Dear Alan – Letters to the Last Days of Youth

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Letter #1 

Dear Alan, Do you ever think of the years 1988 – 1993, that incredible six year long summer we spent together which built in heat and intensity and culminated in you knocking back a bottle of Pernod before ramming your motorbike head-first into the metal railings of Greyhound Park? I only ask because I do, I think of those days a lot. And even though we've not seen one another for almost 20 years I still often wonder where you are and how your life panned out. I imagine you probably grew a beard, became an alcoholic and eked out a meagre, rural existence somewhere, fishing with string and tin cans and using cow shit for fuel... Though I always was romantic in those ways. But that's not really why I write. It's more because of July of whatever-year-it-was, that Sunday morning which brought you to my door, fresh out of a suicide attempt, smelling of aniseed and with a face so laden with drink that it was hanging an inch off the bone. That last great Sunday... I'd like to talk about that.

Dear Alan, I wanted to punch you. You stood there an embarrassment to the art of standing: stooped over and swaying like one of those heavy-bottomed toys which never fall over. Your lipstick was smeared, your eye-liner was run and your long, blonde hair was wiped down flat across across your brow: you looked like a water colour of my mother which had been left out in the rain. For eight seconds you didn't speak. Then you said: “I'm going home, Boy-O... back to Ireland, NOW!” Do you remember? You said that we were killing ourselves but that fate had decreed you was to live. Jesus! Normally you'd knock me up with a joint or a quarter bottle of scotch still rushing with your back swill. The last thing I expected were tears and incoherent tales of how you'd smashed yourself into the railings, survived, seen The Light, and was taking the evening ferry home. Then it was me who couldn’t speak. I had no choice. My closed mouth was all that kept the tears in. And it ended like that. No questions, and no trying to convince you to stay, just those little sounds which precede total breakdown and that desperate bear-hug which always erupts on the point of tears so as men don't have to see each other cry. Four floors above nothing we held on for life, and with the smell of your leather jacket in my nose, I stared across to the park, at your mangled bike which was still caught up and smoking in the railings. And with that embrace we said goodbye to youth and entered the depression of adulthood, that phase of life where we try to reconcile ourselves as people and search around for the things we lost on the free-wheel down. And do you remember how you handed me that little yellow piece of paper with your Irish address on it? Through quivering words, you said: “Now, you make sure you keep in contact, Boy-O... Now you fucking promise me, ya hear!” I pushed the paper away and told you I didn't want your address as I wasn't good at keeping contact and preferred people who were gone to be stayed gone. Really I was just angry and hurt. It wasn't true I never kept contact, it was just I'd never had anyone to keep contact with. When I closed my door I broke down. I wasn't so strong as all that. You should have known! You should have stuck the note to my door, put it through the letter box, given it to my mother, something... not let it drift off over the balcony and flutter away like an early autumn leaf. I suppose we were both weak people acting tough... a perfect breeding place for regrets.

 God, how it really feels like it all happened only yesterday, like I could descend four flights of stairs and come out into that life we once lived. Does it feel like that to you, Alan? Do you live that same shock I do each day, looking in the mirror to see two decades of drug and cigarette and fast food abuse staring back? You wouldn't recognize me now, Alan... I've changed so much, and not all for the better!

Letter #2

Dear Alan, things come and things go and memories come in and arrive on strange winds which I have no real control over. Sometimes a shifting sun can set off a shadow that takes me back. It's as if I'm being constantly thrown around all over the place. To write things down in the order in which they happened is as impossible as it would be useless. The order in which bullets come out a gun is not important, all that matters is the order in which they hit you. That's a weak defence for my writing on whim and asking you to excuse me for abandoning any kind of chronological order. But these words are about emotional order. Time-lines show nothing but how we got to where we are; they completely miss out on who we are. Fuck the clock. The horrors of war are all lost in time.

Alan, I'd like to talk about innocence... maybe our last ever truly innocent day. I suppose there could be many, and maybe you even have your own marker or maybe you just never think of things like that? Still, for me, it's of that day when I was fifteen and you was a little older and we were laying out in the cool of the milky grass, smoking hash and listening to the shouts and cheers of the cricket game. Do you remember how that felt? The sound of leather clacking off wood and young boys and adults jumping up bare-chested and whooping with joy in the afternoon heat? We lay a good distance off, on our backs, with the dark orange light of the sun behind our eyelids. In that hypnotic state you suddenly said, “I've got some speed,” something we'd talked about wanting to try for months. I opened an eye and squinted across. You remained on your back, eyes closed behind your shades, though quite aware I was looking. You pulled a smug smile. God, you was serious! Do you remember how I was suddenly so excited? How my shadow descended over you and how you remained still and teased me more. I called you 'Fuck Face' and prodded and poked  for details, demanding you let me see it. You didn't respond, just remained there: a grin and a pair of black shades, arms flopped down by your sides. And then, very slowly and deliberately, you opened your right hand and in it was a little rectangular wrap of paper. It was as if you had an inch of sun right in your palm. Barely had I time to see it than a cricket ball went fizzing by, followed by the  stamp of some sweaty kid. As he approached you closed your hand, and for a moment it was gone.

Fuck, what an evening that was A kind of loaded revelation. Do you remember? How we experienced one of the greatest highs of our lives? Me, terribly shy and finding it difficult to talk was suddenly thriving and couldn't keep the words in. Everything I'd ever read or skimmed or saw was there on the tip of my tongue and accessible. For a moment I really did feel a part of the world. My elbows didn't feel awkward and bony and my speech wasn't broken or punctuated with 'ums' and 'ers'. And you was the same, shivering with ecstatic speed chills, incessantly rocking away and twisting your hair, a history of Celtic mythology in your dilated pupils as the last Central Line tube rocketed us home. That weekend was the start of real drugs and alcohol, discovering Soho and all her sleazy Rock Clubs and hangouts. Things changed after that. Not for better or worse, they just changed... we were changing. I think we realised that drugs didn't only have to be taken for fun, that they could also be used to give us things we lacked. No matter, along with cigarettes, hash and alcohol, amphetamine also became a regular fixture – and it wasn't too long after that that our mothers' lipsticks started disappearing...

Alan, I hope you think back fondly on those times – you must, really. It'd be a crime not to. Being seventeen and sat crimping each other's hair and doing one another's make-up... Placing tabs of LSD on each other's tongue like we were taking Holy Communion. Do you remember? And what of the time you told me on the 260 night-bus that you was in love and couldn't stop thinking of that mysterious girl who had asked you to dance? And then I suppose you felt very weak and embarrassed and so got angry and punched yourself flat-fisted in the nose. I still remember that bloody, drunken, embarrassed grin you gave, your eyes still smarting and your face twitching from the real pain underneath. I think it was the first time you had hurt in any way but a physical one. Then you made out like it was all an idiotic drunken emotion, and we twisted it around to something cool and wrote 'Love's a Bitch' up our necks in black eye-liner. Fuck, we didn't even know what love was... but we were so fucking right! Still, I wonder what happened to that girl? If she ever forgave you for assaulting her in the Astoria nightclub after you came around from a drunken stupor, mistook her for a squat, stubbled biker and punched her out. And then I have to wonder how you ever fell in love with her in the first place. That really was fucked up. I suppose it just goes to show how vulnerable and needy we really were. And do you remember how we were thrown from the club that night? Our arms twisted up sore behind our backs then rammed head-first through those claret coloured double doors. God, how cool we thought we looked! Tumbling out onto the Soho pavement in cowboy boots and tight stretch jeans and rolling into the bin bags like the Saviours of sleaze. I think it could only have been stupidity that had us back at the club door, banging and kicking away for our jackets, screaming: “Fuck You!!!” at those vicious looking bouncers the other side who threatened us with terrible beatings and broken kneecaps. And d'you remember when our jackets were eventually slung our way, how we were too frozen for them to make much difference? Then, just as we were taking comfort from the thought that we'd soon be being driven home in a warm taxi we realised that the bastards had lifted our wallets. We were left penniless and had to walk 25 miles home down the frozen A40 with chattering teeth, rattling bullet belts, goose-pimpled tattoos and only youth and cigarettes to keep us alive.

 And what about that time when we were both tripping and were convinced we were pilots in the first great war? You wore shades and your grandfather's old cannonball crash-helmet and I sported swimming googles and a child's boxing headguard. Dressed like that and barefooted we ended up on your motorbike, speeding down to Heathrow where we thought the Spitfires were. Do you remember how as we came to a stop in  some late afternoon traffic we spotted two policemen on bikes on the other side of the A-road, staring at us in utter disbelief and motioning for us to stay put? We made out we hadn't seen and zoomed off. It was only the genius of the central divide which stopped us having our idiotic asses slung in jail for the night. Instead , we drove home and strutted around like fighter aces until the acid wore off. You know, that was one of only three decent trips I ever had? My norm on LSD was to flip out and climb the walls, always begging you for guidance out from that world. Those drugs just weren't for me, Alan... especially the hallucinogens. If any drug fucked me up m!ore than tobacco it was LSD. It was bad enough having the ability to see what was there, let alone what wasn't. And anyway, I didn't want to see inside myself or others... I already knew the pile of shit that us humans are. Soon though I discovered my drug: opiates. I annoyed you in those times, I know... drifting off on awake dreams while you were wanting the companionship and brotherhood of old. You liked the image of opiates but not their physical effects... or maybe the effect they had on me? We kinda parted a little then, do you recall? You was flying high and I was dredging along the murky depths. We soon only ever met when you came down and I came up. And the days we had no drugs or alcohol at all we stayed locked in our respective rooms, listening to music and writing poems about death. Looking back on it now we were already halfway to having a psychological dependence on drugs... social occasions had become impossible without them.

Letter #3 

Dear Alan, how's your mother? Is she still alive? Did she ever come to terms with you being a 'transsexual'? It's weird, she accepted it so willingly in me, and yet in You it split her life and faith in two. Do you remember how she started buying and reading all the rock and metal mags, searching for proof that guys who dressed in patent leather and wore make-up were not queers? How relieved she was when she found out that it was much more likely that you was a child-sacrificing member of the Church of Satan... At least confession and a few Sundays in church could cure that! And do you remember how she flipped out at the thought of you returning to Waterford in stilettos, lipstick and eyeliner? How she threatened to disown you if you took the ferry looking like that? In an attempt to flee your present life with respect and enter your new one on the same footing you did the opposite of what most late teens do: you left the house looking like the Bride of Frakenstein and changed into dull, itchy, rural clothes around the corner! I would have understood, you know. Still, I'm glad my last image of you was leaving Wolfe House with your hair crimped and wearing my red leather jacket. Though Alan, I have to tell you, you looked so fucking pathetic and really always did! You were just the wrong shape for glam rock. I only ever told you you looked cool because I wanted to get out and get fucked up and if i'd have told you the truth we'd never have left my bedroom. Excuse me for that. It was mighty selfish. But that's what happens when you stand somebody drinks too often.

