Imposture on the London to Edinburgh night train

I had the chance to realise a persistent fantasy. We sat opposite each other - table seats in an otherwise empty carriage. This is how it was meant to happen. She might have been a bit prettier, and a bit less drunk, but she was, I was sure, without inhibition - if caught in the right frame of mind there was nothing she wouldn't have done.

Ah, it might have been so different. I might have proved myself a man. I could've fucked my way to true adulthood. Instead, my bottle went AWOL, my stomach shrunk, and I didn't know what to do with myself.

I had looked at her with my best tenebrous stare. She had smiled and shuffled round the table to sit next to me. In the sickly dim light, I had noticed the relief of a cluster of little whiteheads on her chin. She had waited for me to act. But I had no strategy. I didn’t know what the word meant.

She wanted wit, innuendo, or maybe (as my fantasy would have had it), ravaging, and I didn’t know what to do. I proffered sheepish grins and a muttered ‘sorry’ for ever having existed.

She laughed. ‘You're cute but your shit,’ she slurred, perceptively.

I had nowhere to hide. I had nothing. I had become a child again, far from home, far from anything except raw, inescapable shame. I was cute, but I was shit. No way out of it; a spotty drunk on a lonely night train had bested me.

Now, as the train raced through the night, her head swayed slightly and she closed her eyes. She took my hand and held it. I held hers back, fizzing with my sense of failure. She began to laugh short, stabbing laughs – the only appropriate reaction to the general silliness of things, personified in me for the remaining hours of the journey.

Then the lights of the carriage suddenly went out. Her laughter diminished to sighs. She continued to hold my hand. ‘You’re a cute wee lad,’ she said. She kissed my hand, and let it fall with hers into her lap. Then she went to sleep.

The Missing Biscuits

During the school holidays when I was nine, a big dog appeared in our back garden. It must have wriggled in under the privet hedges.

When I was nine, life’s limit was announced by privet hedges, but that wasn’t the case for dogs. They could squeeze underneath them, between the trunks, and steal into anyone’s back garden if they wanted.

When dogs strayed into our garden, my mum would run out and stamp her foot and shout ‘Go on! Get out of it! Shoo!’ Mum was at work today though. I was on my own. I was scared stiff of dogs when I was nine.

This one was a big mongrel with a shaggy, dark coat and a long, wonky tail that looked like God had stuck it on for a joke. It was moping around the border of the garden, stopping here and there to sniff in the weeds. It was in no rush at all.

I spied on it through the kitchen window, holding my breath – afraid that it might hear my breathing and charge at me.

I had to make it go away – that’s what you did when stray dogs came in your garden. They were full of fleas, they babbed everywhere, and they had jockoff teeth that could bite through to the bone.

I crept to the door and opened it just enough to peep my head out, tingling at the thought that we were now sharing the same air.

Sharply I whispered over: “Shoo! Oi! Shoo!”

It looked up and stared right at me. I thought it was going to charge. I got ready to slam the door shut, but it just stood there.

“Shoo! Shoo! Go on!” I said. Still nothing.

I stepped over the threshold and, acting myself into boldness, walked out into the garden. “Oi! Shoo! Go on!” I shouted, stamping my foot on the ground, feinting attack like I’d seen my mum do.

The dog started to move. Then it stopped, as if not quite convinced that it had to. I stamped again. “Shoo,” I shouted.

This time it moved. It went back to the gap in the hedge and disappeared.

I couldn’t believe it what had just happened. I couldn’t believe I had got rid of this big black dog… all by myself.

I went back inside with my head fizzing, my heart thumping. It was an intense feeling I hadn’t felt before. I thought of how my mum, the master in shooing unfamiliars away from the house, would be proud of her son.

That night I couldn’t stop thinking about the big, black dog. I lay awake, wondering where it could have come from, why it came to our garden. But most of all I thought about other people’s lives going on beyond those privet hedges, people who were happy to keep dogs and didn’t  worry about  fleas and about them babbing everywhere. And anyway, not all dogs did bite people. Some dogs weren’t like that.

