Hymns for Strange Children
The World’s End, Camden. Where time stood still.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her peroxide crop mirrored my own, and there was something about the way she stood, rocking back on her heels as she swirled the ice in her drink around with a straw. Everyone else seemed muted, fading into the background.
So I was staring. And in between staring I was drinking far too quickly, but then I’d recently developed a work hard/play hard philosophy. It was less than a year since I’d graduated from university, and I was still living in Surbiton. I was juggling four jobs and believed, with the fervour and naïveté of the hopelessly young, that sleep was for weaklings.
Besides, tonight was Crysi’s 21st birthday. We’d arranged to see Rachel Stamp, then head to Popstarz. It was a sly nod to our underage teen drinking years; I went to my first Rachel Stamp gig when I was a 15-year-old mess of glitter, fake fur and cheap vodka.
In six years, their set hadn’t changed much. We sang and danced, and drank and posed. It was a night of nostalgia which I now look back on with even more nostalgia. There’s probably an Instagram filter for that.
By the time we got to Popstarz, I was floating on a cloud of MDMA and Smirnoff Ice, and my sides hurt from laughing so much after Crysi fell down the escalator at King’s Cross. And then, as we were dancing on the stage and after I’d snuck less and less subtle looks at her all evening, it finally happened. She pulled me behind a stack of amps and kissed me. For the first few seconds, my arms hung uselessly at my sides as I reeled from the shock of getting exactly what I wanted. The night was just so perfect. Then her teeth grazed my bottom lip and her fingers twisted into my fishnets and I finally kissed her back, losing myself to pure sensation. We fell back against the amps and she pushed my knees apart with one of her own and…and…
…and I became dimly aware that we were drawing a crowd. That wouldn’t be unheard of back in the wasteland of suburbia, but here it was unnerving. What was everyone looking at?
Crysi ran up to us, a beautiful birthday blur of smeared make-up and fresh bruises. Her shirt had been ripped open, and the word “WHORE” written across her chest in red lipstick.
“Darl-ings?” She teased in a singsong voice. “THEY THINK YOU’RE TWINS.”
I’d like to say that moment was sobering, that it made me coolly reevaluate my lifestyle choices and taste in women.
But I woke up in Oxford.
Still, to this day, my longest walk of shame.
The #2 story I can’t tell
In March 2013, I wrote a blog post entitled “Twenty stories I can’t tell”. This made it to #2 on the list. Of course, it never happened. It would be ridiculous to take the following as anything other than the work of mediocre fiction it patently is. Things like this just don’t happen to people in real life.
So, to be absolutely clear: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
And with that, here’s the tale of the accidental crack den.
The Party House, c.2007
The man on our doorstep wasn’t a friend. If he had been, he’d have known that a sharp kick to the bottom left corner of our front door gained access to our house. No, he knocked. D and I answered by chance. We weren’t in the habit of doing so because we were so used to fending off bailiffs. Maybe the knock didn’t have that authoratative bailiff-timbre to it. I really don’t remember.
He was a sheepish character in his late forties, an ageing hippie type. He told us, in a thick Spanish accent, that his name was Igor. We let him in for three reasons. Firstly, he didn’t look like a bailiff. He was dressed in battered combat trousers and an oversized, ragged jumper, and had straggly black and silver hair past his shoulders. Secondly, he said he was a friend of A, an affable wreckhead from back home in Hampshire who’d been crashing on our sofa. Thirdly, and perhaps this is the most important point, he’d been stabbed through the foot with a screwdriver.
He explained that he was fresh off the plane from South America, and asked if he could use our bathroom. We showed him downstairs with no further questions. He hobbled into our tiny basement bog and locked the door behind him.
D and I slumped back down on the sofa, opposite the bathroom door. We’d thrown another epic house party that weekend, and we weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders. Hell, we were probably still high.
Five minutes passed before D voiced what I’d vaguely been wondering myself.
“Why’d he come here instead of going straight to hospital?”
I shrugged. “Because he’s crazy…and Spanish…and he doesn’t like hospitals? Loads of people hate hospitals, right?”
