you're not getting off

He needed to go into London on a Sunday but had forgotten that the trains would not be running due to engineering works. What would usually be a nineteen-minute journey into town took the best part of an hour on the bus service offered as an alternative. All he could do was look out of the window as the home counties faded into the edges of the suburbs: he could never read in a road vehicle without feeling travel sick.

Early in the journey, only minutes after the coach had pulled away from the bus stands outside the station, a man near the front asked to be let off. He had changed his mind about making the trip into the city. 

"Seriously? You can't just open the door and let me off? We're at a red light."

"You're not getting off here," said the driver.

"Where can you let me off?"

"You're not getting off. This is a rail replacement bus. You're on the train now. You can't just get off the train when you feel like it, can you?"

"But this isn't a train. It's a bus. Why can't you just let me off? What difference does it make to you?"

"Sit down. You're not getting off."

The man sat down. He made a call on his mobile phone.

"I don't believe this," he said to somebody. "I have to sit on this bus all the way into London. Nineteen miles. Because the driver won't let me off."

"It's a rail replacement bus!" the driver shouted. "You're not getting off!"

do you want special sauce with that?

It's the summer of 1999 and to make ends meet I go back to the language school and they give me the job of being the Director of Studies at a young learners' residential course centre. It's not the job I wanted from them. It means driving the ten miles or so in each direction. But they really need someone with a Diploma to be there as DoS so I have some leverage. So I am able to insist on not being there round the clock. Unlike the Centre Director, who has to take care of all the admin and welfare stuff, I get to go home at night and treat it as a day job.

The courses take place in a girls' school in the centre of the town. I've never really spent any time inside a private school. I expected it to be better kept. But the place seems almost as run down as the boys' grammar school I attended. There is disrepair. Parts of it are kind of seedy.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Many of the kids are there to have English classes in the morning and golf lessons in the afternoon. These kids are from Spain, Germany, Belgium and Holland. They arrive in ones and twos in nice cars, their very pleasant parents heading off to do something else in England. I don't know why the Dutch ones bother with English lessons. They speak the language better than the young golf coordinators, who really are fucking arseholes. Cocky little bastards. They resent it when they're asked to do basic things like not throw their cigarette ends on the ground in front of the students. I pass by the room where they keep their kit and have their meetings. I hear them talking about me and about Rachel, the Centre Director. I get so angry that I kick the small safe where petty cash is kept in our makeshift office. I hurt my toe quite badly. Impotent rage. Only damages the self. I know that. I do it anyway. Over and over again, never learning.

We don't have the right materials for the students. The head office keeps sending me terrible teachers. The lessons I observe are horrible. No structure. No outcome. A waste of everybody's time. When I try to give one young blond guy my feedback on his observation, he looks at me as if I am insane. These people think Rachel and I are crazy for trying to get things done the right way.

So I go to the office on my way home one evening to make my feelings known. I've tried going into it on the phone, but nobody listens. My messages are not returned. 

I try to find the owner. I know he is really in his office when I'm told that he isn't. I know that he hides in a blind spot that can't be seen from the doorway when somebody comes looking for him, for money, for help. So I make do with a visit to the Courses Coordinator. I vent my spleen a little and she sympathises. She promises she'll find some better people and send me some more stuff.

"Give me some books to take away now. I've got the car outside."

"I can't do that," she says.

There's a young blonde woman in her office. I wonder who she is. She's sort of cute. When she stands up, I see she's very short, even on the quite high platform sandals she has on her little feet. She is very pale skinned, with flinty grey eyes that keep looking steadily at me as I'm trying to get some better books for the classes. She looks unhappy. Her gaze is uncomfortably intense.

"This is Eleanor," I'm told.

"Hi, Eleanor."

Eleanor follows me out to the car, helping to move some of the materials I eventually manage to procure. Her accent is Scottish.

"So you're working here full time?"

"Just for the summer," she tells me. "I've been studying up at the university. But I'm going to transfer."

"You don't like it?"

"Not really. I need somewhere bigger. More interesting."

"Fair enough. This is not an exciting town to be a student, I guess."

"It isn't."

"I'll find out myself soon. I'm taking a masters here, starting in the autumn. I'll be teaching in the English Language Unit up there to get by. Helping foreign undergrads cheat in their essays and stuff like that."

She doesn't seem to get the joke.

"So, do you want to get a drink or something?" she asks me.

"OK. You don't mean now?"

"No, but soon."

"OK."

So I meet her at the Parrot and it's a strange conversation. Her voice is very quiet. She rarely smiles and she seems uncomfortable the whole time. But in other ways she's encouraging me to be interested in her. She asks me what I like doing. I don't like doing much more than taking drugs, reading books and trying to get laid. So I focus on the books when I answer. She asks me which authors I like, and each time I name one she tells me that she likes him too. I can feel her small foot resting on my shin under the table. It moves a little. She wants me to feel that. She is wearing a shiny dark-coloured blouse which is tight on her chest. The uppermost buttons are parted and the others strain to contain her. She is a small person, but she has fat, round, pale tits and she wants me to notice them. I do. I like them. She's a strange girl. I can't work her out. But I like the tits and the way she seems to be making her availability very obvious. I don't believe I am going to get along well with her because she seems so humourless. Her answers are short and tell me nothing. She's secretive. I wonder how badly damaged she is and who has damaged her.

But I decide I'm going to take up the apparent offer. She'll be leaving for her new university in the north within a month. It's a bloody awful summer. I hate the job and it rains every second or third day. Eleanor could offer some respite.

She's been living in a little flat not far from where I'm staying. So I walk over there on the Sunday afternoon. She admits me into the place wordlessly and, again, conversation is not easy. 

"What do you like a woman to wear?" she asks me out of the blue. 

I've never been asked this question so I don't really know what to say.

"Do you like high heels? Sexy underwear?"

"Sure," I say. "Why not?"

"Come and look at this."

She leads me to her bedroom and shows me a lot of tiny high heeled shoes. She slides her feet into one pair. Her sturdy little calves change shape as she enters them and begins to walk around, wiggling her fat little bottom. Of course I'm aroused. We kiss and she takes off her clothes. She keeps her high heels on and lies on the bedroom floor. She opens her legs more lewdly than I've ever seen it done. 

There is something desperate and aggressive about the hurried blowjob she forces on me. It's not comfortable. She grips too tightly with her small hand and her teeth are too involved in it. I lose patience and push her onto her back. I am between her short thighs. She doesn't want any gentleness. Her nails are in my back, pulling me close to her, trying to crush me into her, like she wants us to merge. Her round breasts are an obstruction, the embrace so tight I am pushing them into strange new shapes. She doesn't make eye contact and resists kisses to her mouth. All she says to me is to go faster and harder. It should be exciting. But it isn't.

