‘Wicked,’ I said and clicked my fingers. Penny undid the seal at the top of the fresh bread and fingered her way down the slices, past the heel and a couple beyond, to pull out a perfect slice, and I wondered, if we really were going to leave today – to what I imagined would be certain death – how the hell exactly I’d got here. Which was the first domino starting the sequence that would end with me knocked into some trench in a provincial football stadium? Helen? The job? The fall?
Hospital. That was where you would say it had started. I’d ended up in hospital because of the final fall, but hospital was the link to Von. Our meeting in hospital: that was the silver thread that was going to lead to my death, when they traced it back – the tracers – if they could even be bothered.
Chapter 4
I WAS IN a pre-med room getting dosed up before having my arm bones pinned back together, when Von was trolleyed in, legs jiggling on his wheelie stretcher. His first words to me were delivered straining like a mummy out of its sarcophagus, asking my advice as to whether he should admit to the nurse that it was taking much longer than he had expected for him to come down from a powerful Ecstasy tablet.
‘Definitely yes,’ I said. But Von got caught on a wave of euphoric abandon, one of the pill’s last big beats of love, and as he grimaced through the final shudder of the previous night, he said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not doing this all again. I’m gonna give it a go!’
I really thought that would be the last I ever saw of this son of Surrey or wherever – waggling some heavy-metal devil-horns back at me like he was in a video, not his actual life. He was wheeled off around the corner, so merry and high he would have raved on to the rhythm of a heart monitor if he’d heard one ping. But no, as it turned out, the downers fought the uppers sufficiently hard that they knocked out the big ox and he came round with his sinuses drained and all well.
We stayed on in the same recovery ward that night with an old soldier guy who’d fought the Germans in Italy and seemed all charming and wily until he started to talk about how he’d ‘do’ our various nurses: this one in a cupboard; this one in a paddling pool; and one of them via a tabletop go-cart contraption of his own design – he had drawings – pulleys and spindles to be constructed so he could stay still at the table’s edge while she was zoomed ecstatically in and out on his stationary member.
The old Lancashire geezer laughed and Von laughed back. He had the gift of being so totally comfortable with his privilege that everyone else was also put at ease. The next morning when the nurse brought a hand mirror so he could check out his swelling, it gave him visible pleasure to see himself again, that handsome blond best friend. His own countenance in that looking glass was a little pre-breakfast treat – a bump of coke, to put a zing in his day.
With his mild good manners and self-mocking benevolence, Von opened a little porthole and I climbed through and soon enough I was round for a smoke, and was unobjectionable enough to join his posse on nights out. I had no sense of how these rich Londoners regarded me – he lived with three big strong young southern men – whether they laughed about me, or tolerated me, or just watched me float past as they sat on the sofa, stoned and insensible. But with my building-site wages, I could stand a round and my tin usually had some weed in it, and anyway, in the end, the people who get to be in the gang, who are they but the ones who put in the hours? Plus, I realised, I had a certain cachet – not being a student, working on a building site. To them it was almost like I was someone ‘real’.
His place was disgusting. A terraced house in Withington where they piled their washing-up in the bath and eventually started pissing on it. But it was still good to get out. I’d followed Helen from the Welsh borders to Manchester and at our place, by then, things were increasingly shitty. Helen worked night shifts at a bakery and I was on labourer’s hours: early start, early finish. Often I’d come home after work to her waking and having a 5 p.m. breakfast, all woozy. I’d be knackered, my legs wobbling, my hair brittle with brick dust and cement, and my back aching for the plastic squeak of the avocado bathtub. I’d be ready to let the day sink away and be good to myself while she was looking through the binoculars of her false morning to all the troubles ahead.
We rarely shared a bed now and I would take my weekends on the weekend, while hers were Tuesday and Wednesday, so nothing matched and more and more she went clubbing alone. I tried not to think about where she spent the after-party hours before she came back home, fragile and asexual – a little nubbin on the settee, warm and vulnerable and drinking her tea with big eyes, backcombed hair wilting, hungry for cigarettes and gas fire. Those were our best times actually, when she was too queasy to talk and I could give her a cuddle and be forgiving of all because I could pretend there was nothing to forgive so long as she didn’t tell me.
