by Charlie Hill
A low point. It seemed everyone I knew was poor. The DSS office in Highgate overlooked two abattoirs. It had reinforced glass windows and the staff were suicidal. I walked to work in the kitchen and served prison food: cheese on toast, baked beans and tuna and malt vinegar sandwiches. Every lunchtime the gaffer played the same tape, some fella going on about the end times and a coming apocalypse. There was talk of rape and screaming. “Listen to this bit,” he’d say, “it’s true you know.” The staff ordered their tuna and malt vinegar sandwiches and asked, “Why is he playing that?” but the question was rhetorical; they knew he was playing that because the world was a place of vileness and depravity and everyone in it lived in poverty and misery and fear and the end times would provide some light relief.
After a month’s trial I was told I wouldn’t be getting the job. “I’ve had better,” said the gaffer, and although he was a cheeky fucker I didn’t argue the toss.
I have nowhere to live and there are no more sofas to surf, so I move into a squat, no, a derelict house with electricity and a cold tap, on Willows Road. I am no longer in touch with any of my family. I stay there for a few weeks, just long enough to call an ambulance for a mate who has a puffy face from booze.
I could see she thought it was a chance worth taking, but the disappointment the PhD student experienced on discovering her homeless bit of rough was struggling with his calculable net worth — an issue that had left me a qualifiably bad shag — was palpable.
I was employed to count bank notes, weigh them and put them into bundles for use in cash machines and I handled hundreds of thousands of pounds every day. The job was based in Newtown, famous for shootings. The note-counting building was a squat concrete block with no identifying marks that was covered in cameras and barbed wire; inside were more cameras, I mean the cameras covered literally every inch of the building. To get to the room where the notes were counted, you had to go through three differently locked doors.
My colleagues were young men who talked orgasmically about cars and fondled the bundles. I couldn’t bring anything to bear on the relationship of these pieces of paper to anything that might be regarded as ‘real’ but that didn’t stop me from spending the whole time I was there imagining a heist. After two days, the note-counting company found out I had an outstanding County Court Judgement against me for a credit card I’d had when I was on a Youth Training Scheme — a packet of Superkings on top of my dole! — and my contract was terminated.
Although I object to elements of the government’s road-building programme, my opposition to it is not implacable and I start as a temp at the Department of Transport. The office is low-ceilinged, grey. My colleagues are on flexi-time, which means they start work any time between seven and ten, take lunch any time between twelve and three, and leave any time after four; one day, I come in at ten, meet my brother in the City Tavern at twelve, and go back to the office from three until four.
Later, when I am escorted off the premises, I am more routinely conflicted — I need the money of course, but can anyone afford the enervation?
John Major was just about in office — no more nor less than a malevolent shadow — and in Moseley we partied despite or because of it all. Northfield Ian was a lovely fella who knew karate and was a sometime chef in a graffiti-ed activist café. When he wasn’t cooking vegan cheese on toast, he’d sit outside singing, under the voice, “Suck on my plums, and tell me that you love me.”
Northfield Ian fell off the roof at a party above the carpet shop and fractured his skull in several places. The temperature was below zero and I heard he lay there for two hours, freezing, bones and matter fusing, knitting together in the cold. I like to imagine him serene. In the ambulance — warmed up — everything came apart and his brain started bleeding and he died. I think about him often.
I started to see a woman. Each of us was broken by love, our only solace to be found in desperate romantic gestures and extravagantly rendered pain. Once, after drinking whisky and taking amphetamines, we decided we wanted to see the sea. We set off for the coast at five in the morning and after a day of hysteria and recrimination, skeetering around the villages of Cardigan Bay in a 2CV, we bedded down for a night of tears in Criccieth. The B&B was run by a man whose business card said ‘I. Strangio’.
Another time we drove in snow to Bangor. My brother was studying there and we were taking him back his dog. The car broke down at nine in the evening and we rang him from a phone box and decided to walk the rest of the way, a long straight road in a blizzard. We weren’t wearing decent clothes and I thought we’d be warmer if we shared body heat; I suggested finding a ditch just as friendly headlights came into view.
Things were looking up. The place we’d moved into was on Runcorn Road in Balsall Heath where the rats were kings, but it had a roof and when we got back from our trips into town there was no one around to ask how it had gone, or if we planned to keep going, or to hear us shouting at each other.
In town, she played the fiddle for small change while I went to the library to read the literary magazines. I was writing about techno but wanted to publish fiction. I thought it would make a difference to our lot, though I wasn’t sure how. If the busking went well, we’d budget for cigarettes and speed and spend the remainder on a cup of tea or coffee; back home we ate dehydrated potato, baked beans and cheese which we arranged into dinosaur shapes, the potato for the body and pieces of the cheese for the spines.
We were always finding junk on our trips out. Things other people had thrown out. We’d bring it home, pile it up in our front room: a rocking horse with a runner missing, a wicker Ali Baba washing basket without a lid, a toaster that could probably be fixed. Perhaps we thought that we could piece together a more recognisable life or love than the one we had, one bit of stuff at a time.
