On the train on his way to the Elysian Fields holiday camp, North Wales, Kevin pondered again his conveyor belt theory of life.
The theory was quite simple. You were strapped to a conveyor belt carrying you through life which was going to take you where it was going to take you and there was nothing you could do about it. Quite often you were aware that the conveyor belt was taking you towards bad things but you were unable to get off. You knew, for example, that the conveyor belt was carrying you towards a lifetime of inconsequence, banality, and ill-rewarded work at some depressingly mundane job, and you knew that this was an undesirable thing, but there was nothing you could do to save yourself. Kevin had known that if he didn't get his act together he would eventually wind up immured in some shithole situation such as the one he was now heading towards, but he seemed to have been powerless to prevent it. The theory had first occurred to him while he was lying on a hospital trolley bearing him towards a minor operation for the removal of an ingrowing tooth from which he was not confident of emerging alive, and he had over the years, when confronted with some particularly depressing newspaper item, developed it from a purely personal philosophy into a conveyor belt theory of history, economics, sociology and fashion.
Right now the conveyor belt was speeding him towards a job at the Elysian Fields holiday camp which would pay him a little over seventy pounds a week. Kevin didn't understand how anyone in their right mind could have hired him after reading the application form and resume he had sent them. It had been one of his best selection-deterring efforts. Either an embittered soon-to-be-ex-employee of the personnel department had passed him as a malicious last act in his job, or the Elysian Fields holiday camp and fun park really would take absolutely anyone. For example, under 'Indicate your reasons for leaving your last job' (a dishwashing gig three years ago) he'd invented and described a violent contretemps with his employer which had ended in his threatening his boss with a meat cleaver. To the question 'Do you have any disability or medical condition which may limit the type of work you can do?' he'd replied that he had psoriasis and was partially blind. In a space provided for 'Describe any interests or hobbies of yours which you think may be of interest to us' he'd written of involvement with extreme left-wing political organizations and as a final whimsical touch, speculating on a family holiday camp's employment policy towards potential paedophiles, had added, 'I like to watch the children in the park.'
They'd snapped him up, writing back instantly to offer him an immediate start. He could only speculate as to the quality of the other applicants and employees, what kind of shambling monsters they must be. The job he'd applied for was operating a computer in the bookings office, a vacancy for which he was totally unqualified and lacking in experience, but they had been pleased to offer him a position as 'general staff'. Kevin was unimpressed by the military overtones of this and knew it was employer-speak for 'cunt'. He had little choice but to accept, however, because their letter also mentioned that they'd apparently been so keen to snare him that they'd taken the liberty of writing to his employment office, whose address had been stamped on his application form, to inform them that they'd offered him a position. If he turned it down, he would almost certainly lose his benefits. He'd been shanghaied, pressganged, railroaded. The Elysian Fields organization's offer, anyway, had arrived two days before the deadline by which he had to be out of the parental home. He had been unable to find any alternative accomodation and the council had made it clear that he had little hope of a flat from them any time this century. He had nowhere else to go.
The sheer arbitrariness of his destiny and destination depressed him. (At the moment, actually, he was in a numb and detached state akin to shock, the depression largely theoretical, but he was sure that once things had had time to sink in the feeling would come to grow on him). Why a holiday camp? Why here? Why him? When all the wide world and its limitless possibilities were, theoretically at least, open to him, how had he come to end up in such an insignificant role in such an insignificant part of the world? Had he no control over his life at all?
