Saving the World, One Mix-Tape at a Time

About the Author

Colin Johnson grew up and still lives in Leeds. Colin’s background is in academic research and technical writing, but he has also read a lot of science fiction and listened to a lot of music of all types. His experience of music and popular culture, in the novel’s unnamed ‘Northern town’, provides the backdrop for many of the key events and misadventures of the protagonist and his friends. When he is not writing, Colin rides a bike, tries to grow a wildflower meadow and enjoys time with his family.

Dedication

To my family and friends.

Copyright Information ©

Colin Johnson 2024

The right of Colin Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035837564 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035837571 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Andy Barlow, Mark Jessop, Fiona Lawson, James Robinson, Phil Walters and Ken Welch for helpful insights, comments, criticisms, and a few parties. Steve Griffin commented on some of the medical aspects of the narrative.

A key theme in the novel was inspired by the Philip K Dick short story ‘Imposter’, re-imagined for a Yorkshire setting in the late ’70s. However, there are a few episodes that are inspired by Iain M Banks and Douglas Adams, as well as some immortal punk rock and disco tracks. Brief quotations from the song lyrics form a minor but integral part of the narrative. (And, in my opinion, the playlist that inspires ‘Angie’s Mix-Tape’ is iconic, appealing to old and young alike.)

Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to June, Tatiana, and Alexander for their comments on the manuscript and narrative, as well as their tolerance, optimism and love.

Photograph credit: Richard Wilson.

Chapter 1

The Colourful Misfits of ’78

During that long year, we understood that something would happen and that it would change us forever. Something, I thought something had to happen soon. I longed for change, for a leap away from the ordinary world. Our school turned from a grammar school into a comprehensive and the old regime was deposed as part of an idealistic social experiment.

The new education system brought together a mix of kids from privileged middle-class and struggling families, as well as poverty-stricken hard-cases from the surrounding council estates. The kids we called ‘posh’ were often just different: perhaps they had a talent for literacy or numeracy that had eluded the rest of us, or they were good at sports. Sometimes it was enough to just wear Clarks Commandos shoes or ride around on a Raleigh Grifter bike. The economic state of the nation was so bad, that even these were obvious extravagances by well-to-do parents.

An uneasy expectation hung over a country, directionless and exhausted by the Three-Day Week, now confronted by the new challenges of the Winter of Discontent. It was all so dreary and grey, that something had to happen even if you had to think it up yourself.

People were muttering and complaining about unfathomable problems. Even we felt a brief unease, but our friendships and conspiracies had the more pressing urgency. The news talked of strikes and the Middle East, but we cared nothing about this outside world; it felt as dull as the 40-watt light bulb in our kitchen.

When even this light went out during the power-cuts, I came home from school to do my homework by candlelight. However, my problems were all simpler and much more interesting: I knew too many kids called Paul; I wanted to go out with a girl; and I had developed an over-active imagination.

In one of the English classes at school, I’d heard a quotation mentioned that ‘the imagination was the greatest instrument of moral good’. I wasn’t sure what it meant but took this as validation for the elaborate dream-like narratives that I thought up. In them, I was always the central figure, the courageous and modest hero, who saved the day.

‘My imagination will get me into trouble one day,’ I mused to myself. ‘It’ll be the death of me. But everyone will know my name and thank me for my selfless bravery. I’ll be a legend.’

My last problem was that I was one of those middle-class posh kids, but I had made friends from way back in primary school and I had to pretend that I wasn’t. They called me Nicky, and this was how everybody knew me at school assuming, of course, that it was short for Nicholas.

Once we hit puberty and I suppose hit was the right word, they started calling me Hairy, because I got a hairy chest before any of the other boys. But my first name is Nikolai because my father was Russian. This marked me out as very different very early on, even from the first day of primary school, and I made sure that not many people knew about my embarrassing father.

If I was ever asked about his accent, I had this line that he was Finnish, and this usually satisfied a casual questioner. Russians were always thought to be evil Communists, plotting to overthrow Western democracy, and I didn’t want questions or worse at school.

But, in all honesty, as I grew up, I became more and more baffled about my father’s account of events. He had married my English mother and had simply been allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. in the sixties to start a new life in a Northern English town. Both of my parents worked at the Polytechnic and seemed to be perpetually busy whenever I needed advice or help.

My father, also called Nikolai and after whom I was named, was a dour and humourless presence in the house. He preferred to be a gloomy chain-smoker, sallow-faced, sitting in his leather armchair, marking essays than to engage with me, his teenage son.

