Thursday, 27 October 2011
Alive and Level
Well, I'm still here, I keep taking the tablets and all's good. And it's not like I've not had my chemically maintained equilibrium quite comprehensively jostled over the last few months. I had a bout of quite sickeningly horrendous back pain which dragged on for weeks and laughed in the face of analgesia and dragged my average sleep per night down to a few meagre, miserable minutes. In the past that would have been more than enough to precipitate at best a slump into depression, at worst the nightmare oscillations between unfounded, frantic optimism and the bleakest despair imaginable that have blighted my life for the last couple of decades. Then my stepdad died of lung cancer and I came down with Bell's Palsy the same week. So, a tricky time which I don't think I could have navigated without Quetiapine steadying my hand on the rudder. And here I am. Starting to feel creative again, working on some music and writing. Not that many people are wasting their time visiting my humble little blog, but I'm going to try and increase the frequencies of my jottings here. Oh yeah - over the last month I went to see VNV Nation in Southampton and New Model Army in Bridport and they both fucking ROCKED.
Sunday, 7 August 2011
alive and level
still here...still level, which is why I've not felt inclined to write anything AT ALL for months...but I will try...
Monday, 2 May 2011
Out of the fire back into the frying pan
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Bi Winning
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Today Was A Good Day
Goddamn it all. This was what I wrote yesterday: "Another one of those days, sitting on a cliff, writing not because I've got anything to say but because I've got nothing else to do. Exiled from the family home, where apparently the mere fact of my existence is upsetting everyone, measuring wasted time in cigarettes and scribbled lines. The sun has brought the humans out again. They're everywhere, milling about, “having fun”, futile as fungi, pointless as plankton. I wasn't going to bother doing anymore writing – doing any more anything really – the meaningless nature of all endeavour has kind of broadsided me and left me stranded on a rubbish-strewn reef of ennui. I spent most of yesterday home alone – the family had decided I wasn't allowed to accompany them on a day out – listening to two songs over and over again, one by Warren Zevon, one by Vic Chessnut. I don't have any time any more for anything by anyone still alive. They've got nothing to tell me anymore. Suicide has seemed like a more and more attractive prospect over the last few days. I no longer believe I'm bipolar or that my medication is doing anything other than sedating me and adding to this sensation of detachment – turning me into, to use a brilliant expression I stumbled across on the Icarus Project website, “a muttering turnip.” I don't believe I have anything that can be treated. I'm just scum. I don't FIT IN anywhere, never will. Medication won't change that – jumping off a cliff will.” So, I wrote that then I nodded off in the sunlight with the sea beneath me, woke up, trudged home. I could feel myself closing down. I had no motivation whatsoever, everything did indeed seem just as pointless as plankton (not to denigrate the little chaps and their vital role at the bottom of the food chain – it just seems that they're not the most motivated of God's creatures, don't really exhibit a great deal of ambition, just sort of mill around being eaten). Thoughts of suicide washed over me in cold, heavy waves. Any anger or sense of injustice I may have had earlier in the day had gone – I just felt like unconditional surrender. I'd given up. I was without will or hope - nothing mattered. It was a complete emotional flatline. I sat around til about 10pm, growing ever more despairing. I posted a message on the Rethink forums that said "Just wondering if anyone else has found themselves in a similar situation... started Quetiapine a month ago - was in a VERY mixed state, so much so that it didn't really feel like depression, just felt like I was crazy. Although filled with self-loathing and misery I was very creative, full of energy, not needing to eat or sleep - all the usual. Now, after a month of meds I just feel DEPRESSED. REALLY depressed. Could it be that the Quetiapine has just removed the hypo aspect of a mixed state episode and just left me with pure, unadultered unipolar depression - or could it be that I feel so down as a RESULT of the medication? Am I bipolar with the enjoyable top sliced off or is this some kind of iatrogenic thang? Seeing the shrink tomorrow and she's suggested that if the depression's not lifted then she'll give me some Effexor (which sounds like a whole 'nother load of fun and games)but I don't get it... has the Quetiapine done ANYTHING? Has it just reduced a tolerable if disruptive mixed state to hideous depression or has it actually MADE me more depressed?" An hour later I posted another message saying I was going to stop my meds. Then I sat alone and cried for an hour and went to bed, calm and relieved that I'd made a decision, I would kill myself the next day. And then I woke up in the morning feeling fine. And today was a good day.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
The Drugs Don't Work
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Sunday, 17 April 2011
inhuman
let's go (back) to work
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Kate Rhiannon Tuson - 1980 - 2003: 4
So...eight years ago today Kate killed herself. She stepped from the ramparts of Raglan Castle and fell 100 ft to her death. The police picked me up, took me to the local police station to give a statement, then drove me to Neville Hall Hospital in Abergavenny. I waited outside til her mother arrived and we were led into a little room where Kate laid dead, cold, with a graze on one cheek. She must have suffered massive and gruesome internal injuries but none of these were apparent. I kissed her goodbye and did the whole stupid talking to a dead body routine, asking her why and so on. I went back to the flat we'd shared together and smoked pot and cried, which I did for about a week before we cremated her and I headed back to Yorkshire. The whole grieving process - which I may detail here later, maybe in another year's time - took about three years and was hideously painful. There's no kind of sorrow or guilt or anguish like that caused by suicide. But I survived, and I recovered, and here I am now, married, with a son, bipolar disorder, eight years older, eight years nearer my own death. Though it may sound cold and callous, I don't think of Kate that often these days. I used to think that I had to think of her every day, I used to think I should cry every day and never get over her and never love anyone else, but the harsh reality of it is that you don't owe anything to someone who choses to kill themselves, no matter how ill they may have been at the time. I think of her from time to time and I wish she was still alive because she was a very beautiful, intelligent, funny person and I loved her very deeply. I don't love her now - and I don't feel guilty about that anymore. I love my wife and I love my family and I love the future that we're working towards - difficult though it is at times. I think of Kate, fondly, from time to time, and I feel privileged to have known her, if only for a short while. With this being the anniversary of her death it seemed fitting to publish a few of the words I wrote about her and some of the photos that I took. But that's it now. I won't think of her very much til this time next year. And I no longer feel guilty about that. And I suppose that that means I've recovered.
Kate Rhiannon Tuson - 1980 - 2003: 3
'Who was it who did this to you?
Tell me, who was it who did this to you?
Well if I could have my way, I would line 'em up against a wall
Do unto them as they have done to you.'
- New Model Army
Tell me, who was it who did this to you?
Well if I could have my way, I would line 'em up against a wall
Do unto them as they have done to you.'
- New Model Army
'It's easier to ride the horse in the direction it's going.' - Anon
At 3am this morning I rang in and told a colleague that I wouldn't be coming in for my shift that day. I was due to start work at 06.45. I was vague as to the reasons for my abscence, choosing not to tell them the truth at this point, that I was actually 350 miles away, in another country, huddled beneath a duvet with a naked 22 year old ex mental hospital patient who I'd met a couple of weeks previously through an occult dating agency. Earlier that evening I'd decided on the spur of the moment not to catch my train back home and instead to live with Kate, her two invisible unicorns and a dead cat called Randolph who stank of garbage and kept trying to rip my face off, on a council estate in Abergavenny. So I wouldn't be at work later to watch the monkeys of Selby reeling round town kicking each others' empty heads in and selling each other heroin on cctv. Yes, I'd ring in later and explain to my boss exactly what the fuck I was up to. Lies told and inadequate excuses made, I crushed out my cigarette and turned off my mobile with a shudering sigh of relief. Kate dropped a Diazepam and nestled in to my cold, clammy body for a few moments before lapsing back into sleep and rolling away across the floor into the gloom, talking to herself. I laid for a while staring up at the cieling and wondering what the hell I was doing before I segued seemlessly from faintly nauseated fatigue into deep, dreamless slumber. Far, far away, as the song goes, the dawn was breaking. Here among the darkened mountains of The Mardy, it was still some way off.