Such thoughts were still circling through his head when, towards the end of his journey, the small coastal train he'd transferred to pulled up at a tiny little branch-line station in the middle of nowhere - about the twentieth such stop it had made in the past hour. On one side of the track there was nothing but a typical wild and windswept Welsh landscape as far as the eye could see, unpopulated save by sheep and the shadows of low-flying RAF planes, but on the other there seemed to be the rudiments of a village of sorts beyond the three square yards of platform. A heartbreakingly beautiful girl was squatting against the station-house wall opposite his window, regarding him sullenly from beneath tousled hair. Kevin suddenly wondered whether it would be possible for him to get off at this station: not go on to the Elysian Fields holiday camp at all, but rather get off here and stay here and seek accomodation and employment of some sort here. It didn't look to be a hive of industry, but surely they could always use another shepherd or poacher or druid or something. Maybe he could get to know that girl. She must be waiting for a train going in the opposite direction at the moment, but she must live here, for if she didn't there could be no reason for her to come here. Hers would be a bleak and lonely existence in a place like this, and she would surely welcome a visitor from civilization with open legs. "Tell me again about video recorders," she would murmur in the moments of post-coital bliss. Show the villagers his tape deck and his Zippo and he could lord it over them like a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's court until they mustered the courage to burn him at the stake. After these fantasies had petered out, Kevin started to think about all the other stations and villages in the world that he had never got off at and never would, all the girls he could get to know and all the possible lives he could lead, and wondered again: why this one, and why not them? Then he thought of all the great big bustling stations in all the great big bustling cities of the world, and all their girls and possibilities, and wondered why he had never taken a train to them.
For some minutes as the train lay idle he pretended to take seriously the idea of getting off here. It would be ridiculous and insane and more than a little sad and no good could possibly come of it, but it would at least be a decision that he had made for himself and he was pretty sure he'd like himself better if he was the sort of person who was capable of doing something like that. But life, at least his life, didn't work that way, and his conveyor belt didn't tend in that direction. Soon the train had pulled him out of the station and away from the girl forever, and half an hour later he had disembarked at another small platform near the Elysian Fields holiday camp.
*
It was early evening. Following the stationmaster's directions, Kevin lugged his suitcase along a path through some woods that ran for half a mile or more parallel to the fence at one side of the camp, until he eventually came to a road and the main gate. There four oversized bouncer types in tight-fitting uniforms sprang out of a portakabin gatehouse and crowded round him refusing to let him move an inch until he had produced his letter of employment, which, after twenty minutes of turning his pockets inside out and strewing his clothes over the pavement, finally proved to be at the very bottom of his case, beneath his pyjamas, the ones with the Rupert the Bear motif. They then directed him to an office in another cabin a hundred yards further on.
As he entered a jowly man in Roy Orbison glasses rose from behind a desk, took a walkie-talkie off his belt, and said to it, "Gatekeeper from Big Chief. The pigeon has arrived." The walkie-talkie emitted a parrot-like squawk and then static. The jowly man scowled and said, "Do you copy, Gatekeeper?" There was another unintelligible squawk. The man scowled at Kevin from behind his glasses and growled, "Come here." He took Kevin's letter from him and scrutinized it minutely, even turning it over and scowlingly studying the blank side for a second or two longer than seemed necessary. He then asked Kevin for his name and address with postcode, holding the letter so that Kevin couldn't see the printed side. When Kevin responded correctly, the man said, "Passport-size photograph." When Kevin said he didn't have one, he sighed and pointed to a Photo-Me booth in the corner. Kevin went over, saw he would need a pound coin, found he didn't have one, and went back to the desk to ask for some change. The jowly man was on the phone. "Gatekeeper?" he was saying. "Is there a problem with your rig?...Check your batteries...This is basic procedure, Gary." Without looking up he took Kevin's fiver and plonked down some coins. Kevin used the Photo-Me booth; as usual he came off looking like a member of the Baader-Meinhof. The jowly man selected the least frightening photograph, stuck it on a card bearing Kevin's name, some sort of identity number, and the words 'General Staff', and ran it through a machine which turned it into a laminated pass card. With the aid of a tape gun he also assembled a plastic name badge bearing the name Kevin.
"That'll be two quid for these," he said.
Kevin paid him. The man handed him the badge and the pass.
"You wear the badge at all times," he said. "If you're caught without it once, it's an official warning. The second time it's grounds for instant dismissal. Carry the pass with you at all times. Do not lose it whatever you do. Without that pass you can neither enter nor leave the camp, nor can you get paid or fed. Without that pass you are a non-person. You will descend into a quagmire of shit from which you are unlikely to emerge before you starve to death. Do you understand?"
Kevin said he understood.
"Right. Now they'll tell you more of the rules at the induction course at the main office at 9:30 tomorrow, but I'll just tell you now that if we catch you hanging round near a guest's caravan or chalet without good reason we'll throw your arse off the camp immediately and probably beat you up as well. The same goes if we catch you acting up in any of the holidaymakers' bars, and the same goes if we catch you with drugs. Understand?"
