Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  I had a tooth abscess during this period. I couldn’t find a free dentist and I had no money to pay for one. The tooth would infect and leave me in pain for a few days, then it would drain and eventually become reinfected. I wasn’t using drugs at all, but I began to treat the pain with opium that I would make myself from plants I gathered on wastelands.

  Abscesses hurt quite a lot, and I suffered with that one, on and off, for about a year, until one day it got so bad that I couldn’t even open my mouth any more.

  I rang a dentist and made an appointment without telling him that I had no money. When I went into his surgery he said, ‘Please open your mouth and let me have a look.’

  I said, ‘I gan’t oken my ’uckin outh. I need anti-giotics. I ’ot no ’oney. Lease gi me a grescription.’

  He wrote out the prescription, but when he found out I had no money he never asked me back for further treatment.

  Two Christmas Stories

  Through every fault of my own I was living rent-free in my friend’s back garden, in a small caravan he owned. A song thrush would perch in a nearby tree every morning and sing a song, and I enjoyed the sound of the rain on the roof. It was a really tiny living space, but it didn’t leak and it was warm and cozy until the temperature dropped below freezing, at which point the Calor Gas heating pipes would freeze and, to avoid the same fate, I would retreat to my trusty sleeping bag, listen to the radio, and write while I waited for the thaw.

  At the time, I was earning some money working with a man and a van doing house removals. He would come round and call to me through the big steel gates at the back of the property where the caravan was parked, and I would go and work for him for as long as he needed me. I worked for five pounds an hour. Sometimes he would employ me for half an hour. That was two pound fifty. I certainly learned the value of money. It was, I suppose, a subsistence existence. I was living hand to mouth but somehow I was quite content. It’s surprising what you get used to.

  As we got closer to Christmas the work became less frequent and I decided to try to sign on for a couple of weeks to get some money from the government. I had become pretty much invisible to society, which made signing on, or getting housing benefit, nearly impossible. So, cap in hand, I went down to the dole office, filled in the sheaf of paperwork they gave me and handed it back to them. After waiting two weeks, during which time I had visited them occasionally to make polite enquiries, I had still heard nothing regarding my claim, so I went in again to ask about it. They told me that I was expected for an interview at the big social security building nearby. Apparently there was a problem with my details.

  I arrived at the featureless office block at the appointed time and date and sat down in a moulded plastic chair to wait for my interview. Eventually, I was told to go to another room. This particular room was about six foot by twelve, it had no windows and it contained a desk that stretched the entire width of the room, bisected by an unbreakable-looking clear screen that ran all of the way from the desktop to the ceiling. Effectively the room was divided into two and there was no way through from one side to the other.

  There was another moulded plastic chair on my side of the screen, so I sat down on it and proceeded to read the graffiti which had been scratched into the wood of the desk. I recognised a few names. Eventually, the door on the other side of the room opened and a man came through and sat down on a moulded chair that was very much like the one I was sitting in. The man was middle aged and nondescript. He didn’t return my smile, greeted me with no emotion and made it clear that he wanted to get down to business. I felt the same. I had been bored since I walked through the door.

  ‘Mr Carruthers,’ he began. ‘We are having some problems with the details you have provided for us.’ He was still as blank as the screen he was looking through. ‘Specifically,’ he continued, ‘the part where you claim to have lived under a hedge and eaten nuts and berries for two years.’ He looked at me sceptically over his glasses.

  ‘What’s the problem with that?’ I replied with a serious, but not too serious expression.

  ‘Our computer will not accept it,’ he said, looking at me with the air of a man who was missing an urgent appointment with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

  ‘In that case,’ I reassured him, ‘the problem would seem to be with your computer and not with my actual details, because, in fact, I did live under a hedge during the specified time and did sustain myself with nuts and berries during that period. If you have a problem believing me, I can show you the hedge and the nuts and berries in question.’