While on the subject of family, what ever happened with your father's inheritance money? I heard tales of you pissing it all away during a six month bike ride around Ireland with a shaven-headed gypsy girl? What was that about? And then I heard even stranger rumours of you and Finbar taking advantage of a freshly broken arm and stage-managing an accident in a supermarket in Ballycullane? Veronica told me that you laid down in a patch of spilt milk and settled out of court for fifty grand? Fuck, I hope it's true... it's hearing of such victories which keep me going! And speaking of broken bones, Jesus, I still cringe in horror when I think of that awful time you asked us to break your ankle so as you could get the summer off work to watch the World Cup. I know you'll not have forgotten that. Maybe you're now even suffering from some permanent damage we imparted? Me, twenty years on, I still spring awake some nights to the crack of snapping bones. There's a story floating around somewhere that it was me who finally put your ankle through, but as you know it wasn't, it was that sadistic fuck Paul. I tried, but my brain just wouldn't allow me to bring that steel bar down on you with sufficient clout. I hurt you, but no more. That's when Paul stepped up  to the helm, licking his lips at the ghoulish prospect of disabling a friend. Do you remember how he even took the precaution of packing  books under your inner calf so as to further weaken the intended point of impact? You was lying on your side, half off the sofa with your right leg outstretched and your outer ankle exposed. After agreeing that Paul was to hit you on the count of three you scrunched up your eyes in anticipation of the pain to come. If you was ever going to raise your hand and back out you was sorely out of luck. Paul, showing a glint of humanity, hit you when you wasn't expecting it, on the count of 'two'. Oh Christ, that depraved sound! It was like the crack of a gunshot. And how you shot up in the air, screaming in agony... then worse, all 180lbs of you instinctively coming back down on that foot, which folded. On the floor you shrieked like the banshee, tears streaming because the pain was so intense. ANKLE SHATTERED IN 11 PLACES: that's what the x-ray showed. And sure enough you got the summer off work and together we all watched the 1990 World Cup, the Republic of Ireland crashing out to Italy in the quarter finals.

There was something special about those times... for me anyway. We were living at the arse end of one of London's most notorious, run-down and crime ridden council estates, and yet there was a kind of magic all around which made life glow. Dreams existed in that place. That's what it was. When the day was done and the night came down, God, staring out across London at far off twinkling lights could make you cry. Do you ever think of things like that? See also a beauty in the broken homes and social problems and the human fallout which we had to live besides? Ponder over shared cigarettes like they were kisses? Or remember snippets of useless conversations which have no right to be memories at all? I do, constantly... they all seem like clues to some huge mystery which is woven through existence. In the last years such small things have taken on such seemingly great significance. Maybe that's why I'm writing to you? I don't know. I don't know what these words are for??? They just are.

Letter #4 

 Dear Alan, why on your return to London in the autumn of 1995 did you purposely search me out? I never really did figure that one out. It was eighteen months after you'd left and you found me sitting outside The George in Soho in the same place we had always sat. Do you remember how you kicked me awake from my eastern dreams? I didn't recognize you. You had shaved off your hair and was wearing biker boots and leathers. I thought you was one of the Outlaws looking for trouble. I was properly full on opiates by then. I suppose we had both stopped pretending... or almost. Almost as I have to admit that I wasn't really  as thin as I acted. It was a put on: the limp wrists and sucked in cheeks, as if I was barely strong enough to hold myself together. That's what happens on the crux of addiction when you're still playing around with it. The vomit was real though. Do you remember you patted me on the back as I threw up outside the Intrepid Fox and said you was leaving? I held up my hand and kept my head down, dry retching as you disappeared for the last time. I didn't even look back. Secretly I was glad you was going... there was too much between us, and one night in a lifetime means nothing to me. Still, how did the abortion go? That's why you were over. Young Girl X was up the duff. As you'll never reply to this letter, I hope it passed OK. I still think it's crazy that you couldn't get an abortion in Southern Ireland. Crazy. And did you ever have any children? I reckon you probably did and probably don't have any contact with them. I don't quite know why I imagine that??? You just seemed emotionally very cold towards family and the like. I never had children. I wouldn't bring something with a vertebrae into this world. And that's not a damning indictment of the state-of-play; it's a damning indictment of me: I just wouldn't dump my hand-me-down genes onto someone. And anyhow, you couldn't bring up a child on my morals, and I couldn't condescend to the morality that a child would need to find its bearings in this world. That's the thing with parenthood, you have to deceive from the start. In a way it's a great tamer of immoral men... a social means to get the infidels under control and thinking in the correct way. Imagine that, at twenty eight, you have to start believing in Santa Claus and happy endings again! No, barring some kind of terrible accident, I will never be a dad.

As for the clubs and Soho, well, that all ended ugly too. Rumours were rife that I was shooting dope in the toilets of the Wag Club, and though that wasn't true, it brought out a sickening, square, conservative side of Rock music which I came to despise - everyone becoming morally responsible and damning me for bringing “that shit around 'ere!” Each member of the flock suddenly had a band member who had died from a smack OD, taking their rotten dreams with him. The entire nightclub fraternity first ostracised and then stoned me. Can you believe that? What with every other scenester pretending they were junkies, painting their eyes black and sitting around itching their forearms! And yet, when they thought that someone had actually gotten into that underside of things they cast him out. Really it was all about unfair competition: the pretenders worried about having to compete for cock action with the real deal. So, I was ejected from that clique and banned from entering the clubs I was working for! A little after that my friend Ewan died. When it was discovered that heroin was involved I was warned out of Soho altogether, threatened that if I stepped foot in the square mile again I'd be the next one getting buried. Well, you know me, the first thing I did on hearing that was take a RETURN ticket into town. Nothing happened. One club promoter made a spurious attempt to attack me with a broken bottle – only to be miraculously restrained by some passing eighty year old invalid! I saluted and bowed out the scene.

Final letter #5

Dear Alan, the time has come to thank you for not fucking my mother – it's always the hallmark of genuine friendship. Though you did have ample opportunity, and that was hard enough to live with at the time. D'you remember those evenings that we used to pass in my bedroom having smoking sessions? By midnight we'd be completely wrecked, just sat there staring into the immediate nothingness. The night seemed so terribly lonely and sad in those moments. Sadder still were the noises which came through the wall, from my mother's room next-door: her groans and screams as she fucked her way through the lodgers (even those with rent arrears!) It still touches me to remember how you never once remarked on it, just always stretched across and turned the music up to drown it out. You was the only friend who knew anything of the real problems that were going on in my home. Then of course there was that terrible afternoon when you had to help me lift my mother off the floor and put her on the couch. Do you remember? Gravity had really gotten a hold of her that day, and no matter how we tried to lift her she always flopped about and dragged down heavy in some other place. It was as if her bones had been removed. Again, you never made a thing of it... not a word. We just went outside and shared a silent cigarette on the balcony. That's when she started calling: “Allaaaaan.... Alllaaaaan...” I called back asking what she wanted. She screamed: “I want Alan, NOT YOU!” And so you handed me the cigarette and went to see what she wanted. What she wanted was pretty damn clear: when you opened the door she was lying bollock naked on the couch with her legs spread, a hulk of dribbling meat, like something that had fallen off a Francis Bacon painting. I was just behind and pulled you out the room before you could see too much... and you'd already seen too much. As we got back outside we heard the thud of her body as it fell off the sofa and landed on the floor. I looked at you. “Just leave it,” you said, “just leave it.” And for the first time in my life I did... I just left it.

Anyway, my mother's much better now. She's completely off the drink and hasn't touched crack or heroin in almost four years. Once she gets off the methadone she'll be completely clean. But the thing is this: you really have missed your chance, Boy-O! Ten years ago she went through the menopause and now even the mention of sex makes her shiver with disgust. It's still hard getting my head around that. Most adults find it difficult to imagine that their parents still have sex; I find it difficult to imagine my mother NOT having sex. But it's happened: age has tamed the old girl. In that way, it's really very sad.

Oh Alan, surely all this didn't happen as long ago as the years say it did? But if not then how come we're all getting old, and some of us have died, and my mother's an OAP? Time's passed Alan... time's really passed and it makes me sad to know it. It's such an impossible thing to comprehend. Can you fathom it? It makes me think of this mental retard I knew growing up called Chris. He was in his thirties and I was nine. We used to ride our bikes together, but mostly he just sat on his and watched. Years later, whenever I'd bump into him, he'd start up with these retarded innocent questions... over and over.

“You got the time, mate?” he'd start off with. Then: “Have you seen Johnny lately? How's Johnny? Have you seen Johnny?” Then he'd ask: “What year is it today?” I would tell him that the day doesn't have a year, and he'd reply “Everything has a year!” That's when he'd start up with: “Where does time go? It must go somewhere? Do you know where time goes? Funny thing, time! Where does it go? Do YOU know? Time, it must go somewhere?”

Well, now I'm the mental retard, and I'm asking you: What year is it today? Have you seen Johnny lately? Where does time go? It must go somewhere? Do YOU know?
- - -
Alan, what a life its been. I think I'm tired. Other than our bones we'll never get a break... that's just one of those happy endings I was talking about. The marks they're really beginning to show. I'm starting to look like the life I've led, and I suppose you don't look much better. If you have news don't send it my way... we're different people now, and this letter is to who you was then. I prefer to remember you like that... Young, wild and sacred, kicking back at life while smarting from love's first tender blows. That was You and that was Me and that was another time...

 Take Care, My Friend... In Loving Memory of a time that was... Six summers yours,

 Shane, X

Coming Up For Air...

For those of you checking for a new post or feed, the wait is almost over....

There'll be a new Memoires post put up within the next few days. It will be a post about  youth and love and   friendship and lipstick on the eve of adulthood. It will belong to the nostalgic set of posts which get put up around here.... I suppose they all do. It will start with a motorbike crash and not get much happier than that.

It's 02.55am on a lonely friday morning.... I'm suffering from a badly cut hand and lack of sleep. If you're after poetry it's in the works. For now, it's one last cigarette then the night is mine...

Take care All... it's an empty world full of people... Shane. X

SICK

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Sick. We were sick. We lay in bed, wrapped up in filthy blankets, smoking, sometimes fucking, doing animal things, you know... like being sick.

Sick. We were sick. Sick in bed. Sick in life. Sick by life. Sick. And we made each other sick.

Sick. Watching TV for days on end, sweating furiously but too bored to pull the covers off. Filthy feet. Filthy legs. Separated by a valley of cigarette ends. Stuffing our faces full of fatty, greasy foods. Shutters down. Apartment crawling with bugs. Toilet blocked. Sick. We were so fucking sick.

Sick. Not dope sick. Life sick. Diseased by pasts and visions and sounds and leather belts and erect cocks and murder. Sick. We were made sick by all these things. Sick. Sickened by cunt. Wet mushy drunken gang-banged cunt. Sick. We were sick. I was Sick. She was sick.