Maybe this was one of those dogs. I imagined that it could be my friend. I imagined us going out on adventures together. He would protect me from the mean lads on the estate. He would do tricks, bring me my shoes. This dog. This big, mongrel dog that fate had plonked right in my garden.

The next morning, I went to check whether the dog had come back and, to my surprise, there it was, sniffing in the weeds by the hedge.

I watched it again from the kitchen. But today I felt different. I didn’t want to be scared. I didn't feel scared. I wanted it to be my friend.

Give him something to eat, I thought.

I took a custard cream from the biscuit tin and cautiously stepped outside.

I crept onto the grass holding the biscuit in my fingertips. He looked over at me, his nose twitching in the air.

“Here dog. Here boy,” I whispered.

He sniffed.

I inched forward until I was right next to him. There was no way back now. If he’d wanted to bite chunks out of me, there was nothing I could have done. For some reason, this made me feel calm.

I held out the biscuit.

“Here,” I whispered again. He padded up to me on his big, hairy paws and, with a last cautionary sniff, took the custard cream.

I felt his wiry whiskers against my hand.

Just like the day before, I felt that quickening feeling, an uncontrollable rush with no words or thoughts attached to it. I couldn’t believe it. I, who had been so petrified of dogs, had now made a friend of one – and not just any dog, but a big, scraggy mongrel with a huge, wonky tail. I felt as if I could do anything.

Unblinking, I watched him eat the biscuit. He lapped up the crumbs that had fallen on the grass, licked his chops, then looked up at me, panting.

“Wait there,” I said.

I ran to the house and grabbed four more custard creams from the tin. When I went back outside he’d moved much closer to the door. He was stood right next to the house. My mum would have had a fit.

I strode up to him and held out another biscuit. “Here boy. Biscuit.” He took it without hesitating this time. I waited until he had finished it and handed him another, then another, then the last. He chomped them all down.

He looks up at me and I look back at him, my new friend. I look at his scraggy, dirty coat and his silly tail that bobs from side to side like a dowsing rod, with a strange, uneven motion.

‘What now, dog?’ I ask. But the dog has no answers. He only looks up at me.

For a moment I don’t know what to do.

I ruffle his matted mane. I say “Good boy”, then I walk back inside.

I look out of the kitchen window. He won’t go. He just looks at me. I want something to happen but nothing does. Why is he just standing there? He's already had five biscuits. He should go now before my mum comes home. This wasn’t how I imagined it.

I heard the sound of keys in the front door. Mum was back. I looked towards the front door and when I looked back he was gone. I decided not tell mum about my new friend. It was my secret.

The dog came back to the garden every day for two weeks. At the same time of day he wriggled through the hole in the hedge and waited in front of the kitchen window. I gave him a custard cream, ruffled his mane, then told him to go.

After two weeks, there were no biscuits left in the tin.

On the last day the dog wriggled into the garden and I walked out to him with my hands empty. But he still looked up at me expecting to be fed.

“They’re all gone,” I say. He just looks up at me. He is panting softly.

They are all gone. Is that all you can do - stare at me with those ‘Can I have another biscuit?’ eyes.

Suddenly I can’t stand the sight of this dog any more. Suddenly I see it for the stupid, greedy animal it is. 

Is that all you wanted, I think. Is that all you can do – eat biscuits?

My eyes cloud over. I bite down on my tongue. The dog looks up at me. Its mouth is open. Its tail is bobbing from side to side. I stamp on the ground and I growl, “Get out!” I stamp and I growl again. “Get out! Get out of it you fucking scrubber! Get out!” And the big, black dog runs, runs back to the hole in the hedge and out of sight.

Wiping my stinging eyes on my sleeve, suddenly I panic: what will mum say about the missing biscuits?

