She falls to her knees in the bottom of the bath . . . she clings at the taps and kicks her feet in the puddle. I try and reassure her, I really do. I take a good long look at her arse, with the little bonde hairs just round the edge. I kneel and kiss it, ever so gently. I bite the cheek and rub my nose in there. That makes her jump - she nearly headbutts the sink.
‘What are you doing!’ She turns on me and snarls, clenches her buttocks and wipes her mouth. Her fists go into little balls. ‘It’s positively unnatural!’ And whilst we’re on the subject, she’s made a few enquiries and apparently anal sex is not only perverted, it’s also against the law!
So, now I know, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms. Nose picking isn’t my only vice. I used to wait ’til she was sound asleep and then spit on it and place it between her cheeks. I used to make her blush with anger. She was irate, she made threats and ultimatums. From nose picking to masturbation! From hair cuts to pornography! It seems that I wasn’t exactly to her liking.
Her mother had voiced her doubt from the outset. That bitch was out to sink me from day one! She called her daughter ‘Honey’ and always had a bitter smile for everyone. Fastidious and caring — a real man hater!
I tell you for free, it’s the mothers who pervert their precious little darlings, not the dirty old men. It’s the mothers who set the mould and administer the poison. From the nursery to the finishing school, pretending to be hurt and slighted. Handing out knowing looks left, right and centre, and sounding off guffaws of disapproval at every sentence. Hating life, hating men, but ultimately hating themselves.
It doesn’t take too many wrenches of their little hearts before they become as stand-offish and ignorant as their mothers. Snorting at everything that hasn’t been double sterilised and endorsed by the Reader’s Digest.
It’s hardly surprising that their little darlings turn to drink. Sanchia wouldn’t even give you so much as a swig from her cider bottle. ‘Little Miss Martini’, we used to call her — it did no good, she still wouldn’t part with a drop.
I only have to glance at a woman and I can guarantee she’s an emotional cripple. Every girl I’ve ever fallen for has come from a broken home. Wrecked marriages and misery is my speciality. We stumble into each other’s arms. ‘Daddy left when I was nine, mummy told me over cold toast and rice crispies, snap crackle pop!’ No kidding, she used to talk to her breakfast cereal. I’ve heard a tape her father made when she was three years old, and she sings a song . . . You can hear her old man muttering in the background. I’ve still got it somewhere. I can spot them a mile off — tragedy attracts tragedy . . .
How can you talk about two years of your life on a piece of fucking paper? Or even begin to discuss it? Christ we come cheap! And me? I lick the tits of a slug! It’s sick, a pointless exercise, that brings me neither hope nor sustenance. Even as I offer my heart up to be absolved, I dismiss myself, for I can never be good enough, not for my father, not for my family. And so, I suffer this humiliation . . . daring to bare the facts . . . for doing my upmost . . . against all the odds . . . for daring to breathe out of turn. And so I contemplate myself in public, and hand you this stick. And love and understanding? Each must find room in their own heart.
And I used to wake up with my lap curled round the ball of her arse. And morning she’d sit between my legs, her hair gone wild, hold my balls and taste the tip of me in her mouth. Her little tits bobbing in the blue curtained light. Her hair silver blond. And it would hurt me, twisting up my legs and balls, getting in her hair and filling my belly button . . . And the clothes knee-deep on the floor. And the sink blocked and the bed damp with mould and the stink of our bodies.
When Sanchia was a kid, her mother used to slice up Mars bars for Sanchia and her sister. They’d get one slice each as a treat after tea. Just one slice! It wasn’t because they were poor or nothing. It was purely to control them. To make sure that they had no sense of their own worth. They got no love, and scarcely any sweets, either. Christ, it would have been better to give them nothing. Little Sanchia and her sister sat waiting for those these little bits of chocolate. Obedient, polite and frozen! Shit, it makes me want to cry.
Argh, two years of losing myself in love, goo and self-pity! And now I should talk steadily? After all this time, to come to terms? My chin trembling, no melodramatics. A fake? If anyone dares even to suggest it, I’ll punch them smack on the nose! I tell you honest and true, in my fashion. I show my colours and walk on. Not for effect but out of love, without too many cheap tricks . . .
