Batley Boy

At the crack of dawn in the train shed at York Station. It’s spring and I’m leaving the north. Tired but happy here. A clear morning, a fine old shed, the trill of swallows echoing in the rafters. The sun comes alive. Light dances over the shed's broad arches, lemon yellow and carnation pink glints bursting from high windows, lending the tracks a thin golden glow.

Puffy-eyed travellers ranged across the platform. They keep to themselves, coat collars up against the residual chill of night, in spirit still back in their warm beds.

Of all places to be, on the east coast rail network at the beginning of day, somewhere up north, might be best. Always a feeling of effervescence at these transit points, ready to speed across the country on a train, landscapes appearing and disappearing as a striated blur past my window, on the way to who-cares-where. 

A wintery breeze brings me back to reality, to the long filigree hands of the big clock, the echoes of the automated PA. As the heavy machine shifts reluctantly into motion, I feel a fleeting sensation that I’m going the wrong way. I have to suppress an urge to jump out, sneak on to the Aberdeen Express and just head for oblivion. Aberdeen, in this case.

  

The Dirty Old Town I leave behind leaves me vexed – it doesn’t care that I came, nor that I am leaving again.  As I head south, I leave a trail of grudging attachment to the town, to its bleak imagery: dark railway bridges built of barrelsized sootblackened bricks, endless damp mossy walls, bare tree branches soaked in smog and vanishing into the sky like dead yearnings…

I once saw my town mentioned in a poem – the only time yet that it has been so immortalised. This was no paean, though. Rather an escapee's send-up of the drabness of provincial life, arch little quatrains on a selection of grim-sounding northern towns. ‘I'll tell you now and I'll tell you flatly/I don't never want to go to Gatley,’ the poet begins - the town which bore me coming next in the list of places he never wants to go to by virtue of its easy rhyme.  

What is there to be vexed about, I wonder as the train speeds onward, through Wakefield, Sheffield and beyond the mystical boundary line of the north. What was so special about Batley?

A creased little photo of a boy in red corduroy dungarees with his shoelaces undone. A bright red-lipped smile and a thatch of dirty blond hair crowning his head… 

The boy in the creased old photograph was me. Sulky little boy, with a fear of everything he didn’t understand, a fear of almost everything beyond the limits of 18 Loxley St… a fear that met with no correction.

****

I grew up on a red-brick cul-de-sac in front of a sink estate, the main area of the estate and its squalor always looming behind. There was a fence separating my mum and dad’s house from the estate proper, but errant kids could climb over, or break the slats and wriggle through, if they wanted. I was one of those kids, sometimes.

At the bottom of our street was the park. Here there was a boating lake with an island in the middle where they used to keep boats, but which had since become a home for ducks and geese. When I was a boy a few of us errant boys found a dinghy and paddled over to the island.

There were six of us so, in our two-man boat, we had to make the trip three times there, three times back. This meant that on the return leg some of us were left on the island at the mercy of the paddler, as the dinghy made its passages. As I stepped into the dinghy with two other boys and we were on our way back to the homeward side, an older boy grabbed a big duck egg from one of the hutches and threw it at us. We had no way of dodging it and it exploded against the side of the dinghy covering all of us in duck slime. It stank.

On the last trip, the paddler left the stupidest boy on the island and he had to wade through the lake to get back to land while we all laughed at him. I think as he got used to his clothes being wet and the slime under his feet he was laughing too.

The boy who threw the egg, Wayne, had ear studs in both ears and he shagged girls. He rarely stayed at home with his family, but rather with one of his succession of gum-chewing, Regal King Size-smoking girlfriends. ‘One of his slags’, as his brother Stephen used to say – until Wayne kicked the shit out of him for saying it. Wayne was such a troublemaker that I think his mum and dad were happy for him to be elsewhere.

Once, we were playing football on the field by the old railway track. By the side of the track there was a big ditch and my football got kicked into it. When I went to get it I found it had gone into a patch of thorns and burst. I was nearly crying and started walking home carrying my flaccid ball. Wayne was being a total shithouse that day and thought it would be funny to chase me and spit at me as I went. So I scuttled home sobbing with him laughing like a moron and spitting all over the back of my coat.

