British Winters Read online

  Chapter Twelve

  Illusion or Delusion?

  Boxing Day used to be a second Christmas for me, as other children of divorce may concur; Boxing Day was Christmas Day for the daddies. In some way the Boxing Day event would surpass the real day. Daddies can be so good at buying their children’s affections. Children are materialistic bastards, you can treat them like shit and then give a toy car and all is forgiven or at least that was the kind of child I was, which is handy when your father is a drunk, abusive twat, who, when sober likes to dish out gifts. My stepmother, at the time, was a bit of a feeder, so a lot of the gifts were edible. I would eat my body weight in chocolate and hard-boiled sweets. And I have never once thrown up on someone. God, my nephew is such a lightweight.

  These days Boxing Day is a dull affair, to the point where I cannot distinguish it from any other day and like any other day, I have to work.

  I am not heart broken at the failure of my relationship with Deb but I do feel bruised by it and I’m not just referring to my balls. I have lost something, well maybe lost isn’t the right way to put it, but either way a part of life has gone. I feel the emptiness of it, not sadness; the feeling is more akin to when you forget to put your watch on and then spend the whole day looking for the time and all you find is a bare wrist.

  “Wow, that’s fucked up.” Kev has pencilled both Nails and me in for the day. I guess he thought Boxing Day would have an influx of Christmas-weary patrons wanting to drink the sorrows of the season away.

  “Yeah.” I was bringing Nails up to speed.

  “It just flew right over your head?” And by ‘up to speed’ I mean everything but the Deb stuff.

  “I know.”

  “You should be dead right now.”

  “Yeah, God spared an atheist and instead took a father of three and put his youngest into a coma.”

  “You shouldn’t joke, Noel,” says a disapproving Benny.

  “It was a joke at God’s expense. I think he can take it.” Why do people keep thinking I’m mocking the victims? What kind of person do these people think I am?

  “He works in mysterious ways,” Benny continues and then taps on his empty pint glass.

  “No, a magician works in mysterious ways, God is just an absent father.”

  Nails takes Benny’s glass and pulls him another pint. Benny doesn’t respond to my blasphemy. I don’t know why I said it, to be honest, I’m an atheist. I don’t blame God any more than I blame the Easter bunny. I just hate shitty excuses and you don’t get much shittier than ‘he moves in mysterious ways’.

  “Fuck, the barrel is empty,” remarks Nails, quickly adding, “your turn.”

  “Fine, but I’m going to take my time down there and have a smoke afterwards.”

  The George’s cellar is a dank, dark place with a low ceiling. Lit only by the light that creeps in from its entrance and the inconsistent light of one flickering fluorescent tube, an epileptic would not last five seconds down here. Rats scuttle at either side of me taking turns to make my head jerk from one side to the other in the fear that they are within pouncing range. I once read about some rat disease which could be passed on to humans through their pee, lepto… something, and that it happens a lot in bars. The reason being that all the beer bottles are stored in the bar’s cellar and male rats climb all over the bottles, pissing as they do so, dragging their oversized ball sacks over the necks of the bottles. Do you think us bartenders are washing each bottle before we hand them out? No, course we don’t. I don’t know if it’s true about the disease being passed on through the pee but either way, I’d ask for your beer to be poured into a glass if I were you. We’ve got traps down here but those rats are still everywhere and pissing on everything as they scurry along.

  The barrel gets changed and I bang on the ceiling to let Nails know he’s good to go, and I light a cancer enhancer. Shit, we’re all going to get it; I’m just choosing which brand I want. They’re all bad but there has got to be different levels of badness. I hear bowel cancer’s the worst and you get that by eating processed meats; turkey-ham and hotdogs and shit like that. So why has my pack of twenty got ‘SMOKING KILLS’ printed on every side in big, bold letters and yet a tin of spam doesn’t have ‘EATING SHITTY FOOD KILLS!!!’ Skin cancer seems the lesser of the evils, however. I read a pamphlet on it, that I picked up from a doctor’s waiting room. It’s kind of like a bruised apple; catch it quick enough and cut out the badness maybe the apple will be ok, if not it’ll rot you to the core. Where’s the sticker on my front door warning me to only go out at night as ‘SUN KILLS’? What we need is matching T-shirts that say ‘LIFE KILLS’ slowly and surely and there is no amount of stickers and warnings that’ll stop it. Maybe if we all came to terms with our own mortality we’d live longer without the cancer of worry. And anyway what the hell are you going to do with those extra years? Yul Brynner died at sixty-five of cancer and that sucks, but it’s not like he was thirty-five or even fifty-five and I bet you he had a good old time before the end.

