The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  Having shoplifted a litre of vodka, we betook ourselves to a Billy Bragg gig at the Blessed Matt Talbot Hall up the street. The BMT, as it was known, was a gruesome little hovel, having for most of its existence been administered by the Religious Sisters of Mercy, a body that once pipped the Democratic Republic of Zaire to the Oscar for World’s Most Ironically Named Entity. Why they needed a dance hall may only be imagined. A venue for public frightenings, perhaps. By the early 1980s, those pious days were receding but the building, like many bishops, was somehow avoiding demolition despite deserving it. It smelt of mould, rising damp, sinking hope and old facecloth, and had statues of the Catholic martyrs, chipped, dismembered or facetiously defaced, in the grottos of its crumbling alcoves. A shockingly bloodthirsty mural of a half-naked Lord Jesus Christ being scourged by personages who looked like Ron Moody as Fagin adorned the wall behind the mineral bar. A sign on another wall warned ‘Jiving is Forbidden’, you traitorous slut of a wannabe-Protestant, you murderer of the Virgin Mary. Manchester’s finest, the Smiths, would play their first southern gig at the Matt Talbot Hall, a venue whose aura of melancholic ruination seemed, at least to me, the perfect frame for their canvas. Fran said the problem with Morrissey was that he wasn’t sexually ambiguous enough.

  The night Billy Bragg played Luton was bleak and thundery and I was feeling more than a bit querulous. If you are an admirer of what Fran used to term ‘Panglo-Irish literature’ you will understand that in any town with an Irish community the rain surges down without the tiniest respite, not quite as evocatively as it does in a novella or short film but quite a lot more wetly. Well, the night of which I write was a first-class pisser. Bilious roars from the heavens. Horizontal sleet. Zeus was dispensing the thunderbolts and lightning. Luton looked like a Judas Priest album cover.

  The previous week had not been a happy one. Fran found himself a room and moved out of our house. A late essay led to a written warning from my tutor. Far worse was a private failure that was scalding my conscience. Julie Hyland from across the road had asked me to her school-leaving dance but the evening failed to go well. Signals misread, badly paced and anxious drinking, the stupidity of the ‘round-buying’ system. I had made a fool of myself and was ashamed that I’d upset Julie, who had shown a child’s uncomplicated kindness to me when my sister was killed and our family came to live in Luton. She had grown into the smartest and loveliest young woman. The fact that I’d ruined a night when she deserved so much better was following me like a bloodhound incubus.

  I took it into the BMT and it squatted on my back, while we waited for Billy Bragg to come on. The fucked-up grimness, the aroma of elderly priest, was not conducive to cheer. I was and will always remain a strong admirer of the Braggster, but, as with any other musician, you’d want to be in the mood. Drunk, in wet clothes, listening to Barking’s own Woody Guthrie was doing little to raise the spirits. How in the name of Christ could the English call a town ‘Barking’? Given the aggression with which he sang, it wasn’t entirely inappropriate. But still. That name annoyed me. I sat in my soak, occasionally bum-shuffling for warmth. There seemed an awful lot of songs about girls who didn’t want you. An awful lot of songs about Trez.

  Well, then there were songs about the wickedness of the tabloid press, and then there were songs about Missus Fatcha. He flailed with tight-jawed fervency at his gloriously loud electric, this one-man Clash, this hammer out of Essex, sweating, apparently on cue. The oppressing of Winnie Mandela, a widely admired personage (outside of Soweto), was condemned in rough four-four. Integrity in a polo shirt stomped and proclaimed and head-butted the mic and pogoed. I agreed with every denunciation busting forth from the PA, but I sensed a growing tension beside me.

  Fran always avowed a loathing for any music that had, or thought it had, a political message, especially if he shared its politics. Personally, I feel the converted are entitled to a sermon now and again, and there are times when fish in a barrel require to be shot, otherwise what is the point of having fish, but he didn’t see it that way at all. He was hard to bore in those days, but ardency bored him. Billy was beginning to burble, he felt; Billy was ‘bellying on’. Fran’s response was to start boring me nearly to violence by communicating his boredom, repeatedly, with nudges, as I tried to focus on the torrid ballads of lonely rebuffings that I’d entered this place to enjoy. Well, by now we were being reminded in jangling G-7th that fascism is not a good thing. The audience, not wanting to be outdone, howled accordance. ‘Intolerance’ was an evil, Billy Bragg announced, and the punters, stoked on lager and rereadings of op-eds in The New Statesman, bellowed for the intolerant never to be tolerated, to be strung from the lamp posts in their pants at dawn and buried in quicklime afterwards. ‘The Trade Union Movement’ was, contrariwise, most excellent in every way and must be supported by all non-Nazis. Again, I agreed. Power to the People. But the cold and the wetness and being told of Fran’s boredom were stirring some drunken resentment. The windmills getting speared would still be there in the morning. What was the point of our presence? I felt like one attending a meeting of kind-hearted grandmothers who were being invited to concur that, generally speaking, little children are preferable to Satan.