I'd met Kate through The Golden Wheel, a contact service for occultists, naturists and geriatric sex fiends with limited social skills and equally limited quantities of teeth and hair. I'd been living the insubstantial life of a sad, thirty something cliche - quietly divorcing, sleeping alone in a narrow bed in a back room at my mother's house just outside of the town in which I was born, picking aubergines for a living and squandering my wages on beer, cigarettes and fucked up Japanese movies. Most of my friends had long since moved away - for company I had only my dissaproving mother, my deaf stepfather and a couple of mates who'd made even more dismal failures of their lives than I had of mine. I was spending most of my free time with Ian, my drug dealer and a kind of friend who looked like the result of a hideous coupling between a homicidal clown and a giant carnivorous insect. His gnarled and dented head, bald and scarred following brain surgery several years ago was like some sinister mountain top, constantly shrouded in clouds of hash smoke from the grimy green plastic bong permanently grasped in his multi ringed, grubby talons. I would drag Ian to The Cricketers' Arms where we would load a few quid into the jukebox, retreat to a table with a couple of pints and then apathetically, dutifully, recite the same old tired variations on the same old weary theme, the regular litany of small town despair and frustration.
"I tell you, Ian, this is absoloutely the last fucking time I'm coming in here."
"That's what you always say, dude."
"I know, and I always mean it. But this is without doubt the last time. Jesus. What a complete waste of time and money. The same old faces, the same pointless conversations. We'll just sit here talking to each other all night, get pissed, buy a scabby kebab on the way back, get stoned, wake up in the morning covered in hot rock burns and bits of damp salad feeling like shit. I mean, for God's sake, there's got to be more to life than this."
And so on. Desperation. Getting older, undermining our already tenuous grips on health and sanity with cigarettes, alcohol and mind bending drugs we couldn't afford. Watching the clock crawl through the tedious hours of clenched teeth, rolling eyes, hyperventilation and stolidly stifled rising panic towards the close of play. Two lonely men with failed marriages behind us, going nowhere other than irretrievably mad in a grim industrial shit hole in the blighted North of England. It was true - there DID have to be more than life than this, but I sure as hell wasn't going to find it chugging through endless Marlboros, swilling back pints of Ayingerbrau and counting the suppurating boils on Ian's cratered bonce in Selby's least happening pub. I could have wept, I really could. I'd never had any intention of living my life this way, it had just happened. A job I hated in a town I'd already left for good at least ten times in the past, wretched evenings sat watching soul shrivelling soap operas in my slippers at my mother's, listening to the maddening howl of step dad Tony's ineptly tuned hearing aid, sipping sweet tea and quietly going out of my mind among the crass chatter of inane TV characters, drowning in a sea of solitude and other people's atrocious knickknacks. I needed more and I certainly wasn't going to find it here. I wasn't going to find anything here other than premature senility and an endless procession of doomed nights in the Cricketer's moaning with Ian. Action needed to be taken.
"I tell you, Ian, this is absoloutely the last fucking time I'm coming in here."
"That's what you always say, dude."
"I know, and I always mean it. But this is without doubt the last time. Jesus. What a complete waste of time and money. The same old faces, the same pointless conversations. We'll just sit here talking to each other all night, get pissed, buy a scabby kebab on the way back, get stoned, wake up in the morning covered in hot rock burns and bits of damp salad feeling like shit. I mean, for God's sake, there's got to be more to life than this."
And so on. Desperation. Getting older, undermining our already tenuous grips on health and sanity with cigarettes, alcohol and mind bending drugs we couldn't afford. Watching the clock crawl through the tedious hours of clenched teeth, rolling eyes, hyperventilation and stolidly stifled rising panic towards the close of play. Two lonely men with failed marriages behind us, going nowhere other than irretrievably mad in a grim industrial shit hole in the blighted North of England. It was true - there DID have to be more than life than this, but I sure as hell wasn't going to find it chugging through endless Marlboros, swilling back pints of Ayingerbrau and counting the suppurating boils on Ian's cratered bonce in Selby's least happening pub. I could have wept, I really could. I'd never had any intention of living my life this way, it had just happened. A job I hated in a town I'd already left for good at least ten times in the past, wretched evenings sat watching soul shrivelling soap operas in my slippers at my mother's, listening to the maddening howl of step dad Tony's ineptly tuned hearing aid, sipping sweet tea and quietly going out of my mind among the crass chatter of inane TV characters, drowning in a sea of solitude and other people's atrocious knickknacks. I needed more and I certainly wasn't going to find it here. I wasn't going to find anything here other than premature senility and an endless procession of doomed nights in the Cricketer's moaning with Ian. Action needed to be taken.
I'd been married for six years , or was it seven? I'd met my wife to be at work - I just sat on my scrawny arse writing twee banalities for teletext for two years, waiting for someone to come along and be delivered to me. She was. She turned up from Cornwall one morning and sit next to me while I spilt water into my keyboard and tried not to throw up last night's wine and mashed potato. After a few days she'd plucked up the courage to ask me if I could score her some hash - I was obviously the most ostensibly debauched and drug addled member of the workforce - and a week or two after that we were living together in my crumbling flat over looking the bloated, sluggish waters of the stinking Ouse with two badly behaved cats, a lot of hash and a toilet that was sinking through the rotting floorboards among a halo of leprous toadstools. A week or two after that I sold my few meagre belongings, quit my job and we moved to Cornwall. Six or seven years of screeching arguements later the cats were dead, the hash had all been smoked and we split up. I went to Canada to visit my best friend and his Canadian girlfriend and spent several months bumming around Southern Ontario before returning to England and Yorkshire and my mother. I was picking aubergines and drinking in the Cricketers' with a bitter, braindamaged dyslexic epileptic whose policy regarding personal hygiene was 'when the filth gets heavy enough, it'll fall off.' I wasn't going to meet the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with among the fetid eggplant jungle or the equally fetid local pub. i needed to cast my net further. The first place i cast it was into the murky waters of a contact agency I'd seen advertised in Bizarre. I sent off for my approval copy of their magazine and waited. A week later I returned from a hard day of snorting clouds of whitefly up my nose and crawling around on my arse picking aubergines to find a sheaf of pornography on the kitchen table. My approval copy of the aforementioned contact mag had been unable to contain itself and had burst from the envelope in an exuberant mass of naked muffs and rouged nipples as the postwoman had shoved it through the letter box. My mother, who'd been in at the time, had been horrified. My mother spends her life in a paroxysm of horror and dissaproval, largely directed at me. The arrival of the equivalent of a Freeman's catalogue for socially inadequate perverts hadn't helped matters.
"God knows what the bloody postwoman thinks now," She moaned.
"I know, I know, I'm sorry. I didn't think it was going to be this kind of thing." Though in all honesty, I'd had more than a vague suspicion that it might be this kind of thing. I was hoping though, that among all the lonely overweight mutts peeling apart their beef curtains in squalid bedsits in Hull there might be some genuinely fascinating women lurking. I went upstairs for a crap and leafed through the catalogue. A veritable cornucopia of scrawny old men with shrivelled cocks like Gonzo's nose, dressed hopefully in bondage gear, overweight mutts from Hull clambering over their lonely eiderdowns with their udders dangling like vieny sacks of pallid dough. Some in black and white, most in stomach churning technicolour. And lurking among this freakshow of frustrated, sexually demented grotesques a couple of women who sounded halfway genuine, only partially desperate, and whose pictures depicted them with clothes on and something other than monstrous, unhinged leers on their faces. So I wrote to them and bared as much of my soul as I felt was safe to to complete strangers and I paid ten pounds and stuffed the lot in an envelope and went back to my eggplants and funny litle dreams.
I had my first response within a week. I scanned down to the bottom of the page - it was from somebody called Michelle and there was a kiss in hideous pink lipstick planted beneath her signature. She told me that her friend - who I'd allegedly written to - had already found herself a man and had passsed my letter on. I, she went on, sounded like Michelle's kind of feller. She was into taking sexy photos of herself. These could be mine for only æÃ15. She went on to tell me that her and her friend frequently engaged in hot lesbian action and had often dreamed of sexually dominating a man between them.
"Fucking ripping the sad twat off, more like," I growled. There was some more puerile drivel about her bisexual tendencies, presumably intended to send me into a gibbering siezure of carnal over excitement, in which trembling and bug eyed state I would take leave of my senses and rip great wads of notes from my wallet and send them to her. By return I guess I'd receive some crappy polaroids and a pair of damp gussetted thongs. Very nice, I'm sure, but not really what I was looking for. The letter went in the bin. More followed from others of Michelles ilk. They were all despondently binned. I needed to look elsewhere. Like a dog returning to its own vomit I returned to Bizarre. There, beneath the ad I'd responded to was one for the Golden Wheel, offering 'New Age Contacts, Occultists, wiccans, circlesêÍcovens, unusual customs' . It would cost me æÃ15. Another night at the Cricketers' would cost me at least æÃ20, a hefty chunk of braincells and many irretrievable hours of my rapidly dwindling life listening to Ian expounding on his many crack pot, joyless paranoid theories. I sent them a cheque and spent many appalling days slicked in sweat, face strung with ribbons of sneezed snot, blundering through endless miles of towering aubergine plants beneath a remorseless summer sun, sustaining my tremulous will to live with groundless promises that The Golden Wheel would be the answer to my increasingly feeble and hopeless prayers. Then the stuff arrived. A clutch of photocopied sheets of details of various saddoes scattered the length and breadth of the nation and beyond. I picked five of the more lucid ones to respond to.
