Read Educating Peter for Free Online Page B

perhaps I shouldn’t have found this camaraderie so surprising,but I couldn’t help feeling hurt. Peter hadn’t talked to
me
about Kitty. He hadn’t talked much at all, really, unless I’d spoken to him first. I wasn’t even sure he thought I was ‘an alright bloke’.
    Later, while Peter nipped off to the lavatory in Burger King, I furtively consulted
Adolescence: The Survival Guide For Parents And Teenagers
. It seemed to contain plenty of advice for adults trying to communicate with sarcastic, unsociable and bullying adolescents, but little on recalcitrance, or at least Peter’s specific mode of it. Frantically, I searched for a chapter headed ‘Generally Pleasant Yet Unforthcoming Teenage Acquaintances: Getting Them To Talk To You A Bit More About Rock And Stuff’. The most relevant thing I found was a section on shyness.
    â€˜Don’t force painfully shy youngsters into the limelight,’ advised Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith, ‘or draw too much attention to them . . . [But] don’t let them off the hook completely.’ And, slightly later: ‘Eating together straightaway normally helps.’
    I closed the book, anticipating Peter’s return. Perhaps I was expecting too much too quickly and bombarding my companion slightly. I had, after all, only met him properly for the first time four hours ago. I’d already asked him questions some of his best friends probably hadn’t asked him: what were his favourite bands?, what exactly did progressive schooling entail?, was he dating anyone at the moment?, did those metal chains he had hanging off his trousers ever get snagged up embarrassingly on road bollards and tube train barriers?, why was Limp Bizkit’s lead singeron the executive board at East West records? It was hardly surprising that most of the answers I’d received were monosyllabic. We hadn’t even had a meal together yet.
    As we tucked into our bacon double cheeseburgers, I resolved to cool my approach slightly, and almost immediately – whether as a direct result of this, by sheer coincidence, or because I was sneakily allowing him to break Jenny’s No-Fast-Food rule – Peter started to open up. For the first time he began to talk of Raf, one of his friends at school, who had ‘the coolest leather jacket’ and could play the whole of Nirvana’s
Nevermind
album on guitar. Peter liked
Nevermind
? But that was from
my
era. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so?’ He liked it a lot – had done before anyone else in his school year. He and his mates were always listening to it; his band, Goat Punishment, liked to cover a couple of songs from it. Peter had a band? Of
course
he had a band. What did I think – that he played the guitar just for the sake of it? In fact, he had two bands, although the other one, Toast Hero, was ‘just a side project’.
    â€˜Goat Punishment are called Goat Punishment because in the quadrangle at school there’s a pen with goats in it.’
    â€˜And you want to punish them?’
    â€˜No. We like them. It’s just a name. Adam, our drummer, wanted us to be called The Fuckers, originally.’
    â€˜But that’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yeah. The rest of us thought so.’
    It made no odds that Peter was growing up in anenvironment that bore almost no resemblance to the one in which I had spent my teenage years: the protocol of communication was exactly the same. Here, you didn’t get what you gave; you got what you didn’t give. If Peter and I were going to get on, I would have to fight my urge to fill every moment of silence with inane jabber and interrogative angling. Worryingly quickly, I found myself back in a bastardised version of my 1989 mindset – desperate to impress the cool kids, but trying to hold back my natural tendency towards politeness and inquisitiveness, in the knowledge that I’d