by Nick Frost
To be fair the atmosphere in their house was always nice. Tea was always being made, Dallas was usually on, and Mandy was there which was a bonus. One night I came in fairly early. Everyone was up and about except Mum. She’d gone to bed early with a bit of a headache. Despite all our shit, I loved, still love, my mum with all of my heart. I pop into the bedroom to say goodnight.
Literally as soon as I push the door open I hear a very inhuman and yet totally human noise, a scream, a hollow roar, the noise of a mother hearing her son has been murdered. It isn’t right and my spine and brain twitch. It’s dark and I don’t know what’s happening but noises like that never mean anything good. Never.
I flick on the light and find her fitting violently. Her arms tight and thrust into the sky like a boxer knocked out with the perfect punch. Arms thrust upwards, defending themselves from a nightmare. Their brains are malfunctioning. My mum’s brain is malfunctioning and it’s the oddest most frightening thing I’ve ever witnessed. She’s having a stroke.
I watch for what seems to be an age, one of her eyes focuses on me, pleading for help. I don’t move, I can’t move, I’m stone. She emits a growl and it snaps me out of my terror. I crash through the door with the little slats and pick up the phone.
I’m making a strange noise, which gets people off the sofa. They peer at me. I literally cannot talk but my noises leave little doubt that something is very fucked up. Chris sees me and sees my panic and as an ex-nurse knows exactly what’s happening. Chris always had a very cool head.
I have the phone in my hand and 999 answers. I can’t speak. I groan and feel tears tumbling down my cheeks. I try and talk but someone takes over and once again life quickens. An ambulance turns up, groaning Mum is rushed into hospital. The stroke was bad, and the doctors suggest it was brought on by drink and stress. It could’ve been a lot worse, we could’ve easily lost her that night. After three days of touch and go, her prognosis finally improves. Her speech returns – this has its good and bad points. Eventually her facial paralysis disappears too. Mum was so fucking lucky.
After this point with the company folding and us losing everything I feel truly alone. It’s a sobering feeling the moment you become your parents’ parent. For some people it’s not until they’re in their fifties or sixties but I was sixteen and it was too much for me to bear. After Mum’s stroke my lovely gentle dad had a massive nervous breakdown and he was never the same again. The man I knew, the workaholic, the joker, always laughing but often absent through hard work, had disappeared. I never saw that man again. There were glimpses every now and then, especially after Mum died, but it wasn’t the same.
I’d only seen Dad cry once up to that point, when Deborah died. After the collapse of us I saw him cry every day. The fact that my dad had failed, failed in business, failed as a man, to support us, his family. It killed him inside. The truth is not this at all, he didn’t fail me. What I saw was a brave man who gave everything he had to make things better. I watched a man get beaten down time and time again and get up, slowly sometimes, but get up and trudge forward. He has always been my inspiration.
He was different when he came out the other side. Not necessarily a bad different but different. He was quieter, gentler, softer, he needed Mum now more than ever and she gave him what he needed. Mum was a good wife and a fucking strong woman despite her issues. She held him when he cried, soothed him when he was frightened, and when it was needed she bullied and cajoled him into action. What that action was is hard to say. Dad never really worked again. At first he’d just leave the house in the morning and would spend all day out, just walking. He’d take the dog and walk along the River Roding sometimes for seven hours a day.
He started fishing through the river and reeds for lost golf balls near a local course. He’d come back with carrier bags filled with hundreds of balls and sell them to a local driving range. This was what he did for a long while. He just couldn’t take it any more. He couldn’t find it in himself to get smashed up by the baying, hungry rat race again. His heart was broken and he was a fragile thing, and if all he could face was collecting golf balls then that was fine by me.
Eventually, after a couple of months, the council rehoused us in a place called the Ray Lodge Estate in South Woodford. The first time I went there my blood ran cold. The room that eventually became my bedroom had human shit smeared all over the walls. There was also a big red puddle in the middle of the floor which the council woman suggested nervously was ‘just paint’.
