Tag Archives: love

Live, Laugh, Love, Urinate

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Our desire to splurge noble and life-affirming messages to ourselves, and to each other, in the most visible of locations is an understandable human impulse. It feels congruous to see such evocations in a great library, or a hall of justice, or emblazoned on a national monument, but it all begins to seem a little indulgent – and more than a little Californian – in the context of the homestead. Case in point: the bathroom.

This is the room in someone’s home where you are most likely to be entreated to Live, Laugh and, inevitably, Love. The message is usually delivered by way of giant 3D letters nailed to the wall. An alphabetic crucifixion. What is it about this room that seems to beg the inclusion of such lofty and uplifting sentiments? I don’t tend to find myself at my most aspirational when I’ve just caught a lungful of putrid jobby. Is the sentiment intended to cancel out the noisy and pungent truth of the filth at our core? Wouldn’t a blank wall be better accompaniment than a trite reminder of our own self-worth? I’m not a fucking dog. I don’t need to hear or see the equivalent of ‘GOOD BOY, OH GOOOOOOOD BOY!’ as I’m curling one out. I know I’m a good boy. I’m also a perfectly able shitter, with my own signature style and everything (I always finish with a snaky Nike tick – it’s all in the hips, folks). Why such puffery? I’d be inclined to lean away from self-help altogether, and keep my house-guests humble by hanging a giant ‘YOU’RE SO FULL OF SHIT’ on my bathroom wall.

My friend’s bathroom has ‘LIFE IS GOOD’ stuck to the wall. It’s positioned a few feet above the toilet cistern, so the message would be roughly eye-level with a person of average height if they stood facing the wall. Again, what is it about this particular place that necessitates such a reminder? I’ve never had a therapist, but I find it unlikely that my first one-to-one would take place inside a communal bathroom. It’s surely far from ideal to compete against a flushing toilet for your therapist’s attention. And it’s probably wise to err on the side of scepticism if you’re approached by someone claiming to want to heal you, if only you’d meet them in the petrol station toilet in ten minutes with your own carrier-bags (or cottaging-loafers, as they’re sometimes known).

I pissed in my friend’s bathroom recently, and the first thing that struck me – whilst I was busy being reminded just how good my life was – was that the placing of the message was misogynistic. This was clearly a message aimed at men, given that they were the only ones truly capable of absorbing it mid-piss. What about the ladies? Didn’t they deserve to ruminate on how fucking good their lives were? Why were only men privy to this encouragement? SEXIST!

Immediately after my wetty (that’s what I was encouraged to call a piss as a kid, and, you’ve got to admit, it’s an accurate tag) I sat down on the toilet seat and stared ahead. I was testing the theory. Sure enough, facing me was a blank wall. Not one word of encouragement stared back at me. If I’d been a woman I would have been devastated. Where was my entreatment to live my best life, or piss harder than I’d ever pissed before because I was pissing on the shoulders of lady giants? Not good enough in 2022! SEXIST!

I clung to this conclusion of misogyny for as long as it took me to work out that it was doubtless my friend’s wife who’d erected the letters. Because of course it was. I’ve never heard my friend say anything even approximating the sentiment ‘life is good’; I’d have been astonished if he’d wall-mounted it.

So if a woman had placed this message – so it could be seen by men and men alone – then the message was misandrist! Because of course it was! Women didn’t need affirmation or encouragement. It was just us men – we saggy sad sacks of aggression and patheticness – that needed a penisary pep-talk as we pished. I GUESS WOMEN ARE JUST PERFECT, AREN’T THEY? Yeah, flash those willy-wearing shit-bags an ego boost, maybe they’ll stop killing women and starting wars for a while. SEXIST!!!

But, then, maybe – just maybe – my friend’s wife had placed the message in recognition of the fact that the male suicide rate is so high, and guys need all the positivity they can get. So… she’s saving lives? SHE’S A BLOODY SAINT! GOD BLESS YOU, FLORENCE SHITE-INGALE!

By this point I was so discombobulated by the inscription on the wall and its ultimate meaning that I stomped to the faucet, turned the cold tap to max, drank deeply, filled my bladder to bursting point, and pished all over the bathroom floor in a steady stream of confused rage. Please think carefully before you place messages on the walls of your bathroom. You could easily kill an over-thinker like me.

But if you can’t beat em, join em, right? I’ve since followed my friend’s lead and placed life-affirming messages in my own house, but not just in the bathroom: everywhere. They’re bloody everywhere. On my kitchen wall you’ll find ‘COOK THOSE EGGS, KING’. In the living room, ‘JESUS CHRIST YOU’RE AMAZING AT WATCHING TV’. On the stairs, ‘ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, STUD’. And, of course, up high in the bedroom, BEAT THAT COCK LIKE THE POLITICAL PRISONER IT IS, YOU MUSCULAR GOD.

What can I say? Life is good.

When your children’s beds lie empty

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When my kids go to live with their mother my house becomes a museum. I walk through it with hushed steps, bowing in quiet reverence before the many delicate proofs of their existence. It’s like they’ve always been here; it’s like they’re never coming back. The quiet – the unnatural, empty quiet – entombs the house. It’s heavy; dark; like night falling in daytime. I could say it’s as quiet as a library, but my boys paint even libraries in bright, bold textures of laughter and mischief. Their noise can make your ears ache, but it’s nothing compared to the dull, hollow ache its absence leaves behind.

I wander into their bedroom and look around. Their room is the dinner table on the Mary Celeste; it’s the perfectly preserved plaster shapes of children in the petrified ash of Pompeii; it’s a vault that contains the world’s most sacred and irreplaceable treasures: there, on the floor, a tiny pair of jeans is the Turin shroud; on the cabinet, a blank vista planted with stick figures is the Mona Lisa. I touch the exhibits, and in so doing make conductive elements of my hands, completing the circuit between tactility and memory. A flood of sentiment flows through me, rushing to fill the empty basin of my heart. Everything I touch contains a message: Braille only I can decipher in the soft contours of a teddy bear, or the hard spine of a picture book.

