To say that the house was a mess would be a considerable understatement. For the first year or so, well, the first six months, maybe, he made an effort, but after a while he began to wonder what the point was. Same with going upstairs to go to bed when there was a perfectly comfortable sofa and sleeping bag right there in the lounge and it only meant heating one room. Fire, TV, laptop, kettle, get all the essentials in one place, that’s the trick. He dragged the fridge into the living room a couple of winters ago, too.
First thing he thought when the door went yesterday was that the debt collectors had come for him. He knows people who took a chance, got on to the electoral roles to vote in the Referendum and are being hounded now by bailiffs and sheriffs for unpaid council tax and other outstanding debts, and the local council’s getting their cut, too. He was too smart to raise his head above that parapet, but he knows they have ways of tracing you, ways of intimidating you, punishing you, and that they need revenue. He should tone his online activities down a bit. He hasn’t done anything strictly illegal as far as he knows, said anything actionably defamatory or likely to incite, but then the definitions keep changing. Then another surge of dread and dismay up from the depths, worse than the bailiffs, maybe it was Howard, fucking Howard come to make some claim on him. He doesn’t want to see Howard again if he can help it.
Eventually he has his Gmail account up and as he waits for the first of the selected emails to open he decides to make a cup of instant coffee. It isn’t an especially big room, but even so, some days the distance from the sofa to the fridge seems immense, partly because the pain in his leg has flared up again, partly just because his sense of scale is diminishing. The kitchen is an ordeal away, upstairs an Everest, the front bedroom a distant country, and yet the whole of time and the whole of space are within easy reach, all there on the computer screen a foot away.
The kettle is empty, meaning he has to go all the way to the kitchen. Once a week he fills up a five litre plastic bottle of water that he uses to make coffee and tea, rehydrate the value pot noodles, moisten the bags of value muesli that he more or less subsists on these days, except for the occasional bit of toast.
He gets up and goes to fill the kettle, stands with it in one hand, the water running, gazing out of the window at the wildly overgrown garden, the dust and pollen rolling over it in the sunlight. It has actually stopped raining. There’s one last teabag in the box, meaning later he will have to go to the shop. He still owes them twenty quid for the tobacco he got on tick a month ago. Ah, now then. You thought that emailed fuck off to Alex Hargreaves would be the end of it, but he is a tenacious wee fucker, is he not?
He will have to go upstairs. That upstairs bathroom though, eh? He won’t be able to resist popping his head round the door for a peak at that, will he? See how the mould on the shower wall has been coming along.
I don’t wanna fucking think about the dead, he says out loud. Not the fucking dead.
Those cunts. He sits down on the floor, back against the cooker. Then again, he doesn’t want to think about the living either, fucking Howard, for instance. He could very happily get through to the end of his allotted though increasingly unlikely looking four score years and ten without clapping eyes on Howard again. He owes nothing to this shiny-faced, sharp-eyed little hustler with his brogues and his World War I flying ace haircut up from London, Alex Hargreaves, but he should probably have warned him off ever going back to see Howard.
Castleford. What was he thinking? They hatched some mad plans didn’t they, back then? Reality seemed to be there for the taking. Too long spent living in the Crescent, thought they could take on the whole world, transform it.
Ah, the glorious folly of youth.
Folly of youth, folly of age, folly after folly. The past. He’d get drunk if he had any money. Good job he is skint. Another smart move that.
The kettle boils, he pours, stirs to try to blend the floating granules in, winces his way back to the living room, sniffs the milk then pours some, breaks through the light crust and adds two heaped teaspoons of sugar from the sticky bag, sips at it, rinses it round his gums. Perfection.
The email has finally opened. Really, unbelievable it has taken so long. He responds to Alex Hargreaves, who has sent him seven emails since the day before. He’s keen.
He sends a message back.
I don’t know how successful you are going to be in this search around for Vernon’s work or trying to write whatever you plan to write about him. But you’re not going to find it without help or information. And I have that. So we need to cut some kind of deal.
So, then, upstairs.