Monday

A day of spirit-fattening sunshiny brightness. Summer extending its dominion, keeping the taloned grip of winter... blah, blah, blah, blah - Doesn't make a fuck of a difference if you're trapped in an office staring at a computer screen.
But why make light? I was completely demoralised by 5.30pm. Gone the full-blooded yesness of Saturday afternoon on the football pitch. Gone the post-coital peace of Sunday morning under the warm duvet. This is Monday, and everyone's a cunt again. Cunts on bikes (the way the tossers with rolled up trousers balance on their pedals at the lights), cunts in cars, cunts staring at you like farm animals on the pavement. Narcissistic cunts. Cunts in suits. Homeless junkie cunts drinking tins of beer as soon as they wake up and looking for an opportunity to nick your stuff so they can sell it for money to buy more beer and scag.
My first thought as I approached home: drink.
But shouldn't I resist this? Shouldn't I use the power of rational thought to sidestep this cheap sense of despair?
I drank. The hecticness, the horrible gravity of workaday London is too often too much.
On the way home I saw the scattered fragments of a car lying in the middle of the road unattended. Remnants of some hateful afternoon collision, the effluvia of another bad-tempered day. And how I wished for an excuse to headbutt a stranger. How hungrily I fantasised, as I pedalled through the rush-hour traffic, about making someone bleed.
What am I doing here? Why do I subject myself to it? Surely I should just walk away. Surely I should just walk away.

Rejection Letter

Dear Mr Frank,

Your terrorising persistence has paid off, I’m bound to admit, and I have read your MS.

In your obsessive determination to be heard, it may not have occurred to you that I am a busy man and that consequently I do not like to waste my time or have my time wasted by others. I am not the sort of editor who, impressed by a fellow’s rare ‘pluck’ or ‘spirit’ will forego the due process to which all other applicants must submit. Nor do I subscribe to that pernicious fallacy which convinces every idle dreamer in the cosmos that any ambition can be achieved as long as it is desired with sufficient earnestness. This is, tragically, a myth.

After reading your MS, to have merely filed it in my litter basket would have confirmed my time as wasted. Only by writing to you with an exhortation could that be avoided. My exhortation to you then, Mr Frank, is to cease in your bid to be a writer immediately. Your submission demonstrates quite clearly how inapt a course this is for you.

You must be made to understand that there are writers in this world and there are non-writers. There is a line in one of Gogol’s tales – The Portrait, I recall – which tells of a sad soul who came to know of “that terrible torment... when a weak talent strains to show itself and fails; that torment which passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning... and which makes man capable of terrible evildoing”.

Over the years I have encountered not a few of these fragile souls – I consider it an occupational hazard – and while it is true that they would all profit immeasurably from such advice as I am giving to you, the fact is that I do not have the opportunity to respond to even a tithe of them. However your case is an extreme one, which compels me to take all the preventive action in my power.

A total inability to write literature does not obscure the poor deluded attempter’s sincerity and striving. I readily perceive these qualities in what you have written, Mr Frank, but this only makes the failure of your enterprise all the more poignant. 


You must know that what you have produced is of no artistic merit at all.

My dear man, you are setting yourself up for a life of unrelenting anguish if you persist in your hope of being a writer. Only once previously in modern times has a figure of such startling inability risen to literary prominence. His name was William McGonagall and he has been a figure of international derision for nearly 200 years. Surely this is not what you want for yourself?

The world is full of possibilities, and there are many endeavours to which you may apply yourself with resultant success and satisfaction. Literature is not one of them. And so, with your very best interests as my guide, I urge you to discontinue with this course of action. Your well-being, indeed your very sanity, may well depend on it.

                                                                                                Yours most sincerely,

P L S Vokov

F&F Chief Commissioning Editor

                                                                                                                 

Carlinghow Princess Royal Junior, Infant and Nursery School: My Class Remembered

Lisa Barraclough – very short, highly freckled, moley in places. I remember a conversation among classmates about what we’d do if we wanted to impress a girl and, in a totally failed attempt to show how cool I was, I casually said ‘Oh, I’d probably just take her to a café for a Coke,’ - all the while looking at her to see if she was impressed.