  He, Fran, kept threatening to sod off, and I told him to sod off if he wished to. One of his immaturities was that he didn’t realise you were not going to beg, that you had a fragile but calculable investment in yourself to maintain, no matter how his neediness might provoke it. You want to go? Fine. Close the door on your way. Did I ask you to remain? Did I fuck. Among the compromised, pretending indifference is a means of saving face, a tactic our friendship had taught me. Anyway, he had annoyed me by dressing in a provocative manner that evening; culturally not sexually provocative. One irony of rebellion is that it wears an extremely prescribed uniform. It was de rigueur for male youths at an event of leftist tenor to sport either black second-hand donkey jackets or denim dungarees and a bobble hat – perhaps with a little badge professing allegiance to the ANC or beleaguered Chileans/whales/Laotians/Ken Livingstone pinned where someone would notice it, like on your tit. But Bucko had pitched up in his powder-blue belly-top and pixie boots, his face like the cake in ‘MacArthur Park’ that someone left out in the rain. It was wearing thin. The attitude, not the make-up, although actually that was wearing thin too. Obviously, they were looking at him. How would they not? Lutonians are a curious people. But he resented the very mild and fleeting glances his deportment had been conjured to stir. He was in this era one of those bohemians whose constant cry is to be left alone and not stared at while sashaying down the street in tiger-skin thong and ball-gag with a nipple-clamped gimp in a nappy. I exaggerate, of course. Yet this was his view. And you can’t have it both ways. But he tried to. The only point during the concert when he stopped his whispered decrials was when a party of drunken Trots started heckling Billy Bragg for not supporting the IRA, or perhaps for singing too many songs about girls who don’t want you, or likelier for not singing enough of them. A great deal of stolen vodka had gone south by then. Jamaica’s second-most-famous export after reggae had also been consumed in hefty measure, along with a flagon of cider. The Trots were calling Billy ‘a Tory’, which in those days wasn’t good unless you were the majority of the British electorate.

  By the time I got home that night, Jimmy was in a state of what used to be called, by him certainly, ‘high dudgeon’. With the chilly summons ‘Oi, Bollocky Bill’, I was beckoned to the kitchen as I tried to creep up the strangely reversing escalator that my drunkenness made of the stairs. His visage appeared at me kaleidoscopically, revolving in quartet, like the faces of Queen in the video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Alcohol is a terrible thing.

  Not only had he opened the electricity bill, the monthly arrival of which he feared and detested, blaming me for turning on the immersion deliberately for no other purpose than to enrage him (largely true), but the phone had been ringing like that of ‘a whure-house in the Vatican’. Telephones, in those less advan
ced days, used to ring when they rang, not bleep, chirp, play the riffs from ‘Dancing Queen’ or ‘Gangnam Style’ or recordings of Simon Cowell disappointing a child. He was angry, tired, hungry, vengeful, and scarlet as an aroused baboon’s arse. Bad enough that I should treat his home ‘like a fukken hotel’ but now I was treating it ‘like a fukken office for daisies’ and he wouldn’t stand for it, did I hear, no he wouldn’t. Who did I think I was? Colonel Tom fukken Parker? The image of ‘an office for daisies’ was threatening to make me laugh, Quentin Crisp dusting the photocopier, Oscar Wilde typing invoices, the noted female-impersonator Danny La Rue high-kicking about the works canteen in taffeta. And it was always hard not to laugh when Jimmy gave out to you if he was wearing his zookeeper’s uniform and when he used the noun ‘daisy’ in that way. But I tried not to. To him, the word meant directionless layabout rather than effeminate person, not that these categories were mutually exclusive in what he often called his way of thinking.

  ‘Some daisyboy, aren’t you? Clueless O’Reilly. The varsity man in my hole.’

