Saturday 25th March 1978: PM Northward Bound along the A1
Robbie used the toilets at the Scotch Corner Hotel, he bought a drink and removed his tie so that he didn’t look like such a public school boy nob. It didn’t work. At least he had hair like a ‘bog brush’ which helped. Not a ponsy centre-parting quiff for him.
He got a lift from a young Australian couple, Hetty and Bill who had a camper van and were touring the British Isles with their young daughter. Robbie smiled to Lola, their six year old who sat with him on the back seat. They drove him up the A1 that ran through Newcastle like thread looped through a needle and pulled tight, north alongside the Town Moor, and through Gosforth. They dropped him on the Great North Road outside the rugby club.
Robbie wandered over to find his trunk and tuck box in the car park of the rugby club. He found it alright. To his surprise his twin sister Kizzy appeared from under the wooden stands which looked out onto the main rugby pitch. She was hauling a luggage trolley.
“Defender of the trunks, at your service” she announced.
Robbie wondered what she meant.
“That grot Mike McAdam’s roled up half an hour ago and was going to wee on your trunk. I became threatening and he decided otherwise.”
Robbie gave his sister a hug.
“He asked me out.”
Robbie was once again surprised.
“I told him where to shove it.”
Kizzy, had sharp blue eyes like her brother, expressive eyebrows, and shoulder-length mousy brown hair. She looked faintly theatrical in a long green duffle coat and eyeliner that stretched ambitiously toward her temples.
Kizzy is looking great. Robbie thinks. Had she arrived earlier she’d have been on the receiving end of cat calls and whistles.
Their faces say it all without a word being said. “What the f***?! Are you alright?”
Kizzy missed Robbie like a phantom limb. Not because they were inseparable. They weren’t. They argued, they poked, and hit. But when he was home, the house had rhythm. A soundtrack. Someone to bounce against. And when he was gone, it was all weightless silence.
“You look like a … ?” Kizzy hasn’t the words. It was the hair that surprised her more than he injuries to his mouth and hand. “A bog brush attack on a barbed wire fence?”
Robbie could do without the ‘bog brush reference’, that was another nickname that had started to stick after he’d cut his own hair for his band the Spunk Muffin.
Kizzy cheerfully ignored his scowl. “Need a hand?”
He nodded. Raising his right arm to show the rist and hand are bandaged.
“What happened there?” Kizzy asks.
“I was thrown off the bus.”
“While it was moving?”
Robbie liked his sisters humour. I got into a fight with Mike McAdam. It doesn’t look like he’s made it home yet.
Together, they heave his trunk and tuck box onto the trolley and began the slow trundle home, up to the Great North Road, along to the Rugby Club—already filling with the muffled thud of someone’s disco setup—and the infamous stone edifice of No. 45 Bus Stop. Robbie noted it. The bus stop would be necessary. It always was. It was their link to the High Street and friends. To Newcastle and its cinemas. It’s where you copped a snog before your bus arrived.
Their house, set slightly apart from the others, had a quiet, forgotten, even unlived-in feel, as if no one had ever spent much time there. Their mum was sleeping in, and their father had long ago upped sticks and moved to Manchester with his girlfriend.
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