6. Man of Truth

6. Man of Truth

[De la Cruz interview – Neil Bird, G1.]

I first met Neil when I was eight. Which means I've known him for almost twenty years. A long time, isn't it?

Feels like longer than that.

Yeah? Really?

Aye.
How come?

I've had to put with your sorry arse for the past two decades. You just don't know how to take a hint!

Knobhead.
[Sound of someone being pushed to the floor.]
Oi! Prat.

It was my first day in this new school and it felt a lot more important and intense than any eight year old should experience.
[The scrape of a chair.]

We had just moved from Oxford up to this tiny little place in Scotland, in Fife.

Cupar isn't that tiny, mate.

Well, it's smaller than Madrid was.

Touché, my international friend.

What? Oh, Madrid. Yeah. Well, when I was five my parents moved from Spain to England. That's part of the reason I was dreading going to school in Scotland, you know? When we got to Oxford, people made fun of the way I pronounced my “th”s and “esse”s.

It's called a lisp.

Right, yeah, I had a lisp because of my Spanish accent. And kids are cruel. I got picked on right until the last day of school in the June before we moved. So then we moved up to Cupar. Middle of effing nowhere, as far as I was concerned.

Screw you, Mr Big-Shot City Boy.

I'd rather not, I am married. I quite like the woman too, she's a very good cook.

Yeah, yeah. Idiot.

Anyway, first day of school. I was terrified. I got to the classroom and everyone had someone sitting next to them, except for a girl in one of the front rows.
 Victoria, wasn't it?

Yep. So I walking up to her, when there was a shout from the other side of the room.
[Neil mumbles in the background.]
Oh, shut up. This kid with dark blond hair was backing away from a girl in pigtails, who was holding something the way you would hold a lightsaber.

Geek.

Says the man who introduced me to Star Wars. 
Geez, you introduce a man to what becomes his life-long passion and this is what you get? How times have changed.

This boy ran around the classroom, followed by the girl in pigtails, until he reached where I was standing. He was taller than me, and stronger too. 
Still am.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and used me as a shield against the girl's attack. The only words I could make out? “Abbie, put the lipstick down!”

That girl was a menace.

She smiled at me and told me that if I got out of the way and gave her Neil, nobody would get hurt. She was creepy even then. 
Damn right she was. Why do you think I was trying to get away?

I had to choose between walking away safely and letting this wide-eyed girl holding a tube of bright red lipstick get the boy behind me, or staying where I was and heed the cries of the boy saying, “Please don't move, I'll be your best friend, just don't let her get me!”

[A moment of silence.]

I moved out of the way. Neil?

Don't talk to me. I blocked that memory out years ago.

She got him good. Drew hearts all over his face. I later found out that he had put a frog in her backpack and a cricket into one of her sandwiches. One of those big green ones. So really she was just getting her revenge for that.

Ha! I'd forgotten about that. Classic.

She hadn't, clearly. Neil came up to me later that day during break time holding a Galaxy chocolate bar. His face was red from where he had scrubbed all the lipstick off, but he had a huge smile. He sat next to me, broke it in half and offered one of those halves to me. We've been friends ever since.
[Mumbles from the other side of the microphone.]

What do mean, why? That's just the way it worked. He was nice to me. I was the new kid. There was no way I was going to push away this friendship.

I thought he was cool. He had tanned skin and dark hair – that was different. And his T-shirt had Spiderman, Firestar and Iceman on it, there was no way I wasn't going to make friends with him.

It's what the best friendships are made of, chocolate and superheroes.

We got Matthew, who sat next to me, to sit next to Victoria, and let Marco here sit next to me.
We were terrors. It was always Neil's idea, but somehow I was always the one to do the dirty work.

Brawn, meet brains.

But the teachers knew it was a two-man operation. This one time, in 5^th year, during Physics class, we almost blew up the lab.
Almost being the operative word there.

We almost got expelled for it too, but the Head Teacher was new, and told us she saw “potential” in us. Poor woman. We never did anything as bad again. Until our last year.

We wanted to go out with a bang.
Brains, do you want to tell the story?

Sure thing, brawn. We planned for weeks. I used Mark's prowling skills along with my own scientific ones and we took over the universe.

[An evil laugh. Then a cough.]

Yes. We waited until we had done all our exams – couldn't risk expulsion because of a prank – then we organised a green bonfire in the playground (bronze filings gave it the green – did you never do chemistry?). We got students to burn their exam notes in it. It caught on really quickly. Oh, and we flooded the school.

Dealing with all the taps took a lot of time – what the police and development students call “field work”. We had to turn the water off at the main, then go through each bathroom and turn all of them on.
Except the kitchens.

Right, except the kitchens, because flooding the appliances would have been cruel.
This was before every school had computers. All of the important documentation was gone, because school was over and everything teachers needed to mark was at home. We did a thorough search of all the rooms as well, just to make sure.

Yeah. We wanted to prank, but we weren't going to destroy anything valuable. I'm pretty sure the Head knew what we were up to. She found us looking through the Secretary's office and just winked at us.
She was lovely. Talked to the police for us when they came a-knocking, she did, told them they weren't going to press charges as long as we paid a symbolic fee to the school.
It's called a “nominal fee”. She was brilliant, we only paid about 40 quid each, to replace someone's expensive calculator and some of the lab equipment we hadn't spotted.
Quite good, considering.
Yeah. Our last big prank. It was excellent.
[Mumbles.]
After? Well, university.
We separated for a while. I went and did Physics in Glasgow, he went back to Spain and did something useless, then he came back up to Scotland and we got a flat together.

Oi! It wasn't useless. I did an Interpretation and Translation degree.
You translate other people's work.

It's difficult, you know. And I get paid extremely well – I'm very good at what I do.

It would do you good to show a wee bit of modesty, you know.

Hey, do you remember that time you got really drunk when came to see me in “Madrí”?

How could I forget? That hangover stayed for days. And the beer was shite.

[Laughter.]

Yes, but I didn't go back for the beer!

[Mumbles.]

Oh, it was so good. We went to this club with some friends of mine and we got him completely wankered. It was amazing. He danced with this drag queen until someone told him who he was currently with.
I was told you had gotten further with her than I ever did.
What can I say, Pedro made a fine looking woman.
Your wife is going to murder you. 
Not if she doesn't find out, Mr-I'm-not-too-drunk-to-hire-us-a-stripper. 
That never happened.
Of course not.

You just can't lie, can you? 
I am a man of truth, my dear Neil. I do not lie. 
Unless it's for your own gain.
Obviously.

Why are we taping this again?

Because your future brother-in-law is putting together a Power Point presentation to use at the wedding instead of the normal best man speech, with this thing instead of music.
[A snort of laughter.]

You're doing a fine job of telling embarrassing stories. Was that the point?

Nope. Your wife-to-be told us to do this.

Oh yeah. That's cos she was afraid that you'd do something stupid.

Like you did at my wedding, you mean?

That wasn't stupid, that was brilliant. Have you ever seen anyone else get a group of Death Eaters to invade a church? How many grooms do you think had Voldemort bless their union? And what about the Death Eater versus Order of the Phoenix dance battle?

It did make for a very interesting wedding video. We still get hits on Youtube.

See? Brilliance, I tell you, pure brilliance. And neither you nor your wife complained at the time.

Your wedding's going to be really boring in comparison. All those plain Scots in coloured skirts. Hang on, shit, are you still recording us?
[White noise and scratchy sounds, like someone is fiddling with a microphone, then the scrape of a chair and footsteps. A moment of silence, then a whisper.]

You know what? Leave that in. It'd do him some good to be beaten up by a bunch of Scottish men in coloured skirts.