I was becoming a disappointment to him, but then, it seemed clear to me, his entire life was a disappointment. The marriage he left Moscow for was a disappointment. Whatever the promises that had been made to him, life in this country had proved to be a disappointment as well.

He sometimes criticised the British for being phoney, meaning that they were insincere or pretentious because they were tactful or observed social decorum. But, round our end, he was equally bewildered by the uncouth lack of tact and decorum from ordinary Northern folk. There were solipsistic tendencies about the sensitive and refined nature of the Russian character, particularly his own. I could well imagine him weeping in front of a couple of birch trees but ignoring a crying child.

He seemed more affectionate to his blue-and-white pack of Players Number 6s. A pack was never too far away, so that he could burn off the hours and minutes in his daily routine; you could almost set your watch by when he lit up, it was so regular. I really disliked his smoking from a young age because I felt that he played a fake role so that he could conceal and keep his distance. It was, quite literally, a smokescreen against the world and, in particular, his family.

It saddened him that, as I grew up, I took my role models and values from the British rather than Russians. But how else could it be? I was desperate to fit in and to be liked. He seemed so disconnected, unfulfilled, and unhappy that he never inspired me as a role model. In retrospect, with my professional clinical eye, I recognise that his strange detachment was brought on by clinical depression and his lifelong struggles against alcoholism. He never drank when I was growing up and still at home, and these were all past struggles that he thought were left back in the U.S.S.R. But unresolved issues have a habit of returning to blight you later in life. For him, they manifested as emotional detachment and a chain-smoking habit that replaced one addiction with another.

At the time, his detachment felt like emotional neglect. Perhaps this explained much of what happened afterwards. I must have longed to have a proper father in my life. Without that effective father-figure guiding me through my early teenage years, I turned away from my strange and self-absorbed parents early on and made my own way in life; aimless, unchecked, and unrestrained.

My friends and I formed a gang that lasted throughout primary school, and we carried on when we moved up to the comprehensive. Sometimes during the week, we met on the backs late in the afternoon after school or early evening. In the unremitting summer drought of 1976, we messed around in the wood, played tig or hide-and-seek or hot rice, and built a tree house.

There was even enough wood left over, strapped and tied together, to make a raft. We added empty plastic jerry cans underneath to make it float, and after that, it could take three of us if we were careful. The Saturday morning that we sailed it down that part of the beck in the woods was the highlight of that year. It must have been in early August during the school holidays.

I remember the ladybirds had swarmed in the sunlight, forming red encrustations on every blade of grass. Whole fields, burnt yellow by the drought, turned red overnight as if it was an invasion by an alien life form. We came home from the fields or woods and queued in the street for our turn to fill up some of the jerry cans with council juice from a standpipe.

In 1977, we celebrated the Queen’s Silver Jubilee with a street party, the whole country, child and adult alike, seemed to be excited by the event. We were in our early teens by then and less impressed. We made a nuisance of ourselves, ate sausage rolls, fell out and argued with each other and then with our parents, teased the younger kids, and then jeered the amateur magician attempting to entertain us.

The longest power-cut was in early November 1977. From then on, the gang had the custom of going outside during the power-cuts that winter, carrying torches if our parents had a spare one, because the streetlights were switched off as well. The only light outside was from the candles in the windows of houses or from the moon if it was a clear night.

It was barely possible to see in the greyness, but this made everything more challenging and entertaining. Once on the street by the backs, in the light of the torches, Jon rolled his eyes back and started moaning that he would search us out in the dark.

This was the beginning of his Imposter trance, and the gang knew what to expect, but the twilight in the streets made it more intense and scarier. We were a bit too old for this game, to be honest, but we wanted to scare some of the younger kids that hung around with us. Jon could be very convincing.

A’m gonna get all o’ ya! he would moan before trembling and falling into his special Imposter trance. "All o’ ya! Not gonna spare none o’ ya! Klaatu barada nikto." In the darkness, he claimed to transform into what he called an Imposter, before reverting into a human.

Fortunately, for the younger kids, the Imposter chased us in the twilight by following accepted custom. We were allowed to use the torches when we were being chased, but this made us an obvious target. Sometimes, it was better to turn off the torch and stand very still in the darkness, breathing slowly to suppress nervous giggling. Jon, as the Imposter, bounced the ball between us in time to the usual chant.

Hot rice, bounce twice

Shit pies, taste nice

We all scattered because we were now living targets for the Imposter, which took the ball as its weapon. The Imposter threw the ball at us and if hit, we too were subverted and became an Imposter. The younger children, terrified and screaming in the dark, were the first unwilling victims.

