by Jason Ayres
Midlife Crisis
By Jason Ayres
Text copyright © 2016 Jason Ayres
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by
SelfPubBookCovers.com/Daniela
For Jane and Ged
Contents
No Future
Modern Life is Rubbish
What Difference Does It Make?
Second-Hand News
Cops and Robbers
Fools Gold
Nothing in my Way
Avenging Angels
Friday I’m In Love
Perfect Day
The Next Life
No Future
November 2018
Richard Kent was having a bad day.
This was nothing unusual. He had a lot of bad days. But this was an exceptionally dismal one, even by his standards. At forty-two years old he had just been dismissed from the only job he had ever known. After two decades in the police force, he had been unceremoniously booted out on his ear.
They had dressed it up and called it voluntary redundancy but he knew the sack when he saw it. He had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse: jump or be pushed. So he had jumped. And now here he was, contemplating another jump.
It was 4.30pm on a freezing cold November afternoon and he was standing on top of the multistorey car park that dominated the skyline of his home town. The building was relatively new, part of an unprecedented amount of local building going on in what was rapidly becoming just another bland London commuter town.
The sky was a huge red and gold expanse to the west where the sun had just set, a brilliant display of colour that complemented the many leaves blowing around in the autumn breeze. As far as Kent was concerned it may as well have been setting on his life.
He hadn’t just had a bad day; he’d had a bad decade. In fact, thinking back over his life in general, he would have to conclude that it had been all downhill since the Millennium.
There just did not seem to be any point in carrying on. Not only were the best days of his life seemingly behind him, but he also hated just about everything about the modern world. From the way it was treating him, apparently it hated him back. As for the future, that was a huge, increasingly alien landscape from which he would only become further and further disconnected.
Had there been anyone up on the roof with him, he could have ranted and raved for an hour about his woes. But even if there had been anyone there, would they have listened? He had vented his frustrations enough times in the pub and no one there took any notice. The core group of regulars in The Red Lion were in just as miserable a state as he was. Most of the others who came into the pub were people half his age and he had nothing in common with them. They were too busy being young, carefree and enjoying themselves. They were not remotely interested in anything he had to say.
It seemed like only yesterday that Kent had been just like them, having fun and ignoring the has-beens at the bar. He had never even contemplated the fact that one day he would become one of them.
If anyone had asked him there and then what was wrong with his life he would have responded with: “Where do I start?” The list was endless. The security of his job had been ripped away from him, his teenage kids either ignored him or took the piss out of him, and his wife, Debs, nagged him continually. As for any sort of sex life, well, that had dwindled to the point where he could describe all the action he’d had in the past year on the back of a postage stamp.
He hated modern music, television and popular culture in general. The town he had grown up in was unrecognisable. Nearly all the great, old pubs had closed down or been modernised to such an extent that Kent considered them ruined, and all the decent shops had gone.
All of that would not have been so bad if he still had his health, but that was going to pieces as well. His once flowing locks of dark hair were rapidly thinning on top, he had ballooned in weight to eighteen stone, and his eyesight was rapidly declining. On top of all that he had suffered from attacks of gout and piles, and for the past five years had been taking a cocktail of pills every day to control his blood pressure. In short, not only was his mind a mess, his body was as well.
There was no point in moaning about it to Debs or anyone else: they never had any sympathy. She blamed all of his ills on the pub. All, that was, apart from the eyesight. This she had cruelly suggested was down to his own self-abuse after discovering a stack of hardcore pornographic DVDs that he had been hiding for years in the garden shed. His lame excuse that they had been confiscated in a police raid after being illegally smuggled into the country had not been believed.
Considering how unforthcoming she had been in the bedroom in recent years, Kent felt that she had been unduly harsh, but then she was about most things.
Other men in Kent’s situation had affairs, but this was not a road he had any intention of traversing. He had seen the mess it had got other people into and he could do without that aggravation. Besides, he was painfully aware that he couldn’t have an affair even if he wanted to. The sad truth was that women didn’t fancy him anymore.
In his youth, attractive, willing girls seemed to be everywhere. At the police Christmas parties back in the 1990s there were always plenty of WPCs who were keen for a snog and a grope in the stationery cupboard.
That sort of thing doubtless still went on but the girls doing it were twenty years younger than him now and there were a whole new breed of alpha males for them to play with. Kent had spent most of last year’s Christmas party standing at the bar doing more or less the same thing he did all year in his local pub – moaning.
The only woman who had made Kent any sort of offer in recent times was Kay, a drunken, middle-aged trollop in his local pub. He had known her since schooldays when she had been the brightest and prettiest girl in the class, but she had squandered her early promise on alcohol. These days she was well known as the pub’s local bike and Kent had steered a wide berth. No matter how bad things got, he swore he would never get that desperate. Besides, he had always maintained a strict policy of never sleeping with anyone with fewer teeth than he had.