If their room really were a museum the placard on the wall would read: ‘This is a faithful reproduction of a child’s bedroom circa 2021, accurate right down to the details of the gently unmade beds and the arc of toys curling out like a tail from an upturned perspex box. If you look closely, you might still see the imprints of their heads on the pillows; soft, ephemeral mementoes of little lives suddenly frozen by circumstance; theirs to continue elsewhere, their father’s to stop. At least until they return.’

Parenthood can be a perpetual source of guilt and commiseration – the fear of never knowing how the threads you pluck and pull might shape the tapestry of your children’s lives, and whether for good or ill – but it’s also a source of light and warmth so fierce and brilliant it can plunge the rest of your world into shadow. I never realised quite how much of my identity was wrapped in my children until I couldn’t see them every day; until I felt how cold and helpless and rudderless I was shorn of their auras. I’m half of their template for making sense of the world, but it’s become abundantly clear to me that they’re 100 per cent of mine. I need my children like Tony Stark needs his artificial heart.

I know in some respects I’m privileged. Very few separated or divorced dads enjoy a fifty-fifty split on custody. Hell, some married dads with jobs abroad or offshore don’t see their children for weeks or even months at a time. But these comparisons only provide intellectual perspective. It makes no difference to the heart. Other people may suffer more, but their suffering, though deeply regretted, is abstract to me. I suppose, like everything in life, it takes time. A skeletal platitude, perhaps, but the only one I have to hold on to.

My wife and I separated just before the dawning of Covid. We were forced to co-habit in the same house for a year, living together but separately. In retrospect, this period of transition, as tough as it was for the adults in the house, probably helped the kids to come to terms with the changed dynamic and their new reality. Thus, when their mother did move out, it seemed less of a short, sharp shock to them, and more of a logical culmination of the process.

As parents we sometimes wish for a break from our kids – hell, sometimes we need it – but we’re safe to wish such things because we know – and not even deep down but right there on the surface – that we couldn’t exist without them. These are fleeting thoughts, situational, with no real substance to them. And they can be tamed or quelled, usually by something as simple as coffee with a friend, a long walk up the hills, or an occasional evening in the company of good friends and fine wine. I’m a highly-strung person, or else can be when faced with the possibilities of either failure or letting someone down. My anxiety goes into overload. One such occasion came back to haunt me as I sat thinking about the kids after they’d gone.

Years back I’d had a writing deadline, and was feeling overwhelmed. I paced around the house, and though the kids were asleep and didn’t hear me, I said, in a fit of rising adrenalin: “Do you know what, I’d get a whole hell of a lot more fucking writing done and wouldn’t find myself in these positions if I lived alone and could just focus entirely on it.” I didn’t mean it any more than a young child having a tantrum means it when they tell their parents they hate them. But those words still lodge in my heart like an arrow, one fired by my own hand. I said those things because I was stressed, and my body was using my mouth as a vent. I said those things safe in the belief that not for a second would there ever come a time when I might be living alone; that I wouldn’t be able to see them first thing every morning, and last thing every night.

That first night the kids went to stay at their mother’s, I wandered through the house, which was by then half-empty of furniture and possessions, and fully empty of other people. I sat in my former bedroom (now mine again and mine alone) on the bare floor, surrounded by emptiness, and I cried. I’m a sentimental fool, so I leak often – every time a movie tugs at my heart-strings – but I rarely cry, not the kind that shakes your shoulders, and makes your face a mute mask of anguish. I called my mum. I didn’t know what else to do. I sobbed like an infant. “I’ve lost my family,” I told her. It hit me then. It all hit me. A dam of worry and stress and recrimination and irritation and anger broke , and from it rushed waves of sadness that completely engulfed me. I didn’t want my wife back. I knew that would never happen. But that room held the weight of all that had been, could have been and should have been, and I was now trapped and drowning inside of it.

Throughout my adult life, thoughts of suicide have occasionally flitted through my head. It comes with the territory when depression and anxiety are your life-long bed-fellows; when your coping skills operate on the cross-roads of ‘fuck it’ and ‘fuck that’. Fortunately, both the frequency of such desperate, morbid thoughts and the ferocity with which my body responds to anxiety have lessened over the decades, perhaps a case of my brain learning how not to be an asshole, perhaps down to something as simple as a decrease in testosterone production. In any case, such thoughts were always abstract in character, like visits from Scrooge’s three ghosts. I was mired in ideation, not channelling intent. Ultimately, my thoughts were a mechanism to help me identify and explore a problem in my soul or psyche; a reminder that beyond that hot fog of adrenalin or the empty scorch it leaves behind are the pillars of peace and hope, however much time it may take to reach them. My malaise was always curable, or at the very least manageable, and the courses of treatment I recommended for myself – though often far from salubrious – were always less extreme than self-extermination.

But a short while after my children left, I felt possessed by something far less abstract. I never acted, or tried to act, on any impulses, but they were disconcertingly strong. Suicidal ideation has sometimes felt, for me at least, cinematic; a looped narrative of flashbacks and angry what-ifs, accompanied by a rollicking roller-coaster of blood and adrenalin – other times an extreme manifestation of grief or sadness that blocks out all else. But it was never cold.

This feeling was cold. Clinical. Precise. Like all else had been stripped away: all feeling, all options – leaving only suicide’s inarguable truth. I couldn’t see a happy ending. All of my actions would lead to disappointment. I couldn’t safeguard my children from the intra-familial tussles, battles and wars that might be ahead – the very conditions in my own past that made me at least half the basket-case I am today. I didn’t want them to be like me. I didn’t want them to be burdened by my inevitable failures. I didn’t think I could give them the life they needed: spiritually or materially. I didn’t think I was good enough for them.

At once I understood two things. One: that all of my ideas about suicide being a selfish act had been wrong. When those thoughts took over my brain, the world seemed distant to me. Alien. I felt emotionless. Devoid. I knew that my non-existence would be a mercy not just to me, but to everyone else, because I wouldn’t be the wild card that might make things worse. I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. And two: that if I’d been American I probably would have blown my own head off (an act that would have suited my impulsivity, and removed that period of regret, and desire to undo, that undoubtedly falls upon even the most committed of self-exterminators).

