All our neighbours looked like the snooker star Ray Reardon: black slicks of hair swept back from their foreheads with fierce brushes. 
       They were stoop-backed prowlers with watchful eyes. In the summer months of 1984 they swilled cars in the alley, later leaning on their back doors to smoke cigarettes and admire their handiwork. 
       When they spoke, which they rarely did, it was to say, in voices as flat as the Fylde, “Ey up, cocker.” 
       We shunned them.
       The moors were our place: treeless white places swept by wind, notched with trenches dug by long-dead soldiers. 
       Most days, we lay in the wavy-hair grass there and looked down over town, over the slate roofs and biscuit-coloured streets. There was a lot to talk about: school, and films, and the dryness of grass. And the thing that had happened to Mandy’s dad. Words too – because he’d pressed books on her, and she’d read them. 
       For instance, roof and roofs, and why not rooves? 
       There were never any answers, and so what. 
       It was hot, had been hot for ages. Each morning we dragged open the curtains and the sun was still shining, as if it had been there all night. 
      “The Day the Sun Shone All Night,” I said. 
      Mandy laughed from a deep place in the moor. It was our game, inventing names for science-fiction films they hadn’t made yet. 
       She twirled her long blonde hair. Not blonde – white. Whiter than the bleached grass. We made up a nickname for her – Village Of The Damned, after a film in which telepathic albino kids came from a cold star to destroy the Earth. You killed the aliens by tucking a bomb in your briefcase and thinking of brick walls. 
       Ka-booom! 
       “What am I thinking of now?” I said. 
       “Cake,” said Mandy. 
       “Ha!” I said. “Your powers are on the wane. It was Ray Reardon, the snooker player Ray Reardon.” 
       “The... break... goes... to... 27...” said Mandy in a slow robot voice. 
       “Say what you like about snooker,” I told her, wondering how she could have known it was cake: “I bet you couldn’t hit it in them tiny pockets.” 
       “I don’t want to hit it into tiny pockets. I want to go to Sweden again. Swim in a warm lake, forget all about snooker... forget these Ray Reardons!” 
       No-one knew when the Ray Reardons had first appeared. It had been a stealthy encroachment, individual Reardon by Reardon. 
       But, one day, we turned around to find they surrounded us. 
       “They’ve stuffed our real neighbours into bins,” I said. “And we’re next, we’re next.” Which was our catchphrase. We took it from a film in which aliens turned everybody into vegetable replicas and a bloke ran along the motorways, banging on cars, warning the drivers, You’re next! You’re next! 
        But everybody was too scared to wind down their windows, so they were all doomed.           "Lucky for us we got snooker players,” I told Mandy. “It could have been lizards.” 
        She sighed from the deep place in the grass, unstirred by wind. The sun was a mallet. It kept on bashing. Soon we’d be as flat as our shadows. “I wish it had been lizards,” she said. “I wish them creeps in our back alley would clear off.”
       “Clear off where?”
       “Back to the planet they came from.”
       “Their Own World Is Dying,” I said, in a sad voice. 
       “It’s the way they prowl,” hissed Mandy. “And how they lean. Lean in their doorways, staring. Like they want to... want to...” 
       “Like they want to pot you,” I said. 
       She looked at me for a long time, till the sun closed her face to a distant speck. 
       “Mandy – it’s because they’re redundant.”
       “It doesn’t mean they have to be idle. And lie around watching snooker. And stare at people’s legs.”
       “It’s because they’ve shut the factories, Mandy.” 
       “They ought to do something.” 
       “They can’t. Because of Thatcher,” I said. “That cow, Thatcher.” 
        Which is what you had to say after you’d said Thatcher. 
        Mandy shook her head. 
        “Their steady eyes,” she said.

 

*

 

Then came talk of standpipes. 
       “Hottest summer since ‘76,” sighed our mums, wiping foreheads, studying the sky. 
       “Because the sun has spun loose,” I told my parents. 
       But we’d to be out from under the feet, out from under the feet right this minute. 
       “Your stupid fault,” said Mandy. “Always coming out with lines.” 
       We traipsed the alley’s cobbles, clearing a path through the laundry, wet sheets hanging limp from black cables. 
        Here and there, in gaps between the washing, several Ray Reardons splashed their cars with water, dabbed red stuff over the hubs, rubbed wax into paintwork. 
        “Not be doing that much longer,” I said. 
        Mandy kicked me on the shin, gestured towards the scariest Ray Reardon, the most silent. The possible Leader Of The Ray Reardons. 
        He rubbed his hubs with a moist cloth, scowling into the tiny cracks. 
        “Yep,” I said, “the Earth is burning to a parched, blackened husk. Under the constantly beating sun...” 
        “Your big mouth,” said Mandy, secretly giggling. 
        She had learned to read my mind and I had learned how to make her laugh. When they say we wasted the drought summer of 1984, they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

 

 

 

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