I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  ‘Is this your weird idea of revenge for me smashing your CD? Putting up a poster of a woman you fancy next to your bed? You really are a loser. What are you going to do, lay there with me on top of you and gaze at her? You’re so pathetic it’s funny.

  Anyway, do you want to come up town? You and this crappy house have depressed me so much that I need to buy something to cheer myself up. You can wander round the record shops for a couple of hours whilst I buy a new dress from Top Shop then we can go to the pub, get drunk and try and forget about slugs and Beth soddin’ Orton.’

  How could I possibly have refused such an offer? That was it, our first major row over and done with. Over an Aftershock toast in Metros later that night, we vowed to, ‘never have another argument ever again’.

  Over the next few weeks we kept to our no argument pledge and normal, loving service was resumed. As with any couple, we still had a whole heap of issues though. Our problem list included our slum house, homesickness and the fact that by November we were having to cope with one of the worst winters since the last ice age.

  As a boy from the Fens, a patch of East Anglia where the land is so flat that a molehill really does resemble a mountain, Cardiff was a shock to the system. I didn’t ever acclimatise to the bone snapping cold of a Welsh winter or opening our front door and seeing a snow-topped hill seemingly only a couple of miles away. In Talybont this hadn’t been a problem, as the communal heating was constantly set to match the temperature of a hospital ward. Even in the depths of February, with snow and ice on the ground, we would be sat in our kitchen in shorts and t-shirts, moaning about the cloying heat. In our house in Wyverne Road it was very different. If we managed to persuade the heating to work, usually by whacking the boiler with a lump hammer, the 4 of us would huddle around the only two radiators that actually gave out any heat whilst passing round a medicinal bottle of cherry brandy.

  The damp was creeping up the walls of every downstairs room. Any clothes left exposed to the air would quickly develop an unknown species of white moss. We complained to the landlord, Reenie, about the situation, with me ringing her daily to give her disaster updates but she was much smarter than us. Reenie was a wily old fox who would play the, “I’m just an old lady, I don’t know anything about anything” card when it suited her, to distract us from threats of witholding our rent. Alternatively, if we complained about the heating, she would come to the house, make a point of taking off her hat, coat, scarf and gloves, sit down and proclaim; “Nonsense, it is lovely and warm in here”, as her teeth chattered and her lips began to match the colour of her hair.

  The house was dragging Amy into a stagnant pool of depression and I didn’t have a clue how to wade in and drag her out. As always, I turned to Morrissey for answers. The Smiths song “Jeane” became our anthem, well my anthem, for Wyverne Road, with its talk of ice on sinks and bare cupboards. I would play it all the time, singing it to Amy and, if she was happy she would laugh. If the house was getting her down she would weep and throw things at me. She would lay on my bed, wrapped up against the elements in my two, always slightly damp, duvets as I danced around the room serenading her. I was doing my best. It was a crap, immature best but it was all I had.

  I wasn’t letting the house get me down. As Amy quite rightly pointed out, it’s cheap rent meant that I had money to spend on CD’s, and I was now even cutting back on food and beer to buy more music every week.

  I also loved the fact that living in such a decrepit old house allowed me to live life as if I was in the dark comedic world of a Smiths song. I didn’t see anything worrying or pathetic in telling my girlfriend that, even as she cried herself to sleep.

  Then in December of ’96, SFA released a song of true genius, in the form of the behemoth, f-word filled, “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” and everything seemed right in our world again. Not many songs could have that kind of momunental impact on life, but this was no ordinary tune. It was a glorious song, the kind that picked you up, spun you around until you felt a bit sick before smashing your serotonin levels with a hammer and taking over control of your limbs to achieve its own gloriously perverted aims. Amy and I would put it on in my room and dance around while the windows rattled with the bass. As with so many truly gargantuan songs it was even better when played live. We went to the triumphant end of year Manics gig at the Cardiff International Arena with SFA and Catatonia supporting. SFA blew us all away that night with 40 minutes of scuzzed up rock ‘n’ roll perfection, culminating in a glorious 10 minute version of that song.

