Watching the Midweek Match

Sat on the old man's seat at the end of the bar. I'm 31. Liverpool's Europa Cup match is on the plasma-screen telly. I've been hooked on the anodyne effect of watching football matches for a long time. I recognise most of the team managers and pundits as the players I used to cheer as a boy. Seeing them now is a sickener, a heinous raid on the sanctity of my youth, every time. Why couldn't they just stay back in 1989 or whatever year they were my heroes? Pat Nevin's bulbous head appears on the screen at half-time. Old, bloodless, balding. No longer the nippy little Everton winger I remember, bright with the bloom of youth, at the top of his game, the floppy-haired, mulletted Pat Nevin that smiled out at me as an embodiment of promise from page 14 of my Panini sticker book. No, definitely not that any more.
Suddenly I have to have another drink. It feels like a necessary response to seeing Nevin's shrunken old face. It seems like the absolutely the most life-affirming thing I can do at this precious, worthless moment in time. It isn't, of course. That's just the kind of thing the old man at the end of the bar would think.

The Working Men's Club

The perfumed mothers have entered

All glitter, highlights and bubble-bathed quims

Drinking half pints, fat-tongued and fat-fingered

Sharing dick jokes and gossip and things

Dog

Fart-shadows, smells of sawdust and biscuit crumb.

Her guileless doggyness stupefies me:

Curled up like a croissant, contented she sleeps

Though mental music rattles the glass.

How does she achieve such complete peace

This Zen master, this life of furry ease

Show me how you do it, doggy. Show me, please!

Locked in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Boy walked over the ha-ha hump bridge which laughed quiet at the start, loud in the middle then quiet again at the end, like this: hahahahahahaha.

It was a day of incorrigible gales and boy was terribly put out because his writerly hair was being thrown wildly out of shape. He looked unpretty.

He would never attract girls in these conditions. So he surrendered to the absurdity of the ha-ha hump bridge and laughed its laugh. hahahahahahaha.

He heard his laugh thrown to and fro in the wild wind as the day began to blacken. Soon the park gates would be closed and he would be stuck.

Books, thought boy, are a flatus. And not a divine one either. SB had proved this beyond doubt aged two score and six and with his hideous precocity had unshaped those shapes of the book’s void-shaping.

He was frightening and compelling even at such a green age, that c-c-c-c-cunt. He thrust boy into the darkness and said: ‘There – have that.’ Boy baulked. He whimpered for the lights to be turned back on. But he kept reading. He kept reading to the end, for the sake of the end. It was making him sick.

"To hell with this, I have to get out of here,’ he heard himself saying, though he didn’t move.

‘Calm down. Things will sort themselves out if you’re patient. Just wait it out,’ said the kung-fu hare on top of the anvil.

These words helped him to breathe in the strangling darkness of the park, the gates of which were about to be locked.

Love had broken. That was the problem, he thought. (He was wrong though). Yes, love had broken, he thought, and he was too small-balled to do anything about it - even write about it. Words dissipated in his frantic mind as readily as did now the shapes of the skeletal trees in the park, which was now very locked as well as deathly dark.

‘This will not do,’ he thought. He faked some composure, which his unwriterly hair did much to betray.

hahahahahahaha. ‘Shutthefuckup,’ he said.

‘Calm down,’ said the kung-fu hare.

‘Oh yeah, sure, I’ll do that. Yeah, thanks,’ replied boy.

hahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha.

Yes, things were going well given the circumstances.

Suddenly the kung-fu hare was nose to nose with boy and with a mouth that smelled of fried kidneys went and said: ‘Boy, you think it's all so difficult don't you? But it isn't. All you need, boy, all anybody needs, is a good, long, soothing crap.’ Then he legged it.

‘Thank you. Thanks for that,’ boy shouted as the hare disappeared in a blur of whirring feet into the dark.

Alone again, boy rolled a cigarette and walked on. The moon waxed bright and broad behind the trees. He walked on, in the dark, into the bolted night, on the look-out for Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Maybe they knew how to get out of here...

Of Fungi and Humus, Mingled

Yes I remember the day. Or rather, I have failed to forget.

The weather was unbearably hot. That white heat that twists people’s already warped senses even further out of shape. I had gone out driving in the car. It’s true, I was lost, but it didn't worry me. I was given to thinking, at that time, of the mind and body being separate from each other, of being able to refine right out of existence the mind’s connections with the body’s urges and complaints. In this way no perturbation could possibly compromise the stillness of the sphinxlike ‘I’.