D stared at me dubiously. Actually, he could have just been trying to focus. It was one of those Mondays.
So we sat, and we smoked, and we waited. Another five minutes went by. Another ten. It was at least half an hour before we finally heard the bolt on the bathroom door scrape back. We looked up expectantly. Igor limped out. Whatever he’d been doing in there, it wasn’t tending to his foot. He still had the same filthy trainers on, and the right one was soaked through with blood.
There was a faint but unmistakable smell of shit in the air, and Igor had his hands full. He grinned at us, and dropped their contents onto our coffee table with a slight flourish; a dozen dark grey pellets roughly the size and shape of cocktail sausages. They bounced and rolled across the table’s surface like giant Mexican jumping beans.
D and I looked at each other. We’d only seen pellets like this on news reports, but somehow we took their sudden appearance in our stride. A moment of silent understanding passed between us. We would act like this happened ALL THE DAMN TIME.
“How much is there?” I asked nonchalantly.
“About 15k, street value. Pocket money.”
“And where did you say you flew in from again?”
“Bolivia.”
“Huh. Figures. A’s gonna be back in a bit. Wanna hang out?”
Igor sat cross-legged at the table and pulled out a Swiss army knife. I decided not to ask if THAT had given him any trouble at customs. He picked a pellet at random and started sawing through its outer skin, which seemed to be composed of equal parts electrical tape and cling film…
…and that’s the last thing I remember clearly until five days later, when we were so paranoid that we covered the lounge’s one grimy window using drawing pins and a torn blanket. We thought people were staring down at us from the street. A couple of years later, I asked A what had happened to Igor. He snorted, and said he was “rotting in some Spanish jail”.
Worst nurse EVER
My mother’s just had a hip replacement, so I’ve spent the last few days back in Swanwick “looking after” her. The quotation marks are there because she was, less than a month into recovery, adamant that she didn’t need any help. In fact, since leaving hospital she’s only taken ONE codeine tablet, claiming that an Ibuprofen before bed was perfectly sufficient. I may, at this point, be forced to admit that stubbornness is genetic. I quickly ascertained that I was largely there to alleviate her boredom. So, here’s a representative list of things my mother learnt from my visit:
1) How to connect to the internet on her phone (fuck knows how she’d managed to turn it off in the first place).
2) The existence of my lower back tattoo, and the fact that it’s the Expendables logo.
3) That ‘The Expendables’ and ‘The Incredibles’ are two very different films.
4) The existence of cat shaming, and pets interrupting yoga.
5) How to block people on Facebook, specifically “that fat bitch from work”.
6) How to create an Instagram account.
7) How to post photos of her cats on Instagram.
(Yes, I realise 6 and 7 make me PART OF THE PROBLEM.)
8) That my answer to every other technological question is “because Windows is shit, switch to Android”.
365 Films in 365 Days
Way back at the end of 2012, my Facebook Wifeface Nicola Manning and I resolved to watch a new film together on every single day of 2013. It’s probably the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept, and we managed it with a minimum of drama and catch-up marathons, but a healthy dollop of whining about not having time to re-watch Con Air or finish Breaking Bad.
Essentially, 2013 taught me that when it comes to sitting on our arses staring at a screen, we’re stubborn, opinionated bastards.
So, here are my top and bottom ten films from the entire project. They’re not in any particular order, because I think I’ve done enough rating and reviewing for one year. Decade. LIFETIME.
THE GOOD: Frankenweenie, The Stendhal Syndrome, This is the End, Baise-Moi, Brick, Triangle, Excision, They Live, The Doom Generation, Django Unchained.
THE BAD AND THE UGLY: Howard the Duck, Monster House, Die Hard Dracula, Santos, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Elysium, 9 Songs, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Robotropolis, Puppetmaster.
Happy New Year everyone!
Designer drugs
Chandler’s Ford, 1999
“Fuck!” I yelled. “What the fuck does that to you? What the shitting hell has he taken?!”
Vocabulary-wise, it was not my finest hour, but there had been junk food, cider and napalm at Sarah’s party, so I was running on teen-delinquent IQ level.
