Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

by Joel Golby

  And you can talk an inordinate amount of shit on that forty-minute walk to the Big Tesco out of town. The Big Tesco out of town is open 24/7, although past midnight now it’s more a film set of a mega-store than a mega-store proper: limp-faced shop boys fresh out of school themselves unrack plastic-wrapped containers of yogurt into electric-white cooler aisles, and ghosts of other shoppers glimpsed around corners in the distance, the coffee aisle stretching away to nothingness, the detergent, the beer. This was before beer, before weed, before school and life and other cities got in the way, before, crucially, girls: in a pure and true time when the only thing that mattered to the Boys was the Other Boys, and shit talking, and these little Rolo-brand donuts that Tesco used to do, and a two-for-£1 offer on Frijj milkshakes, and Walkers Sensations family-sized crisps, and eating it all, together, in the brisk air outside the shop, on benches below fuzzy orange streetlamps, again; then playing soccer with whatever detritus we could find beneath the alleyway below the roundabout, and then the walk home, blood pulsing, the air fresh with the smell of grass, and flowers coldly blooming, and damp and dry at the same time; the smell of car exhaust, and the dust of the day settling down again; the smell of anticipation, in the air, for everything that was coming to us. Walking back in clot-like groups having conversations where we theorized what bras looked like. Walking back the way teenage boys walk when they walk together, which is, primarily, “very clumsily into one another.”

  At Tesco, though, we would mostly eat our snacks (chocolate milkshakes, Dairylea Dunkers; an entire packet of jerky; six-packs of Coke and Tesco-brand fizzy laces; off-brand energy drinks; an entire cheese-crusted loaf of fresh bread; Bountys, Kit Kats, Curly Wurlys, Sherbet, Pop Rocks; we would buy pink packs of re-formed ham and eat them neat, folding the slices up into our upturned mouths as we sat on the back of benches outside the store) in silence, then pick our way through the empty parking lot, blurred and streaked with orange lamplight, down to the underpass tunnel beneath the major roundabout coming in. This is where we spent hours: letting off fireworks, playing soccer with an upturned bottle cap, eating just balled-up pieces of bread, playing with old camcorders, talking the kind of undulating shit only teenage boys are capable of talking (“What if…Warhammer was real?” “What do you think Brian Blessed is doing right now?” “[Hours-long conversation about wrestling]”). One time we dropped a brick from the bridge above us onto a carefully arranged stack of crackers below, just to see what happened. No nonadolescent mind has ever thought to do that. Why would it?

  Occasionally, drunks—drawn to the glow of the Tesco beyond—would stumble upon us, rabbit-eyed teenagers in sweat-slicked hoodies, desperately trying to tackle each other for a Coke bottle top. They would eye us with the same suspicion we would eye them: like one animal had stumbled into the territory of a herd of others. A man and his girlfriend accosted us once, wobbling on their feet: “You boys,” he said. “You boys, you boys, you boys.” He unzipped his trousers and pissed in full view of all of us. “Let me give you one piece of advice, boys,” he said, maintaining a startling virile stream throughout. “All women—all women—are whores.” This is the folklore imbued into the very soil of Chesterfield. The devil got inside this man and made him piss at us. He shook our hands, wetly, every one of us, then patted his girlfriend on the back and ushered her along with him. “Good night.” Then the rain came, sudden and total, and we stood in the yellow-white blur of the underpass we knew so well, rocking like we’d just been punched, staring out into the darkness as it lit up jagged with splinters of water, stunned into silence.