  By the time we got back to The Beat Bar for their late night indie disco, we were buzzing our bits off. Amy and I decided to mark the occasion by deciding to visit the ‘bloke in the corner of the bar’ and enjoy a Mitsubishi enhanced evening. We followed the classic sequence of events and were frustrated when, half an hour after having taken a half each, we agreed that ‘nothing’s happening, these must be duds’. Frustrated, we decided to neck the other halves. Ten minutes later we were shaking our heads at each other, silently fuming that we had paid £12 each for aspirin. Then the opening beats to ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ filled the room and my internal headlights switched in an instant from sidelights to full beam. For the 4 minutes and 48 seconds duration of the song, we jumped up and down, gurning and attempting to kiss while pogoing. With the venue lights projecting violent arcs of purple and red, I assumed I was just tripping when I thought I saw blood all down my front and so carried on dancing. It was only at the end of the song, as my now super modelesque girlfriend gave me a euphoric snog that we realised we had a problem. I looked at Amy’s mouth and with wide eyed wonder, rather than alarm, told her;

  ‘Wow, you look like a vampire, you’ve got blood all over your lips, that looks cool, really cool.’

  As she attempted to get the auto focus function for her eyes working again, she looked deep into my open mouth;

  ‘I think it’s you Jay, you’ve got a mouth full of blood and it’s all over your top,’ she said as she bounced up and down next to me, as ‘Girls & Boys’ smashed into our ears.

  I looked down at my newly purchased grey SFA t-shirt and saw that the front had turned a beautiful crimson colour. I put my hand to my lips and felt warm, comforting, velvet like blood flowing out of a gash that felt intriguingly deep as I pushed my finger in. My brain was telling me that it was a blood fountain, a special gift from the lead Furry Animal and that it was to be loved and cherished.

  ‘Jay, JAY – are you ok? You’ve been stood holding your lip and not saying anything for ages.’

  I stood and tried to rationalise my options. I had to make the night carry on, the bar was still open and we were flying, we couldn’t waste it. The solution seemed spectacularly simple. Amy went to the bar and I went to get a plaster from the friendly bouncers. We spent the next 2 hours buzzing, going crazy to any tune the DJ served up, while I kept pushing the Elastoplast full of blood back onto my gaping wound.

  The next minute it was 5am and the two of us were in our shower, fully dressed, singing Stone Roses tunes. As the water smashed into my tender lip, I sat and watched the blood slowly wash down the plug hole for what may well have been an hour but was more likely to have been a minute or two. With more love within our frames than we knew what to do with, we looked at each other under this red hot shower, me with blood flowing from my lips, her looking like a giant panda thanks to the combination of water and mascara, we burst out laughing and had a big, soggy hug.

  As Amy got undressed, I examined my battle scarred face. It was painfully obvious from the shape of the wound in my lip that I had bitten down on it, with a lot of force, during the euphoria of ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ and my tooth had gone deep into the flesh.

  I put some butterfly strips across it that I’d found in Amys medical box and collapsed onto her bed in a fit of giggles. Realising we were both still under the influence of the night before, we used the last of our chemical energy to please each other, in that intense, fuzzy yet almost unhum
an way that only E can produce, before falling asleep wrapped in each other for the next 7 hours.

  After a couple of weeks and 3 packets of sterile strips my lip finally healed, though the indentation of my tooth remained as a scar and a permanent reminder of a blinding night.

  1997

  Your Ex-Boyfriend Is At The Door

  OUR Christmas break from University wasn’t quite the romantic snow and sex filled holiday that the previous year had been but we still met up, drank mulled wine and discussed ways to make Amy happier. I didn’t have any strong suggestions on how to achieve this, other than to borrow Neil’s standard advice, ‘I’ll get us another pint in.’ I knew the house was getting her down and I suspected that I was as well but there was nothing I could do about either of those, so decided to keep quiet.

