Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

 My 500 is better than The Rolling Stone 500 

In September 2021, esteemed rock mag Rolling Stone published a list of what they believed to be the 500 best songs ever. Gauntlet thrown sufficiently downward, and fuelled by a lifelong addiction to lists, lists of any kind but especially music lists, lists being the way in which a young me made sense of the world, I decided to make my own. Anyway, I did and there’s a playlist.

In October, bored and listless, I decided to write a little about each song. Something that it provoked in me. Not always a critique, not always a memoir about my relationship to that song, sometimes it would be fiction, or poetry. I hadn’t yet decided. I would do a song at random, the Spotify shuffle would be my muse…

#217 – Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood – Nina Simone.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

 

THURSDAY NIGHT

Joanne rings me to tell me that it’s over and that I should bring our son with me to meet her tomorrow to begin the rest of our lives separately. I’m stood in my parents’ kitchen verbally nodding into a telephone receiver the colour of sick and trying not to cry. 

 

Our son is sat on my father’s lap, less than three feet from me, my dad forlornly trying to persuade him that what he really wants is to eat the mash potato he has served up for dinner. 

 

Joanne says she’s had time and space to think and that she can’t forgive me for what I did. 

 

She says her parents will pay for the most expensive solicitors in the world if I don’t show up. 

 

She apologises. 

 

I gulp hard. 

 

She says to meet her at 12 tomorrow outside Tesco. 

 

Ok. 

 

And that was the end of us. 

 

 

FRIDAY MORNING 

 

I never saw a sun shining with quite the ferocity as the day I woke up knowing I was going to have my heart smashed into a thousand ugly pieces at noon. Absolutely tore through the curtain, a big old golden fuck you and your imminent sadness. My forehead getting a bead on before I’ve even worked the piss out of my boner. Downstairs my mum is making a fuss over my son. My dad has gone to work. 

 

I slept. Not much, but enough to remember something in a dream. 

 

I was back at school. 8 maybe 9 years old and the headmaster is giving a sermon in the school hall. Or a parable. Or something. The headmaster used these sermons as a way of saying “I know some of you little cunts have been bad. And this is what happens when you do.” He was a squat little man, Mr McBride. He was terrifying in the way that all authority figures with a cane are. 

 

McBride was telling us this story about a boy who vandalised a phone box in a small village not far from our school. The only phone box in the village. Him and his friends. Just smashed it to shit because there was nothing else to do. And one day he comes home from just chilling out with his boys, vandalising stuff and his dad is sparked out on the kitchen floor and his mum is screaming and beating his chest. She says to the boy “Go to the phone and get an ambulance!!” and of course the boy runs like the wind and as he gets to the phone box, he realises that it isn’t going to work and by the time he finds a house with a phone that will let him in, it’s too late. His dad’s dead. 

 

We all sat there in the hall terrified of becoming vandals and having our dads die on us. Even little Stevie Williams and his dad was already dad. Nothing to do with vandalism. He just fell over in Tesco’s.  

 

That Tesco’s is cursed. 

 

I don’t know why I’m thinking of that.  

 

I have to make the most of the hours I have and there aren’t many of them. I go downstairs and my mum has made me a tea which tastes like crap because my gut is all torn with bile.  

 

“You sure this is what you want?” 

 

“I don’t think I have a choice.” 

 

“You’re her parent just as much as Joanne is. Solicitors. We can get solicitors.” 

 

“Mum, they are not going to ever let me be the sole parent. Best I can do is play nice and get to see him weekends. And look maybe if Joanne sees me, sees the two of us, she’ll crumble, she’ll realise what she’s throwing away.” 

 

What she’s throwing away. Me, 21 years old, unemployable, useless, druggie me. Yeah that’s worth diving in the trash bin to salvage. Me and her and our beautiful beautiful fucking baby. 

 

Three years together. Each other’s first. You know what I mean. And it was intense and passionate and angry and dirty and physical and complicated, and you never felt anything like you did, either of you, the fucking animalness of it, the realness of it. And you got her knocked up. Because the pair of you didn’t give a fuck about consequences. Not in those moments. You never knew how it would end, an encounter with her. You could end up with a black eye and a blowjob. It was all you had ever known, romantically speaking, and now it was over.  

 

Three weeks earlier she’s got up early. First time ever. You always got up first, dealt with the baby, did breakfast. Got to the post. 