From my end, I tried to package up the stories of what I’d seen round at the student houses Von took me to, but they never landed. I couldn’t quite describe how exotic they all smelt, how I’d seen such remarkable things: young people swaggering with such unwarranted confidence, people eating meals of extraordinary sophistication: a girl who ate a plump little steak, still red in the middle, with nothing but some lettuce leaves and olive oil – Star Trek food; glasses of wine that went undrunk as people left for the pub, the whole second half of a bottle sometimes that didn’t get finished, just abandoned on a table and forgotten.
I couldn’t really frame all that. How I loved them, and hated them, with their electric toothbrushes in the bathroom, too lazy to waggle, grotesque and terrifying pretend little adults.
For a while I tried to include her – took her to the pub one terrible night with Von and his pals where she was so quiet and he was so loud. She didn’t like them. Didn’t like the look of them or the sound of them. They made her queasy and she felt, moreover, that her discomfort somehow, obscurely, was the price of their ease.
That night, as we listened to Von and his friends talking – about London and the people they knew and the rich thatch of connections that kept them warm and dry – I knew Helen well enough to feel the little spring of fury bubbling in her breast. My forehead grew hot, worrying that she was going to burst and accuse them of some unspecific social crime. But, instead, she went inward and dragged a torn beer mat along the grooves of the pub table. I smiled and nodded along with the conversation, throwing glances like fishing nets at her, trying to pull her in, but she refused to be caught. When they went outside for a joint, I asked her outright, ‘C’mon, Hel, what’s the problem?’
She just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, shut up, you rich fucking bastards.’
I shook my head, as if she had failed to live up to our credo of universal human commonality – speak as you find, and so on. But really I admired her a bit for the steely, almost sectarian, edge to her rejection.
So I stopped talking about them, started not to mention how often I climbed on the student buses and went down to the wide suburban streets of south Manchester to visit. Instead, when Helen came home knackered from work, in the grey mornings in the back kitchen where no sunlight ever made it, I’d throw her thoughts about my other obsession: my own personal foreign policy options. She’d smoke cigarettes as I explained to her my idea of what I called FMI, ‘forced mass intervention’. That was my Balkans policy and I had been refining it for some time – ever since I’d got back into current affairs.
*
For a while, when everything had been going well, I’d somewhat got out of history. I was nineteen, twenty, still living at home above the pub that my parents sometimes claimed, trying to drum up business, straddled the border – lounge in England, bar in Wales. It didn’t. We were located across the river, on the dark north-facing side of the valley, the English hinterland of my Welsh town-village, Chirk. This was ’89, ’90, and everyone I knew had a car. We’d drive twenty miles deep into Wales, smoke a joint, and jump into pools where deep cold mountain rivers eddied. Then we’d go out and drink and then back to someone’s place to talk an
d sleep like happy dogs wherever we lay.
One night I ended up in a sleeping bag next to Helen. She always watched everyone quietly with wide blue eyes. But that night I found out what she was thinking. She whispered funny generous things about our friends and we laughed. We cuddled chastely, from inside the double prophylactic bags, then got together properly the next week. We’d travelled to Stoke together, legs pressed up in the back of the same Honda Civic, and when we made love at her parents’ place the next day it was buttery and gentle. She went to work and I stayed in her bed, up in the converted shed-barn behind the farm, so happy I did a bit of solo music-less dancing, threw myself back against the thick stone wall and shouted ‘Fuck you!’ merrily into the mirror.
Helen was hot. That is, it felt like her thermostat was broken. She was so warm to the touch when we slept in the same bed I had to roll far from her radiating heat. She’d grown up on that farm. It was situated in the soft round end of a valley, a finger poked into the Welsh Hills, where the climate was equitable. Spring came early and summer lasted a long time. Her hippy parents had claimed the spot in the seventies. She had been friends with a boy from the hill farm up above. Like Heidi, from age four or five she’d climb the hill to go and see him. They played together every day for years until they moved on to certain naughty games in the hay barn and, caught by his mother, Eden got ended and she wasn’t allowed to go round any more.
