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.

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.