I get dressed and I notice for the first time what look like a lot of old bruises on her pale legs.

Three days later I'm standing in the dark outside the school's indoor swimming pool. Rachel passes me a joint and we talk quietly. I'm telling her about Eleanor.

"She sounds a little strange," says Rachel.
"She is. I thought I liked that. But I'm not sure with this one."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know."

We really skimp on entertainment. The kids that don't play golf must be so bored in the afternoons. The farcical 'project-based learning' has been abandoned. The students knew it was nonsense. Just a way of keeping them occupied without our spending any money. Two very bright Russian girls confronted me with exactly that accusation. They knew from how I avoided a straight answer that they were right. The rainy days are the worst.

Eleanor is given a strange job to do on one of those rainy days. Somehow, somebody at the head office has persuaded her to come down to Ashford and lead an embarrassing afternoon activity. With her quiet voice and her restrained manner, she is not well suited to the difficult task of getting a group of very pissed off European teenagers involved in her display of Scottish folk dancing. She looks ridiculous, carrying on despite their mocking laughter and hostile stares. I'm at the back of the room, looking at her little feet making pointy shapes. I can't stand it. I leave for the office and hide there, constantly checking my watch to ensure I will not be around when the dancing stops.

"Eleanor was looking for you," says Rachel.
"I bet."
"She seemed  annoyed that you weren't around."
"OK."
"If you're not into her you should say something."
"You're right."

I'm watching the TV several days after that and I hear the letterbox banging shut. There's a handwritten note from Eleanor:

You bastard: you think you can just fuck me and leave me? You're not a man.

I put it in the bin and go back to the television.

The summer ends and life changes a little. The university is OK. Everything is clean and works well. The campus is green and spacious. I don't find the study or the work to be too hard. Some of it is interesting. I know what I have to do and I do it.

The undergraduates seem to be very dull. They have come here to pass the time and to learn the sense of entitlement they will carry around during their working lives in offices in London. On Friday and Saturday nights I just go to the home of a married couple who are friends of mine. I've known Mark since we were kids. He has a proper house and a wife and he's talking about having a child. He makes good money. We drink a lot of vodka and red wine and most weekends we do coke in his living room. Sometimes we weave out as far the the fried chicken place on the high street. We've nearly had fights in there at least half a dozen times. He speaks incautiously to drunk and stupid people. It never goes well. The Turkish guy in there always asks if we want special sauce.

Special sauce is just a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise. It's not very special.

One day I need to move from one level of the university library to another. I use the stairs. Two blandly handsome students are on the stairs ahead of me. They have stopped to talk. Rugby shirts. Hair styled to look like it's not been styled. Tall.

"So, he was like I left my fleece at your place, I want it back and I'm like fuck off, mate."
"You're hilarious, mate."

The stairwell is not very wide. They are stationary, blocking the way. They see me advancing up towards them and they don't move. I stand there. Nothing happens.

"Excuse me," I say.

Very reluctantly, they move a little closer to the walls, creating a marginally smaller space through which I might be able to pass. I squeeze through. The record bag I use to carry folders and books touches one of them on the way past. I hear one of the voices behind me say the word "twat". I keep going. I am a twat for wanting to use the stairs for getting from one storey to another. They own the stairs. It's their stairway. It's their library. They own it. They own the world. You are nothing. You're just an object. They notice you for a moment when you cause some inconvenience. Get used to them.

I get up to the third floor. The queue to use a computer is shorter there. After less than ten minutes of waiting for a free terminal, I get one and sit down. I remember to turn off my Philips mobile phone. I'm glad to move the weight and bulk of it out of my pocket and onto the desk.

I use Netscape Navigator and Alta Vista to surf the web for a little while and then hit the Usenet newsgroups. At alt.books.bukowski, I had initially expected to find people with whom I might discuss the dirty old man of San Pedro and all his works. The lunatics there have all read Bukowski, but they are more interested in trolls and flame wars. A year ago, I barely knew what the internet was. Now I'm living online in lieu of the life I can't seem to build at the university or in the town.

I see that Googolpex, the bull moose of alt.books.bukowski has replied to every one of the messages I wrote on my last visit. Googolplex owns a light bulb store in Chicago. I didn't even know you could get a store that stocked only light bulbs. It seems overly specialised. He never answers when I ask about that.  He calls me gay just about every time I write something. Yet he's always asking me to blow him for a nickel. I can't work out why a straight man accusing another straight man of being a homosexual would ask for oral sex. It kind of undermines the allegation.

I write a few long replies to Googolplex and to some others. Then I mess around with the layout of the Bukowski tribute website I built to practise using html. I see that a few more messages have been posted at the messageboard attached to the site. One of them interests me more than the others. Because it's written by Caitlin.

My email inbox contains many long messages from Caitlin. To read them back is to see a kind of courtship unfold. She loves Bukowski. That's how she found me - via this website. I only know one person in the real world who loves Bukowski - the friend who sent me Buk's novel Post Office when I was working abroad. In the virtual world of alt.books.bukowski I 'know' a whole gang of his fans. None of them are women.

Caitlin says she's Irish but living in Glasgow. She has some office job. She has a Geocities page with a few wounded poems. I don't like them. But I tell her that I do. We exchange several emails a day. She knows versions of the stories of my failed relationships. She knows what I think of the people around me and of the existence I have. She understands. She feels the same. It has become flirtatious. I know she has big tits. I know she likes leather and poetry and spanking. I get a hard on each time I open her latest message. It is beyond flirtatious now. She keeps saying very dirty  things and then, in the next email, saying she can't believe she's writing this stuff to me. She's never written like this to anyone ever. She loves my mind, she says. She feels close to me, but she knows that's crazy.

Caitlin and I are nervous because in a week's time I will be in Scotland to attend the wedding of a guy I used to work with. I'm really only going up there to meet her.

I want to give you my cunt, she writes. I want you to hurt me with your big cock. She doesn't know that my cock isn't all that big.

We have discussed what will happen if there is no physical attraction at all. We have discussed what will happen if only one of us is attracted to the other. We will walk away as friends and with no hard feelings.

After spending half the day with the groom and his friends, I slip away to meet Caitlin. I still haven't heard her voice. 