  At this point, he betrayed a little irritation, laid down his notes, looked me in the eye through his protective screen, and uttered the immortal words, ‘Mr Carruthers, what do you see your role in society as being?’

  I began to realise why the screen was there.

  I had never thought of myself as having any particular role in society. I suppose I liked to think of myself as being a little bit like the song thrush that turned up and sang next to the caravan every morning, but I wasn’t about to try to explain that complex philosophical point to him.

  I decided to go on the offensive instead. ‘What’s your role in society?’ I said to him.

  ‘I am a guardian of public funds,’ he said indignantly, with a little too much emphasis on the ‘I’.

  He had started justifying himself.

  ‘No you aren’t,’ I said, getting into the flow of it. ‘You are a drain on public funds. What are you on? About twenty grand a year to sit behind your little plastic screen asking insulting questions of a legitimate claimant?’

  ‘I am not here to answer your questions,’ he spluttered, implying that I was actually there to answer his questions, and not just to get the money that I was legally entitled to.

  He composed himself and continued. ‘You claim to be of no fixed abode and yet you say that you live in a caravan in your friend’s back garden. That is a fixed abode. Why haven’t you given us an address?’

  I was a little bit annoyed with him but I held my temper and smiled reasonably. ‘Well, the situation is this,’ I explained, as you would to an idiot or a machine. ‘I do, indeed, live in my friend’s back garden in a small but beautifully arranged caravan. However, they do not want me to sign on from that address, so if I tell you where I live, I no longer live there. You see, if I tell you I live there, I don’t live there, but if I don’t tell you I live there, I do live there unless I tell you I live there, at which point I live somewhere else, so I wouldn’t be living there and that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? Do you follow me?’

  He kept on laying the blank face on me so I knew I was making progress. I continued, ‘Furthermore, if you do not give me the money to which I am LEGALLY entitled, I shall find out where you live, because I know you must come out from behind that screen sometimes, and then I shall go back to my non-fixed abode and I will grasp the tow bar with my own bare hands and roll my humble caravan, on its little non-fixed wheels, onto the road outside the house where you live. I will park it there over Christmas and when you and your family are eating your Christmas dinner, I will scratch, pathetically, at your window, weeping and moaning in a theatrical manner.’

  The tone was generally good-natured, but I did get a little theatrical towards the end just so he knew I had it in me.

  I looked at him as dispassionately as I could manage. It seemed to be the order of the day. Just keep it factual. No need for messy emotions on either side of the plastic.

  He looked back at me through the protective screen that did not divide us outside of the room.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We shall assess your claim.’

  He left through his little door and I left through mine.

  Two days later I got my money, my role in society still undefined.

  He ate his Christmas dinner in peace, and I suppose we were both happy in our own little ways.

  Or Something …

  People who write and read and review books are fucking putting
themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us who fucking make records and write pathetic little songs for a living … I don’t get it. Booksellers, book readers, book writers, book owners – fuck all of them.

  Noel Gallagher

  The horn beeped and I appeared out of some bushes, much to the amusement of the driver. I must have been pretty tired because the four measly hours of sleep had just flown by. I brushed the dirt off myself, got in the van and rolled a cigarette. The van had dropped me off a few hours earlier and there had seemed to be little point in getting comfortable, so I had chosen to sleep in the garden at my mum’s house, where I was living at the time. We had finished late the night before and the van had gotten a flat tire on the way back to Rugby. There had been many dull hours spent beside the motorway, wondering why nobody had a fucking spanner that could remove the wheel nuts. We had one tiny spanner that fitted the wheel nuts, but there was no way anybody could get enough leverage on it by hand for it to do its job. In the end, my friend Jürgen, a German fellow who had somehow ended up in Rugby dodging national service in his own country, suggested we lift a nearby drain cover, slide that over our useless spanner, and then use it to get the necessary torque to remove the wheel nuts. It had worked, much to everyone’s relief.