Wayne wasn't all bad. He was of what doctors would have called 'subnormal intelligence'. Got suspended from school over and over again. Nicked off to the point where his teachers simply forgot about him. 

His brother Stephen, who was my age, was not much brighter. I remember he used to spit a lot too. Later, he got an ear stud just like Wayne. Stephen used to have a little black dog called Lucky. Lucky got run over after a while, then he got another little black dog called Lucky Two and it got run over as well. Once when Stephen was sat on the floor by the swings in the park, Lucky came up behind him, hopped up and dangled his paws over Stephen's shoulders. We all thought it was funny and Stephen loved all the attention he was getting. Then Lucky Two started humping Stephen, growing a red slimy hardon all the while, and everyone laughed even more.

That dog had a horrible bark. We all thought it was annoying. We thought the same of Stephen. He was an absolute vegetable. He used to make strange animal noises for no apparent reason, like Chewbakka from Star Wars. He didn’t do it for attention - I know this because I once spied on him standing on his front doorstep late at night and just groaning like that… an imbecile's call into the void.

There was one other brother in this family who was a bit older. He was called Stacey. I used to kick the footy around with him all the time and swap stickers, even though he was older than was appropriate for that kind of thing. He loved Everton and would pretend he was their star striker of the time, Tony Cottee. I used to think Stacey was fucking ace at football, and fast as lightning, but looking back it was just that he made himself look good by playing against the young kids.

I had my first two sexual experiences with Stacey. The first time, he'd hidden a porno in the bushes over in the park. One day he took me over and showed the porno to me, and we spent a few minutes licking pictures of big peachy fannies on its weatherwarped pages. I hadn’t started wanking yet, but seeing those fannies made my head swim and my prepubescent cock throb. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to eat the pages of the porno.

The other happened in my back garden. It was starting to get dark and we were kicking a football around. My mum was peeling potatoes in the kitchen that looked out onto the garden. Stacey kicked the ball away from us and said, ‘Come over ere. I want to show you something.’ We went behind the rose bush in the middle of the garden. We lay down flat on our backs next to each other, hidden from the kitchen window by the rose bush. Stacey pulled his pants down to his knees and told me to do the same. Then he started stroking his cock. ‘Go on, you do it’, he said. I copied him, while my mum went on making the tea in the kitchen window. Stacey’s cock was hairy and thick. Mine was smooth and small. We both lay back on the grass with our jeans around our knees, stroking our cocks until they were erect. Then we pulled up our pants and went in for tea.

Stacey used to be really fast and a better football player than any of us, even though he was about five years older. Now he's really fat, with a bald ovaloid head. He works in a paint factory where his dad also works. He plays snooker, like his dad does, and drinks pints, like his dad does. Stacey's dad sometimes used to take us swimming and when we were in the changing rooms I noticed he smelled slightly of shit. Now I imagine Stacey smells slightly of shit as well. 

The park and the woods beyond them were a frontierland when I was young, places where I knocked about with the other estate boys, played football, tennis, touch rugby, green bowls, cricket, putting on the putting green, and any other game that any of us knew how to play. It was also a place where I sometimes went to get lost. 

Lots of gradated paths, flanked by fragrant rhododendron bushes and wild garlic, snaked up through the woods, meandering and branching off in so many directions that when you walked up them you were rarely sure where you would end up. Some of the paths would open up upon mossy relics of the park of yesteryear: stone ruins of bandstands and crumbling bridges. It was a place of mystery to a young lad like me. Its dark arbours, its undulating terrain and little streams, the sounds of unknown animals rustling in the leaves and snapping twigs, the whispering of the canopy, the unnatural darkness and hemmed-in fragrances - of rhododendrons, humus and stagnant water from dead streams… for a time this was an uncharted land to me, a place with its own moods, somewhere I would lose myself and, in my childish way, test fate.

At the top of the woods was the topiaried, tiered garden of the museum, with yet more rhododendrons, its huge Italianate fountain and a central set of broad stone steps leading up to the huge copper-towered museum. If Batley were the cosmos of the ancient Greeks, this is where Zeus and Hera would have lived. To the right, looking up towards the museum there are farmers fields, cattle pasture, but nearer, hidden under a natural curtain of tree growth, a little observatory, Batley’s modest link to the mysteries of cosmos, the door of which was always padlocked.