She is waiting in the pub. She is, as described online, a tiny but voluptuous person: tits, hips and all that on an otherwise small frame. Her hair is black, with purple dye here and there. It goes quite well with an outfit of black satin, lace and leather. Sort of gothic. Not usually my thing. But she has constructed an intense module of erotic pressure from the intersection of her pale flesh and the dark materials. Her eyes are sad, steady and grey. My brain spins. The hair is different. The clothes are different. But this is Eleanor.

I sit down, and then I'm not sure this is Eleanor. I never took a picture of her. This girl is the same size and shape. Her eyes are the same colour, I think. But nothing about her expression or how she greets me suggests that she has met me in person before.

"Wow," she says. "It's amazing to meet you finally. I've been so nervous."

Her accent is Scottish.

"I thought," I say carefully, "that you were Irish. Your accent doesn't sound Irish."

I hope the remark sounds innocent.

"Well, I was born in Ireland, but I've lived here since I was about ten years old."

I try to remember if this is what she's told me online. I can't find that part of the story anywhere in my head.

We drink, then walk and talk. Her dagger sharp high heels clatter on the pavements. She takes my hand.

"Here goes," she says. She stands on tiptoes to kiss me. It feels good and I return it.
"This might work," I tell her. But I can't decide if I'm kissing Caitlin or Eleanor.

A week later she comes all the way down the length of the country by bus to see me. I walk up to the bus station to meet her. Her hair now has more purple in it. It doesn't look as good. She's wearing an alarmingly short skirt and her pale blue sweater is horrible. She looks like a barmaid in a bad pub. I decide I can't take her to Mark and Sarah's place as planned. I'll have to tell her that they have gone away at short notice. I know that if she turns up at their house looking like this, Mark will say something when the mix of drink and coke makes him even less diplomatic than usual. So she doesn't look presentable. But she looks fuckable.

I can't go down on her. The smell between her legs isn't good. So I just stick it in and fuck her. Her eyes are blank and her nails dig in. Her tits are fat and her hard little heels press my flesh. I'm almost certain that I'm fucking Eleanor. I'm almost sure that Caitlin is a construction of Eleanor's mind.

When I roll away, I see traces of menstrual blood on my cock and on the sheets. I'm disgusted. Why the fuck did she come down here at her time of the month? Why wasn't I warned?

But I don't say anything and I know I'll do it again to avoid having to talk about why I don't want to do it again.

She takes a shower and I search her bag and her purse. All her ID says Caitlin Collins. Not Eleanor Burns.

So Eleanor and Caitlin are two different people. I must be losing my mind faster than I'd thought. I need to ease up on the cocaine. I need to get out of myself and into the world.

Unless Caitlin Collins is the real person and Eleanor Burns was a made-up character. No, that's stupid. How could she have got a job at the language school's head office by using a false name? They would need to see her bank details and her national insurance information.

I am losing it. It's just a coincidence that the last two women I've had sex with are both short, with large breasts, grey eyes, Scottish accents and a blank, detached manner. That could happen. That has happened.

I tell her by email that it just didn't feel right. That although our minds met online, something didn't click for me. She expresses disappointment but no hostility.

The emails become less frequent and less interesting. I start to forget about her.

One day, months later, she crosses my mind. I enter her email address into Alta Vista's search box. The first result is for her poetry page on Geocities. I check it. She hasn't written any more poems.

The second result takes me to an online petition. Something to do with some feminist cause. I find her brief message of support. Then I notice the name of the petition entry immediately below hers: Eleanor Burns. The email address associated with the name is not visible.

I write to Caitlin. I put it all down. It's a long email which concludes with me asking her she is the same person as Eleanor Burns.

The next day I get the reply:

I'm not Eleanor Burns. I've never heard of Eleanor Burns. I don't know what you're talking about. You sound paranoid. 

I decide to take it no further.

I still don't know what to think.

the cable guy

We were moving house. Moving from a cramped flat near Murder Mile to a chunky little cottage in the suburbs. It was time to get disconnected from one place and connected to another.

The cable TV company instructed us to send their set top box to them. They said they would send someone to the flat. 

"When?"

"Between ten a.m. and midday on Wednesday."

"That's no good. I'll be at work."

"Can anyone else be there?"

"My wife works full time too. We can't really take time off work just to return your equipment to you."

"We can send someone to your work address."

"OK."

On the Tuesday evening I tried and failed to disconnect the box from the cable. It was like they were welded together. I tried the only suitably-sized spanner we had. It didn't work. Feeling like a bloody fool, I went to the flat downstairs and asked our neighbour for help.

"I'm crap at these things," I said.

"Don't worry," he said confidently. "I'm sure it'll be no problem."

He felt very masculine and capable as he said that. He couldn't do it either.

So I called the cable company to explain the problem. But at that time of night it wasn't possible to reach anyone who dealt with set top box collections. I learned this after more than ten minutes of moving between options on the automated customer service phone line. I learned that the relevant people would be available again at 9 a.m.

So, in the morning, I headed to work minus the box. I finally managed to reach somebody at the cable company about half an hour before their man was scheduled to turn up at my office. 

"I don't have the box with me," I told someone at the other end of the line. "I just can't get the nut loose where it connects to the cable."

"No, you should be able to turn that just with your fingers."

"I couldn't. I also tried a spanner. My neighbour tried my spanner and his own spanner. It won't come loose."

"That shouldn't happen."

"But it did. So what now?"

"We have a slot tomorrow between three and five p.m."

"I'll be at work."

"What about Thursday between two p.m and four p.m.?"

"I'll be at work. What about an evening?"

"They can't come out in the evening."

"I can't stay home in the daytime."

"You need to return the box, sir."

"I'll tell you what. I'll go home tonight and I'll try a fucking hammer."

"You can't talk to me like that."

"I'll talk to you later. I've got work to do. Just make sure your man doesn't come to my office. He'd be wasting his time."

Half an hour later, their man turned up. I had to have another long conversation.

I put the set top box out of my mind. We were moving on the Saturday. I had bigger things to deal with.

The flat was rapidly emptying. I watched our sofa being hoisted out of the front window and humped onto the van outside. Just behind it, a man was climbing out of a van marked with the cable company's logo. I went out to him.

"Hello. Are you here to collect your set top box?"

"No, mate. I'm upgrading a broadband connection."

"OK. Which address?"

"Right there. Number 51A."

His accent was South African. He was a tall bloke with longish blonde hair.

"Great. I'm in 51B. I'm moving out today. 51A is downstairs from me. You can take the box."

"I can't do that, mate. That's a different team."

I explained my troubles with the box. I was friendly. He agreed to take it. He was sure it would be fine.

