Short Story Special - Guest Writer @psychonaut99

 Introducing a new series in which friends who write send me stuff they've written and I host it because they aren't sad enough to be blogging this late in the holocene era. This week - it's twitter and real life chum of mine @psychonaut99 who you should follow. This story reminds me of both Alan Moore and Terry Pratchett. So, you know, it's fucking great.

UPLINE TRAFFIC

Snow was falling in soft, wet clumps, and Fat Angus was talking bollocks again. Banjo had heard it before a hundred times, but he kept half-listening whilst fussing with his mattress. The snow had started twenty minutes ago and now the cardboard was sodden. He was worried moving it too much would make the whole thing would fall apart. 

"Everyone together.." Fat Angus went on. He was a dozen or so  places upline and Banjo couldn't see hm through the crowd but he could picture the expansive gestures he'd be making with his old Irn Bru bottle half-full of cloudy poitin. "Brought everyone together, you see…" 

Banjo tried gently squeezing his mattress. A few drops oozed out from between the corrugations, but were immediately replaced as new snow melted into the card. He pressed again, harder, aware all the while that it was pointless. He'd had it for over a year, which was good run for a mattress made from a flattened fridge box. They always fell apart in the end and all the careful drying and optimism in the world couldn't stop it. This one though…his mum had found it, summer before last, when, over the course of three days, their place in the queue had shuffled past the stinking entranceway to an alley next to a Budgens. "Hold my place!" she had suddenly hissed, and scampered into the alleyway with that spryness that had never left her, even at the very end. She'd emerged five minutes later, hauling the huge box out of the darkness, its side already stained green with the cabbage juice that even now Banjo could see on the board between his fingers.

For an autumn, a winter, a spring, a summer and now another autumn that box had separated Banjo from the greasy pavements and broken tarmacs of London, three centimetres of insulating cardboard between his bones and the stones that sucked the warmth, the strength and eventually the life out of you. Just as they'd done to his mum, not three months after she'd liberated his bed from that yawning alley. He'd woken one November morning and seen her next to him, blue, still and somehow smaller than she'd been the night before, as if the stones had stolen some of her flesh as well as her life.

"I met Her once, you know." Fat Angus was still going, as he always would unless he passed out or someone smacked him one. "Proudest moment of my life, it was." 

This was always the crescendo of Fat Angus' bullshit soliloquy, but Banjo turned towards it anyway, willing himself to be distracted by it. He couldn't see Angus admidst the upline crowd, but occasionally glimpsed his bottle when he waved it with particular enthusiasm.

The claim was transparently untrue. Even if Angus' skin hadn't been tattooed with the patina of the queue-born - a worked-in layer of soot and grime, fixed permanently by a lifetime of weather-beating - Banjo's mum had once told him she remembered Fat Angus being born when she was a kid herself. His mum had occupied the same spot that Angus now did, just as Banjo had inherited his own mum's spot when she died. And Banjo's mum had been brought to the queue as a baby by her mum and dad, which meant that Fat Angus hadn't been born until years after the queue started. So Fat Angus could never have met Her. She must had been years dead by the time Fat Angus's mum had squirted him into the world in a flowerbed outside Serpentine Park. God alone knew why Angus always claimed to have met Her, but he'd been claiming it for as long as Banjo could remember.

"When you were in Her presence, it was like nothing else, y'know. As if She was more than human."

It wasn't entirely clear who Fat Angus was even saying all this stuff too. All his adjacents in the queue had stopped listening years ago. There was always Screwface, Banjo supposed. He'd been sat next to Fat Angus since forever.  He might be Fat Angus's dad, but no one knew. Some people even said he wasn't queue-born, that he'd been here since the start. But if either of those things were the case, Screwface wasn't saying. Largely because Screwface never said anything. For Banjo's whole life, Screwface had sat in the queue a dozen or so places upline, keeping Fat Angus's place when he went scavenging for poitin, smoking a pipe which he filled with God-knows-what and listening to Fat Angus's endless bullshitting, his face as tanned and motionless as a mahogany carving, all of it in complete silence. 

Noises downline drew Banjo's attention in the other direction. Voices, indistinct at first, but growing louder as they got closer. 

"Jump tickets! Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred! Thousand! Jump tickets!"

It was Alice's kids, on the return leg of their annual trek. They'd passed by heading downline back in March or April, now they were heading back upline to wherever it was Alice herself was holding their place.

Banjo scanned them as they approached, counting six. Down two from the outgoing trip. He felt a stab of sympathy. The missing two could have paired up, but it was unlikely. People didn't pair up downline, as a rule, because then the upline half of the couple lost their place. More likely they'd run into trouble.

"Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred! Thousand!"

The kids weren't carrying much either, a lot less than Banjo had seen them hauling in previous years. It looked like it had been a tough pilgrimage this time round. 

They did it every year, walking almost the whole length of the queue, trading jump tickets for whatever they could get. Bedding, food, lamps, tools. The barter-currency of the queue. The tickets were official documents, each one signed by the Prime Minister themselves, and entitled the bearer to advance a hundred, five hundred or even a thousand places upline, depending on the value stated on the ticket.

Banjo had nearly got one himself, 7 or 8 years back. He had it in his hand and was in the process of handing his knife over to the kid when he felt his mum's hand on his wrist. She'd snatched the card out of his hand, read it, then thrown it into the kid's face with a snarl.