It was the worst place in the world to me. Hard kids with dead, hard eyes bogged me down, smashed-up washing machines and fridges lay everywhere, needles and burnt-out gutted cars littered the underground car park. How the mighty fall. As a sixteen-year-old it was a bad time to try and fit in. I’d missed the window. If I’d have moved here when I was younger I’d have just become a part of it. I never became part of it. Thank fuck I had a big dog, a big Alsatian, the gorgeous and talented Sheba. No one fucks with you when you have a big dog. She was my furry flick-knife.
Once we moved into the mouth of heck – so dramatic – my ‘mates’ distanced themselves from me. After everything that had happened it hurt me so much. They’d play games with me, not answer their phones (house phones I might add, this was a long time before mobiles). They’d not call me back, they’d say they’d come round and they never did and I don’t know why. What had I done to deserve this? This was one of many catalysts that led to a descent that seemed to be unstoppable.
I was alone in a terrible place with an alcoholic mum and a father broken by failure. I think I probably wanted to be dead at this point. One day I’m very drunk at home in my room. I’d started stealing and squirrelling away Dad’s pills, he had so many barbs and squeakers and downers he never noticed any missing. I liked the way they made me feel when I took a bunch with booze.
The drunker and higher I got the sadder I became. I took a handful of pills and washed it down with more booze. I write a goodbye to Mum and Dad apologising for what was about to happen and I try and attempt to lie on my bed. I don’t make it. The Close Encounters soundtrack, a favourite album I find in a junk shop, blares out, my head fogs up and I collapse on the floor. Dead. I’ll definitely miss everyone but I’m glad, to be honest.
I wake up the next morning. Balls. I’m still alive. My room has literally not been touched. My note has not been found, my Close Encounters album is still revolving on the record player. No one came in. No one lifted me onto my bed or called an ambulance. I feel like shit. I’m seventeen.
I leave school when Mum and Dad collapse. Partly because I hate school (apart from rugby) and partly through a sense of duty: we have no money. Nothing. We live off of Mum and Dad’s benefits. I felt like I needed to contribute.
After a lot of interviews and looking in the papers for jobs I find myself employed. I start working at a shipping company in Ilford called Cowell Nicola. I have no experience but it doesn’t seem to matter, they employ me and I like it. I really like working in that office.
I’m the youngest one there and they treat me good, the girls think I’m cute, and the blokes talk to me like I’m a football hooligan. At this point I was earning five thousand a year! It seems like fuck all now but back then it was loads, loads to me anyway. After I’d paid housekeeping to Mum and Dad I was free to spend the rest. Spending my money meant booze and petrol for our mate who drove, and McDonalds and raves and hard-house weekenders and hash and squares of paper with mystical symbols etched into them. If you ate the squares the wonders of the universe would be unveiled to you. Not bad for a fiver.
There were some great people at that company. Big Terry Musk, our office manager, heavy smoker, nice easy laugh. Kerry, who looked like a sexy poodle with her mound of heavily curled hair, heavy smoker. I fancied her a bit. Dave, a big brutish ex-hooligan, great at tennis. Dean, suave and heavily receding. Sue, busty, saucy and a real den mother, and Neil Driver, a Cooganesque section leader who made us all laugh a lot.
I
liked the fact they treated me like a grown up, which I wasn’t. The work was easy and they introduced me to the joys/regrets of afternoon drinking. Nipping out at lunch for a couple. A couple often turned into four or five. How could people work like this? Once a girl got so hammered at lunch we had to cover her in coats and hide her under our desks. That company felt like a little family, we’d do things together a lot after work, softball tournaments, tennis tournaments, parties, drinking in shit pubs in Barking. It was a good time for me, professionally anyway.
Home was somewhere I did not want to be. I’d work then I’d do drugs, mostly on my own. Mostly weed, sometimes other things if I needed to be really away. I needed to escape that place mentally if not physically. When I was there I was locked in my room listening to music, music was one of my escapes. I loved the Happy Mondays, loved the Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, Spacemen 3 and the illegal exciting world of pirate radio. I also began writing poems and painting. Could I have been any more of an angsty teen-twat cliché? My poor parents, my poor me.