He stands again and his left leg throbs, his knee a bit wobbly, a sharp point in his groin like someone trying to poke a crochet hook between the muscles. The front bedroom is an assault course of broken and unwanted furniture, boxes of crap, bags of clothes, his old bike, piles of records, magazines, tapes. He chartered a van to get it all up from Castleford, all this crap he can’t throw away. He was certainly dissolute enough with his other meagre possessions, his energy, his body, his mind, but things, objects, scraps and tatters, totems and tokens of his life, he has clung onto. He hasn’t taken care of them, or filed them away, merely dumped them in ever increasing mounds from one place to the next. And if he has to leave here? If his sister decides they need to sell the place? Will he take all this with him again to a bedsit? He’ll be up to his neck in it all, like that old dear in
Happy Days
.
He should bin it all, burn it all, but in through the doorway and taking down a lungful of damp musty air, out of breath from climbing a single flight of stairs, he feels the past overwhelm him, all rich and heady, spiced with rot, the damp and dust of ages. Suddenly he longs for the grave, for old stone and moss, the patient work of water on brick and bone.
Oh aye, poetic stuff.
Don’t get distracted, he tells himself, knowing familiar things will loom out to take hold of him, how easily he could sit going through piles of yellowed clippings or old journals, reading the track lists on old cassettes as the day disappears.
He knows the box he wants is in the wardrobe and he battles manfully forward through the siren song of the half-forgotten. Here it is, Vernon’s shoebox. Fucking Vernon. Two-decade old suppressed emotion roils through him. Fuck off now, he murmurs, teeth gritted. The past attacking him.
Get to fuck, now, will you! He pulls out carrier bags and assorted flotsam and ephemera, sticks it down on a patch of empty floor space behind him, lifts the lid, pulls out the brown A4 envelope, V. C. 96 1–5 3 written on the front in black felt tip. That’s the one. There’s any number of fascinating, heart breaking, memory-stirring odds and ends in there too, all set to provoke an intense and overwhelming concatenation of interlinked, sublime, ineffable reverie.
Walk away, Rob. Walk away, son.
He does, more or less, half bolting for the bedroom door, turning so quickly he almost stumbles on the bags he’s just put down behind him, sending a long, thin filament of pain down the inside of his leg and into his toes. Ah fuck, he cries out, and hobbles angrily to the landing. The pain peaks and subsides to a dull ache. He should go to the doctor and get some more painkillers, stronger ones. Officially, he’s on them for his back but any problems with that seem to have been supplanted by this leg thing now. He puts pressure on it and feels the ball in his groin balloon and chafe at his hipbone. It takes him ten minutes to get back to the living room, where he lies back on the sofa, duvet bunched up behind his head, massaging his thigh. His laptop pings; yet another message from Alex Hargreaves.
What kind of deal did you have in mind?
Very good. Something falls over in the room upstairs with a bang and the vibrations run down the stairs, soak through the floor, make the window glass tremble slightly in the frame and the letterbox creak expectantly. His heart leaps and then takes a while to settle down. He’s on edge alright, too much coffee maybe. He sits, listening. A car starts up a few streets away.
That reminds him. He should talk to Andy.
He needs money; he wishes he didn’t of course, but that voice is whispering away at him, asking him questions he would rather not be asked. How is it starting to look, the future you have set up for yourself with your heroic refusal, with your ruthless critique of everything existing, with your refusal to compromise, your refusal to play the game, your scorn for the blandishments of realism and your constant reiteration of your abiding commitment to radical change?
You’re fucked now, sitting in your mouldy house stuffed full of relics, moaning in the pub when you can scrape together enough for a pint, ranting online, scared to put the heating on in winter, wondering how you are going to eat next week, constantly trying to keep the Dole office off your back. Oh yes the cuts are coming, the culling, the council up to its neck in debt and selling everything off to the Scottish affiliates of
USG
.
Still there are glimmers of hope, even he can’t deny that, faint though they are.
Funny how he responded when Hargreaves mentioned trying to contact Vernon’s parents. He doesn’t know them, met them once or twice, they were around in the background when they stayed there, going out in the town to play in the old Labour club or at house parties or an outdoor rave once, some cold November night, Rob fucked on a handful of mushrooms, the rain coming down through the lights and into his face like arc welder sparks, burning holes through him, the steam rising off his body like smoke.