Her name was Sanchia, and it meant everything to me, and her name is still Sanchia . . . All the little intimacies that we held together, they belonged to nobody but us two. And now they’ve gone for good. If we pass on the street, we hold our heads high. We make believe and stick to pleasantries. We bat the breeze about old times, half-remembered faces, about nothing . . . We steer well clear of matters of the heart; we deny ourselves.
I’m pointing no finger, I betray no confidences. We didn’t have a chance . . . so we wave goodbye and something dies. A little death. Numbing. A pain that kills. After two or three of those little deaths, of those encounters of the heart, there isn’t so very much left to give.
We stare bankrupt and we try and lose ourselves in the streets, in the bars. But next morning we awake alone, heavy headed and thick tongued, our own personal brand of darkness. Sweet to the taste . . . I hold it in my guts and bite down into my pillow, stinging tears.
It’s only possible to lose yourself and your unhappiness in somebody else for so long . . . basking in the first few weeks in the sun’s glow of her dawn. Our souls purged, redeemed, brimming over with love, with joy for our fellow man. We allow others to hold that power over us and then we smash them, looking for any excuse to make them sorry, to make them apologise for all the past wrongs done unto us, and for having the nerve to love us when we don’t even have the stomach to love ourselves. But in the end, no matter to what depths we degrade them, our unhappiness flops back into our own miserable laps. Only this time it’s more stinking, foul and malignant than ever before . . . And we have to move on, to shift our gears, wounded, forever looking back over our shoulders, clutching onto those pathetic remembrances, those dreams that were never, in fact, true.
The one who plucks up the courage to leave first, the more chance they have of getting out still partially intact. Limping, a cripple, but still able to breathe. Existing through being the perpetrator.
I should’ve seen that kidney punch coming. Sanchia was only biding her time. The signs, the hints, building up over the months; I knew it, but I didn’t want to know it. In fact to know doesn’t even help in the end. I went down and I didn’t come back up. That was some punch — it lasted for years, revolving, repeating on me. I can still feel it now, if I sit quietly for a moment.
I stagger, I blubber and beg . . . strings of snot . . . I crawl around in a little pool of it. . . I demean myself. I want a new role in life, the part of a dog. Only not a dog at all, more like a half-dog, too vile for the dignity of a mongrel. I howl at the moon and lick at her feet . . . I crawl in the dust and disgust myself, longing to never have been born. I swear to die, if only I can . . . of a ruptured heart . . .
The door went, her things disappeared — and my heart beat and the clock ticked. No more her hair in the plug hole, blonde and matted. I lift it out and fling it to the floor. No more the smell of her hair on the pillow. No more her drunken laughter or the white grungey stuff in the crotch of her discarded knickers. No more her eyes and lips . . . she is as dead to me as a lost hand or an eye . . .
I walk the streets like a dead man; I look for her on passing buses, in the night rain. I gripe and I complain . . . I indulge myself, boring my friends and complete strangers, licking back salt tears and staring into my whisky. The faces drift away, the place is closing up . . .
People demand success and hate a failure, but more than that they despise a whinger. So I drink and I storm, my fragile ego so ready
to burst anybody else’s. I live on a memory, trying to recreate those same heart-felt feelings with the next woman, and then the next. I even use the same shameful chat-up lines. The same tired conversations, until in the end I can’t remember if I ever meant any of those sweet sentiments of youth.
All mine and Sanchia’s young love talk was flushed down the crapper like a used Durex on the 19th December 1980.
42. LIKE CRABS
All this idiotic talk about my women, my father and my crummy beginnings, where’s it all leading us? It’s disjointed, I grant you, but that’s the nature of dialogue. We zoom about all over the shop. Like a regular automobile. Jumpy as a field mouse. We change tack mid-stream. I overemphasise and re-emerge, crab-like, in totally unexpected places. Bear with me please, dear benefactor, my inadequacies . . . my humble attempts to communicate an idea . . . it has to be said, and in plain English. The unhijacked variety, yours and mine, spoken from the heart, trumpeted with zest.