Whatever configuration my mind fell into during those dark days has been reset. I pushed through the fog. Started seeing things clearly. I can see that my kids are happy. They don’t cry when they leave their mother to come to me, and they don’t cry when they leave me to go to their mother. While they undoubtedly miss whichever one of us they aren’t with, they’ve always got one of us by their side, and I’m happy that the bulk of the burden of loss is upon my shoulders, and not theirs. I feel like a good dad again; someone who can make a positive impact on their lives.

Outside of my boys I haven’t achieved much in this life that’s truly good – practically, morally, or spiritually – but those incredible little people make me feel as accomplished as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo rolled into one. While it’s hard to divest one’s self-interest and ego from the things and people to which and to whom you’ve given life, my love for my children isn’t the same as that which a painter feels upon finishing a masterpiece, or an author feels when their worlds start to gather and bloom inside other people’s heads. It’s greater. Infinitely so. But it’s also restrained; tempered with respect and a sense of duty. I care about the little people they are, and the big people they’re destined to become. I don’t want them to be little carbon copies stomping robotically in my wake; I only wish for them to be inspired by me: to be free to take my triumphs and eject my miseries, and make for themselves a life that’s been shaped, but never moulded by my presence in their lives. And where they are like me, I want them to be better: to leave me in the dust, both figuratively and literally. I never want them to forget that they were and always will be loved. Fiercely. By me, and by their mother.

I’m going to indulge myself to quite a horrendous extent by ending on a particularly twee cliché: that what happened to our family wasn’t an ending, but a new beginning. And one that’s going to work because all the love that matters is flowing through our children.

That I believe.

A Tale of Two Bedtimes: Peaceful and P***ed Off

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I smell.

That’s not news to some, I’m sure. But I’m not talking about the smell of sweat or failure. I’m talking about my particular scent, that reassuring mix of aftershave, lotions and pheromones that’s as unique an identifier to those who love me as the dangly hairs that sprout from my nose, my rapidly receding hairline or my incredibly disappointing penis.

Smell is an overlooked and perhaps under-rated sense, especially given how intimately associated it is with memory. One whiff of a gently-boiling pan of lentil soup, or a long-ago loved perfume on the neck of a passer-by, or the reassuring aroma of a house loaded with the wet tang of dogs can be enough to whisk us away on a nostril-based leap through time, to a place where we were happy; to a place where we felt loved.

My scent is apparently music to my eldest son’s ears  – or a freshly-baked cookie to his nose, if you’d prefer. The other week at bedtime – after a) the stories had been read, b) his younger brother was asleep and c) we’d exhausted our pre-sleep chit-chat – Jack, 6, asked me to leave my jumper behind so he could sleep with it next to his face. He wanted to be able to smell me.

It’s perhaps the sweetest request I’ve ever received. In few other spheres of life could another human being ask to smell your clothes without you calling the police or backing away really, really slowly. I took it off and handed it to him, and he pulled it close to his face and huffed it like it was a bag of glue. He lay there for a second, the jumper pressed against his cheek, his eyes closed and a dreamy little smile resting on his features. Then he put my jumper on, sitting there half-buried in it, two long trunks dangling from his shoulders where arms should be. And he went to sleep like that, too. I checked on him later in the night. He’d thrown the covers off himself, content to lie there wrapped in the warmth of my massively over-sized jumper.  I walked away in the half-darkness with a lump in my throat and a swelling in my breast.

What a difference a day makes.

Remember that old song? I think it was meant to convey the wonderful capacity of time to change things for the better. Well, I’m not using it in that sense. Think of the difference a day makes to a forest fire during a windy drought season. That’s where I’m coming from.

Here comes bedtime number two. The scene, this time, is rather less inspirational.

Intergenerational relations were already strained from the twenty-odd minutes it took for me to convince (see also; harangue) the kids to change into their pyjamas; lots of glassy stares, sudden attention shifts, oodles of wilful defiance, brotherly scrapping and hyperactive mayhem had overthrown what weak little slip of sanity still reigned over my war-torn brain.  Negotiations finally broke down over tooth-brushing timescales, although to describe them as negotiations rather over-estimates my status as an equal partner in them.

I was in a miffed sort of a mood anyway. It wasn’t supposed to be my night doing their stories, and they were both supposed to have been pre-occupied earlier that evening with a family visit. Thus, I’d portioned my evening into productive/recreational segments, which began with an hour of tidying (mostly tackling the cluttered hell-hole of the children’s toy-room), which I duly completed, then an hour of TV, then a couple of hours of writing. Half-way through my hour of TV, the kids ran into the bedroom and bounced on me like I was an airbed, signalling that my R&R was RIP. I didn’t mind. Happy kids trump TV every time. But when the story time flipped to accommodate an unexpected supermarket trip their mother was taking, my writing time – with a deadline looming – was DOA.

I carried that irritation with me, amplified by the reality of co-existing in a house with a person from whom I’m in the process of separating, and it seeped into my interactions with the kids.

And they were already being plenty objectively irritating independently of my soured mood.

Inevitably, they rebelled against brushing their teeth. They dithered, dallied, dillied and defied. I’d already knocked their story allocation down from three to one (they love story time, as do I, so it hurt us all) as punishment for their tardiness and cheek-tongued ebullience.

For his next trick, Jack stood in the hallway with his toothbrush clamped between his teeth like one of Hannibal’s cigars, readying himself to snark off like Murdoch (if you’re too old or too young to share my pop culture references here, feel free to google the A-Team – I pity the fool who doesn’t).

‘I’m going to sleep in the big bed tonight,’ he garbled. That’s the big double-bed his mum currently sleeps in.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘Then you won’t be playing Spiderman on the PS4 tomorrow.’

‘We won’t be home tomorrow, so that’s okay, I’ll play it the next day.’

‘Then you won’t be playing it the next day…’

The tit for tat continued like this until a crucial keystone of my patience suddenly plummeted earthwards.

