Young-couple-with-car syndrome

This evening at seven I met Jeremy in the Beatrice Hotel in Farnshaw.

Gillian Wade turned up not long after, as did Deborah Blakey and boyfriend Tony; Tommy never quite managed it. Gillian is off to study Philosophy at Rummidge. She was OK this time, not trying so hard and thereby coming across more as herself. Deborah and Tony showed up late; they’d been to Fiona Abery’s wedding (she was in the year above us at school). Julie Crabtree is married now too, and Sharon Horsfield has a baby. . . .

It’s an odd thought, because we college-types remain in identical circumstances to two years ago and live below the official poverty line. Deborah and Tony are sliding irretrievably into marriage and the young-couple-with-car syndrome, all set for the next few years.

Being fairly intolerant these days, I couldn’t understand what D. finds attractive about T. He seems particularly dull and dead. I nipped to the off licence at nine to buy a bottle of whiskey for Jeremy and I as were going to Addie Williams’ party “somewhere in Egley,” and then the five of us drove to Keddon and the Copper Kettle before dropping Gillian off at home. Deborah gave Jeremy and I a lift back to Egley and we tried to find the party.

Jeremy’d lost the invite but remembered it was at No. 11, so we tried 11 Egley Rise, then 11 Briar Avenue. The rain began to fall and we splashed through the streets cursing the heavens and ourselves.

Terrible times.

After an hour of this we were soaked and no longer cared about the party; we wanted to get there merely on principle. We eventually gave up at about one and went back to my house and sat up talking in the front room until three.

I give up on Easterby.

Deluge

Jeremy arrived in Watermouth at ten o’clock last night.

Lee was there to meet him but I went instead to the Green Man on Philip Street where I met Barry, Raven, Guy, and Kamran. I’d only intended having a couple of drinks at most, but ended up drunk and at the L.A. I didn’t get back to Maynard Gardens until well gone midnight.

Lee and Jeremy weren’t up, and I slept in my old bathroom-cum-bedroom.

We all went down to the pier this afternoon to show Jeremy the grotesqueries of Watermouth’s summer side; e.g. the stripper game—if you shoot the target enough times with a toy rifle the dummy’s clothes hinge open to reveal a spectacularly hairless body. Everything was very badly made and full of sexual innuendo, which he found amusing. We had a drink at the bar at the end of the pier.

The sea was quite rough and heaved its green bulk against the shore in a deluge of foam.

Other life

I returned to my other life today, a journey that took nine hours marooned on a coach and no one to talk to, getting back to Westdorgan Road to find my room occupied once more by the TV, numerous dirty plates and ashtrays and Stu, immobile before the screen, fag in hand. Barry was sleeping in my bed.

I don’t think Stu really understood why I was getting so uptight. I suppose my current mania for order and privacy (of belongings if not of person) does appear a little neurotic and overblown. But I can’t help it. It’s hard to pin down the subtle mental change that takes place as I travel the miles from Easterby to Watermouth, and I think really it’s the losing of full mindfulness of home as the familiar topography flows away and melts into flatter and more modern lines, one life flowing out of direct perception (like the scenery), the other flowing in.

Some sort of perspective on that other life.

Lee is coming back to Watermouth on Thursday. He rang me up last night to ask if I wanted to go across but I had too much packing. It was a tranquil sunny evening and later I half-regretted not going. He’s just got back from a weekend in North Wales with his Dad. They visited Portmeirion which was full of Prisoner  cranks saying “Be seeing you” to one another. He spent £6 on ‘Prisonerbilia.’ His Art College course seems to have gone quite well, although he, Gav and Ian Tropp have been ‘referred,’ so he has essays to write over the summer vacation to make up for it.

Jeremy enters the 3rd of a 4-year course at Edgestow in September and he’s staying in Easterby over the summer, despite Steve Bates’s insistent attempts to get him to go to Spain.

Steve is still at Debdenshaw U. doing Chemistry. He was mugged a week last Monday and was almost proud when he told me about it when we went out on Saturday. He doesn’t like me and I’m not too fond of him with his wooden student stereotypes.

Tommy is now at Brynmor Poly.

Richard Houlding works at the tax office in Farnshaw and is in a band, The Metros. When I saw him last he was wearing stone washed jeans elasticated at the ankle, bright red specs, and low cut blue loafer shoes. I thought he’d changed a lot at first, but beneath it all he’s still the same person he was in sixth form.

Peter Wood is working on his Dad’s fruit and vegetable stall in Whincliffe market.

