Seeing the Wires

Even without a bus pass I had to travel to meet Judy. We met at pubs and at the cinema, where I tried to find out what she wanted to see while looking as though I was deciding. There’s a ten-screen cinema close to Dudley; nine of the screens show the latest blockbusters, and the other one is closed for cleaning. We saw the latest blockbusters, and I bought us four pence worth of assorted sweets from the pick’n’mix booth.

If you’re ever in the position of having to spend very little money on confectionery that’s paid for by weight, go with marshmallows. They don’t weigh much at all and they’re bulky.

With our bag of two marshmallows we’d sit and watch Arnie save the day, listening to stray parts of the soundtracks of other films. As the lights went down Judy’s eyes would get darker. I had trouble not looking at them. I had trouble not looking at Judy.

We passed the two-week mark, moving into what was, for me, new territory.

She kept on going out with me. What was wrong with her? I kept buying her small quantities of cheap marshmallows and meeting her when the travel was cheapest. She seemed to like it.

One thing led to another, and that led to itself, repeatedly.

The time came to introduce her to my friends. I didn’t know where Darren and Spin had got to, and I didn’t have friends at the office. It’d have to be Jack. If she wasn’t put off by Dudley pubs, and sweets with the consistency of sandy snot, then she might just be able to take Jack.

I asked her if she’d like to meet him, and she said yes. He said he’d like to meet anyone who’d go out with me for more than a month, as it would constitute a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I arranged a date and we got together.

II

Jack got on with Judy. Sometimes I didn’t like how well they got on together. I was jealous in two directions. I didn’t want to be jealous at all. I wanted happiness and joy. I wanted enough money to pay back the building society all of their correspondence-producing costs before they went bankrupt. I wanted more money than that, really. I wanted enough money to buy an island, hollow it out, and live under an imitation volcano with a swivel chair and a cat and a stack of underlings in boiler suits. I had to keep things in perspective, however. On my wages I wouldn’t be able to buy an island for several hundred years, and that wasn’t allowing for island inflation.

I could always lower my sights and sponsor a traffic island. That can’t cost much. Companies do it, at least in the West Midlands. You’re in the traffic, beside the latest traffic island, and there next to the discarded shoe and the McWrapper is a sign saying:

This traffic island is sponsored by Keegan’s Home for the Bewildered.

That can’t cost much. The only time people see the things is when they’re stuck in traffic, wondering whether there’s a reason for the traffic jam and hoping it’s a juicy accident. So the name of the company becomes subconsciously linked with stress and waiting and death and no one uses the company ever again, and the managing director in his Portakabin somewhere outside Tipton waits by the dormant telephone until the receivers come and shut him down. Still, at least it’s something to look at while you wait for an accident you can get to before the emergency services arrive and hide all the body parts.

This could just be me.

I told Judy about my days at the office and she told me about her days at the travel centre. I had always known it was a bad queue to be in. Many strange people stood in it. Dandruff was rife, coughing was likely, gaudy skin diseases drew the attention and there was the smell of people who misunderstood the use of soap. There would be strange men in combat gear and huge women with foul tattoos and hairstyles copied from ’70s footballers. There would be someone in a faded Queen concert T-shirt. There would be a young woman with the sort of eyes you normally saw on a dead fish.

I thought the queue was bad and I only saw it from the back for one hour each month. Imagine, Judy said, seeing them face-on for eight hours a day, six days a week, shuffling towards you to ask you for tickets on the space shuttle. She’d spotted me months ago, among the living dead. I was always going to the other window, and she thought I fancied Lynn, her partner. I did fancy Lynn but I didn’t mention it. You can only push your luck so far before it falls to the floor and shatters. I asked what happened in the office at the back.

Maureen happened there. Maureen was a supervisor and was in an age range starting at sixty. There was no upper limit. She spent the day in the back office. She had a chair and a desk and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. She had a calendar with pictures of pigs on it. She had a few framed photographs of children. Judy thought they were her grandchildren. Lynn thought they were her victims. No one thought they were pretty. Maureen had a kettle and a sink and she could check bank cards. She liked checking them. She enjoyed it more if they turned out to be invalid. She had twenty/twenty vision and all her own teeth. She had a medical complaint which was never specified but which meant that she was unable to take incoming calls. Lynn had to take them.

Lynn was a blonde midget, full of energy from the tips of her toes all the short way up to her uncontrollable frizzy hair. She fidgeted in her chair all day. I was careful not to call her perky while Judy was in earshot. Since I didn’t know how far Judy’s hearing range extended, I never called her perky at all. Not out loud. She was, though. She had a perky bosom. I had often tried not to notice it. Of course, I had once stared blatantly at it, so as to divert attention away from the amount of attention I had been paying to Judy. Lynn remembered me looking at her chest. She thought I was a pervert, but gradually mellowed. One night, Judy and Lynn came out with me and Jack. The idea was that Jack and Lynn would hit it off, so that we could go out as two couples instead of one couple and a straggler.