Richard Thorpe – carrot-top. Had a tiny nipple-like mole on his right cheek. Would get erections and hop around the classroom like a jester, giggling, ‘Look! I’ve got a hard-on!’

James Marshall – sickboy. Serious asthma. Always carried an inhaler. Had had a major heart operation which left a massive scar down his chest, to which we all reacted with appalled gasps when he showed us. Everyone said if you punched him he might die. I did once. Thankfully, he didn’t die.

Christopher Shaw – another carrot-top. Probably my best mate for most of our infant and junior school days. His mum always bought him really good trainers, which made me jealous. Skinny and an annoyingly fast runner. Once, he slipped on in the playground and landed on his front teeth. He chipped one. I was there and saw his face contort as he registered the pain and started to cry. Afterwards I would try to imitate this face to make the other children laugh. Often when he was there.

Andrew Wilkinson – Another mate. Had impossibly straight, fair hair. Always the same haircut, throughout school. Never brushed his teeth.

Darren Smith – Good at sport and at one stage considered the ‘cock of the school’. A bully. When working in class and needing the rubber (eraser), would start counting down from five, with the threat that if someone on the table didn’t find it for him before he got to zero, he would twat them. Also among his tyrannies of the Red Table, instituted the use of a swear jar. Eventually took all the money. Also used to demand other children’s Kit-Kats at lunch-times.

Tasleem Kamal – distinguished by being one of the two class ‘pakis’, along with her brother, Shakeel. Once pissed her pants in class. Often picked on. Ran quite fast.

Shakeel Kamal – who was stupider than his sister and more eager to please the class alphas. He wore a little silk pouch round his neck whose contents were always a mystery.

Claire Waddington – darling, darling Claire, who always did her work to a high standard, had thick dark hair and lovely white skin, and a stippling of freckles on the flesh between the thumb and index finger of her writing hand.

Natalie Ramsden – came to the class late. At the age of ten, could speak authoritatively about the collective unconscious and other things that bamboozled her classmates and probably the teacher. She was nervous and wonderfully clever and not like the other kids. Natalie, where are you now? Sorry I took so many of your Kit-Kats.

Lisa Jackson – while in this class, I once heard a voice in my head, something that had never happened before and has never happened since. It was unconnected with anything I have ever been able to think of. It whispered one word: the name ‘Lisa’. She was the only Lisa I knew (the other Lisa had not yet joined the class), and I had absolutely no interest in her, so I don't know what that was all about. She once pissed her pants in class, like Tasleem.

Yvonne Marsden – who was always licking her lips to keep them wet, for god-knows what reason, and spoke in a barely audible whisper. Excruciatingly shy in class. Had mottled legs. Though I don’t remember her ever pissing her pants in class, she was always a likely candidate.

Shelley Kilroy – the only mixed-race girl in the class. Quite pretty. Had pig-tails and acted like a baby. Was a bit of a space cadet, liked to ‘make believe’ – always in an American accent, as was de rigueur at the time.

Lee Brydon – big lad. Rugby-player’s build. Ran really fast. Had a mini-motorbike at home. He liked George Formby and would sometimes imitate his laugh. “Tickety-boo!” I used to call him Babdon. Had a fight with him once when I was ‘cock of the school’. He was far tougher than me and when he hit me I filled up with tears. I pretended it was because I had something in my eye.

Lee Rowan – who used to be sick into his mouth and would chew the bits. Was able to fold his eyelids backwards. The roughest boy in the class. Always had scabs round his mouth. Rock hard. His dad, an alcoholic former boxer, had two rottweilers. Was never happy about my status as ‘cock of the school’ and eventually challenged me. I was shit-scared, but surprisingly I saw him off in a fist fight.

Mark Gibbons – a mischief-maker. Always hung around with the bad lads. Would bite his nails until there was hardly any nail left. A cheeky, funny lad, always up to no good.

Jason Goodall – a pretty, blond boy from a broken home. Used to knock about with Lee and Mark. The only boy whose mother let him have long hair.