She told me that story a month after we’d got together. I liked her a lot. We hung out all the time, and in the end we called what we were in ‘love’ because we didn’t really know what else it might be. It was certainly nice.
So around then, if I saw the news at all, it seemed natural to me that people would knock down walls and let noble old black gentlemen out of jail. History seemed to be getting on really well without any intervention from me.
Then things started to break up. Me and Helen seemed solid, but a couple of the older lads went to colleges and university and cities, then a couple more girls went to jobs or courses. But there were still three or four of us, including Helen, who were planning, getting our shit together, going in – when it suited us, but overall less and less – to the sixth-form college which was more of a hangout than a place of education. Those of us who remained in town would zoom up at weird times of the night to Sheffield and Leeds and Liverpool, to student-housing blocks, with our glamorous quantities of wage money fluttering at the lips of our wallets. Much better, it seemed sometimes, than actually attending. I read the NME, sitting out in the backshop of a low-price supermarket off across the border near Wrexham.
Helen leaving for university kicked off in earnest the evolution of my Balkan policy. I looked around one September and suddenly what everyone had joked hard and funny about all summer, how I’d be the last one left, how I should, finally, actually decide where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, was suddenly, unamusingly, true. It had seemed unreal through August, but now Helen was in Manchester, her shared phone often engaged, her letters a page or two shorter than mine and my banged-out Mini was the only car left crawling the country lanes at night, looking for a spot to smoke a joint.
In my darkening mood, left alone in the sour-smelling supermarket, the siege of Vukovar started to seem like the sort of thing that would of course happen in the world. Mandela was out and the Berliners were free – but it was all so much more complicated than that. For the first time in my life I looked at my dad’s Express in the morning. Then I started to buy my own Independent. Through the mornings I’d read a book – anything counter-cultural: Miller, Bukowski, Vonnegut, those lovely guys at first. Then my pal in Liverpool sent me his reading list and soon enough I found I was ahead of him. At the supermarket, hiding round the back, resting up on the soft bed of a pallet of nappies, I had a great deal more time for study than anyone starting at university, surrounded by lots of interesting and potentially naked fellow young people.
After fiction in the mornings, at lunch I’d go to this place, the European Delicatessen, where all the delights of the Continent were brought together for the enjoyment of the Welsh Marches. Quite the Mitteleuropean I’d feel as I ate an Edam and piccalilli and value-mayonnaise baguette, followed by a custard tart with a cup of tea and some modernist poetry spread across my lap. Through the afternoon I read non-fiction, theory, news magazines and the paper.
At first it was hard to know who to root for. Yugoslavia had seemed like a sort of fair-enough option to the stupid Left through the eighties. No one wanted to go the whole Stasi, but maybe a bit non-aligned and Yugoslav would be good? There was affection for that rambling nation; you could go there on holiday and if Tito and his partisans had murdered some tens of thousands or so in the mid-forties – well, in the arithmetic of the Second World War, you could round that down to nothing at all.
The Croats, I read, had a nasty, chequered little history to hide. Nevertheless, as their poor beautiful Vukovar was strafed, the first plank of my Balkan policy was laid down and it was this: don’t bomb people. Do not blow human beings up. This led me, deductively, to support Vukovar against the Yugoslav National Army.
Round then, I asked Helen if I could come up and live with her, if she’d move out of her halls of residence and in with me? I made my request by letter, enclosing for comment, also, a long letter to the New Statesman on the situation in the Balkans. I called her up the next day to ask for her reaction. She told me my letter on current affairs was very powerful, but she hadn’t been able to finish it in its entirety because she’d fallen asleep on it midway through, and her drool had made all the ink run. I laughed and asked if I could move in with her. She said no and I made out I was just very unhappy about all the conflict in the world.