A couple of weeks later I was sprawled out unconscious on a friend's sofa bed in Leeds when my mobile beeped in the early morning gloom. I'd received a text message from the unlikely monikored Suki who, I recalled, was into tattoos, laughs, candlelit baths and tarot cards. I don't have any tattoos, though I did once buy a pack of transfers while on holiday in Withernsea when I was a child, and generally believe tarot card readings to be a load of old bollocks. I am however capable of producing laugh-like sounds on occassion and have enjoyed candlelit baths in the past, usually during power cuts. "Here's to a long and giddy friendship," she said, then sent a flurry of texts whinging about the problems associated with single parenthood and then vanished. While on my way back home to Selby on the train I got another text, this time from Lesley in Manchester. I couldn't remember anything about her ad at all. We exchanged a few texts over the next few days and said nothing of any real import, though tentative plans were made to ring each other up for a chat at some point soon. She rang me a few days later and the second I answered my phone forgot my name.
"Ooh 'eck!" She shrieked, "Not a very good start is it? Eh, what am I like? Barmy, me...me mates are always telling me I'm mad! Bluddy 'ell!" And so on. A lot of tiresome cackling and agonising silences. We never spoke again, though I did receive a photo a few days later of a fat woman with a face like a bulldog squatting in the middle of a field and looking like she was taking a crap.
"God knows what the bloody postwoman thinks now," She moaned.
"I know, I know, I'm sorry. I didn't think it was going to be this kind of thing." Though in all honesty, I'd had more than a vague suspicion that it might be this kind of thing. I was hoping though, that among all the lonely overweight mutts peeling apart their beef curtains in squalid bedsits in Hull there might be some genuinely fascinating women lurking. I went upstairs for a crap and leafed through the catalogue. A veritable cornucopia of scrawny old men with shrivelled cocks like Gonzo's nose, dressed hopefully in bondage gear, overweight mutts from Hull clambering over their lonely eiderdowns with their udders dangling like vieny sacks of pallid dough. Some in black and white, most in stomach churning technicolour. And lurking among this freakshow of frustrated, sexually demented grotesques a couple of women who sounded halfway genuine, only partially desperate, and whose pictures depicted them with clothes on and something other than monstrous, unhinged leers on their faces. So I wrote to them and bared as much of my soul as I felt was safe to to complete strangers and I paid ten pounds and stuffed the lot in an envelope and went back to my eggplants and funny litle dreams.
I had my first response within a week. I scanned down to the bottom of the page - it was from somebody called Michelle and there was a kiss in hideous pink lipstick planted beneath her signature. She told me that her friend - who I'd allegedly written to - had already found herself a man and had passsed my letter on. I, she went on, sounded like Michelle's kind of feller. She was into taking sexy photos of herself. These could be mine for only æÃ15. She went on to tell me that her and her friend frequently engaged in hot lesbian action and had often dreamed of sexually dominating a man between them.
"Fucking ripping the sad twat off, more like," I growled. There was some more puerile drivel about her bisexual tendencies, presumably intended to send me into a gibbering siezure of carnal over excitement, in which trembling and bug eyed state I would take leave of my senses and rip great wads of notes from my wallet and send them to her. By return I guess I'd receive some crappy polaroids and a pair of damp gussetted thongs. Very nice, I'm sure, but not really what I was looking for. The letter went in the bin. More followed from others of Michelles ilk. They were all despondently binned. I needed to look elsewhere. Like a dog returning to its own vomit I returned to Bizarre. There, beneath the ad I'd responded to was one for the Golden Wheel, offering 'New Age Contacts, Occultists, wiccans, circlesêÍcovens, unusual customs' . It would cost me æÃ15. Another night at the Cricketers' would cost me at least æÃ20, a hefty chunk of braincells and many irretrievable hours of my rapidly dwindling life listening to Ian expounding on his many crack pot, joyless paranoid theories. I sent them a cheque and spent many appalling days slicked in sweat, face strung with ribbons of sneezed snot, blundering through endless miles of towering aubergine plants beneath a remorseless summer sun, sustaining my tremulous will to live with groundless promises that The Golden Wheel would be the answer to my increasingly feeble and hopeless prayers. Then the stuff arrived. A clutch of photocopied sheets of details of various saddoes scattered the length and breadth of the nation and beyond. I picked five of the more lucid ones to respond to.
A couple of weeks later I was sprawled out unconscious on a friend's sofa bed in Leeds when my mobile beeped in the early morning gloom. I'd received a text message from the unlikely monikored Suki who, I recalled, was into tattoos, laughs, candlelit baths and tarot cards. I don't have any tattoos, though I did once buy a pack of transfers while on holiday in Withernsea when I was a child, and generally believe tarot card readings to be a load of old bollocks. I am however capable of producing laugh-like sounds on occassion and have enjoyed candlelit baths in the past, usually during power cuts. "Here's to a long and giddy friendship," she said, then sent a flurry of texts whinging about the problems associated with single parenthood and then vanished. While on my way back home to Selby on the train I got another text, this time from Lesley in Manchester. I couldn't remember anything about her ad at all. We exchanged a few texts over the next few days and said nothing of any real import, though tentative plans were made to ring each other up for a chat at some point soon. She rang me a few days later and the second I answered my phone forgot my name.
"Ooh 'eck!" She shrieked, "Not a very good start is it? Eh, what am I like? Barmy, me...me mates are always telling me I'm mad! Bluddy 'ell!" And so on. A lot of tiresome cackling and agonising silences. We never spoke again, though I did receive a photo a few days later of a fat woman with a face like a bulldog squatting in the middle of a field and looking like she was taking a crap.
And so it came to pass that I heard no more from any strange women for a while and with no tantalising carrot of possible romance dangling before my bloodshot and myopic eyes the ragged stick of aubergine picking became too much for me to endure. I arrived at work as usual at 04.30 and pottered around the vast, stinking, sweltering greenhouse gathering the tools of my trade. My obstinate trolley that defied all attempts to dominate and steer it, my lethally sharp secateurs with which I'd gashed my nose very badly a few weeks ago after forgetting I was holding them and then reaching up to swipe sweat from my eyebrows, bags, white gloves and a filthy facemask I wore to minimise the choking effects of the aubergine dust. I wrestled my trolley onto the rails between an aisle of looming plants. And I couldn't do it. Just couldn't do it anymore. I tried. Sighing and gasping disconsolately I took a few half hearted steps and snipped a couple of bloated, black fruits from their branches before flipping and hurling them around me.
"Bastard fucking things, bastard fucking aubergine motherfuckers."
My body was awash with sweat. I was blind with sneezing. My chin was slick with snot. My head was pounding. I slung my tools down and made my way to the office where the depressed human resources bod, who was all too used to hearing this kind of thing, heard my tale of woe with an expression of resignation on his face.
"Hello, Ted, "I said, "Just the person I need to speak to."
"Why, what's the problem?"
"Well..." I wheedled, "I'm going to have to hand in my notice."
"Oh. That's a shame. When were you thinking of leaving?"
"Well, now. I can't stand it anymore. It's doing my head in. I'm more of a people person than an aubergine person really, Ted. If I pick one more bastard aubergine I'm going to lose the plot entirely."
"Can you work the rest of the day?"
The rest of the day equated to about another nine hours, another 4000 aubergines. So no, I couldn't.
"Okay." I said. Then I walked out of the office and went home.