Rebecca Thompson – had a birthmark on her cheek. We used to make up rude-sounding names to call each other, like ‘you spargle’ or ‘you bortfinger’, or ‘you spewm’.

Paul Asquith – short-arse who had buck-teeth and a massive boa constrictor living in his house.

Sarah Carter – who wore thick NHS glasses that made her look comically stupid, and seemed destined for calamity.

Andrew Layden – who lived right next to the school and was most in need of schooling. Always arguing with his sister. His dad was a mechanic.  

Angela Layden – Andrew’s sister, who had bigger buck-teeth than Paul, and who once called me a ‘shitflick’. So I punched square in the face, busting her nose.

Kelly Whitehead – was pretty, though had quite a large head. When it was milk time, she had this way of rhythmically sticking her tongue out as she sucked the milk through the straw – a display I would always secretly watch, giggling.

Joanne Mellor – my partner for the May-pole dance in class 6. Once, when I was milk monitor, I spiked one of the bottles of milk with all sorts crap I found on the floor, like bits of dust, pencil shavings and hair. Joanne was the unfortunate one to drink it. She was sick and had to have the next day off school.

Multi-coloured paragraphs

All over the world people are leaping out of bed in the morning to build great bridges and skyscrapers, to write award-winning books and songs, to discover new fundamental particles of matter, to kill or be killed for honour, to deliver babies, save souls, to debate to their Platonic essence the mysteries sleeping beneath the surface of everyday life, to bang each other senseless on supersonic aircraft, to dance themselves into whole-body orgasms… and I look out of my window feeling very close to nothing about the bounteous, complex, beautiful, grotesque world showreeling past my eyes. I long to be doused in cold water. I long to fuck off into the wilderness, climb on a winged horse and gallop out of the atmosphere, past the Milky Way, to the end of the universe, and there to pierce through its outermost membrane and into the annihilating light beyond.

But it’s just not me.

You feel sunk and that you are a waste of atoms, then an empty ultimatum. You’ll do it now or not at all. No more of the ‘I wanner be a rider’ shite. Hopes telescope to the present. All your worst fears about being an empty vessel brought up close. But you can’t go back. So you throw yourself into something without really knowing what it is. Even though you feel as if there’s absolutely nothing to give, as if you’ve proved beyond doubt that you’re incapable, that all you’re good for is cleaning up after people and keeping time… you just keep moving the pen and scribbling on. It seems like you’re annihilating yourself in the process. You’re spilling yourself out until you’re not there anymore. It’s just this constant scribbling, this eyeless, you-less effusion. But you push and push, and the brain starts to respond and the body starts to respond. Suddenly you find that you have emerged. New. Not unhappy. Not desperate… It’s like sodomy for the first time… unsure whether what you’ve done is good or bad. You’re the same but different. And you feel as if you were right to do it, right to push on without knowing what you were doing, because there’s mystery and wonder and ecstasy that you’ll only ever know if you take your clothes off and join the party. And then the drugs wear off and that old shame throbs red raw...

A feeling that I’m getting away with it, having everything my own way, every urge, even the most idle desire, answered punctually and to satiety. Life isn’t like this, ergo, I must be some sort of genius. And so inner smile becomes outer swagger becomes uncontrollable arrogance, til I’m thinking and saying things that make people think there’s something ugly about my soul. From here to shame, from shame a return to ‘penitential loneliness’, then up the Sysiphian slope again, in search of that place where everyone smiles at you and thinks you’re a ‘great guy’.

Down't Pit

They were downt pit and somebody farted.

- Poo! You dirty cunt. I love you.

- What’s in your sarnies?

- Fish paste. What’s in yours?

- Cerry.

- Cerry?

- Cerry.

- BWEEAARKK! By ‘eck, that were a rich burp!

- Bob broke his elbow off int big machine last neet. Did you see it?

- What, with my no-eyes? Don’t make me laugh.

- Poo, you proper dirty cunt. 
- Ha, ha, ha, haa.