Robin Quinn makes good money working with computers in London . . . he and Tim Moyles went potholing in the Dales at the weekend.

Andrew Boyd is leaving Ecclesley Poly because he doesn’t like the people there and is going to do a journalism apprenticeship at the Echo. He’s going out with Louise Metcalf, and according to Jeremy says he wants to “change her.”

Deborah is still working for an accountant and is still going out with Tony Megson. She’s undecided about taking up a place on an accountancy course at Brynmor in the autumn, her doubts apparently springing as much from her Mother’s keen promotion of the idea rather than from any real misgivings. Needless to say, Tony doesn’t want her to go.

I haven’t heard from Claire since April. I never wrote back in reply to her last letter, a decay in interest that occurred as I realised all my feelings for her were false and overwrought. I was more attracted to the idea of her than the reality of her. I suppose I should give her my new address.

Grant Riley is home for the summer and is planning a new magazine venture with Nik Gordon and intimated that contributions are welcome. A friend of his at Gloucester is making a film and he’s playing the role of Charles Bukowski. Although I keep inviting him to Watermouth and he keeps expressing enthusiasm for the idea, I somehow doubt he’ll ever make it down.

His mate RJ is still living with Jackie in Lockley. Nik is in his last year at Camberwell College of Art.

I reread my journal for January and February of 1983; how becalmed in non-emotion I am now! Then, every day seemed to pass in a blaze of raw hypersensitivity. Lindsey was a symptom of my despair and lack of direction and I think I was in love with her at one point, something I hadn’t felt before, or since . . . But that was over a year ago, I was 18 then. Now I’m 20 and  a little older.

The thing

I went into Easterby again, to Suits Me to peruse their suits, and then to a Heel Bar to buy dark brown dye for my DM shoes that I’ve still only worn once—I dyed them from their original oxblood to black and now to a deep brown.

Jeremy rang me in the evening to persuade me to go to his house; I declined at first, but when he rang back at eleven saying I just had to go, I half-heartedly acquiesced—he said his step-brother Colin was having a party and it was “quite amusing” to watch. So I walked into Farnshaw and met he and Tommy beneath St. Anne’s steeple.

Tommy has transferred to Brynmor Poly and is on a design course, to which he commutes from Easterby. Jeremy has also transferred, from Bristol University to Edgestow, so in September he will be a new boy again. We walked the remaining miles up Whincliffe Road to Jeremy’s, where the beery gathering was reaching an inevitable and time-honoured finale. Jeremy’s Dad has married again, and so Jeremy has inherited a new family, a step-brother and step-sister, plus their friends and girlfriends/boyfriends. He says he feels like a stranger in his own home and wants to spend Christmases away now because he feels he no longer belongs.

For some reason, when we got there all the males present were stripped to the waist, Colin barely coherent, his eyes bloodshot, soon to pass out on the living room carpet. We then had to play host to one of his drunken acolytes, a self-professed biker who constantly impressed upon us the favour he was bestowing on us by actually speaking to us.

“Some of ‘em think yer should speak just to bikers, but me, I think that’s wrong.”

He demanded we share an opinion of him: “If yer think am' a shit then say so, I don’t care.”

Jeremy’s step-sister was pissed as a newt and flopping giddily about, falling onto Tommy and making him flush with embarrassment, before she disappeared upstairs with her boyfriend for a giggle and a grope. She came back down in a dressing gown, saying she felt embarrassed, “in front ‘er so many men.” Jeremy, Tommy and I watched The Thing on video while the revelries subsided and Colin locked himself in the toilet—he had £100 stolen that evening too.

I went to bed at five.

Everyday life

I did go out last night; I met Deborah and Jeremy in the virtually empty Moon. Despite promises, Steve, Nick Gaunt and Lee didn’t turn up. It took me an hour or so and a few pints of cider to overcome shyness and self-consciousness; it’s quite depressing the regularity with which this occurs, and no doubt I’ll be similarly hampered for the first few days and hours of the new term.

Deborah looked very smart and respectable and she hasn’t changed a bit; she’s working at a solicitor’s for a year and going on some law course at Brynmor next September. She seems very content with the way her world is going. She told me that when she first met me it was as if I was “someone to look up to”!

I hide my true self behind a mask of pleasant superficialities, so that people often gain a totally inaccurate picture of me.

Both Jeremy and I told her of our dissatisfaction at what we’re doing at university, and she made me feel a bit guilty by telling us both how lucky we are; it was clear just from her demeanour and attitude that she’s happy with her lot and has unpretentious desires. She said it annoyed her when girls who want houses and husbands were condemned: “Why shouldn’t they want these things?” . . . to which we could only vaguely counter that if they really looked about them then they would want more, but what that ‘more’ is we were totally unable to say.