I spent a week round at Ian's house. Ian was delighted with this arrangement. I was his only friend. He lived next door to his sister, Sue, but Sue couldn't bear to be in his company for longer than a few minutes at a time due to his unique joy sapping qualities. In fairness, life hadn't been particularly kind to Ian. Having snorted several hundred kilos of rancid amphetamines as a youth he'd managed to basically melt his sinuses. The corrossive pus had etched its way into his brain and a lengthy period of hospitalisation and numerous operations on his poor swollen grey matter had ensued, leaving him epileptic, dyslexic, bald and deaf in one ear. Then he'd got married and his iwfe had run off with a ginger scouser called Gareth, taking their young daughter with her. Then he'd had both his legs shattered when a dustbin lorry had ploughed into his van. He'd recently lapsed into status epilepticus, the frequently fatal condition where one grand mal seizure follows at the heels of its predeccessor without giving the sufferer time to come up for air. This had left him buggered physically, and the additionaal damage to his brain had done nothing to improve his increasingly sour and paranoid disposition. Ian believed theworld to be a dark and hostile place. People and circumstances constanttly conspired against him. He'd caught herpes from somewhere and was convinced he'd got it while in hospital. He believed some psychotic nurse had crept into his room at night time and injected him with it. There was no arguing with him. I spent a week on his couch having my sanity assaulted and was reaching the point where one more poisonous sneer on his reptillian features would have resulted in me performing a little impromptu brain surgery of my own with the nearest available blunt object (which would probably have been the ubiquitous bong) when I got another job. A very strange one. I began working in a windowless, bombproof control centre monitoring fire alarms, personal attack alarms, intruder alarms etc all over Britain and spying on the mean streets of Selby through the town centre cctv system. The job entailed working 12 hour shifts, days and nights, signing the official secrets act and wearing a shirt and tie - something I hadn't had to do for any job for a good many years. I'd been doing this for a couple of weeks when the letter came from Wales.
"Bastard fucking things, bastard fucking aubergine motherfuckers."
My body was awash with sweat. I was blind with sneezing. My chin was slick with snot. My head was pounding. I slung my tools down and made my way to the office where the depressed human resources bod, who was all too used to hearing this kind of thing, heard my tale of woe with an expression of resignation on his face.
"Hello, Ted, "I said, "Just the person I need to speak to."
"Why, what's the problem?"
"Well..." I wheedled, "I'm going to have to hand in my notice."
"Oh. That's a shame. When were you thinking of leaving?"
"Well, now. I can't stand it anymore. It's doing my head in. I'm more of a people person than an aubergine person really, Ted. If I pick one more bastard aubergine I'm going to lose the plot entirely."
"Can you work the rest of the day?"
The rest of the day equated to about another nine hours, another 4000 aubergines. So no, I couldn't.
"Okay." I said. Then I walked out of the office and went home.
I spent a week round at Ian's house. Ian was delighted with this arrangement. I was his only friend. He lived next door to his sister, Sue, but Sue couldn't bear to be in his company for longer than a few minutes at a time due to his unique joy sapping qualities. In fairness, life hadn't been particularly kind to Ian. Having snorted several hundred kilos of rancid amphetamines as a youth he'd managed to basically melt his sinuses. The corrossive pus had etched its way into his brain and a lengthy period of hospitalisation and numerous operations on his poor swollen grey matter had ensued, leaving him epileptic, dyslexic, bald and deaf in one ear. Then he'd got married and his iwfe had run off with a ginger scouser called Gareth, taking their young daughter with her. Then he'd had both his legs shattered when a dustbin lorry had ploughed into his van. He'd recently lapsed into status epilepticus, the frequently fatal condition where one grand mal seizure follows at the heels of its predeccessor without giving the sufferer time to come up for air. This had left him buggered physically, and the additionaal damage to his brain had done nothing to improve his increasingly sour and paranoid disposition. Ian believed theworld to be a dark and hostile place. People and circumstances constanttly conspired against him. He'd caught herpes from somewhere and was convinced he'd got it while in hospital. He believed some psychotic nurse had crept into his room at night time and injected him with it. There was no arguing with him. I spent a week on his couch having my sanity assaulted and was reaching the point where one more poisonous sneer on his reptillian features would have resulted in me performing a little impromptu brain surgery of my own with the nearest available blunt object (which would probably have been the ubiquitous bong) when I got another job. A very strange one. I began working in a windowless, bombproof control centre monitoring fire alarms, personal attack alarms, intruder alarms etc all over Britain and spying on the mean streets of Selby through the town centre cctv system. The job entailed working 12 hour shifts, days and nights, signing the official secrets act and wearing a shirt and tie - something I hadn't had to do for any job for a good many years. I'd been doing this for a couple of weeks when the letter came from Wales.
She'd said she was a Celtic Princess. She said age and location weren't important, though she lived in South Wales. She was looking for a 'loving relationship.' I'd written to her along with the other disasters some time ago now and had given up on hearing back from her - obviously, I thought, some latter day knight in shining armour had torn down to the valleys and swept her away. But no. She hadn't replied sooner because she'd been busy. I found out later she'd been busy trying to kill herself in a graveyard in Abergavenny and being forcibly committed to the local looney bin. There was something about the letter with the dragon stamp that made me smile, and smiles were an increasingly rare commodity in Selby round about then. She lived alone in a flat on The Mardy, an estate on the outskirts of Abergavenny, a town I'd only ever heard mentioned in the buffoonish eponymous song by Marty Wilde released in 1968, theyear of my birth. I don't think there was any mention of the two house unicorns at that point, or the putrid, grave damp cat that 'lived' in the hedge behind her flat. Just Kate, living a strange and amusing life on her own. I wrote a very long letter by way of a reply and hinted at my own dubious past. We began volleying letters and strange gifts across the mountains at each other - I sent her a piece of stone I'd found in a local field and fistfuls of flowers I'd surreptitiously wrenched from my mother's garden while everyone was out, she sent me a feather from a pink Welsh pigeon and a photo of a tree. Her letters brightened my days. After claustrophobic marathon sessions of watching shaven headed louts staggering through town on a night with mushed up fistfuls of greasy kebab meat and spew down their trouser legs I wouild come back home to find another letter with a Welsh postmark and all would be okay again. After a month of this I was desperate to speak to her. I kept sending her my phone number in the hope that she;d take the hint and give me a call, but she didn't. Eventually she sent me hers, and we spoke for the first time one night when I was at work. I left the building in the dark and stood outside in the cold northern night smoking and called her. 350 miles away in a country I'd never visited she answered. The conversation and the few that followed were stilted, prickly, depressingly uncomfortable - but we both persisted. A window of opportunity was opening up in the near future. My mother and Tony were due to fly to Cyprus for a fortnight and I would be home alone. I managed to lure Kate up North. By this point she didn't really need a great deal of luring, much to my delight and amazement. We agreed to meet halfway, at Manchester Piccadilly, on September 11th, a year to the day since the World Trade Centre was obliterated. The symbolism of the date wasn't lost on me.
I spent the morning stockpiling provisions fit for a 22 year old Celtic Princess. By this time I knew what kind of food she liked - sweets, fruit, honey and Dairy Lee processed cheese triangles. I also knew she'd been sectioned and spent time languishing in various psychiatric hospitals - but what the hell, so had I. I was unaware at this stage that Kate's history of serious insanity made my own look like a trivial bout of troubled nerves by comparison. Having filled several carrier bags with kiwi fruit, ready brek and rice pudding I lugged them round to Ian's and endured an hour or two of sneering andcynical, superior pontificating before scoring some excellent hash and doing a round trip to Carlton to drop off the food. I got the bus back to town and sat on Selby station between a couple of eldery dwarfs lurking behind their massive suitcase and a young lad puffing valiantly on a crooked spliff which kept going out. At one something a message came over the tannoy inviting us all to observe a minute's silence in comemoration of those who died a year ago. Nobody was talking to each other anyway. We don't do that kind of thing in Selby. The train pulled in and I boarded it and it occurred to me that if Al Quaida decided to launch a terrorist attack on Britain today then at least two of the cities I'd be passing through would have to be near the top of their hitlist. Wouldn't it be tragic - and yet spectacularly romantic - if Kate and I were atomised in a massive bomb blast only a moment before we were due to meet, hurrying towards each other along the platform then whiteout and hello eternity...Within moments of sitting down and having my ticket punched I was asleep and dozed on and off through Leeds, through Huddersfield where I'd had my most dramatic and critically acclaimed breakdown back in 1988, into Manchester Picadilly. I scuttled upstairs and wolfed a KFC burger, wiped my greasy face with the complimentary handiwipe and scuttled down to platform 11 to chainsmoke and wait for the train from the Pembrokeshire coast to get in. I was sweating now, my heart pounding. The voice, the handwriting, the charming doodles were about to arrive in the flesh. We might hate each other. She might find me startlingly repulsive - why not, I did. She'd told me the night before that she
wasn't beautiful but I'd stubbornly refused to believe her. She HAD to be beautiful - the survival of my dreams depended on it. With time to kill I wandered onto another platform to use the toilets, failed to find them and wandered back. Smoked another half dozen cigarettes. Stuffed a fist sized wad of breathtaking Airwaves chewing gum into my dry mouth. At this point I would like to pause and apologise to Kate who's been waiting patiently - not that patiently, actually - waiting all day long, for me to get to the point in the story where she makes her entrance. Well I've now reached my daily quota of words for the day and don't have enough left to squeeze you in. So you'll have to wait til tomorrow. There you go. Life's tough.
wasn't beautiful but I'd stubbornly refused to believe her. She HAD to be beautiful - the survival of my dreams depended on it. With time to kill I wandered onto another platform to use the toilets, failed to find them and wandered back. Smoked another half dozen cigarettes. Stuffed a fist sized wad of breathtaking Airwaves chewing gum into my dry mouth. At this point I would like to pause and apologise to Kate who's been waiting patiently - not that patiently, actually - waiting all day long, for me to get to the point in the story where she makes her entrance. Well I've now reached my daily quota of words for the day and don't have enough left to squeeze you in. So you'll have to wait til tomorrow. There you go. Life's tough.