I jump, I hesitate, I leap . . . but I get there in the end. Bend and adapt, through a living language, incomplete, inadequate, I grant you, but it’s all I’ve got. Crab-like, first over here then back over there. Side-walkers, they sink in, they pull themselves out again. They lift up their skirts and scuttle off. Have you ever seen them? Jolly little fellows, artists! Not straight on but sideways, like that! No noise, they’re silent, walking on damp sand; tic-tic-tic-tic-tic . . . The tide’s coming in!
The expressions, the faces of youth and the masks of the dead. I’m a mass observer, recording all of man’s low-down dealings and deceits. From the cradle to the grave. From the victims to the perpetrators, all of them lost, sad and hoping. It’s my legacy, my document. Personal details of the sort that should be kept under wraps. My early beginnings, unasked for? Certainly! But I’ll repeat them until I’m purged of their significance, to anybody who’s got ears and time to listen.
* * *
I’m sat propped up in front of the television set. I’m one and a half years old. There’s no programme playing, just the test card and this humming noise . . . I can’t get up and just walk away, I’m a baby, dumb, sat there, staring into it, contemplating the snowflakes, the molecules.
Stood naked on a beach in Devon, three years old. A cheese sandwich in my little hand, and my parents are watching me, daring me to throw it away. Then a great wave comes thundering in over the rocks into the bay. It overtakes me and I drop the sandwich. I release it into the sea . . . The wave covers me . . . it foams down, and I’m left standing there. My mother runs up to me, she thought she’d seen the last of me, that I’d been washed cleaned away . . .
‘I dropped my sandwich . . .’
‘That’s alright,’ she tells me, she rubs me with a towel. ‘Never mind, never mind . . .’
I’m seven years old, stood in the shallow end of the Great Danes indoor swimming pool. My mother sits on the side, and my brother and father swim up the deep end. And there’s this column in the middle like an island. I want to get to it, to touch it. But I can’t swim, so I make little hops, nudging closer and closer, just another couple of yards . . . Then I slide down this little shelf and out of my depth. Gurgling through the green stuff! Blowing bubbles! A terrible noise in my head! Drinking down great lungfuls of chlorine . . . I don’t know that I’m drowning . . . I just watch the bubbles bursting out of me.
I’m eight years old, me ’n’ me brother come out of his little tent in the back garden and watch a flying saucer come up over the trees, and disappear over the house . . . a little silver disc spinning in the clear summer blue.
‘Look Nick . . . a flying saucer!’
My brother shields his eyes and squints up at the disc — slowly it revolves across the sky.
‘No . . . it’s only a jet.’
‘But it’s round . . .’
‘It’s a jet.’
I watch it ’til it disappears . . . a flying saucer.
* * *
I hear a great crashing of dustbins and run up the garden and out into the alleyway . . . I tell the old girl I’m going over the estate to see Crowsfeet. . . I hang about by the door saying my farewells and then this great noise, like dustbins. I hesitate, then run skipping into the dark, humming to myself, keeping myself company . . . I just get into the alley when this little light comes rushing towards me . . . It grows by the second, heading straight for me, a white light with a sort of gingery glow . . . It zaps along the ground. I have to stall so as not to run into it. One moment it’s trundling along towards me like a little ginger moggy, the next it towers up in front of me, the height of a man, solid and glowing . . . I’m caught hopping on one foot. I skid to a halt then it just sucks itself under the fence to my left, and I start running again .. . I’ve no time to turn for home, I want the streets, the street lamps and the people.
I tell you so that you know something of my experiences, of the faces of little men . . . of dusk time and of things about which we know next to nothing . . . A panther seen in broad daylight crossing my path in local woods . . . Not a dog, not a rabbit, but a full grown black panther, twenty yards away . . . minding his own business, stepping from one place to the next.
I’m sixteen years old living in a squat in Chalk Farm with my brother. Travelling on the tube, I pull up on the escalator behind this Indian girl. Her arse smiles at me, and slowly, not knowing myself, I push a finger into the split, I nudge it in there, my heart pounding . . . We get to the top of the stairs and I watch as she walks away. I’m in love . . . I look for her again but can never find her. Week after week, I scour the empty halls of the traveller, but she’s gone, my angel.