  Suddenly, someone or something stomps across the floor above and then I hear muffled voices, one of which is shouting. Enraged customer? Gladys handing in her notice due to the fact she had to dispose of a bottle of someone else’s urine? Kev’s wife having just worked out that his jokey homosexual persona isn’t an act? The stomping begins again. The mysterious person has to be staff; they’ve passed behind the bar and into the kitchen. They are heading towards me.

  “You fucking asshole!” Deb. Should have known, a break-up never ends in one night.

  “Yeah, we’ve established that, Deb.”

  “Who’s this bitch, then?”

  “Whoa, what bitch? There are no bitches involved.”

  “Bullshit, Jenny something.”

  “Jenny? Jenny is just an old friend. Who told you about Jenny?”

  “Who told me? If she’s just a friend why does that matter?”

  “It doesn’t and believe me, us ending things has nothing to do with Jenny Weir.”

  “Jenny Weir, that dick tease.”

  “Dick tease?”

  “I know who she is.” Deb smiles a demented grin. “Ha, good luck, nob.”

  She clicks back into stomp mode and heads off upstairs.

  “Who told you about…?”

  “Toby!” Toby, you bastard. He’s supposed to be my best mate. Back in school he fingered Tammy Connor whilst he was still dating her twin, Gail, and I never told a soul. I light another cig and puff in the carcinogens.

  There have been lots of parables on life, simplified visual references to the complex struggle of what it is to be human; an instinctual beast with cognitive thought.

  ‘Life is like a rollercoaster, it has its ups and its downs.’

  ‘Life is like a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you plan to stop peddling.’

  ‘Life is like a box of…’ yadda, yadda, yadda, thanks Forrest.

  All these comparisons are all good and well and have truth to them, except the bike one. I’m pretty sure if you keep peddling at some point you are still going to fall off. They all play on the edges of the randomness of life, but sugar coat it in the ‘Ah well’ British sensibility. So here is my unsweetened version.

  People refer to life as an uphill battle explaining that the halfway point is when you are over the hill but it’s not, it’s all downhill. At birth you are a tiny falling snowflake gliding slowly down to the earth, then you hit the peak of a very snowy mountain and you quickly begin to roll down, without a choice, without a destination, spinning to the end of the race. Life gets bigger as you roll along; you haphazardly pick up new friends and acquaintances, lovers and enemies. They take their roles in your existence by a mere flip of a coin; life-long friends because of where a teacher sat you on the first day of school; your nemesis created out of another similar misfortune; a lover appears because of God knows why; all just debris sticking to you as you roll down the mountainside of life, gaining speed. You hit a branch or a r
ock now and then dislodging the odd person, but then pick up a few more from the faceless masses. All of a sudden the mountain runs out of snow and one by one they all disperse leaving you once again a single tiny snowflake, left to melt away at the foot of life’s mountain now not looking quite as tall as you first thought.

  Quentin Crisp said, “You fall out of your mother’s womb and crawl across open country under fire and crawl into your grave.” I like mine more, it has snowflakes in it.

  “What was that all about?” asks Nails as I return to the bar.

  “Toby told Deb about Jenny.”

  “So you’re fucking this Jenny now?”

  “No, but me and Deb broke up last night and so she thinks that I am.”

  “You been caught out, lad,” Benny pipes up again and taps on his pint glass, once again empty.

  My mouth opens knowing that the words will turn into a sigh and the anger will become a lethargic headshake.