Though I stood three metres or more away from him, the force with which my temper broke free might’ve caused an earthquake. ‘Then I’ll take your Spiderman game and smash it into a million pieces, how would you like that?’ I instantly regretted saying it, but sometimes you start dancing to your anger before you’ve even had time to hear its song.

It was a very tense and emotionally fraught bedroom to which we retired. Christopher was in his bed – his mood really rather chirpy – I sat in the reclining chair between the two beds, and Jack was on his bed, sufficiently recovered from his bollocking to lobby for the reinstatement of at least one of the discontinued stories.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you I’m going to do something then go back on it. That won’t teach you a lesson.’

‘But you told mummy you’d sit with us and watch Star Trek with us until she got back from the shops.’

‘I said maybe I would, Jack, and at that point I didn’t know exactly when she’d be going or when she’d be back.’

‘I heard you say it.’

Maybe that’s why he’d been pushing for the big bed. Because he’d overheard me debating whether or not I should just cuddle up watching TV with them until their mum got back from the shops. I had to be a man of my word. Plus, I relished an opportunity to do something nice for them that wouldn’t look like a capitulation, even though it most definitely was.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I did say that. Let’s go to the big bed and watch Star Trek for a wee bit. OK?’

I’d no sooner pushed my arse half-a-foot above the chair than Jack decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

‘Well, I’ll tell you this, I’ll never sit next to you again, not on the couch, not anywhere, for the rest of my life.’

My arse clattered back down on the chair. A frayed and bitter part of me was close to spitting back: ‘Well you’ll get the chance when your mum moves out, then we’ll see how much you like it’, but I snuffed it out. It’s never wise or right to respond to your child’s molten anger with further hurt or anger.

He’s said hurtful things before, ‘I hate you’, ‘You’re not my friend any more’ etc. and I have always, without fail, recognised the outbursts as being the byproduct of the big feelings that kids sometimes feel. I usually just smile, shake my head, and say something like, ‘No you don’t. You’re just angry. You won’t feel that way when the anger leaves. You love me and I love you.’ And I always get an ‘I’m sorry’ cuddle very soon afterwards.

I realised that I was just extra tired and pissed off that night, and it was frazzling my judgement.

Jack’s outburst called for consequences, certainly, but above it called all a cool head. So I sat back in the seat – nice and aloof – and said: ‘Congratulations, son, you’ve just blown it.’

This – perhaps predictably – provoked a partial meltdown. Jack sat up in bed, tears of frustration clouding his eyes. He waved his hands around, bringing them together and then stretching them apart as though he were playing an accordion. ‘THIS is how unfair this is. THIS MUCH.’

‘Jack, how can you say you want to snuggle next to me in the big bed when you’ve just told me you don’t ever want to sit next to me again?’

‘THIS MUCH!’ he screamed.

‘You did this to yourself, son,’ I said, coolly staring ahead. His tear-soaked temper eventually abated, and he curled up on the bed. By this point Christopher was restless, so I slid in next to him in his bed. After a minute or so, I pulled the lever on the reclining chair. It popped up and sprang out, revealing a boy-shaped space, if only the little boy in question wasn’t too defiant to occupy it. I slapped the leather.

‘Come on, Jack, let’s be pals again. Come sit next to me.’

He hesitated for a moment, perhaps contemplating digging in, but he quickly relented. He skulked over to lie on the outstretched seat, but kept himself as far away from me as possible, and with his back turned to me. He was playing hard to get. I knew he wanted more than anything to come in for a cuddle, but he didn’t want to lose face, or let go of the righteous anger that swirled in his belly. I could relate.

‘Come into the bed with me and your brother,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s not be silly, let’s just say sorry and be pals again.’

He clambered over the seat, quick as a flash. I budged up and somehow, miraculously, we sat three abreast in that tiny single bed, me with my toes almost bursting through the bookcase at the foot of it.

‘Sometimes, Jack,’ I said as he snuggled into me, ‘when people are angry, they say things that they don’t mean. Like when I said I would smash Spiderman.’

He looked up at me. ‘Or when I said I’d never sit next to you again.’

‘Exactly. I never have and never would break any of your toys or games. I was just really frustrated that you weren’t listening to me and I got desperate. I didn’t know what else to do. Plus I was already annoyed about something else and I took a little of that out on you. So I’m not sorry about being cross when you wouldn’t listen to me – you did wrong, and I hope you know that – but I’m sorry for losing my temper and saying that nasty thing. That was wrong of me.’

I used to be a lot more hot-headed in my younger days, to the point of psychopathology. I think a combination of time, dwindling testosterone, self-improvement and bitter experience has taught me the folly of that kind of stinking thinking.

Jack cuddled into me more tightly.

As a parent, I’ve got a very loud bark but a very soft bite. More of a nuzzle than a bite, really. Most of my anger comes from frustration at not being listened to, which only really serves to make me angry with myself for getting so angry. It’s quite the feedback loop.

But when I do fuck up or do something wrong, I always apologise for it, and try to explain why it happened. The parents of my mother’s generation were better at letting their kids peak behind the curtain of their supposed perfection than their own parents, but sorry was still a word largely absent from the Boomers’ lexicon. I’m bucking that trend: this Generation X’er is one sorry motherfucker.

‘No big person does the right thing all of the time, Jack. Not me, not your mum, not your teachers, not policemen, not doctors, not strangers in the street. We all make mistakes, son, sometimes we do things wrong, even as adults. None of us is perfect.’

What Jack said next is one of those things that’s bound to illicit the reaction, ‘Yeah, did he fuck say that, you liar.’ And if you do say that, I can certainly see where you’re coming from. We’ve all seen posts on-line where a parent will say something like, “I was discussing the situation in Palestine with my two-year-old daughter the other day, and do you know what, she fixed me with such a knowing little look, and she said, ‘Mummy? Sometimes I think humanity is locked in a perpetual, spiralling cycle of blindness, rage and violence from which it will never escape.”

But Jack did say this next line, word for word. And it made me smile.

‘There’s one thing you are perfect at, dad… Being yourself.’

I tousled his hair, and landed a kiss on that wise wee bonce of his. ‘I guess you’re right.’