How old must they be now? Getting on, certainly. More or less a decade older than his own, but they got married, had kids young. That’s what he ran away from, the sense that at sixteen he was due to get married, get working, raise a few wains, sit silently in the living room watching telly or play the big man down the pub for the next sixty years.
Well, at least you dodged that Rob.
Maybe he should contact his own Mum and Dad too. His sister keeps telling him; they die and you’re on bad terms, you’ll regret it.
Still, fucked as his hometown might be, thank fuck he’s back north of the border. He looks south and shudders. No country for the likes of you any more Rob.
And what if you’d stayed with her? She loved you. Have you got the balls, Rob, to send that message on Facebook yet or will you lurk silently, angrily, despairingly in a lather of denial and loss? Still got her maiden name, eh? That thrilled you didn’t it, to see her photo again, to know she never married.
Worried that if you send her a friend request she’ll rightfully ignore it and then one more little hopeful fantasy will be closed down, and oh aye, you’ll be even more bereft than you had been.
Bereft! Nice word.
Is he in mourning? The thought leaps up at him. Can a person mourn for twenty years, mourn the death of a friend, the loss of a love, the erosion, the eradication of the future they were certain they were guaranteed? Can you mourn the death of a possible world and all the lives that could have thrived and flourished within it?
Am I grieving?
Anyway, anyway, enough of all that. Love, poetry, magic.
And besides, you’ve got fat, somehow. And your teeth are fucked. That’ll be the sugar in the coffee and a solid half-decade of lying on a sofa.
Still, at least he’s got a roof over his head. He came to an arrangement with his sister years ago when she inherited the house off his granddad that Rob would live in it, claim housing benefit, and they would split it 50/50, though it turns out his sister also has to pay tax on the income and so she makes a tiny sum really. Rob knows she could sell it or rent it out to a family, that she is doing him a favour, but he finds it hard to be grateful. He hasn’t seen her for over a year now anyway after he went there at Christmas and predictably had a row with Tommy about Independence and with his sister about the house.
Sainted grandfather, saintly sister who took care of the old man after his wife died, who stayed in Aberdeen and raised a family and invited him to tea and did all the good local, kindly things that family are supposed to do, not disappear at the age of sixteen to get fucked on drugs, squander their youth and young manhood in dissolution at the State’s expense and then get washed up on the wrong side of thirty back in your home town with nothing but a mouth full of bad attitudes and boring abstract arguments.
Still, the Crescent. There was a joy to those years for sure, a boundlessness, the luxury among the squalor of time, of space to experiment, of spontaneity, the magical properties of chance, of hundreds of people chasing a life beyond the grey, crumbling confines of the blocks themselves, blocks they transformed, walls knocked down to turn old flats into nightclubs, or art spaces, or day-care centres, or rehearsal rooms, or communal kitchens. The impromptu sharing of space, food, drugs, bodies, ideas, equipment, support, contacts, art, love, the circulation of needs met and support offered, everyone always knowing who got their Giro when, the money ending up as the next addition to the common weal so that somehow everyone stayed in fags and booze and drugs and food.
And then, well, if it hadn’t been for his sister, in fact, but for exactly that sense of family that he has always repudiated and which he still can’t bring himself to be fully grateful for he would be even less comfortably off than he is now. True enough, but he knows how they think about him, Jean, Tommy, the kids, his Ma and Pa, they think his life has gone wrong, that he is a lost cause, that he needs help and understanding, that he has problems and they can’t understand why he might think exactly the same way about them, in their bungalow or their detached four bedroom house up in Stonehaven. They think he’s parasitical: on the Government, on his relatives, on the industry and conformity and clear-sightedness of others, past and present, on Left or Right. His grandfather was a working man they tell him, he struggled along with his fellow workers for better pay and for rights, saved his money, made do and got by, went without, bought a house to raise his family in, and now Rob lives in the tail end of that legacy doesn’t he? What, his sister asked in their festive row, Rob a few sheets to the wind having liberally helped himself to Tommy’s stash of Glenlivet, do you think grandpa thought about us having a nice house and a garden, climbing the ladder? He was happy for us, that we could give our kids something he couldn’t give our Ma and Pa.