 

She thinks we’re saving up for a deposit for a house. Joint account. But you’ve been fucking around, getting wasted with your mates and getting drunk the moment she gives you any shit. She’s at work all day doing her degree thing and you’re sat at home with a baby. You have dinner ready for her the moment she’s home and it isn’t enough. She wants to know what you’re doing, what the plan is and you row, and you fuck off out of the flat and get shitfaced with your childless, irresponsible friends. The plan, Joanne, is to live off you as you get progressively more successful. That’s the plan. I don’t have anything else to offer. Childcare and consistency. 

 

Yeah, she opens the bank statement and it’s about 3 grand light. She doesn’t scream. You hear her say “What the fuck.” 

 

The moment you get downstairs you know it’s fucked. No more blowjobs. That shit’s done. You’re fucked. 

 

She packs an overnight bag and goes to her parents. 

 

Her dad turns up and threatens me. Then he punches me. So, his threat was more of a very short-term warning kind of thing. 

 

He goes to take the baby and I tell him that I will have him for abduction there and then. Fuck Joanne. Fuck him. The kid is mine. He goes. He figures with my nose bleeding and everything that it won’t look good for him if the cops come. He used to be a cop. I don’t know why he left but he did, and I don’t think he has many friends there. Or anywhere else for that matter. 

 

My boys Neil and Phil turn up. We pack everything up and drive to my parents in Neil’s van. Neil has a van that he uses to deliver food to school canteens. It’s a side-line. His main job is pretending to be a student even though he got kicked out two years back for the small crime of running a pirate radio station from the college chapel. Phil is somehow, still a student. Thirty miles to my parents and though they are delighted to see the grandson, they’re not so keen on my backstory. 

 

I spend the next 3 weeks either on the phone to Joanne or rehearsing all the things I will say to her next time I am on the phone. But nothing works. Trying to explain, trying to pretend I have a plan. Not apologising. Then apologising. We bawl and cry and scream at each other and my dad takes me to the village pub, and I tell him everything. He doesn’t punch me or threaten to.  

 

The reason he’s left for work so early is to make sure I don’t see him cry, saying goodbye to his grandson. 

 

So now it’s 8am. My bus to Lampeter is at 9.25. Next bus is to Carmarthen at 10.40. I’ll literally have fifteen minutes or so to wait to be heartbroken when I arrive. 

 

I shower, I shave. I want to look salvageable, like something you might want to reconsider. But I know it’s no good. I’m wearing the Van Gogh t-shirt she bought me. I don’t know anything about art. But it’s a guy with a bandage round his head. He’s cut his ear off apparently. Fuck knows what she sees in me that she sees in Van Gogh. But it’s clean. And I’m looking good. I’m no oil painting, Van Gogh or not, but I don’t look like complete shit. That’s all on the inside. 

 

He looks like her. Nothing like me. We had a row where I accused Joanne of not being faithful. That the boy wasn’t mine. I began to see in his tiny, beautiful face traces of Big Kieron, who she’d always fancied. I didn’t care much for Big Kieron as you can imagine and he was definitely around the scene around the time she fell pregnant. But I can’t deny we definitely had drunken, unprotected sex around that same time.  

 

I wanted the boy to be mine.  

 

Who fucking knows? 

 

Now it’s time to go and I grab the pushchair out and put it in the front garden. My Mum has the boy in a t-shirt and shorts, and he has his favourite cuddly elephant tight in his mitt. I strap him in and tell Mum I’ll be back tonight, most probably, but I’ll let her know. 

 

The bus is on time. Dai Price is still driving it today. He has driven that bus since God was a foetus and doesn’t appear to have aged any further than the 800 years old he has always been. 

 

“Right Dai. Single to Lampeter, please mate.” 

 

“Right.” 

 

The bus is not quite pre war though the ticket stub is – the print barely visible. I get the boy out the chair and sit him on my lap, and I point out sheep and cows because that’s what you’re supposed to do. And he knows about sheep and cows, he’s nearly two, so he makes the noises and the old woman opposite me smiles politely though she probably thinks I’m a dick. Which I am. 

 

Off by the Black Lion. Fucking murder a pint though I am with child and the pub ain’t open yet. And she’ll know if I’ve had a can so that’s out the question. This is a test. It ain’t over. I just got to look like something worth giving another go, that’s all. I go to the florist and I come out again empty handed because fuck it, she’s never going to give me another chance, flowers or not. Peace offering. Yeah that might work. I roll the phrase around my mouth to try it out. Peace offering, I picture myself saying casually as I produce the flowers from behind my back, sly magician that I am. 