"That silly cow hasn't been Prime Minister for twenty years you little shit. Now fuck off, and if I see you talking to my boy again, I'll cut you from your face your balls."

Banjo missed his mum. All his life, it had been the two of them. He'd never met his dad. Mum said he'd been an upliner, who came wandering down on a foraging trip. They'd tumbled one night, and then he'd buggered off back up the line to where his wife and kids were holding his place. Since then it had been Banjo and his mum, looking after each other, each holding their place when the other went off scavenging. A smiling face in the morning when the sun rose, a soothing word when night fell.

But now she was gone. Banjo was on his own. He'd never paired up himself. He had no one to hold his place, so he couldn't go foraging. He'd been feeding himself by trading what he had, and now he had almost nothing left. His mattress was dissolving. His last possession was his knife, tucked under his jumper, the same one his mum had stopped him from giving to that Alice kid.

"Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hundred! Thousand!"

Alice's kids trudged passed, their faces and their meagre haul both rimed with snow. They chanted mechanically, not expecting an answer and not receiving one. Banjo stared at their faces - pinched, hardened with weariness and sorrow. They confirmed his suspicions. The gaps in their ranks weren't through downline pair-ups. They'd suffered loss. A barter gone awry, or a run-in the prastermengros, or maybe just the endless damp chill of the stones themselves. A lonely death, a long way from home, and for those left, a long walk upline with winter coming on, to a patch of shining pavement and whatever welcome Alice had to offer.

But for them there was at least that. Each other, and a home to go to. For Banjo now there was nothing, and no one. He was never going to make it to the front of the queue. He'd be lucky to make it the next half mile. 

The kids passed by, shuffling among the queue, still calling with no response.

 "Jump tickets! Hundred! Five hun-" 

"No point." 

The reply came suddenly enough for Banjo to snap his head round and peer through the tumbling snowflakes and the gathering dusk to see the speaker. The tone had been conversational but the voice was wholly unfamiliar. 

The queue had parted slightly to allow Alice's kids a way through, and between the huddled bodies, he saw a solitary kid paused, stooped over the interlocutor.

A hunched, wizened figure, sitting cross legged, wrapped in a blanket from which a fleshless brown head poked like a sun-dried tortoise.

It was Screwface.

The kid didn't know him, of course, so she leaned in, wholly clueless as to why everyone round was craning their necks in astonishment.

 "No point? Why of course there's a point! Any one of these reasonably priced tickets brings you that much closer to Her…" The kid slipped into back into her rote patter.

 "No point at all. She gone."

There was a pause during which Banjo could almost hear the kid's mind clicking through her options. Screwface chose to fill the silence himself.

 "Crystal box empty. Old girl been in the ground long time now. Nothin' up front 'cept ghosts."

 "Th…then why are you still here?" The kid finally found her voice, but Screwface's only reply was to withdraw his head and light his pipe. He puffed deeply then expelled a cloud of greasy smoke which drifted listlessly over his gawping neighbours. He plainly considered the conversation, his first in living memory, to be at an end.

 The kid pressed for a bit, but meeting nothing but the resumption of Screwface's implacable silence, she trudged off to catch up with her siblings.

Banjo watched her go, then turned to find Screwface again, but the queue had closed in around him and he was gone from sight.

Snow settled on him, and the night drew round like a shroud. The cold seeped in, and even just sitting there he felt the stones beneath him stealing his life, just as they'd stolen his mum's, and Fat Angus' mum's, and the trekking kids'. His mum had sat in the queue her whole life and never made it to the front. Her hope towards the end was that he would make it her place, but he'd made it less than a year and there were still more places between him and the front than there were stars in the sky. There was no one he could leave his place to, no one to reach the front for him. He'd never see the front.

He gripped his knife, his last possession, the only thing he had to trade, and opened his mouth to call the kids back. He knew the jump tickets were a worthless thimblerig. His mum had told him, all those years back. But what if they weren't? What if his knife could buy him another thousand places up the queue? Or even just a hundred? Would that get him close enough before the stones took him?

But what if his mum had been right, as she'd always been? He'd lose his place, and his knife, for nothing.

Indecision silenced him. His call to the kids died in his throat.

But his fingers remained wrapped round the smooth plastic handle under his jumper. A new idea was forming. For a moment it's components drifted unconnnected round his mind in an unsettling Brownian motion, then suddenly coalesced. An idea, whole and gleaming. A way to move up the queue without losing his place, without trading away what little he had left. A way to make it to the front, to see for himself whether She was still there, and to gaze upon Her if she was.

Silently, he stood up. His fingers clenched tight under his jumper, and he pulled out his knife.

 

 

A New and Shining Future

This is just ranting. Feel free to ignore.

Before I go on, just to say this isn't a suicide note. 

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve reached a kind of final level of exhaustion with things. A dark epiphany, this. Realising that this country, this world of ours, can never be good, never be kind. That evil has triumphed, it always had and always will.

I used to be funny. Now I scream more pointlessness into the void. Used to kid myself that at least it was cathartic. Now I don’t even get the mildest of dopamine hits from relieving myself of that anger. What needs to happen here, and elsewhere, is clear and obvious. But it cannot happen and will not be allowed to happen. Only money matters.

Known this for a long time of course but after 2019, when really I should have just climbed into whatever form of sensory deprivation was nearest, I doubled down. Got labelled an anti-Semite for wanting some form of social justice, an end to homelessness, a protected NHS. But the country is thick and selfish and wandered back down the corpse-strewn path they know and love.