I didn’t always think like this. Sometimes it was the woozy paranoia of multiple selves, or of zombies… but enough… I see no reason why I should try to explain myself to a crowd of shits like you.

Before long I reached the country where I happened on an inn – an ancient-looking sandstone pile whose squat, crumbling brickwork gleamed white in the glare of the sun. I stopped and looked out upon a pair of old men who were sat on a bench, wordlessly supping ale. They regarded me as cattle might: dull incomprehension and unwilling. One of them had the look of old Simon.

Old Simon... hard to say what is more remarkable about that beast: his estrangement from reality or his preternatural resistance to death. Simon rarely speaks, but he has a story – a story known to most of the vagrants and lost souls that have taken shelter in the same nook as him over the years... and almost certainly fantastic lies from prologue to epilogue... not that that’s unusual, the lies...

He was a banker for many years, the story goes. A respected and influential figure. Moneyed, too. Yes, money to burn. His was a singularly brilliant career: record company performance, unprecedented shareholder approval, election to the board, advisory roles, if you please... Well, one day – quite spontaneously, he says – in full view of fellow directors, his PA and even a group of visiting dignitaries from some far-off land, he collapsed to the floor and began to bawl. Bawling like you’ve never heard, he says. Nobody was able to rouse him. He remained curled up like an embryo on the office floor for over an hour. Refused all help. His PA brought him a cup of water and he struck the woman in the face, breaking her nose. His howls could be heard on the adjoining floors and he would not stop. Everyone was asked to leave. Eventually he had to be sedated and was taken away.

Never an explanation for this. All he would ever say was: “It was as if the external world completely disappeared.”

That was the end of that. Simon... well, he never wore a suit again. Still in the City though. Oh yes, there for all to see, dressed in his filthy judge’s gown, gibbering from his bench under the oak tree on Sanctus Street in the shadows of the towers of Mammon.

But why was I? Where was I? Yes, the old men on the bench. One of the old men, the one who didn’t look like Simon, grumbled something about a forest. He even explained where I could find it.

Now I like forests, and this was more of a discovery than I could have hoped for when I set out. To an extent it assuaged my desire to end the man’s life. I would have stayed longer with the two of them, but it’s never a good idea to stay anywhere for too long. Get out while you can, that's what I've learned. Leave no trace.

On reflection it was a pleasant little inn. Perhaps it would be better if I could name it. But no, such details elude me. Other things have happened since then, so many execrable things, that the memory has been routed from my mind. It may just as well not have happened at all.

In any case, spurred on by this intervention, I set off driving again in search of the forest. I drove down a seemingly endless road, the car trained on the silvery shimmers on the horizon. It was a scene almost barren – the odd tree, an orphaned tuft of luminant white cloud – but then I noticed something, a dark, incongruous shape in the distance. A wisp of smoke was rising from it. As I came closer I saw that it was a car, much like mine – very much like mine – which appeared to have been grafted onto a large tree trunk. I stopped and walked around this car to see what the matter was.

The corner on the driver’s side of the car was crushed flat against the tree trunk – which had itself held up admirably well. A hissing sound rose from the car’s innards. I peered in. On the passenger side an airbag billowed in the breeze, but there was no passenger. In the driver’s seat, a man was slumped against the wheel, his eyes closed. He had a gloopy hole in his forehead. Viscous drops of blood pit-patted onto his knee. I leaned in and prodded the body. No movement. I prodded again. There seemed to be a twitch, a subtle tensing of muscle. I opened my mouth to speak then snapped to my senses. What the hell was I doing? This was absolutely not my concern. This was not what I was here for – I was here to find the forest.

I had driven for no more than a mile when I suffered another imposition: another human shape, walking carelessly along the verge. As I approached I saw that it was a girl, a rather fat girl dressed all in black and walking on bare feet. What a strange figure she presented. She wore a tutu, yes, a flouncy black tutu, and above that a slender black chemise which bared to the sun the fleshy expanse of her nape and shoulders.

I brought the car to a stop beside her. As I did so she paused and began to stare up at a bright knot of cloud morphing over her head.

I wound down the passenger-side window. The car hummed. I looked down towards the mirage bubbling at the end of the road, then back at her. She walked up to the car and squinted through the window. Around her eyelids mascara bled.