  There is a little guilt within me, not about any act; I am innocent of any carnal action. Guilty of the odd carnal thought, yes, but who is exempt of that? Lust is built into our DNA; it’s a vital cog to the perpetuation of our species. In the war between instinct and logic, the regular winner is instinct, simply because instinct is instant whilst logic brews and ferments like a fine ale. Oh, regrets; regrets are their bastard children with logic being the mother. Instinct loves to do the fucking but it is the neurosis of logic that swaddles and nurses the regrets. All this waffling is of course me trying to redirect blame; trying to delude myself into thinking we still live in a world run by our baser instincts; living a life without full control, a life out of our control, meaning a blameless society and a blameless society also means a blameless me. Bullshit, it was my decision to pursue Jenny Weir. It’s not out of some primal instinct; it’s some nostalgic wet dream and it is the fertile Darwinian channels of my cognitive mind that has put this brush to this particular canvas. I have seen my sudden outburst of honesty as some great act of kindness; that I have spared Deb that final indignity - skimming over the reality, which is that I have strung Deb along for months. The sorry condition of my life has always been an inward attack, but I have genuinely hurt Deb, unintentionally; she has become the first casualty in the war of me. And now I chase Jenny Weir in some vain attempt to fulfil the pleasures of a young me, who is so far gone I could not describe him to you. Oh, my head hurts.

  With a blink of my mind’s eye, I’m sat in the Parrot. I am an hour and a half early for my date with Jenny and she is now half an hour late. Yes, it’s a date. I return back to my snowflake defence; I am an out of control flurry ball. Deb has been dislodged and I hope to infuse Jenny into my giant rolling ice sphere.

  “Could I have another cider, please?”

  And yes, I’m drinking cider. Spirits this early in the day may look bad like I have a problem and I avoid lager because I don’t wish to have beer breath in case we end up snogging. Not snogging, making out, no, that’s American - a kiss, a tender kiss that I don’t wish to ruin with beer breath. God, I need a fag.

  “Barkeep, I’m just popping out for a smoke. I am expecting a friend so if someone comes looking for me I’ll be in the beer garden.” Did I just call him barkeep, as if I am in the sodding Shire?

  “My name is Noel Winters…soon to be Summers.” Summers is my mother’s maiden name, which I will soon be adopting. The name Summers certainly adds a touch of black humour to her entering into a cold bleak marriage with a man named Winters. She is, however, on her second marriage and has now become Mrs Badland; I’m unclear of what that will denote.

  The smoke is a bad idea - it’s fucking freezing outside. The cider is a worse idea; it’s sugared alcohol, like getting pissed on treacle. The sugar speeds up your senses and your thoughts, whereas alcohol cripples them. They are conflicting actions; my face feels hot as the syrup courses through my veins. I need a pub snack: peanuts and pork bits, out-of-date crisps and scampi fry. I head back inside and return to the barkeep.

  “Could I please have some peanuts? Wait, what are those?”

  “Flapjacks.”

  “Yes, forget the nuts I will have two of the flapjacks.”

  “Are you ok, mate?”

  “Yes. I haven’t eaten and cider isn’t my customary tipple.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “Yes, yes, I would, please, like some water.”

  “We’ve only got bottled water.”

  “You don’t have any taps?”

  “We do, but I can only sell you the bottled water.”

  “Bottled? Rat ballsacks.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Can I have it in a glass?”

  With the flapjacks in my coat pockets, a pint of cider in one hand and less than a pint of bottled water poured into a pint glass in the other, I make my way over to a booth seat as I feel a little off kilter on the bar stool. Feeling too hot to give a number in degrees Celsius and a little too drunk to spell the word Celsius, I whip off my coat and fling it onto the seat. This action then results in me squashing my two flapjacks as I drop my ample buttocks down onto the seat. I still eat them, licking the crushed contents out of their plastic sheaths like a coke fiend trying to get the remnants from the previous night’s dime bag. Looking at the two pint glasses I compare the price of water to cider. How can water be more expensive than cider? With cider you need to pick the apples and brew them and whatever else you do to make cider; filtering, I’m sure filtering is involved or there would be pips in it and stuff. What do they do with water? It tastes just like tap water; it’s not from some babbling brook because then it would taste like fish and weasel piss.

  “Hey, Noel, sorry I’m late.”

  “Jen. You’re not late, I mean you’re late but fashionably.”

  “Ok, and it seems like you are fashionably pissed.”