Was that all he had to look forward to? A wife who had gone cold on him, a stack of porn in the shed and offers from toothless old crones?
As he stood on the roof with all these thoughts tumbling through his mind, all he could think about was how much better life had been in the past. As for the future, he certainly couldn’t imagine any scenario where things were going to improve. In fact he could only envisage things getting worse. Was it really worth sticking around to find out?
Why not just end it all, here and now?
Modern Life is Rubbish
November 2018
When he was young it had all been so different. Kent had really felt part of the world, embracing popular culture along with the rest of his generation. He had felt edgy, cool and at the forefront of everything that was happening.
He had been born in 1976 at the end of one of the longest and hottest summers the UK had even known. He knew this because he’d been told about it by his mother. She had complained many times about how uncomfortable it had been being heavily pregnant in the heat, sounding as if she blamed him. Kent felt this was a little harsh: he could hardly help when he was born. If anyone was to blame for the timing of the event it was his father.
He had popped out on the bank holiday Monday at the end of August, just as the heatwave broke and the he
avens opened. He couldn’t remember anything about the 1970s but he did know that he had been born into a great time. It was the beginning of the glorious era of punk rock, just before the Sex Pistols were about to shock the establishment.
He had loved pop music when he was a kid. One of his earliest memories was seeing David Bowie performing “Ashes to Ashes” on Top of the Pops. Very soon after that he became obsessed with the charts. It started with listening to the weekly rundown on Sunday teatimes with his sister. A few years later, he insisted that he be allowed to come home for his lunches on Tuesdays in order to hear the brand new chart being revealed.
As the DJ read out the songs he used to try and write them down as quickly as possible in a Woolworths exercise book. Then he’d gain kudos from his classmates when he took the book back into school in the afternoon to announce the rundown all over again for them. He was only about nine or ten when he was doing this, and had bold aspirations at the time to become a Radio 1 DJ when he grew up.
By the time he was in his mid-teens he was helping out a DJ who ran mobile discos at various local youth clubs and social clubs, but that amounted mostly to fetching and carrying for a bit of extra pocket money. Rarely was he let loose on the decks and this was as far as his DJ’ing career ever went. Various other distractions such as girls and beer got in the way, so, like most of his youthful ambitions, it ultimately came to nothing.
As he became increasingly aware of the whole music scene in the early 1980s, he was thrilled at how vibrant and exciting it seemed. The highlight of the week was Thursday evening when Top of the Pops came on. Week after week, new and innovative acts filled the screen, alongside the more established artists.
He could remember so many watershed moments, such as the first time Culture Club appeared. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ was the hot topic of discussion at school the next day. Even at five or six years old all of the kids were into music in a big way. It wasn’t long until he went through a major rite of passage of every child in those halcyon days: the buying of his first single.
It was 1984 and he didn’t get a huge amount of pocket money at that time – 50p a week if he remembered rightly. Although 50p went a lot further in 1984 than it did in 2018, he still had to save up for two weeks to be able to afford to buy a record. It was very hard for him to resist spending the first week’s money on sweets, which was where his pocket money usually went, but he had put the money in his piggy bank and vowed not to touch it.
Nearly all music back then came on 7” vinyl singles. CD was in its infancy and cassette singles had not really caught on. They never did, as far as he could remember. His sister, who was three years older, already had a large collection of singles from the big stars of the day. It was she who had taken him down to Woolworths to buy that first single. How he remembered and cherished that moment! Life had seemed so simple back then and the world an exciting and amazing place, full of new experiences.
That world that he had grown up in was long gone. Even Woolworths, a shop that had been ever-present throughout his life and a monument to his childhood, had vanished, gone bankrupt during a recession which Kent blamed on reckless and greedy bankers. The reality was, it probably would have gone bust anyway sooner or later, a victim of changing times rather like Kent himself.
As he had grown up, the music scene had got ever more exciting. By the time the seemingly futuristic year of 1990 rolled round, Kent was a teenager and ready to fully embrace the whole Madchester music scene. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans and many more provided the soundtrack to the first half of his teenage life.
As soon as he had turned thirteen he had got himself a paper round. For this, he got the princely sum of £15 a week, most of which he spent on records. After much badgering, his parents had bought him a small hi-fi system for his fifteenth birthday which contained that most modern of things at the time, a CD player. He would spend many a happy hour up in his room, as well as a few melancholy ones, playing his CDs over and over again. Whatever his mood, he had the perfect album to accompany it. Other kids were into computer games or football, but Kent just loved his music.