I don’t buy the flowers. 

 

Next bus is on time too. It’s all go. The gods clearly want me to be on time. The sun is shining. There’s a florist opposite the bus station in Carmarthen, if I’m quick and I’m willing. I check the boy doesn’t need the toilet. I feel like I could puke, shit and piss all at once but I can’t. I got to see Joanne. And then I can explode after. 

 

Off we go. Down the hill past the coloured houses and the shit supermarket. Over the bridge, out of Ceredigion, quaint, racist, backwards, beautiful Ceredigion and into the unholy alcoholocaust of Carmarthenshire. Cwmann. Llanybydder. Llanllwni. Pencader. New Inn….shithole village after shithole village pass by with their names like misspelt diseases. I can’t go back tonight. I’ve got to get Joanne back. Whatever it takes. 

 

A boy of about 16 gets on in Peniel. He’s a cadet, full camo. Probably going to the barracks in Carmarthen. I think about how young he is and how he might be dead before he’s the age I am now. As he makes his way down the bus his backpack blocks out the sun through the front windscreen and it’s dark and shimmery at the edges of him, so he looks like a combat angel or something. Maybe he’s one of the lads my mate Belfast John nearly got us all into a huge pile of grief over. 

 

That was a couple of years back. John reckons he’s got uncles in the IRA and shit like that. Walks past the barracks one night, there’s a bunch of teenage boys doing some sort of march thing, we’ve had too much to drink as fucking usual and Laurie starts screaming at these kids about bombs in the post. They’re not proper soldiers, they’re just kids looking for a way out of here.  

 

Anyway, the big old fucking main gate starts to slide and we’re not fucking stupid. Fuck this, get our legs going, big old sprint up the side street before the Picton Monument and we are out of there. Belfast’s laughing and shouting shit about the Queen’s sexual preferences. We see an Army Land Rover go down Sycamore Way. I mean, even if they saw us, they can’t just come out and kick shit out of us, can they?  

 

Belfast says, “kicking’s the least of our worries with those cunts.” 

 

The soldier on the bus sits down. 

 

I make the mistake of saying to the boy we’re going to see Mummy. And he’s so excited. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Each time he says it, I think I’m going to puke. And finally we start the slow dribble into Carmarthen. 

 

This is where we met. At college. 

 

Joanne was doing Fine Art. And me, I was supposedly training to become an English teacher but I’d fucking ruined that. I thought it would be like Robin Williams in that film but it’s all child psychology and fucking weeks and weeks of making lesson plans and dressing like a dick and going to primary schools in villages like Pencader and “being observed” whilst I try and pretend a nine-year-old has written a fucking amazing poem about Christmas. I stopped going. All of my mates from school were doing shit like Architecture and Film Studies and visiting burial sites and discussing Casablanca and getting high on proper London/Manchester pills/weed. I’d made it thirty miles down the road, hanging about with the other A-level losers. It was like school again only you got paid to go. 

 

It was like that army barracks. Just another way of making sure you weren’t counted as unemployed. 

Joanne and me first met at a really shit party. I was shy and she was drunk and somehow that worked. I always associated the taste of red wine with our first kiss after that. I thought that made me romantic but apparently it didn’t. It was a horrible drunken terrible mess that kiss because I’d only ever kissed one girl before, and I was about 11 then. 

 

Now we were at the end. 

 

I got off the bus with child tucked under one arm and a folded up pushchair under the other. Another passenger brought my bags off for me. Here we go. Walk up the road. Deep breath. Get my shit together. Think salvageable.  

 

He starts singing Mummy again. And I’m excited too now. This is just a bump in the road, people fuck up, they are forgiven, everyone moves on. It’s a beautiful day. She loves you. It’s going to be fine. 

 

Thirty seconds from Tesco, I see her. And her dad. And I knew then that, whatever other hopes I may have had for today, the main one, the one I got out of bed for, the one I prayed (silently, tearfully, drunkenly, often) for is not going to happen. 

 

I hand our child over in the manner of someone passing their suitcase through one of those x-ray machines at an airport. Not that I’ve ever flown anywhere. But I’ve seen it on telly. 