What right have we to condemn and shoot to pieces other people for wanting something from their lives which we don’t? At least they’re sure of themselves and don’t waste time with pointless frustrations and empty questions. I’m sure I came across to Deborah as unhappy, which really I’m not. I haven’t anything to be unhappy about.

“What you need”, she said to me with final certainty, “is a love affair,” and she even suggested Claire (who I wrote an apologetic letter to the other day). It sounded so self-indulgent to admit to being “bored all the time,” but it’s the truth.

Perhaps I don’t try hard enough?

Last orders were being called when Deborah finally gave us a lift home in her gold VW beetle. The previous evening’s talk must’ve affected me because when I went to bed I had really odd and disturbing dreams, akin to a nightmares; I was back at Wintersett Crescent and I kept on seeing the ghosts of brutally murdered children in the back garden. In a frenzy of fear I locked the doors trying to keep them out and even took a photograph of them running between the motionless standing figures of other (unidentified) family members. They stared out of the photo with frightening, intense eyes . . . A dimly recollected image of a body hanging in a cupboard . . .

I woke up in the grey light of early morning gripped by fear, the covers pulled tightly over my head lest the ghosts get me. Half asleep, I couldn’t imagine the daytime and being free of my fear. It was pretty bad and left me feeling quite odd.

I finally got to Farnshaw and the dry cleaner’s this afternoon, and Dad and I got caught in a terrific cloudburst which swept away the sun and sent workmen at the site of Farnshaw’s vast new supermarket complex sprinting for cover; we had to shelter in a ‘phonebox.

I really enjoyed the mundane wandering about amid streets \and shops: everything seemed vibrant and alive. Last night, Deborah asked me what excited me and I couldn’t really give her a specific answer. Today I would say that it’s life which excites me, with all its myriad permutations, unexpected rewards, wonders . . . which is probably the most positive thing I’ve said all summer.

Empty roads intersect

It rained overnight leaving the soil damp and black.

Lee stayed over and he went again to the abattoir at 11.30 to get blood, returning in the early afternoon pretty sickened with what he’d seen. Blood, fur and fear everywhere. He’d heard the crying of sheep and the crack of the lead bolt as it was fired through some animal’s skull. As he stood there waiting, a pig that was about to be done in gave him a pathetic look and he had to turn away. He got two pop bottles full of blood for 60p, still hot from the pig’s neck; he’d had to hold the funnel as the blood splashed  over his hands. When he got back the bottles were still warm and topped with a head of red froth.

He cycled home to collect electrical flex, rope and a white pillow-case and came back shortly after Jeremy arrived, and at half-past four we set off to Easterby, Lee wearing his ‘corpse’ clothes—the formless gold trousers which I once wore proudly to school and an old blue collarless shirt.

When we reached ‘his’ house at the corner of Geoffrey Road and Abbot Street, Lee clambered in through the upstairs window to remove the barricades from the door and we climbed the partially collapsed dusty staircase to the second floor into what once had been a front bedroom. It was now a bare cell, with floorboards rotted through and gone in many places and a single glass-less window.

We gingerly crept across the floor, feeling none too safe because we could see the room beneath through the missing sections of floorboards. We tied Lee’s hands behind his back with electrical flex, tied his feet together and finally slipped the pillowcase over his head, tying it round his neck with the flex. When he was ‘in position’ we poured the bottled blood over the floor and him, adding touches here and there to good corpse-like effect. The blood dripped through to the room beneath.

He looked quite convincing lying there, backlit by the window, sprawled amid thick pools of blood and scattered shards of glass. I’d ‘borrowed’ a camera of Andrew's specially for the occasion, and Jeremy and I clicked away, creeping into new positions, reduced to hoarse and frantic whispers at the sound of a car pulling up outside, none of this helped by the floorboards giving way under my heel. I was glad to be out.

Our next location was a long narrow road that sweeps down between warehouses from Crossley Street near the Polytechnic. Bare-footed, bound and hooded, Lee took his place again, in the gutter this time, and we spattered blood onto his clothing which glistened thickly down the kerb. A few people who hurried by smiled at us, thinking “damn art students” no doubt.

The light meter on Andrew's camera packed in mysteriously, so I had to use Jeremy’s meter readings. Lee’s ‘body’ looked a bit ham and staged in this location, so we finished off our films on a piece of spare land up by the Polytechnic in an area I’ve never walked before—acres of weeds, empty warehouses, deserted roads and glass-strewn pavements.