Three weeks later, in our new suburban home, I got a call on my mobile. The cable company wanted the box back. I would have to pay them £250 if I didn't return it immediately.

"I've returned it."

"Not according to our records, sir."

"I've returned it. One of your people took it away."

I explained, in detail, what had happened.

"Very good, sir. I'll look into that."

"I consider the matter closed now. Thank you," I said.

A fortnight later I was out at a meeting. My mobile rang. It was the cable company. They wanted their box back.

"OK, listen," I began. "On Saturday 8th September I personally watched one of your employees put the box in his van. It was around midday. He was there to upgrade my downstairs neighbours' broadband connection. They live at number 51A. Their names are Mark Roscoe and Suzanne Campbell. They saw your employee taking the box. Your employee was a tall blonde guy with a South African accent. He assured me that he could take the box away and deal with it".
"Yes, sir. I see."
"So you are accusing me of stealing your box."
"We're not accusing you of stealing it, sir."
"You're saying I've failed to return your property. You're saying there's a piece of your company's property that either is in my possession or perhaps I've had in my possession and got rid of it. Either way, you're saying it's yours and I haven't given it back. So you're saying I stole it."
"Well, not exactly."
"So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to call the police."
"The police?"
"Yes, I'm going to report a theft. I'm going to explain I've been accused of theft by the cable company but that I have witnesses who can report that the real thief is an employee of the cable company with a South African accent and long, blonde hair who was seen taking the stolen goods at a precise time of day. I daresay if the police interview your HR people or look at your records they will identify the thief."
"OK, sir. What I'm going to do is just look into this again and call you back."
"Please do."

Ten minutes later I got a call.

"The matter is now closed, sir."
"Can I have that in writing?"
"Very good, sir."

wet

We went to the park on a June day that was more like a day in April. Not that warm, and with showers on and off for hours. There's an Italian restaurant right in one corner of the park. It's an OK place. Nothing special. You can get ice creams or a coffee to takeaway. The kid wanted an ice cream. It was just starting to rain. So I asked the guy if we could have the ice cream and a couple of coffees inside. I'd just seen a young couple head in there before us, order coffees and sit down. A lunch party was winding up: a few friends finishing their desserts. It was getting towards 3 p.m. "We're closing," the guy said. "I can just sell you a coffee to takeaway." "It's raining. Why can't we just sit in here for ten minutes?" My wife told me leave it. "It doesn't matter," she said. So we took the stuff outside. It really started to pour out there. Proper rain: bouncing off the paths, puddling on the grass, reducing visibility. We huddled under one of the umbrellas covering the chairs and tables outside. I cursed that fucker in the restaurant as my wife told me to calm down and forget about it.

happy anniversary

I limped into the town. Fifty minutes before, I had slipped on the stairs and smashed the edges of some of the lower steps into the small of my back, my right wrist and the little toe on my left foot. Some time spent with ice packs on the sofa had been helpful. The back and wrist were OK. The toe still hurt like buggery. Advancing into the city centre on my wife's arm, I was learning how to roll the foot onto the pavement without causing further discomfort to the swollen digit.

By the time we were passing the Blacksmith's Arms and the Cock Inn, I had it working OK. It was only on about every third or fourth footstep that I'd feel a  sudden lancing pain inside my Kurt Geiger desert boot. Those are good boots. Very soft.  When pulling the left boot onto the damaged foot, I'd felt almost nothing. Getting the sock on had actually been more of a trial, making me think of a very familiar Bukowski line:

"I don't know about other people, but when I bend over to put on my shoes in the morning, I think, Christ Almighty, now what?"

That's always just done it for me, that line. Human life is right there. For me, anyway, if not for other people.

I tried to make conversation. I spoke about the day I'd had at work:

"So we met Hammell again today."

"Who's that?"

"Hammell. This big professor. He used to advise the last government and now he advises the new one."

"Oh, right."

"These people interest me."

"That's good."

"It interests me that he could violently agree with the last Secretary of State and now he can violently agree with a new Secretary of State who has scrapped a lot of the last guy's measures and completely changed everything around. Hammell is adaptable. He's savvy."

"Yes."

"Words like that are interesting. We take them to mean something positive. It sounds good if someone is 'savvy', 'adaptable' or 'in tune with the times'. But there's another way of looking at it, isn't there?"

"Is there?"

"Yes. Those words just mean the person is a survivor who will do and say anything to maintain his position and remain influential and well-rewarded."

"I suppose so. In a way."

"You could choose to use words like 'hypocrite' or 'turncoat' instead."

She didn't say anything. She just looked a little bored. We were crossing the road. I wondered if the Cock was full of cocks.

"You'd think that intellectuals would shape the way the way we think about things. You'd think all that research and thought would enable them to take a lead, guiding mere politicians and businessmen as they set about deciding how things should be done. But it doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like the things the intellectuals say are the product of a reverse engineering process. The businessmen, and the politicians whom they own, first become attached to an idea because it serves their interests. It looks like a way of maximising shareholder value or of transferring wealth from the pockets of a dispreferred group to the pockets of a preferred group. Then intellectuals receive grants from government or from business to do their great work. They continue to receive the grants and to travel to conferences in San Francisco, Qatar and Mumbai so long as their output serves to support the conclusions at which their paymasters have already arrived. They do the work that attracts the funding. The funding supports the work which is not unhelpful."

I had to pause for a moment. The words and the footfalls both halted. My toe really fucking hurt.

"My guess is," I continued, "that adaptable, savvy people who 'understand the Zeitgeist' would be able to find their places in this system no matter who is at the top of it. Perhaps this is how we could gradually shift into the grip of dictators. The intellectuals, the media, the advertisers all combining to create a language that makes it impossible to point out that something might be cruel or absurd. To raise an objection to something completely commonplace and taken-for-granted is to sound shrill. To sound like a crank. A lunatic."

We stood at another pelican crossing, waiting for the lights to change so we could cross the main shopping street. Across the road, a very fat person in three-quarter length combat trousers kicked a crumpled beer can. He kicked it again. His forearms were tattooed quite extravagantly and the one earlobe I could see had a large tunnel stretched into it. My wife tutted. The fat person kicked the can again as he continued on his way. One paw was wrapped around an open box of chicken pieces.  With his other paw he lifted meat into his mouth. There was a bone between his teeth when I turned my gaze away from him.