Sick. Locked in the apartment, blankets up against the windows, dust in the sunbeams, Repulsion looping on the DVD player. Sick, the room smelled of sick. Two diseased lovers with open welts, leaking abscesses, strange bumps and sores and scars. Sick. The days made us sick. Fresh air made us sick. We stopped answering the door, muted the TV, and silently gagged when the buzzer rang. Sick. We looked at each other in terror, sick, a mirror of ourselves, sick. And in the bed we lay, puking up milk and yoghurt in our sleep, choking to death on the trauma of the life we had seen. Sick. That's what we were: Sick.

And outside, the grimy, slick, lit up city  became a hostile place. We concocted stories and plots, sick sick things, of a world of enemies encroaching upon us. Sick, we listened through the walls, eyed neighbours through the spy-hole: big, warped, looping faces, coming in, examining our door, the apartment bugged. Sick, the postman working for Interpol. Sick, police surveillance in the building opposite. Sick. We invented laws, sick laws, laws that said the flat couldn't be raided between 3 and 5am. So we'd rise, sick, in the early hours, cracking eggs and frying sausages and bacon and cabbage and bread; stuffing our mouths full of sandwiches dripping oil and ketchup, then, climbing back into bed and pulling the blankets tight around our necks so as we couldn't smell our own arseholes. Sick. The times were sick. We were sick. The hours were sick, and they dripped on by.

Sick. We slept like the sick: feverish, groaning and tensing up, our hair wet with sweat and stuck to our brows, mucus, dribble, crying through dreams, clenched fists and ugly faces. Sick. We were sick. Saying, “It hurts! It hurts so bad!” Drifting off into worlds of black, The Sins of our Fathers seeping out our skins. Sick. Ravaged by life. Sick. Sick to the bones. Turning grey. Fingers dark yellow. World shut out. TV on. Lines of bugs filing up the bin bags. Insane erections leaking watery cum. Tampons kicked to the bottom of the the bed with the socks. The flies gathering. Death getting near. Sick. We were so terribly sick.

Sick. 114 missed calls. 33 new messages, battery low, notes under the door, sick:

“Where R U?” [sic]
“Called to read lekky meter. return monday @ noon” [sic]
“Sis, Are You OK? Call me.” [sic]
“Your shower's leaking into our apartment!” [sic]
“24/7 Plumbing emergency services: need access ASAP!” [sic]
“Whats happening? Please answer phone. Getting vry worried!” [sic]
“Monday noon. Called, no answer. Please leave meter reading on door.”  [sic]
'Domino's Pizza Wednesday Special. Half-Price. Free home delivery' [sic]
“Sis, I know your there. if you don't give sign will call police!” [sic]
“Ceiling and bathroom carpet ruined. phoning agency. It's raw sewage! PIGS!!!” [sic]

Sick. We did what we had to do: sent a text; pushed the notes back under the door; held our livers and crawled back into bed. Sick. We were made sick and we spewed it all out. On the floors, into bags, on the blankets, on each other, we were sick. Bright yellow bile, lumps of intestine, slithers of liver, black jellied blood. Sick, our kisses were sick. In the 69 position we were sick. Sucking and licking and bobbing like children, retching on each others pleasure. Sick.You tasted of curdled milk and fresh-smeared shit, and God knows what I was to you. Sick, our future was SICK. Our love was SICK. We were SICK, doing animal things, you know... like eating grass, getting better by being SICK.

To The End of Rotten Love

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There's been a murder, a young girl, and now I can't sleep.

 It happened a little over four hours ago. I woke up to a symphony of banging and screaming coming from the upstairs apartment. In the dark, I lay on my bed, listening to the ruckus. It was a wrestling match. Two bodies tumbling around, kneecaps and elbows making blunt thuds overhead, then someone scrambling to their feet and bounding heavy-footed across the floor, screaming. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out like the bored.

From within the melee above I could make out two voices. One was that of a young girl and the other a man. The girl was hysterical, sometimes shouting insults and at other times shrieking as if desperate to to be let loose. The man made mostly angry sounds, like something driven mad. His only comprehensible words were: “WHORE! SLUT! WHORE!” Both voices were ruined with alcohol, a hateful rasp that writhed through their insults.

Woken for good, my eyes adjusted to the dark. On my back I concentrated on the fight, following it back and forth across the ceiling while trying to work out which part of whose body had hit what. At times the thumping and screaming became so bad that I was unsure of just where the fight was coming from. It was as if my neighbours to the left, right, behind and above were all going at it, like the entire apartment block had gone insane and all the occupants were participating in some surreal, early morning, communal bust-up. My bedsit quaked. From the far wall a painting worked loose from its fixing and fell like a dead-weight. It hit the floor standing and stayed there. In a rage I hurled a shoe at the wall. That fell and stayed there too.

 The light is on and I am up, sat on the edge of my bed in front of my laptop. A text screen is open. As I listen to the domestic above I try to type it up live. I cannot. When I try it comes out like this:
Two in corner, struggling. girl screams. Man enraged. Heavy thudding. Sounds like they're jumping off fucking bed. running, across room.. away. Voices not clear.. shouting. The man is shouting. Girl responds. an insult. Banging; footsteps??? Door slams shut. Someone (man) kicking door. Girls voice. Quiet.
I give up my live reporting. It's impossible to write and at the same time try to figure out what the noises are. It's equally impossible to decipher any words – not that I really care. Really I just want the dispute to end so I can get back to sleep. The fight starts up again. I light another cigarette and sit crouched over smoking and listening. Sad lonely shouts and screams accompany me and the night. I think fuck it and cook up a hit. With domestic violence on repeat in the background I slide a blunt, Sunday night needle into the back of my calf, pinning a newly surfaced vein which forks up from around my Achilles heel. After the shot the girl upstairs sounds like she's in the bathroom. Maybe she even is.

 It was about then that things started breaking. I could hear them hit the wall and shatter as I sat trying to align a flame to my cigarette. In between the bombardment the man was bawling: “I loved you!!!!” I loved you!!!!” For his declarations of spent love he received an ashtray, or a plant pot, or some vicious reminder of the inadequate size of his penis. And so it went on... My apartment being battered by the fight above; my paintings all worked crooked from the vibrations. I sat on a chair near the wall, tranquillized. Like a change of light, a sudden melancholy came over me. The sounds of the upstairs domestic were then all too familiar – something I'd lived before. They romanced tears, though not totally sad ones. I closed my eyes and nodded forward. History filtered down through the walls and filled the room, and for a moment, I drifted away... … …

 The room smells of spilled Martini, mint chewing gum, and the bottom of my mother's handbag. The noise of the fight sounds like it's coming out of an old radio. In the dark, behind my closed eyes, I can make out shapes; they scare me. I am back in time, alone, eight years old, standing downstairs in the cold, dark back room where the slugs live. My fingers are in my ears and I am humming and dancing to block out the sounds. Up above, mum and dad are going at it. When enough time seems to have passed I uncover my ears and hope to hear silence. Instead I can still hear the fight, my mother hitting off the wall and crashing down into her perfume cabinet, the bottles bouncing around and clacking together like beach stones. I re-plug my ears. The next time I uncover them I hear my father tramping down the stairs. I pray that it's over, that mum will keep her mouth shut and let him disappear to bed. But before I've even time to harbour any real hope there's a flurry of insults from my mother and then dad is bounding back up the stairs only to have the door slammed flat against his even flatter nose. Dad charges the door. He bursts in to furious squirts of  Chanel 'bootleg' No.5, mum rushing at him, blinding him with perfume while screeching out my name. I replug my ears and dance and hum some more. I don't want to hear my name. My name means I must go and hit dad over the back with a cricket bat and I don't want to. The thought of hurting dad hurts me. It hurts so bad I could cry. It's not love because I'm only eight and don't know what love is. More it's that tomorrow Dad's promised to buy me new shoes. How can I hit a man with a cricket bat when tomorrow he'll buy me new shoes? Buy me something more than what I need with money more than what we have? I can't. I block out the sound and dance some more. Even at this young age I know the morning always comes and we must face up to what we've done in the dark. Filtering down from up above were those same sounds again tonight: the same chase; the same screams; the same foul, acerbic drunken insults – a lifetime of rotten love, piercing the night and floating off over the city. Real-life drama. Something to listen to and try to work out – that was all. So I sat there in the early hours, alone, listening to the past and the present and feeling kinda sad.

 It's 3am. The fight above has been going on for over 90 minutes. I am back, perched on the edge of my bed, staring at the disjointed text I had written earlier. The main light is off and my standing lamp lights up the bottom half of half the room. The couple upstairs are taking a break from knocking each other's teeth out and for the moment are content with screaming at each other. But not only insults, there's some kind of dialogue going on, even if it's not what can be called conversation. Eager to know what has kept two lovers fighting for so long and what has woken my night I take to standing with my ear against the wall. From what I could figure it seemed that the couple had spent the night out drinking. At some time during the evening the man had begun seeing The Great Whore of Babylon wriggling through his girl – a temptress, her hand feeling out the contours of bulging erections through tight trousers as she swept past strange men; cocks crawling across the floor towards her; his sweet girl – dick-charming – her head thrown back in laughter, showing off a long sexual throat, a serpent for a tongue, her eye catching his and humiliating him further as he watched through the distorted lens of drunkenness: a 360° haze of people laughing and jeering, him stood in the centre, impotent, self-loathing, swaying while watching: his girl, drunk and loose and arousing cock after cock after cock. It all came out; an insane jealousy. Weeks, months, maybe years or torment and imagined happenings. The girl swore off his nonsense. That only enraged him further and brought him about her once more, this time with an ungodly screech like you'd maybe give while finally exorcising your nemesis. Heavy footsteps shook my apartment once more before the fight tailed off into some nearby room, culminating in an almighty crash against something. From the struggle worrying noises surfaced, the girl gagging and flapping as if being throttled while the man shrieked like something gone wild. The throttling sounds didn't last long. By the time I had placed them the girl was free and scampering across the floor, the man warning, “No, no, NO!!!!” In the room directly above I heard the window banging and rattling, and for a moment the girl's anguish was free and real, cutting the back of the city in two. The word “whore” was the last one to taste the night before the girl's scream was dragged back in by the ankles, the window pulled shut, and the fight privatized once more – now with kicking and full-combat violence. Stood below, my heart thumping, I seriously contemplated calling  the French emergency services. I verified the number, thinking: “I should call the police.” Then I thought: “I certainly SHOULDN'T call the police”, that “someone else will surely do it.” But it's 2012, we've heard it all before. It's entertainment for those without cable TV. I don't have cable TV. No-one made the call.

 At 03h37 the girl was on the floor and I think she was being kicked. I could hear her whimpering over in the corner and making scratchy sounds like she was curling herself up. It made me think of a hamster I used to have. Standing beneath the spot where I assumed she was I banged on the ceiling with a mop. Immediately the fight stopped and the man hissed something at the girl. I heard no reply. Her silence was answered by what sounded like her being stomped... one, two, three times. Listening to such stuff made my belly empty and nervous. My legs felt weak. I banged again. For a moment all was calm, and then there was movement and the girl pulled herself up. I thought of my mother, and it all started again.