Easterby is surrounded by a belt of warehouse-land: forgotten buildings and sordid corners that offer many fine panoramas of grime-stained walls, slate-roofs, rows and rows of empty dark windows and spidery fire escapes. Empty roads intersect overgrown wastelands where factories once stood.

The yellowing sun was low now and streaked the tangled weeds and broken paving stones with long shadows and light. We bound Lee once more and hid his corpse amid a profusion of purple weeds, his shrouded head nestled in the filth beside the front wheel of a little kid’s pedal cycle, his body awkwardly twisted to one side.

Finally, Lee wrapped himself in a large piece of dirty carpeting that, apart from his legs, completely hid him. We dumped him in a dark hollow against a red brick wall among the nettles and lumps of concrete, his bare feet poking out towards the camera. In this way we used up the rest of the film and the evening degenerated into blood-splashed boredom.

We had to walk back to the bus station and ride back with Lee who was covered in dirt, his ripped shirt stained with dried blood. He didn’t mind a bit, and he and Jeremy stayed until eleven-thirty before they cycled home.

Overnight Soviet fighters shot down a South Korean 747 carrying 269 people over the Sea of Japan. They claim the Boeing didn’t respond to repeated calls to turn back or attempts to “help it to the nearest airfield,” and because it was heading towards a top secret naval base at Vladivostok, it was shot down. One theory is that there has been a total oxygen failure on the 747 which immobilized the crew and explains their refusal to answer. I’m just now listening to Radio Moscow and they say only that the “intruder plane” headed off towards the Sea of Japan after twice violating Soviet airspace. The US government has expressed its “revulsion” and there's going to be a big international wrangle over this in the next few weeks.

My writing is tired and strained and filled with colourless expressions . . . There’s condensation on the dining room windows tonight for the first time in months.

Tang

I rose blearily at eight-fifteen to catch the bus into town to sign on. Autumn definitely detectable in the air which was damp and chilly; I could almost smell the tang of foggy mornings and wet leaves.

As I made my way to the dole office, there was my RCP bogeyman Keith and his blond friend, selling the Next Step. “Hello Paul” he said, almost knowingly. I smiled weakly. He gave me a leaflet advertising a demo’ in Blackpool on September 5th, and asked me if I wanted to go.

I hedged. “Goodbye, I’ll see you on Saturday” I lied, both to him and to myself.

Lee and I made another unsuccessful trip to try get blood from the abattoir. It had turned into a warm and stifling day and the smell around the abattoir was worse than ever. It made Lee feel ill. I can see how the workers there must get hardened to it, for it was only our second trip bit the sight of drums full of sheep’s heads and blood trickling across the loading bays wasn’t quite as horrible as the day before.

In the evening it seemed as though the telephone never stopped ringing: cousin Nicola, Barry, a friend of Andrew’s, Jeremy . . . Barry told me he’s drawing £460 out of the bank soon to buy a synthesizer and next year he and a friend who’s coming down to live in Watermouth are getting a group together.

He’s been working most of the summer apart from a fortnight in Spain (“no drugs”). Andrew’s mate treated me like an old friend. I told him Andrew was now in London and he said he remembered seeing me at Andrew’s party in ‘82). He's now living in Watermouth and said, “maybe the three of us could get together sometime?”

Jeremy was full of his trip to see Ms. Hirst.

Except for the birds

Dad and Mum ran me in to Easterby on their way to Robert and Carol’s and I tried to ring Lee but had no luck. So I wandered about at a loss. For no particular reason I was on my way towards the library when I spotted two figures handing out leaflets outside the job centre by the Northern Building Society.

RCP!

For some reason—later I tried to work out exactly why, perhaps simply just a blind and unthinking eagerness to make contact with some part of that other world, my life at Watermouth—I made a bee-line straight for the nearest of the two, a dark-haired man in his mid ‘20s sporting the now to-be-expected circular wire NHS specs.

He was selling copies of the Next Step and I introduced myself, and mentioned that I know Carl Cotton and Barry. He told me that an RCP group is being set up in Watermouth and that one has just got off the ground in Whincliffe. We had a long talk, or rather, he talked and I listened and nodded. He asked me for my phone number and I told him I didn't have a single fixed address and that I lived with friends. “What’s your local?” he asked and I gave him a vaguely truthful answer this time.