  ‘Just beep the horn when you get here,’ I had said as I’d got out of the van in the early hours of the morning. So they had, and there I was, sitting in the back of a minibus that smelled like hashish, tiredness and yesterday’s beer as we drove and picked up the other workers from all over Rugby. By the time we were all loaded up and ready to go it was fucking seven o’clock in the morning, or something unfriendly.

  Nobody was communicating beyond essential grunting and moaning, so I just went to sleep as the van made its way onto the motorway that would somehow lead us to the grand stately home of Knebworth. I was woken up by the sound of somebody puking out of the van window. This was nothing unusual. There were more than a few alcoholics and drug addicts on the team. They were decent people, but they lacked ambition or something.

  Go team.

  Somehow our company had won the contract to work at one of the biggest concerts ever. It was that defining moment in history when everybody’s stupid low-rent indie dreams were finally going to be blasted into the stratosphere. NEW LABOUR. BRITPOP. KNEBWORTH. OASIS. COOL BRITANNIA. It was a time of optimism and new beginnings, and somehow I was finally part of the future. I’d hit the big time. Well, when I say ‘hit’ it, I mean I had blundered into it like a person might walk into a glass door presuming it was open. Due to a combination of zero monetary ambition and poverty, I had fallen into another low-end job. It was probably day three of the load-in. The day before the big rock and roll show.

  We arrived at Knebworth and found the other crews from various parts of the country, who were all in the same state as we were and who were generally looking like they wished they were somewhere else too. Most people were fairly awake by the time we all gathered to start work. Somebody with lots of tools attached to their belt gave out the orders. Some members of the crews had skills, like tuning guitars, or climbing, or rigging, or lights. I had no skills. ‘OK, Will,’ my gaffer said to me, ‘you can dig in the cables.’ He gave me a spade and walked me out into the field in front of the stage. When we got to the mixing desk he pointed out a big cable that stretched into the distance in about three directions. It looked like a big fat black worm. I had to cut the turf out, dig a bit of soil out, lay the cable in the trench, and then put the turf on top so no paying customer would trip over it and have a funny turn. My gaffer fucked off and I took a couple of ephedrine tablets from my pocket and swallowed them. I was still half asleep when I stuck the spade into the ground and made a start. There was half a fucking mile of cable to dig in. I dug the turf out, laid the cable into the little trench and then stamped it down with my boots. I looked at the stage and wondered why I was digging out trenches, and then I did a bit more half-hearted digging until the tablets kicked in. I channelled all of that bullshit energy into my trenching. I was like a maniac, digging and laying and stamping like it mattered to me. By tea break I had done a hundred metres or so. Because of the drugs I had hardly noticed my own exertions, even though they weren’t really drugs because I had got them from a chemist. They were decongestants. They certainly decongested my doubts about why I was fucking bothering.

  My mate Jürgen came over and we both went backstage to find the ‘hospitality’ tent. As we sat down I noticed a certain amount of unease within the tent and turned to look at what everyone else was looking at. Standing at the entrance were two high-ranking police officers. Lots of people in the tent were on drugs, or wanted to be, so the appearance of policemen attracted understandable attention. It was pretty much unheard of for any police to be seen in the backstage area anywhere at these events. The high-ranking officers surveyed the situation. They smiled and appeared to be benign. Nobody smiled back. I went back to the cables. Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  It just went on and on like that until it was time to have a food break.

  I wasn’t hungry so I went for a little look around the backstage area. There was another big tent, with a massive toy-car track in it. I took two more pills and went back to the cables.

  Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  It was quite sunny, and everything was almost in place for the gig of the fucking century. I have to admit that I didn’t feel like I was involved in history in the making. The PA started to make sounds, big walls of pink noise and the occasional burst of music. Somewhere in the distance, near the stage, I saw two white golf carts with people in them. It was the stars of the show pretending to be the Beatles, or something. They drove round and round and laughed. Their joy seemed neither convincing nor entirely convinced, or maybe I was just jealous. When Oasis had started they were like a punk rock Slade, and they were pretty good. After they got a bit bigger someone made the mistake of telling them they were like the Beatles, and, because they were popular and putting lots of cocaine up their noses, they believed that maybe they might even be better than the Beatles, a little bit. I was basically unmoved by my proximity to glamour. I kept digging.