And now, I’m worn out. I spend my days doomscrolling and my nights sleepstruggling. I’ll just post mildly amusing bon mots instead. I guess they won. I hope that whatever warmth I can afford this winter will be boosted by the brief tingle of happiness getting nine likes for a joke about pop music can get me.

I’ve got friends and family who will probably struggle to survive the winter. Friends who are loved, who have contributed greatly to the universe in terms of being decent, kind, creative souls guilty only of being vulnerable, poor, selfless. What the pandemic didn’t take, the government will, one final deathly tax on the desperate.

Only now, 12 years into austerity, with the spectre of poverty finally at Joe Public’s own door, has this become an issue, this idea of decent standards of living. That’s conservatism for you. Oh it affects me now so I give a fuck.

I didn’t do nearly enough to affect any change in the world so it’s on me too. I still used Amazon despite everything, used Wetherspoons. I’m as bad as any other hypocrite. What a world.

Came off my meds earlier this year, nothing really had changed for me mentally. I didn’t see the point. The main cause of my anxiety had ended. So, it was just taking pills for no reason other than something to do before bed. Maybe I’ll ring the doctors and get something else. Lie down and wait for the Bodysnatchers to grab me, become another consumer, numb on fast food and soothed by Ant and Dec’s Great British Love Shop. I’d like that, some comfort. .

In the end, the house always wins. And Britain, not so much a casino as a kind of bawdy end of the pier amusement arcade mere feet above a sea of shit, is no different. Stick another coin in the bandit, stare at the pretty lights and repeat. All the fun of the unfair is here. Fuck it all. And fuck me for caring.

 

Dragons

 This blogpost is intended for the even more limited than usual audience of a select few I went to college with. But read on if you want. It's an apology, a confession, a prayer, a fuck knows.

This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song….

Ha, ha. Imagine that.

That’s something from a fucking shit 90s trailer for a fucking shit 90s Disney movie. A low budget Disney movie. A movie about a dragon, yes, a dragon, obviously because what else is there? Yes, it’s about a dragon. A baby dragon. And he’s like got this weedy voice and he can’t sing in the choir because he’s shit and weak. And all the other dragons are going to an Eisteddfod and they need to win this competition because I don’t know, reasons. And suddenly, through some errant piece of luck precipitating a montage sequence, the dragon finds his voice. What shall we call the dragon? We’ll call him something Welsh, but something the kids in Baton Rouge and Ottawa can pronounce. We’ll call him Jenkins. Ha ha. Fucking hell. The 80s video trailer guy walks to the microphone. He looks out onto a projection of a Disneyfied version of what some Californian executive thinks Snowdonia looks like. He begins.

“This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song….”

(cut to shot of newborn dragon)…

They make the movie and it has probably got a Phil Collins song to sell it. The song is called “No Smoke Without Fire.” It’s terrible. Really, even by Phil’s standards¹. In the movie Phil voices the dragon’s best friend, a sheepdog called Huw Bark (geddit). To this day, it’s widely regarded as a cinematic low point of the decade. And, in the decade they chose to make Sliding Doors and Medicine Man, that’s some low point.

I am already regretting opening this piece with a story about a film that doesn’t exist yet alone comparing myself to a baby dragon in said film.

Where were we?

This is a story about finding your voice in the land of song and it begins at the bottom of a tower block in Carmarthen. The only one in town, thank you nice²

Carmarthen is only an hour west of Swansea but it isn’t South Wales. It’s only half hour from Llanelli but there’s no industrial scarring, no backdrop to the town of men doing unimaginable things in heat and darkness. It’s a rural town, a crossroads, a place where all the other versions of Wales meet before deciding to go their separate ways. Little England fucking off with its hipster beaches and blue flag bakers in one direction, Sheepy Rural Mountainy Wales getting on a tractor and heading north. Coal-flecked, Rugby Flavoured, Close Harmony Singing Wales downing it’s pint and trudging east into the dark wet night. Carmarthen, ancient and mysterious, dull and sexy and drunk, once the largest settlement in Wales, has been dumped. It sits alone, brooding like Burton.

I got wrecked on Saturday because I wanted to and I was walking the hills around Carmarthen whilst very drunk/stoned. And I made a video and I deleted it before I could view it but not before I sent it to some old pals that I had previously made in Carmarthen. I think I said everything I wanted to say which was something like “I was young and foolish and happy here and I miss everyone who was part of that young, foolish happiness and I miss the young, foolish happy me. Oh yes and sorry about getting people pregnant and failing my degree.”

And these lanes I’m a strolling down in a nice space cake and lager fug well they might have been built by Romans. Fuck knows. I’m not a historian. I could have been a historian but the Elephant was open and I was 19 and unimpressed by everything except Garry Lumb’s way around a slotty. But the Romans left, like everyone leaves.

In the end, towns are like people. They get dumped, they fall in love, they get old, they fall apart. The only thing that really sets them apart from us is that, unlike people, they don’t often die.

I associate Carmarthen with love. With all the ways you can fall in love, and all the ways you can fall out of it. Unrequited love, passionate love, intense, stupid, deep and lasting, transient, fleeting, toxic love. Dirty rotten love. The love of women, music, life and love itself. All of it.

Soon as I’m over that little bridge before Glangwili, the moment I set eyes on Tower from the train, the moment it appears out of the trees from the dual carriageway, I’m in love again.