Then throwing the ball between us, a horde of Imposters cornered the remaining survivors. The Imposters would always win. In the end, everybody was subverted. The last survivor would pass through the Tunnel of Death, and Jon would come back to us, but would be unresponsive and then confused. He would talk normally for a while but then unpredictably, would fall back into the Imposter trance.

Ah can feel it, it’s happening, can’t stop it. You’ve gotta run! Help me, it’s hurting me! He paused for effect, so that the younger kids had the full benefit of the transformation. "Klaatu barada nikto." It was a line he’d picked up from a film on telly.

I soon learned that Jon’s older brother—an electrician we nicknamed Drillbit—had recurrent episodes of epilepsy. Jon was pretending to have a seizure and the postictal confusion that he must have seen on several occasions at home and hospital. Some of us may have known this at the time—although I didn’t—but by an unspoken agreement, this was a serious adult matter that was of only passing relevance and shouldn’t be discussed.

Everybody just thought that Drillbit was a bit slow because he spoke in stuttering phrases, interrupted by pauses as if the power had dimmed and had then come back in a flash of buzzing clarity. Folklore had it that Drillbit had got a near-fatal electric shock at work and that it had scrambled his brain. Jon himself never spoke about any of it, but was fiercely loyal and protective of his peculiar elder brother.

I realised later that Jon was probably redirecting his own fear by frightening the rest of us with his Imposter trance. Drillbit (his real name was Neville) was a nice bloke, not least because he found odd jobs for Jon and me on various building-sites as we were growing up.

You got used to the episodic and slightly haphazard nature of the conversations with him. A couple of times he did cartoons of our faces, sketching them with a pencil in a notepad. He did a ruthless job of capturing our most easily caricatured features.

With me, he exaggerated the slab-like flatness of my cheeks, my broad nose and my tooth-crammed smile to make me look like a hoodlum with emotional vulnerabilities. I still have Neville’s caricature and it hangs in a frame to the side of my desk at home. That carefree, handsome face looks out at me, confident and unsuspecting, the eyes still clear and undaunted by experience. I barely recognise the teenage Nicky from the times back then.

Jonathan Holdsworth was a good, quiet, hard-working kid. He was the quietest one of all of us, but he didn’t need anything to prove unlike the rest of us. It was clear that he was going to pick up a trade and take over his dad’s business with his elder brother.

In those years of the gang, he was the quiet and supportive one, the clever, unexcitable one who knew when to help and to say a few words to make it better. If Jon ever did anything malicious, it was because we put him up to it because, by nature, he was a bit kinder than the rest of us. He understood and even encouraged my unhealthy obsession with science fiction.

I can still remember the first few tattered sci-fi paperbacks that I picked up at a jumble sale and what an effect they had on me. They revealed a new alternate reality to me that had previously been hidden at a remove or at a tangent from this one. It was as if something always sensed out of the corner of my eye, suddenly came into full focus.

Jon and I read all sorts of paperbacks voraciously and indiscriminately throughout our teenage years. We started out with space wars, mercenary heroes, princesses-of-the-sands and death worms but we soon acquired tastes that were more sophisticated.

Paul Baxter was dapper and well spoken, quick-witted with his repartee and in the comedic turns that he did to amuse the rest of us. He seemed to be a born entertainer. Despite the broad humour, he had the coolest head when we got in a pickle, with an ability to get to the heart of the problem and to solve it for the rest of us.

Then there was the other Paul-with-Glasses, Paul Ronson. He was the most flamboyant and opinionated out of all of us, making us listen to the terrible mix-tapes that he made of his favourite tracks. He was the one that came up with most of the schemes that got us into a pickle in the first place. Somehow, he had a gift in persuading us to go along with his plans and to become willing accomplices.

I think that there were two reasons for this. He was the shortest one of the four of us, and to compensate, he seemed to need an outsized personality to get attention. The second reason was that his mother had died the year before and, nowadays, he lived with just his dad.

The need for attention was a trait that I understood all too well. People from back then would say that I was fun to be around and that I made friends easily but stood by them. That was because I needed them since I had no one else in my life. It was the ‘ceaseless longing of a yearning to belong’.

From those years of the gang and beyond, I owe my loyal, wonderful friends such a debt of gratitude. All I can do is recount the events and repercussions of that long year as an extended note of thanks, explanation, and apology.

***

I should also add that Jon was the only one of my friends who understood me when I made my odd references to science fiction. Nobody else really understood either of us when we started talking about the books we’d read or the weird sci-fi ideas that we’d come across. Nobody else wanted to go to see ‘Star Wars’ with us in February 1978 because it was a kid’s film.