  “I won’t lie, Jenny, I’m, ha, not as you say fashionably pissed. I am unfashionably pissed, because unlike you I was unfashionably early and got drunk. I have no style.”

  “Shall we stop with all the fashion stuff and I’ll go get a drink and see if I can catch you up?”

  “Well, I’m taking a small break, to give you a chance.”

  I’m in there; she’s found me totally inebriated and didn’t just leave. That has to be a good sign, right? Or maybe it’s a sign that she’s into drunks, which isn’t such a good sign; she’d have issues in that case. You know what, I don’t care if she has issues; she’s cool, issues are cool, issues make you interesting. Hey, have you got any issues? Any problems you are working through?

  ‘No, not me. Plain sailing, I’m afraid. I am a terribly dull individual,’ says the imaginary normal person in my head. Normal people, who needs ‘em? Plus she’d probably be the only girl in Britain who doesn’t think Dirty Dancing is a masterpiece, making her a keeper in my book.

  “Here you go, I bought you a chocolate chip flapjack to help soak up the drink.”

  “Thanks, you’re soooo nice. I just sat on two earlier and then ate them like a rabid hobo.”

  “Nice. You know you shouldn’t start with cider. That stuff is loopy juice.”

  “I don’t normally drink it, bit of a girls’ drink really. Not girls like you, girlie girls, like… Jordan.”

  “Does Jordan drink cider?”

  “I don’t know but she’s a slag, though. Did someone turn the jukebox on?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s just I lost fifty pence in it before, and it wasn’t plugged in you see and now someone’s playing the Bee Gees.”

  “I think it’s Steps.”

  “It is, but it’s a Bee Gees’ song. I went to school with her you know.”

  “What, a girl out of Steps?”

  “Yep.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know, not H. God, I’m so hot.”

  Suddenly my date is in flames, shot out of the European skies by cider Nazis. She’s laughing; my drunken ramblings are a hit. She find
s it both funny and adorable, like a puppy that has peed on the rug. It’s bad, but God love him, he’s cute.

  Why is it when you are drunk, that your brain seems in some way to stay sober, totally aware of the fool you are making of yourself. It knows the coherent sentence you wish to speak yet when it arrives at the mouth words are missing with new ones in their place. The brain knows where your glass is on the table; it knows what speed your hand should swoop in to pick it up and yet the brain has to sit back and watch as you grab at the glass like superman saving a falling child but unlike superman you miss. The brain is the designated driver, which then gets shoved into the back seat where he is forced to watch as the car speeds towards a ravine.

  “How about instead of me trying to catch you up, we head back to mine and smoke some pot?”

  “Yes, let’s do that. We can go whenever you’re ready. I have no intention of drinking any of this cider.”

  “I didn’t think so as I have finished mine and if anything your glass seems fuller.”

  “That is down to the fact that I have dropped a large piece of my flapjack into it.”

  The walk to Jenny’s is sobering; that’s the thing about cider - if you stop you seem to sober up fairly quickly. I’m not saying I’d attempt to drive but I feel fairly confident that I could now successfully unwrap an oaty treat without dropping most of it into my beverage. On the way, we natter about the holiday season and how it has become complete bullshit and then we admit that this opinion is mostly down to our bitter view of the world in general rather than any real shift in the way Christmas is these days. We speak of how these views aren’t helped by the fact that this winter has been all damp and chilly with not a single snowfall this year. This is a little incorrect as it had in actuality snowed several times in January; it just hasn’t snowed any time in the latter half of the year but that’s me being more than a tiny bit pedantic. With every step forward we make, I get pangs of déjà vu; not only a sense of knowing the buildings around but as though I am stepping in footsteps I have already walked.

  “So you still live in that same house?”

  “I do.”

  “Wasn’t that a house share?”

  “Yeah, Bobby and Mike moved out a good few years back. I guess I just couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be. The place is home you know?”

  “Totally.”

  So, I wanted nostalgia and here it is. I get to try and fuck Jenny Weir in the very same house, the same room and most likely the same bed in which we first fucked. That’s cool, isn’t it? That this groovy hot girl I’ve pined for all these years has not done a lot of changing in the past decade. It’s not weird, right? This is what I wanted; to get with that girl from twelve years ago and it seems she’s exactly where I left her.