I wish I could forget it all but it’s the curse of being whatever the fuck level of autism I am that I can’t.

Every street, every raindrop, every pint, every vomit, every song, every word.

I exaggerate of course, I’m no Funes³, but I dream in SA31 colours and still wake up sad to be in the present and happy to not be in the past.

So what did I want to get out of going to college?

I wanted to stop being me. And it’s been a battle my whole life not to be me.

Some people want to change gender, others want more money, fame, whatever. I just don’t like being me. I love my family, my friends but I wake up and it’s still me, it’s still that and that’s inescapable. So, back in 1989 I tried on different versions of me to see what might happen. It started the day I went to Trinity and then I couldn’t stop.

I was shy so I decided not to be. I was quiet so I spoke up. I had never had a sexual thought in my life so I thought I might try some. I did not want to be cool. Being cool looks like a lot of hard work and that leads me to the next problem.

Lazy. Slapdash. Disinterested. Words that ran through my school reports with regularity. I’m not lazy. I just only do things when they’re necessary or interesting. Trinity sent me a list of novels I should read before coming along. The first two were Catch-22 and 1984. I bought them from WHSmith in Aberystwyth the next day.

That’s the most education I got from the place. Those books fired something in me. Suddenly I wanted to go. Suddenly I was interested, could picture a version of me sitting by a river with a scarf round my neck. Maybe a nice girl close by. A bottle of wine certainly.

Then it came to lectures. And I just couldn’t have been less interested. I had pictured academics fired up with a burning sense of injustice on behalf of neglected poets, abandoned philosophers and crazed, dangerous texts. I got Gareth Hughes and The Waste Land. So I jacked that in. Once you realise that the college aren’t going to chase you to attend, it’s hard for someone lacking in motivation to do so.

I wished I had heroes. Something to aspire to. But I didn’t. I was content to be the clown, to make people laugh, make myself into a story. It’s all bollocks. But at least I wasn’t me. Somehow I became for the first time in my life the centre of attention. And boy is that addictive.

Get off the bus from Lampeter in the first of several thousand Carmarthen downpours you will encounter. Wait for the promised minibus to pick you up. Realise no one is coming. Walk through Albion Arcade, past a flat you don’t know will be part of your story very soon. Get wet. Get wetter every step. Up past the Boars Head, closed for years. All your belongings in a set of plastic bags. A tramp already. Make your way down Lammas Street past pubs that you haven’t set foot in. Past Picton where your friends you haven’t met yet may already be settling in. Down the hill, soaked through now. Up Job’s Well Road. The rain picks up now. It's saved itself for you, you pathetic fucking wreck.

The optimism that Yossarian’s humanity and fear has instilled in your college dreams is being replaced by the fear, a real fear, that whatever promises you have made to yourself will last as soon as someone, someone hard, someone cool, someone cleverer than you realises you are just a cunt. Someone worth hurting.

And you are back at square 1. You are you again.

So you double down. You steel yourself as you walk down past the block you don’t know yet is an art block, past the library they haven’t built yet, through a car park, down through that little gap, following people with parents because they must be new, new and scared and weak like you are and you join a queue that lasts for hours only to be told that there’s no room set aside for you.

Because that’s what happened. That guy from the Bursar’s Office asked me where I would be living. I had filled in the slip that said “Please can I live on campus as I am barely out of childhood.” But they’d fucked up and there was a look on my face that said “I will die of stupidity tonight if you don’t house me.”

So they gave me a room in Tower. It looked like something from a BBC news item smuggled out of behind the iron curtain. Which made it better than going home.

And I went to the Union. And I met Garry. And I was horrible to him in a way I thought would sound funny and somehow I got away with it and I made a friend who is one of The Great Loves of My Life. And I found Newcastle Brown. And I found dancing. And I found smiling.

The rest you know.

In a stoned hedge-flanked walk at the weekend, I remembered who I wanted not to be and who I tried to become. I loved those days because I met you all. I got something better than a degree. I worked out a path from childhood to adulthood that was a little bit different to how I imagined it. I read the books I wanted to and got the culture I needed slowly, at my own pace. I made the friends I needed and that has made all the difference.

I had my heart broken a few times. But it was okay. I didn’t imagine I could live life without that happening. Now I just break my own heart. It’s better in a way. The glow in my cheeks sat in a Llansteffan pub on Saturday came from 30 years of memories suddenly visible all at once. I was in the Morris, the Elephant, the Union, playing pool, rowing with rugby boys, swinging upside down from the Union balcony, watching my son being born, watching him leave me, watching my friends become incredible, seeing them leave, walking the streets with them all, walking them alone, withdrawing money in Spanish from the HSBC and dancing alone to Ride On Time, to Transmission, to Orange Crush, eating a pastie, throwing up a kebab, watching Spencer climb the Tower, falling in love, falling out again, rowing, laughing, crying, being me and not being me.

All at once and never again.

Anyway, I’d love to see you all back there one day. Come on in, the past is lovely as you want it to be.

 

1: Phil Collins can be forgiven nearly everything just for “Against All Odds.” The kind of tune I could never have admitted loving back in the day. It’s fucking solid.

2: One of the Monk’s many bizarre Carmarthenshire Welsh colloquialisms.

3: Funes the Memorious is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man cursed by an ability to recall the minutest detail of every single thing he’d ever witnessed.

 

Suede

Newport, 22nd May, 1993. Today is the anniversary of me going to see Suede.