At this point I fall for a girl who I knew from school called Lee Morris. She was so beautiful. She lived near work on her own and knew what I was going through; she was kind and let me stay with her sometimes. It felt intense and grown up, confusing. She lived in one room, a bedsit, she had a little TV and a black kitten that would flick cat-litter all over the floor at night. I have no idea why a seventeen-year-old lived on her own. If I did know the reason it’s now gone. We sleep in the same bed but nothing ever really happens although I seem to remember trying a bit.
Lee was the first in a long line of girls who were way out of my league. I fell for them, hard, but they didn’t feel the same way. They saw me more as a friend. Shit. Not good for a falling-in-lover like me. I feel the first delicious pain that only unrequited love can bring. I grow to oddly like that feeling. Sometimes you fall back to something you know and understand, even if it’s something that hurts. You get used to it and at the end of the day it’s better to feel something, even if it’s pain, than feel nothing at all.
Eventually Lee and I stopped whatever it was that we were doing. We contacted each other recently on Twitter. She was happy and apparently makes amazing soup! All’s well that ends well.
After a year or so at Cowell Nicola I began to think about moving up the ladder. I needed to be more than a Junior Freight Assistant. I think the truth was I actually wanted a bit more money. Cowell Nicola was a small company but well thought of and it looked good on my CV. I found a job – or was I headhunted? Maybe. That sounds good so let’s say yes, I was headhunted, and began working at P&O Containers in Hainault on their Africa desk.
Again I meet good people. It was me, Iain Brymer, our team leader who we all love. Denise, a beautiful cockney firebrand who had a thing with Iain for a bit. Lydia, who’s sexy and brassy as fuck, I’d literally never seen a girl like her before, she wore suspenders! This is my first brush with lingerie. Sometimes if you were lucky you’d get a cheeky little flash. Pervert. Me, not her. Last but by no means least the brother of my junior school mate, the one and only Brendan Heggarty.
We had such a laugh. I loved them all and I loved working there. I also got a pay rise, I was now earning a stunning £6,400 (p/a) which was frigging great!
Living with Mum and Dad in Ray Lodge, I took the train every day to Hainault, where the offices of P&O were. I loved going to work because it meant I could leave the confines of my council prison. I hated leaving the office at night as it meant I’d have to go back to Ray Lodge. Whenever I got close to that place my heart would beat a little faster, especially if I didn’t have the dog.
It says something about the estate that I was relieved when I finally shut that heavy multi-locked PVC door behind me. Inside was a different type of nightmare but one I’d grown used to.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom in that tiny five-room flat. For all the drama and alcohol there were times when we laughed and danced and forgot. The walls in that place were so thin I could hear when my dad ripped off a powerful guff. I’d laugh and then Dad, hearing me laugh, would join in. During this time the smell would waft up into my mum’s sensitive nose and she would begin a series of very high-pitched dry heaves. This would send Dad and me into fits of hysterical laughter. Every time she heaved we would lie there on the other side of the gossamer-thin walls laughing our arses off. Mum would struggle to speak. Hearing her heave her way through the sentence ‘John, you dirty bastard’ was too much to bear. Sometimes I’d laugh so much I’d have to leap up and do a wee. I think it says something about my memories of that place that the best thing I can muster is listening to my mum heaving to one of Dad’s eggy farts.
I began hanging out with Iain Brymer more and more outside the office. He was my direct superior and a bloody good egg. I think he had problems with his mum too in their tiny flat in a tower block in Tilbury. Often I’ve found myself drawn to people, sometimes without even knowing it, who have similar issues to me.
Even though he was our boss, Bifta (Iain’s nickname) often got into trouble for not wearing socks and his anti-establishment vibe meant he was a bit of a hero to me. He was a raver, a renegade and charming as all hell. Don’t get me wrong, when we worked, we worked; even though we laughed a lot there was no fucking around. It was important to him and therefore to us that we had the best, politest, most efficient desk in the office and we did.
One day at lunch while Iain flicked through his copy of the NME (so fucking cool) he stopped us mid-sandwich and declared that we were getting tickets to see the Stone Roses at Spike Island. So this is exactly what we did.