Kevin affirmed.
"Right." The man glared at a wristwatch buried deep in the undergrowth of a hairy forearm. "Now you'd better get next door to the accomodation office and sort out a chalet. You'd better hurry, they're about to close."
This was prophetic. As Kevin dragged his suitcase over to the next building along he saw a uniformed woman walking away from it jingling a bunch of keys. Her name badge proclaimed her to be Sue of Staff Accommodation. He accosted her and said he wanted a chalet.
She smiled regretfully. "We're closed, I'm afraid. Come back tomorrow."
"But where am I going to sleep tonight?"
She frowned. "Couldn't you share with someone, just for tonight?"
"I've only just got here. I don't know anyone."
"People make friends quickly here, you know," she said brightly.
"I'd still quite like somewhere to sleep," said Kevin humbly, alarmed by an image of him cruising round a nightclub, still dragging the suitcase, desperately trying to bag off with someone just to get a bed.
She sighed. "I suppose you'd better come up then, hadn't you?"
By some vagary of construction the accomodation office was on the second floor of its building and accessible from the outside by a set of steep and narrow wooden stairs, rather than lug his bulging, heavy and unwieldy suitcase up which Kevin decided to chance leaving it at the bottom. In the office the woman tutted and fretted over charts and lists for a bit and then handed him a key, after first extracting a non-returnable £2 deposit for it. She told him his chalet number was C27 and gave him a map showing how to reach it.
When Kevin descended the steps he found the jowly man and one of the security men from the gate standing around his suitcase with their walkie-talkies out. The jowly man spoke into his.
"Overlord from Big Chief. We've got a Mr. Adams outside the staff accomodation office...No, a Mr. Adams...A suspicious package, sir." The bouncer from the gate stepped forward and experimentally prodded Kevin's case with his toe. The jowly man extended a hand and drew him back. "No, Gary, no. Think about it, son."
Kevin picked up his suitcase.
"Is that your suitcase?" asked the jowly man.
"Yes."
"You wanna be careful. You almost lost it then." He scowled at Kevin and considered another security angle. "I suppose you can prove it's yours?"
Too tired to point out that he must have just seen him with it in his office, Kevin said, "It contains Rupert the Bear pyjamas."
"It does, too," said Gary.
"Well you don't wanna go leaving it lying around unattended in future...Overlord from Big Chief. Package claimed."
*
Kevin set off towards his chalet. He walked along boulevards full of shops and clubs and ice-cream stands and sauntering holidaymakers. The staff he saw were all wearing uniforms of unrelieved hideousness but after the security men seemed reassuringly human.
Presently he came to several rows of wooden buildings reminiscent at first glance of the prisoners' barracks in The Great Escape. These were the staff chalets. He walked along row C until he found a door numbered 27.
He went inside and found himself in a room slightly smaller than the cell he'd spent a night in, containing a narrow bed, a doll-size chest of drawers, and a table. There was a large curtainless window facing out onto the path and the next row of chalets beyond. In each of the wooden walls to right and left there was a door. From the door on the right strange sounds were emerging which presently resolved themselves as Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.
Kevin dropped his case on the bed and watched it collapse. He stared at the right hand door for some seconds and then went over and tentatively knocked at it. There was no answer. He went back to the bed and started to unpack. Just then the front door opened and a carrot-haired young man dressed as a pixie entered.
"A'right," said the pixie. "Is Jack in?" He opened the door on his left and stuck his head through. "No," he answered himself. He crossed to the door from which music was emerging and went in. Through the doorway Kevin saw a room which was a duplicate of his own but with no other doors in it. Lying on the bed wreathed in cannabis smoke and staring at the ceiling was the noted monk and Romanoff courtier Rasputin. By degrees he pulled his gaze from the ceiling to the pixie. Tears were running down his face and into his beard. The pixie enacted some sort of transaction, handing Rasputin a small envelope and accepting a crumpled note in return. "Top stuff," said the pixie. Rasputin nodded slowly. "New chalet-mate," said the pixie. Rasputin cranked his glittering, deep-set eyes round to bear on Kevin. He gazed at Kevin with the mournful yearning of Aschenbach staring at the kid in Death In Venice. A hundred years later he nodded again. Then he lay back on the bed and fixed on the ceiling once more. The pixie came out and shut the door behind him.