I’m not having the best of springs. I’ve been made homeless and failed my finals. This was a direct result of me being dumped and losing contact with my baby son. My response to this cataclysmic turn of events is to throw myself headlong into a new and exciting lifestyle of getting blind drunk and experimenting with drugs. My network of friends, being themselves young and foolish too, are only too happy to accommodate this descent into chaos.

When I’m not wallowing in hungover self-pity or crashing on park benches/in farm outbuildings/on sofas/floors, I’m glued to my Walkman and, in particular, Suede. Their tales of drug abuse, suicide and squalor are wrapped in a winning package of glam-stomp and retro-sleaze. In short, more escapism. Anything to take me away from my life.

Anyway, one of our little gang managed to sort out tickets for Suede in Newport. 80 miles east of here. The biggest band in the country in the week their debut album tops the charts. It’s got to be better than another Saturday night watching sexually frustrated farmers kicking shit out of each other in Carmarthen town centre.

The night before the gig, having unintentionally soaked up more of that Suede album’s DNA than is perhaps necessary, is a riot of cross-dressing, speed, acid and break-ins. Hungover, we watch Death Race 2000 and Withnail and I to soak up the day.

Eventually, a convoy of crappy cars takes us down the M4. To Newport, a city more gangrene than glam. Despite the unpromising surroundings, every broken-hearted young outcast, every androgynous waif and stray in Wales has made their way to this village of damned. I am surrounded by kohl-faced minors, glitter bugs, pantomime drowners and insatiable horse fiends. It’s brilliant. Between gulps of smuggled-in vodka we are punishing ourselves with more chemicals.

Brett and Bernard walk on. The Next Life is the calm before the storm. Mat and Simon get on stage. Moving provides the adrenaline rush I’ve waited my whole life for. The hits keep coming. Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey, The Drowners. Around me kids of indeterminate gender and uncertain futures are lost in a sea of ecstatic fumbling. Teenage Valleys boys scream along to lyrics about gay love and suicide. This is what rock and roll should be. Exciting, subversive, inclusive.

The drugs don’t work, they don’t need to. I’m high on the possibilities of life. Pop music has saved my soul. I’m going to turn it around, going to be alright, I’m going to make it.

Tapes OR How I Learned To Love the iPod

 

Tapes

She says there’s no room in the flat for the box.

She doesn’t say it with words, of course.  Just looks at me with my huge cellotaped together washing machine box and her expression, her stance, the sheer force of her gaze signifies that this isn’t going to go as far as an argument. Not if I want the evening to end with white wine and sex.

The box is full of cassettes.

I’ve collected these over the last twenty years. First cassette I ever bought with my own money was Let’s Dance by David Bowie. Three for a fiver from some bootlegger outside Woolworths. I bought that and a Queen one and a Eurythmics one because I wasn’t cool yet. I didn’t know about the world outside of the charts. I was 12. If it wasn’t on Top of the Pops on a Thursday I wouldn’t know about it, it didn’t exist.

As I grew, the collection grew. First kiss, first drink, first fist fight, first pay cheque, first love, first affair. All of it was in there in those tapes. The compilations Ie made for women are the sounds of my mistakes about them and their mistakes about me. My first band. Swimming In Belgium. Me and my mates wrote about four songs when we were 16 and thought we were fucking it. The songs were shit but I had the tape, I used to drag it out every now and then and listen to it alone, the amateur enthusiasm of the din shaking me back to a time where everything seemed to matter and yet nothing did at all.

First kiss. Rowena. She came up to me in the park and showed me her tits. Summer evening. She walked on to the football pitch and whapped them out whilst I was in goal and she had her back to the other boys. She waited around till we finished playing and then stuck her tongue down my throat. I remember thinking this was an important moment. That my life was different now. But what I remember more is that I went home and listened to Wonderful Life by Black, having taped it off the charts the week before. I listened to it over and over again. High on life. Rowena never kissed me again. She’s in a wheelchair now. Rolled her car off a hill road up by Strata Florida. Same place her brother died.

First drink, not long after. Me and the boys went to this holiday park out by Aberaeron way. Sunday night thinking we look like holiday makers and nobody will suss we are only 16. All dressed up like. Worked a fucking treat. I had a fiver and got wankered. First go. Picked up by my mate’s big brother and he’s got Erasure on the stereo and it sounds perfect. Euphoric even. I ask my mate’s big brother to tape it for me and he does, fair play, like he’s happy that someone else likes it and he drops it round the next day.

First fist fight. Me and the boys went back to that holiday park and there’s a load of yoyo’s over from Wolverhampton. We called em yoyo’s because that’s what they sounded like. Anyway, I can’t remember how it goes but there’s an altercation, some girl involved and the next thing there’s nine yoyos battering six local boys including me. It doesn’t hurt much because I’ve had four pints. It’s not too bad. Bit of bruising round the cheeks like but they weren’t hard boys, they were just more of them. That night, my dad goes mental. He’s really upset. Wants to go over there and dish out some whooping on my behalf. I go to my room and I put on a compilation tape this girl made me. Her name is Sioned and she’s fucking weird but funny. I really fancy her but sadly she is spending most of her days getting ridden by my mate Matthew. Matthew is alright but at that time I was consumed by jealousy.