  Chesterfield never felt like home to me when I lived there, and I always had this itching urgency to get out. I never understood why nobody else there had that: Is this what you want? Does nobody here want to leave? But then I realized it offers something serene, and simple, and homey and safe. You can see why the devil found a home here: Chesterfield doesn’t challenge you, and it doesn’t ask for anything but a bit of respect back. Navigating it as an adult now is odd: we sold the family home a few years ago, and the last time I saw it there was a Halloween pumpkin outside it and a plume of steam coming from a newly installed boiler exhaust, and I realized that the rooms I once knew so well—a room that felt like a bedroom, a room that felt like a front room, the room out back with the big table where my mum used to smoke—had gone, been reshaped and repurposed by another family who know it only as their own. When I go back, I sleep on sofas and walk around town marveling at the new shops that have opened there. When I go back, I pull in backwards on the train and watch that old Crooked Spire creak into view. When I go back, I feel nothing, really, just a few half memories of big walks to Tesco, the flat where my dad died, an old factory that used to be here, the inexplicable amount of time I spent on a town’s golf course for someone who never really ever played golf. Then I get caught in the rain without a jacket, and have to hide under an awning and watch a sudden curtain of water fall in front of me, and there’s that smell—the particular scent of cold, sudden drops of rain falling on hot dusty summer air—and it’s there again: there’s that feeling I had so many times growing up. Home doesn’t have to be a place because places change: places get sold and exploded with dynamite in front of a watching crowd, and torn down and replastered and built anew, and sat on and contorted and bent. But then sometimes home is something simpler than that: or for me it is, at least. Home is the smell of being dry beneath an underpass, watching outside as it rains.

  Mustache Rider

  When I was a kid, my dad had so much of a beard it was essentially the only defining feature of his entire head. Dad was defined—much like Groucho Marx, or Hitler—by the accessories of his face rather than the bone structure underneath it: perfectly round bald circle head, Homer Simpson–esque M’s of hair on either side, a beard to join them, and glasses in between. I truly do not know if my father had a nose or not. Were there eyes behind the glasses? It is impossible to tell. Freckles, moles, scars, wrinkles? Honestly couldn’t tell you. I would say once a year for the past decade and a half I have been walking through a train station and seen a bald man with glasses and just gone, “Ah, that is my dad then.” You see those heartbreaking viral videos, don’t you, of orphan monkeys being given to a surrogate mother, and you think: How can the idiot monkey be so easily convinced that this baboon with tits is its true mother? Come on, baby monkey. Interrogate the information a little. But honestly, give me pints enough to reduce my faculties and introduce me to a bald man with glasses and I’ll just assume he is my father, no questions asked. I’ll curl up at his feet and ask him to tell me a story. I’ll beg him not to leave me again. The scene, after a while, will actually become quite chilling.

  My dad’s beard was so intrinsic to him that the day he shaved it off it felt like a glitch in the matrix. I came home from school and he was just looking at me, smiling, and I looked at his face—a jawline I had never seen before in my life, a chin, oddly soft skin around the jowls—and my mind couldn’t really process what it was seeing. “Notice anything?” he said, and I said: “There’s definitely something.” We stared at each other for a minute or so. “There’s definitely something wrong with your face.” It was as if someone had yanked the sky away and I was just staring at the void left behind. Like skipping over a spelling error in an otherwise smooth-flowing sentence. My brain filled in the information that it couldn’t truly see. “I shaved my beard off,” he finally said, pointing to his nude, soft face, and I said: “Dad, are you drunk again.”

  He was, but that’s irrelevant. The point is I dropped further from the testosterone tree than my dad did. I have a full head of hair—and thank almighty Christ that I do, honestly, because without it I would be nothing—so I am already one up on the man who went bald at nineteen and, twenty-three years later, sproinged me from his loins, but facial hair has for the entirety of my postadolescent life been my bane. I didn’t start shaving until I was twenty, and it took a couple of years from t
hat early scraping for a full filled-in face of stubble to occur. I stopped clean-shaving years ago because I have such a soft babyish face that I quite visibly revert to childhood when I do it, and corner stores and bars stop serving me because they assume I am a preternaturally tall and confident twelfth grader trying to buy alcohol for his smaller and less pubescent classmates. I cannot grow a full beard because something in my genetic makeup won’t allow it: at some point my stubble grows long enough to be scruffy but not significant enough to comb together into a beard, so I just look like George Michael after a couple of days spent tangled in the Hampstead Heath toilets, RIP. Essentially my facial hair grows in a liminal space between boyhood and true manliness, and I’m fine with it, I’m fine with it, but also I’m very much not fine with it.