  Upon our return to Cardiff we found that the days appeared to be getting ever shorter and the temperature was dropping like a Morrissey single’s chart position in its second week of release. One morning, Amy still hadn’t surfaced by 10am, so I went up to her room and, as always, went in without knocking. I found her in bed, shivering despite 2 duvets, multiple layers of clothes and an electric fan heater dangerously less than 6 inches from her face. She was weeping dejected tears of ice and I realised that I had to do something. Lacking in real inspiration, I gave her a warming cuddle, made her a coffee and ran her a bath, having scrubbed the worst of the grime off it first. She kissed me on the cheek with her pale blue lips and seemed to cheer up after her dip. I knew it wasn’t going to last of course, she was desperately unhappy with our home and a bath, even with bubbles in, couldn’t solve that permanently. I was still blissfully happy despite the cold. I had my cheap room, towering piles of CD’s to sort into alphabetical order and my ever loving girlfriend.

  I was snapped out of this little daydream and back into the reality of the situation in late January when I came home from an exam, with the intention of taking Amy out for a pint in the warm pub, but instead got no reply when I shouted “Are you here, Indiana?” I went into my room and saw, with a sense of foreboding, a note that I instantly recognised as being from Amy thanks to her spidery, Morrisseyesque handwriting. It read:

  Jay

  I can’t take this place anymore. I’ve finished my exams and can’t spend another night here. I know you are happy living like this but I’m not. I love you but I can’t live with you like this.

  I’m going home to my folks and I’m not sure if or when I will be coming back.

  Feel free to ring me if you want to….

  Love Always

  Indiana

  X

  PS – I bet after the initial shock of this note fades, you will be thinking about which Moz tracks you can listen to whilst clutching a bottle of lager and thinking how tough the world is on you.

  I sat there dumbfounded. I hadn’t for one minute considered that she would leave me here and go home. How could she leave me? Was that how little she thought of our relationship? How could she just up and leave without saying goodbye or giving me the chance to persuade her to stay? I read the note again and again trying to find some hidden meaning but the only solace I could find was that she had signed it “Indiana”, rather than Amy. Slim pickings indeed. She was right though, I put Moz on the stereo, drew the curtains and revelled in the dark to the likes of “Jack The Ripper” and “Southpaw”.

  Later that evening, I went up to her room to discover that she had packed a few clothes, some of her books and, obviously, made a quick exit. I decided that I would stay in her room until she returned, partly through some strange romantic notion but mainly because it was much nicer than mine, even with the distinct smell of sick and slugs buried deep in the carpet.

  Sitting on her bed that night, morosely drinking hot chocolate and feeling sorry for myself, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she had left behind her copy of Suede’s “Coming Up”. Now I was worried, as she loved that album. It had become our album, listening to Brett Anderson’s tales of glittering, battered urban landscapes had become an integral part of our lives in this shitty old house. We would listen to songs from it every day, sometimes dancing round the room, sometimes laying on the bed in contented silence, sometimes crying. That album had everything and she had left it behind. She had left me behind. Like Amy had done so many nights before in that bed, I wrapped the duvets around me and cried myself to a bitter, dreamless sleep.

  The next evening, I found myself back in her room with a morbid determination to feel like the victim of the situation. I put on “Coming Up”, laid back on the bed that smelt of her and let the songs sweep over me. From the brash, us against the world love affair of “Trash”, to the anthem we used to sing about the cool kids at the university, “The Beautiful Ones”. Then came the haunting beauty of “By The Sea” hit me hard in the chest and in a pit of self loathing I mentally beat myself up for pushing her away.

  I reminisced about when, a few months earlier, we had gone to see Suede on the ‘Coming Up’ tour at Newport Leisure Centre. Amy had loved it, went crazier than I had ever seen her before, with her bobbed hair matted to her sweaty forehead, totally lost in the emotion of the gig. She had looked so beautiful, in a manic Suede induced fever and I don’t think I ever loved her as much as when, whilst waiting for the encore to begin, her lips planted themselves against mine and she said, ‘Get me a pint sweetheart, I’m sweating my tits off here.’