 

Joanne smiles, I smile. I kiss my son goodbye. I feel all of the thoughts and hopes and fears and dreams and conversations I’ve ever had evaporate in my mouth and whatever great swooping gesture I was going to convey with my next words falls apart before I can speak. 

 

“Ok, then.” 

“Ok.” 

“Right, well, take care.” 

“Ok. Yeah, you too.” 

 

Joanne’s dad has the decency to offer me a smile, like he knows what I’m going through is awful, but is the Right Thing to Do so he has some Level of Respect for me. 

 

I watch as my girlfriend officially becomes an ex-girlfriend and all I can hear is the boy saying Mummy over and over again as they fade into Personal History. 

 

I look at my watch. It isn’t even 12. 

 

Plan is to find Neil. Crash at his tonight. Get some cans in. Go up to the uni this afternoon mind, find out what I need to go to get back on track. Lick all the arses. Make all the apologies and explain. Two minutes is all it takes to get derailed. 

 

I’m walking up Water Street. I don’t know why it’s called Water Street. Maybe it was a river once. Now it’s a stream of takeaways and pubs. So many pubs in this small town. What was it that cabbie called them? “Palaces of drink.” Fucking brilliant, that. I didn’t get cabs very often. Sometimes though with a kid and they’re two and they’ve just fucking shit themselves and you’ve already used the spare nappy and clothes you had, and you have to get home quickly then taxi is the best. I lived right at the top end of town. Well, I did. I’ve got a street map of Carmarthen and there we were, our little crappy cul-de-sac in the A1 box of the map. A1. I’m about as far from A1 as it fucking gets. 

The cabbie I always seemed to get was called Peter. A real philosopher. He was wiry and had that permanent stubble olive-skinned guys always seem to have. It makes them look cool and dangerous. Even if they’re delivering shit covered toddlers to A1. Peter always managed to fit some wisdom into the journey. 

 

“You never cross the same river twice, my friend.” 

 

First pub I pass is the Blue. A regular haunt. I try not to look in, try to walk past, hang on, no I don’t – I don’t try at all. I tell myself I tried later to make it look or at least feel like I did try. I walked straight in. Brian’s behind the bar. He nods. Jeremy’s at the cigarette machine. 

 

I know Jeremy pretty well. He’s one of the few public schoolboys who went to uni here. Get your fees back, Daddy. Fucking hell. Eight grand a year and you’re still here. Stick that on your prospectus. Jeremy’s alright, though. A fucking mouthy cunt at times, he’s like a little fat Withnail. You know, all loud and assertive and Listen Here until it fucking kicks off and some cunt’s going to go all McFuck on you. Still, he’ll probably buy me a pint. And he does.

 

Five minutes later he’s consoling me as I tell him about Joanne and Alice. We’re sat in front of the big screen watching some cricket match. I don’t know much about cricket. I went for a game at the uni once, the 2nds, and everyone laughed at me because I didn’t know about any of the niceties. I’m stood there, looking like a prick, the last batsman. There’s this thing you’re supposed to do, ask your opposite batsman if your stance is in line with the wicket you’re protecting but I didn’t know about any of that, so this bowler shouts out “Are you ready” and I shout back “Yeah get on with it you cunt” because it was just like all those other times when I was being me somewhere people like me didn’t belong and I didn’t know the rules. Ball smashed off the end of my shit trainers. All blood in my sock. Fuck sake. I got a four next ball by ducking and inadvertently raising my bat to the ball flying at me.

 

Anyway, they never asked me back.  

 

So, the cricket’s on and there’s me, Jeremy, Fat Andy and Jan. Jan is Norwegian. His mum is something important in the Welsh Office, so he’s ended up here. He does more drugs than anyone I know. Fat Andy is a lunatic. Did a yard of vodka and orange at the Student Union once. Bought 100 pints of lager another time. 

 

On the telly, this batsman just keeps smashing six after six after six. Fat Andy and Jeremy are cheering and going fucking mad. The sound of the crowd just reminds me what I have lost. After a couple of drinks, I won’t care, I’m sure I won’t care. I can’t care because if it goes wrong, I’ll feel worse than I do now.  

 

Jan asks me if I manage to sort it with Joanne. 

 

Whole pub seems to fall silent as I tell him the news. 

 

Jeremy decides this necessitates Heavy Drinking. Neil and Phil walk in, their timing immaculate.

 

On the jukebox a Nina Simone song begins.