  With no small effort, I managed not to chuckle.

  ‘Backchat me, Mister, and I’ll put you on that road! You may up and pack your bags and away to some gin-shop with my foot up your transom as you go.’

  Again, I suppressed any bleat of mirth. I was afraid I might befoul myself if I surrendered at all. There was a technique I had perfected of grinding my fingernails into my palms and staring impassively at the wall behind him. The small pain produced by the grinding I had found a way of translating into a steely-faced, sullen, shark-like coldness, an unreachable Arctic of teenaged contempt with igloos of malice in its glare. But I was hoping to Holy Jesus that he did not address me as ‘Bridget’, a thing he often did when in the windstorms of his annoyance. It could reduce me to bawls of uncontrollable laughter, and I didn’t want those to happen.

  ‘A nice gentleman I am after raising in this misfortunate house and the whiff of drink off you enough to floor a fukken racehorse. Chomping Polo Mints, were we, beyond on the bus? Well, the jig is up, Bridget. I know that game. When’s this do you think I was born?’

  I was going to say ‘11 BC’ or something easy like that. For the moment, I held my powder.

  My fukken tea was fukken ruined, he continued, accusingly. My parents were of that Irish class and generation that had its dinner at lunchtime and its tea at six o’clock in the evening following ‘the Angelus bells’ on the radio. Point out that they were ‘pips’, not actual bells, and Jimmy would warn you not to upset your mum by further displays of smart-arsery. If you hopped the ball by telling him that ‘dinner’ was a repast taken in the hours of darkness, he accused you of fancying yourself a member of the British Royal Family, an entity he disparaged while being magnetised to its marriages, its comings and multiple goings. The word ‘supper’ would have got you veritably flogged by his mockeries. I knew. I had tried it out and was building up to ‘luncheon’, saving it for a wintry Sunday when amusement might be needed in the house, one of those sad little windswept cabin-fever Sabbaths when Only Fools and Horses wasn’t on. He yanked open the under-sink bin to show me the congealing or coagulating remains of my meal. It was, had once been, beans and a rasher. There were hungry souls in the world this night, he thundered.

  ‘Send them that, so.’ I nodded.

  That was lovely talk now, God forgive me for a reprobate. Had he dared to disrespect his own father, Lord have mercy on the same, ‘the cunt would have killed me stone dead’. It was down on my ignorant knees I should fall, for the mercies of the Deity and His providence. The peoples of Ethiopia would give their every graven idol to be me, fed by caring elderly parents of martyric unselfishness whilst I dandied about the town like a playboy. To awaken in 57 Rutherford Road would be the summit of their dreams. Gratefully they would clear a table to earn their board-and-lodging about the place and would not assume the words ‘dishwasher’ or ‘chimneysweep’ meant his wife. If male they would take out the rubbish or mow the fukken grass and would sometimes bring the dog for a walk. They would go to Mass when told to and not be shaming the household. Unlike my brother and me, they would shrink from belief in a supernatural presence called ‘Captain Daz’ whose purpose was to gather besmirched garments or bed-linen from a reeking clump in the wardrobe and convey them to the laundry basket. These unfortunates would use the antiperspirant and foot-powder my mum had bought for them in Boots and be thankful for the insole deodorant. The bedroom charitably provided for them would not be ‘a slag-heap’ or ‘the County of Bedfordshire Dump’. But what had he and his espoused saint received by way of appreciation or acknowledgement? (A slap in the kisser for their troubles.) What was it a mortal sin to waste? (Good food.) Where and when would I burn? (In Hell, one day.) Who, precisely, did I think I was? (Depends how you’re framing the question.) Jimmy was such a good-natured man that seeing him lose his temper was ridiculous, like watching the Dalai Lama do the Twist. My ‘comeuppance’, his favourite word, was coming soon. When was I last to Confession?

  ‘I don’t believe in Confession.’

  Here I had the Jimster rather against the ropes, because I knew he didn’t believe in it either. But it was interesting to see how he’d fight his way out. ‘Oh, he doesn’t believe in Confession. Wonderful, tell us more. What else do you not believe in, Mr Daisy?’