That music just seemed to get better and better. By the time he’d reached his late-teens and started drinking in pubs, Britpop had arrived. In 1994 he’d lost his virginity in his bedroom to a girl called Mandy who worked in a Little Chef. This landmark moment in his life was played out to the backdrop of Blur’s Parklife, still his favourite album of all time. Life was exciting and full of promise. He nurtured dreams of becoming a rockstar himself. To that end, he decided to teach himself the guitar and then form a band.
Unfortunately, his attempts to play the guitar were appalling. It wasn’t for want of trying, but he had no natural ability in that area whatsoever. Just as with the DJ’ing, his interest in it fizzled out. He spent a year bumming around after leaving school, trying to decide what to do, before settling for the considerably more mundane life of a career in the police force instead.
And then, frustratingly, the music changed. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he fell out of love with the music scene but he guessed it must have been some time around his 30th birthday.
He had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the proliferation of manufactured plastic pop in the charts in the early 2000s. Of course, boy bands and girl bands had always been there, but he hadn’t minded them so much in his younger years. Perhaps it was because a lot of them back then still had genuine talent, as well as writing a lot of their own material. But after the Millennium, there was a distinct change in the musical landscape.
Kent blamed TV talent shows which had become very big around that time. It was suddenly all about a procession of wannabe stars being paraded on TV singing songs that the audience already knew. Performance was everything, creative talent and songwriting skills were irrelevant. Songs that the public didn’t know weren’t good for viewing figures. Rehashing tried and tested former hits was.
He absolutely hated this kind of approach and the more popular it became, the more he railed against it. But what could he do? Everyone else seemed to love it, it took up a huge amount of space in the tabloids, and it was all his younger colleagues at work ever seemed to talk about.
He couldn’t even escape it at home; his wife was glued to it every Saturday and Sunday night. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also felt the need to waste money phoning in votes for the talentless morons who performed on the shows. In Kent’s opinion, it was blatantly all fixed, so what was the point in voting anyway? His opinion was vindicated on this a few years later when a voting scandal erupted.
At least there had still been some decent music around at the time to keep him sane. He loved The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, Keane and Maroon 5. But over time even these bands seemed to fade from the scene, squeezed out by an increasing number of artists filling up the charts that Kent had never heard of. By the time the decade drew to a close the charts were full of unfamiliar names to him.
Nearly every song in the chart seemed to be by some overegotistical DJ or rapper with a silly name featuring someone else with an even stupider name. Quite apart from the ridiculous monikers these new acts went by, couldn’t they even stick to their own stuff anymore? What was with all the collaborations? He couldn’t make sense of it all.
Top of the Pops went off the air around this time, another piece of his childhood stripped away, though in truth he had long since stopped watching it. As for Radio 1, that had become about as relevant to him as a weather forecast for Jupiter. He was grimly aware that he was no longer part of their target demographic and that the station he had grown up with no longer wanted him. It wasn’t just the music they played that he couldn’t relate to, but the DJs, too. They spoke a language he no longer understood.
On the few occasions he got a chance to listen to the wireless now he found himself increasingly drawn to Radio 2, despite the fact that he had mocked the station not that many years earlier. He remembered one night when he was out on a coll
eague’s stag night and some of the lads had tried to leave early because they were on duty in the morning. At the time he had ripped the piss out of them, quipping, “You lightweights! You’ll be listening to Radio 2 next!”
It didn’t seem so funny now. Those chickens had well and truly come home to roost. Most of the DJs he had grown up listening to on Radio 1 had been moved across to the sister station, and grudgingly he was being forced to join them.
He had also been gutted when John Peel had died – in his opinion, the best DJ of all time. Unlike many who claimed to have spent their formative years listening to Peel in an attempt to look cool, Kent genuinely had. As the years flew by, more and more of those who had had such an influence on his early life through music and TV passed on. With each death, Kent felt a tiny piece of himself dying inside, too. This process seemed to be accelerating by early 2016, when hardly a week went by without some childhood hero or other dying, leading him to question his own mortality.
There was no danger of his friends finding out about his shameful defection to Radio 2, as he no longer had any proper mates. His social life had disappeared into the abyss around the same time he fell out of love with music. He still spent a lot of time in the pub, but they weren’t the type of nights out that he had enjoyed when he was younger. Then, him and a bunch of other lads had started at the top of the town and worked their way around the town’s pubs every Friday night. Now those lads had gone their separate ways and he was reduced to standing at the bar with the other middle-aged losers going on about how much better life had been in the good old days.
As the 2010s wore on, things just got worse and worse musically. He thought he was moving with the times, now listening to his old music on an iPod classic rather than playing CDs. But before long it seemed even that was considered old hat. When he had gone into an electrical superstore in search of a new hi-fi system, he had asked one of the young lads who worked there if they had one with an iPod dock.