She looked at me, passively – or was it impassively?

“I’m going into the forest,” I said.

She gave no reply. Her eyes started to adjust to the light and her face assumed better definition. Those eyes. Huge glossy black discs. I could see myself in them.

“I’m going to the forest,” I repeated. She opened the door and sat beside me.

She was no beauty. No, hardly that. And her proportions, well, they would have made da Vinci puke... but those huge black eyes, the shimmering dark mirror-pool of them… and… well… I don’t wish to think too hard about it. I have since tried to forget her. I have tried, yes, but I have failed. Certain things about her have been fixed in my mind by her perfect inscrutability. There’s nothing I can do about it. Personally I’d prefer it if every experience died as soon as it were born. How much better to be a mayfly, with its single day of fresh-peeled, glorious flight. Or a wet-brained drunk. Oh yes, the Promised Land that would be. How much more simple for them – free to appreciate every fresh crime with the wonder of a child, to savour every new horror with a palate perennially clean.

“My name… is Simon,” I said. She did not respond. Instead she looked at herself in the sideview mirror.

I looked more closely at her flushed body. Her tutu had ridden up as she slumped in the seat. The thick flesh of her thighs spread against the hot vinyl. Her knees were dimpled, like a cherub’s, and she had a light stippling of hairs on her otherwise esculent calves.

Soon we arrived at the forest – the old corpse had been telling the truth! We left the car. I removed my shoes and socks – it seemed the right thing to do – and we walked deep into the forest together.

The air was dense and cool. A couple of birds twittered above us, high in the trees. Silently we walked, my companion now and then staring up into the dappled light of the canopy.

After some time we came upon a little clearing, a broad blanket of moss under an awning of mangled trees.

“We’re here,” I said.

We lay down on the moss, on our backs, and stared up into the chaos of twisted branches above us. Into our shelter came the creamy, mealy waft of fungi and humus, mingled.

“Humus,” I said. Still she said nothing. She did nothing. I began to doubt whether she was human. I knew about zombies, of course... but something was working on me, a subtle gravity that drew me towards her. I could not resist.

I climbed on top of her. She did not object. Uncomprehendingly, I looked into her panda eyes, which answered nothing. “What?” I asked, sharply. “What do you see?” She sighed. Her breath rose up to my nostrils. Sweet. Hormoney. Death-conquering.

At one stage a glossy black labrador bounded over, surprising us. I rose from between her legs, gave his rascally head a ruffle and sent him on his way.

I don’t think there is anything else to tell of her, of that. There is immeasurably more left inside... No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean that at all. We think there are memories when there are none. We think we have stories to tell, but it never works out that way. Now I wish I’d never begun. After all, what’s there to say? When you consider the carnage of it all, the slightest artifice is disgusting.

Oh, there was the cobweb. A cobweb became tangled in my hair. I picked it out, with difficulty, and rubbed it into her cunt.

I came away from the forest with my face sticky and stinking of her secretions. I left her there. It seemed the right thing to do.

Hackney Blues

I don't know how I came to occupy this patch of floor. I don't know how it came to look like this or what I could have done to change it. I tried to prosper. But the gods of prosperity guffawed at my efforts. The more I tried the more absurd the enterprise seemed. So I let it go. I let go. Yes, that's it. That's why here. 

This mess. This bare wood floor covered in shit. Abandoned bits of paper and plastic, half-eaten bits of bread, wine bottles. A pile of mildewed, dogeared books in the corner in a little mound, relics of a writerly ambition long since stubbed-out. Whenever I get round to burning this place down, they’ll kindle the flames. Have to get some use out of them.

I’ve got those stomach cramps again. As if it's full of thorns. What to do? There are empty-bellied schizophrenics at motorway service stations in the most desolate parts of this island with more of a sense of direction than I have. That's the truth. No furniture; no chairs, no sofa, no table. There's a telly – of course there's a telly – but it stopped working a long time ago. Now it just serves as a grotesque mirror reflecting an appalled convex face, which, however I try to alter my expression, always looks exactly like Munch’s Screamer.

I sit on the edge of the mattress in my freezing room and look around in the faint hope of finding inspiration. I look over my possessions for clues. I have books. I could read a book, I think. Pass the time, nourish the mind. But then I remember what A said to me before she kicked me out: “You’re always reading. What for? What are you reading? What are you doing… You don’t do anything.” 