  Any symphony of Jimmy’s fury would include this allegro spiritoso passage, where he’d repeat your most recent utterance of daisyfication to some invisible magistrate in the room. I listed some of the other things in which I didn’t believe: deep-pan pizza, the likeability of the seaside, the posthumous apparition of holy virgins to pubescent girls in grottos, the fretless bass guitar, the too-frequent cutting of my toenails, the capitalist system, hummus, optimism, Western civilisation, Spandau Ballet. Some daisies believe Miss Piggy will eventually marry Kermit, I expounded – generally the more imaginative of the flora. Sooner or later, we got around to the immersion heater, as sooner or later the Arabs and the Israelis get around to the borders of Palestine. Clearly the fukken immersion was something I did believe in, since my devotion to it was fukkenwell frenzied. He produced the electricity bill from the pocket of his epaulette-gilded tunic as though it were a piece of revolting pornography he had found beneath my mattress. Mum didn’t have a pair of pincers among the accoutrements of her kitchen. Had she had them, he’d be using them now. His glower was fierce and avenging as he twirled that gruesome document, evidence of my lizard depravity. ‘Love does not rejoice in the wrong,’ the Good Book tells us. In the case of Jimmy Goulding, it did.

  How many baths a day did I think I needed? (Five, I said. No more.) Was I of the view that his money grew on the trees? (Did it not?) I must be the cleanest fukken student in the greater Luton area. (Not hard.) Did I think him a fool? (In which sense?) How often did I think he had bathed when a boy back in Dublin? (Biannually.) What had he done to deserve this abuse? (Difficult. Maybe blame it on the boogie?)

  That was nice talk indeed I had learned at the college, an institution he imagined as conducting seminars on insolence and perversion before everyone ‘minced off for a coffee’. Mrs Burchmore across the road had witnessed me ‘spitting in her rockery’. I had given ‘a funny look’ to Mr Prior down the newsagents. Where would the infamy end? This led back by no circuitous route to the question of the telephone, my overuse use of same, for no Christian purpose, but for organising my indolence and debauchings (if only), now for auditioning drummers. Well the gravy train stopped here. I must reckon him ‘a tool’. The piss would no longer be taken. I was treating him as the PAYE department of the Inland Revenue treated him, viz, a muggins mcbride to be soaked. Well I’d milk him no more. He was ‘nobody Rosie’. The milk truck done shut down.

  I pointed out to the several Jimmies assailing me that someone ringing the house did not cost us, i.e. him, any money, but as always when confronted by rational opposition he insisted this wasn’t the point. After a day spent hefting carrion into the vultu
res, chasing an escaped tapir throughout the immensity of Whipsnade Zoo’s bus park and shouting at disreputable Scousers in the penguin enclosure, he was entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his home. The telephone his labours provided was not my individual property. My mother, he continued, was being driven out of her mind. ‘And she doesn’t have far to go!’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Tell you this, Mister Lip, there’s a new sheriff in town. Your daisying days are over.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Don’t you answer me back! Enough of your smartness, my gosser. Am I running a fukken employment exchange for your daisying friends, you twittering impudent maggot? I’ll give you fukken drummers. Up your sainted idle hole! Do you know what I was doing tonight while you were fannying around like a Mary? I was bottle-feeding a poor little pygmy marmoset whose mother abandoned him. Imagine what he’d give to be you and your brother. Get up to that sty of a bedroom and study.’

  ‘I did a lot of study today,’ I countered when I had finished gnawing my lips. ‘I wrote an essay on William Blake’s imagery.’

  ‘Oh Jaysus, stop the lights. You poor lamb.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic about it,’ I said, deliberately riling him. Jimmy was a large man in those days and had a tendency to sweat a lot when angry, and this, combined with his cue-ball baldness, could sometimes produce the remarkable effect of the perspiration on his scalp being evaporated by the heat of his ire, resulting in what looked like smoke pouring from his head. When this happened, and it happened not infrequently while Shay and I were in our teens, it was a sight for which queues would form. Jimmy when angry went stark, staring loco. Shay termed it ‘in loco parentis’.

  ‘An essay on Blake’s imagery. Boys oh boys.’ Notwithstanding that it didn’t mention sociology, a study Jimmy defined as ‘the science of destroying society’, the phrase encompassed everything he found suspect in third-level education, a system he felt had only been put in place to give bigamists something to do for a living. Every time he repeated the sentence, he vocally italicised another of its hated words. ‘An essay on Blake’s imagery. An essay on Blake’s imagery. It’s exhausted you must be. Rest your brains.’