. He had been messing around with a shotgun with his friend and it had gone off, catching the side of his face and throat. The only visible damage now was the thick scar around his Adam’s apple and a few pellets still embedded in his jaw line. My mother said he had become so nervous since that day. That was the day his left leg started to shake every time he sat down, causing merry hell at meal times.

  He passed me Sun. ‘Sedgefield three o’clock, Al. Whatever you think.’

  ‘Doubles and trebles?’

  ‘Aye. If nowt comes to mind, we’ll just go for the favourite.’

  I’ve been gambling with Tommy since I was at school. My mother pretended to be annoyed, but she loved the bond between us. I remember when my mother found out I smoked. I was sixteen and it was becoming tiresome denying the cigarette dumps in the ashtray in my room were mine, so I came clean. My mother was devastated and immediately packed in smoking herself and has never touched one since. Tommy kept me in cigarettes the whole two weeks I was grounded.

  ‘Did you get to the match, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah, I was working.’

  ‘I thought the stripper

  ‘I thought the stripper might be you, but they say he’s got a big knob.’

  ‘Like me.’

  He snorted and re-lit his rolly.

  The back door opened and my mother rushed towards me with her arms outstretched. ‘Alex! Darling! I never heard you come in!’

  I bent down and she planted a smacker on my cheek.

  ‘There’s plenty of bacon in, I’m just going to the church meeting, it was put back because of the match. Did you go? What about that man? I tell you, the girls are going mad about him.’ She stubbed Tommy’s cigarette out on the wall without taking her eyes off me. ‘I hope they’re not over-working you at the pub, Alex. You need the free time to work on the book, that’s the whole point of you being there. If you can’t have free time, you might as well…’

  My mother went off on one about me wasting my life.

  When I was at uni, I entered a short story competition and won. It was published in the university mag and I got £25. Apparently, it was a big thing among the English students to win this competition. At the time, I was hardly attending any classes and was looking for a way out, so I told everyone I was leaving to write a novel.

  That was over two years ago, and the lie is kind of getting out of control now. My mother thinks I’m on the last book of a trilogy, which I must submit by the end of the year. I recently downloaded the start of someone else’s book from a writing website and gave it to her ‘in confidence’, to keep her off my back. I reckon I’m good for another six months before my career needs a change in direction, or Sam and I eventually get our act together and go travelling.

  My mother gave me another kiss and went out the front door.

  I went inside to make Tommy and me a bacon sandwich.

  When I came out, Tommy was having a coughing fit.

  I got him a glass of water.

  He straightened up and I handed him the water. There was blood down the side of his face and on his jacket sleeve.

  ‘That doesn’t look good,’ I said.

  He quickly wiped the blood off. ‘It’s nowt. It’ll be them throat ulcers again. I’m in next week for a checkup anyway, but don’t tell your mother, you know what she’s like.’

  We sat quiet for a while, eating our sarnies.

  ‘I wish I knew who that stripper was,’ Tommy said. ‘Streaker. What for?’

  ‘Every fucker in the club thinks they know who it is.

  I’d make a fortune.’

  My mother’s phone rang and I went inside to answer it. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Meet me at the flat in twenty minutes.’ The line went dead.

  It was quarter-past twelve, Sam’s lunch hour.

  ‘I’m doing a shoot,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll follow you out. I’m going to the club. Just for a couple. I’m not drinking much these days.’

  I pulled the front door behind us.

  ‘Don’t mention the doc’s to your mother, will you?’

  ‘I’ll not, but take it easy, you’ll lose those good looks.’

  Tommy gave me the finger and I headed back to the flat.

  Sam works in a printing factory during the day. He runs to work and back, so meeting me at lunchtime would mean another four mile run. I don’t know how he could even contemplate it.

  He was pacing the living room when I arrived.

  ‘I’ve got it, Al. I’ve got it.’

  I got past him and took my coat off and sat down.

  Sam knelt in front of me. ‘I’ll streak on Wednesday at Darlington. No sponsorship, no nothing. No mention of the charity.’

  ‘Eh? What’s the point in that? I thought you were keen on the charity thing.’

  ‘When I escape, it’ll be all over the papers. Then we come out and say the next streak’s for charity. That way we’d already be famous, and the charity benefits on the back of us. Not the other way round.’

  ‘How do you propose getting out of Darlington’s ground without getting caught? It’ll be impossible.’

  ‘If I get caught, I get caught. Who’s bothered? If I don’t, though, can you imagine the publicity?’

  If the weekend had been anything to go by, Sam would be on the front of every newspaper, TV, Radio – everywhere.

  ‘You see where I’m coming from,’ he was saying, kneeling down in front of me. ‘We can’t lose. And if I make it out, the next streak for charity will be the biggie. The swan song.’

  ‘I swear, Sam, they’ll make a film out of this if you get out of there.’

  Sam was hyper.

  I was worried.

  ‘You’ll have to sort the tickets today,’ Sam was saying, standing at the front door. ‘Just use my cash card.’

  I needed to go to Darlington’s ground. Plan his escape route. Find a bar close by to stash his clothes.

  ‘And make sure they’re as low down the stand as possible, so it doesn’t take too long to get on the pitch.’

  I couldn’t believe he was going through with this.

  ‘And, Al.’ I lifted my head out of my hands. ‘I’ve got you a date for Sunday night.’

  I went to the window and shouted down to him. ‘A date? Who with?’ Sam took off. ‘Sam! Who with!’

  4

  Wednesday night

  There were a few home supporters hanging around the ticket office as we approached Darlington’s ground an hour before kick off. The 25,000 capacity stadium looked like a fortress with the blue turnstile doors locked shut beneath the white stanchions.

  We walked around to the west stand, across the car park and out onto Neasham Road. Sam glanced back at the stadium as we reached the first h
ouses, and again when we came to the Golden Fleece. We went inside.

  The bar was packed with Darlington supporters.

  We got a pint and stood in the corner and watched Sky Sports News on the big screen.

  I got another round in and when I returned Sam was smirking.

  ‘What’s up?’

  He shook his head and sipped his pint, still smirking.

  ‘Nah, come on,’ I said, ‘let’s have it.’

  ‘Look in the mirror.’

  I did. ‘And?’

  ‘Don’t you think you look a bit peaky?’

  I checked myself out again. ‘Naff off.’

  We’d hardly spoken since we left the flat, apart from to play, ‘guess who your date for Sunday is’. And I already knew who it was.

  ‘So,’ Sam said. ‘You reckon it’s Becky.’

  ‘It is Becky and you’re taking the new secretary out, who probably wouldn’t go on a straight date with you, so you’ve dragged me into. Admit it.’

  ‘Might not be Becky – who, by the way, is looking extremely smart.’

  ‘It’s Becky.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Becky?’

  ‘So it is Becky.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘It’s Becky. You’re transparent.’

  I met Becky last year at Sam’s Christmas do. She’s thirty-three, blonde, and as far as I can remember, small and skinny. Blonde, small and skinny Becky who was going through a divorce and ended up jammed in a doorway with me outside Newcastle Civic Centre waiting for her bus. She’d won a bottle of peach schnapps, which we downed, swig for swig. I can’t remember leaving the doorway and for some reason, the next day, I bragged to Sam that I’d done allsorts with her. There’s no way Sam would have kept that to himself at work and I felt really bad about it at the time.