  At thirty, I tried to grow a mustache. I have always been a fan of mustaches, ever since the England goalkeeper David Seaman stopped a penalty against Scotland during Euro ’96—the exact and precise moment, if you want to stop the universe and know exactly where it happened, I fell in love with soccer—and roared in celebration in a lurid yellow Umbro shirt and a lustrous brown mustache (before overarming the ball to Darren Anderton, who set off the assist for the ensuing Gazza goal—truly, the greatest four minutes of soccer ever played in history). Tom Selleck had a mustache, sure, and about a hundred TV detectives, and also about 90 percent of sex offenders ever imprisoned in the United Kingdom or the States. But despite that they represent a sort of grizzled, world-weary version of manhood: a mustache says you are aged and wise, and know what a good cigar tastes like, and can fix or put up a shelf. Nobody is going to take a swing at a guy with a mustache, because they know he’s going to swing right back. In an active hostage situation, are you (the bank robber) going to try and put a gun to the head of the dude rocking a ’stache? Like hell you are. You just fucking know that guy knows medium-to-basic kung fu, and will take the weapon off you before you can blink. The last few milliseconds of your life—as the bullet slowly crashes your skull apart, out from the back of it—will be spent thinking, I never should have underestimated the mustachioed man. I had to have one.

  Sadly, this took weeks. I tried to underarm the new Mustache Me into existence: I grew my stubble out as far as it would go, so everyone assumed I was just having a sort of ungroomed mental health break, then shaved down the sides and chin—just a little, just subtly—so the mustache area stood out a couple of millimeters more. At first, like with my dad and the vacant beard, people noticed but didn’t notice: “Your face looks more…ginger,” they would say, pointing to the curious orange-redness around my mouth, as if I had been sucking frenziedly from a rusted tap. “There’s something…red about you.” I was kissing a girl in the red-pink glow of her bedroom after midnight and she pulled away, her arms still around me, and said sweetly: “This tickles and we have to stop.” About three weeks later, one Friday, everything fell into place: “Are you…growing a mustache?” three separate people asked me, and I told them: yes. “Why?” they would say, and I ignored them. I felt manly for the first time in my life. I felt robust, like I could fix a motorcycle. Like I could hit the president over the head with a folding chair. Like I could be a medium-to-high-famous Hollywood actor in ’70s America. Like I could go into space and come back without choking in the vacuum of it, without my lungs exploding.

  Life with a mustache was good, for a while. I took to nibbling on it when I was bored or thinking. I would flick at the long edges of it when I was watching TV. I’ve never smoked but always envied that smokers have something cool-looking to do with their fingers—they are always twirling a cigarette from one knuckle to another, or flicking and unflicking a Zippo lighter, or unfolding a Rizla paper and rolling it up tight—and now I finally had something to occupy myself: an orangutan-red half mustache that sort of looked like I was getting ready to go to my first prom with it. Then one day I woke up and looked at myself in a mirror and realized: Ah, no. Good god, no. I looked like a substitute manager at a regional branch of GameStop. Like I took model-making very seriously as an adult. I looked like I had a five-hundred-yard forbidden zone around every primary school in the country. Like I had opinions about motherboards that I expressed on special motherboard forums. I looked, as a man, as if I collected replica swords.

  It had to go. I felt nothing as I trimmed it down to the nub. Five weeks of ludicrous experimental growing, gone. The switch from “Ah, this mustache is good!” to “Get the horrid hair off my face” was not unlike the ugly feeling of regret you have after masturbating alone: shut the laptop lid, close out all the squalid porn, shave your mustache off, and moisturize the area beneath. My upper lip was dry and caked with a dry skin residue under there. My face suddenly looked vacant without the addition of a third eyebrow. I started to detach from reality a little: if my face wasn’t my face with the mustache, and it wasn’t my face without it, then where did my face go? Who…am I? And then I realized that I’m a man who cannot experiment with the way his head and skull looks, at all. I can never pierce an eyebrow or get a teardrop tattoo. I am very dependent on my lustrous hairline and without it I look foolish. That I, too, don’t have a discernible face, much like my dad: that I am a collection of notable features, mushed onto a sort of plain canvas backdrop. I learned a lot about myself, growing a mustache for a little bit. I learned a lot about who I am as much as who I am not. I am not, it turns out, capable of having a mustache.

