I’ll tell you the road and you can check it out for yourself. I’m not telling you her name, if it bothers you, you can figure that much out yourself. I don’t mind telling you the story but I’m not having you go all internet miscreant on me and send all this stuff to her parents. I’m sure if you really wanted to, you could check out the local news reports from the summer of ’93 and find everything you want but if you do just, leave it there.
As I said, you want the story, I’ll give you the story, but please just let it lie. Fuck knows they’ve been through enough and those few weeks late in that summer would have been too much for anyone. Every paper for weeks had her face on it. That small brunette, with the tragically 90’s bob and crushed velour dress. She was all bright brown eyes with a cheeky grin that proudly showed off her missing milk teeth. It was a Christmas photo. A little slice of winter all over the summer papers.
It was on Sandon Road, in Wallasey, Merseyside. You can see it on Google Maps. That was the road I grew up on. You can see at the bottom one of the broadest stretches of the Mersey Estuary, where the River Mersey finally empties the sludge and the shit from three industrial cities into the cleansing Irish sea. The final pitstop of filth before everything becomes clean again. I’d had some awesome memories of that little area before it happened. I was well on my way to a nice little collection of half-remembered antics that would one day blossom into fully formed nostalgia. Like, for instance, that road is a shitload steeper than it looks. I got a bright blue Everton skateboard from my uncle for my 7th birthday (not liking football myself, I had no idea what the hell ‘Up the Toffees’ meant) and I’d used to just sit on it and ride the steep left bank of the road right down to the riverfront, destroying the heels of my off-brand trainers in order to brake short of hurtling into the syringe brown soup that was the mid-nineties River Mersey.
However, it was when I wrecked my lip that the skateboard got taken away from me. See, once I’d hit the prom at the bottom, I’d have to get back to the top of hill. The easiest way I found to do this was to plant both hands on the board and run up the hill bent over like some ridiculous reverse dog-wheelchair. But it worked, and my little 7 year old self was mighty proud of his engineering prowess. That was, until the day I misjudged a step, putting my foot on the back of the board and, in one balletic sweep of idiocy, sent the board hurtling back from under me and my face squarely into the pavement. My bottom teeth went clean through my lower lip, turning my face into a splash of gore. I was able to pick my face up just in time to see the board hurtle over the prom’s edge and into the river, never to be seen again.
My burgeoning career as a pro skater was over.
She’d seen it happen. Of course she had, first girl I really knew and I get to introduce myself with the immortal method of making a complete fucking prick of myself. She rushed out as soon as she saw my concrete kiss, and helped me off my bleeding knees before shouldering me up the slope back to my house. Helping me past the offensively yellow gate and up to my open front door.
The look on my mum’s face when I stumbled into the kitchen, my mouth a blitz of pain and gravel, my knees scraped open, my eyes a swollen mess of tears and shame and my nose a bruised smear of blood and snot was priceless. Had I had the sense to use this villainous revenge of the pavement as proof that, in fact, the outdoors was horrible and I should really get a SNES then who knows what might have happened.
I once wondered if she might be alive, but I never really believed it.
No, instead I got a facefull of stinging TCP and a recommendation to possibly not use my face to break my fall in future. She got a bag of crisps for helping me up, and once the bleeding had stopped we were both turfed back onto the street again. Mid-nineties parenting in a nutshell; man up and fuck off.