  They drove around a bit more, in what seemed to me to be an imitation of fun, or maybe an imitation of the Beatles pretending to have fun, and then, after they got bored of driving round in their little white golf carts, they went somewhere else. They were probably playing Scalextric, or doing drugs. To be fair, they were probably having more fun than I was, which wasn’t really that difficult. Weirdly, I was not envious. Maybe the ephedrine was giving meaning to my life.

  Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  I didn’t even know I was tired, even though I had dug in a quarter of a mile of cable. It was a battle between me and the drugs and the cable. None of us was winning. It was a nil-nil draw. There was still about a mile of cable left to dig in and I had a whole box of nasty speed pretending to be a cold remedy in my pocket. My nose was as clear as my conscience. I couldn’t even be bothered to think about anything.

  I looked around. My boss was walking across the field.

  The boss had once sold the Socialist Worker on the streets of Rugby, but now he ran a job agency. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and looked quite stressed most of the time. It might have been work stress, or it might have been showbiz-sherbet stress, it was hard to tell. Every hour that we worked he got paid for. I liked him, but I couldn’t resist taking the piss out of what I perceived as being the contradiction between his socialist beliefs and his current occupation as the head of a job agency, albeit a job agency employing the misfits who would have either been laughed out of (or would have laughed at) most of the other jobs available in our small town. My sarcastic nature and proclivity for wandering meant that my possibilities for advancement within the company were considerably diminished.

  There was a fairly strict hierarchy within the crew. There were the roadies (people who were actually on the road with the band), all of the office people and organisers, and then
there was us. The local crew of humpers and losers. The hierarchy was most evident in the type of drugs people took. If you were high enough up, you got to take cocaine, like the rock stars. If you were a low-end humper with no obvious skills, it was beer and hash. If you were a loser but had friends who weren’t, you might be given the odd line. I worked at this job on and off for about a year and never even saw a line of cocaine. Anyway. Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  A big old Luton van pulled up beside where I was working. I was so bored I stopped to look at it. The driver got out and rolled up the shutter at the rear of the van. About ten kids in their early teens piled out in a state of youthful excitement. They were feeling the glamour of being part of the rock and roll circus after having been cooped up with no seating in the back of a windowless van from Hull or somewhere. They had probably been promised free tickets to the gig of the century in exchange for a ‘few hours work’ and would most likely be flipping burgers and washing pots at one of the food vans while Liam was singing ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ or ‘Champagne Supernova’. I guessed most of those kids hadn’t drunk a lot of champagne, but at least now they wanted to. Cocaine lifestyles, golf carts, rock stars, big Scalextric. Dare to fucking dream. Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  Oasis had been having a bit of a disagreement with another band called Blur. It was on the news and everything. Oasis hated Blur and the feeling was mutual. There was a battle for the number-one slot in the charts, a fight to see who would win. There could only be one biggest. It was survival of the most ambitious.

  Blur had a song about a rich person moving to a country house and Oasis had a song about rolling with it. What ‘it’ actually was was never specified. Like all great advertising slogans it was vague but seemingly full of meaning. In the media the bands had been portrayed as being very different to each other, it was said that they were coming from different places in society. You know how the class system is in Britain, right? As soon as you open your mouth you get slotted into a subcategory on some tier of unbreakable class distinction. The funny thing was, both bands wanted the same thing, which was, of course, what everyone else wanted, which was to be the biggest, or the best, or something. It was neat divide and rule packaged as alternative culture and sold with mock disapproval and a vaguely patronising chuckle by the mainstream media. Can you imagine Crass doing it? Me neither. It was all about aspiration. Sadly, the aspirations in question were extremely fucking dull.