Faced with the suspension of all conjugal rights, having been called an evil bastard and having suffered unspeakable torments, I now have no option but to write on. I have no option anyway, really. If I don't become a bestselling writer by the end of the month I'm going to starve to death and die like a mangy dog on the rain swept streets of The Mardy. The few hundred quid left over from my last pay cheque is dwindling and will dwindle more rapidly once I return to Yorkshire next week on an essential hash finding tour. So there we go. It's now 22.39 and Kate's grovelling around on the floor grooming the carpet and Newsnight's on behind me and I'd really like to just turn this fucking word processor off and indulge in a little senseless chilling out... but it's not to be.
I waited. The train drew in. People's midsections crowded the dusty windows, shambling towards the doors. I stood up and wiped my greasy palms on my jeans. This was it. The moment I'd been waiting for. "You will recognise me by my armadillo," She had told me. I'd seen a photo of her, a tiny little black and white face glued among a tangle of Brian Froud fairies. She'd looked beautiful, in an impish kind of way, but photos are merely frozen nanoseconds - maybe this one had merely captured a rare moment of attractiveness in a face's lifetime of plainness. Maybe the slim face was attached to a corpulent body...what then? It would be impolite to recoil and regurgitate my chicken burger, splashing the Colonel's secret recipe sauce over my boots. Then, in a moment seared eternally onto my mind, she lurched from the train with an expression of mortal terror, dragging the armadillo. She was absoloutely, mind blowingly beautiful. I stepped towards her and proffered a sweaty hand which she ignored, throwing slender arms around my neck and swinging on me like a monkey on a branch. When she let me go she looked like she might vomit or collapse or burst into tears, so I ushered her outside where we sat on the floor in the glorious September sunlight while she silently chewed some Haribro Starmix I'd bought her and I fumblingly mended a broken bracelet she'd handed me. So this was really it. My heart was sinking, despite my best efforts to keep it afloat. She was TOO beautiful. There was something achingly otherworldly about her, something indefinable and entrancing I felt I'd never be able to touch. And she wasn't going to find me attractive. I was greying and lumpen, a stodgy, slow ogre twelve years her senior. I felt like a sad and deflated dad, past his prime, all his flatulent, cadverous inadequacies starkly revealed in the dark, glittering light of her gaze. I felt like a fool for ever imagining this might work. I'd become the kind of man I'd always despised, an ageing beast tragically fawning over a young beauty who would forever remain beyond his tragically reduced, palsied grasp, who could never look at him as anything other than a pathetic, self deluded figure of fun. Ian was right. The world was indeed a squalid and joyless place and we were all doomed to miserable life scenteces of loneliness, desperation and unrequited love. I tried to see the bright side of the situation. There wasn't one. I heard myself bleating, a quavering torrent of screaming banalities gushing out on my putrid, fag corrupted breath. What a tit, I thought, what a tragic, terminal tit. She didn't seem too impressed. She still looked terrified - probably by my panicked and increasingly hysterical attempts at being amusing. The minutes of self abasement and humiliation crawled by, and then we shoe horned ourselves onto the train to Selby. We had to stand wedged between beery breath and burger scented armpits.
"Don't talk to me until we get to Selby," She said, "There are too many people around."
"Really? Are you serious?" The journey would take us an hour and a half. If I had to do it in silence I'd crack. I'd have to sneak off to the toilets and stab myself to death with a biro. She nodded. She was serious.
"Okay." I agreed. I wanted to cry. This was all going horribly wrong. I'd made a dreadful mistake. We both had. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I spoke to her anyway. We began sneering at our fellow passengers and within minutes were guffawing at the idea of tossing babies from the window of the train. I even found, from somewhere, the courage to touch her - a matey punch to the thigh which I instantly regretted and still cringe about to this day. What a twat. What an incorrigible knob head.
I waited. The train drew in. People's midsections crowded the dusty windows, shambling towards the doors. I stood up and wiped my greasy palms on my jeans. This was it. The moment I'd been waiting for. "You will recognise me by my armadillo," She had told me. I'd seen a photo of her, a tiny little black and white face glued among a tangle of Brian Froud fairies. She'd looked beautiful, in an impish kind of way, but photos are merely frozen nanoseconds - maybe this one had merely captured a rare moment of attractiveness in a face's lifetime of plainness. Maybe the slim face was attached to a corpulent body...what then? It would be impolite to recoil and regurgitate my chicken burger, splashing the Colonel's secret recipe sauce over my boots. Then, in a moment seared eternally onto my mind, she lurched from the train with an expression of mortal terror, dragging the armadillo. She was absoloutely, mind blowingly beautiful. I stepped towards her and proffered a sweaty hand which she ignored, throwing slender arms around my neck and swinging on me like a monkey on a branch. When she let me go she looked like she might vomit or collapse or burst into tears, so I ushered her outside where we sat on the floor in the glorious September sunlight while she silently chewed some Haribro Starmix I'd bought her and I fumblingly mended a broken bracelet she'd handed me. So this was really it. My heart was sinking, despite my best efforts to keep it afloat. She was TOO beautiful. There was something achingly otherworldly about her, something indefinable and entrancing I felt I'd never be able to touch. And she wasn't going to find me attractive. I was greying and lumpen, a stodgy, slow ogre twelve years her senior. I felt like a sad and deflated dad, past his prime, all his flatulent, cadverous inadequacies starkly revealed in the dark, glittering light of her gaze. I felt like a fool for ever imagining this might work. I'd become the kind of man I'd always despised, an ageing beast tragically fawning over a young beauty who would forever remain beyond his tragically reduced, palsied grasp, who could never look at him as anything other than a pathetic, self deluded figure of fun. Ian was right. The world was indeed a squalid and joyless place and we were all doomed to miserable life scenteces of loneliness, desperation and unrequited love. I tried to see the bright side of the situation. There wasn't one. I heard myself bleating, a quavering torrent of screaming banalities gushing out on my putrid, fag corrupted breath. What a tit, I thought, what a tragic, terminal tit. She didn't seem too impressed. She still looked terrified - probably by my panicked and increasingly hysterical attempts at being amusing. The minutes of self abasement and humiliation crawled by, and then we shoe horned ourselves onto the train to Selby. We had to stand wedged between beery breath and burger scented armpits.
"Don't talk to me until we get to Selby," She said, "There are too many people around."
"Really? Are you serious?" The journey would take us an hour and a half. If I had to do it in silence I'd crack. I'd have to sneak off to the toilets and stab myself to death with a biro. She nodded. She was serious.
"Okay." I agreed. I wanted to cry. This was all going horribly wrong. I'd made a dreadful mistake. We both had. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I spoke to her anyway. We began sneering at our fellow passengers and within minutes were guffawing at the idea of tossing babies from the window of the train. I even found, from somewhere, the courage to touch her - a matey punch to the thigh which I instantly regretted and still cringe about to this day. What a twat. What an incorrigible knob head.
23.32 Going on behind me, Kate is filing her nails and on the TV there's now a documentary about the growing trend for baby raping in South Africa. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried, I really couldn't. I'm going to finish my cigarette and go get a bath. It's a cold night in Wales, but the more or less incessant rain we've had for the last three days has stopped at last.