"For example," I went on. "It might be acceptable to argue that one or other measure introduced by the new Secretary of state may or may not have the desired effect of improving the education of children in this country. Arguments can appear to be quite heated. But no one says what's really true - that this government doesn't want to improve education for most people's children. They want to ensure that the richest people continue to enjoy the advantages of an education which stabilises and improves their position towards the top of society. They want to divert resources and funds away from most people's children and towards the children of the people for whom these ministers really work. Put this together with the privatisation of the NHS and with the non-regulation of rapacious banks. In this context, every policy this government produces makes perfect sense. But don't expect Her Majesty's Opposition to say any of what I've just said, even though they know it to be true. They know that to speak in these terms would have them branded as 'extremists' or 'mad'. So they confine their arguments to narrow matters of technical detail."

My wife sighed. We were nearing the restaurant and I think she hoped that filling my mouth with wine and food would soon prevent it from emitting  more words.

"If you go back to even trying to give the children of cleaners and shop assistants the same quality of education as the children of ministers or financiers, what will happen? Well, some of those cleaners' kids might actually want to take over and a smaller number might even start making that happen. We've been down that road. Oiks running the country, or thinking that they do. But our masters are back in power now and they want to turn back the clock. Real people must be kept in their place. That means just enough education to operate machinery, read the tabloids and watch Britain's Got Talent. They must not care about or understand what's happening to them."

As we passed the Boot Inn, a family straggled along the other side of the street, moving towards us. Noises were coming out of their mouths. They got closer. I thought that the noises had to be words, given that there was some evidence of prosody. But it was not until they were behind us that I recognised little bits of what they were saying to be items of English vocabulary.

"Sometimes I have to listen really, really carefully to people to realise that they're actually speaking the same language as me," I said.

We got to the place and were shown to a table. We had kir royales to toast our wedding anniversary and once mine had been efficiently dispatched I got stuck into the bottle of Muscadet. My wife hadn't even drained half of the pinkish aperitif from her glass.

We ate: olives, bread, salads, cheeses, pâté. We talked about the kid. I tried not to allow any connection to exist between what I thought specifically about his schooling and the stuff I'd been saying as I limped into the restaurant. People don't want to think that things like that apply directly to them. My wife is no exception.

"Just so long as he's happy, that's the main thing," she said.
"Yes, that's the main thing."

To my left, men sat on one side of a long table. Women sat opposite them. Husbands and wives. I could hear they were speaking English but I didn't catch much of it. The men were competing to make the funniest remarks. As each utterance reached its conclusion, the whole table barked with furious laughter. It happened every few minutes for the duration of our meal.

I was feeling the wine by the time I found something metallic between my teeth. I extracted it and looked at it. It was a tinselly object, gold in colour. The words 'happy birthday' had been in my mouth, presumably cooked into the cod goujon I'd just eaten. A decoration.

We didn't make a fuss. The price of the goujons and of my wife's dessert were not added to the bill.

My foot felt a little better on the way home.

"Perhaps it's just the alcohol taking the edge off the pain," my wife said.
"I've had a drink. But I'm not drunk."

A car moved past us. Really dismal music thumped inside it and out of its windows. The bass was heavy and the vocalist sounded like a bloody fool trying to win a singing competition.

I danced around a bit, pumping the arms. The toe protested but I was having a good time. The front passenger's window rolled down further.

"Oi, cunt. Are you taking the piss?"
He looked like he was in his early twenties and not the brightest boy.
"I'm enjoying your music."
"You fucking what? Fuck off."
"You don't want me to enjoy it? I assumed that music played at that volume was meant to be enjoyed by everyone in the street."
"Do you want me to fill you in, cunt?"

My wife's grip tightened on my arm.

"Don't do this," she said.

"Smile," I told my young friend, gesturing towards the cameras mounted on posts all over our high street. "You're on CCTV. So is your licence plate."

They drove away, all of them in the car adding their comments into the mix.

"Don't do things like that. I don't like things like that," said my wife.
"I do. I think they're funny."
"Well, just don't do them when I'm with you."
"OK," I agreed.

We went home and began our eighth year of our marriage.

management material

The shop was in good order. The delivery had been put away. The shelves were well stocked, with the label of every bottle of wine facing the right way. Every shelf-edge price label was  correctly placed. The fridge was full of beers and soft drinks, with the coldest cans moved to the  front so no customer could complain about picking up a warm one. The floor had been vacuumed and the worn green carpet tiles bore not a visible trace of dust or dirt from the street outside. The window display was tidy, attractive and arranged exactly as dictated by the instructions from head office.

Downstairs, the cellar was tidy and its floor and stairs had been swept. Fresh stock had been ordered and the paperwork was done. A tape was whirring in the VCR that recorded the output of the security cameras.

Noon was approaching and the last customer I'd seen had blown in and out more than half an hour ago to buy twenty Benson. He had stalked out, unwrapping the little gold pack and adjusting the copy of the Racing Post that was tucked under one arm.

I spread the newspaper out on the counter. The siege of Sarajevo was two months old. A photograph showed a department store split wide apart. In the foreground, a notice had been plastered to the side of a telephone booth: Pazite, Snajper!

The door to Shirland Road swung open, admitting hot air and Christine Pigeon.

"Hello, John," cooed the Pigeon. "Not busy, then?"

"It's never too busy this time of day in the week," I told the Area Manager. "Half the locals are at work and the other half are lying in dark rooms working up the courage to face the world."

Christine looked at me. It was a wide, unpleasant face. Like  a representation of a middle-aged woman formed poorly from dough. Thumbed deep into it, set below viciously plucked and repainted eyebrows, were two very dry and tough raisins. They did not catch the light.

"How do you think the shop is looking, Christine?" I asked.

She turned that head slightly.

"Yes, it looks alright."

"Did you notice the window? What did you think?"

"It's OK."

"No stock loss at all this month," I volunteered. "That's two months in a row. A bit of an improvement, isn't it?"

The Pigeon remained impassive. 

"Is the office tidy?"

"The office? The office? Do you mean the single swivel chair tucked under a length of formica-topped plywood in a windowless alcove off the upstairs stockroom? Yes, you will find it to be absolutely immaculate. Shall I put the kettle on?"

"Yes, please. No, wait. Then you'd have to leave the shop floor unattended."

"We can't have that."

"No, we can't." She found the words of the Store Manual right at the front of her hard little brain and shared them with me: "The shop floor shall never be left unattended for any reason unless the outer door of the shop is securely locked."

"Yes," I countered, "and the outer door of the shop shall not be locked during the designated trading hours of the branch other than during a genuine emergency, such as a serious injury to a member of staff."

"Very good," said the Pigeon. "You've been reading your Manual. You're better off reading that than your bloomin' posh paper there," she said, gesturing towards my broadsheet with an accusing finger.