He’d run out of the party in tears, so we’d followed him at a reasonable distance to make sure he didn’t play with sharp things, or fall foul of anything with flashy blue lights.
He’d collapsed outside the skate park, sprawled across the grass verge and out into the road in a pile of his own viscous, black vomit.
Cars started slowing down to get a better look, but none stopped. I thanked a god I no longer believed in for good old-fashioned suburban apathy. We ran over, grabbed him by the shoulders and hoisted him out of the road.
He sat up loosely, his head lolling from side to side in semi-consciousness. His chin and shirt were stained black and flecked with dark lumps. It reminded me of failed suicide attempts; desperate handfuls of pills, stomach pumps and activated charcoal.
We decided to carry him back to the party and inventory what everyone had taken. After all, this was clearly some seriously potent shit. I was secretly upset that I hadn’t heard about it first.
We carried him between us with his arms draped around our shoulders. His feet alternated between valiant attempts at baby steps and dragging uselessly behind him. He’d never weighed much though; the layers of clothes hid skin and bones.
We rang the doorbell. Sarah bounded up to greet us.
“Hey, wondered where you’d gone. Fuck, he looks wasted!”
I wiped his chin defensively with the sleeve of my hoodie.
“Yeah, about that…everything been going okay here?”
Sarah scrunched up her face in half-cut concentration.
“Napalm in the garden, but then you were here for that. Um, microwaving vodka? Apparently that’s still fun. Oh, but the weirdest thing? Well, you know my parents feel better if it looks like we’re eating something? I put out a giant bowl of jellybabies.”
“Why’s that the weirdest thing?”
Sarah sighed.
“Someone ate all the black ones. Every single goddamn one of them.”
Wessex Girl
I still navigate the streets of Winchester using the mental map of my 16-year-old self. The Buttercross is the only place to meet people. Rollies on the top step, facing the high street dead on so you can watch the tourists trying to pick up 50 pence pieces superglued to the flagstones. The Cat Ground’s for sunshine-soaked daytime drinking, pot-luck picnics from Safeway’s reduced section, and – on one horrifically memorable occasion – throwing up neon yellow after dropping on the bus to college because IT WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE MONDAYS. Angel Gardens is forever in twilight; awkward teenage sex and floodlit nunchuck practice. Another five minutes of back streets takes you to Culver, which should have been spelt with a K, and evokes hopscotch and slow-motion police raids.
I’ve already mentioned St. Giles’ Hill on here, and been reprimanded for being a closet hopeless romantic as a result. But the rose-tinted true crowning glory of my teenage Winchester, the one landmark that makes even my nature-hating ass just a little bit homesick, is St. Catherine’s Hill.
You’re not technically meant to camp on St. Catherine’s, because it’s all ancient mazes and protected wildflowers and shit, but in reality we’d get left to our own devices as long as we cleaned up after ourselves. Admittedly we accidentally set fire to a tree once, but we put it out really quickly and felt terrible about it. We were, on the whole, better behaved on St. Catherine’s than anywhere else in the city. We were still wasted idiots peeing on electric fences for kicks, but we respected that fucking hill. We’d lie on its peak at sunset, in a circle with each person’s head resting on the next’s stomach, and laugh until it hurt. Even when it was so cold one night that we found ourselves huddled together, ten of us in a three-man tent, no one wanted to leave. We made jokes about inappropriate erections and wandering hands in the pitch black mass of bodies until we dozed in the half-light of the small hours. Nights like that, growing up in Hampshire wasn’t really so terrible after all.
One evening, we watched all hell break loose across the landscape beneath us. A giant fire spewing a toxic black cloud of smoke, and blue lights streaming in from half a dozen directions to meet it. We lined up, passing bottles between us, and tracked the unfolding drama from our all-seeing yet helpless vantage point.
“Fucking hell,” breathed Sam. “That’s at the bottom of my road.”
“You want to head back?”
Sam looked momentarily perplexed.
“Nah, my house is at the other end.”
This was, of course, before smart phones and Twitter and any of us ever having any damn credit anyway, so none of us found out the cause of the fire – a jack-knifed tyre lorry – until the following morning.
That night, we just watched our city burn. Time stood still on St. Catherine’s anyway.
