Chapter 1 #4
Cathy: I guessed his brother was coming because he knew what AJ liked but wasn’t as busy as him, and that it would be easier for him to travel without getting mobbed. I’d seen the Beatles at a tiny hall in the sixties as a kid. I knew what teenage girls were like.
Pea: I called Alex straight after we dispersed.
It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me, to us, and I needed to hear his reaction to know how I felt about it.
He went quiet after I told him. He said his name a couple of times.
‘AJ Silver? The AJ Silver?’ And then he was screaming and laughing and telling me this was the best thing he’d ever heard and he couldn’t wait until those bitches at school found out.
Later, when I was lying in bed, I repeated that to myself.
Those bitches at school. He meant Nicole Waddington and her friends.
Kelly and Fay. They’d had it in for me for years, and I guess Alex thought this was like getting one up on them.
John: I was on a high for days. I wanted to get some champagne, but Cathy said we should wait until it was more certain. I think she still thought it might come to nothing. At the time, I would have felt absolutely devastated if it had. But now? Now I wish we’d never heard from Maggie McGee again.
Pea: The next morning, Mum and Dad said we should keep it to ourselves until it was all signed, and I looked down at my cornflakes and hoped they wouldn’t know I’d already told Alex.
Within a week it was all over school. I was in PE one day when Nicole threw a netball at my chest and said, ‘I heard you think AJ Silver is coming to your sad little theme park.’ Her friends laughed in this mean, high-pitched way. ‘As if,’ one of them said.
Sebastian: I didn’t tell a soul. Why would I?
John: It’s hard to keep a secret when it’s something huge like that, isn’t it?
You tell one person and then they tell someone else.
It was a small town. It was impossible to keep a lid on it.
I had to call a meeting in the end, because nothing was getting done.
I told the staff I could confirm the rumour was true.
Nothing was definite, but the wheels were in motion.
The atmosphere was electric. I reminded them that we had a park to run.
They all filed out, and it was business as usual for a while.
Pea: The rumour wouldn’t go away at school. You have to wait for something bigger to come along, but there wasn’t going to be anything bigger than this, was there?
Danny: I tracked down Pea’s old headteacher, June Pears, to ask whether she heard the rumours.
June Pears: I’d been a headteacher for twenty years, and I knew a thing or two about teen heartthrobs.
When you’re around teenagers that much, you get to know who the big stars of the day are.
And I’ll tell you what. I hadn’t ever seen so much excitement about anyone as I saw about AJ Silver in those mid-nineties years.
Even I could see that he had something. Underneath the baggy jeans and the floppy hair, he had these eyes that made you feel like he was looking just at you.
I remembered what it was like to be a teenage girl.
All those hormones. I understood. So when I first heard the rumour about him coming here, coming to Wildworld, I just laughed.
He was from LA. He might as well have been from the moon.
But it didn’t die down the way unsubstantiated rumours usually did.
After a couple of weeks, I called Pea Hunter into my office and asked what she knew about it.
She squirmed a bit, and then she told me it was true.
Or that it was half true, and his management were coming over to have a look at the place.
I think my mouth was hanging open. She’d never been in trouble, and she wasn’t the sort to make up lies in the headteacher’s office.
I let her go, and I just sat there behind my desk for five minutes or more, thinking about the absolute carnage this would cause, if it ever came to pass. Little did I know.
Cathy: I bought one of his albums. Pea laughed her head off, but I just wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
Once, I picked Sebastian up and I’d forgotten to turn it off, and he looked at me with absolute disdain.
‘Mum, this music is for pre-teen girls.’ I told him I was just curious.
I listened to that album from start to finish three times, and I didn’t connect with it at all.
It was manufactured pop, with meaningless lyrics and synthesised sound.
Pea: I couldn’t wait for this visit to happen, to be honest. Because then we would know one way or the other, and things could go back to normal if he wasn’t coming.
And if he was… well, I didn’t know what would happen then.