"You're not a Guardian reader, Christine? You surprise me. I suppose you take the Telegraph?"

She looked at me again. Traces of an expression were barely discernible. Perhaps she hadn't enjoyed my remark.

"What about that cup of tea?" she asked.

"What shall I do? Close the shop? That's against the rules. Or leave you in charge? Meaning that you might have to ring up a sale on a till that you haven't signed into yourself, which is also against the rules. Or would you prefer to make the cup of tea yourself?"

"Don't worry. I'll make it myself. Do you want one?"

"But how would I drink it? It's against the rules to eat or drink on the shop floor and, as we have established, against the rules to leave the shop floor unattended."

Christine rounded the end of the counter and pushed aside the door to the stockroom. For an oddly  proportioned old bird with a stupid and ugly face, she had quite trim legs tapering down to neat ankles and a decent backside packed into her polyester skirt. I assumed that if Mr. Pigeon was in charge in the bedroom, he must surely insist on taking his lady wife from behind. The view from the rear was  just about acceptable and the need not to look at that terrible mouth must have been particularly acute as climax was approaching.

"Send them through when they arrive," she said as her arse, tights and high heels disappeared into the gloom beyond the brightly lit shop floor.

"Will do," I replied, folding up my Guardian and placing it out of sight. The snipers and shells of Bosnia would have to wait. In my pocket, I found the tie I should have been wearing with my white shirt and bottle-green apron. I hastily knotted it and placed my palms on the counter, fixing my gaze on the middle distance and waiting for punters and for Christine's interviewees.

A replacement needed to be found for Alan, the Kiwi part-time assistant who was returning to his native Auckland, having satisfied fully his curiosity about life in London. He had a place confirmed at the police academy in his home city, and was looking forward to doing battle with Maori gang members. He enjoyed telling me that they were the hardest bastards in the world.

yardies are bad news?" he used to ask me. "They're fucking pussies. Those fucking Auckland boys would eat them for breakfast."

Alan was a good bloke. It was on a dingy mattress brought from his flat that I'd spent more than eight sleepless hours on the stockroom floor the last time the alarm has failed to set properly. When I'd called the alarm company I was told that the nearest engineer was the other side of London with half a dozen call outs to deal with before he could get to me.

The shop shall not for any reason be left unattended without a fully functioning alarm system engaged, said the Store Manual.

So, because I was too much of a bloody fool to hire a part-time shop assistant, the Pigeon had flown in to run the rule over the three applicants for the job vacated by the departing New Zealander.

Christine's first and second appointments failed to show up. So my Area Manager had been tucked away for more than an hour when the fucking mad woman entered. I had sold one box of matches, a can of Cherry Coke and a litre of a British fortified wine whose taste was meant to resemble that of Sherry.

The visibly insane female smelled of butter and wore ill-matching clothes as well as an expression of crazed hatred for the world. The fearful eyes travelled over the shelves and bottles. 

"This shop is a mess," said the horrible person in front of me.

"How can I help you?"

"I'm here for an interview."

"Ah, so you must be Geraldine. I'll let Christine know that you're here."

I broke the seal between shop and storeroom. Christine had filled the little space just inside the door with her cigarette smoke and her bullshit. She was on the phone, talking to somebody as if she were addressing a person with severe learning difficulties. I smiled and announced the arrival of the crazy person.

The nutjob went in for her interview. Not even the Pigeon would hire an obvious lunatic, I thought. It's not worth the trouble. No good can come of employing somebody with mental illness so severe that it's visible to the naked eye.

Two weeks later, I wanted to kill myself. The evening shifts I'd spent in the company of Geraldine were torture. Her voice was Satan's rusty iron cock stabbed repeatedly into my soul. Each word killed a thousand brain cells. Each sentence seemed to last one hundred and twenty days of auto-sodomy by the horns of my own despair.

Three weeks later, I took the tube up the Northern Line to Totteridge and Whetstone. It was in an office above the Whetstone branch that important company business was conducted. My shoes shined, my shirt ironed and my rebellious hair beaten into submission, I was off to meet not only the Pigeon but her immediate superior, none other than the Regional Manager himself. I was to learn the outcome of my application to join the Management Training Scheme.

The Regional Manager decided that some chitchat would put me at my ease.

"What do you get up to away from work?" he asked.

I decided not to mention all the time I spent under the influence of ecstasy in nightclubs and at parties in abandoned office buildings around the country. I didn't think he needed to know about the married Polish woman I'd met some months ago and between whose sturdy legs I'd whiled away many a happy hour. I also thought better of telling him how much time I spent reading  the works  of Dostoevsky, Celine, Knut Hamsun and Charles Bukowski. It was just a hunch, but I didn't have him down as a man with whom I could discuss literature.

"I go to the football as much as I can," I told him, truthfully.
"Who do you support?"
"QPR."
"That rubbish? I'm an Arsenal man myself."

I guffawed in the approved manner. This seemed to work OK. His stone face softened a little.

"So tell me why you want to join the Scheme," he said.
"Well, I was given a shop to run five months ago. In that time I've got it looking good, stopped all stock losses, improved sales, got the stock levels down to where they should be and kept within the staffing budget."
"That's not what I asked."
"Excuse me?"
"I didn't ask why you think you're qualified to join the Scheme. I was going to ask that later. I asked why you want to join it."
"Why?"
"Yes, what makes you want to pursue a career in retail management?"
"Because I know I can do it. Because I'm doing it anyway. So I might as well get the proper training and be paid properly for it."
"So it's for the money?"
"Not entirely. It's for the satisfaction. Being recognised as officially qualified to do something."
"That's your answer?"
"Yes," I said. "What kind of answer are you looking for?"

The face hardened again. He wrote something on the form in front of him.

"Would you say you have the right attitude to be a store manager?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm sure I do."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I work hard to make the shop look right, balance the tills, keep the stock at the right level and improve sales."
"That's not really what I asked, is it?"
"Isn't it?"
"No, it isn't."

I looked from my interrogator to Christine Pigeon. She wore one of her tight polyester skirts and some sort of smile. It was hard to guess why it was there under her lumpy nose. There was a rustling noise and the crackle of static electricity when the ugly fucking bitch crossed her good legs a little higher up.

"I'm sorry, what are you asking then?"
"You told me you can do the basics of the job," replied the Regional Manager. "But I asked you about your attitude. Do you have the right attitude?"
"I think I do."
"Why?"
"Because I do everything that's expected of me and more - and that's without the proper training. So imagine what I can offer if I have the training."
"Well, I'm afraid we're not going to offer you a place on the Scheme on this occasion," he said.