 During some moments the dispute would quieten down. Like when fighting dogs rest still, locked onto one another, froth and blood on their coats, catching breath before tugging and ripping at each other some more. It was like that. Only now, as the fight wore on, it was increasingly the man's rage I could hear. The young girl seemed done for, and soon she even stopped resisting, just succumbed, and like me was surely hoping for an end.

 Listening to the racket of the fight was no longer fun. It hadn't been fun anyway, but at first it was something to do to after it had so rudely woke me up. Now I hung below, genuinely worried, a pained expression on my face, concentrating on the disturbing one-way violence from upstairs. I took my phone in hand and typed in the emergency number '17'. I stared at the number. SE-VEN-TEEN. It didn't seem as serious as calling '999'. I thought hard, paced the room and then closed the phone.

 The problem was that by calling the police I'd risk being arrested myself. My apartment was chock full of used needles, heroin, old wraps, filters and black market methadone bottles carrying weird names that just weren't on my passport. And even if there are many police who'd wave that aside in lieu of a real serious crime, there are just as many others who'd arrest me, and maybe even suspect me of having something to do with the dispute I was reporting. So I thought about calling the police and then I quickly thought against it. I toyed with the idea of tidying away all incriminating evidence and then phoning, but that would have taken a good hour as I'd also need to scrub the blood off the doors and walls. Also, when you've been using smack for so many years and are accustomed to being around needles and spoons and wrappers and blood, you stop being able to see these things, and so tidying up and hiding it becomes impossible because you can no longer see what you're supposed to hide. So I left it. Everybody left it.

 I suppose we all thought someone else would call the cops, or they'd just arrive. They always arrive when it's you. So the fight went on, and though it didn't escalate or seem to get any worse it never stopped, lingering on like a dying fire, occasionally flaring up before settling down again. And it was on that flame that tragedy blew in and gave this night to history.

 * * *
First there was a thud, then the ceiling shuddered; and then there was silence. Mid-fight the dispute suddenly stopped and I was left sitting on my bed with my head cocked listening for any sound at all. There wasn't a tinkle. Not a footstep; not things being picked up; not exhausted voices calling a truce, not the bed rattling as the two lovers made up – nothing. I sat there in the strange silence, trying to figure out what had happened. I eyed my unaligned paintings as proof that I hadn't imagined it all. Death or injury never entered my mind, more I imagined that the lovers had burned themselves out, or that the alcohol had worn off and they were sitting across from each other huffing and bleeding and all punched out. But it was weird, like a film that just ends with no music or closing credits. It's over and you wonder if it's a mistake or artistic choice while waiting for some kind of confirmation either way. For some time I sat on pause too, and when nothing happened I hit the light and climbed into bed.

 It was a good twenty minutes later when I sensed that the world outside was astir. It was nothing distinct, nothing audible, an intuitive understanding that sat in the air, like when a door is left open or someone is staring at you on a packed train. It just didn't feel lonely enough for it to be 4am in a french ghetto. I got up and made my way to the double set of front doors which lock me in. The outer door leading to the street is on rails, and when closed there's an inch gap on either side which is perfect for spying from. In the dark I stood peering out. Fifty yards down, outside the entrance to the main building, were two police cars. Past the police cars and falling out of shot there was a loose crowd with more arriving. As I watched a twirling blue light lit up the night scene and an ambulance drove into view. From the apartment blocks way down lights were on; whole families up against their windows or out on their balconies staring across. For a moment my view blacked over as my neighbour came out in his bed-clothes, barefooted, and stood there smoking. A man, a stranger, joined him. He asked what had happened. My neighbour mentioned the earlier fight then threw his hands up as if not sure if the two incidents were related. I wanted to go out and take a look at the action, gauge if this was worth staying up for or the anti-climax to what had seemed a pretty decent if terribly sad bust-up. I thought again of the drugs and paraphernalia lodging with me and stayed put. In the pitch dark I lit a cigarette and hung there silently like some guilty spectre watching the mayhem it had caused. Not being here was about the best thing I could be tonight. Up above there were noises afresh; not fighting, footsteps, some other activity going on in the apartment.

 For some time nothing happened and then two cars came slowly up the forecourt. They stopped a little distance off. Three plain clothes officers wearing orange police armbands got out and made their way down towards the crowd. Almost immediately there was some out-of-sight commotion. An armed, black-booted, uniformed Policeman briefly appeared, made some kind of a gesture and then went running off back into the building. The three plain clothes went running after him. I decided it was time to get dressed and get outside. I rushed into my bedsit, pulled on some clothes , wrapped up my gram of smack, and pushed all the drug paraphernalia into a bin bag. I gave my hob a quick wipe down for traces of blood, carbon, and cooked heroin, and then went outside to join the crowd and act as innocent as everybody else.

 Outside I greeted my neighbour who was now standing a good way down from his door right on the outside edge of this side of the small crowd. He was visibly excited with wide night eyes. Over in the entrance of the building there was a lot of commotion and activity – police and a number of residents. My neighbour told me that the police had just taken a boy away, and that some time before that the paramedics had entered with a stretcher. I asked some questions but they didn't register. My neighbour was too preoccupied with what was happening inside the building. His worried and dramatic behaviour infected me. I stood peering anxiously over towards the entrance, which was now unofficially a no-go zone.

 “Did the fight upstairs wake you too?” my neighbour suddenly asked.
“Yes;” I said, “I thought my ceiling was gonna come down!”
“Do you know why they were fighting? Over what?”
“God knows,” I said, “I think they were drunk.” He gave a bored, tragic look, like alcohol and domestic violence was a given, even in France. When I mentioned just how long the fightc had raged on for he seemed surprised. Like me he had heard the fighting but unlike me had drowned it out with a set of headphones, only to wake hours later with his R&B then replaced by police radios and oscillating lights. I stood with him for a moment and then worked my way around the crowd to where I had a proper view into the foyer of the building.

 Inside the building the police were talking to two girls. One girl, maybe nineteen with distressed mousy hair, was squatted down under a payphone on the wall, crying, with a blanket pulled around her shoulders. The second girl, around the same age, was also visibly upset. She stood over the first girl and every now and again would wipe away her tears with the backs of her thumbs. Around the foyer of the building there were similar scenes with other neighbours, but they seemed more shocked than upset and even while being questioned kept looking over at the two girls and the policemen near the phonebooth. From what I could pick up the two girls had been in the room next door to the fighting couple and had called the police. I think they had also entered the room where the fight had been, but that wasn't entirely clear. After taking in all there was to see in the lobby I made my way back around and reported it to my neighbour. He in turn told me that he'd spoken to a friend up on the second floor and apparently the girl who'd been involved in the domestic was quite badly beaten and shocked but it didn't seem any more serious than that. He spoke of the amount of time the paramedics had been upstairs, and said if it was serious they'd have been out and gone a long time ago. So as not to complicate things I agreed. I hung around for another quarter of an hour, and with nothing moving, and the cold starting to bite, I called time and returned indoors.

 Inside, out of the cold, I lit a cigarette and hung around in the dark once more spying out the gap in the door. For some time nothing happened and then the police were pushing what was left of the crowd back and making space for something. My neighbour, still outside, was now speaking on his phone, relating to someone what was happening. A paramedic left the building and backed the ambulance right up to the doorway of the building. With the view blocked, I left my apartment once more and joined the hardcore gore seekers hoping for a nightmare or two.

I could tell by the attitudes of the police towards us that no good news was going to go into the back of the ambulance which we were rallied around. They treated us with a kind of contempt, like we were criminals, trespassing in on something that should be given space and some kind of private dignity. I suppose most of us were there only for the drama, I was, but equally, many of those with guns and badges had only taken the job for the promise of such excitement, and more: to be the good side of the police line... even closer to the gory, bloody details. Neither of us had to be there, and even if we did, we didn't have to look. I eyed one of the policemen, a tall, athletic thing in black with a little paper-boat cap on his head. He looked like some militant Mcdonalds' employee. He stood there with all the indifference of duty in his posture. Now that WAS cold; my heart was racing.

 To the back of the foyer the lift door opened. We all jerked to get a look but it was only a single paramedic and nothing more. He rushed over towards a door leading to the stairwell. The door opened and he helped manoeuvre a stretcher through the narrow space and into the lobby. On the stretcher was a body. The night hushed and drama became a mighty sad vision on four wheels, the sound of squeaking metal and solemn paramedics going about their work.

I couldn't see too well as the police were doing their best to block the view, and anyone idiot enough to try and force through was liable to be arrested. But I saw enough: a small body, supine, covered neatly with a white sheet, the sad and unnerving contours of the body beneath letting me know how slight the young girl was and bringing home to me that I had stood below and done nothing as she'd been systematically beaten lifeless. Death was in those elegant, covered shapes... something much more horrific than blood and guts, as it showed not the horror but only the consequence. There was no time to notice anything else. As quickly as the stretcher had appeared it was just as quickly gone, and then one paramedic rushed around to the drivers side of the ambulance as the other two remained in the back. The ambulance moved away and soon all there was to see were the other people on the other side of the crowd, all silently trying to process what they'd seen. The night suddenly seemed weird, like it really was the middle of the night. I left the crowd for the final time and walked the fifty yards back to my door. On the way I passed my neighbour. I looked at him. He looked at me. Without saying a word we both lowered our eyes to the ground, and then I was home.

- - -
 The crowd is gone now but the police are still here and more have arrived since. I suppose that there will be a lot of work for some people through this and the dark nights to come, and I know a family will be woken up to tragic news and one young boy will not see freedom for a very long time. It's hard to take in and make sense of such an event when it happens, and although by tomorrow the world outside will carry on as usual, in here, something has changed and I'm sure this place can never be the same again.

 It's now almost 5am. The morning is still dark and no hint of light will reach here until seven. I turn my light out and retire to my bed. It's dark outside, but not as dark as it should be. It's quiet outside, but not as quiet as it should be. Once again the world has been broken and I go to sleep to faded screams. Through the gap in my door I can see the blue light of a police car. It's hypnotic and sad, and soon in this grim night I shall find my peace.

Thanks for bearing with me Everyone...  Shane. X

3000 Days in The Lost

.
It's been years now; so many years. If I think of just how many and what I've missed I'll become sadder than the word was ever meant to mean. I miss my home, my city – the dust of where I'm from.

I never knew London was so much a part of me until I became estranged from her. Up until then I mostly only ever cursed the city. I saw a rottenness within her of which I wanted no part. Only once in 30years did she ever really seem beautiful, and that didn't last long before the river turned back to the brown sludge of before and the streets and parks reclaimed their former hopelessness only then with an added air of cruelty. Though how things change through longing. How you can miss even the most terrible lover if they are suddenly no longer there; how you can see only the beauty then, when the world revolves ugly with their loss. Now, I'm exiled from my great prison, outside trying to sneak a peek back in via films, news reports and You Tube clips. I'm becoming crazy with it. Not insane crazy; rather profoundly sad nostalgic crazy. My heart is turning black, like a flower rooted in the wrong soil, I'm rotting from the inside out.