Today is now yesterday's tomorrow and I'm not going to get much chance to write during the day as Kate's enlisted my help to drag several holdalls of junk into town in a little while. She's streamlining her life, casting aside the accumulated detritus of 22 years of hurtling through existence aboard spaceship earth. Always a good thing, I think. If you've got more stuff than you can carry or leave behind without a moment's thought then you're carting around needless baggage, and the road's long and hard enough as it is. For some reason the road seems particularly long and hard today. Don't know why, I'm just feeling a little down, maybe some minor chemical imbalance, maybe just the weight of the sunless grey skies beyond the windows. Feeling a little paniccy at our financial situation, the fact that I need to return to Yorkshire next week to grab a load of my stuff which will cost another æÃ65, money's just draining away and there won't be any more coming in once it's gone, poverty beckons, the trap looms and I'm being dragged into its jaws, there's no way out unless I manage to find myself a job here in Abergavenny and the only realistic employment options on offer at the moment are working at the chicken processing plant, the local cheese factory or stacking shelves with a load of teenage retards at Safeway.
Randolph the Risen has just sauntered in, the first time we've seen him in days. The afterlife's been kind to him, or the incessant rain has washed away some of his scabs and cleansed his fur as he's slumbered in the grave. Either way he's looking pretty good today, his coat snow white, his hooded, lizardy eyes clear of encrusted matter, his reeking face not as pungent as usual. He's now in the kitchen, munching tuna, Kate's sat beside me reading Weaveworld and all's well with the world apart from the fact we've got no fucking money. I must remember to buy a lottery ticket in town.
Randolph the Risen has just sauntered in, the first time we've seen him in days. The afterlife's been kind to him, or the incessant rain has washed away some of his scabs and cleansed his fur as he's slumbered in the grave. Either way he's looking pretty good today, his coat snow white, his hooded, lizardy eyes clear of encrusted matter, his reeking face not as pungent as usual. He's now in the kitchen, munching tuna, Kate's sat beside me reading Weaveworld and all's well with the world apart from the fact we've got no fucking money. I must remember to buy a lottery ticket in town.
Kate Rhiannon Tuson - 1980 - 2003: 2
The following is from a website I was working on while living with Kate...
Imps: An Owners' Guide
| The Imp in question is called Kate - she's a 22 year old Imp from Abergavenny and is the first creature of this species I've encountered. Hopefully this page will be of use to others involved in relationships with 'similar' creatures and will answer a few questions visitors to the site may have. |
| Imp Characteristics: Well, it kind of goes without saying that imps are a uniquely strange type of creature. Half human, half something else entirely, they are, in the words of the great philosopher Beck, truly ,"Playing footsie in another dimension." Privy to many fantastic visions and susceptible to plagues of demons, this particular imp is generally accompanied on her travels by two unicorns and a dead cat, with whom she may be heard conversing while she is asleep. The imp is particularly dangerous while asleep as, unaware of her terrestrial surroundings, she may seek to act out the bizarre dramas unfolding in her unconscious mind. On one recent occassion I awoke to find the imp jabbering and cackling to itself while fast asleep, clutching a large rock in one hand and an empty cereal bowl in the other. I believe a fractured skull (mine) was only narrowly avoided. |
| Caring for your Imp: Imps require a good deal of fresh air and exercise and soon become disturbed and fractious if deprived of either. A healthy, young imp will happily walk for anywhere between 6-10 hours a day. Imps thrive on a diet of cheap sweets, fruit, diazepam and omlettes though they will often go without eating altogether unless prompted. The imp's sleep pattern is notoriously erratic - sometimes the imp will sleep for a full 24 hours; during such nano-hibernations it is not uncommon for the imp's skin to adopt a waxy pallor and for its breathing to become shallow. It is unwise to wake the imp at these times as she will probably respond with great hostility, though this can be tempered somewhat by presenting the waking imp with a Snickers bar or some Jelly Babies. At other times the imp will only sleep for a couple of hours a night and will occupy the rest of the nocturnal hours shrieking and clambering over her partner, cackling and inflicting upon him thousands of impy nips, a particularly unpleasant impish characteristic.Imp Health: Generally, imps have pretty robust constitutions though they are prone to stomach problems and certain types of psychotic illness as well as having a slight tendency towards hypochondria. |
Kate Rhiannon Tuson - 1980 - 2003: 1
| First entry. It's 10:09 and Kate's kicking a squeaky rubber dumbbell around the floor for Finn, the newest addition to the household, an eight week old Patterdale terrier who we've had here at the flat since last Sunday. Right now he's excitedly taking a semi masticated wad of pancake for a journey around the place, while Eric, the guy upstairs is banging and braying at his 'secret project' which we fear involves gullible old women, a saw and a wooden box. The afternoon saw us taking Sergeant Finn on manoeuvres to Stan's lair where we were fed on dead poultry, plied with wine and then driven back here. Finn has taken to eating clumps of hair from the imp's hairbrush which presents us (or rather, me) with a problem when he takes a dump. We were five minutes into watching a video (The Ugly) last night when the air was rent with ear splitting shrieks of absolute terror and Finn began tearing around the flat as though pursued by the very Hounds of Hell themselves. Unfortunately he wasn't being pursued by the Hounds of Hell themselves, rather half a turd attached to his terror clenched arse by means of 10 inches of imp hair. He proceeded to run screaming around the flat, dragging his unholy cargo with him, leaving skidmarks all over the soft furnishings, pausing briefly now and then to glance round to check he was still being chased, until I managed to catch him and yank out the hair and its passenger. The imp had by this point shut herself in the bedroom from where peals of convulsed laughter rang out. She's a good mother to her little pup, is the imp. |
| 24.11.02 Sunday A quiet day among the mountains. Working on the web site, stealing music (today I have mostly been stealing David Bowie), exercising, reading crap from newsgroups. The Imp sat and watched The Ugly again today, over-indulging her unwholesome appetite for things psychosis and murder related. Finn's been reasonably amusing. We brought the washing-up bowl full of water into the front room and entertained ourselves for a while by repeatedly dropping him in it. I've had no fresh air at all today - I can feel my skin greying. I've wanted a cigarette all day long. My tattoo's beginning to scab over. The Imp's currently decorating her lair, I'm sitting here alone in the front room listening to The Swans. Oh happy days. LATER: Was roused from my bath this evening by the clatter of crockery - dashed naked and alarmed into the front room to discover the imp had swooned into the table and was sprawled on the floor, vague and unfocussed, complaining of feeling unwell. She recovered after a little while. Wile I was attending to her I discovered half a dog turd that had gone missing earlier in the day. The other half remains unaccounted for. |
| 25.11.02 Monday 22.24 and I'm glad the day's just about over, it's not been a good one. Woke from dreams in which I was plagued by thoughts of cigarettes and my ex-wife and then trudged into town to try and find out why I've yet to receive a penny from the DSS despite having made a claim nearly a month ago. Thus began a long and confusing series of visits and phone calls, trawling the depths of open mouthed ignorance and shameful incompetence. We were also waiting for the council to arrive to mend the boiler. They didn't. The imp grew fretful and began fashioning an army of killer carrots to wage war upon the forces of evil which blight our lives, then grew wobblier still and rang her CPN to ask her to pressurise the council into doing something. The imp was cold and in danger of stiffening, swaddled in the depths of her thick winter coat and became uncommunicative. She finally announced she was going out to buy chocolate and vanished for an hour - armed and dangerous. She returned and I went out to buy biscuits and chocolates for myself. Stan descended and took the boisterous Finn out for an evening's fun with his cousin Sally. The imp eventually thawed beneath the rays of an emergency heater a harassed council official had brought round and went to bed where - I'm pleased to report - she slumbers now, while an exhausted Fin is sprawled upon my lap. |
| 26.11.02Tuesday 11.12 Sitting listening to Skinny Puppy. The imp grows restless waiting for the promised council visit. It's cold in the flat and the heater they dropped off last night is a little on the puny side. I worry that today's going to metamorphosise into a horror similar to yesterday. I worked on the website last night until about one in the morning and then slid into bed alongside the imp who murmured "There he is, down there on the floor." "Who is?" "Big Stoney D." "Who?" "Big Stoney D." "Oh. Alright." There followed another half hour or so of gibberish before the imp woke up. We talked about laughing. I told her about how once, when I was a kid, I went to a friend's house for dinner and one of his dad's contact lenses fell out into his mashed potato and gravy and I was convulsed with hopeless laughter - she told me a tale about a female schoolfriend being mistaken for a boy by a visiting writer and how this reduced her to a similar state of incapacity. Then she told me that Stoney D had been a character in her dream - a cheesy DJ who looked like Goldie. We talked for a while about Tony and the Bielbys, about how sinister the idea of them was becoming, and I told her about how I'd had an email from Jake and that he sounded as though he was becoming depressed. Then we went to sleep. I had a dream that I held up the Star Wars character Yoda with a shotgun and stole his mobile phone, with which I attempted to phone my ex-wife. Then I woke up. And here I am. The imp's imped off into town to buy fruit and I'm sitting here holding the baby and waiting for the council to arrive. 13.54 Still no visit from the council, but we have managed to get the boiler going. The fire alarm's playing up again, going off for no reason. The bespectacled imp is now jeering at Day of The Dead. We both enjoy post-apocalyptic movies. We'd both like to live in a post apocalyptic world. Come, come nuclear bomb... |