Often I would walk up the hill-sloped wood alone at night, trekking from the valley bottom where I and the scummy estate folk lived, to the rarefied heights, where people had latest registration cars and lived in houses that had names, like 'Woodrise' or 'The Poplars'. Having emerged from the pitch-dark woods, breathless with relief from the horrors that my imagination dreamed up along the way – of serial killers chasing me up the meandering path, of sex maniacs or cannibals leaping out from the bushes – I would climb the tiered steps of the museum garden, feeling like an alien, but safe at the same time. I'd turn around and look over the silhouette sea of trees that separated me from my the valley bottom, my home. Here I would experience an exquisite sense of solitude. I would look on the darkness of the wood below as a sort of cosmic void. And I would lean into it. Sometimes I would be too scared to walk back through the woods to get home and would have to take the road route round the wood, which was three times as long…   

About 95% of my youth was spent kicking a football against a wall. Or dribbling around the rose bushes my dad had planted in the back garden. (I remember as emblems of incongruous beauty those pale salmon-coloured roses that flourished for the two summers that dad wasn’t too depressed to tend them…) Dribbling the ball around the rose bushes and providing my own gushing commentary as I went (Oh and look at this gifted youngster,  such a joy to watch. He’s away! A glorious shimmy there. The ball’s glued to his feet. Past one, past two.This is wonderful stuff… Not since Maradona have we seen…) Practising Cruyff turns and stepovers I’d learned from the John Barnes training video that Malcolm the football coach had lent me. Left foot over the ball, turn and away with the right… over the ball, turn and away… over the ball, turn and away... Umpteen hours. Me, a football and my dreams of glory. 


Bittersweet velleities, born in the pit of the belly, travelling up to the creases of my eyes. As, when feeling stupid and lost, I read the spines of my favourite books. Here I am, sat on my backside, yet coursing with the speed of a hero across an entire country. The journey seems not four hours long, but of a single, dimension-bending second. Past my window streak the backs of houses, past scrubland and claggy, furrowed fields where suddenly, with blue confetti flickers, a flock of wood pigeons take wing. It’s a virginal day. The first sighting of blue in the sky for a long time.   

Menage a trois

It was the three of us. In the old man's pub on the Botley Road. We went straight for the cheap spirits. Neither of you was even old enough to be there. But we got served. And on what was a very ordinary Sunday afternoon in West Oxford, we necked the spirits and hugged each other as a grinning, careless trinity, and that was as fulsome a threesome as we ever were.

If I had special powers, I'd have enormous sex with 7,000 girls at the same time. But second to that, I would be in that pub with you two, necking cheap spirits, linked arm by arm, with the uncomprehending eyes of the barman flitting over us.

To thine own self be true

Wake up and expect it will go on for ever when the reality is very, very different. Wake up, go to work. Lots of little disappointments. In headaches and in worries vaguely life leaks away. Keep telling yourself, it will get better and it is worth the ever so regal patience.

What do you live for? In what does your hope consist? Unclear. How shit of you not to be able to put it into words, and how boring to do that anyway. It is happening, it is happening, and it is so tiring, so often trying. It should be clear. You should have it emblazoned over your desk, tattooed on your forehead. Is it something to do with love, with looking upon your beloved and saying calmly, I don't want any more than this?

Some abandon thinking. Others never thought. Still others strive for justice, solidarity, to pass on knowledge and wisdom. I live by the heart, by the selfish heart that wills to hear a broken plea answered. And that is a vague way to live. Empty accusatory days. There is plenty of time for it though, isn't there? Plenty of time to ask oneself the question: am I living in full awareness of the quiddity of being alive? And to answer: Hell no.

George 3

Family, friends, please accept this intimation and meet at the crematorium of St Mary’s...

George senior stands outside the crematorium, dressed in the dark blue suit he last wore two years ago, to the wedding of Joseph, his only living son. Patricia, his wife of a quarter of a century, from whom he separated pleading utter indifference two years ago, leans on his arm. She holds a worried tissue in her tiny fist.