It started innocently enough, looking at Google maps and visiting the areas where I used to live and had grown up. I'd take virtual walks around, zoom into certain windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of someone I knew or a familiar ornament I had once touched. I enjoyed those virtual strolls, but they left me desperate and profoundly miserable. Finally I had to stop. It was too hard visiting those places, being almost able to suck in the diesel fumes and yet aware that not even ten metres from my door was the modern, driverless, Lyon metro system, and then thousands of miles of alien and foreign land. I could walk for months, years, and still never get to the place I needed to be. That's when I started to create something of a fantasy world within my apartment – setting up an atmosphere designed to fool myself into believing I was back home.

Mostly I do this with audio and visual tricks. I'll go online and download an entire day of British television programmes, loosely following the daily schedule. I'll set them up on an automatic playlist and run them through my TV. Anything laying around the apartment obviously French I arrange out of sight. The round two-pinned electrical plugs and sockets are an instant giveaway and so I take great care to cover them. Cigarettes are removed from the packet and left loose in the ashtray. On my bed I'll litter about a selection of old, ash filled books – always the ones which travelled with me from London and have the Pound sign on the back. With the scene all set I'll swallow a triple dose of methadone and lay myself down. Sleep is crucial. Nothing works without sleep. And it need not be long. London is a place you have to wake up to. And it's on waking, to Kilroy Silk's morning call to prayer, that the illusion really begins, and for a moment I feel that it's only six inches of brick wall which separates me from home.

Sedated, subdued, something, I'll lay on my bed and let the morning and afternoon move across the sky, distant sounds filtering in like those dull and unremarkable afternoons of the past. I'll smoke, get a coffee, and lay back down leafing through yesterday’s paper, circling TV programs to watch -- which is just about as surreal as it gets and probably as far away from sanity as I've ever been at any stage in my life. Sometimes I'll pause inbetween what I'm doing to watch a piece of the crap on the box: watch some fat guy break down and admit he's addicted to whores, or learn that cane toads in Australia are regarded as amphibious rats and some farmers blow their bellies out with shotguns. Once again the hours of my day are defined by the familiar jingles of TV programmes, buzzers going off, and comfortable voices drifting around the room and telling me to tune back in tomorrow. And I'd love to; and I will; and I'd really fucking love to.

In the evening, between Cash in the Attic and Eastenders, I phone mum. As we speak I imagine I'm just the other side of town.

“Is that the TV playing in the background?” she'll always ask.

“Yeah,” I'll reply, though I don't tell her that the news she can hear is from 1998 and Frank Sinatra has just died. For the remainder of the evening I'll lounge around, France blocked out in every direction, conjuring up images of what it must be like outside in my imaginary London. I think of the dusk and how the evenings fall with a distant tincture of tragedy this time of year; of how the street lights must just be flickering on and how the last of the days news is being scavenged from the vendors outside the stations or picked like strips of flesh from the upturned milk crates on the newsagents' floors. I imagine lit up buses with rain speckled windows, pulling out of their stops and rejoining the evening traffic, smoke drifting out the back vents as they crawl slowly into nowhere. I toy with the idea of hooding up and going out – maybe to score, or running down to the chippy to pick up a Jamaican Pattie and a Galaxy Caramel. I imagine the grime of High Street, the pavement a slippery mush of dead leaves, sodden cardboard and tramped rotten fruit. I'll let my disembodied consciousness, my Minds-Eye-Googlemap-Street-View, wander down dark back-streets that once led home. It's eerily quiet. Life is confined behind brick walls and Chubb-locked doors. The only hint of the problems housed inside is the occasional hallway light and a glimpse of the top few stairs. The church is an ominous dark projection parked on the corner; I hurry by. I can see everything. As I lay in bed alone, 560 miles from home, not a soul for a friend, not a number to phone, my head a time capsule full of my past. – I close my eyes and imagine it all.

I want to go home. I miss home. I'm sick from longing. Not always but it's always there. The days television schedule has run through and I'm sane and back in France. I don't want to die here. I want to die in the place that killed me. I want my history. The whole disgusting beautiful ugly abused and rotten lot of it. I want the London rain. I want the summer evening walks along the mansions by the river. I want my memories. I want my old invisible footsteps. I want to revisit the places where mum tried to kill herself or where we found her shacked up and bruised with her latest no-good fuck. I want to pass the registry office where I got married. I want to pass my fathers old house and pretend he's still inside mulling over past hustles and planning new ones. I want to read the local papers. England: I WANT YOUR JUNK MAIL! I want to know what deals the pizza place is offering. I want to have the numbers of all the local mini-cabs firms in a tin box by the telephone. I want to understand every word and be involved in social activity again, even if it's only being the local junkie. In France I'm not even that. Here I'm just a silent shape; a blank canvass of human form that comes and goes and sometimes buys a kebab and checks the mail. I am unexpressed. No one knows me. Here I have to offer away all my cigarettes to express something that would normally be free in words. I must hug and kiss tramps to show my politics. I have to activate 'fake call' on my phone, and stand talking to a dead line for five minutes so as people can see my natural body movements and expressions. Really, it's the only way. “No, Georges Bataille wrote that,” I'll say. “Yes, GEORGE BATAILLE!” And now they know I enjoy literature, because I cannot tell them in another way. And clothes, clothes suddenly become important. TOO important. They help to speak my words, a wealth of words no-one would ever listen to anyway, but hears never-the-less – hears and forms an intuitive picture of who you are. I have to find other ways to be discovered here, desperate ways to bring myself out of The Lost. France, listen to me: I'M SAD AND I'M DOWN AND I'M LONELY... NOT EVEN THE DOGS UNDERSTAND ME! Your cafés are killing me, and it's not the passive smoke (that's been banned!) I can't even kill myself comfortably in public any more. You're doing your best to drive me out, and I WANT to go, I NEED to go, but I CAN'T go. France, I am on my knees...

And that's how it goes. Some days are not as bad as others and some weeks pass by more sedated than the last. Apart from maybe the first few days of summer where light tranquil winds waft the smell of the river and life over town, there is no beauty here. It's all cafés and bars and cigarettes, square ordinary people with 20/20 vision wearing glasses and lounging around with intellectual haircuts. These days of love and life are nothing more than a cinematic fantasy. Even the guy with the harmonica is a fraud, and the scandalous news is he's not even French but Romanian!. The Bohemians are bulimic... vomiting up their excess culture just to 'get it out'. Bulimia in Bohemia – a sophisticated Hollywood or a depressed heroin ravaged Bollywood, I don't know. Oh France! Oh France! Shoot me in the head and Vive La France... Just send my body home.

La Fin.

Bored... ... ...

.
I mean: I'm bored. Like picking at the wall bored. Or laying on my bed just staring up at the ceiling bored. Constantly thinking of calling my dealer bored, while in my head going: No, no, I can't! Yet knowing that yes, yes, I will. I look at the TV – nothing interesting there. I think about writing – that leaves me blank. I stare with contempt  at my bookshelf – now I'm  depressed as well. I let all my muscles relax and slump back down,  making huffing sounds and calculating how I can make not enough money go even further. It's impossible. “No, no, I can't!” I tell myself again... Unless I walk to work every other day, smoke only a third of what I usually do, and live of pasta and butter. Then I could. For a moment my boredom had left. My unrealisable planning and conniving had kept it at bay. But now it's back, and so is the ceiling and it's EXACTLY the same as before. I light a cigarette and smoke it laying on my back letting the ash drop from its tip and crumble all over me. I hope I burn myself. I hope I set myself on fire. How I feel right now I'd just lay here, stare at the 60 watt lightbulb as I burst into flames. Ha! That'd be perfect. I could blame someone for that. The one thing I musn't do is move, get up and dial that number. That number that this is all about, that the thought of calling is drilling down into my head, trying desperately to find some brain matter to connect with and overpower my helpless and unwilling body. I hope it does. God, please let it do so! But NO! That number I will end up dialling I must not! And I must get this stupid idea of a pasta diet out my head because it's returned, and each time it seems a little less impossible and a little more manageable.

In the space of the last paragraph and these words I have been dressed and stripped twice. Both times it was the same. I jumped up and said “That's it, I'm going to phone, fuck it!” As soon as I was dressed I kicked off my shoes again, wandered around the room, rested my held on the cold glass of the window pane, then went and slumped back down on the bed. I closed my eyes and thought of the brittle winter sun.

The killer is this fucking boredom. A kind of cancerous restlessness that has invaded every cell of my body. I am not thinking of anything. I'm certainly not thinking about unbuttoning my jeans and taking my cock out. That would be madness. Yet here I am, trousers off, flapping my dick about, doing strange things to it, trying to sustain a hard on while looking at the ceiling which isn't a turn on at all. My cock gets a little hard, but hope doesn't stay too long around here and just as quickly it's limp again. That's due to my wandering mind. I leave it be, out for an airing, as bored as me. Instead I pick more paint off the wall and lay suffering in the dull afternoon, sounds a humdrum in the distance.

I'm staring at my phone. I shouldn't but I am. In my mind I am going through all the angles again, trying to dredge up some deciding factor either way. Only that must be a joke, as this moment was decided eleven years ago, as the Millennium night exploded to my imploding heart and I lay in the dark sobbing to the fireworks and the bright colours in the sky. It was all decided then – even before... way before. I cry sad tears. It doesn't seem right. I let them roll. I should definitely call now. I need to call. But I musn't call. I won't call. The tears have dried, idiot! Don't be such a wuss! We can all think of sad things, especially on afternoons like this; especially when we're bored. Get up and fix the apartment, find a film – like last weekend. Enjoy  it. Think of writing – live and exist of this day – let the boredom make boring literature. Oh I WILL!!! Thank God I'm alive! I jump up, back into my trousers, but it's hopeless. Even pulling the leg on I almost can't be arsed. I don't bother to button them up. What's the use? I'm not going anywhere. Only I am. I know it. You know it. The whole goddamn world knows it. That phone which is laying near my head, which I intermittently pick up and bite and suck and play with in my mouth, which I dial my dealer with then kill the call before it rings, we all know will very soon be used to order smack. That's how this piece of writing will end. Every junkie knows it, every reader knows it... even the fucking keyboard knows it. This is a fated piece of text, and not even the unpredictability of human behaviour can stop it. So why try?

Bored! God I'm bored. The bed feels uncomfortable, like all my muscles ache. How long have I been laying here anyway? Have I been crying? I feel like I've been crying. Or concentrating. It's hard to tell. I think I have a cold. There's only one way to fix that. My stomach hurts. I want to sleep. I Can't sleep. I'm so sure  I can't I haven't even tried. I'm bored with trying to sleep. I need for it to just happen. I can make it 'just' happen. But no, no I can't. I musn't. But fuck, oh fuck, I know I will... we all know that. Oh my God, what is this energy that is suddenly in my body? What the hell am I writing? What the hell am I doing?