Back at the squat, I lay on my camp-bed and wank to my saviour of the cold city. A real woman, to touch, to hold and to cherish . . . I vowed then and there to travel to India, to leave first thing in the morning: to find my princess.
I can’t bear this much longer, these remembrances, a headache, stretching back over the years, like a crusade. A crusade without money or meaning. I know, I keep mouthing off, making a laughing stock of myself, a whipping post for the liberals and extremists alike. Pissing over their freedoms and dogmas, belittling their literary traditions. I’ve let the mask slip once too often to pretend to hide anything from you now — it’s all history. Write it down and forget, that’s the rule. But it doesn’t always work out that way, it isn’t always that simple . . . I rewrite, I rethink, and try a new perspective . . . I admit to it, I try the dirtiest trick in the book: I whinge to my readers. I suppose it’s too late to ask for forgiveness? ‘Ah’, you’ll say, ‘a romantic to the very end,’ and you’d be right. Just one view of little Elisabeth’s arse walking down Walderslade Road and I go all to pieces. I start getting all sentimental over it right away, that’s my poetic nature. I crawl upon my hands and knees. I lick at the pavement. I roll over on my back and spit gravel. I beat the tarmac with my bare fists, my head bowed to God.
43. OAKWOOD MENTAL HOSPITAL
We all have our jobs of work to do. Mine was cleaning out the shit-house! Scrubbing the crappers! Sloshing round the U-bends! Ward porter. They gave me a giant passkey to all the doors in our little world. Cupboards like you’ve never seen. Deep, black, cobwebbed, stacked to the ceiling with every device known to fight the dripping arse of man. I’ve still got the key, weighty, silver, impressive.
It’s just the other side of Maidstone. Five minutes from the London Road. Turn left towards Barming. You can’t miss the dump. Go take a peep for yourself, borrow my passkey if you like. A big stone wall, grey, flint-like, built right round the grounds of that place, daunting . . . In Victorian times it was to keep the patients in. Now it’s more out of politeness, to keep all those bits of crawling humanity out of people’s faces. A junkyard for human eyesores. The busted down, the unloveable and the dead. Sapped minds, buggerists, shit-eaters and alcoholics, mostly.
Look out for the gatehouse, a hole between the stone walls. A driveway, broad, expansive, lined with great, green monsters, right the way up to the
front steps. Pine trees, full of twitterings. Little brown fellows and the occasional wood pigeon, cooing their incessant little songs of freedom. The mood will hit you right away; you won’t be able to mistake it. And the smell will stay with you forever . . . Lost in a labyrinth of corridors. Miles and miles of the stuff, disappearing into a point in the far distance . . . The light hits the windows, then drops off, giving up the ghost, uninterested, repetitive, never-ending. It’s a place that breeds depression. And outside on the little lawn, the disused bandstand, wrought ironwork from yesteryear.
My great-gran died in this dump. The sun slanting in, yellowish, sadly . . . An acrid stench, ammonia, a trickle of piss, white ankles . . . An old guy shuffles past, he stoops and picks up a dog end. A never-ending stream of the unwanted. They stagger and drool, herded towards the canteen, towards the little grey serving hatch at the far end. Cups of dark orange tea, saccharin tasting.
You go in and sit down next to the mural the local school kids painted. The juke-box cranking out songs of young love and never-ending happiness. Blatant and unrelenting. You stare into the tea, opaque . . . And the faces tell you of failure — lined, ludicrous twitches, rockings, mutterings. And you know that the people who tell you that this world is a good place, that their days are full of hope and meaning, are just a bunch of charlatans, on the devil’s pay-role, actors with cash in the bank.
Crappers! That’s my department, cleaning, polishing . . . First thing, get the shit-house clean! Next, buff up the corridors! Buff up the corridors! It sounds like playing with a rag, but there’s acres of those tiles: parquet. Each with its own character, wooden, stained and never wanting to gleam. And in between, I have to help serve the dinners and remove forty years worth of encrusted nicotine from the lounge ceiling. Dark brown, a billion puffs and then some more. With only a mop and a bucket. The yellow juice streaming down my arms. I wasn’t laughing — that was a messy business, and as far as I could see it, a pretty pointless one.
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