Fifteen or so guest, mostly members of their extended family, emerge from the crematorium. It is a spectacularly bright spring morning.

George senior squints up at the sun. 
“Ashes…”

In his head, he repeats the word, once, twice, as if doing so will give him a sign about what to feel. Then something breaks within him. An unexpected sensation takes over. A nauseating lightness from head to toe. Still with his head raised towards the sun, he closes his eyes and focuses on the fiery red glow on the screens of his eyelids.

A hand grips his shoulder. Uncle Tony.

George opens his eyes. 
“He wanted to be a singer.”

“You what?” asks Tony.

“He said he wanted to be a singer.”

Patricia leaves them and walks over to the mumbling group of relatives.

“What?”

“He told me a few weeks ago.

“Fuck you on about? I don’t know…”

“Neither do I...’ George looks up and closes his eyes again. “I never have. Never.”

Tony takes out his tobacco tin and quickly rolls an unfiltered cigarette. He takes a long drag, closes his mouth to hold in the smoke for a moment, then exhales.

“They’re coming over, George,” he says.

“Fuck‘em. I can’t bear ‘em. Let’s go for a walk."

They walk along the gravel path to the adjoining cemetery. Gravestones of sootblackened sandstone and lacquered granite lean at all angles. Some have collapsed completely, or vandals have kicked them over. 

George walks down the slatternly rows with Tony by his side, picking out the words.

He tries to imagine himself as a boy, fresh, soft-skinned and without spite. Nothing.
“A fucking singer.”

“George, come on…”

“It’s a fucking joke. It’s our fault, Tony. He couldn’t handle it. Why did he have to be so fucking... thick?”

“Come on, mate...”

“You know I’m right Tony. Your lot's just the same.”

“George, don't start...”

“Ah fuck off, Tony, don’t get precious. You know it as well as I do. It's shit heaped on shit. Never ends."  

“He didn’t know what he was doing. It was the drink. It had already done its damage. I know. I know what it’s like. To hit rock-bottom. Some can't hack it. It’s what happens. Round here...” 
Tony takes another deep drag and shakes his head. “It’s too much...” 

“You’re right there, lad,” says George.

George 1

The Vic. Saturday night. Bradford lost 4-0 this aft. George got started at about 11 in the morning – a couple of tins left over from Friday night, fuel for the coach ride over to the Valley. He hasn’t stopped since then. Hard to take, 4-0.

Cath, the menopausal landlady, serves George his pint with a disdainful shake of the head. ‘You gunna pull yerself together George or are you gunna sulk into yer beer all night?’

She’s joined by Stu, the barman from Samoa. He used to be a professional rugby player. Built like a gorilla. It’s midwinter and it’s dark outside, but he’s wearing bermudas and flip flops all the same. ‘How’d you get on there, Georgie boy?’ he goads, nudging Cath. ‘Did you win?’ 

‘You know what happened, you. Now fuck off back to aborigine land,’ George replies, lost in the bubbles of his pint.

Cath grins, her thin lips stretching over a condemned set of grey teeth. Stu laughs, looking at the regulars slumped around the bar to back him up.

The pub is filling up. The Tango brigade gets settled round the U-shaped banquette - all have dyed black hair, all wear black, all saturated in fake tan and mascara, stinking of discount scent.

Stevie, who Cath refers to as ‘that weird foreign lass’, tiptoes in and looks around.

A meek-looking woman of about 30, with lank muddy blonde hair framing her chubby, rosacea-afflicted face, Stevie sees George and smiles faintly. It’s a smile that simultaneously expresses relief and disappointment.

‘Stephanie, come here, sit down with me.’ Stevie hesitates. ‘Come on. Come on over here and sit with me. What you having?’

George stumbles back to the table with a double vodka and diet coke for Stevie, about £1.50’s-worth of which he spills en route.

Andy powers up the karaoke, starts checking his monitor and the mic. This brings George to life. ‘Time for summat from’t repertoire. What d’yer fancy, Steph?’ 

‘Not tonight, you’re too pissed,’ Andy says.

‘No I’m not. Come on, one song.’