  “Ok, we have to go round the back. The landlord has boarded up the front door because we kept getting broken into.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “I know, right?”

  “Surely won’t the thieves just break in through the back? In fact, you’d think breaking in at the back would be the norm. You know, out of sight and all that?”

  “I think the crooks around here are so dumb it doesn’t even occur to them that we have a back door.”

  There is definitely a faint pulse of life from inside the building; as we cross into the back garden I have fears that in the last twelve years the place has become derelict and is now festering with squatters and vagrants, making Jenny one of those groups. Hopefully, she’s just a squatter, though thinking about it when categorising such people I assume vagrants, tramps and vagabonds would all fall under the term squatters once they’ve occupied a dwelling. Jenny leads me through the house, throwing up a casual hand from time to time, followed by “Hey, guy” or “What’s up, bud?” I follow close behind; my eyes dart back and forth as if I am a refugee being led by friendly forces to a safety zone. The house’s other occupants all look younger than us and wear an array of different fashion so that you can’t identify what subculture they are affiliated with. It is as if all the hippies, the Rastafarians, metalheads and punks have gotten together, have had a big orgy and spawned some kind of new super race, well not super just… new. Some very heavy drug use is going on in the kitchen, nothing Class A but they certainly are not just passing a joint around. We make it to the top of the stairs where a couple are screwing, not dry humping, actually fucking on the landing of a shared house.

  “Oh don’t worry, Noel, that’s Petey and Sam. They never make it to their room. Aww, young love,” Jenny informs me, adding, “Petey is the girl, it’s short for Patricia.”

  Jenny’s bedroom door shuts behind us, I feel somewhat molested from the hallway debauchery and coming in from the cold I realise I’m still a little drunk. Here I am, in Jenny Weir’s room and it’s 1997 once again; any moment now Hal is going to appear from a questionable looking black doorway and tell me that Ziggy is eighty per cent sure that if I sleep with Jenny I’ll somehow alter the future in an irreparable way. The same posters don the walls, and the same second hand sofa without the cushions is below the window. Her mattress is on the floor - no base - and the dishevelled unmade sheets look different but are not new. Still only the one pillow, any gentleman callers who spend the night have to make do with a jumper stuffed into a T-shirt.

  There is something new in the room; well, actually it is something old, but it is new to the room; a BBC Acorn Archimedes A310. She must have found it after I left. I am so pleased to see it was not destroyed whilst simultaneously being peeved that my paid-for-goods have been hijacked by another. Can I mention it? Should I mention it? No, entering into a dialogue of possession, in that I have paid for ownership and yet she has ownership, would derail tonight’s purpose. Not that I really know what that purpose is. I just know this train is heading somewhere and though I’m not one hundred per cent sure about the final destination, the journey so far has felt enjoyable and familiar.

  “Joint?”

  “Yes, I would very much like a toke on that...” I want to say chubby “…Fatty?”

  The ganja leaf has not been imbibed by my body, in any form, in over five years and I would never have described myself as a heavy user but I inhale from that chubby reefer as though I am a drowning man coming up for air. The dense dark smoke slowly drifts from my open mouth; its sluggish tentacle-like movement hangs heavy in the air. Jenny comes in close and presses her mouth to mine, our tongues stroke each other. I feel a piercing; that’s new. The kiss ends with my lower lip popping out from the grasp of hers. She blows smoke from her nose, my smoke. It’s the best kiss and possibly the coolest moment of my life, though I find it hard not to think that the satisfied look that is now crossing her face is down to the pot and not my kissing ability; to be honest I think she is just after the blowback.

  “Good pot.”

  “I only sell the best.”

  Half choking on the hemp fog that still remains in my lungs: “You’re a fucking dealer?”

  “You already knew that, you used to buy from me.”

  “As casual friends. I didn’t know you were a fully-fledged dealer.”

  “Is that not cool with you? You’re toking on a pretty fat joint, to be so judgemental.”

  “It’s cool, it’s super cool now I know where to get my shit from.” Again I haven’t smoked dope in over five years.