I rang Lee and waited at the library. My mind was in turmoil. Repeatedly I ask myself: what is it I disagree with? I think maybe it’s the RCP’s tactics and the way they extol their policies more than anything else, but maybe here I’m just being prejudiced by my dislike of Carl C. and co.

The RCP isn't something you should just ‘join’; you should feel and I don’t feel their policies. . . . I should accept that I can’t hide any longer from the questions the RCP raise for me about myself. I think deep down I’m frightened of discovering that everything I see and hear and do can be so easily explained by historical materialism and that that will take the “mystery” out of life.

When I see that written down on the page it makes me sick. I’m running away! I haven’t lived or seen or read and I don’t know or feel enough to know what I’m doing or to put what I’m doing in a larger perspective. This applies to my Nietszchean ravings . . . I write the words but don’t feel their full emotional impact. What I say is what I say. What I know is different. I need time. . . .

But perhaps this is all just flannelling justification for something the implications of which I daredn’t face up to?

When Lee showed up I was in a distinctly different mood than when I’d set off from home. We walked up Whincliffe Road to the abattoir that sits in the midst of a big area of semi-industrialised dereliction. We could soon smell a stench that caught in the back of our throats and we could sense fear as we approached the big anonymous factory buildings. We were nervous for some reason.

Outside, an empty lorry that had brought a cargo of animals was caked in shit and was being hosed out. Nearby in a concrete pen, sheep huddled silently, and from the bowels of the factory we could hear human shouts and a squealing pig.

Lee asked someone for some blood (for our photo-shoot) and it took four or five tries before we found our way into the heart of the abattoir, past rows of hanging, skinned carcasses; a lone man was skinning sheep heads, other skinned heads hanging neatly nearby on hooks; there was a room of white clad figures chopping up slithering piles of glistening guts . . . The stone steps, the yards and even the walls were stained with dried blood.

We couldn’t get any fresh blood because it had all been sold minutes before. We went back out into the hot sun feeling unclean. Lee’s vegetarianism was reconfirmed.

It’s such an awful way for those animals to die, the same sort of awful way that Jews died in the gas-chambers, their hardened, cheerful executioners shouting to one another above the bustle and noise of routine butchery.

Lee left to cycle home and after buying a couple of singles, I went home too. I briefly saw Grant stalking through Queensgate shoppers; he and a “curious” Nik may be coming down for the photo-shoot tomorrow.

Jeremy won’t be there; he’s visiting Ms. Hirst again, just him and Gillian Wade this time, who seems to have taken quite a fancy to his “la la la company” as she herself puts it. He showed me a card she sent him full of ‘witty’ comments and clear attempts to mimic his airy sarcasms. A case of Hirst’s ‘matchmaking’ according to Jeremy.

[Audio version]

Prosperity and ruin

I got to Jeremy’s at about eight last night. Duncan Verity and Tommy Whelan there already, Tommy in quasi-New Romantic garb. Neither very forthcoming about anything, each content to hang back and laugh at the jokes and comments.

There was quite a big spread of crisps, pizza, flans, sausages on sticks etc., laid out on a trestle table outside. The barbecue sizzled and smoked in the drizzle. Quite a lot of effort had gone into this: a dance floor was outside in a stone shed, with straw bales around the walls for seating and Jeremy’s stereo for the music. The booze was in a nearby wooden outhouse.

We went for a brief drink somewhere nearby and when we got back Duncan was leaving; he played a Diana Ross track on the stereo outside and then was gone. I subjected everyone to the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie & The Banshees before I was outvoted. There were a lot of boring middle-aged people present, presumably friends of Jeremy’s Dad and his step-mum Jane; one graying bloke came and sat down and pretended to enjoy the music, even tapping his foot to “Pretty Vacant.”

This was the only stage where I actually enjoyed myself. Soon the stereo was reclaimed and the straw bales were packed with young friends and relatives of the extended Beaumont family who milled around, although to look at them he and they seemed a million miles apart.

I retreated inside and was subject to drunken unfriendly comments from Jeremy's sister Sarah’s fiancé Robert: “Fuckin’ hell, look at the size on ‘im! Frankenstein! All he needs are bolts through his neck!” From then on he called me “Frankenstein.”

Later, as I was sitting down eating, Sarah herself started in at me: “All your friends are puffs Jeremy,” then, to me, “Look at you, trying to be something you’re not, trying to put yourself above us.” And then she erupted at her future step-mother, and a huge family scene started.