| 27.11.02 Wednesday I rose early and stomped into town for my 10am appointment with Jacquie Donati at the job centre. The place didn't open til 10 and I was there early so I had to spend ten minutes milling around outside with a load of badly dressed dolies like a nextra from a George Romero zombie movie, listlessly bumping into each other, jostling the doors. Finally got inside - she was late. I told her I wanted to set up my own business. She told me I should apply for a job in the china department of Richards, a local department store which the imp and I enjoy visiting and then wandering around fiddling with the toys and guffawing like a couple of clever bastards at the cheesy ornaments. Came home to find a man from the council mending the boiler. Once he'd finished that the Imp and I strolled to Llanfoist to take Sally for a walk and got absoloutely, utterly, pissing wet through. Stan gave us a lift back. Engaged in a bout of naughty behaviour with the Imp and then went to bed. |
| 28.11.02 Thursday Woke up to what we hoped was the postman pushing a giro through the letterbox but was actually the postman pushing a letter from the council through the letter box telling us we owed them loads of money.Walked into town with the Imp to check my bank balance. £1.30, the display screen's familiar and now frankly quite wearisome lament. That's it. £1.30. All we have in the world. So we bought some chocolate and pop and went to the library where the Imp was viciously scratched by a librarian. Then we took Sally for a walk. Aimed for the canal but the Imp had lost it. Walked back into town as it grew dark, bought more chocolate, bummed a lift back with Stan. Played around with the PC, trying to find someone to do the Imp's transdermal implants. She grew tired and befuddled and behaved like a silly imp, forgetting the basics of using a computer and whining so incessantly that I involountarily spurted coffee all down the front of my jumper. She was whining because she wanted to steal a car and go joy riding down the back lanes and I'd told her we couldn't as I wouldn't be able to hotwire it in the dark without a torch. Impractical imp! Sometimes she just refuses to deal with the reality of certain situations... |
| 29.11.02 Friday A day of bizarre omens and strange finds. Walking into town we saw a gang of doves (my unlucky birds) being chased away by a crow (Kate's lucky bird). We went to Llanfoist to take the Doughy Hoglet Dog for a walk alongside the Usk and I found an enormous horse's skull on the bank which I promptly prised out of the mud and offered up to the Imp who was absoloutely enraptured with this surprise gift. We strolled along looking for other bits of dead animals and found the top of a sheep's skull and several interesting bits of driftwood which we picked up. Also saw a huge salmon leap from the swirling torrents and execute a perfect somersault. On our way back we spotted a heron, a kestrel and the usual coven of surly cows lurking in the Castle Meadows. Came back here and feasted extravagently on more bastard toast. By then it was too late for the Imp and I to go and have frenzied sex on the Derry as we'd planned so the dyspeptic Imp took her grumbling innards off to bed with her and I scuttled around in the gloom for a while picking up dog turds before settling down to a couple of hours of Thief. It's now 21.33 and the Imp's pottering and cleaning her beloved skull. Finn slumbers. I'm knackered. The Imp has wandered in munching a sausage. |
| 01.12.02 Sunday The Imp is in Cardiff with Stan so I have the flat to myself for a little while. Yesterday...well, yesterday... I went into town early to buy provisions and the Imp and I then spent a few hours fannying around on the PC before getting ready for our big night out in Abergavenny with Stan. While I was shaving and generally admiring my tattoo the excited imp came into the bathroom clutching something in her trembling hands. "You know that hash I lost when I came back home after visiting you in Selby?" "Yes..." "Well I was just having a look in my medicine bag and..." And there it was. About a teenth of golfball black that I'd thought I would never lay my glazzies on again. It had fallen onto the floor at my mother's house, somewhere in the vicinity of the Imp's armadillo prior to her returning to Abergavenny and had never been found. Until now. Glory be to the Imp. We went to Stan's and ate enormous sausages then I skinned up and we all shared a smoke before heading into town for a night of high culture - a night at the theatre no less. The imp looked trepidatious as we took our seats - i think she was a little too hot and felt somewhat claustrophobic among the clammy press of elderly flesh and the stench of Werther's Originals, noisily sucked, clacking ferociously against false teeth. The moment the lights dimmed and the first actor strutted on stage we began to laugh - painful, wracking, silent laughter, the kind that neccesitates a fist crammed into the mouth to quell the hysterics. It was shit. It was absoloutely aweful. After our initial hilarity at the diabolical amateurishness of the performance had dwindled there was no more laughter. We sat in stunned and appalled silence. Surreptitious glimpses at the imp revelealed a look of slowly deepening horror upon her pallid features. At half time we all acknowleged that it was unadulterated shite and ran away. The Imp and I sat up into the small hours watching videos, having decided that if god had intended us to go to the theatre he wouldn't have given us television, and getting wasted on the newly restored hash. |
| 02.12.02 Monday Praise the lord! At long last the giro has descended! Money in the bank account - at last we can eat! Walked Sally, swept through town and treated ourselves to a tattoo magazine. Came back to the flat and ate a lot of chocolate. The Imp told me that she wanted to evict Seargent Finn and feared she might hurt him if he remained. She admitted to having drugged him twice over the last couple of days with diazepam. I was absoloutely horrified and had to struggle against becoming angry. Sat pretty quietly for most of the evening after that bombshell, went to bed on my own and was woken by a squirming imp a few hours later, complaining of stomach pains. A disturbed night ensued. |
| 03.12.02 Tuesday A stricken imp day, today, with the Imp failing to get out of bed. It was hard to rouse her this morning, all I got for my troubles was some murmering and a milimetre's worth of bleary eyeball appearing through heavy lids. I rang her dentist and cancelled her appointment, pottered around a bit and then marched into town to buy some fruit to cheer her up. Coming back with my rucksack full of provisions it exploded, showering apples and tins of beans over my head and into the rain swept road. Traffic ground to a halt as I scuttled, red faced and harrassed, around in the road, picking battered fruit and provisions out of the puddles. Thought it was a shame the imp wasn't with me - she loves to see people falling over/dropping things etc - especially me. Got back and still couldn't rouse her so rang Aunty Lisa, the Imp's CPN and cancelled her appointment. Occupied myself in various ways for most of the day until about 8pm when I was disturbed by faint, impy beseechings from the hallway. Went out and discovered a naked imp crawling shakily around on the floor, moaning and wobbling. Helped her crawl into bed where she began retching. Grabbed a bin for her to vomit in, nearly knocked her teeth out on the rim as I attempted to manouever it beneath her chin. She brought up a little bile, then began croakily pleading for chocolate. Fed her a flake. She then got dressed and wandered around the flat moaning, padding in and out of the bathroom for an hour before calling a doctor and arranging to meet him at a local practise. The ever dependable Stan was called and nobly took us out there, where the Imp was diagnosed with Cystitis and prescribed some antibiotics by a doctor who'd once described her as 'barking mad.' Came back here, put the imp to bed. |
| 04.12.02 Wednesday As far as I can remember, nothing happened on Wednesday. Aunty Lisa visited and told us that the Imp's 117 is now going to be on Wednesday. The Imp was feeling better. |
agitated
one of those days, don't seem to be able to get anything DONE, flitting from one unfinished task to the next with a sense of mounting panic, time running out, time running faster, pacing, smoking, drinking coffee, can't settle, nothing accomplished, gnawing at my mind, too much to do, a million things started then dropped, haphazard bite marks from the grey flesh of the day, reading this, writing that, click, pace, click
suicide postponed and an introduction to Kate
So for once in my life I'm going to do the decent thing. I'm embarking on a journey which involves a litre of vodka, 20 cigarettes and a packet of razors. I'm not sure how long this journey's going to take or whereabouts I'm going to disembark but the good news is that I'm on the train, I'm comfortable, I've paid for my ticket and I am definitely, incontrovertibly leaving here. At the moment I'm sitting in my flat, feeling the niggling little maggot of nicotine addiction worming into my soul, calling me away from the screen and towards the open window. Once I worried – hell, lots of times I worried – about whether or not my love affair with the cigarette would end up dumping me, betrayed and alone, in the oncology ward but now...it doesn't matter. There's no way on earth I'm going to live long enough for cancer to be an issue, so I can chug away with gay abandon. Smoke upon smoke, it doesn't matter. Having resolved to be dead within the next forty eight hours is extremely liberating – there's nothing now I can't do.
