Authors: Jude Cook
The bare spaces on the walls where posters once hung remain empty. Honestly, you get so beaten down by failure and humiliation that you can’t even assert your own character on your own surroundings. You don’t feel entitled to. Besides, it takes energy to put posters up, and that I reserved for thought. Circuitous, exhausting thought; pinning the fat-torsoed moths of memory in their appropriate glass cases.
So, lying there in the diminishing light, tangled up in blue, I felt like a communications centre of intersecting thoughts, intense impulses. Yet paradoxically impotent, unable to act. A rain started up in the gardens out back, spattering the blackened undergrowth. This reminded me again of my task. My great shame. To wash my borrowed bedsheets, preferably unobserved by anyone in the flat. This, I knew, would necessitate a visit to the laundrette. Because in the early hours of that morning, as astonishing as it may seem, and for the first time since childhood, I had wet the bed.
Yes, go on and have a good laugh, ungentle reader.
Maybe it was the rain in the middle of the night that did it. That set me off. That set
it
off. First a soft purring against the sash window, like hoarse ghosts trying to gain access to the room; then a furious vertical hammering into the barren gardens. That old sound-association must have triggered a hot hosing into my mattress and mould-dappled duvet at three in the morning. I had tried in my half-sleeping, half-conscious state to find a part of the bed that wasn’t intimately damp, that wasn’t a swimming pool of now-cooling piss, but to my fuddled dismay the whole area seemed to be immersed. I was wet, wet, wet, right up to the armpits of Mandy’s dressing gown, an item of clothing which I had taken to sleeping in, as I had snatched hers by mistake in my hasty exit from the flat. But this was too much. I must have staggered out of bed and thrown off the robe only to return and find the mattress much, much damper; the rain still cat-o’-nine-tailing the panes. What was once steamy, almost luxurious, was now cold, grimly alien. Yes, it must have been the rain that caused me to piss the bed, aged thirty, in the middle of the night.
Of course, it wasn’t the rain. It was the booze. I had made my way home from Rudi’s place in the small hours like a blind forest animal, feeling my way from lamp post to lamp post. We’d had a few to say the least. Just the sheer cc volume would have burst Henry the Eighth’s bladder. I remember Martin, that old road-hound, telling me a cast-iron way of deceiving hotel staff if such an accident occurred while on tour. The clever, seasoned boozer would heat a kettle of water in the morning and then upend it on the bed, leaving the whole apparatus lying there innocently for the maids to find when they did their rounds. The band would be long out of town before they discovered the sheets were saturated with a more bodily fluid, thus avoiding a hefty cleaning bill charged to the room. However, this ruse was not of much use to me. The only observer of the sad sight of my drenched bed was me. How did this happen? Was this the summit of my degradation, or was there more to come? I remembered reading an article by a child psychologist citing emotional upset as the chief cause for infantile incontinence, but surely this cannot have contributed to my nocturnal disaster. Was I so fucked up to be experiencing a second childhood? But regardless of the aetiology, something told me I had to act fast, otherwise I would be sleeping under my coat on the floor later that evening. The classical musician, who occupied the room next door to mine, had just returned, sighing audibly as she gained the top of the staircase. Minutes later I heard the muted sound of a viola through the walls: stark and beautiful—rich down the bottom end, full of serpiginous melancholy. It was now or never. I jumped to my feet and stuffed the duvet into a bin-liner. Then I hauled the mattress into the centre of the room, to give it a better airing. The rain had begun to step up, so I closed the window. The downpour started to thunder against the panes; the last light glowing gold in the murky distance. Making sure my sleeves were rolled down (a necessary ritual, as I had been trying to keep the scars inflicted by Mandy a secret from my flatmates) I bolted downstairs and out onto the street.
Luckily, the laundrette was nearby. I opened the smeared door of my machine under the accusing eyes of a gaggle of mums with pushchairs, then bundled the reeking bedclothes inside. The cocktail of those intent watchers and the furtive sense of my own humiliation told me I couldn’t stay. Standing there in the dead light, I suddenly realised I was ravenous; that I hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I checked my pockets for coins, then fled for the caff over the road, my sad sheets revolving in their drum.
Predictably, the place was almost full. Didn’t people have jobs to go to? All these busted losers with days to kill; or workmen reading whole tabloids from breasts to betting tips. How did they get away with it? Having said that, I wasn’t in a position to judge. I seemed to have plenty of time on my scarred hands just lately, Martin having downsized me to one day a week. Even this made me count my blessings, because, until I split with Mandy, I hadn’t been working for him at all. A sense of pity must have encouraged him to offer me some paid employment. In fact, only Martin had called regularly to see how I was bearing up over the last couple of months. Unlike Rudi, unlike Antonia and Nick, he knew what the end of a marriage felt like.