My jeans are being tugged up, I'm jumping into a nice fit. Jumping so I can't think. Shirt on, tucked in, scrunched up. This is it... I know from experience this is it! Fuck you bare naked walls! Fuck you unread boring books by shit authors! Fuck you 7 million films none of which interest me! Money, money money... Where's the money? Don't think about it! You've thought about it and decided this. It's OK... it works out. Shoes. Where are my shoes? There's one, where's the other? Phone Sonia first! If she says an hour find the shoe while time's passing. Cigarette. I need a cigarette, just in case she doesn't answer straight away and this doesn't end here. Fuck, it's ringing! Was it even me who dialled? Yes!!!! That's her voice and there's mine. I can hear it like I'm not in my body, putting an order through for a very bad end to the month. Fifteen? Fuck, I'll be there in ten. I'm coming. Shoe, where's my other shoe? Jacket??? Fuck, where's my hat? Money? Phone? Ah, my shoe! Brilliant. Heel trodden down, no time to fit in properly now. Gotta run. Worry about shoe and comfort later. I'm rattling my keys... I'm turning off the light.. the door is open and the dull afternoon opens up to a blast which is me hitting life. I'm not bored now, oh I'm not! I kiss the wall, turn off the light, close the door, don't bother locking it. I'm on my way, I'm going... Fuck, I'm already gone, running, unbored as hell, chasing life, chasing smoke, chasing dreams, chasing ghosts, alone, totally alone, and I'll see you all sometime soon or maybe in no time at all....


X

The Look

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“Did you get it?” I'd ask “Did you get The Look?”
“Nah, don't think so,” she'd say. “She was normal. Just miserable”
“Hm... Ok. Try the next one. If it's the man with the swept over hair you'll definitely get it from him.”
“Won't you come in with me?” she'd say.
“No, he knows me. He won't give The Look if I'm there. You never get it when they know you. When they know you you get something else, something like the shutters coming down and a pump action shotgun being  cocked.... You'll learn about that later. For The Look, that works on an air of complete and utter surprise. You'll have to go in alone for that.”

Anne came out the pharmacy shaking her head in vain. I gave her a curious look. “And you was served by the moron with the pigeon wing of hair?”
She nodded. “He served me like anyone else. I'm starting to wonder if The Look even exists,” she said “or if it's maybe some kind of a problem with me?”
“Oh it exists!” I told her, “but it's a subtle thing, like when US Presidents shapeshift on Youtube – you have to be receptive of it. We'll hit the next one together. You just stand by and watch.”

The next pharmacy was a little affair in a gentrified part of town. It was wedged in nicely between a family owned bakers and an organic greengrocers which sold mostly cherries and pumpkins. I peered in through the pharmacy window, around the cardboard cut-out display of a beaming family all off their heads on garlic pills. Behind the counter was a young pharmacist, natural blond hair, PH neutral skin and a neck which looked like it would smell of peppermint drops. I turned to Anne and nodded. “Perfect,” I said.Then: “How do I look?”
“Great,” said Anne, fixing my shirt collar and stroking my jumper down flat and respectable. She straightened herself, ditched her cigarette, and followed me in, the two of us looking like liberal bank workers or people with money pretending we had none. When the young girl heard us talking in English she glanced up and sang a big friendly “Bonjour!”

“BONJOUR!” we both replied, looking around and pointing like we were in a church or something.

Standing at the counter I looked into the pharmacist's polished enamel teeth, her young elastic lips, and then her clear helpful eyes as she positioned herself in preparation to concentrate on some heavily accented french.
“Erhm, I'd like some 1 mil syringes, please?” I asked, candidly. I watched as her smile disintegrated, furrowed like a brow and struggled to stay curved the right side of Customer Service joy. Her eyes widened as if she was trying to breathe through them.
“Pardon? What???” she asked, having heard perfectly  but taken aback.
“Some 1ml syringes,” I repeated “I'd like five Steri-Boxes.”
“Five???”
“Yes, FIVE... I've got loads of drugs!” I quipped, milking it and standing basking in my own idiotic cleverness.
I paid with a note. The pharmacist pushed the boxes of needles my way and dumped the change down in a saucer on the counter so as to avoid the slightest risk of accidentally touching my hand. Then without uttering the customary “Bonne Journée!” she disappeared out back – probably to have a full strip-down disinfectant scrub.

“There, did you see it! Did you see IT!!!” I cried excitedly to Anne, as we left the shop. “Now That was The Look! A good one too. Did you see it?”

Anne looked at me like I was losing my mind. She said she hadn't seen a thing, that the girl had served me as normal, had been indifferent all the while, and then went about her business. “Whaaat???” I asked in disbelief. “She gave me The Look... she gave us both The Look! God, are you seriously saying you didn't see it?.”
Anne shook a no from her head. I put the needles in my bag and thought, “maybe she's right... maybe there is something wrong with her.”

-  -  -

It took a while, almost a year, but finally Anne did come to recognize and bask in the magical properties of The Look. She saw it just as clearly as I – sometimes even seeing it when I had not – straight-laced pharmacists shocked into a state of confused incompetence, the human animal within them struck dumb, on pause, the mouth slung open and the brain struggling to control the eyes whenever we said the word “syringes”. Not that the word in itself was so shocking, it was more trying to marry the word with the people stood in front of them: me in classic pin-stripe shirt and jumper, and Anne in smart professional town wear, both well groomed and speaking in the Queen's own tongue.

Getting The Look became a game to us, something we'd do to jolly up our day or give it a little taste of adventure. On a whim we'd whip into a chemists and ask for needles, both of us watching eagerly to see whether or not we'd receive The Look. It was something akin to buying a scratch card or chucking a dime in a one-armed bandit, that mystical thing which could dictate if we'd have a lucky day or not:

Get The Look = winning ticket/good day.
Not getting The Look = losing ticket/average to lousy day.

Some weekends we'd even rise early, dress in our best clothes and travel around the city trying to procure The Look. Thinking back now I remember holding hands and running and laughing, and somewhere the sky was blue,  life was in the air and we sucked it down without the slightest fuss.

The problem was that whenever we were canvassing The Look it mostly always took place during a very specific period of our lives. It would be that period where we'd be having a prolonged break from heroin, after having paid off our debts, having brought a new wardrobe of clothes, after having caught up with all the latest books, films and music, then suddenly having nothing much to do or buy – money building up in the bank, and at home a stock of clean needles gradually building up in the bedroom. It always started with the needles and then progressively other things would creep in: listening to the Heartbreakers; watching heroin DVDs and punk documentaries; looking at our old junk photos; reminiscing about scoring and the characters we'd met. Some nights we would get teary eyed with happiness and  nostalgia, and even the couple of bouts of sickness we had shared together we built up into a tremendous feat, laughing and grimacing at how torturous those days were. That's how it always started. Then the hats and scarves would come out, the loose round tops, exposed necks and love bites, cuts,  perfume that smelled of centuries old musk. We'd  triple our methadone doses and wander around the city. We'd, sit outside cafés, visit chemists, go home, chuck the needles with the others and spend the evening watching more of the same heroin films. From that point on it was never long before Anne would arrive home one day and I'd say: “I've got a surprise!”
She would know what it would be; any other surprise would have been a huge disappointment.

“Where is it?" she'd ask.
“In the kitchen,” I'd tell.
“Is it any good?” she'd shout through, sitting down at a syringe and spoon laid table.
“Oh, it's not bad,” I'd say, my mind drifting away behind world heavy eyelids.
“Oh yeah, it's good!” she'd say. “Fuck, it's so good.”

Coming out of reverse we'd start in first gear: heroin once or twice a week. By the end of the month we'd be raising an hour earlier each morning so as to get a decent fix before leaving for work. Slowly our stock of needles would whittle away, our cash too, and six months later we'd be scraping around for a quid to buy new works. At that point needles were never bought for fun but out of pure necessity. The Look could go fuck itself – and anyway, it was quite obvious from the burnholes in our clothes and the dried blood in our fingernails just as to what ends we were doing in the chemists.

It would have been around that time when we'd begin to postpone our rent, juggle the electricity and water bills, stall paying just about anything we could, post off hard luck stories telling of deceased relatives and asking for special permission to pay in instalments, sell our DVDs, take loans out from the bank, and invent surprise costs so as we could wheedle money out of Anne's parents. When you're at that stage in the game you visit the ATM machine with a Bible and your fingers crossed, 'insufficient funds' about the best result you're likely to get. And because of all the bad cheques we'd been cashing (saving the real money for smack) it was never too long before our bank cards could no longer take the strain and sought refuge inside the cash machine. As mine had a lower overdraw limit than Anne's it'd always be the first one to go, signalling the moment to begin battening down the hatches and preparing ourselves for the inevitable H bomb which would follow. We'd start regulating our methadone intake, rationing out what we had and swallowing a dose every three days so as when Anne's card would be finally recalled we wouldn't be left completely fucked. For a while we'd struggle on like that: using methadone, but always thinking of heroin and scoring whenever we could.

Then one day I'd say: “I need new shirts... I've no fucking shirts!”
And Anne would say: “I need shoes! I can't go to work in these... the fucking heel's hanging off!”
And I'd say: “The electricity’s gonna get CUT OFF! Maybe we should take care of that first?”

For a month we'd loaf around the apartment depressed and thinking of heroin. We'd score obly very occasionally and not really enjoy it when we did. Then when we were paid we'd find an extra ounce of resolve, knock back a double dose of methadone and instead of going out to score we'd go out shopping.  We'd buy shirts, shoes, belts, socks, scarves, skirts, CD's, DVD's, new music, magazines. We'd reload, reculturalize, and rebuild relations with our landlord, our bank manager, the in-laws, and the outlaws. We'd take all the used needles to the exchange dump and leave without taking any freebies. Soon we'd be back in the cafés, back doing weekly shopping, in and out of changing rooms, and arriving home with all manner of gadgets and accessories for the apartment. And then one day, on a whim, walking around in our new clothes with bags from Zara, H&M and Mango, I'd duck into a pharmacy and return smiling.
“Did you get it?” She'd ask. “Did you get The Look?”
And I'd say: “Yeah, I got it! Dressed like this how could I not!”
And she'd say: “It's not fair! I want The Look... I want The Look too.”
And I'd look at her, with eyes when love was new, and I'd say: “Go get it, My Love... Go knock 'em dead!” And she'd know, we'd both know, that this was life and it was about to start again...