  Running Alongside the Wagon

  1% ABV

  I don’t remember how old I was exactly but I know I was a fucking dumbass, so that narrows it down slightly to anywhere between the ages of five and twenty-three. (For simplicity’s sake I’m going to eyeball it and say I was seven or eight.) I’d just got home from school—my school was just up the road from my house, so I was trusted, which I now recognize as being some sort of ’50s-era idyll in comparison to every other person my age alive, to walk there and back on my own from a young age, like olden days, before child molesters were a thing. And when I got home from it, my dad, as he ever was, was on the sofa.

  Something was off this time, though. Dad had his sofa that he shared with the dog, and Mum and I had ours. I think everyone’s dad has a sofa. I do not know if this is something inherent to fatherhood—that the moment a baby is born, scalped with red blood and thin sacs of skin, and cords and screaming and yellow-orange liquids, origin unknown—something within the male psyche clicks and unlocks, and they go home and put a Real Ridge in a sofa cushion or their favorite chair, and they get antsy and agitated when they cannot sit in that chair, if guests are over for example, and they keep the butt ridge deep and maintained, something close to sacrosanct, a Shroud of Turin personal to their own dad arse. I know I do not yet have this urge. But Dad always had his cushion—to the left of the sofa, to get a better angle on the TV—and this time he was slumped facedown across the whole thing, orange and moaning slightly.

  “Dad,” I said (this was the way I addressed my father). “What’s up.”

  “Mmrnnf,” he said, or something like that.

  And I noticed the pint glass he had on the floor, by his trailing hand. Again, you probably had this in your childhood home, but there was a hierarchy of glassware—beakers and tumblers that you, a clumsy boy or girl, were trusted with for your soda or juice; nice glasses, such as you might drink water out of at dinner with the tablecloth down; then something crisp and crystal that might only be broken out if it was Christmas or a grandma was coming to stay. Dad had his special pint glass out—ornately formed, slightly blue-green in color, and stemmed, sturdy but elegant at the same time—and it was filled with something see-thru and sparkling. I was, and remain, a fat sugar-crazed gurgling idiot of a child, and I was jolted and ecstatic to see lemonade—previously considered contraband in our household—on full display.

  “Is that…lemonade?” I asked him. Dad paused for a second.

  “Yes,” he said. “That—yes. That is…yes
. Lemonade.”

  And I drank the lemonade. And it wasn’t lemonade. Dad was drunk.

  2% ABV

  The thing with having an alcoholic father is you don’t really realize you have an alcoholic father because even when you see other, nonalcoholic fathers, yours doesn’t exactly strike you as unusual. (It does not help, of course, that alcoholics are very famously reluctant to admit their alcoholism—I mean admitting it very literally is Step 1 of the Program for a reason; people don’t cheerfully roll around with an extended hand all “Hi!” and “I am an alcoholic! Nice to meet you! Please, if you have any port in the house, fucking hide it from me! My very bones are desperate to drink it!”) I suppose I did not notice anything was different until I was ten, eleven, say: that it wasn’t the usual childhood rite of passage to come home from school before Mum did, to make black coffee for Dad, drunk in the afternoon, to shake him from his slumber, to pat him round the cheeks and try and make him more lucid, to come to. And I didn’t realize, either, that in doing so I wasn’t doing it out of any particular care for him, but rather for me: that making my dad sober, or at least a hollow impression of sobriety, meant the house might go an evening without an argument about how drunk he was, and I would have a more peaceful life as a result of it. Draw a string from my dad cracking a cold one at noon on the dot to me in my room, cross-legged and playing Sega Genesis, trying to get Sonic through the Chemical Plant Zone and failing because the people downstairs keep shouting. My motivations were, as they ever are, very selfish. I never beat Robotnik and I squarely blame my father.