Jack refused to hit it off.

‘She’s a midget,’ he said. ‘What am I, Billy fucking Smart?’

‘Billy fucking Stupid,’ I told him. We were in the men’s toilet in the Curdled Milk, a Dudley theme pub. The theme seemed to be bad taste and watery beer, but I might have been missing something. Jack was missing something. He was missing the urinal, completely. I wasn’t looking at his dick – well, you don’t, do you? – but there was a glint of metal from its vicinity. Perhaps that accounted for the spray he was producing. I moved to stand some distance behind him but I still didn’t feel safe.

‘She’s not a midget,’ I said. ‘She’s compact.’

‘Compact? She needs to sit on a cushion to reach the table. That’s a fucking dwarf, chief. If I showed her this she’d run a mile.’

‘If you showed anyone that they’d run a mile.’

‘Shows how much you know. I showed it to your girlfriend and now I can’t get her off the phone. On all day and night she is. Out-fucking-rageous. Can’t get enough of it.’

‘I didn’t know she was into scrap metal.’

‘Ha ha. At least she isn’t a fucking midget.’

‘She might be. Film stars are all midgets. It’s well known.’

‘What about Robert De Niro?’

‘Midget. All done with camera angles. He can’t reach the top shelf in the newsagent.’

‘Robert De Niro doesn’t go to newsagents, he has people to do it for him. He’s seven feet tall in his socks. He’s a wiseguy.’

‘He’s an actor. And he only ever plays the same role, so it’s hardly difficult.’

‘Oh?’ Jack looked round, doing up his zip. ‘And what role’s that?’

‘He always plays Robert De Niro. Every film he’s in, he’s himself.’

Jack was affronted. He was a fan of Robert De Niro. I had been, but it was something I was trying to grow out of. You can’t be impressed with New York gangsters when you leave puberty. It has to go the way of Clark’s Commandos and Action Man.

‘You talking to me?’ asked Jack. ‘There’s nobody else here.’

‘Too true,’ I said, leaving him to it.

Chapter Four

I

Eddie Finch met Judy at a party thrown by a friend of someone Jack knew. The party looked as though it had been thrown with some force, if not much accuracy. It was held in all of the open areas of a three-storey town house on the more expensive side of Stourbridge. There was a spiky record playing somewhere, and someone said that someone who’d once been one of Pop Will Eat Itself was being the DJ for the night. Judy talked to me but I couldn’t hear her. I could only hear the record. I was trying to identify it.

I do that with music. I can’t help it. Instead of listening to whoever I’m with, I try to work out what the song is. It isn’t deliberate. It’s my ears. They prioritize. Music over conversation. That may be something to do with the conversations I usually get caught in at parties.

Judy sidestepped a slug of red wine that fell to the carpet with a thud. She looked at me and said something. I laughed, hopefully appropriately. A thin white man with thick dreadlocks gave me a stare that might have cleared the student union bar. It didn’t work in Stourbridge, even on the more expensive side. I gave him a look of my own.

Judy tugged me between people who felt as though they were made of elbows and broomsticks, my can of Supa Brew Ice Special brimming over with high-alcohol, low-taste lager. I saw what she’d seen; Jack, reeling down the stairs, carrying a glass that might have been full before he’d tipped it over a quantity of guests.

Although he’d invited us, Jack wasn’t sure whose party it was. He was fairly sure, he’d said in the Frog’s Sister earlier that evening, that his friend Craig knew someone at the party. It would all be okay. They’d be happy to see us. We could get some drinks from the off-licence on Nail Street and drop in. I wanted to stay in the Frog’s Sister. It was quiz night, and they had easy quizzes if you knew your Black Sabbath albums. When Jack went to the bar to get another round in for himself – ‘You’ve got loads there mate, you don’t need another one’ – I asked Judy whether she’d like to go to the party. I tried to make it sound unappealing.

‘It’ll just be like a student party,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in a house, someone crying on the stairs, someone being sick in the bedroom, lots of people we don’t know. You know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘I haven’t been a student. I don’t go around with students. I don’t know enough about student parties to know whether I want to go to one or not. It’s just as well you’re here to help me with it, otherwise I might go out and have some fun or something.’

I don’t pretend to know everything about women. I know they like to go in clothes shops for hours picking up things they don’t like and saying how horrible they are. I once asked Spin about it and he shrugged.