We took a coach up to Spike Island, which was somewhere near Widnes. It was to be my first time in the Great North. Heck, I even made my own flares. Making flares is simple really, if you ever fancy it, essentially you cut sections out of the bottoms of your jeans and insert big triangles of another fabric, in this case yellow corduroy, simples. Apart from Bifta and Denise and I think Brendan, I have no idea who else came. It was a long coach trip up from Victoria with a real bunch of weirdos, us included. When we finally got there Widnes looked like a frightening shit hole.
The Stone Roses gig at Spike Island has now passed into legend, a defining moment for a bunch of floppy-haired revolutionaries demanding the freedom to party. The zenith of a cultural upheaval and a new Woodstock for what was called the second summer of love. Of course I remember next to nothing about it. Well, I remember bits, I’m not a complete morom. Microdots were ingested, things get wobbly, it was a very hot day I seem to remember, and at one point they play the noise of a freezing cold wind through the PA. I watch about twenty thousand people stand and put their coats on. I also see a man who had no feet, but hoofs, clip-clop by. This wasn’t just me, everyone in the group saw him.
I do however remember the Stone Roses themselves; we were some way away from the stage so it looked like a flea circus to me but it felt amazing. Standing in that field on that island in the middle of the River Mersey surrounded by all the weird fuck-ups my subculture could muster belting out the words to ‘I Am The Resurrection’ was pretty fucking awe-inspiring. Those moments of complete synchronicity are rare and fleeting and pass so quickly. Embrace it when it happens.
On the drive home we listen to a man screaming about a baby being on the roof of the coach for two hours; it’s weird and frightening and does nothing to aid sleep. I get off the coach in Victoria at dawn, wide-eyed, freezing cold and shattered. Being with Brendan and Bifta made me feel happier and I could almost forget about home and the fact my friends had abandoned me. I return home and cry.
***
I really should describe to you all the injuries my mum received while she was drinking. I’ve no idea why but I feel it’s important for you to realise what I see growing up.
One evening during a holiday in Wales, Mum and Dad go out to a party. I’m there too but I don’t remember much about the party but I do remember leaving. It was cold, icy and misty. Mum, drunk, took a tum
ble down some stairs. It was brutal. She lay there a while, silent, then she began laughing and, by this time, people were out helping her up. She was embarrassed and waved them off. We went home and went to bed.
The next morning I hear a moan coming from their room. I was frightened so I ran in and found Dad trying to help Mum up onto her feet. Both of her legs were black, she’d broken both of them in the fall and she didn’t even realise. Poor thing.
I have a terrible phobia of porcelain dolls. I come in from school one day, aged about twelve, people were there, I think my half-sister Debbie among them. There was a kerfuffle of sorts, a tall box on the floor. Not bothered, I go into the front room and take my shoes off and switch the telly on. I turn to look into the kitchen and I see my mum staggering towards me, tottering, teetering, pissed up, arms outstretched, she’s coming towards me holding a large, white-faced porcelain doll with curly blonde hair, Victorian dress, bonnet of lace. She’s also covered in bright-red blood, it pumps from a deep wound in Mum’s hand. The doll is crying tears of blood, its gaze and jagged smile fixed as Mum stumbles towards me.
On hearing I’d returned from school she panics and tries to hide the abomination. Leaning on the back of a chair, it overbalances and she tumbles backwards, slashing her hand on a sharp metal edge on the top of the radiator; she didn’t even know. She had to have lots of stitches.
When we lived at Ray Lodge, Mum was in bed early one evening, pissed. Me and Dad had a perfunctory conversation.
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘Is she asleep?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s six o’clock!’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right.’
‘Do you want any tea?’
‘No. I’m going to my room. You okay?’
‘Yeah. You?’
‘Yeah.’
I run upstairs and put my music on low, headphones plastered to my head. I’m hiding, hoping she doesn’t wake up. When you’re the child of an alcoholic parent more often than not you breathe a sigh of relief when you come in and they’re asleep. You pray they don’t wake up. Suddenly I hear a noise that sounds something like a forty-seven-year-old woman falling down a set of steep wooden steps. I fly out of my room to find a forty-seven-year-old woman, my mum, lying at the bottom of a set of steep wooden steps. Dad runs out of the kitchen and we stare at each other. She lies semi-conscious at the base of the stairs groaning. We wait for an ambulance and in the hospital later they tell us she has snapped the bottom inch off her coccyx.