I was going through a mildly pacifist stage anyway. The shop lads in the supermarket contained a mini-crew who were Wrexham Frontliners – a football-related organisation dedicated to talking about, at very great length, and occasionally doing, violence. Often they’d make jokes about how if I ever did a night shift with them they’d give me a Chelsea smile with a Stanley knife. I didn’t find those jokes very funny. One of the lads, Neil, had gone to court for breaking a Scouser’s leg with a fencing post at a pre-season friendly.
I could see why they hated the English: pretty, sandy, walled Chester, where I drove to buy jeans and records; pimply, correct Shrewsbury, up on its hill, gift-ribboned by the Severn below. Both were an affront to flat Wrexham, drab on its plain – I could see that. But it still seemed rather tough on me that I should feel a whirr of fear whenever I walked into the stockroom on a quiet night.
One on one, the Frontliners were fine. But in a group, if there were three or more, it could go dark. One time I wandered around into the backshop to find Neil’s pal Sion pulling up his trousers after laying a shit on a flattened cardboard box. Then, as I tried to back away unnoticed, I got hauled into the circle and was invited to watch as he picked up the turd, munched it, and then offered me a bite. It was an inch from getting thrust in to my mouth before I realised it was Soreen Malt Loaf scrunched shit-shaped – we all laughed. But instead of making me part of the gang, it seemed I’d got my reaction wrong. That I was too disgusted by the crap-eating masquerade, all prim and uppity and English about faeces consumption.
A week later, I was drinking in Wrexham on a Friday night when I got spotted by the Frontliners as I nipped out of the pub to use the cashpoint. From the opposite side of the road they called me ‘Bertie Woofter’ and ‘English Bridget’, after the song ‘Always Shit on the English side of the Bridge’. It all seemed quite matey in its aggression initially – I took a mock bow as they chanted ‘cunt, cunt, cunt’ and they all laughed at that. There were a couple of lads with them hanging back in the shadow of a passageway smoking, lads who weren’t from the supermarket, and one of them chucked a two-pence coin over at me. As I read it, if I didn’t respond I was inviting trouble, so I sang out a round of ‘Does Your Sister Know You’re Out Shagging Sheep?’ With just me, against the seven of them,
the insult felt humorously ironised by my physical inferiority. But I guess they felt it was insufficiently ironised, because a bunch of the lads darted for me. I turned and started running fast up Hope Street.
My pursuers were more pissed than me and one tripped and a couple lost heart. Soon I too was tired, and only Sion – the friendliest of them – was left chasing me. ‘Andy!’ he shouted.
‘Why are they chasing me, Sion?’ I asked, stopping up and drawing deep breaths.
But as I said it, he took my arms and buckled my knees from behind so I was low down when the others arrived. I didn’t try to get away because it seemed like it might still be a joke if I treated it like one.
The biggest lad punched me. ‘Oh aye, fucking yes!’ someone said to him, but the punch came in at a weird angle so it didn’t really land. I didn’t look up at them or struggle; the whole incident was so degrading I didn’t want to ennoble it with any form of resistance. I just wanted it over. Then three others came in close to give me knees in the face, more grinds than blows, but still the blood came from my nose, warm and worrying and fast.
Back at work that week, like a bit of shameful alley sex, we all pretended the assault hadn’t happened. Sion made me a cup of tea on a tea run, but another lad asked me pretend-innocent how I’d fucked my nose up so that others could laugh. It wasn’t the main reason I left for Manchester, but I didn’t want to be around there any more. Helen had fallen out with the girls she was living with by then. She said she was happy to move in to the dark little place I found for us. Every other Saturday we could hear the groans from the Man City ground nearby and we watched the damp grow up the wall like an advancing army on a map.
Chapter 5
BY THE TIME I first met Penny, Helen had dropped out of her course, landed onto the night shift, and we were into our slump. I’d always known deep down that Helen sometimes fucked other people. When I rumbled her and we fell out, she said that she would ‘try not to do it again’, if she could, and she was very sorry that I was so sad. But there was this subtext that I was perhaps making a bit of a fuss about her simply being very nice to interesting and attractive people she met in nightclubs.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 3