Tommy and I fled into the front room, while out in the hall and kitchen angry voices got louder and angrier until all hell was let loose – hysterical crying and screaming as the women tried to stop the men from kicking the shit out of each other. I heard Jeremy’s brother shouting at his mum Jane and it all ended up in a physical fight outside.

Tommy and I hid in the front room drinking vodka. It was disturbing & unpleasant listening to so many people crying and shouting and I felt I shouldn’t have been there listening to it; I wanted to go but I daredn’t brave the storms raging on the other side of the door.

We tried to calm down a little kid who came skulking into the room; he kept shouting “Me Dad’s fighting!” and running fearfully to the window. Sarah was in tears, weeping uncontrollably and saying her head hurt. What can you do? I helplessly tried to console her and soon she was sobbing in Jeremy’s arms. I felt so sorry for him.

I fell asleep and when I woke up everything was quiet and most people were in bed. Tommy was gone and Jeremy had gone to bed. I heard later that the aggro had spilled out onto the street and a taxi driver had somehow got involved and his cab window was broken.

It was just me, Robert and his drunkenly unpredictable mate Adrian, Robert still calling me “Frankenstein.” They speculated how they would each crush the other’s balls at karate. I couldn’t take it any more and so I left at three o’clock or thereabouts, my name-caller insisting on shaking my hand and apologising for “taking the piss,” saying I seemed like a “nice bloke.”

I got home to find I was locked out. I spent the night in the back of the car, and staggered blearily in at about eight this morning with a headache, feeling rotten. Dad was up and writing away.

I went back to bed after the air had been soured by Mum erupting at Dad as he was preparing to launch himself into yet another of his “declining morals” tirades against “filth” and porn. It’s 5.30 p.m., I just got up and they’re still not speaking to one another, but Dad seems cheerful enough.

Mum is in a silent morose sulk.

Ought oughts are ought

Another damp day. I signed on at nine and made an abortive trip to the barber’s before setting off into Easterby with Mum at half-twelve.

I missed the four minutes to one train and so had an hour to wait in the drizzle for the next one. The train crawled through the unprepossessing landscapes of Haley Hill, Nortonroyd and Mill Bridge; wet-roofed factory buildings and dark houses crouched shivering on the hillsides, and black clusters of buildings loomed out of the murk as we rattled past.

Ms. Hirst picked me up at the station and we drove to her house high above Midgeroyd, a small ivy-clad cottage perched overlooking the valley. Lee, Jeremy, and Gillian were already there, sitting uneasily across from one another in the front room. Gillian's just like her sister, perhaps a bit more easy going and trendy. Hirst’s house is small with typically arty touches--a tastefully arranged pile of pebbles on one corner of the coffee table, a heap of shells placed with studied carelessness on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, several pseudo-pointillist paintings of palm trees on the walls.

She asked me about Watermouth and asked me how it was going. I blurted out the usual spiel about the academic drudgery of ploughing through books only to write essays and told her my semi-serious idea of packing it all in. She mentioned Art History: I began to think about it seriously, but I felt very uncomfortable with her probing questions: What would I do on the dole? etc etc.

Lee made the idle, incidental comment that I should have done an Art course, but I should change me, not my course, and anyway I can’t imagine my tutors taking too kindly to my flitting from one course to another in such whimsical fashion. I came across as very undecided and lacking any real self-knowledge. Truthfully I haven’t a clue as to what else I’d rather be doing.

“Ought oughts are ought” said Hirst, meaning I’m not deserving of any reward if I don’t put anything in. Jeremy later told me I’d sounded “neurotic.”

Apart from this all was quite OK. Hirst thought Lee and I looked fresh-faced and boyish, and I thought she was her usual satirical self, quite unchanged. She made us lasagne and salad with plum crumble for dessert and told us she’s reaching a bit of a crisis point in her life, isn’t really happy with her career at Egley, and feels that, at thirty four, she isn’t getting anywhere in particular. Promotions don’t interest her and she says she needs a change.

I’m doomed to feel this too.

By now the sun had pierced the gloom and shone into the living room. We went for a walk. Midgeroyd was still wrapped in a murk the sun couldn’t penetrate, the valley bottom a jumble of shrouded outlines and silhouettes. The grass was sodden and the roads were still damp from the heavy afternoon rain. We climbed up a flight of stone steps and emerged onto the top of the hillside and finally into evening sunshine.

The valley is very narrow at this point, its sides towering over the village. Lots of steep hills and narrow streets. We saw one building with a tower, about two-storeys high, topped off with a small spire. We also glimpsed a magnificent chapel set back in its own grounds, a huge blackened building with a frontage adorned with pillars at either side of an imposing doorway.