Shit I believe, so you don’t have to
1) Press-ups should only ever be attempted first thing in the morning, LIKE BATMAN.
2) Water is for people who are too poor to buy Pepsi Max.
3) Every ex has their own theme song. Recent ones for me have included Bad Religion’s 21st Century Digital Boy and Franz Nicolay’s This is Not a Pipe.
4) Rule three always comes back to haunt me. Years ago, it was a running joke that my song was The Offspring’s Self Esteem.
5) The most important wisdom my mother ever imparted to me: only amateurs get caught.
6) A bet’s a bet, so never wager what you can’t afford to lose. I say this from the vantage point of someone who has three names tattooed on her butt.
7) It’s perfectly acceptable to go to great lengths to set up an awesome one-liner. I recently bought Las Vegas bedding just so I could tell everyone that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
8) Life’s too short to paint your fucking toenails.
9) If in doubt, ask yourself “What would Tank Girl do?”. Well, unless it involves a kangaroo. PETA would be all over your ass.
10) The most important wisdom a dealer ever imparted to me: you don’t get anything unless you put your hand up.
11) If a spider is running towards me, then it is patently NOT more scared of me than I am of it.
12) Arguing with people you live with is like playing Russian roulette with an automatic: there are never any winners, and the police are probably going to get called.
13) Never trust a) Children’s TV characters whose eyes are too close together b) People who don’t read fiction yet claim to still have souls c) Riot police d) Anyone who claims to only like Rancid’s “early stuff” e) Cats f) Anything on my Facebook profile.
14) Nature is, for the most part, boring and itchy, and best viewed from the comfort of a skate park.
Tiny shoe
Last Sunday afternoon, Niall and I were walking down Queen’s Road when we passed a small, abandoned toddler’s shoe in the street.
“Ti-ny shoe!” Niall sing-songed, pointing to the seemingly innocuous object.
It was intensely unsettling, and not just because Niall had already reached the stage of daytime drinking where he was reduced to pointing at things and naming them. No, there was something about those words, that intonation…
The memory rose up and loomed over me ominously as I replayed the words in my head. Tiny shoe. Ti-ny shoe.
Oh god.
Something clicked. Broke. Crumbled under the weight of the words. The wave of memory crashed down over me in a thunderous tsunami of WRONG.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I’m sorry about what comes next.
The Royal Oak, Winchester
J had found an abandoned toddler’s shoe on the way to the pub. It was an otherwise slow news day, so we were making a big deal out of it.
“Aw, ti-ny shoe! What happened to the rest of the kid?”
“I bet he was abducted.”
“…and that’s vital evidence you’ve stolen from the crime scene.”
“Which now has your DNA all over it. Way to go, J.”
“Maybe he did it after all, and this is a double bluff.”
“Yeah, and that’s the trophy from his kill.”
“Years from now, we’ll all be on one of those talking heads crime re-enactment programmes, telling the presenter how J always seemed to be such a quiet, unassuming young man.”
“Bollocks to that. I’m telling them we knew he was a wrong ‘un from the get-go…”
Gradually we lost interest in the shoe, and left it sitting on the table while we turned the conversation to more pressing matters, like whether we should order chips with or without cheese, and if the quiz machine was liable to pay out if we tried our luck at Monopoly.
No one really paid much attention to M when he plucked the shoe up off the table and walked off faux-casually, whistling to himself and spinning it on his index finger as he sauntered away in the direction of the bar. I figured he was going to hide it somewhere, so we could creep people out with it at a later date. I imagined the legend of The Toddler J Murdered on the Way to the Pub could have quite a bit of mileage in it.
Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. Our chips arrived and were swiftly demolished. M still wasn’t back from the bar.
No, wait. M wasn’t AT the bar.
He was in the toilet.
When he finally reappeared he was looking strangely pleased with himself. He carried the tiny shoe back to our table slightly too carefully, pinched between his thumb and forefinger like a prized biological specimen. He placed it back in the precise centre of our table, and sat down with smug finality.
Silence. For a few seconds, no one dared to move.
Gingerly, B leant forwards, sniffing the air warily as he peered into the shoe.