What a lad. What a perfect boy.

‘Now go to sleep,’ I told him, ‘Or I’ll smash that fucking bed to pieces.’

 

…I didn’t say that.

Thoughts on ‘Love’

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love1I recently participated in a charity event called ‘Scrapbooks and Rapbooks’, where I read from the diary of my 16-year-old self. The event inspired me to dig out these two complementary yet contrasting pieces on the subject of love. I say ‘pieces’. More like pieces of shit. Especially the first one, the poem. It’s basically a few nifty lines surrounded by a sea of overly sentimental faux-profound pretentious fuckery. Instead of going to all the effort of penning a poem I could just as easily have written ‘I KNOW A COUPLE OF BIG WORDS, NOW WILL YOU PLEASE FUCK ME???!!!’ on a piece of A3 paper, photocopied it and stapled it to trees and lamp-posts throughout the local area. As a strategy, it wouldn’t have worked, but at least it would’ve been honest. I wrote the poem when I was 17, and it makes me want to vomit up my heart and squish it underfoot like a dying fish.

The second piece, which is more of a rambling essay-of-sorts, I wrote when I was 25, and was inspired by an episode of Ross Kemp on Gangs. I wonder if you can also tell that I wrote it not long after a break-up, another in a long-line of healthy relationships my younger-self was addicted to machine-gunning to death in fits of faithless, fickle, sexually feckless behaviour.

I don’t know if ‘enjoy’ is the correct word in this context, but I certainly bid you to tolerate the following musings. First up, the piss-ass poem. Bits of it really are reminiscent of a song written by David Brent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Science Vs Religion

–

A paradox, a fraud amongst feelings,

A laboured lie cursed upon souls:

Of all the bonds that bind a man,

None can be so false as ‘love’.

–

Our minds control our destiny, not our hearts,

And what we feel can run no deeper than the

River of blood that runs through us all –

A deformity, a bastard born of man,

A twisted, deceptive purity! Inconceivable! –

it grows from our ignorance, not our instinct;

what lunacy a force as such could join the

feelings fortified in man.

–

To grieve a child can not be love.

Can it not be seen that creator weeps when creation fails?

What we grieve in loss is not empathy for the lost

But for an emptiness in ourselves –

Pity for a hole in us, not in earth.

–

To take a woman can not be love.

Nothing more can couplings be than means to lust and procreate,

A web of neurones, nerves and volts, making mortal drives seem great!

Another held above one’s self –

That’s tantamount to suicide!

–

Then dead am I.

–

For this that shudders down my veins,

From pounding heart, through all my brains:

but bubbling broth of DNA?

Have faith, my friend, join hands, let’s pray:

–

Once fingers fondly skirt the flesh,

All limbs entwined and hearts enmeshed;

Once the cliché’s been embraced

the ugly beast in each soul faced;

Then once you’ve watched the whole world die

Deep down dark, in mans mind’s eye,

And asked yourself (but please don’t lie),

Tell me, friend, but did you cry?

–

No?

–

My friend, once you’ve experienced that…

Atheism, as your doubts, will crumble to dust.

To ask how love can be is futile.

To simply know that it does must suffice.

–

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Excruciating, eh? Anyway, on to the next one.

Love

mongIn a television documentary series entitled ‘Ross Kemp on Gangs’, British actor Ross Kemp travelled the world to spend time with various gangs renowned for their brutality. The episode I watched featured the town of Auckland, New Zealand, where Kemp chronicled a native gang called ‘The Mongrel Mob’.

The Mongrel Mob’s members all feel shunned or abused by society in some way. Thus they have formed a clan of like-minded sociopaths hell-bent on visiting violent retribution upon society for these perceived slights and wrongs. Some of the group rage against society with a twisted sense of propriety and righteousness ; others gravitate to the group simply because they enjoy raging for destruction’s sake.

In this particular episode Kemp spoke with an elderly member of the Mongrel Mob about the role of women in the gang dynamic. It became clear that the gang members valued not subservience in their women – as a master would a pet – but instead didn’t value women at all. Those women who were permitted entry to a Mongrel Mob clubhouse entered on the proviso that they left their human rights at the door. They were expected to surrender themselves into the Mongrels’ fold as nothing more than shrieking, sucking, walking, fucking vaginas.

tampOne of the old charmers recalled to Kemp a distant time when, in one of these very clubhouses somewhere in the dilapidated suburbs of Auckland, he ripped off a woman’s pants with his teeth, and then used them to pull out her tampon. The tampon, as you might expect, was soaked in blood – as, very quickly, was the chap’s face. Naturally – as you do in these situations – he then asked a male friend to lick the blood from his face, and then invited his acquiescent comrade to share with him the tampon feast. Maybe this recital will have more impact if I present it in plainer English: they ate her fucking tampon.

Kemp asked the romantic so-and-so why he thought the woman had tolerated being treated in this manner. “She was in love with me in those days,” he replied.

Kemp, stony-faced, asked what happened next. I got the feeling Kemp wasn’t holding out hope for a sanguine ending to the tale. Neither was I. “I made love to her on the bar in front of me mates,” said the Mongrel, somewhat softly.

Did I really hear that? Did you just really read it? Love? A guest appearance from such a word in this old man’s lexicon seemed as incongruous as Kemp himself appearing in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. [VOICE OF PRESENT-DAY JAMIE – I WROTE THIS PIECE IN A PRE-EXTRAS WORLD. YEARS LATER, RICKY GERVAIS WOULD INDEED CAST KEMP IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. VERY FUNNY IT WAS, TOO.]

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If this act was performed in and, if we assume, received in the spirit of love, then what can the rest of us mean when we lay claim to the same concept? What price a declaration of love when its currency has been devalued so by wretched creatures such as these?

But then words are nothing more than representations of concepts; arbitrary symbols that refer to a framework we have erected to make sense of the things and ideas around us. They aren’t the actual thing that they represent, merely esoteric representations presented in a form tangible to certain human groups of representations of things filtered through our fallible, objective senses; and isn’t pinning down the nature of love a million, billion times more baffling than trying to unravel the middle section of this nonsensical and heavy sentence? [VOICE OF PRESENT-DAY JAMIE – MAYBE IF YOUR SENTENCES WERE BETTER AND MORE COHERENT IT WOULDN’T BE SO MUCH OF A PROBLEM, JAMIE]

We must remember, however, that The Mongrel Mob has chosen the Nazi interpretation of the swastika as the symbol of their ‘struggle’ against society. The irony that the Nazis were a mob of mongrels who would gladly have purified this assortment of mainly ethnic, dim-witted alcoholics with extreme prejudice is sadly lost on them. So, perhaps their definition of love should not be unquestionably accepted as definitive.

Man marries cushion

But isn’t that the point? I could profess love to a calculator, and no man on Earth would have any right to question my commitment or feelings towards the object. I could love that calculator more than a man loves his wife. I could love a sunset, or a painting, or a dung beetle. I could love with an unmatched burning intensity a woman who steals my house, or love a woman I’ve just brutally raped. I could love fifteen women at once. What do I, do we, mean when we say that? How is my love for a woman the same as or different from the way that any number of men love women; or that women love men, women women, and men men?

I’m sure we all have our own sense of truth in this matter. The English language may be standardised, but the emotion of love (if it can be called an emotion) varies in its form from person to person, culture to culture. I have read many interpretations of and theories about love in books on religion, psychology, sociology, philosophy, biology, anthropology and history. [STILL DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE FRENCH I TOOK, THOUGH] I’ve read comprehensive studies and reports (even Cosmo-fucking-politan), asked many friends and acquaintances, searched my own thoughts and feelings, and still I’m not sure whether or not love even exists.

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We all agree what it means and feels to be angry, sad or afraid. But ask us of love and each will offer a different and ‘definitive’ translation: the woman married for 60 faithful years to a loving husband will cite the trials and tribulations of holding together a union over six decades as the epitome of love; the woman who holds her newborn child in her arms may know no greater case for the manifestation of love than the feelings stirred in her by the tiny pissing puke-bag under her care [I’VE GOT A SON NOW. HE IS INDEED A TINY, PISSING PUKE-BAG, BUT THE BEST TINY, PISSING PUKE-BAG IN THE UNIVERSE, AND I WOULD CRAWL NAKED OVER IRRADIATED BROKEN GLASS TO KEEP HIM SAFE]; the teenager who stands at a girl’s house in the early hours of the morning with a bunch of flowers and a fluttering heart believes that no-one has felt such strength and purity of love as he has at that moment, believes that love itself wasn’t born until his eyes fell on the object of his affections; the men at the altar, both the priest and the groom, have different ideas about, but perhaps equal intensity in their feelings, of love, for God and woman respectively (some may say the two aren’t mutually exclusive); the man who cheats on his wife but still loves her; the Muslim man who loves his daughter but kills her to restore family honour; the woman who takes an overdose of pills through an overdose of love; the stalker who waits unseen outside of his idol’s home with a wedding ring in one hand and a knife in the other; the woman lying at the bottom of the stairs in a broken, bruised heap, her husband towering over her triumphantly on the landing above: all love.

And the man who makes love to a brutalised woman on a bar in the presence of his mates.

All love.

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But, again, that’s the point; if indeed there is a point. None of us can do more than see the world through our own eyes. My analysis of love, however more elaborate, is no more or less useful than any analysis that may be offered by a member of the Mongrel Mob. Whether you believe in love at first sight; or that love is forged through hardship over time, or whether you believe that love itself is a questionable concept doesn’t matter so much as the thought that all of this belief is just personal conjecture.

Yes, it’s interesting to discover how highly people revere love and the idea of love, or what in regards to it they believe to be true, but it can never be anything more than merely interesting. Revealing about the person doing the soul searching, yes; but not conclusive: never definitive.

In this respect belief in love – perhaps specifically romantic love – requires a similar leap of faith to belief in God.

I could state that we are all animals and no more capable of romantic love than starfish or kangaroos. To attempt to convince you of this I could fashion an intricate argument that harnessed power from the fields of zoology, anthropology, biology and every episode of Trisha; tell you that survival and reproduction is our over-riding goal, and even our love for our offspring is essentially love for the continuation of our own genetic and ancestral line. Which would tie in very nicely with what I might claim next: namely that all love emanates, at root, from the self, to the self. I could even rattle out a witty little aphorism that runs a little like this: ‘You can’t make people fall in love with you; you can only help them to fall in love with themselves’. Pretty trite and catchy, yeah? I could tell you that you’ve all watched too many bloody movies and that real life is more like The Sopranos than Ghost.

wedding

I could even, if you so wish, quote a study which found that the brain of someone supposedly in love exhibits the same waves and patterns as the brain of a bona fide lunatic. Is there a man or woman alive who wouldn’t agree with that? I could even, in final desperation, disavow love as a Frankenstein emotion, or expose it as nothing more than other emotions like guilt, anger, pride, fear and vanity wearing a clever disguise.

Would it matter? If love is indeed the new religion, then its associated supporters and fundamentalists will care not for any of my opinions. And why should they? Faith is their bulwark. Maybe it’s yours too.

It’s nice to hear and say sometimes, isn’t it? To love and to be loved. What would we in the West do without it? Besides, what’s the alternative? To remove ‘love’ from the dictionary, to wipe it from our hearts and minds would be as successful an endeavour as one faced by your average grumpy, secular British father should he wish one year to ban Christmas from his house. Sure, it’s a load of overly-sentimental tacky shite that has significantly decreased in impact and worth over the millennia, but just try explaining that to your kids or your wife.