I was taken aback.

"Why not?" I asked.
"That last question about attitude was the key one," said the hard face. "Because we don't think you do have the right attitude."
"I see. Why not?"
"Christine tells me you were reading a newspaper the last time she was at your store."
"Yes. Is that important?"
"Yes it is. It shows you're not focused on your work."
"But I had done all my work. The shop was immaculate. There was nothing more I could do."
"Were the shelves fully stocked?"
"Yes."
"Fully stocked?"
"Yes."
"So every line was six bottles deep? Every single line?"
"No," I admitted. "But every bottle was pulled to the front of the line and every bottle was facing outwards."
"Yes, but some of the lines were not full."
"Well how could they be?"
"You could get more stock from the cellar and fill every single line six bottles deep."
"But how could I go to the cellar?"
"How?"
"'The shop floor shall never be left unattended for any reason unless the outer door of the shop is securely locked'", I parroted. "Also, 'the outer door of the shop shall not be locked during the designated trading hours of the branch other than during a genuine emergency, such as a serious injury to a member of staff.' So, if I'm on my own, I'm not allowed to leave the shop floor without shutting the shop. But I'm not allowed to shut the shop."
"Yes," allowed the stone face.
"So I was on my own. I have to be on my own in the mornings because the staffing budget for a shop with the turnover of that branch only allows for having two staff at the busiest times, which means the evenings and Saturday afternoon. Most of the time there's only one person working there. How can that person get more stock without leaving the shop floor?"
"This is what we mean about your attitude. It's not positive."
"Not positive?"
"No, this sort of talk is not positive."
"I'm just pointing out that you're marking me down for not doing something that the company rules actually make impossible."
"Also," said the Area Manager triumphantly, "you weren't wearing a tie when Christine arrived."

He had me there.

"That's true," I admitted. "I was not wearing a tie."

In the weeks that followed, Geraldine's voice and her buttery smell nearly killed me. She continually committed the same act of theft involving the same acquaintance. Her friend would come in and pay for one item. Geraldine would fill her friend's bag with several additional items. All of this was captured on CCTV. She also allowed her ex-husband to make purchases using stolen credit cards on several occasions. This was also caught on CCTV. Christine's choice of part-time sales assistant was not really working out as hoped.

A fucking idiot named David, who was coming toward the end of the Management Training Scheme, was installed as the shop's manager-in-waiting. He was routinely late for work, routinely offended some of our more sensitive customers and quickly displayed the symptoms of a nervous breakdown.

While David was off sick, I got the shop looking decent again, smoothed over the arguments he'd caused with the upset regular punters and got everything nicely under control. The job was very fucking easy.

I never became a store manager. I was not management material.

lips and arseholes

I was Little John. He was Big John. Sometimes. He was also called Mad John.

He was a proselytising vegan. On our road trips, if somebody unwrapped a pork pie, scotch egg or Cornish pasty at the motorway services, he would darkly opine thus: "Lips and arseholes."

"What?"

"That thing you're eating: lips and arseholes. The sweepings from the the dirty abattoir floor".

"It tastes good."

"It will kill you. You will be killed by the lips and arseholes of animals you never even met."

"I don't want to meet them. I want to eat them."

"It will eat you."

"What will?"

"Cancer. Bowel cancer will eat you slowly. It will hurt and you will remember stuffing this pork pie into your face at a service station on the way up to some shitty nightclub."

"Oh fuck off."

The story was that he hadn't always been like this. Before a stint in prison he'd been just another sharp-suited, fully omnivorous bullshitter, into clothes, cars and fucking. After his few months on remand, there was something of the Charlie Manson about him. He enjoyed coming across as unpredictable and dangerous, but I never saw him actually hurt anybody. Not physically anyway. Not properly.

"How did you get through prison?" somebody would ask him.

"Acid," he liked to reply.

"Acid?"

"Yes, this mate of mine would sent me tabs or microdots under the stamp on a postcard. It's a piece of piss."

"Why did you want to be tripping in there? Anything could have happened."

"I just wanted to."

"Alright."

The two occasions I saw him roused to anything like real violence were both in and around Brixton, where I was living in a chaotic flat with a girlfriend who was fucking a shitty little homunculus named Ian and with a gaudily painted fright mask who was the girlfriend of somebody who used to torment me and everyone else at school.

One Brixton afternoon, the lunatic from downstairs decided to start some shit.

He was given to harassing us for alleged noisiness, usually kicking off his complaint session with a lusty assault on the buzzer and intercom. He drank all day and sat around waiting for somebody from our flat to return from work, college or criminal activity.

"Why is your buzzer going mental like that?" asked Big John.

"That's Mikey. He'll be saying that we're making too much noise."

"It's the middle of a weekday afternoon and all we're doing is cutting up coke and putting it in wraps. We're not making any noise."

"He will have seen us come in here. He's waited twenty minutes or so and now he can't wait to get started with his usual bullshit."

"Get rid of him."

"I'll try."

It wasn't easy. Mikey was not a rational person. Despite trying very hard to keep cool, I ended up annoying him by refusing his command to come downstairs. 

"I'm not going down there to talk to you, Mikey. You come up here if you're got a problem."

We heard Mikey thundering up the stairs. He pounded on the door.

"Get rid of him," said John.

"I said I'll try."

"Try harder - and don't let him in here."

I opened the door to attempt to reason with the excited Mauritian. Barefoot and wearing a grubby vest, he attempted to barge his way in.

I'm not a big bloke. Neither was he. I was able to keep him from crossing the threshold.

"You're not coming in here, Mikey. If you want to talk to me, you can talk out on the landing."

Mikey was all flailing arms and dirty words. John was laughing inside the flat.

"Who's laughing? Who's fucking laughing?" screamed Mikey.

John emerged from the living room and made himself known at the front door.

"I'm laughing," he told Mikey. "I'm laughing at you."

Mikey weighed up the situation. The younger man in front of him looked large and capable of causing harm.

"Why you fucking laughing?"

"I spend my life laughing at cunts like you."

Mikey exploded: a whirlwind of limbs and snarling curses. John gave him a shove in the chest. The smaller man staggered backwards and found himself at the top of the stairs. He thought for a moment and then pretended that the force of the shove had carried him further than it really had. He made a meal of rolling down the uncarpeted steps. He decided not to go further than the turn in the stairway.

"You pushed me," he screamed. "I'm calling the police."

"Are you, cunt?" smiled John. "Shall I call the immigration service?"