Tony Blair is elected Prime Minister and on the Friday I interview the techno DJ Billy Nasty for What’s On in Birmingham, a free listings magazine published by Mirror Group Newspapers. Billy Nasty’s music is non-commercial, even underground, and when he says “Nothing’s going to change,” I am reminded of my recent affinity for libertarianism and seduced by the simplicity of his objections: when I am given the cover, it feels like the bigger victory.
Princess Diana dies and we take acid. We leave my other pair of jeans drying in front of the fire while we go out to the garage to buy cigarettes and return to find them blackened and smoking, which might have been a sign of something, but I’m not sure what, except for the obvious.
I love Balsall Heath, despite or because of it all. After a night of various techno-related excesses, I am visibly morose on my way to buy some fags at dawn. A man emerges from a terraced house and is followed along the pavement by two sheep in single file. He goes a few doors down, a front door opens and he and the sheep disappear inside. A man in a flat turban clocks my non-cheery mien and says, “You have trouble with woman?” and I say, “Just the usual,” and he says, “In my country we have no trouble with women,” and I say, “And which country is that?” and he says, “Afghanistan.” He has such a mischievous smile and such twinkly eyes that my mood is lifted.
One day, it was colder than a January in Amsterdam. My brother and I passed a man in the doorway of a barbers shop along from Zaffs, and through drifting snow we asked him into the warm.
His name was Smurf. We sat in my small front room off Runcorn Road and offered him a beer but he said he didn’t drink and sniffed gas from a can he had hidden up his sleeve. He slept in front of the fire and the next morning I told him he could stay again that night but my girlfriend was coming back soon and if at all possible he should find somewhere else to crash — me and my brother would be out all day but we’d be back at eight if he was stuck. At about a quarter past eight we returned and there was a pair of footprints on the doorstep, lightly dusted with fresh snow, as if a ghost had come to visit.
My brother was studying in Bangor and I visited him while I was sporting a ponytail and an Errol Flynn moustache a
nd putting coffee and cocoa in my chilli beans. I don’t know which of these — if any — it was, but one of his friends and I became close. The next morning I heard her on the phone. “I love you,” she said, and it reminded me that I should probably make a call too.
I think it was the idea of her that I loved. I mean if we were in a film or a book or a song we would have been perfect for each other, I mean we would have been Bonnie and Clyde or Abelard and Heloise or Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. But we weren’t well and by the end of it were making each other worse.
I was twenty-eight when I worked a summer at Laughtons, a factory in moribund Yardley Wood that put lacquer onto plastic nick-nacks. I got the job through an ex-armed robber who had a big heart and a dad who sold baked potatoes and burgers from the back of a van at the Henley Regatta.
We were provided with supermarket facemasks and domestic paint scrapers to chip away at the layers of chemicals that coated the inside of a waste pipe. At first, I could only do ten minutes inside the pipe before feeling dizzy, then I got used to it. There was hardly anyone on site so we smoked spliffs on the roof, although we didn’t need to.
I was in bed with my best friend and a woman we both knew. We were having some fun. “Would you like to touch it?” he said and I said, “No.” Afterwards, I wondered if I’d been a bit strait-laced, a bit buttoned-up, a bit ill-at-ease with my sexuality. I don’t think I had, though — I just didn’t fancy him.
When I worked at a free-through-the-door business paper on Hill Street, for whom I wrote risible advertorial — innovative sausages! (another boom) — I got together with a woman. We were wary. We had each just come out of a relationship and neither of us wanted another. I had an idea. “Why don’t we have a non-relationship?” I said. “You could be my non-girlfriend and I could be your non-boyfriend. We could see each other but not, you know, go out with each other, not spend too much time together, or get too close, or any of that nonsense. It’ll only end in tears, after all — why not just have the fun? What do you think?”
“OK,” she said, but it was unconvincing.
After a while I wanted her to want to buy cushions with me, so I asked my new casual girlfriend to Greater Malvern where I was due to review a play. I borrowed a new tent from some people with trust issues and, rather than take it into the theatre, we walked a little way up a hill and left it behind a bush.
We saw the play. It was Bertolt Brecht I think, though it might have been Molière, and then we had a cocktail. Afterwards, it was dark and we nearly didn’t find the bush and when we did the tent was gone and we had to sleep on the hillside, our clothes stuffed with newspapers.
The next morning, to show her I had my shit together after all, I performed a Tai Chi routine I cobbled together out of some half-remembered moves and although she never mentioned cushions, I like to think she was impressed.
A narrow escape. We enjoyed particularly sensual, soft-focus sex but irked each other too and the mid-term prognosis was underwhelming; shortly after I dallied with an ex, she bagged a good mate of mine, and time was saved.