I’m not sure why she’s made me a tape. I know I can’t tell Matthew though because the compilation is called DO NOT EVER LET MATTHEW SEE THIS. Anyway, first song is The Housemartins, The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. I’ve not heard this before and it’s fucking excellent. I see every song on this tape as a secret instruction to me to wait, bide my time, let Matthew fuck this up in his own sweet way and soon I shall be the victor.

Of course, it doesn’t happen. They’re still together now. Fuck sake. I did love that tape though.

First pay cheque. Shit Saturday job at Woolworths. Money was crap but I was brilliant at nicking stuff. First pay cheque was something like 30 quid and I bought Surfer Rosa from Andy’s because I asked him to recommend me a tape. I stuck it on my battered Walkman, not a proper Walkman, a shit Bush or Alba rip off with crap foam orange headphones for the bus back from Aberystwyth and it was perfect, noisy and strange and sunny and weird. The sun dipping in and out of the clouds on the coast road and old Black Francis yelping and whooping about Japanese lovers and riding tigers.

First love, well you know about her. We were young and intense and did a lot of things that young, intense people do when their hormones have suddenly kicked in. Ended up with a baby and a bedsit. I taped our son trying to say “mama”. Got about 90 seconds of him trying to make that noise and the pair of us laughing and crying and just being so fucking happy. It’s a nice sound, that. A baby and his parents laughing together. It was something to listen to after we split, at first it was so hard. I would put it on late at night, back at my parents house, the shame of it, me back in my childhood bed at 23, fucking silently sobbing to the sound of not having fucked up just yet.

I spend the next few years sofa surfing, then flat surfing, job surfing. Girlfriend surfing. I can’t be arsed to get my life together because I don’t know what that would mean. The jobs begin to pay slightly more, the flats slightly more expensive. I trade up in girlfriends, I start having discussions about careers and mortgages and pension plans. All the while, the tapes amass.

Compilation tapes for girls that I never ever give them, dozens of them. All that genuinely heartfelt attention to detail and then I’m like Oh Christ, she’s not going to want this. She doesn’t even know who I am. Ask her out for coffee or something. Christ don’t give her a musical manifesto. This one tape I made I ended up keeping for myself because it was absolutely the nearest thing I’d ever get to writing a love letter and that was too intense. I can’t remember what else was on it but it started with Holes by Mercury Rev.

Birthday tapes for friends. I used to give them horrendous titles so people would be too embarrassed to have them out. “The Sound of King Spastic”, “My Deep Nappy Shame.” You’ve got to amuse yourself sometimes. Anyway, the tapes were fucking everywhere until I got a new washing machine and the box seemed a good way of storing them now I’d succumbed to a bastard CD player years after everyone else.

But I couldn’t be parted with those tapes. And now me and this girl were moving in together. A new flat. A nice one, big bay windows, amazing light coming through off the mountains. All her nice things from her nice past. And me with a bin liner of clothes, two boxes of books and a washing machine box full of obsolescent hiss and clatter.

There’s no room, she says. Like I said, not with her mouth but with a look that said this is a crunch moment in our relationship and I will prevail.

She buys me an iPod as a moving in present a few days later. It’s beautiful and when I open it, I realise that the box of tapes is no longer in the hallway. I tell myself it’s okay, that she’s right, I never listen to them, they’re just in the way, and now I can have every song I’ve ever loved in a small white beautiful brick.

And it’s got headphones which means she never has to listen to any of it.

A few weeks later, my son got sick. It has nothing to do with the tapes going, this isn’t that sort of story but I suddenly remembered that one tape of his sweet baby voice. And now it was gone. And if I could lose that, I could lose everything. We went to the hospital in my new girlfriend’s car. She’d wait outside and smoke cigarettes. I’d pace the floor like they do in movies. Through a window I could see my ex holding my son’s hand as he lay there unconscious, some sort of allergic reaction to something, no one seemed to know what had happened. I wanted to walk in, to be part of that love and concern, to feel something other than this. But that tape had ended and was gone.

 

 

New short story - second draft

 I wrote my first short story in ages last week, well the first draft and here's the second. If you like it let me know. Or you can tell me to go fuck myself. 

My City Eyes.

It was the day Johnson said we had to take personal responsibility from now on. That wasn’t a phrase I particularly cared for. Not that that would be an opinion I’d express in the pub or online. You could just tell that about me if you took a close look at me and my life. Not even a close look. More than a passing glance but nothing forensic. Just a brief stare. At my flat. My finances. I had to venture into the city to buy some funeral clothes. My dad. I was still processing it.

Monday night heading into the city. Half hour on the bus. This time of day, this time of year, you can get on a bus in sunshine and alight in darkness. Cities shed the day people and absorb the night folk. Ties and name tags coming out, overalls and drinkers coming in. And me, with money for a black tie and white shirt and black trousers. My dad dead in a box, waiting for the morning.

I used to live in the city. Had a beautiful flat just out of the centre, expensive area. I liked that version of me though I knew I was pretending. I wasn’t a coffee person, I wasn’t an expensive haircut guy, I didn’t do service washes and deli takeouts. I didn’t belong there but it was nice pretending I did.

The city has changed in my absence. I was surrounded by skyscrapers that weren’t there before. Ghosts on every corner. The bus station looked clean and efficient. The row of desperate charity shops and vape shops and cheap sandwich shops had been replaced with some sort of Information Centre which was now closed.

I made my way almost by the stars, even the streets had changed shape. I walked towards Hoolahan’s, an Irish bar which I had once frequented, but it was gone. I remembered my mission and promised myself a Reward Pint somewhere once I was suited up.