"Mellow guy," said the pixie. "You need anything, mate? Trips, weed, speed?"
Kevin considered. A new environment, a new start, perhaps the time to break with the bad habits of the past...
"Can you do us a teenth?" he asked.
The pixie sorted him out. "You new here, yeah? I've been here a month, it's a good buzz. You'll be all right if you just don't take any shit from anyone. If you end up on one of the shitty jobs just don't stand for it. I'm on frigging kiddies' entertainments at the moment but I'm not standing for that for long." The pixie stared at Kevin's open suitcase and pointed at his tape-deck. "That won't last long, they'll have that."
"Who will?"
"The thieves. They get round to everyone eventually but they're always turning this chalet over 'coz the lock doesn't work." He started to root through the contents of Kevin's case in a desultory fashion. "They'll probably take this too," he said holding up Kevin's best shirt. He rummaged through the rest of Kevin's stuff but appeared to find it unworthy of larceny. "They'll probably get round to you tomorrow or the day after. I've told Jack, when they do just go straight to accomodation and tell them you want a transfer 'coz the lock's gone south. If you mouth it up they'll put you in the new luxury staff chalets just to get rid of you. Tell them you've had hundreds of pounds worth of gear taxed and give them the wrath of Jehovah. If you don't stand up for yourself in this place you'll get crushed like a frigging fly."
The pixie left.
Kevin thought for a moment and then packed all his stuff back in his case and slid it under the bed after propping that back up. He consulted his map and found there was a shower and toilet block at the end of the next row of chalets. He took a towel and made his way there.
The latrine block was illuminated by a single glaring lightbulb; a tap dripped echoingly into a broken sink and thence onto the floor. It was indefinably sinister and reminded him obscurely of a washroom beneath the streets of Berlin or somewhere in a spy film he'd seen once where a courier had been cornered and shivved for his attache case. The one unbroken bog was in a cubicle with a broken lock; scrawled on the back of the door was a piece of self-advertisement from a man who apparently possessed a twelve-inch cock which it was his special joy to insert, not very gently by the sounds of things, into the hindquarters of younger men. 'Meet me here at nights for some big cock action,' it offered. Kevin finished his business in a hurry. The shower cubicle was a ridiculous cartoon of squalor, something out of Fungus the Bogeyman. By wadding them into a very tight bundle Kevin was able to deposit his clothes on the one tiny island of dry floor not covered by the pool of slimy water stretching from the door to the shower attachment, in which his towel had already been dipped after he had deposited it on a peg which had subsequently, without any fuss or preamble whatsoever, fallen off the wall. He waded through the slime and stood beneath the nozzle, in the middle of an industrial-size drainhole which was clogged with what looked to be a combination of the aggregate yearly toe-mulch for the male population of a town of the size of, say, Oldham, and the results of someone shaving a mule. After dousing himself in tepid rustwater for several minutes, he sloshed back to his clothes, half-dried himself partly by a few reluctant dabs with his now rank and greasy towel but mostly by a process of evaporation, and, by a quite remarkable feat of balancing involving standing balletically en point first on one leg and then the other, on the island of dry tile, managed to dress without immersing more than one sock, the bottom of one jeans leg, and one trailing shirt sleeve in the water.
Only slightly dirtier than when he had entered the cubicle, Kevin headed back to his chalet. En route he was forced to run the gauntlet of a gaggle of hard-looking girls who suddenly appeared on the path in front of him and made him the subject of a chorus of wolf-whistles, catcalls, and loud speculations on his possible sexual proficiency or more probable lack thereof. Their comments grew more scathing and less good-natured as it became clear he was going to walk through them with no more response to their sallies than a feeble and rather cretinous grin, the only other rejoinder that had occurred to him having been, "Fuck off, you foul harpies," which at the time he had rejected as being likely to provoke violence but which immediately afterwards became the focus of a keen esprit de l'escalier regret as having been the exact phrase that met the occasion perfectly. How was he supposed to react, anyway? Shag them on the path? Possibly, by the looks of them.