My Thoughts & Wishes to All, Shane. X

Dedicated to Anne Spieswinkel

So Long Johnny

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Now...
            Johnny was the kind of guy who'd get you in a headlock then playfully twist and grind his knuckles deep down into the top of your head so that it hurt like hell. Or, he'd put his palms against your ears, push in until your world went silent, then lift you six inches off the ground. At lunchtime he'd twist your arm far up behind your back and walk you around the playground like one of those machines which paint the white lines on a football pitch. And on the school coach, as you sat quietly looking out the window, he'd suddenly elbow you in the thigh, screaming “Dead Leg Time!” laughing, knowing he'd rendered you lame for five minutes. On Saturday mornings he'd knock on your door and greet you with a headbutt that'd burst your nose open. He'd invite himself in, throwing darts at your bare feet while chanting “Dance! Dance! Dance!” Out in the street a pair of strung together boxing gloves would land your way and before you'd even had chance to untie them he'd be about you, a flurry of punches busting your face up good; Johnny dancing around with his arms raised, singing “Champ! Champ! Champ!” In the school yard he'd lead you over to a group of girls, promising you a share of the spoils, then the moment you made your presence known he'd suddenly knee you in the bollocks, laughing as you went to ground. Through watery pain seared eyes you'd watch him walking off with all three girls – an ugly deformed kind of a boy, skinhead, big ears, bleached Levi jeans, brown Bomber jacket and white bouncy sports trainers. From behind you'd fantasize about clumping him around the head with a solid lump of wood, but never did dare due to an irrational fear that he'd only get crazier still. In the front yard, summer time, sitting on granite coloured bins, he'd talk about becoming blood brothers and when you agreed he'd pull his pen-knife across your upper arm and an ugly weeping mouth would open in your skin. He didn't want to be blood brothers; he just wanted a valid reason to stab you. What a boy Johnny was, and what a CV he had:

Johhny Merryfield. Born 1974, Bellshill, Scotland


1983       : Moved to London
1984-85 : Sherbrooke School (Best fighter)
1986-88 : Henry Compton School (Best lower year Fighter)
1988-89 : Elliot School (2nd best Fighter)
1990       : Expelled for pulling a knife on PE teacher.
                 Became a Chelsea Headhunter
                 Multiple petty arrests (violent conduct; vandalism, etc)
1991-93  : Hardcore Football Hooligan
1993       : Known Heavy Criminal.
1994       : Knightsbridge Crown Court - GBH. Guilty
1994-96 : Wandsworth prison
1996-98 : Crack addict
1998       : Arrested and charged with murder
1998       : Knightsbridge Crown Court – Murder – Case thrown out,
                  insufficient evidence
1998
-2002      : Multiple arrests (theft; robbery; handling stolen goods; 
                   benefit fraud, etc)
                   Heroin & Crack addict

Oh how I hated Johnny Merryfield. How relieved I was when my own family imploded and split up and we finally moved away. Over the years catching sight of him from a distance every now and again – bouncing down Edgware Road with a black eye and stitches in his cheek; leaving a bar in Chelsea with an unconscious girl strewn over his shoulder; running out of Dixons with a laptop under his arm and tattoos up his neck; looking at knives in the window of the Army Surplus store; getting on the No.11 bus with a bandaged right hand; gripping someone up by the neck and screaming on Goldhawk Road. Then fifteen years after having moved away, of hearing his antics filter through via old friends and newsaper clippings, there I am scoring heroin with him in Donnelly Court. No teeth. Face full of scars. Thin as bones. Broken nose. Walking cane. Shaking hands. Begging and crying for me to lend him two quid so as he could get a rock of white as well. Johnny Merryfield – The bully bullied by life. Scary-no-more. Lifted six inches off the ground by crack cocaine; arm twisted tight behind his back by heroin; brought to his knees, and if I'd have taken out my cock and said “Suck that, Champ! Dance! Dance!.” he would have done it. I gave Johnny five pounds and he seemed confused. It was more than he needed and I owed him nothing, Johnny scored and then quickly hobbled away. I watched him leave. He wore the same bleached denim trousers, only now dirty, out of fashion and an inch too short. His trainers were almost the same, only now a cheap unnamed market version with the back sole flapping off.
“Take care Johnny!” I called as he hobbled away. “And watch out for those Compton boys!”. Johnny didn't look back, just held a clenched hand in the air, like the old communist workers raised fist of solidarity. Not that Johnny was a communist or gave a fuck about things like solidarity, his fist was clenched because it held his rocks, I know, I was clutching mine in exactly the same way. I raised my clenched fist too. “So long, Brother,” it meant,  “I'm glad you are as you are.”  And I never saw nor heard of Johnny again.

---

A full Memoirs post will follow shortly...


Thoughts as Ever, Shane. X

A Brief History of Work

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One day I will tell you of the time I worked as the school's milkboy, delivering the fresh crates to the classrooms each morning, then in the afternoon, collecting the vile, curdled, stinking empties, for 25p a week – which is slave labour now, and was slave labour then. I'll tell you of how, after a couple of weeks, I got bored and lay on the stage, in the assembly hall, chucking the bottles across the room while laughing and banging my feet as each one exploded and shattered; how the  teachers congregated at the entrance, waiting the arrival of the school nurse, as they thought I was having an epileptic fit - when really, all I was having, was a whole lotta fun. One day I will tell you of that.

And of the time I landed a paper round with John Menzies. How I rose at 5am each morning and delivered yesterdays news, in the snap cold, pitch black mornings, with all of Central London's paedophiles in hot pursuit. I'll tell you how that comforted me, as at least then (I thought) my sister would be safe. I'll tell you all, and of why I kept my round a secret, as only poor children had to deliver papers to earn money to save up to buy their own clothes and new school uniform. One day I'll write about it: John Menzies, Pimlico, 1987, of how I pissed on the priest's Daily Telegraph, tramped it in dog shit, then posted it through the vicarage letterbox, and how the following day I was refused entry to the newsagents, and my paper round was then the burden of some other poor unfortunate's soul.

And one day I will tell you of the time I worked in the Five Star Car Wash on Shepherds Bush Green, and how we dusted and polished dashboards, shook out and hoovered floor mats, then drove the cars through the wash, hand buffing them the other side. I'll tell of how the tight-fisted owner, a big fat cigar smoking Turk who dressed in fur and gold and had a fleet of second hand Mercedes, how he'd send his  family members through the wash with a twenty pound note placed under the passenger seat to see which of his workers would pocket their good luck rather than put it in the kitty - the kitty which no one ever saw shared out. I'll tell of that. I'll tell you all.

And of how, when I was 15, I passed myself of for 18 and landed a labouring job with Kone Lifts. And how one afternoon, while having lunch with Joe and smoking thai weed on top of the elevator, I fell down the back, my spine bent to snapping point, and Joe clutching a hold of my legs to prevent me from falling 100ft down, to certain death, into the concrete pit below. I'll tell you of that, and of how, when I told my mother she completely freaked out before asking me for the next week's rent in advance: “Just in case!”

And one day I will tell you of the Video Rental Shop where I was taken on for work experience from a YTS scheme, and how I worked 12 hour shifts for not a penny of pay;  how one Friday evening I stole a copy of: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, before ringing the till open and walking out, leaving three hundred plus pounds for some lucky soul to find.

And I'll tell you of the time I spent working at Hyde Park Police Station as an apprentice electrician for Blenheim Electrics, of being treated like a piece of shit by everybody except a man called Ray; of how I hit the head bully across the kneecaps with a scaffolding pole when he tried to strip me naked as part of an initiation ritual, which would end in me being tied to the roof and laughed at for hours before being ordered down to make the tea. I'll tell of that.

And of how I worked for just about every Soho nightclub, handing out flyers while dressed up as an alien with a plastic spaceship sellotaped to my head. All that, for free entry, two drinks vouchers, and a whole lot of trouble from rival club promoters. I'll tell all about it, and off how when Ewan died (their main leafleter and my best friend) they disowned me, blamed me for his death for introducing him to heroin. After that I was no longer welcome in the clubs, and what's more, they grouped together and barred me from the funeral, said that if I attended there'd be another death! All those people Ewan hated so much, putting him in the ground, fake tears behind blacked out rock sunglasses, as now they'd have to find another great guitarist who'd be prepared to record for nothing, and hand out leaflets to boot.

One day I will tell you of it all, and of the years I worked at Vaughans Ltd, employed as the Head Baizer, cutting out and gluing green felt onto the bottoms of reproduction antique lamps; of how I wired 24 armed chandeliers and shot smack in the toilets; of how I went to war with the managing director after he illegally made three workers redundant, and how I brought the place to daily standstills until they'd had just about enough and tried to blackmail me after finding used syringes in my bag. And how, when I wouldn't surrender my position, they offered me £15,000 to accept and sign a dismissal for gross misconduct, which I did willingly , but not before trying to get the work van thrown into the deal - though on being reminded that I couldn't drive, I conceded it was a fair point and took the cheque, and a whole lot of drugs, and that was the start of the good times. One day I'll tell you all about them.

And of my next job, working for Financial Training, employed to pack boxes, yet somehow, two years later, finding myself in the manager's chair wwith a three quarter million pound annual budget - which mostly went on luxury chauffeur driven cars, heroin, and crack cocaine. And that was the start of the even better times. Until I was dismissed a year later due to “horrendous expenditure abnormalities”.  I agreed to go as long as they paid me up until the end of the month. I was leaving the country anyway. One day I'll write about that.

And of my first year in France when I faked enthusiasm and went grape picking in the countryside. How after two days I was a broken man, cursing at how inhumane the work was,  phoning my father-in-law and having him drive 300km, into the thick of the Beaujolais hills, to rescue me.

And one day I'll tell you about my 18 months with Arctic Spas, travelling an hour and a half each morning out into the middle of nowhere, then walking for 25 minutes through fields of cows and horses, to repair, modify and test top-of-the-range jacuzzis, and how one day while on a maintenance call in the Grenoble mountains, ten below zero, I slipped with a screwdriver and pushed the thing three inches down into my hand. I'll tell of how the fire brigade had to come and save me and take me to the nearest hospital, from which I fled as soon as I'd been stitched up as I was getting ill from opiate withdrawals, was more than 4hrs from home, with no methadone, no medical insurance, and no passport. I'll tell you of all that.

And about the time I worked for Envie Rhône, a 'Program of Insertion'  for social misfits, the insane, and those on pre-release from prison. I'll explain of how we fixed-up washing machines, fridge freezers, and ovens, and how the conditions in that place were like stepping back 100 years with every law and safety regulation ever fought for IGNORED. I tell of the workers, all on short 3 month contracts, blackmailed, so if they said anything their contracts would not be renewed, and then it'd be either  back to prison or the mental hospital. Then,  when I complained, having no place to be sent back to, the entire company and every social institution of the region closed ranks and tried to force me out, and when I wouldn't leave (or shut up) they contacted an old success, an ex-prison tough, and had him threaten me, to stop my action “OR ELSE!”

And one day I'll tell of the weeks I spent working in the Beaux Art Museum, how I stood there from 11am to 6pm with my hands behind my back surveying the public and giving them directions when I was lost myself. I'll tell you of how we were allowed to play phone games to pass the time, and  how I pretended I was playing Zombie Shootout or Clubroom Billiards when really I was writing, something they wouldn't have permitted, just in case I was writing about them - which of course, I was. I'll tell all about it.