‘That’s a shrug, chief,’ Darren said. ‘Easy one. No one understands women, not even women.’

I didn’t understand them. I understood Historic Peculiarities well enough to pass exams. If there had been an exam for understanding women my paper would have been returned with a cutting comment on it and I’d have been forced to retake it the following September. I knew that Judy was in a mood without needing to know anything else. There were clues. She kept putting things down forcefully. She answered questions with sharper questions. She’d mentioned not being a student. That helped. She thought that I was patronizing her by telling her what the party would be like. Add that to her bad mood – and I was usually careful not to add anything to her bad moods, they seemed to get along well enough by themselves – and that was enough.

‘We could go,’ I said. ‘If Jack’s going. I mean, it’s Friday night. It’s not as if we have to get up tomorrow.’

‘Yeah well, if it’s no trouble for you. I’d hate to put you out.’

Just then I wanted to put her out of the window of a moving train, but these tender moments are what makes a relationship special.

‘I’d love to go with you. When I was a student I didn’t go out with anyone like you.’

‘What, female?’

No, beset by inexplicable mood swings. I mean, come on. If I was stuck with a twenty-eight day cycle that sent me insane one week in four – I’m not a biologist, so I might have got some of the details wrong on this – and it started in early adolescence, then by the time I was twenty I think I might just have got the hang of it. I might think, hold on, he hasn’t stopped loving me after all. I might think, I know, I’ll just tell him what the problem is and that’ll be that. I might think, hold on, it’s three weeks since last time this happened, it’ll be menstruation, just like it was last month and the month before that and every other bloody month, and there’s nothing wrong.

Jack returned from the bar with drinks for himself. He’d got a pint and a short. I wanted a pint and a short, and I had half a pint. Judy was drinking gin and tonic.

That’s another thing. If I was female and heading towards the ovary-popping time of the month, I’d steer clear of gin.

Then again, I’ve had plenty of bad times on whisky, and I’ll still drink that if there’s any going.

‘You coming?’ Jack asked, downing his pint. ‘You’ll get in with me. You stick with me,’ he said, arranging himself around Judy and talking into her face from close range, ‘and we’ll be fine. I don’t know about this miserable git though. We might have to dump him somewhere.’

‘Yeah,’ said Judy. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight?’

She drained her gin and tonic and stood up. I followed her to the party, via the off-licence.

II

We got in with no trouble. The man who opened the door didn’t recognize us, but he didn’t live there and he didn’t give a fuck. I know this because he told me so. He told all three of us, one by one and then all together. He took my shoulder in his hand and told me from very close range.

I don’t know what he’d been drinking, but it wasn’t mouthwash.

I shrugged him onto Jack and went into the hall. Everyone was drunk and talking too loudly. A girl was crying on the stairs and another girl was comforting her by pointing out the pitfalls of all male humans. I seemed to be in a themed evening. Then, looking at the male humans in the immediate area, I saw that she had a point. Girls grow up and become women, boys become men but the growing up part gets left out. Some boys were dancing. Some were singing. Some were involved in competitions involving drinking. No one was winning.

‘They’re not worth it,’ said the girl on the stairs who wasn’t crying. The other one gathered herself and looked around. From where she was, halfway up the stairs, it must have seemed like Dandruff Central. I had thought that the long-haired look had died out with the end of grebo, that short-lived Midland sound that sounded exactly like the Midlands – industrial and stupid. I had been wrong. The hall was packed with leather jackets and straggling unwashed manes, ripped jeans and split boots. It was as though Marilyn Manson had been decanted into a kaleidoscope. From the horde came the smells of cider and patchouli. I didn’t see many tattoos. They weren’t well enough off to have tattoos.

Tattoos arrived, in the form of Jack.

‘Stone me,’ he said, ‘what’s this, fucking Donnington? What’s that fucking music?’

He went in search of it.

‘Are we going to have a drink?’ Judy asked me. I nodded. I had four cans of Supa Brew Ice Special and a bottle of the cheapest red wine. You have to take a bottle of the cheapest red wine to parties. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six hundred bikers in a clapped-out semi or a dinner party with minor royalty, it’s only polite.

I gave Judy a can of Supa and opened one myself. It tasted terrible. If it hadn’t had the alcoholic content of Dean Martin, it would have been undrinkable. It tasted so bad that you could forget what it was doing to your body. Supa comes in packs of four and costs less than either embrocation or lighter fluid, which come in packs of one. It isn’t advertised. It’s gained popularity through word of mouth. Which is strange, because once you’ve had a can or two, you can’t speak.