  Those good times now seemed like they belonged in the first movie of our relationship trilogy and that we were now in the depths of the convoluted, badly scripted 2nd film in the series.

  I didn’t write or call straight away. I wallowed for a full 4 days. On the 5th day a postcard arrived with a photo of the Eiffel Tower on the front. I knew without turning it over it was from Amy, as she was desperate for us to visit Paris. On the back she had simply written:

  Not missing me then?

  Was it meant to be dark humour or was she warning me that I had better call or write soon? Either way, it made me smile and realise that she was still thinking about me. I gathered up all the money I had in my emergency fund and all the silver coins from her ‘change pot’ walked to Cardiff Central to buy a ticket and boarded a train headed for Cambridge. Five hours, two trains and a bus journey later, I arrived at her parents front door, rang the bell and hoped that her dad didn’t answer the door.

  Her dad answered the door and, without acknowledging my existence, turned and shouted up the stairs:

  ‘Amy, your ex-boyfriend is at the door!’

  I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. He looked at me with absolute disdain. I could see his eyes asking how his beautiful daughter was going out with the buffoon stood before him. That just made me want to laugh some more.

  Amy bounded down the stairs, made a point of kissing me whilst her dad tutted and walked back into the living room, then said; “You took your time didn’t you, I’ve been sat here all packed for 3 days waiting for you to come and get me”. After a quick chat on the doorstep about; “things that need to change in our relationship” (Amy) and humble apologies (Me), we were out of the front door and on our way back to South Wales.

  Even to an idiot like me it was obvious that I needed to get back into Amy’s good books and quickly. I decided that a trip to the city of love would be in order. On a frozen February morning, with our heating not working again, I took her out to breakfast at our local greasy spoon café and proudly announced:

  ‘Look, I know I can be a knobhead sometimes and I know the house is my fault and it’s been getting you down so, to make up for it, I’m taking you to Paris.’

  When she leant over the table to hug and kiss me, I was happy. I even ignored the fact that her green Benetton scarf had dipped into my fried egg. When she began to quietly cry with tears of joy and thanks, I began to feel a little guilty. I knew that Amy was dreaming of a weekend of aeroplanes, 4* hotels, fine dining and romance. Instead, I had booked us on a £35 a head, 30 hour coach trip to Paris. We would be l
eaving Cardiff at 3am to drive to Dover before boarding the ferry to Calais. Upon reaching French soil, the coach would drive to Paris and drop us off in the Place De La Concorde. We would then have a full 12 hours to explore the city before the coach picked us up and began the long journey back to Wales. I didn’t fill her in with all the details at the café, mainly because she was elated at the thought of going to Paris and wanted to head into town to buy a guide book.

  After buying the book, we then spent the rest of the day sat in the SU bar planning our adventure. She was happier than I had seen her for months and I couldn’t bring myself to give her the full details of our trip. I woke at 3am, looked over at her having the first decent night’s sleep she’d had in Cardiff for months and thought that only I could make such a mess of taking my girlfriend to Paris.

  It was when she woke me next morning with a cheery “Bonjour” and a plate of fresh croissants that I knew I had to come clean about the reality of our trip. I persuaded her to get back under the duvet, wrapped my arms around her and, with an entirely inappropriate grin on my face, told her about the coach journey. As her face began to drop, I adjusted the grin downwards ever so slightly and quietly promised that we would do everything she wanted to; visit the Louvre, the Arc De Triomphe, Eiffel Tower and drink coffee on the Champs-Eleysee. We would just have to do them all quickly. She offered me a tight, watery smile and through slightly gritted teeth said “It will be wonderful”. As I drifted back to sleep, I could feel her laid in my arms gently beginning to cry. I had no words, no way of improving the situation, so I kept my eyes closed and hoped that sleep would take me quickly.

  As she was quite perky when I woke up an hour later, I thought that I had got away with it. That was until I overheard her talking to Lou in our kitchen a few days later: