KateF
Silver Member
More unfamiliar surroundings; a scruffy house on a council estate, takeaway wrappers and cans strewn across the floor, semi darkness, a smell of stale cigarettes and three or four people sprawled nearly comatose on settees and chairs. Andrew is looking for his friend Mark who he seems to urgently need to see for some reason. We find him. I have no recollection what he looked like. We headed to a pub somewhere near the house. My diary records that I ordered a Cinzano Bianco and lemonade. The drink I used to have on Sundays when I went to my friend Fiona’s house for dinner with her and her parents. We’d have a bacon sandwich, watch “Tour of Duty” about American soldiers in Vietnam and “Stay Lucky” with Dennis Waterman, recorded from the night before. Her Dad would take us for a swim at the local pool, then we’d all have a Sunday roast, me and Fiona enjoying our Cinzano and lemonade in fake crystal glasses. It was a taste of a different sort of family life for me, in which the members ate together and actually talked to each other. Both that and my own family life seemed very far away now as I sat in this pub in Blackpool with these two men.
They were friendly enough, but I didn’t feel comfortable. Andrew was talking through how he wanted to learn the “tricks of the trade” from Jim. He talks casually about my parents. Says that my Mother came on to him, but he wasn’t really attracted to women in their forties and she wasn’t the prettiest. He preferred Sindy the French girl who lived in the hamlet near our house, but she was only fourteen so he wasn’t going to do anything. He thought my Dad was weird, and said he’d asked him to get rid of our cat, Topsy down the well, because he couldn’t do it himself, but my Mum wouldn’t leave France if it meant having to put her in quarantine. All of this hit home with a series of hammer blows, that constituted another few impossible things to believe before breakfast and that I couldn’t quite take in properly.
He said that tomorrow we’d go to his and Jim’s friend James Battersby and ask him to do the photocopying that Jim had suggested, and Jim had said he would ring me there. Then on Monday we’d go to two building societies and open a student account in each in my name and ask them to express through the cheques that Andrew was going to forge with my Stepfather’s signature. The cash should be collectable by the next day or Wednesday and then we’d be able to fly back to Jim in Germany. That was the plan. It was clearer in my head now.
Andrew walked me back to the B and B and asked if he could come in for a cup of tea. In the room he asked if I minded if he sorted himself out with some heroin. Actually, I have no memory of how he asked this. Given that I’d never even been in the company of someone smoking cannabis, I’d failed to spot any of the signs of someone who had really needed to score. Perhaps he asked politely “Do you mind awfully if I shoot up?”. I do remember trying to appear blasé when he did. He asked me if I would go downstairs and get him a dessert spoon. I have memory flashes of him heating the spoon over the sink, tying a tan belt round his arm and me looking away or reading the paper. I mused that Jim’s belief that Andrew was a former heroin addict was a bit optimistic. When he’d left, having arranged to meet me outside James Battersby’s offices the next day, I cleaned the spoon with water and toilet roll. A couple of days later I would use it to eat a Muller Fruit Corner yoghurt.
A few months later I would have a couple of sessions with a counsellor who I dismissed as no help because she constantly “Hmm’ed sympathetically” and I felt she didn’t understand what I was talking about. But I did write down how she said “Love is where you don’t lead the other person into danger”. It was as if that was some exotic concept I was just getting ready to consider. I can finally feel angry now about the danger I was in. Both at home, and when I left home. Ironic that I was spending most of my thinking time worrying about whether Jim was okay. With his tumour, his gun shot leg, his being on the run, and even more ironically; his guilt about having no conscience. I’d mistakenly convinced myself that I didn’t either.
Later that night I walked down the main promenade into Blackpool’s surreal street life. It’s brashness- all surface and shine, deflecting the eye from the rubbish and dirt underneath- was both appealing and terrifying to me.
Snatches of disembodied voices distorted and amplified floated out of arcades;
“Two little ducks”, “Hold tight, for the ride of your life”, “Five for a pound, that’s five for just a pound”
My own echoed in my head; “What do you say to a man who says he’s lost his soul?”, “Who are you when your Dad’s not your Dad?”, “My Mum advertises for other men to sleep with her, so he can watch, look, I’ve got photographs and everything…”
Families walking in uneven lines across the pavement, children swamped by huge fluffy cellophane wrapped bears.
The smell of fish and chips permeating everything.
Red, yellow, blue lights, twinkling and blinking and refracting and dissolving into the blackness of the night. Disco balls spinning, glittering, reflecting me, bits of me, me as a blur in one arcade window, a stretched reflection in the aluminium fascia of a slot machine, broken up into sections in the shining, mirrored back of a hot dog stall.
The clank and clack of slot machines. Money being fed into holes, dropping off shelves, clinking and chugging into metal trays. Risks happening here, but mostly measured in coppers, in ten pence pieces. Gambling on cartoonesque horses, on machines with Elvis Presley grinning on the front, not seriously looking for wins or losses. Enjoying the game, passing the time, forgetting the world for a while. Was that what I was doing? Maybe I was safer here on my own than with any of the other people who had a claim on me…
I cross over to the other side of the prom, where there are no shops, just a wall and the beach on the other side. I walk down a few steps to where the sea washes back and forth, white foam in the blackness. There’s just me down here and I feel a relief and stillness in the silence after the noise and chaos of the street.
When I emerge back onto the front, I stay rooted for a while trying to cross the road. Cars and trams seeming to zigzag in a never ending convoy after slowing past the illuminations, kids craning out of windows at the neon seahorses and octopuses mounted on the lamp posts at this lower end of the prom. A stooped elderly man in a long beige coat stands next to me for a few seconds as we wait. Then says “Now!” and we cross together, he briefly clasps my arm, then releases it as we reach the other side. I’m surprised but touched and we mouth goodbye as we head our separate ways down the pavement. Such a tiny encounter, but it feels like something I haven’t had before. The random kindness of strangers at an age when you’re still being told not to talk to strangers.