“Oh god. You DIDN’T?!”
M grinned evilly.
D stood up to get a better look.
“Yeah,” he announced mournfully. “He wanked in the shoe. HE WANKED IN THE FUCKING SHOE.”
“You know M,” I said. “There’s a line. And then there’s crossing that line. And then, a really, REALLY long way past the line, then there’s you. Do you even share a fucking postcode with the line any more?!”
I burst out laughing. It might have been hysteria.
D picked the shoe up. Everyone dove for cover like he’d just opened fire.
“Well we need to get rid of it!” he yelped. “I’ll chuck it out the door.”
He flung the tiny shoe in the direction of the open back door. It ricocheted off the door frame, and splattered its contents across the back of the nearest chair.
The nearest chair belonged to a clean-cut yet imposing man who was treating his date to dinner and a bottle from bottom half of the wine list. The jacket draped over the back of the chair was light brown and looked expensive. Possibly suede. Definitely stickier than it had been five seconds ago.
Time stood still. I think I forgot how to breathe.
The man glared at us over his shoulder, annoyed at having to share the pub with a gaggle of shrieking children. Then, mercifully, he turned back to his companion. They were holding hands across the table.
“Um…” D piped up. “Shall we go to the Railway?”
We nodded in mute unison, and gathered up our things as quickly as we could. Rats from a sinking ship.
For months afterwards, we taunted each other with lilting calls of “Ti-ny shoe!” It was nails down the blackboard, crunching a snail underfoot and Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day all rolled into one.
It was, for a while there, our very favourite story.
It’s only forever, not long at all
The Great Eastern, Brighton, 2013
“I don’t have a type!” I argued stubbornly.
“Sure, not a physical type,” Niall countered, “but there’s a definite pattern. Let’s make a list.”
It was 11 o’clock and we were already nursing straight whiskeys over the day’s events and crosswords. Between us, we had a birthday party, a Justice Force 5 gig and the Indy’s concise under our belts, and the night was starting to taste just a tiny bit dangerous. Niall and I have always had a terrible habit of egging each other on.
“Go for it.”
Niall’s list of what I look for in a man ran as follows:
1) How well I think they’d do in a fight
2) Accent
3) Risk-taking
4) Bad tattoos
5) Stories
6) Ability to drink me under the table
It was a fair assessment. I returned the favour succinctly with a three point description of his ideal woman:
1) Thin
2) Pretty
3) Batshit
“What about intelligence?” Niall protested.
“Nope.” I said. “Your girlfriends tend to be the clever ones of the bunch, but it’s not something you actively seek out in a conquest. You put your dick in crazy places.”
“Well you’d know.”
“Hey, I’m not excluding myself from the list. Besides, there was vodka and mead. Only you would think mead needed an extra kick.”
Niall shrugged and downed his drink.
“Game of pool before bedtime?”
“I’m meant to be behaving,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Wanna bet on it?”
He had me there.
“That depends on the stakes.”
“How about a mogwai?” Niall ventured.
“Hell no, my mogwais are precious. Besides, you don’t have one to bet. What about tattoos?”
Niall scribbled the letters YUTBC on a spare scrap of newspaper.
“You used to be cool?”
“Yep. If I win, that’s what you have to get tattooed.”
“Well if I win,” I said. “You have to get a tattoo.”
Niall had, by this point, reached the ripe old age of thirty-two without a tattoo needle sullying his flesh.
“Done.”
We shook on it, and headed off to the Caroline. Niall shoulder-barged me playfully a couple of times on the way, knocking me flying across the pavement each time.
“Dick! Are you sure you want to do this?”
“A bet’s a bet.”
The pool table at the Caz was in use and surrounded by people, but it seemed to clear in seconds when Niall announced our plans.
I’ve seen Niall win games of pool when he was too drunk to work out which end of the cue to use. I, on the other hand, was notorious for crumbling under pressure. My brief stint on the Horse and Groom’s pool team a few years back was motivated entirely by the promise of free pizza for players, and hadn’t ended well.