She said this last bit with a little jolt of surprise… realising for the first time that she was disgusted by me. It hurt. I didn’t let her know that it hurt. I just sat there in silence. Easy, ambiguous silence. She told me to leave. I told her to fuck herself. She threatened to call the police. I threatened to set fire to her bush. She called the police. I left.

Whenever the inertia comes on and I pick up a book to cure it, I remember those barbed last words… You don’t DO anything… I remember that look of nascent disgust. Suddenly the book feels very heavy and I have to put it down.

I look around the room. Poor little boy. Unhappy little boy. Deserted by everything which once made life so dear.

I’ve been awake for seven minutes.

I leave the house and straight away it’s an assault. Last night's toxic supper of red wine, ketamine and pornography have given the light of this new day a painfully interrogative tinge. I want the world to myself today. That's the only way I can imagine being able to hold my head up. It was a lovely bottle of wine, but that’s no comfort now...

They're everywhere – on these pavements stained by phlegm globs and piss streaks and greasy chicken bones – so many malignant figures rushing past me. Some with hatred scored into their faces, busy being bastards, some wincing with infirmity, others who look exactly like me – who dress like me, walk like me… Christ, even have on the same shoes as me - who mope about stealing glances of themselves in shop windows. 

And then there's the laughter. Noisy, cackling kids sucking on fried chicken, listening to ‘grime’ at full blast on the mobiles, fearless little shites who smell their prey a mile off and live to see them wither.

I’ve been spotted.

‘Oh ma days, look at ‘im, look at ‘im.’

‘HAA HA HA HAAAAAKGH…’

‘Oh ma days, dat guy is bare butters...’

Hateful, hateful fuckers.

What do I do? Do I find a bar, booze my heart quiet? Do I find a shop and buy something – anything, some sweets, a book, some gloves? Do I get on a bus? To where? Fuck knows. But I have to do something. I can't just stand here in the street.

In the process of moving, I stumble into an old Jamaican woman with a hook-shaped spine. I can’t escape her eyes.

‘Chile, are you aar right?

I almost shit myself.

‘Of course I am, can't you see?’ I gasp. Then I start running.

I can’t stay on this street. Just get on a bus. I hurry towards the bus stop, then pause and turn around. I take a few steps in the other direction, pause, then look around. Still not sure. I shouldn't have had that wank. I didn't enjoy it. My head goes all cold and hot. I can't do this. They know. They all know and anyway I can't hide it. I look like Will Self.

I'm at the bus stop and gratefully lean against the post. There's a bus. 38. That'll do. A long journey through London. I'll go away. I'll just go away from where I am.

I'm on the bus for a long time. A confusion of people, noise and shop signs rushes past my misted up window. An ambulance siren wails, a slighted would-be passenger punches the window of the bus. I just catch the words ‘fucking asshole…’ before we move on to the next horror. Words, words, words, stimuli, stimuli, too many stumuli. Evening dim sum imagine the fun retail and repair mr wu hot buffet sex hotel terror iced chai latte real dutch model credit crunch prices buy before boarding no membership required mind the closing door the end is near...

Never catch a 38 bus. Absolutely the last thing for a crisis.

***

I leap through the beeping automatic doors in Chinatown. Outside a Subway shop, two young workers are having a break. A blond one with split ends and spots and a cheap business suit on, the polyester trousers hoisting up her no-doubt pimpled buttocks, sucks on a Mayfair. Her companion, with short, spiked hair set rigid with gel, eats a burger from a polystyrene box. He's wearing a gold ear stud. They shoot monosyllables at each other, smoke and gorge on burger. Suddenly and brazenly she burps. A loud reverberative open-mouthed one for the whole world to enjoy. She's not even amused by it. He snortlaughs, by way of afterthought.

On the other side of the street, by the bus stop some alkie bird is turning heads. She's stumbling in front of two alkie blokes who are sat on a wall. I don’t know it yet, but this is in fact an act of seduction. She’s focused on one of them. He’s young, unshaven, and wears a baseball cap. The other is old and pale. He just stares straight ahead, like a sphinx. She's talking to the young bloke, who is sneering at her with a mixture of lust and hatred.

There’s quite a lot wrong with this girl, but she’s too fucked to care. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her face is covered in purple blotches, like acne scars. She’s wearing fluorescent pink velour leggings, knee-high black boots and a black vinyl puffer jacket. Her lacquered hair is scrunched up into a bun which explodes from her crown in a profusion of tight coils.