Up the High Street, past the places of my younger self. The Palace had gone too. That was the place a guy one time took a dump out the bathroom window when he found the cubicles full. No one I knew but it was funny at the time. The Balmoral. The Parish. Ah, the Parish. Still here. It’ll never close. Every city needs a bar where no one gives a fuck who you are or how you’re dressed, as long as you can pay for your drinks and don’t puke, you’re welcome.

I met her at the Parish. The one that got away. How is it that you can tell all kinds of woman you like them and would they like to hang out and build on that and not tell the one woman who stopped you dead in your tracks and made you feel like you had entered a new part of life, like there was Old You and New You. Old You was cocky, calm and collected. New You just stood and stammered and said nothing and then it was too late.

The more people around me, the lonelier I feel. Crowds made their way from shop to bar to home, the streets were lit with human company, and none of it for me. I thought about the nights I could walk into practically any bar and know someone there. All of that was a long time ago and the memory brought no comfort.

I had done my research. By which I mean that I had phoned my daughter and she told me to head for Primark. Got myself the lot for 25 quid. Guessed my sizes but I kept the receipt just in case. Came out of there and thought about going for a drink so I went for a drink.

Where to go? The Clarion. Gone. Robinson’s. Revamped. The Guppy Inn had gone that way too. Oldest bar in the city, original 16^th century frontage and dingy as fuck inside. My kind of place. Steak sandwich and a Guinness for 3 quid back in the day. Now it looks like everywhere else. I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight. 

For a start, it’s Monday and this ain’t the nineties. Remember them. You went out six nights a week minimum. You and all your friends. McJob after McJob. You didn’t care. None of you had any plans bar lasting the week at whatever job/relationship/shithole apartment you had at the time. There were twenty or so of us doing the rounds. You went from call centre to call centre. It was like The Grand Tour but for poor people. You went from recruitment agency to recruitment agency. No one gave a fuck. They all knew that you’d fuck it off the sooner some new cunt showed up offering slightly better money and perks. All that mattered was getting some loser on the phones. And we were that loser.

Gas. Insurance. Satellite. Mobile. Directories. Internet. Water. Electric. I did them all. You shopped around, you’d hear some place would be doing a six-week training induction fully paid and you quit the job you had because training is basically being paid for sitting about and pretending to listen to some dude and it’s always a dude in these places telling you about how great this opportunity is and how exciting it will be to start with this company where they’re always looking to promote People From Within. Six weeks training? Six weeks paid holiday.

I could do that spiel in my sleep, I’d heard so many versions of it and eventually I did do it too, stood in a room with a flip chart and a power point and a nice suit telling you the shit I heard from some other place. That was when I had suits, of course. Having a suit or two is where ambition gets you. Ambition, that was the thing that did for my friendship group. The worst disease in the world.

There were rumours of a new call centre. Someone had gone to an agency to complain that their pay had been fucked up and had caught wind of a new operation in town. The money was the best anyone in town had ever offered, seven quid an hour and this was in 2000. Nobody was paying anything like that kind of money. Not in this neck of the woods. That’s why they set up shop here. All the heavy industry gone, what’s left but nothing but people who’ll take whatever shilling they get just so they can stay close to something that feels like home. The government would even pay companies to set up shop here so they got to keep even more money for your shareholders.

Pete Hobson was the first to go. He came into work one morning cocky as fuck and telling everyone he was off to this new company paying serious money. By serious money he meant serious money for Round Here. Not money that anyone in London or Manchester would consider serious.

I can’t help myself.

“They’re all the same, mate. You will be back here with the rest of us in six weeks.”

This was projection, I knew. This particular call centre we were at, Directory Enquiries, was the easiest time you’d ever do. The money was shit but the work was easy and my shift was 8-4. Sweet times. Breakfast in the canteen at first break. In the pub by 4.15. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want anyone else to leave either. Hobson was that bird in Animal Farm. Was it a crow? Telling everyone there’s good times the other side of the hill. Hope is dangerous, you can’t wear a mask around that shit, and it’ll kill you in the end.

The company was called 1Bill. You remember them. The advert - "Put your payday feet up and chill. Everrything's covered with 1Bill." A load of good looking couples in places you could never afford sat on the sofa smug in the warm glow of having paid a load of bills. 

Sign up to them and everything other than your rent and council tax was covered in 1Bill. They’d find the cheapest bundle for you, internet, gas, water, electric, insurance, car insurance and wallop, come pay day it’s all dealt with. Some big American company. They’d done a Wetherspoons and built this brand-new call centre where the city courts had once stood.

 I wasn’t going. We had a good thing going here, we all did, why leave?

Then Hobson plays his joker.

“Mate, I’m going in as a Team Leader.”

Turns out that experience of working in all the call centres in all the sectors in town did have value after all. Hobson was going in on a 20k starting salary. In our heads we all made calculations of who we might be with almost double the pay we were on now.

Hobson plays a second joker.

“I’ve been asked to ask friends if they have the right experience.”

Panic ensues. An unseemly rush to get CV’s printed, polished. People buying Interview Clothes. Only one not to get excited was her. The One That Got Away. And now I’m torn. If I stay, I can be nearer her and maybe build up the resolve to finally tell her everything I feel, everything I’ve always felt. On the other hand, there’s a Proper Job with Proper Money and I am sick of my damp bedsit, my shit telly and even drinking six nights a week instead of looking after myself has begun to take its toll.

