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.