We had a couple of drinks at a pub and Hirst let us into some of the secrets at school. It sounds as awful in the staff room as it was being a pupil there. She says the staff is boring and gave us a glimpse of the crawling careerist Mrs. St. John who “is a fascist.”

Gillian had to be back or her parents would have been on her about staying out late, but before we caught the nine-thirty train back Hirst gave me Ornette Coleman's Body Meta (which she hates); Jeremy came away with a Zenit camera. Gillian seems OK; I quite liked her.

Lee was in fine form and we got on very well; he had me in fits several times and as we hurried for the train he whistled loudly and regaled us with impressions from Coronation Street. Back in Easterby we said goodbye to Gillian in the station and went for a drink at the Four Pigeons, but I missed my bus and ended the day trudging home through the mist on foot.

Andrew was in bed when I got back. He’s come home to pick some stuff up.

A fly buzzed

It’s approaching one a.m. and I’m sweating to death, with only the whine of the flies to keep me company. It’s too warm to sleep.

Today we had blazing cloudless weather for the second day running. Mum and Dad spent part of it watching cricket in Moxthorpe; they stayed out until eight thirty, enjoying what Mum described as a “perfect golden evening.” She says she’s worried that I don’t get enough fresh air. “You’ve hardly stirred since we came back from Calverdale,” she chides anxiously and she still thinks I could be unwell.

Not unwell, just a dullness and weariness brought about by day-after-day of unremitting—and quite self-inflicted—mental tedium. Trial by boredom. I “hardly stirred” from morning until night, watching the final day of the World Championships from Helsinki, between times pacing the house restlessly. Lethargy weighs me down as surely as if I was prisoner here. The one thing plays on the other; it’s a vicious circle and the more bored I become, the harder it is to muster motivation to escape.

I can count my friends here on one hand

Jeremy called in last night and stayed until well gone midnight. We were almost like two orphans, and spent a long and not particularly thrilling evening having a strange, ill-at-ease sort of conversation that touched on deeply paranoid subjects.

When I think of all the work I have to do my reaction is ‘What is the point?’ The academic drudge doesn’t ‘do’ anything for me and I doubt if all the effort in the world would really alter the feeling that all I’m doing is ploughing on and on through book after book, with nothing truly relevant to me as a person or the way I live my life. I wish I had the guts and assurance to just say “Fuck it” and jack it all in, strike out on some new path. But knowing me (as I do so horribly well) I’d end up vegetating on the dole, without even the cover of a degree course to give my existence some point.

Drink the long draught

An evening of drinking, boozy laughs, leg-pulling and teasing with Jeremy, Lee and Tommy Whelan. It was my first night out for weeks.


I got to Jeremy’s house at nine, two hours late, and as it wasn’t worth going out, we went to an off-licence instead and bought half-bottles of vodka and whisky. Jeremy rang Tommy Whelan and when he came up he brought another ½ bottle of whisky.

We had the usual falling apart scenes, Jeremy forcing Lee to drink some vile green-coloured mint liqueur while Tommy (baggy black suit, white collarless shirt, white shoes), laughed until he could laugh no more. I fell into a drunken reverie while the others crawled about on the floor giggling. Lee didn’t feel too good, but we ventured forth long after midnight and weaved our way out into the orange darkness.

As a dare, Jeremy shuffled across the road with his trousers around his ankles. Lee puked in the street. Jeremy really was quite reckless, urging vandalism and trips along the train tunnel of old, but we had to go back as Lee felt ill.


Another night on Jeremy’s floor.

Heavy clout, heart out

Lee and Jeremy called round which cheered me up a lot; I haven’t had contact with anyone but family for a fortnight and I think it’s been getting me down a bit.

They arrived on their bikes after dark and stayed for an hour or so. When I’m forced onto my own resources for any longish period of time it seems I always end up tending towards morbidity and self-pity. The last half-dozen pages vouch for this.

Dole penicillin

I got another cheque from the dole office today, this time for £47.30. So in a week I’ve received nearly £120; maybe I’ll be able to afford to go to Greece with Gareth if I’m very careful. I revealed this idea to Mum and she reacted predictably: “You young people make me sick”—the word spat out—“you’ve got all your priorities wrong.”

This signaled a bitter tirade against me over the bike incident from a year or so ago (“Thirty pounds for a rusty, unused bike . . .” etc.) and I was angry that she was dragging out this skeleton.

