Turntables of the Night

Terry Pratchett's Turntables of the Night is a short story for 11 year olds, told by a bloke giving a statement to a police officer about the night his best mate died.

What happens

It runs to about three and a half thousand words. One sitting.

Wayne collects records. Not the good ones particularly. All of them. He and his mum are down to two rooms because of the collection. He'll get John to drive him to Preston to find a self-employed plumber who once called himself Ronnie Sequin and got to number 152 back in 1961, on the off chance the man kept a spare copy.

Wayne can't drive and has no interest in learning. John can, and owns a van with Hellfire Disco painted over the words Midland Electricity Board, which you can still read if you know where to look.

So they start a mobile disco. Wayne is dreadful at it. He stands there telling a hall of drunk wedding guests that there's a rather interesting story attached to this record.

And then, somehow, it takes off. People start asking for songs they half remember from decades ago, and Wayne has every one of them in the van.

The last booking is a Halloween dance in a village hall. Scout posters on the wall. A mirror ball with half its little mirrors fallen off. It smells of tennis shoes.

Wayne keeps staring at a man on the dance floor in a black silk suit, platform soles and a skull mask, doing John Travolta impressions all night. John looks, and there's nobody there.

The part you actually need is this.

This is Pratchett writing for grown-ups. John swears his way through his statement. Mostly it's mild, prat and pillock and crap, but not all of it is. There's also a memory of a school disco where another boy broke one of Wayne's records, and it took four of them to prise the iron bar out of Wayne's hands, and it ended with police and an ambulance.

And the narrator's friend is already dead when the story starts. You know it from the first page, from the way he keeps correcting his own tenses. It's funny and properly sad at the same time, and the sadness is about a man who loved things nobody else could be bothered with.

Some children will take to it. Plenty won't be ready for the language or the weight, and you can't really tell from the outside which you've got. Read it yourself first. It'll cost you twenty minutes.

What to read next

If they do like that deadpan way of making enormous things sound ordinary, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens by calling Earth an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose inhabitants still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.