But at least it would be a definite fact and not just something people thought I’d made up to make myself sound interesting.
In one way, I wanted it to happen. Because Dad had looked so happy since the call, whistling and bustling about the place like a younger man. Mum, too. Plus, I was fifteen and I was desperate for anything to happen, like all teenagers are. But another part of me just wanted it to be over.
Sebastian: It was all anyone talked about for weeks, and it was just boring, to be honest. When Mum told us Maggie had called again, and that the visit was set for the following week, I was just glad it might soon be over.
John: We all went into a kind of meltdown when we heard the visit was booked.
Ever since that first call, I’d been tarting the place up as best I could.
Giving some of the rides fresh paint, getting the staff to pick up every last piece of litter, but when we had the dates, it was so real, and it felt like what I’d done wasn’t enough.
I started working late into the night, giving all the rides a really thorough going over, making sure they were all serviced and running smoothly.
We had this one chance, and it could change everything, and we needed to make sure we didn’t blow it.
Cathy: John worked himself into the ground in the run up to the visit.
I did what I could, too, of course. Smartened up the office and made sure the house was looking its best. Pea was excited, I think, but she didn’t really show it.
One night, the week before they came, I said to her that it was okay to be enthusiastic about something, even if it wasn’t quite your thing. She just shrugged.
Pea: I didn’t tell anyone at school when we had the dates for the visit. Didn’t even tell Alex.
Alex: I knew when they were coming, yes. I’m pretty sure Pea told me.
Danny: Now, let’s leave the Hunters there for now and go across the Atlantic to talk to the Campbells.
Grace: We knew AJ was special from the time he was about two years old.
Danny: That’s Grace, AJ’s mum.
Grace: He was always a performer, always lining up his soft toys and dancing or singing to them. It was just in his nature. With Zak, our first son, I had no idea what he’d do as an adult, but with AJ it just seemed really clear from very early on.
Ken: Those early years with Grace and the boys in Atlanta were the happiest of my life.
Danny: And Ken, his dad.
Ken: We’d been together a couple of years when we found out she was pregnant with Zak. It wasn’t planned, but we were both in our twenties and I had steady work as a builder and we were in love, so I couldn’t have been happier.
Grace: It was hard, adjusting to that first pregnancy.
I’d been a dancer as a child and teenager, and I’d never quite made it to the top.
By the time I met Ken, I’d stopped training, but I don’t think I’d fully let go of that dream.
But with that pregnancy, I was forced to.
If I was going to be a mom, I was never going to be a professional dancer.
It was a beginning and an ending, for me.
And then Zak was born and he was a hard baby. Or maybe he wasn’t, and it was just that he was my first. But I remember really struggling with the lack of sleep and the fact that he wouldn’t eat sometimes and he had these allergies. There was always something, you know?
Ken: I wanted to have a whole bunch of kids, yeah. Four or five. When Zak turned one, I said I thought we should start trying again and Grace looked at me like I was nuts.
Grace: He had no idea. He was at work all day and I was at home dealing with tantrums and dirty diapers. And it had taken a toll on my body. I’d lost the weight but I was a different shape, somehow. I told him I wasn’t sure about having another.
Ken: I was floored at that. We’d never discussed it but I’d just assumed we’d have at least two or three.
I didn’t want Zak to grow up lonely. It was clear that Grace was serious, so I started petitioning for just one more.
She said I should give it another six months and then she’d think about it. I marked it on the family calendar.
Grace: I think I told him I wanted to wait another year. But he didn’t.
Ken: Looking back, I think that was maybe the beginning of the end for us.
We wanted such different things. So I just kept on working, and at the weekends I’d play with Zak for hours.
Take him swimming and chase him around the garden.
Sing songs and push buttons and fit puzzle pieces together.
He was a joy to be around. And Grace was there but she wasn’t, somehow.
She was always in the kitchen fixing lunch or doing a load of washing.
It was like she didn’t want to just be with us. It was hard.