Kids went down to the Elmete Lane shops to buy packs of bubble gum—chuddy, as it was called—that had three filmcards showing scenes from the film. By the time we got to watch the film, we had already seen the best bits from the kids swapping cards outside the shop or at school.

Giz ya chuddy an’ all, they would say, if they were trying to drive a hard bargain for a swap with a rare or particularly prized card in the series.

We quite enjoyed the film, I suppose, but afterwards we felt cheated that it hadn’t given us something more thought provoking. We were a bit too old for it. The music reminded me of Tchaikovsky and the LP of ‘Swan Lake’ excerpts that my dad sometimes listened to on our music centre. It had a small display that glowed an unearthly, toxic green like the eye of an alien invader.

The switches and knobs, silky and silver-coloured, seemed to be the arcane relics in a ritual that only my father fully understood. I remember that his eyes moistened while he listened to the tragic end of Odette and Prince Siegfried.

It was just a kid’s film, Hairy, Jon said sadly, unable to contain his disappointment after watching ‘Star Wars’ with me. We had become sci-fi snobs. They were right. I wanted it to be so much more. We’d moved on from robots and galactic empires a long time ago.

The science fiction we liked was fun as well. It was also worthwhile as there was an edge of existentialist drama or psychological insight into the human condition. We didn’t, of course, attach those labels to the authors we read or the shows we watched at the time.

I went round to Jon’s house to watch the shows because his family had a colour telly, unlike my parents who could only afford a small black-and-white one on hire purchase. My father saved the Green Shield stamps he received after paying the monthly rental, but it hardly seemed worth the effort because they could only be exchanged for tat in the shop.

***

The new Ice Age that they were always taking about on the telly began in early January. There were huge blizzards that blocked roads. School closed. This was, we dimly realised, probably the most exceptional and exciting event that would be happening to us in the grey backdrop of that year. It probably wasn’t going to get much better than this.

The snowdrifts seemed to glow from inside with a pale, unworldly light that dulled our voices. We ventured out into the snow, our parents delighted that we were out of the house so that they could drink, or have it off, or whatever else adults did when they had unexpected spare time.

My parents would probably just spend the time working or marking stuff for the Poly. They were either unaware of the petty theft and pointless trouble that we committed, or couldn’t be bothered to find out unless it spilled into real police trouble. But this was rare; we got into fights, but nobody carried knives and nothing serious ever happened.

Earlier in December, Drillbit’s friend was stabbed outside the neighbouring sink school. Jon told us that the police informed his parents that the guy was dealing speed and stabbed for his drug money. Some of us had seen Drillbit’s friend outside our school and Jon confirmed that he had been expelled a couple of years ago.

He’s a right div, said Jon, passing judgement. He’s gonna get his head kicked in. Paul pointed out that getting stabbed was probably worse, but Jon told him to stop being clever because we all knew what he meant. He was upset about the stabbing.

Yeah, he was always proper divvy, him. He got stabbed in the arm. It’s them kids from Beechwood, they’re mental. We considered this new information about our rivals from the other school and our mood darkened.

They’re not normal. They can’t get away with it, said the other Paul-with-Glasses.

The Beechwood kids were notorious because they were uncontrollable when the red mist descended. Legend had it that one year, they had broken out of school, ransacked the dining hall and attacked everybody with stolen forks. There were eyewitnesses to the event in our own school. Angela even had a battle-scar caused by the tines, a run of red puncture marks on her thigh. She would lift the hemline of her skirt and show you if you paid her 10p.

This was good enough evidence to keep our rivalry simmering throughout that winter. Stabbing with a knife was, by unspoken agreement, further dishonour, and an act that only Beechwood could commit. This was clear provocation and escalation of the rivalry between the tribes.

We need to do summat! Speccy-Paul said. I bet that they’ll be sledging on Hill 60. We’ll get the Thommo twins on the way home.

Yeah, they’re soft as anything, them two. They’re posh. Jon had been considering the options for retaliation. We’ll just scare them a bit.

The Thompsons were popular at Beechwood because they formed a two-man package on their football team, playing wing positions on outside right and outside left, almost as if they were reflections of each other on the pitch. Once in their kit, they were practically identical. Then, they had another trick that confused opposition players even more because they dropped back to midfield in the second half.

Chris, out of the pair, was friendlier but also more volatile on the pitch, whereas Steve was quieter and didn’t take chances. They were popular, but they weren’t hard-cases and their talent for sport marked them out as different. We had the instinctive English disdain of anybody who did well through hard work, talent or luck and felt that they were the