My CV is with Hobson the next day.

A few days later TOTGA says to me, “Are you going?”

“I don’t know. It seems like a good opportunity but can you imagine it? Me, in a suit. Being important. Doesn’t seem right to me.”

She says she’ll miss me and makes me promise I’ll still go to The Parish after work.

You can guess the rest. I got the job. I never went to The Parish. I became somebody I wasn’t meant to be and moved to an expensive part of town. I started having my laundry done. I met a woman who lived by the sea and married her. I never saw the one that got away again. She isn’t even on Facebook. Later I got found out by 1Bill. I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I'd be. I lost my job. I lost my wife. I lost the flat and ended up right back where I started.

My dad was big on personal responsibility. He shaved every morning. He wore a suit every day. His house was his own and he’d paid the thing off by the time he’d retired. He never criticised the choices I made; he didn’t need to. His expression whenever he dropped round said it all. He was a respected man, a man who’d done all that was expected of him and that brought him a sense of achievement, I suppose.

He dropped dead in the middle of Tesco’s a fortnight ago. Pushing the trolley round. Collapsed against the fish counter. A girl in a hairnet and apron came out with a defibrillator but nothing could be done. I got the call from my brother, who got the call from my mum, who got the call from the hospital.

Tomorrow we will all go to the local crematorium. He had it all planned ages ago, the service, the songs, the will. And here I am in the last minutes of shopping, with a brown bag containing the things I will wear to send him off. Not knowing if these things will fit. Not knowing what to do if they don’t. Making my way into a pub full of ghosts. Thinking about the one that got away. I will only have one pint and then I will only have two. I will take a seat by the window, away from the bar. No one will know me and I will know no one. I will watch the night cars on the night road outside. The headlights will remind me of the bright lights of my youth. The dazzle of a Saturday night with all the promise of the life to come. The pub smoke the club strobe the red taxi meter pounds and pence in my city eyes.

I will think about writing these thoughts down. I will grab a burger when I miss the next bus. I will put the key into my flat door and go straight to bed. The rain outside will keep me awake. I will oversleep and only just make it to the service in time. I will hug people in the car park and at my parents’ house. I will make excuses. I will leave. I will wonder what could have been if Hobson hadn’t told us all of Sugarcandy Mountain. I would have stayed where I was, is what would have happened. That’s what I tell myself halfway through my third pint. I would have told the girl how much I loved her; how much I had always loved her. We’d have left our jobs there and then and gone and rented a cottage in west Wales and somehow saved up and opened up a café cum second-hand bookshop. We’d have been so happy. Then I’d have got drunk one time and cheated on her. She’d leave me broken hearted and sometimes you’d see her in The Parish, she’d look like shit, like she’d really been through something. My fling wouldn’t have led anywhere, I’d lose the café, end up owing quite a bit of money and running away and coming back to where I started out. I’d get a phone call from my brother. I’d have to get some funeral clothes. My dad was dead after all.

 

 

 

Waltz #2

My 500 is better than The Rolling Stone 

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…

#276 – Waltz – Elliott Smith

There is a feeling that I used to really like, a feeling I got only a couple of times, but it’s one I’ll probably never get again, being too old to stay the distance now. It’s a feeling you get maybe 6 or 7am and you’ve been out all night. It’s probably midsummer. There’s only been a little bit of darkness. You’ve drunk a lot and you’ve done other things too. You’ve been out to some place you never went before, met some cool people and ended up back at theirs, drinking and listening to music and talking and feeling like you’re connecting with somebody important, ignoring the chemicals rattling around your system and thinking this might be a profound moment and wanting to hold on to it, not wanting the night to go or to end, but knowing it has to and feeling when you’re in the back of a taxi, with the window slightly open and the sky all pink and shy outside, feeling like you’re in a polaroid picture taken by something bigger than you, that the moment was beautiful but it’s gone and there’s no point in being sad about it, there’s nothing to mourn, everything is temporary and that, like this taxi journey, it’ll soon be over. You’re just a figure framed in a moment already gone. Maybe you’ll be alone in the taxi except for the driver. Maybe there’ll be a friend with you. It’s not important. What is important is that feeling, it’s a little short of love, but it’s close, a kind of nervousness and excitement just at life. A fleeting burst of satisfaction tinged with the recognition that it doesn’t come around too often, this feeling.

The taxi will turn into your street and it’s still early and you get out and you suddenly feel very tired, the feeling is going already and every now and then you’ll get a little taste of it, a little déjà vu thing, a little snapshot of a sensation you had a couple of times. There was a night in London where I met a group of people from the internet for the first time, and we had a lot of drinks, and when we left there was that trapped city heat still there, two in the morning, keeping us happy and laughing. I had that feeling then, like I could see the picture of it and me in it.

Another time I ended up in Newport with my friend Bev, this boxer and his girlfriend, and they had Elliott Smith on and I’m strung out on whatever we’ve done and this boxer’s girlfriend takes me up to their bedroom and starts mopping my brow and singing to me on her bed. Nothing happens, I’m just very tired and high and far from home, and besides there’s a boxer downstairs, and then I’m in a taxi and it’s that feeling again, where you and the taxi driver are the only people in the world and Cardiff looks like New York as you shoot through and you can’t explain it, you just lock it away until it’s time to think about it again.

I don’t know what that is but I call it The Elliot Smith feeling.