I’m not very good at drinking. I can drink as much as the next man, but I’ll fall over a long time before he does. I know my limits.

But I can’t stick to them. I recognize them as I see them receding into the distance far behind me. I’ve had one too many, I’ll think. Better have one or two more.

Then I start on the shorts.

We didn’t have any shorts with us, so once the cans were gone I unscrewed the wine bottle and swigged from that. Judy began to move in and out of my field of vision. So did everything else. The red wine stains became more widespread. I had them on my clothes. I had them on everyone else’s clothes. I found myself in the bathroom, with my forehead against the tiles above the bath. Someone had been sick in the bath. It wasn’t me. I had been sick in the sink. Remembering that, I was sick down the wall I was leaning against. I rested on the floor and listened to people knocking on the door. There was some very bad language. I was sick in the bath.

A chunk of the evening vanished.

I was on the stairs. There were more stairs than I remembered. I trod on a stair that wasn’t there and had a rest at the foot of the stairs for a while. A pair of men looking like the bastard offspring of a terrible union between Lemmy and himself helped me to my feet and spoke to me. I couldn’t understand anything they said. They sounded like warthogs. They looked like warthogs. The man who had once been in Pop Will Eat Itself walked past us. He looked like a better-known warthog.

Another chunk of the evening vanished.

I was outside, sitting on the drive. It was uncomfortable. Someone had been sick on it. It wasn’t me, I was sick on the lawn and on a cat that had been up to no good in the shrubbery. Legs were next to me. I looked up them. Standing over me were Eddie Finch, Jack, and Judy.

‘Eddie!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here tonight.’

They exchanged looks.

‘He’s always like this,’ said Judy. ‘He’s too wussy for this sort of thing.’

‘Always was,’ said Jack. ‘Used to throw up if he had Woodpecker, and that’s pop.’

‘How much has he had?’ Eddie asked.

‘Half a pint,’ said Judy.

‘As much as that?’ said Jack. ‘He’s getting to be one of the big lads.’

‘Wine,’ Judy added. ‘Two cans of Brew and half a pint of wine.’

‘Well most of the wine’s on the garden,’ said Eddie.

‘Two cans of Brew? Call a fucking ambulance,’ said Jack.

‘You’re an ambulance,’ I said. I knew I’d got the joke wrong, but they were all drunk and I thought I’d get away with it

‘There, he says he wants an ambulance. He knows he’s overdone it. Stick to the Vimto, mate.’

I noticed that Eddie had put his arm around Judy, and that Judy didn’t seem to mind. I told them both what I thought about that. I tried to tell them, anyway. The words came out overlapping and stretched.

‘Yeah mate,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve had a bit too much tonight. See Eddie? He’s going to take Judy home. Put her to bed, mate. What you’d be doing if you weren’t on the drive of this charming residence. I’ll take you to mine, you sleep on the floor. Throw up on the floor and I’ll murder you. Fair play? Fair play. Eddie’s got his car here. Haven’t you?’

Eddie nodded.

‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’

‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.

‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’

We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.

‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’

I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.

‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’

I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.

‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’

I threw away a chunk of the evening.

I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.

III

In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.

Someone had been sick on me in the night.

Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.

She was at my house, waiting for me. She made me a cup of tea and made me have a shower. After the shower she sniffed me and told me to take my clothes outside and burn them.

‘Don’t bother getting out of them either, you drunken bastard,’ she said.

I had a feeling she was upset about something.

‘I’m sorry I was drunk,’ I said.

‘Drunk? I can cope with drunk boyfriends. They’re easier than sober ones. At least they’re honest. But there’s drunk and there’s paralytic. How did you get home?’

I didn’t know. That had fallen out of my head.

‘I knew it,’ she said, scrunching her face. A scrunchy face on the girlfriend means, Sam’s in trouble.

‘We went to the park,’ I remembered. ‘There were ducks.’

‘Lovely. You and Jack went for a stroll in the park. I was driven home by Eddie Finch, who has always wanted to be a rally driver. How do I know this? Because he drove me home at seventy miles an hour, going sideways for a lot of the time. He has fog lamps and bumper stickers and roll bars. There’s you, puking all over the wonders of nature, and there’s me, being driven home so fast I got there before I went out. Of course, I had to sleep with him. He’d driven me home, it was the least I could do.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘I may be. We’ll have to see.’

‘How many kidneys do you have?’

‘What?’ Judy went to the living room and came back with a cigarette. She had started smoking after going out with me for a few weeks. I’d tried to give up but it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t tried to give up. She claimed she didn’t smoke much. If she didn’t, either my cigarettes were evaporating or we had some woodlice in the wainscoting that were going to have chest problems when they got older.