The Girl With The Metal Teeth

1981 (16 YEARS OLD)1 month ago

Banbury Fair happened every year in late October. It was called the Michaelmas (pronounced Miklemus) Fair. It went on for 4 nights, and had games and rides and attractions. It was put up in the market square, and it was magical. Everybody went at least once. Lucky buggers went twice.

It was one of the highlights of the year.

And then it got ruined.

When I was 15, my family took a trip to the US to see my newly-married sister, Dee, in Oklahoma City. For a day trip, we visited Six Flags Over Texas, a massive shiny theme park that had every ride imaginable, including roller coasters that that had sections where you were upside down.

After that, Banbury Fair seemed more like this:

One Saturday afternoon, I went to the fair for the first time during the day. I went by myself because I had knocked on Singhy’s door, and his mum had told me he was still asleep.

The fair was grotty without the night and flashing lights to hide behind. The stuffed animals at the games stalls looked dreadful. It didn’t matter, though, because nobody would ever win one. The best you could hope to win were two goldfish in a plastic bag that would always die a few days later. It was rumoured, however, that someone had once won a coconut at the coconut shy.

I went home, and I had almost reached my front door when an American girl I had never met before stopped me and gave me what seemed to be her full life story with an easy confidence. She went to the American High School at RAF Upper Heyford, the American base my dad worked at.

Her name was Cindy.

Of course.

And she had a full mouth of braces. I’d never seen such a thing before, and I tried to avoid staring. But I agreed to go back to the fair with her.

We ended up kissing behind the dogem cars.

Like most Americans, she was fastidious about brushing her teeth. So kissing her tasted like a mixture of Polo mints and those tarnished silver spoons I’d use at Mrs. Bowley’s to eat the dusty fruit cake she’d give me after doing her shopping.

We left the fair, and when I got home my mum, who had seen Cindy and I bump into each other, gave me the third degree.

Like most Americans at that time, Cindy had horrific taste in music: Billy Squier, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a whole host of other shit groups that I pretended to like out of the sycophancy all teenage boys employ in the quest for sex.

Obviously, she hated my music, too. But she had the luxury of being able to tell me so.

The only song in her music collection that I barely liked, was Black Betty by Ram Jam:

And so started a brief fling that revolved around meeting at the house of whoever’s parents weren’t home. When she came to my place, the only thing she would listed to was my burgeoning David Bowie collection.

At her place, I endured the wailing of the damned.

Besides the fair, we never went out on a date. I never even introduced her to my friends. I told them about her, but they thought I was making her up.

And while that might make me seem a bit of an arse, to be fair, she never introduced me to any of her friends either.

And then for some reason, it ended as abruptly as it started.

At some point during this whirlwind romance, my dad pulled me aside and said he found a prophylactic in the bottom of the rubbish bin and told me to be more careful so that my mother wouldn’t find it.

I had no earthly idea what that was. We called them rubber johnnies or simply johnnies if we were trying to be cosmopolitan. We called them Durex if we’d actually used one.

He changed the word: condom.

I lied and swore it wasn’t mine; he looked disappointed.

I’m sure it was because he thought I was telling the truth.