I took my seat at the window. The artery-clogging air was dense with the pungent aromas of frying. After ten minutes a Macedonian waiter sullenly took my order for egg and chips—without the toast, as I couldn’t stretch to that. I stared at the harried bums and jakeys of Kentish Town, shivering in their sleeping bags outside the tube station. This compelling sight always acted as a reminder of the next rung on the ladder: the bottom rung. My chest felt heavy with the weight of this knowledge; with the intolerable weight of my loathsome self. In fact, I felt as if I had slipped down the biggest ladder on the snakes-and-ladders board. One moment I was snoring under our laundered duvet, the next pissing into a mouldy, semen-streaked sheet purloined from my neighbour’s cellar. How had it come to this? I also felt vulnerable, self-conscious, sitting there; as if something terrible were about to happen. Eating solo in the caff had been an unsettling experience to begin with. One felt like a virtual advertisement for the bachelor life, a living, breathing poster of what’s in store for the hopeless divorcee. There was also the acute shame I felt at the scars on my forearms, the hunted, desperate look I must always be wearing; and also the fact I only ever ordered the cheapest things on the board. But, after a while, I realised there were other men (nearly always men, apart from the obese bag-lady who sat for hours over a cooling cup of tea) doing exactly the same. I had joined the club. The losers’ club. Any age welcome. The newly separated or the mentally ill specially catered for. At first, the hum and noise of the place had been disturbing. The croupier’s flat, despite its ramshackle ambience, had served as a sanctuary for me. There was a merciful quiet there most days; a lack of turbulence, raised voices, slammed doors, smashed objects. In contrast, the caff was a zoo of belching brickies, yapping cruel misogynist horseshit in coarse voices. Just lately, I had been unable to overhear anyone talking in an aggressive manner. It made me sick to my very soul. A curious phenomenon. I had to have silence, otherwise my centre was upset for days. Like Keats in his tubercular dilapidation, I could only contemplate beauty. Anything else, I felt, might finish me off for good.
The egg and chips arrived: two yolks of orange pus bathing in an Exxon Valdez of oil. Grimly, I forced myself to eat, though I felt too hungover to get much down. There was also the noise pollution of the radio to deal with. Constantly tuned to an MOR station, last week it had played, consecutively, ‘She’s Gone’ by Hall and Oates, ‘One More Night’ by Phil Collins and ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor. Yeah, they must’ve have seen me coming. The sad-sack with his drooping antlers. How I moaned inwardly at the monstrous irony. Some gleeful playlister must have compiled that little selection specifically for the likes of me, buckled over my plate of cholesterol in a greasy spoon somewhere. And I was especially not in the mood that morning. As I had crossed the road to the caff, a vintage red VW had nearly run me over at the lights, tearing off into the traffic with a guttural roar. It was Mandy’s car. It had to be. There was only a handful of the same model in the country. Hadn’t she seen me there, about to cross? Or maybe she had, and that was the point. She was merely attempting what she had always threatened to do: wipe me from the face of the earth. Confirmation that it had been her came ten minutes later: there was the same Volkswagen, with Mandy at the wheel—terse-looking, patrician—driving back in the opposite direction. This, as you can imagine, didn’t serve as an
aide-digestif
.
I returned in the tooling rain to the laundrette and rescued my sheets. Inside, the mothers and pushchairs had been replaced by a group of teenage girls; tracksuited, gum-chewing, supremely arrogant. They didn’t give me a second look as I wrestled with the ripped bin-liner. This added another cut to my heart. But why should they have checked me out? They had their cool to take care of, their conceited splendour to attend to. Who was I to yearn for attention from teenage girls? Me, balding, just turned thirty, egg on my unshaven chin. I was back on the shelf, and I had better get used to it. Slightly shop-soiled, with a ‘reduced’ price tag stamped on my forehead. Going cheap in the sales.
Later that evening, I carried out another task that I had been putting off for much longer than washing my bedclothes: returning my set of keys to the flat Mandy and I had once shared. A registered psychotherapist (or Randy Newman) could probably give you a better explanation as to why I had held on to them for so long. I set off on this dreaded mission after draping my duvet from the single coat hook on the back of my door. I took one last look at my garret, as if I wasn’t expecting to see it again for some time. Like Mr Bleaney’s room, it was laughably austere. Is
this
all I had accumulated? The sodden mattress in the centre; the scoured ashtray; the sad socks. It suddenly struck me that the room was very familiar. Its layout was identical to my first room in Hamford, the one I moved into aged eighteen when shuttling between the houses of two indifferent parents had become too much to bear. The bed was in the same position next to the window. There was the same lack of a cupboard, the same veneered camping table with its pile of coins next to a comb. So I had come full circle, then. How we live measuring our own nature.