  “Who do you go to now?”

  “A guy near town.”

  “The Chief?”

  “Yes,” I answer, fearful that any follow-up questions will show that I am completely talking out of my arse.

  “Shit, good you found me. His stuff is weak as hell and he charges nearly double.”

  “I knew I was getting stiffed.”

  She drifts across the room to the cushionless sofa, toying with the BBC Acorn’s vibrant function keys. Is she toying with me? Does she know that it is mine? She plops down on the sofa and slides off her shoes; my blood begins to rush at the
excitement of seeing a little flesh. There’s a ‘Modest Mouse’ T-shirt with a jumper stuffed into it lying on the floor by one of the sofa’s arms; looks like spending the night is an option - my pillow is already made up for me. Oh Jesus, when I saw Jenny by the school she was talking to a couple of kids. Is she dealing to teenagers? That’s awesome for them, but oh so very lame for her… and it’s wrong and whatever. I think if this place is raided, right here and now, I’ll tell the cops I am here to buy cannabis rather than give the real reason. Jenny calls me over and moves in for another kiss. She’s such a good kisser and this time she has no chance of any blowback; she’s in it just for the kiss.

  Cough, splutter, wheeze. I choke embarrassingly on Jenny’s second hand smoke offering.

  “Sorry, I just thought you’d want me to return the favour.”

  “No, that’s ok, thanks. Just wasn’t ready for it.”

  “How about I put this joint out and we just mouth fuck for a while?”

  “Sounds good.” I hope that’s just a really aggressive way of saying kissing.

  It’s finally happening: the night is getting to a pace I can handle. All thoughts of scary vagabonds and dirty hallway fuckers slip away. All those problems are for ‘the morning Noel’ to deal with; it’s time for ‘the Noel of the now’ to get busy. Her shirt is open and I pop the bra strap on only two attempts; this makes the boobs available, but the bra is still in the way. The kissing, or as she put it mouth fucking, switches gear erratically from slow intense to hard and raw face sucking and all the gears in between. Groping of my meat and two veg has happened, yet only through my jeans. She toys with my top jean button with no real attempt at undoing it. And so I feel it is my duty to make the move; the hand switching for boob fondle to pants’ top button in a blink of an eye; you’d need matrix bullet time to catch the transition.

  “Whoa, wait.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just don’t want to complicate this with sex.” This coming from a thirty-plus pot dealer, who is living in a doss house with a scary future race. I don’t think sex is going to be the flapping wings of a butterfly that starts a hurricane.

  “In what way?”

  “Sex always makes things different.”

  “Sex doesn’t make things different, it’s just a progression.”

  “No. Having sex makes guys think they can get some more whenever they want it.”

  “Fuck this, did other guys fuck and run? Well, maybe you shouldn’t drag them up to this hovel of sin after one drink and get all hot and heavy with them. Do you think?”

  “I just...”

  “No, you did this last time.”

  “Last time?”

  “Yeah, I duped myself into thinking we screwed but we didn’t. We just did this: smoked a joint; sucked face for an hour or so; and fell asleep spooning. I don’t know what you call morning glory if it’s the same hard-on you fell asleep with,… morning disgrace, I guess.”

  “This is really not cool, Noel.”

  “No, it isn’t, and neither is lying about losing your virginity for a year before you actually did and then having to keep up that masquerade after you finally did lose it.”

  “Oh fuck you, Noel. I’m sorry that back when we were kids you tried to screw me and you failed and now it’s become some sick lifetime obsession.”

  I do feel a little sick, could be a whitie, could be the alcohol or could it be there is a shimmer of truth to Jenny’s words? I’m here just to fulfil the fantasies of my former self. It’s some deep-seeded macho bullshit. Fuck me, I hate all that macho stuff. I’m not a sports guy or a motors guy or a porn guy. Apparently, none of that hinders my ability for being a massive dickhead.

  “You’re right, it’s just head stuff. I’m going to go.”

  “I think that’s best.”

  With blue in my balls and fear in my eye, I make my way back through the home base of the new world army and head to the place I call home… The George, it is still open and I need Nails’ camaraderie and a stiff drink - maybe stiff is a poor choice of words.