‘Why don’t you stay over there and have a dance instead,’ Andy says. ‘I’m not having you falling all over my gear again.’

‘Come on, Andy, I’m not drunk. I’ve had a few but I’m not drunk. I’m not drunk.’

The drawstring from George’s hoodie is dangling in his pint.

‘Next time. Not today.’

George stares at the table. In front of him on the table three pints of lager are going flat. Time to get this night back on track, he thinks. ‘Steph, have a vodka red bull.’

I’ve told you, it’s Stevie, and I’m fine with this, thanks.’

‘Ah come on, I’ll get you one.’

George sways up to the bar, orders two double vodka red bulls and sways back to the table, nudging the glasses on to the edge of the table between the undrunk pints.

He leans over and whispers into her ear, the drawstring from his hoodie again dangling in his drink.

‘Steph, do you remember that text you sent to me that time? Do you remember?’

‘James, it’s Stevie. And I didn’t mean to send that to you. It was an accident. It was meant for another James.’

‘Do you remember what it said, Stephie?’

Stevie rolls her eyes and takes a long swig of her vodka coke. Made bold by her anonymity in this dark little town, thousands of miles from home, she had made this mistake after her first night at the Vic, a brief, shamefully deliberate flouting of caution. James repeated the story every time he saw her.

George leans in again. ‘Do you remember what it said, Stephie?’ He slurs, his fat lower lip brushing against her ear. He lowers his voice. Sour warm breath. ‘It said: Come over now and fuck me.’

‘James, you’re drunk again. Don’t be so...’ – she stops herself.

‘No, I’m not. I just wanted you to know...’ His heavy-lidded eyes seek out hers. ‘...I’m all right with it you know. You and me, Stevie. I’ll go back with you later. Or now if you want… No, let’s have one more first...’

‘James, you’re a damn mess.’

‘Yeah, I know, it’s all right.’ He smiles at her.’ I’ll go back with you.’ He leans over and pats her leg, sending his hoodie drawsting back into his pint. Stevie downs the rest of her vodka coke.

Mick the bastard – greasy haired, unshaven, wearing a polo shirt and baggy stonewashed jeans – comes up behind George. He clasps his scalp in both hands like it’s the FA Cup and kisses him on top of his head.

‘You doing all right here, love?’ he says into George’s ear.

George smiles at Stevie. Mick squeezes his shoulders. ‘You gonna fuck that later or what?’

‘We’re all right, Mick,’ George answers. ‘We’re all right, mate.’

‘Course you are, love. Course you are. There’s nowt wrong with you. And don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise,’ says Mick with a dirty grin, before stumbling off to the gents, picking his arse crack as he goes.

The words to Angels appear in huge pink letters on the big karaoke screen.

‘Aah, Andy, come on. Angels!’ 

 

9-5

Wake up. Fall back to sleep. Veer in and out of dreams. In and out of a paralysed fascination with being alive. The is-ness of the thing. The consciousness of it. The meaninglessness of it. I'm awake again. Sporting a rock-hard erection. Have to get up now. Have to. Do it all over again. Make some more decisions. Put off making more decisions. Something always held back. Hi, how was your weekend? Oh fuck off.

Jogging

I'll tell you what, the silence tonight. Unbearable. Not sure why that is. Drying out from the weekend.  Yesterday's diazepam leaving its slugtrail over my membrane. Feels as if I would shatter like cheap glass if I heard a sudden noise. But I fill the void with music. Impressionistic music. Ravel, Bacarisse. Love the sound of that. That mad bushy-faced cunt Nietzsche was right: without music life would be a mistake. Take me somewhere I don't know and where yet I feel fated to go. Beautiful while it lasts. But what next? What now? There has to be a something.

Keep going back to the memory of my remark to Gerry about joggers. I said that joggers gave the impression of being pathological or something, that they ran and ran and kept on running because if they were to stop they'd go mad or die. Gerry laughed. I assumed at the time he laughed because he thought it an amusing apercu, and I felt quite pleased with myself, but now I know he was laughing at my naivety. Because it's not just the joggers, it's all of us, and I just hadn't realised it. We are all running, sweating, panting, to escape madness or thoughts of death.