Policemen with hands clasped behind their back stand with firmset mouths at even spaces in front of the Imperial Hotel, the handles of their black batons sticking out of waist holsters. I put my head down as I head up the side street back to the Thirlmere.
The world is safe.
The world is dangerous.
People are safe,
People are dangerous.
They were friendly enough, but I didn’t feel comfortable. Andrew was talking through how he wanted to learn the “tricks of the trade” from Jim. He talks casually about my parents. Says that my Mother came on to him, but he wasn’t really attracted to women in their forties and she wasn’t the prettiest. He preferred Sindy the French girl who lived in the hamlet near our house, but she was only fourteen so he wasn’t going to do anything. He thought my Dad was weird, and said he’d asked him to get rid of our cat, Topsy down the well, because he couldn’t do it himself, but my Mum wouldn’t leave France if it meant having to put her in quarantine. All of this hit home with a series of hammer blows, that constituted another few impossible things to believe before breakfast and that I couldn’t quite take in properly.
He said that tomorrow we’d go to his and Jim’s friend James Battersby and ask him to do the photocopying that Jim had suggested, and Jim had said he would ring me there. Then on Monday we’d go to two building societies and open a student account in each in my name and ask them to express through the cheques that Andrew was going to forge with my Stepfather’s signature. The cash should be collectable by the next day or Wednesday and then we’d be able to fly back to Jim in Germany. That was the plan. It was clearer in my head now.
Andrew walked me back to the B and B and asked if he could come in for a cup of tea. In the room he asked if I minded if he sorted himself out with some heroin. Actually, I have no memory of how he asked this. Given that I’d never even been in the company of someone smoking cannabis, I’d failed to spot any of the signs of someone who had really needed to score. Perhaps he asked politely “Do you mind awfully if I shoot up?”. I do remember trying to appear blasé when he did. He asked me if I would go downstairs and get him a dessert spoon. I have memory flashes of him heating the spoon over the sink, tying a tan belt round his arm and me looking away or reading the paper. I mused that Jim’s belief that Andrew was a former heroin addict was a bit optimistic. When he’d left, having arranged to meet me outside James Battersby’s offices the next day, I cleaned the spoon with water and toilet roll. A couple of days later I would use it to eat a Muller Fruit Corner yoghurt.
A few months later I would have a couple of sessions with a counsellor who I dismissed as no help because she constantly “Hmm’ed sympathetically” and I felt she didn’t understand what I was talking about. But I did write down how she said “Love is where you don’t lead the other person into danger”. It was as if that was some exotic concept I was just getting ready to consider. I can finally feel angry now about the danger I was in. Both at home, and when I left home. Ironic that I was spending most of my thinking time worrying about whether Jim was okay. With his tumour, his gun shot leg, his being on the run, and even more ironically; his guilt about having no conscience. I’d mistakenly convinced myself that I didn’t either.
Later that night I walked down the main promenade into Blackpool’s surreal street life. It’s brashness- all surface and shine, deflecting the eye from the rubbish and dirt underneath- was both appealing and terrifying to me.
Snatches of disembodied voices distorted and amplified floated out of arcades;
“Two little ducks”, “Hold tight, for the ride of your life”, “Five for a pound, that’s five for just a pound”
My own echoed in my head; “What do you say to a man who says he’s lost his soul?”, “Who are you when your Dad’s not your Dad?”, “My Mum advertises for other men to sleep with her, so he can watch, look, I’ve got photographs and everything…”
Families walking in uneven lines across the pavement, children swamped by huge fluffy cellophane wrapped bears.
The smell of fish and chips permeating everything.
Red, yellow, blue lights, twinkling and blinking and refracting and dissolving into the blackness of the night. Disco balls spinning, glittering, reflecting me, bits of me, me as a blur in one arcade window, a stretched reflection in the aluminium fascia of a slot machine, broken up into sections in the shining, mirrored back of a hot dog stall.
The clank and clack of slot machines. Money being fed into holes, dropping off shelves, clinking and chugging into metal trays. Risks happening here, but mostly measured in coppers, in ten pence pieces. Gambling on cartoonesque horses, on machines with Elvis Presley grinning on the front, not seriously looking for wins or losses. Enjoying the game, passing the time, forgetting the world for a while. Was that what I was doing? Maybe I was safer here on my own than with any of the other people who had a claim on me…
I cross over to the other side of the prom, where there are no shops, just a wall and the beach on the other side. I walk down a few steps to where the sea washes back and forth, white foam in the blackness. There’s just me down here and I feel a relief and stillness in the silence after the noise and chaos of the street.
When I emerge back onto the front, I stay rooted for a while trying to cross the road. Cars and trams seeming to zigzag in a never ending convoy after slowing past the illuminations, kids craning out of windows at the neon seahorses and octopuses mounted on the lamp posts at this lower end of the prom. A stooped elderly man in a long beige coat stands next to me for a few seconds as we wait. Then says “Now!” and we cross together, he briefly clasps my arm, then releases it as we reach the other side. I’m surprised but touched and we mouth goodbye as we head our separate ways down the pavement. Such a tiny encounter, but it feels like something I haven’t had before. The random kindness of strangers at an age when you’re still being told not to talk to strangers.
Policemen with hands clasped behind their back stand with firmset mouths at even spaces in front of the Imperial Hotel, the handles of their black batons sticking out of waist holsters. I put my head down as I head up the side street back to the Thirlmere.
The world is safe.
The world is dangerous.
People are safe,
People are dangerous.