I rolled my cue nervously between my hands, wishing I was sober enough to work out if it was straight. I was already planning where I could get my tattoo. There was space on my right leg, but across my left butt cheek would probably be funnier.
Niall broke. Nothing went down.
I went for an easy shot and fluffed it. Yep, left butt cheek. Might as well get the rest of my ass tattooed while it still looked good enough to get out in the pub.
Niall missed his next shot too. This was looking to be a long game. I took a large gulp of my drink. I figured at this point that it couldn’t really hurt.
I took a deep breath…and cleared up.
Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, black.
“Fuck yeah!” I yelled, far too drunk to be a gracious winner.
There may also have been a victory dance. I make no apologies.
“Seven ball rule!” Someone called out behind us.
Niall dropped his trousers and paraded around the table three times.
“So,” I said. “What are you going to get?”
“Under the circumstances? Another whiskey.”
Niall’s first tattoo is booked in for 11th May. It’s a full sleeve. We’ve banned ourselves from making any more stupid bets until after it’s finished.
The Hole in the centre of Winchester, 2000-2001
Five words. Five little words. Picture the main courtyard of Winchester College on a crisp spring morning, brilliant sunshine and leaves edged with hoar frost. The school’s eldest pupils are lined up in a quasi-military formation as the Headmaster leads Prince Charles along the front row, inviting him to shake various pupils’ hands and chat about their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. Finally, they reach the last boy in the line, and the Headmaster stiffens noticeably as he realises he’s not quite as well turned out as the other students. His hair is sticking up wildly, and he’s chewing on a lip piercing he shouldn’t have. As they stop in front of him the boy shields his eyes from the morning sun and squints at the Prince, screwing up his face in suspicion.
Oblivious to the boy’s demeanour, Prince Charles smiles and steps forwards to greet him. The boy recoils and five words, five little words erupt and spew forth.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Five words, and Cunt Girl had to wave goodbye to the boarding house he’d called home for five years. His desperate parents convinced the school to let him stay on as a day student by providing him with accommodation in the local area and bribing him to behave.
The poor misguided fools rented The Hole.
The Hole didn’t start off as a dive. It was a beautiful terraced house in one of the quiet, subtly expensive streets tucked behind the Cathedral Grounds. At first, we just used it as somewhere to hang out when the weather was crappy, or when the pubs wouldn’t serve us. Cunt Girl lent the keys out to whoever needed them, providing we didn’t take the piss.
I had copies cut. You know, just in case.
Actually, in retrospect, that’s probably where it started to go wrong.
A few months back, I wrote a list of 20 stories I couldn’t tell. The Hole was on that list for two reasons. Firstly, because a lot of what we did there was very, very illegal. After a few months, you could run a card along any given surface in that house and find yourself in need of a rolled-up note. Secondly – and I fully admit that this is linked to the first reason – I can’t remember most of it.
I remember tequila. A kicked-in window. My poor burnt Action Man. DIY nipple piercings. Voyeuristic videos and people throwing themselves down the stairs. Bleaching t-shirts. The Spit Roast song. Sinking into a chintzy armchair and being utterly unable to finish a sentence. The details are sketchy though; the faces are blurred, and the chronology is long lost. In fact, only one object from that woefully-abused house remains clear in my mind.
The microwave.
Potato waffles. They were our gateway drug. The box stated specifically that they weren’t suitable for microwave cooking, but I was hungry and couldn’t be arsed to faff around with the oven. Microwaved waffles weren’t too bad either. A bit soggy, but they didn’t kill me. In my mind, the box had lied to me. If waffles could be microwaved, what else could?
Well, not mobile phones. It only took three seconds to kill the mobile Cunt Girl’s dad had given him that morning. After that it was a free-for-all. CDs were fun if you propped them up with Blu-tac so you could see the lightning display. Money was fine if it wasn’t yours, but notes went up disappointingly quickly because of the foil woven through their centres. Plug adapters glowed orange, but still worked afterwards. Lightbulbs were messy. So was soap. Anything made of metal was a test of teenage nerves. We usually set the timer for twenty or thirty seconds then duck-and-covered.
The toaster wouldn’t fit. That was probably for the best.
EmmaMendesdaCosta 