I'm Gay and an Alcoholic

Okay, yes, I must admit it:
I'm gay and I'm an alcoholic
There, it's over, done, I've said it
No need to cry, no need to panic
I know I've been a bit pathetic
To not see that it's true
But there, I've fucking done it,
Now what about you?

Coming down

A, I will address you directly, because that is one of the only ways I have of preventing your memory from vanishing for good. A - and I use your initial interchangeably with methylenedioxymethamphetamine here - because of you, my sober life is a nightmare. I twirled with you and your friend to the buzz of fiendish techno on the scummy concrete floor of a disused warehouse. I somehow found myself with you back at my flat in the early hours of New Year’s day – you and your fat-lipped friend. I don’t have any memory of seeing your face or of physical contact with you while levitating at that New Year's party, but I do, just about, remember your face and the feel of you from when the three of us were lying on my bed, coming down. Your hand in mind. My gob on yours. Your angular shoulders, one of which I tried to hold as we surrendered to sleep. I try hard to remember, A. I remember also sneaking looks at you while you dressed to leave as daylight crept up, all too abruptly, and thinking, she's tall. And gorgeous. And she dresses well. And her eyebrows are good. Don’t leave.

You were from the same place as me. I remember you saying more than once - as if reminding yourself of the silly situation you found yourself in, or the silly person you found yourself with - ‘Darren from Batley’. That lightly mocking tone. So natural to northern folk. To people like us. We didn’t even talk about our shared origins. You just said, now and then, ‘Darren from Batley’. What a privilege to know that I was a coherent concept to you.

Can I remember how many times we kissed and how good that felt? No. Between five and fifteen, I think. In the morning we lay half-dead on my worried mattress. Your friend writhed and murmured next to us. Time was running out. You held in your hand a tube of lip balm, which I felt jealous of and replaced with my own hand. I remember more than anything else your rich, low, perpetually unimpressed voice.       

I remember, as rumours of your leaving plucked the threads of this living dream, forgetting what you were called, and confessing as much in shame. You said something like, ‘I told you enough times when we were at the party.’ Time is a scythe - on that memory, the bluntest.

Now, A, between my unsteady hands, I hold your memory like Andalucian sand. At least I have your texts. If they were actually written by you and not, as the final one would suggest, by some mocking and infinitely cruel accomplice...

Me: Alex, my tongue is all bitten up and I look like a corpse. Are you going to be able to make it out later? I think you should. (Translation: Alex, I’ve lost every shred of confidence I had when I saw you, but please come and see me.)

Alex: That text was funny. Well, what’s your plan for tonight? I’d like to but I’m really not sure I’m capable!

Me: Me too. I’m fucking broken. I don’t have a plan yet. But would be good go meet you at some point. Any interest in coming over my way? (Translation: Please, fucking please, I want to see you again.)

Me, hours later: Come on Alex, let’s do something! (Translation: Alex, I love you!)

Alex: We’ve just ordered an enormous amount of Chinese takeaway! I’ll see how I feel after but I can’t promise anything as I am a shell of a person!

Me: Good. MSG good. I’m going to keep drinking wine until you get in touch. Ha, ha. Herm. Sigh. (Translation: Thank God you replied. I’m going to avoid the tiniest suggestion of sobriety until, unless, you get in touch.)

Me, hours later: Right. I wish you would get active. I’m totally prepared to come over where you are. Well, not totally prepared, but you know. Come on, I’ll be depressed otherwise. (Translation: Oh fuck, you’ve switched off. Why? WHY? Was it my last message? Oh God, I'm dying!)

Alex: Food took nearly two hours to come. The only thing left for me to do now is go to bed and end this day! I’m sorry, last night was fun though x.

Me: Ah that’s rubbish. You should come over and sleep with me. Just get in a taxi. I’ll cover it. (Translation: An 'x'?)

Alex, or someone using her phone: I’ll be round in ten. I do have gonorrhoea though, hope that’s okay.

Me: That’s my favourite STD. (Translation: She's gone.) 

You will say I’m an idiot and that it was just a night of fun. But you were tall, O A, O MDMA, without you I feel nothing. Nada. Nowt.