Having said that, 48 hours is quite a long time. The older you get the faster you seem to romp through the months but there are times when life seems to enter bullet time, everything moving so slow you can stand back and watch the vapour trail from every word you utter form and then dissolve. I'm drunk, already, which I have to say is something of a surprise. When did I become such a lightweight? Sometime over the last week or two, presumably. Before then I could drink from as soon as the pubs would let me in until they scraped me up and tossed me out. Today I've had about six vodkas and already I can feel my thoughts turning to mush, my usual articulacy breaking down...I'm sitting here with a chest scored with superficial razor slashes and a burgeoning ...something, fuck, I've forgotten already. But I'm sitting here dripping blood and BLACK EYE, that's what I was going to say, a burgeoning black eye from where my wife punched me in the face a couple of hours ago, and fuck it, I dunno. I'm sitting here counting down to oblivion and you know what – it doesn't feel bad. It feels OK. It feels RIGHT. So there you go. I've got a life story to tell before the sands sift down to nothing. Nobody will read it, those who do won't care, I've got nothing to gain by telling this tell apart from the relief of lancing an emotional boil. So here goes.
This is not in any particular order. So I'm starting with what was, until very recently, the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I was living in Abergavenny, South Wales, with a girl called Kate who I'd met through...fuck, I dunno, are they called The Golden Wheel? Whatever, it's like a pen pal facility for occultisms, oddballs and the mentally ill. I was recovering from my first experience of divorce, living with my mother and picking aubergines for a living and I'd started writing to a girl whose nom de plume was Celtic Princess. She was called Kate, she was quite a bit younger than me and she lived on The Mardy, a sprawling council estate in Abergavenny which, contrary to anything Marty Wilde may have told you is NOT full of paradise people. It pisses it down with rain all the time and the only people who believe they're living in paradise are fucked out of their heads on class A's. Kate was very beautiful, but she was also very mad. She'd had many different diagnoses over the years, and in the end they decided on schizophrenia with a side serving of depression. She heard voices, had two unicorns living with her, walked and talked in her sleep, had made a couple of fairly serious attempts to kill herself and was prone to sudden slumps into almost catatonic misery which came about without warning. She was also incredibly intelligent and incredibly funny. When we met I wanted to look after her, take care of her, be the one good thing in a life which had seen more than its fair share of unhappiness. She was raped at 13, got pregnant, miscarried, and it was round about then that the voices and the visions started. After we spent a couple of months writing to each other she came and stayed with me for a weekend, I then made a couple of trips to see her in Wales and on my last visit she asked me to stay. I did. I just didn't go back home. We had a lovely life together. For a while I couldn't find work and we used to spend all day together talking, walking, reading, being creative. It was like living with some beautiful alien, some impossible being from another realm. There were only a few episodes of acute mental illness during our time together and her health workers were delighted by her progress. I found a job at a local factory and was able to bring a little money home which she usually spent on clothes and jewellery, and we were, most of the time, very happy. Then, I came home from work one day and came across an email that Kate had sent someone, asking them to call her but not to do so when I might be at home. I questioned her about it and she admitted she'd been talking to a man she'd met online, and there were romantic undertones. I was devastated. She was devastated. We sat and spoke and cried then she went out for a walk to clear her head. When she came back she was swaying, her speech was slurred. Overdose. I called an ambulance and struggled to keep her conscious til they arrived. She spent the night in hospital and was released the next day, no harm done. We spent the day talking. She was seriously depressed, saying she'd ruined everything, saying that I'd never see her in the same light ever again. I told her that I was hurt – very hurt, but that my love for her was greater than my pain and that if she wanted to, we could pick up the pieces and carry on. I offered her every alternative – I could stay, I could go, we could try something in between. Whatever she needed, I would have done for her. We went to bed, slept, woke. She phoned her mum who came and picked her up and took her over to her house. Alone in the flat I rolled a spliff and distractedly surfed the web for a couple of hours. I wandered over to the window. A white car pulled up at the kerb and two burly, serious looking men got out and began walking up the path. My first thought was that they were bailiffs, we'd fallen behind with the rent and the council tax. The buzzer sounded and they asked for Kate. Not in, I told them. They asked if they could come in. What's it about? Police, sir, we'd like to talk with you. I didn't know what to think. I let them in. They asked me when I'd last seen Kate.
“A couple of hours ago, why?”
“And how did she seem when she left?”
“Well...she was OK...she's gone round to her mum's...she's not been well, she's got mental health problems...”
“And was she wearing any distinctive jewellery when she left? Does she have any tattoos?”
“Yes, she...look, what's this about?”
They ignored my question. “Do you have a recent photo of Kate?” I handed them one I'd taken only a week ago, Kate sat by a stream in a wood full of daffodils. He looked at it, passed it to his colleague.
“Look, I'm not going to answer any more questions til you give me some kind of clue what's going on – is Kate okay?”
He took a deep breath. There was no emotion in his voice or on his face. He was probably used to giving people bad news.
“The body of a young woman's been found at Raglan Castle – we have reason to believe that it's Kate.”
Monday, 11 April 2011
deadbeat - a stillborn novel - 1999 - chapter three
Fucking freezing back out on the street, and a thick, choking fog billowing up from the river, swirling round the street lights. I’m staggering a little, through the noisy crowds, past the chipshops and dark fronted Indian restaurants, into another pub. A mistake. It’s very noisy in here. The floor is tacky underfoot and a swirling mirrorball adds to my instability as I pick my way between dancers to the bar. I buy a bottle of Grolsch and get a heartbreakingly paltry smattering of change in return. I lean against the bar for support, head spinning, a fat worm of nausea beginning to gnaw at the pit of my stomach. Have I eaten today? I don’t know. I buy a bag of crisps sand stand dribbling crumbs down myself and wanting to sit down. The pounding music is making my skull vibrate. Bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. I drain the bottle of beer, stifle a damp belch and push myself back out into the street, stagger across the road to the low brick wall that runs along the top of the river bank and sit down heavily. The streetlights swim sickeningly, the noise of revellers has a disturbing flanged quality to it. I close my eyes and am beginning to nod off when a car horn bleats. I drag my eyes open. A bright orange Ford Capri has pulled up at the traffic lights and a gang of bristle headed, T-Shirt clad lads are hanging out of the window jeering at me.
“Fuck off,” I mutter, and allow my head to sink again. Some time later I am roused again by the sound of people moving around me. I don’t know how long it has been since leaving the last pub, how long I’ve been slumped there nodding in and out of this nauseating, drunken, fatigued stupor.
Someone’s asking me if I’m alright. I swallow.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” My eyes struggle to focus. Three people. Two boys and a girl. Teenagers.
“Here, have a pull on this.” And someone is thrusting a spliff at me. I take it gratefully. It will have one of two possible outcomes. Either the recognized anti emetic effect of cannabis will calm my guts and chill me out, or I’ll have a whitey – the soul shredding terror attack which descends like an acute case of the worst flu ever upon those lightweights foolish enough to smoke on a stomach full of booze. The smoke tastes good. I shake my head. I vaguely recognize these people – they’re occasional visitors to Ed’s place.
“So,” I ask them, fighting to sound reasonably sober, “What’s going on?”
“We’re on our way to a party – we were just walking past and saw you sitting there looking dead and thought we’d see if you were okay.”
“Come with us,”Suggested the girl.
“Yeah, come with us. You know Kate?”
I shook my head, “I don’t know. Kate. Do I?”
“Todd. Works at Shared Earth in York? Dreads? Goes out with Mark?”
“Oh yeah.” I haven’t got a fucking clue. “How’re you getting there?”
“Walking. She only lives down Ousegate.”
Ousegate. It’s only a few hundred yards away. I could go with them, sit down, drink some water, sort myself out.
“Yeah,” I say, “Why not.”
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