Which of these likely lads do the odds favour to sustain a meaningful union long enough to have children?:

Man A: “I love you, darling. Will you marry me?”
Man B: “You see, sweetheart, love is an artificial construct born of our own narcissism and naivety. Something foisted on us and indoctrinated into our fragile minds from birth. Often one of the first words we’ll ever hear. It’s perpetuated in the classrooms, the churches, the cinemas. And, interestingly, the Marxists believe that love ultimately leads us to marriage, which in turn ensures that the working man is sufficiently pacified and preoccupied to almost guarantee that he will never wish to or be able to revolt; he’ll be nothing more than an efficient cog in the machine, thus preserving the balance of power in society and protecting those in its higher echelons. Anyway, since everybody else seems to be doing it, and since I don’t want other men to be able to sleep with you too easily, do you want to put this ring on?”

marky

You’d die alone, wouldn’t you?

So maybe you agree with me; and maybe you don’t. Maybe you think that love is one of the constant forces of the universe, and I’m just a cynical, selfish, failed-romantic motherfucker. Your opinion, then, is as irrelevant to me as mine is to you. It doesn’t mean you still can’t be right.

In conclusion, then: it seems to me that if love can mean so many different – and often contradictory – things to so many millions of different people, then the word and the idea begins to be stretched to the point where they are rendered almost completely meaningless… but then what do I know? I don’t believe in God either.

Maybe He loves me anyway.

Trench

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This is a short story I wrote a few years ago THAT NO FUCKER WILL PUBLISH EVEN THOUGH MY CREATIVE WRITING TUTOR GAVE ME 98 MOTHER FUCKING PER CENT!! WHAT, DOES SHE KNOW NOTHING, IS SHE A FUCKING IDIOT OR SOMETHING? But I’m not bitter about that in the slightest. I’ll just publish it here, so it can be read by those who matter. All five of you. This story hopefully proves there’s a heart behind all of the quadruple amputee jokes I do.

All locations in the story are a blend of different places, but anyone from Falkirk reading this may be interested to know (but probably won’t be) that the park at the beginning of the story is based on the top park in Wallacestone (apart from the water), and the industrial town in which most of the action takes place is modeled on none other than my dearly beloved Grangemouth.

Trench is a The Road-esque tale of a grandfather trying to do right by his grandson in a time of great horror. Excuse the shite formatting; this site’s not conducive to the smooth and proper publication of fiction.

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Trench

by Jamie Andrew

The old man gave the boy a gentle shove; the swing’s chains creaked.

‘Higher, grandpa,’ said the boy. ‘Higher.’

      His muscles stiffened with the effort, issuing a few creaks of their own. He moved just in time to avoid the back-swing and a pair of boots in his chest.

‘I can nearly see past the town!’

‘Not so loud,’ said the old man, drawing out and lighting a cigarette.

      The boy propelled himself ever higher into the blank and cloudless sky; normally it would have been alive with jets cutting white scars across its marine canvas.

‘I’m going… to jump…’ said the boy, wrestling himself higher still, ‘…and jump… over…’

‘Take it easy, now,’ said the old man.

‘…the whole… town…’

      He landed on the grass, his supple little legs soaking up the impact as if he’d done nothing more than step off a kerb. Fearless. Or oblivious. It amounted to the same thing.

      The boy tumbled and somersaulted over the grass; and ran like a greyhound around the rusting relic of a roundabout in the centre of the park.

      ‘Come to my side,’ said the old man firmly, moving hurriedly past the gently rocking swing to reach him. He too felt like a relic: his body ached. He’d outgrown the world, or it him. There was nothing more he now wished except to see his grandson safe.

‘We’ll need to get going, son.’

      It was crazy to have taken him there by himself, especially given what he was carrying. He guessed the play-park visit was as dangerous as it was selfish. But if this was to be the last day their last day together then he wanted something with which to remember the boy, and a memory for the boy to hold on to that didn’t weigh heavy with sorrow or infection.

      His wife would have given him hell for this, but owing to the trifle of hard and soft contrasts stacked inside her large heart loved him more because of it. The old man allowed himself a smile.

      Twigs snapped. He hadn’t seen them coming. Two men stood on the opposite bank of the stream that fringed the park, a hundred yards away or less. The town had been in quarantine for only days (was it ten? twelve?), but the men’s grimy, ragged clothes looked like they’d been worn through an apocalypse. Dark and dirt sat on their faces, and seemed reflected in their glazed eyes. Many unsavoury things, especially natures, had been brought to the surface since the sealing of the town and the removal of law enforcement; like rats after a flood.

      ‘By my side,’ the old man barked. The boy did as he was told, slowly and without panic. The old man softly placed his leathery hand atop the boy’s head, then trod out his cigarette on the grass.

      The old man stood a silent statue. The men stared; wolves that smiled.

      ‘Are you sick, old man?’ hissed one of them, the taller and more toothless of the two.

      ‘Want us to take care of the boy?’ croaked the other, the fatter one, his voice blending into a rackety cough, which in turn became a rasping laugh.

      They wore their illnesses like tattoos. Bruise-like legions and weeping sores peppered their faces.

‘Well?’

      The old man replied by way of opening his jacket and drawing out his Webley Mk IV revolver; a souvenir from his war years trading bullets in the deserts and trenches.

      ‘This gun’s killed worthier and less deserving than you,’ said the old man, steadily raising his gun level with the taller one’s chest. His mouth felt dry, and his words scratched like flesh against gravel as they worked up his throat. The water rationing had done it. And the cigarettes, his long-departed wife would’ve reminded him. ‘Don’t make me prove that this old thing still works.’

He felt the boy push against his right leg, thread an arm above and around his calf.

      ‘Your old thing stopped working years ago,’ rasped the fat man, which caused the tall one to cackle like he’d a lungful of wasps. ‘We’ll teach the boy what he’s missing out on.’

      The gun-shot made the boy jump. It made the men jump too: blasted the smiles from their faces. But they didn’t leave. The old man felt the boy’s hands clamp tightly around his leg.

‘The next two bullets will cure you of your sickness, gentlemen, I can guarantee you that.’

      His hand trembled, but only because adrenalin had become more and more a stranger to his bloodstream since the beginning of his bus-pass days.

      The men stared. The old man stared back at them. Whether it was the gun itself or the look in its owner’s eyes that repelled them, within seconds they were gone; vanished back into the dense fronds and bushes from which they’d slithered.