Back in his chalet, he flopped on his bed and sighed. Rasputin and Pink Floyd were still charting the outer realms of cosmic consciousness in the room to his left. From the room on his right, he soon became aware, sounds of low murmuring and female giggling were emerging.
A few moments later the right hand door was flung open and a muscular boy of Kevin's age came out. He was naked to the waist and clad below in a pair of baggy track-suit bottoms which did little to dissemble a three-quarter-mast erection.
"You got a condom, mate?" he asked Kevin urgently.
Kevin mutely shook his head. The boy flung the outer door open, stalked across to the chalet opposite and disappeared inside. Kevin continued to lie on his bed and pondered idly. There was a creak of bedsprings in the next room and a girl with a mass of russet hair hanging over her face appeared in the doorway, wearing only a white T-shirt which came to a millimetre or so below her crotch and which clung lovingly to a capacious bosom and a pair of nipples on which raincoats or possibly even oil paintings could have been hung. She smiled at him unselfconsciously, revealing small precisely even teeth like a row of sugar cubes.
"Hi," she said warmly.
"Hi," said Kevin trying not to blush.
"I'm Veronica."
"I'm Kevin."
She nodded at the bed. "That bed's always collapsing, you know."
"I know."
"I got off with the last lad who slept there," she explained. "It collapsed under us three times." She pushed her hair away from her face and studied him. "He looked a bit like you, come to think of it."
Kevin nodded wisely.
"Well," she grinned, "see you around."
"Yes," said Kevin.
The girl disappeared. Her swain re-entered tearing open a condom packet with his teeth.
"Just got here?" he said to Kevin. "I only got here yesterday meself. I tell you what, mate - we're in fanny heaven here. If you can't get a fuck here, you've either got a glass eye, or a wooden leg, or a fucking hump on your back - and even then you'd get the sympathy vote. See you at the induction tomorrow."
He darted back through his door, reaching towards his crotch with the condom as it closed behind him.
Presently sounds of energetic humping started to come through the partition, which was constructed either of some unusually thin species of plywood or possibly cardboard. Kevin got up and went out into the twilight.
He explored the camp thoroughly. There were several bars, clubs, fast-food joints and restaurants, supermarkets and other shops, a cinema, a swimming pool, a funfair containing dodgems, water slides, a log flume, a waltzer, a small big dipper, a huge big wheel, and various coconut shies and so forth, a crazy golf course, a miniature railway with a brightly painted little train you could ride around the camp on, a hairdressing salon, amusement arcades, a casino, a kiddies' playground incorporating a sort of miniature farm area containing some mangy-looking rabbits and an extremely vicious-looking goat tethered to a stake, and a man-made lake with boats and ducks on it.
He ate half a hamburger from a vendor with a cart, threw the rest to the ducks in the lake, then went into the cinema and sat through half a five year old film which one of his media studies lecturers had once described as one man's iconic odyssey in quest of truth, vengeance and redemption through a nightmare landscape of moral nihilism but which Kevin would have described as one man's quest to shoot, gob and bully people, drive cars very fast, and blow things up, through a landscape of evil druggies, whining liberal do-gooders, cranky old precinct captains and girls who got them out regularly.
Afterwards he wandered round aimlessly again until he came across the staff bar. He went in and started to hit the Southern Comfort. Most of the other patrons were crowded round a stage on which people were playing Club 18-30 type games. An MC with a microphone was getting girls to do things with bananas and encouraging boys to simulate sexual positions with chairs.
On the other side of the bar Kevin found an almost deserted games room. Leaning on a table-tennis-table bouncing a ball was a short and chunky boy with a face so open, sunny and good-natured that Kevin at once took him to be some sort of retard. He had a sort of spiked hairdo reminiscent of the end of a French tickler, and a moustache like a slipped eyebrow, and was clad in a pair of shellsuit bottoms, trainers the size of Volkswagens, and a T-shirt bearing the legend FREDDIE MERCURY 1946-1991 - GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. He challenged Kevin to a game of table-tennis. Kevin accepted and was soundly thrashed, and likewise at pool and darts and table football. He called a halt and went and skinned up in the toilets and then smoked it sitting on the step outside the fire door, inviting the stocky boy to join him. The latter reciprocated by vaulting over the bar while the staff were all busy round the other side, stealing them some bottles of beer and opening them with his teeth.