In the act of standing still she stumbles. She looks like she's on the deck of a churning ship. Whenever she speaks she lunges forward at this bloke as if she might headbutt him. She can't stop shouting and stumbling all over the place. People at the bus stop are smiling at her antics. They are entertained, as if it were a show.

She’s shitfaced, but she’s loving it. She’s excited. She’s having fun. Because… yes - because she’s flirting.

She wants to give him her phone number. She fumbles in her pockets and pulls out a bookie’s pen. She drops it between his legs. She bends over to pick it up. Her legs are wide apart and awkwardly bent. It’s a struggle to get down. Her high heeled boots thrust her backside upward disgracefully like she’s trying to crap into the sky.

She grasps at the pen once, twice, and picks it up on the third attempt. All the while her head is bobbing over this bloke's lap. Then, in the supreme act of shamelessness, she drops to her knees and rubs her face into his crotch, as if it were a baby's belly.

Everyone at the bus stop is smiling. The other alkie just sits there, staring straight ahead, like a sphinx. This one, he's untouchable. No sorrow or horror he can't let slide over him. He just is. Sitting there in the autumn sun with his tin of Spesh. I suppose we all have our ways of getting through the day.

***

You're not on the stage for long. It seems a shame to waste it listening to the bullshit of barflies. When I grasped that, I jettisoned them for good. Left them buzzing at the bar.

They suck you in so they don't feel as bad, like low-rent vampires diluting their wretchedness with purer blood. The wheezing, silver-stubbled old man ushers me over… I have a feeling that I'm crossing a malign threshold, that I'm about to become part of a squalid tableaux with these grisly old wasters, that I will be stuck with them for ever, doing the same squalid things over and over again, for ever. But I need a drink and I don't know this part of town so well.

He orders me a large whisky and himself another glass of red wine. I perch on the stool and try to hold my breath as he brings his stinking, sunken face right up to mine. Behind us a flabby, red-faced bag lady is sat opposite a purple-faced old bag man. Bag lady is wearing old Walkman headphones and is throwing her arms about, singing loudly. Shakira. Hips Don’t Lie. She slurs the bits she doesn’t know and as she becomes excited, starts massaging a shapeless sagging mammary in front of the grinning old bag man. ‘Errr… derrdee drrem… merr… baby… asi es perfecto!’ She knocks her half-pint of lager on the floor. The liquid runs over the wood panel floor and starts to seep under her Tesco bags.

The old man looks lasciviously at me. He says he is lonely and needs someone to talk to. Our drinks come and the old man pulls out a dirty crumpled tenner, carefully straightening it out with his yellowed fingers before handing it to the barmaid. He tells me that this barmaid – a middle-aged gaseous woman with sack-like breasts and wiry, red-dyed hair in a schoolgirl ponytail – wants to be with him, that when she gave him his change she made sure she touched his hand ‘as a sign’. His sour breath is all over me and as he speaks, spitting liberally on his plosives.

He says his name is Antonio. He says he is a painter. He says important people are interested in his paintings, and frequently visit his council flat to look at his latest work. I thank him for the drink, wipe my face and leave. 

Out now, stirred by the firelick of whisky, into the dark street… bristling with night static, thrilled by the thought that I'll never have to see them again.

***

***soho, more drugs, close shave with a gang of coke-addled sodomisers on the 18th floor of a council flat, retreat home***

I've made it back to my street with my bum intact. Of life's small mercies, one for which I'm particularly grateful. My heart's thudding against my ribcage like a maniac, but being back on this landfill site of street is strangely soothing. Back among these cramped together old houses, most of them long since abandoned, with awful black cavities where windows used to be, a collapsing row of houses that looks like a set of rotten old teeth... it feels like the authorites have erased this place from the map, and that suits me.

A freight train rumbles over the rusty iron bridge.On the wall below, a corrugated plastic sign declares: 'We buy gold.' There's a boarded up pub across the road with a dirty tiled facade. Above the doors is a marble relief of Adam and Eve standing either side of the tree of knowledge. Eve is shyly insinuating an apple into Adam's hand.    

Ode to a Marmot

I’m just sat on this rock
In the sunshine
Eating a nice fat berry.

I have a long stretch
And a scratch

And think about finding a shag

But a chill wind comes
So I mooch back to the snug and sleep

For about four months.