I was out with two friends who’d heard things about me — the Charity Shop Lothario! — and after the pub they came back to my place on Newport Road for more booze, missed their last chance to get home, and decided to stay over. I meant to say, “I’ve got a double mattress, so one of you can share with me if you like — no monkey business — but I’m afraid one of you will have to sleep on the sofa.” It came out as, “I’m going upstairs now, so you need to decide which one of you is going to sleep with me,” at which point I was introduced to universe-expanding levels of incredulity and scorn.
To Perry’s Scenic Productions in Bearwood, a neo-Black Country suburb of Sikhism and Greggs, where I put together stage sets for Madonna, Paul McCartney and the Pet Shop Boys. For Madonna it was plastic titty-cones, for the Pet Shop Boys I fireproofed enormous cardboard boxes with something that stank of piss and dissolved the plastic bags we used to protect our shoes.
Once, I worked on a script for the SEA LIFE Centre, who wanted to scare visitors with a ten-foot animatronic squid; in a darkened room alarms would sound, lights would flash, the lid of a tank would open and the beast would slowly emerge. I wrote: “The ferocious giant squid — or Architeuthis — has never been captured alive. Until now. This specimen was… oh… oh my god… it’s… it’s escaping! Run! Run for your lives!” It was my first collaborative writing experience and went through a dozen rewrites and three recordings before being binned.
A former Councillor and Chair of Committees — the one-time wife of a one-time Mayor! — needed help putting together an application for a grant from a European Union funding body and when I saw the job on the funny boards, I nearly dropped my bat. At the time I was sleeping on the floor of a rented back-to-back on Oldfield Road and shooting cans with an air rifle in the yard. For the interview, in June, I wore a thick tweed suit that was only a couple of sizes too small but the former Councillor liked my teenaged engagement with machinations political and I got the gig.
Her house was at the top of Russell Road. It was enormous and she was brisk. “Have a look at that,” she said, showing me a three-hundred page application pack, “and tell me what I need to do get the money.” She left me alone in her attic room where I lay on the floor and had palpitations.
“How is this working out?” she asked the next day and I said, “It’s pretty impenetrable but I think I’m getting there,” and she said, “This isn’t working out.” I billed her for two days at the agreed rate and she refused to pay until I got in touch with a solicitor who didn’t charge the unemployed. She was unhappy and I could see why, but still.
I am living in Woodfield Road with Stu Pid, lead singer of Police Bastard, and Big/Mad Graham, a six-and-a-half foot fire juggler, who will go on to perform at the court of the Sultan of Brunei, or somesuch. Each year, old punks gather in Birmingham for the Punx Picnic; this time, several are staying. On the Friday night I try to make them feel comfortable by passing round a tray of speed and am perplexed when no one indulges (they no longer indulge, though the cider is bountiful).
One of our visitors is a Native American who shares my bed for a week and then asks if I want to sleep with her. I do, really, but I have to go out, so I don’t, a cause of some regret and unusual too — at this time, I am experimenting with polyamory, or at least fuck buddies and friends with benefits. This is unsatisfactory. Despite my straitened circs there is still power involved; one evening I ask a dreadlocked djembe player round and then, as per the terms of our agreement, decide against it after all. Although I have read about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and understand this is probably how it works, neither of us is happy.
In Manchester I meet a woman in a nightclub. She is a primary school teacher and when she comes down to visit the next weekend, she brings with her a dozen brightly coloured pictures in felt tip pen and paint, that she has asked her class to do for me. There are trees and rainbows and fish. I make a pitch-perfect tub of hummus — all the right proportions, a soupcon of cumin! — and we go to bed but I have been a bit spooked, I presume, by the good wishes of her pupils and can’t sustain an erection. I laugh — not unkindly, I think; at me, I think — but she doesn’t find it funny and leaves.
My best mate — who is up to something with BAE Systems — comes to visit and I take him to Satan’s Paradise, a junglist club, and King Tubby’s dub night in the old Islamabad restaurant, where they sell tins of Red Stripe and free-pour the rum. In Satan’s Paradise, a stranger hands me an enormous cartoon pill and I swallow it. My mate tells me he enjoys having money to spend, and although we studiously avoid comparisons, I am having fun too.
I write a story and send it to a new Birmingham-based publisher called Tindal Street Press. It is autobiographical and published in an anthology. My fellow contributors are young and I mistrust their imaginative excesses and resent their apparent confidence and serenity; I hope they resent my hard-won experience in return, but it
seems unlikely.
It is 1999. I am writing an opinion column for What’s On in Birmingham — ‘A View From the Hill!’ — when my best friend, who has some spare air miles, invites me to Adelaide for three months; on arrival in Oz a customs official says, “You’re not going to get very far on thirty dollars, are you mate?”
My friend’s partner works for an NGO and I am whisked from the airport to the Raukkan Community on the shores of Lake Alexandrina for a gathering — corroboree —of the Ngarrindjeri people. The aboriginal Hall-of-Famer Jimmy Little performs, there is dancing, and kangaroo tails are lowered into a fire pit in the scoop of a digger, but there is no booze to take the edge off the near-delirium of my jet lag: this only recedes when I immerse myself in an enormous meat pie from a bakery somewhere in the Coorong.