His name was Brian. He had an unfortunate habit, when his hands were not occupied with ping-pong paddle or pool cue, of groping vigorously at his crotch as he talked, and then bringing his finger and thumb up to his nose to sniff them, apparently entirely unconsciously, grinning openly and sunnily and good-naturedly the while. He said he was from Blackburn and was here to be a camp entertainer.
"You watch," he said, "I'll have them eating out of me fucking hand inside five minutes. This is me big break, this. All the greats started out in places like this."
He then regaled Kevin with his act, a barrage of soi-disant jokes that managed to plumb the most repulsive depths of obscenity, misogyny, callousness to invalids and racial stereotyping and yet still not be in the least bit funny. At the end of every anecdote he gave a leering wink, bared a mouthful of badly eroded teeth, clapped his flipper-like hands together and said, "Thankyou, Missus." Eventually the strain of grinning and faking uproarious, filling-revealing laughter on cue became too much to bear and Kevin was forced to buy him more lager to shut him up. While his new friend had his throat occupied drinking Kevin said, "What's through there?" and pointed at a door at the back of the room marked 'TV Lounge'. The room proved to contain the advertised TV and several rows of chairs. Alone in the room sitting in the back row was a tall, thin, pale boy in a tweed jacket. He was apparently watching an opera.
"What the fucking hell's this?" said Brian in disbelief, swaying drunkenly in the doorway.
"Tosca," muttered the pale boy. He had a cultured, drawling, South-of-England voice.
Brian nodded as he digested this information, and squinted at the telly.
"Nice tits," he said. "What's she scriking about?"
The tall boy turned and looked Brian up and down disdainfully, curling his lip.
"She's unhappy because her Rottweiler has just been impounded," he said.
"Really?" said Brian.
"Yes," said the boy turning back to the telly, "and her local football team are about to be relegated. She's overcome with grief."
Brian blinked in surprise. "Well bugger me," he said. He sat down next to the pale boy and stared at the screen with new interest. "Who's that bloke?"
"He's the villain. He's a wicked man who's come to repossess her satellite TV dish," said the boy with a sneer.
"She's having a bit of a bad day, isn't she? Does she get 'em out after or what?"
"Yes. Yes she does. She gets them out and goes down on him in a minute. She offers herself to him in order to keep the dish. Wouldn't you?"
Just then a group of boys pushed past Kevin, sat down in the front row, and switched the telly over to some boxing.
"I was watching the opera, actually," said the pale boy after a while.
There was no answer.
"It's Tosca," he said. "Rather a good production."
There was still no answer. The pale boy got up and went out.
"Peasants," he muttered viciously as he passed Kevin.
Kevin went too. He sank another short and returned to his chalet. Inside, he turned the light on and leaned against the door and studied every inch of the room's grim bareness. He thought with deep nostalgia of his own beloved bedroom at home, filled with a poignant longing for his books and posters and records and his favourite mug. His room contained all the high points of 3000 years of Western civilization, from the thoughts of Aristotle to Pamela Anderson's breasts. Why couldn't he have been allowed to live out his life there undisturbed? Was it really so much to ask?
There was no sound from either of the other wings of the chalet; on his way out of the bar he had seen his neighbour Jack there snogging a different girl. He had a bedtime joint, got into his Rupert the Bear pjyamas, turned out the light and got into bed.
Half an hour later, just as he was on the verge of dozing off, the left-hand door flew open. Rasputin emerged, crossed the room in two paces, kicked the front door wide and pissed massively onto the path. Then he came over to the bed, yanked the covers away from Kevin's head, and leaned so close Kevin could feel his breath in his ear.
"Death is only the mirror of life, my friend," whispered Rasputin in a voice that seemed to have travelled several miles through caverns full of stalactites. "Remember that. Death is only the mirror of life."
Kevin nodded. Rasputin nodded. Rasputin went back to his room.
Kevin didn't get much sleep that night.
Chapter 5
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