Mikey went quiet and I didn't hear anything from him for a few months after that.

peanut

The 38-year-old Jensen Beach man who dressed as a peanut and armed himself with a marlinspike was drinking and apparently suicidal when he made the 911 call that brought police to his house.

Ignatius J. Reilly's aunt Emerald said her nephew told people he wanted to die. Reilly was shot twenty-eight times by police while wielding the weapon.

Emerald Reilly said she was told that her nephew was upset when he woke up Friday and realized he had survived the shooting.

Police arrived about 6:30 p.m. Thursday after Reilly called in a disturbance at his home, 33123366677700 XYZAVB St.

Reilly was armed with a 47-foot-long marlinspike, police said. Officers commanded him to drop the weapon, police said, but he refused and advanced on them screaming "I am the Cheshire Cat and I demand the elephant pyjamas of bestial sexuality."

Police said Friday that Reilly was yelling for officers to shoot him, lowered his weapon and pointed it towards officers as he got closer.

Officer Troy Hitler first used a Taser to no apparent effect, then shot Reilly twenty-seven times. Hitler's partner Officer Laird Rapunzel shot him once, police said.

Emerald Reilly, who lives in a Palm Beach County pet grooming parlor, said she has not talked to her nephew since the shooting. She said she had a phone conversation with him about an hour before it happened.

"He was having a bad day. He said that legions of fire hydrants despised his lightbulb store and were molesting his lime green 1984 Chevy Camaro. I didn't think anything of it and just told him it was just that, a bad day, and that tomorrow would be better," she said.

Reilly had threatened to commit suicide in the past and recently had been very down, she said. "He was bothered by the royal wedding in the UK," she reported. "He felt it was a manifestation of an alien conspiracy to smuggle eggplant into the souls of infants."

He also might have stopped taking his medication for attention-deficit disorder in recent days and started drinking more, she said. "He was all about the M/D 20 20. His favorite flavor was the cocoa bean and donkey cum."

Emerald Reilly said her nephew was calling family members Thursday night "like he was trying to say goodbye and evangelize about the asshole of the Whore of Babylon."

His brother got one of the calls and went to the Jensen Beach house, Emerald Reilly said. Ignatius Reilly was wearing the elaborate violet and yellow peanut costume his mother had made for him.

It had multiple layers, individually crafted from the foreskins of rare animals, which she speculated might have reduced the effectiveness of the Taser.

The brother, whom she declined to name, told Emerald Reilly that when Ignatius was hit by the Taser, he shook a little, then "cut through the (Taser) wires with his antique marlinspike and came back at the cops."

Police were still interviewing people and could not comment on Emerald Reilly's account of events.

Hiltler, who has been with the Police Department since the fall of 1845, is on administrative leave while the investigation continues.

Reilly operates a lawn ornament repair business from the home. Emerald Reilly said he was having trouble at work and had been fighting with his 345 lb. girlfriend, Lulu Googolplex.

Martin County Court records show that Reilly has a long criminal history.

He served a little over a year in prison for attempted fifth-degree pet molestation and was released in March 2002.

He was sentenced to 90 days in jail in 2001 for driving under the influence of ghost farts. He was sentenced to 273 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to third offense drunken boating in 2000 and 90 days in jail for a protection order violation in 1999.

"It's sad. . . . I'm not faulting the cops," Emerald Reilly said. "When he gets better, I hope he goes to a mental health hospital and not jail."

His condition at Martin Memorial Hospital was classified under the Homeland Security Act.

I'm Rangers too

We got Manchester United in the fourth round of the League Cup. I don't call it the Carling Cup and I never called it the Worthington Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup, the Rumbelows Cup, the Littlewoods Challenge Cup or the Milk Cup. It's the only thing we've ever won and to me it's the League Cup.

So we motored up to Manchester and checked in at a Travelodge in Salford. My dad had started to feel bad on the way up - tummy trouble brewing. He ate nothing when we went to some peculiar Italian place near the hotel and he was contemplating not coming to the match at all. He toughed it out though, and was back and forth to the gents throughout the dull fixture. The home side's second choice players ground out a 1-0 win and we made the mistake of trying to get a taxi near Old Trafford. We must have covered a good mile and a half on a wet and windy night before we eventually flagged one down. Dad managed not to soil himself or throw up in the cab.

I needed a beer and got one from the hotel's rudimentary bar. He headed upstairs, warning me not to disturb him in the night or in the morning under any circumstances:

"When I'm ready, I'll knock on your door or send you a text or something."
"OK."

So, when someone rapped on the door of his room in the small hours, he got up thinking I'd decided not to pay attention to his instructions. When the last bout of vomiting was finished, he'd finally retired to bed wearing a polo shirt in our club colours.

Standing before him was a naked man. Stark bollock naked. Not a stitch.

"Hello, mate. I've run out of the free tea bags. You couldn't spare one, could you?"

My dad tried to understand what he was seeing and hearing. The nude intruder pointed to a QPR tattoo on his bare chest and said, "It's alright, mate. I'm Rangers too."

black birds

We only knew one London cab driver, an old schoolmate of my dad's. He was a motormouthed pain in hole and I'd avoided him as much as I could. By the time I was in my early 20s and had flown the nest I thought I might never have to listen to his bullshit ever again.

But one day we were in the car and heading back from a match in deepest southeast London, i.e. away at Charlton. We pulled into a petrol station to fill up and were sitting there for a moment when we saw a taxi shudder onto the forecourt. Well, of course it was him.

He and the old man can't have seen each other for about a couple of years so naturally my dad was out of the car and across the oily concrete as quick as a flash, smile turned on and hand held out. But emotional displays were not his old friend's style. He looked past my dad and at me through those pebble lenses. Expressionless, he turned his fat head and watery gaze to his school chum, jerked a pudgy thumb at me and said:

'You still driving this lazy cunt around then, are you?'

Then, before dad could craft a proper response, he was peering through me and at a woman who had paid for her fuel and was heading back to her car.

'Fuck me,' he said tonelessly. 'Black birds always look like they're walking around with someone else's arse.'

kilburn grange park

in the early 1970s he was working in kilburn grange park. every morning the place was full of every kind of shit you could imagine and he had to clear up as thoroughly as possible before the gates were opened to the great british and irish public. the toilets were the worst job, especially on the days that men living in rough digs and working on the building sites would get paid and buy new clothes.

a man could buy a suit in burtons and wear it with work boots every day. the suits would be destroyed inside 2-3 weeks. on paydays, they would head back to burtons to buy another suit. the trousers and jacket would be stuffed into a toilet down in kilburn grange park and then crapped on.

he had to deal with that on a regular basis.