The walk took some time. I had spent my last pennies in the caff and was without the bus fare to get to the Haringey Ladder, where Mandy and I spent our last miserable months. I literally didn’t know where my next meal was coming from. After the noxious ghouls at the bank had closed me down, asking me to return my cashpoint card ‘cut into four pieces’, Mandy and I had opened a shared account, but my access to this had ceased the afternoon we split. Ah, the mesmerising ongoing humiliation of not having a bank account, aged thirty. I had no credit anywhere. Anyone who hasn’t been in this position might romantically conjecture that such a fix would free the soul to concentrate on its higher aspirations. A very middle-class notion. They might see it as a glorious, poetic unfettering. Hell, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose! Just think of Van Gogh or Soutine. Or of Jackson Pollock, ploughing his Ford into the fatal tree with only a hundred and fifty bucks to his name. But they would be wrong. Walking around with no money in your pocket—no money to your name, anywhere on earth—and with no idea of how to go about getting any—is terrifying. It’s like driving a car with the needle constantly on empty, on red. There is the same pervasive sense of insecurity and imminent disaster. And after a while it can affect your personality. Everything becomes provisional. If you were a political system, an analyst would say you were afflicted with short-termism. You can’t plan further than the middle of tomorrow afternoon. Once a stoical person, you become a fearful person. Eventually, the post starts to scare you to death. Another bill or a bailiff’s notice? Either way, they’re having a fucking laugh. You become a trembling suppliant, racking your brains for anyone to borrow from whose patience you haven’t already exhausted; grateful for any titbit that happens to fall from life’s table. It also alters your physical posture. I looked at the human flotsam and jetsam on the sluiced, neon-lit Tufnell Park Road (all reduced to this for want of a few quid! This indignity! Each a human life!) and shivered inwardly. People who never had any money looked deformed, bent out of shape. They never grew straight and strong. Somewhere along the line they’d been fatally negligent—or unlucky—concerning this vital resource, money. Forget the rich being different to us, it was the poor who belonged to another species. The more savvy I became about the world (and believe me, sagacious reader, it took a number of years), the more I came to realise that nearly
everyone
had a bit tucked away somewhere: shares, peps, ISAs, second accounts, nice little earners, small inheritances, pension-schemes, batty rich aunts twice removed, family heirlooms—stuff they could draw on when the going became choppy. Whereas I had the contents (or non-contents) of my wallet. Fucking scary. These people had obviously done some hard thinking about money and the consequences of not having any. What was I up to when they were doing all that serious, remunerative thinking? Writing poems, that’s what.
I reached the Archway roundabout, that magnet for hedge-haired nutters and whippet-thin tarts who always seemed to be bleeding slightly from the nose. I felt unable to go any further, my stomach full of a churning, gnawing heat; a fatal heaviness in my limbs. The worst depression I had ever experienced: a Sisyphean effort to get through each minute. I sensed I was expiring somehow from a bottomless, untreatable despair. The harsh wind Ferraried around the gyratory system, dragging with it, in the gutter, the discarded financial pages from the
Evening Standard
, a halved bottle of Becks, a slew of chicken parts. To the north was the mysterious tunnel of the Archway Road, spanned by its Suicide Bridge, leading to Highgate and Hampstead with their secure implacable wealth. To the south the massed lights of the City, a lurid glare hanging over the hidden chasms of Bishopsgate, of Threadneedle Street, a crimson inferno seen from a miry summit. Once the human components have left a city—have ceased their ant-like industry, their ferment of activity—all that’s left is the garbage; a life-vacuum. I felt disgusted with my fellow humans, all fleeing homeward from the light-ringed maw of the tube, ignoring the imploring arms of beggars. I shouted into the crowd, ashamed at my bitterness, my mad unshaven face: ‘Go on! You can afford it, you bastards!’ The sound of my own voice surprised me. The only other sentence I had spoken that day was when ordering the glutinous egg and chips. The usual, seething thoughts assailed me. How base, stale, unprofitable, et cetera. Then I remembered my mission. My talismanic act of emancipation. I grasped the keys in my pocket, jangling in their plain envelope. I felt I had to divest myself of these symbolic objects. The first step in letting go.