And also of the time I worked in the Town Hall. Of how I was paid to follow behind the Mayor, fanning his wind to either side as he went, making sure that his councillors, riding in his slipstream, didn't die of intoxication while trying to lay a successful knife in his back before sailing on by. One day I will tell of all that, and of how  on Saturdays I had to dress up like a low class waiter and lead soon-to-be unhappy couples into the marriage room with a low sweeping bow, then walk them down the aisle - the Bride to my right; the Groom to my left - inviting them to take seat on the ornate King and Queen, wood and velvet chairs.

One day I'll tell you about all these things, only not now and not here, as time's ticking on and I'm just not paid to write.

(This post was originally posted in poem format. You can find a copy of the original posting HERE)
---
A New Memoires post will follow soon...
Thoughts & Wishes To All, Shane, X

Three Degrees of Loss

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Three pieces about loss following the death of The Man I Called "Dad."
---
#1 
Nightmares

The nightmares began the day my father died. Harrowing, torturous things which come to me as soon as my eyes find sleep and leave my body contorted and struggling to wake. Sometimes they toss me around and leave me fighting all night and at other times I manage to pull myself from their grip almost before they begin. But they do always begin, and it's been so long now that it feels like they've been plaguing me forever.

The dreams are always different and the dreams are always the same: My father, dying, stretching out for me and pleading for help. Sometimes he is in a hospital gown in a hospital bed. The bed is in a room and the room is white. It is all that exists in the universe. There are no windows, but it is dark outside. You can feel it, an infinity of black nothingness stretching out into forever. We are deep into dreamscope.

I am standing either just inside or just outside of that room. I have a profile view of my father from the left. He is on his back, slightly propped up in the bed. A sheet covers his body up to his neck. He looks smaller than I remember, weaker. He looks dead. His face is drained of all tones but grey. Over to his right is a machine. A calm green ripple runs across its screen. It's the only real colour in the room. My father opens his eyes. The skin around his cheekbones stretches a little tighter. Without moving his head he shifts his eyes across so that they are looking at me. Like that he speaks, his mouth talking to the space above his chest. He always starts by using my name. His voice is normal but quivers with fear.
“Shane, is that you? Shane???”
“I'm here Dad,” I say. He becomes agitated. Not at my presence but because someone is there and not ignoring him.
“Shane, where's the doctors? Shane, why are there no doctors? Shane, it hurts. I think this is it. I can't believe it. Two hours ago I was fine and now I'm dying. Death's here. Shane, this is it. Shane, do I look bad. Shaaane?”
By now his upper body is uncovered. His face is stained in hard and ugly ways as he tries in desperation to reach an arm out towards me. He looks like an old religious painting. His eyes are straining so far in the corners to keep fixed on me that they're almost looking back in on themselves. He starts saying my name over and over....
“Shane... Shane.... Shane. Shane, I'm dying. Can't you do anything? Can no-one do anything? Shane, it hurts. I'm hurting. Living hurts.”
I want to tell him he'll be OK but it seems useless to say that, and I don't want to admit nothing can be done because that seems even more hopeless. And so I say nothing. I stand there and I want to run. He is reaching out to me with ever more desperation. I'm not sure if he wants help or human contact. Whatever, it scares me. I want to cry and I don't want to cry. I need to cry. But I don't cry. He's never seen me cry and to see my tears now will only terrify him further. I want to tell him I love him and have always loved him and that HE is my father, but I know if I tell him that now, here, like this, it will surely kill him. And so I do and say nothing. I stand either just inside or just outside of the room, watching the strain of his reach and the strain in his eyes. And though he doesn't know it, that look he is wearing, that perverse, twisted face of desperation, is the first manifestation of death in hs body, making it  pull strange and ugly shapes. It's a real nightmare. And as my father struggles to live, I struggle to wake – we struggle together. I am somewhere between two worlds and for once I want the waking world.

In another dream my father appears out of a smoky distance. He's limping and in pain and looks like he's come home from a long hard war. His head is bandaged and there is blood, red on white, as he limps out of the dust of time. He's not old but more as I remember him as a child, as my father, invincible, The Man with Tattooed Hands, a gold tooth, and a square and solid jaw. There are tubes up his nose, black sensors on his body and a drip in the tender region of his wrist. He limps on in pain and he tells me it hurts and that I'm good with needles and could I remove the drip. He is deteriorating by the second and his lips have a faint blue/grey tint. He looks awful, kinda braindead, but he isn't – he's just scared. His eyes and cheeks are sucked in. It's like his body is eating him up. He's heaving and spluttering and a constant groaning is rising up from his chest. “Yesterday you was a boy and I was your age,” he moans. “Yesterday.” He says other stuff. I can't make it out but I know it's sad. He groans in pain but never stops to allow me to help him. He staggers right on past like he can't stop even if he wanted to. To stop is to die and to carry on is to die too – just a longer way about it. I don't fight his wishes, there's nothing I can do. He's not dying in a way which can be helped, and it's not his physical pain which is my nightmare. I watch him walk on. Trailing behind him are tubes, a leaking drip bag and wires torn from a machine. He is heading towards a shed, a shed which is an airing cupboard, the same airing cupboard that my mother's cat crawled into to die.

There are other dreams, a thousand different variations of the same theme. And in all these dreams, no matter how bad or ill my father looks, the worst thing is that he's always fully conscious of his condition. He is living through his death, aware that it is in him and taking a hold. That what only yesterday was an abstract thought is now here, conquering him. But my father is never conquered in the dreams - he never dies, just suffers on. And that is the real, real nightmare.

Each night, at the peak of my father's pain, my eyes shoot open and I wake exhausted sat up boltright in the  bed. And in the dark of the night, with the aura of the dream still fresh, I light a cigarette and lay back down, blowing out smoke as warm tears run free and curl up behind my ears. And some nights I let out a squeak of pain and sob “Dad... Dad”, but mostly I don't. I just lay there in the dark, on my back, in silence, not wanting to sleep any more. So agitated I'm awake and up, writing or mopping the tiles or doing the dishes or arranging my bookshelf. When the sun comes up I'll bed down, I say, it's much more peaceful that way, and cooler. I tell myself it's the summer and that the heat is unbearable and that when winter comes I'll sleep much better and at normal hours. And I will. I believe that. It's just been a long hot summer.
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#2 
60 Rosaline Road, Fulham, London, SW6

The house doesn't look the same any more. The door's been painted, the crumbling front wall fixed, the missing windows replaced and the weeds from the front yard pulled up by the roots. But the house is still there, and no matter what repairs it has taken it still faces the east, still takes the best part of the sun on summer days, and no doubt the back rooms are still dark and suffer from damp. I think often of that place. It's a good memory, even the bad times. We were all there, all young, all alive, and it was home, as tragic as it was. But a new family lives there now, maybe a happier family – I don't know.

When my father died early on this year he was no longer living in the old house. He'd moved out years earlier after my best friend had succumbed to a slow and suffocating death up in one of the top rooms. He said he couldn't bare living there after that, that death seemed to have a permanent presence in the place and was always on the prowl. He said he could feel it in the rooms at night, creeping in on him as he sat watching TV alone. By the end he'd moved everything down into the small front room that looked out onto the street, living there without visiting the other rooms in the house. Then he moved out, into a property opposite.

In a way, my father living across the road was even better. While visiting him I could then look out his window and stare over at the old ghost and reminisce of all the comings and goings, the tragedies, the fights and all the broken people and lives which had staggered to and from it over the years. Somehow, like that, it took on an even greater significance in my life. I suppose because I could no longer enter inside that it felt more like an encased chapter which could no longer be meddled with, or meddle with me. From my father's new place I could watch the old house and fantasize about getting back inside, taking a walk through the rooms and seeing how the new family had arranged them and if they'd discovered the loose floorboards under which I'd hid many young secrets. And while my father was still alive it remained like that, a presence across the road and something which housed an era of memories which seemed to grow dearer each year.

But my father is dead now and the council has taken back the property he died in. The name Levene has no residence or business on that road any more. To see the old house now I must specifically go there for that reason, and even then I could only pass by as slow as I can to try and savour the moment and remember how things happened and how we all used to be. If I go there now I'll be a wanderer; at home and with no place to go. When my father vacated his space something else went with him, but it's not quite clear what. That's when I started searching

60, Rosaline Road, Fulham, London, SW6. That's what I'd type into Google Maps. The address. I'd zoom right in and visit the street, walk down to the house and turn into the yard. It felt real. Other times I'd zoom in 400% on the house and look through the windows, examine the brickwork and guttering, searching for some trace of our old existence there – a name scrawled somewhere or a piece of brick I remembered knocking out. After I'd make my way up the street and think of how we'd play football out in the road all summer long and how we'd peddle our bikes to freedom around those streets. I'd go down to the opposite end of the road, the place where Josh's garage used to be, and imagine how my father used to look coming around the corner after losing all his money in the betting shop and with only twenty paces left to figure out how he'd raise money to feed us that night. Other times I'd follow the route I used to take to school and observe all the things that have changed just as much as all the things which have stayed the same. It seems like a different time now. Just invisible footprints and dead skin in a street I still think of as mine. And the weird thing is, after all that happened, after all the blood and years of life that was spilled in that house, if it came on the market tomorrow, and if I had the money, I'd buy it. I'd prise open that encased chapter and risk more tragedy. I'd move in, alone or with a lover or a dog, amongst all the old ghosts, visiting the little corners of the house where mighty things had once happened.

Sometimes, just for tears, I wish I could go back.
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#3 
The Snail Bank

I think it's only normal. After the passing of my father I've been preoccupied with death: His, my own, and everything from bugs to plant life. Somehow death and dying seems more real, and at the same time, more mystical than before.

I pull a petal off a flower and look at it. “That's death right there,” I think. “It's in my hand... gone for all eternity.” At the bushes, across from the bench where I sometimes sit and smoke and read, I look at the symmetry of the leaves and try to work out what birth and life and family and death really is. I try to understand why the death and rebirth of leaves and flowers seem so natural and acceptable, and yet the same birth, growth and death in humans seems tragic and flawed. At home I stare at the dead flies and moths on the window sill and it seems impossible to believe that they can never be re-animated. That even given infinite time these things will never again Be. A fly – It's hardly made of anything. Why can't such a little thing be fixed? It's hard to understand. There is no understanding. One moment things have a conscious existence the size of their known universe, and the next, the lights are out are we exist no more.

From my bed, as I write, there is a bug making its way nimbly across the floor. It's a small black rain beetle. They get in here all the time, crawling in from out the cold and wet of the plant beds just outside. My instinct is to jump up and squash it flat. But I've given up killing bugs, instead I drive them into a glass and then rattle them to freedom out the window. The other night I even went outside and picked up all the snails which had slithered out after the evening rain. I carefully unstuck them from the concrete and moved them out of harms way so as they didn't get crushed by the evening crowds. Why? I don't fully understand, but I know it's because my father's dead.

- - -

Thoughts and Wishes to All, Shane. X