The old man led his grandson through the streets. Most of the windows in the blocks flanking them were smashed, and people’s possessions lay strewn on the grass and pavements like carcasses. Wardrobes, clothes, chairs, televisions. All smashed and broken. Derelict and spilling out. The old man caught the scent of smoke from a nearby fire.

      He watched the boy surveying the destruction, a look of fascination relaxing his delicate features. The old man’s chest tightened. His hip felt like it had been sculpted from granite. He squeezed the nape of the boy’s neck then reached up to ruffle his shaggy mop of hair.

‘Will we get sick, grandpa?’ the boy asked, looking up at him.

‘We’ll be fine, son.’

      For some reason the disease, whatever it was, had spared the very old and the very young: two groups of people contagion usually fell and fed upon with unrelenting ferocity.

      There was a medical unit in the town square where people were taken once they became sick, or died. Its reek made the town smell like a hospital that had caught fire. The healthy and symptomless could submit themselves to the unit’s care voluntarily, but rumours persisted that those who entered it never returned. Nor did they seem to win their freedom beyond the makeshift razor-wire fences and military sentry posts that bordered the town.

      He’d heard the stories. People had tried to escape. Others had simply tried to climb or walk out, refusing to believe that in our golden age of human rights a civilised government had the authority to pen them against their will. All had been shot. It was said that a middle-aged man had scrabbled a few feet up one of the fences before a far-off sniper’s bullet had pounded through the fabric of his suit, leaving a raw, bloody wound through his chest. The next day his body was gone.

      They always came like phantoms in the night – in full bio-suits, he’d heard – to retrieve the terminally sick and the dead. It mattered little whether or not the tales were true. They stopped people trying to escape.

‘Grandpa, look,’ said the boy, squeezing his hand.

      The old man turned to see three young lads shuffle out from the entrance to a block of flats. They stood and stared from the opposite side of the street, each of them wearing police hats too big for their heads. One of them clutched a kitchen knife, which drooped menacingly from his grip like a pendulous limb.

‘What do they want?’ asked the boy, staring back at them.

      It still unnerved the old man how quickly the veneer of society could crack and peel. He recalled the words uttered long ago by a commanding officer: ‘The road to Hell isn’t just paved with good intentions, sergeant: its slabs are cemented by the blood of Samaritans.’

      ‘Keep walking, son,’ said the old man, focusing on the sensation of the pistol that rested against his heart.

      They weren’t far from the fence. As they passed by the local pub, its elderly landlord – an acquaintance of the old man – was standing on the pavement outside. The landlord leaned on the butt of a shotgun that was doubling as his walking stick; he called them over.

      Even though the old man knew he was a few years younger than the landlord, he felt twenty years’ younger by comparison. A life of free booze and second-hand smoke had produced a face barely one step ahead of the mortician’s easel. His barman’s apron was spotted with dark-red and brown stains, which made him look more like an over-enthusiastic butcher than a bar tender.

‘Look over to the east,’ said the landlord.

      The old man looked out towards the town square. He couldn’t see the square itself, but behind the rows of streets and factories he watched the first of the military helicopters rise to the sky. The boy looked up at him. He smiled back as best he could.

‘Where are they going?’ asked the boy.

      The sky thundered with an orchestra of blades and engines, its music reassuring the old man that this course of action was the right one. Once the helicopters had climbed high enough above the buildings, they dipped their noses and swarmed off towards the horizon like giant insects.

‘Can I pour you a pint?’

‘Maybe later,’ said the old man.

The landlord’s eyes were fixed on the empty sky. ‘Last orders.’

*****

The soldier waited for them by the hole in the chain-link fence. He wore a balaclava, only his glazed, blood-tinged eyes visible. The last time the old man had seen him the soldier had been proud and erect. Now he hunched and twitched like a vagabond, his uniform ripped and smeared with dirt.

‘Keep the boy well back from me,’ rasped the soldier. ‘Do you have it?’

      The old man reached into another of his pockets and withdrew two thick rolls of bank notes.

      Throughout the long, happy years with his wife he’d maintained the illusion of every Wednesday strolling to the square with their bank book, even though their savings had been locked in a chest in the attic. She wouldn’t have approved. Until today.

      The old man held out the rolls for the boy, who received them with a look of puzzlement.

      ‘You give one of these to your mum, and the other to the nice lady who’s waiting at the other side of that field.’

      The old man nodded towards the hole and its jagged fringes. In the field beyond, tall blades of grass swayed in the breeze like waves on an ocean. The ground dipped downwards after about five hundred yards, above which green mop-heads of trees were visible. No sign of the military, or the road, or the soldier’s wife that would drive him to safety. The boy would be running across no-man’s-land.

‘Aren’t you coming, grandpa?’

      The old man bent down to place his palm on the boy’s cheek, and looked at him; really looked at him. In those shimmering blue eyes he could see his wife, his daughter. In the heat of the boy’s skin he could feel the future.

      ‘I’m coming later, son,’ he whispered, ‘I’m too old to be running through fields.’

      ‘Keep low in the grass and don’t stop running until you reach my wife’s car. It’s red.’

      The soldier wrenched an envelope from his jacket and threw it down at the mouth of the hole.

‘Give her this letter,’ he said, his head hanging earthward like a scarecrow’s.

      The old man looked down at the boy. He’d thought about writing a letter to his daughter, but affairs of the heart had always been his wife’s department. Besides, those clear blue eyes looking up at her would be the only message she’d need. He bent down to clasp the boy’s tiny hands in one of his, and kissed him on the head.

‘Your gran and I love you very much.’

*****

The automated message boomed from the loudspeakers the old man knew were bolted like chain-guns to the town’s many sentry pillars.

‘Citizens. Proceed to your homes. Remain indoors.’

      He stood on the small balcony of his top-floor flat and looked past the town. He lit his last cigarette. A few minutes later the first group of bombers appeared over the horizon. From that distance they looked like a flock of birds, swift and silent. When they whistled, he closed his eyes; his grandson on his lap, his wife by his side.

      Maybe the bombers would follow the boy; but today, the old sergeant’s blood had cemented something no disease could curdle, nor government extinguish.