Jeremy rang and says that Lee is keeping to his friends from Easterby College and going out a lot with them. I haven’t rung Claire—I’m a stupid bastard, and no doubt my thoughtlessness and paranoid uselessness has reaped the harvest it deserves. I promise myself I’ll do something about it as soon as we get back (we're leaving tomorrow for a week in Calverdale).

There’s been much fussing and packing from Mum the last two days but now we’re set. Dad has been cleaning the tanks in preparation. This morning, he, Andrew and I went to Dengates to let a dozen or so little frogs go. The grass was teaming with them.

The weather has been warm again today after the drizzle of the last few days; thunder and lightning rumbles and flashes threateningly in the distance, beckoning us into the empty spaces and the sweeping skies.

Pink and white

Robert drove over in the morning and then, while he, Andrew and Dad walked to Moxthorpe to watch a cricket match, I went into Easterby.

I didn’t have any enthusiasm for going into town, but I thought I’d hate myself even more if I didn’t make the effort, so at four I finally got up off my backside and got the bus. I went to a second-hand bookshop, took my trousers to a dry cleaners to be altered, and bought 2 books, a William Blake anthology and a critical book on the 'Romantic Imagination.'

Jeremy rang not long after I got back and asked if I wanted to go out for a drink. I met him and Lee at twenty to nine, forty minutes late (quite good for me), and we went straight to the Four Pigeons, mainly because we’d never been there before.

It stands painfully alone, surrounded by grey '60s concrete and glass. We sat out on the grass but retired inside when it got chilly. Lee was his usual distant self, maybe a bit more noticeably uneasy, but we talked and laughed until Jeremy told me that last year Lee read my diary and knows about my infatuation with Claire.

I shrank blushing—embarrassing! “I know, I’m a cunt,” said Lee, laughing cheerfully. They continued to tease me with booze-ridden affability (“she was yours to have” etc, - oh God, don’t say things like that!), but I was to have my revenge.

Because we'd had quite a bit to drink, things deteriorated accordingly. Jeremy threw my jacket onto the roof of a shop on the corner of Queensgate where it hung above our heads while we blundered hysterically around for twenty minutes, Jeremy swaying astride my shoulders before he fell face-down onto the pavement as Lee tried to climb up on top of him.

I eventually retrieved my jacket with a long stick we found on a nearby building site. For want of somewhere better to go, we descended on Jasper’s and sat downstairs in the “wine lounge,” the name they’ve given to what is nothing more than a huge meat-market. White and pink are evidently this year’s colours, and the now familiar legions of girls in said outfits sat in silence with crossed legs, waiting. . . .

Lee and Jeremy squeezed in alongside one such girl in white skirt, white jacket, with blonde blowsy hair, and while Lee struck up a conversation with her, Jeremy and I drifted around, to the bog, or back and forth to the bar. Before we knew it, Lee and the girl were snogging, burying themselves in the soft upholstery of their seat! With a disbelieving laugh Jeremy and I left him to it, marveling at the ease with which Nature has her way with even the most wayward of her sons, who was all scorn and condemnation one minute, all entwined arms the next.

We went and climbed up onto the roof of the row of shops on William Street opposite Jasper’s and cased them up then headed back to the club and interrupted Lee to tell him our taxi was due. He and the girl in white parted without a word.

We teased him mercilessly on the ride back and he took it all in stride, with eyes closed, a mischievous smile across his face. We got to Jeremy’s as it was approaching three.

Step inside

I went into Easterby and met Lee. We went up to the Admiral Street dole office, then down to the one on Lloyd Street so that he could sign on. It was again very hot; I felt as if I was being burnt.

We wandered up to the Art College and Lee collected a boxful of ‘objets d’art’ which we then took around to the derelict house on Abbot Street that he's using as his base. He’s boarded up all the doors and we climbed up onto the porch roof to gain entry through an upper floor window. He hid the box in an upstairs room, barricading the door with a huge wooden beam, and we left for the pub for a drink, and then drifted around Easterby feeling jaded by the heat.

Lee seemed distant and uncommunicative.

We went to Suits Me and I looked for a second hand overcoat and after this, we ended up down on Lockley Lane, trying to gain entry to the old photography studios where he found all the photos. We crept through the overgrown rubble-choked yard but found the back door locked, so Lee suggested we explore an empty school nearby, the old Easterby Grammar School building that stands near the point where Hetherington Road and Dyson Street split. It’s been empty for as long as I can remember, the odd pane of glass broken, brick work black with soot and grime.

We got in through a gaping glass-less window, jumped down and I found myself in a classroom, empty and debris-littered, but still recognizably a classroom. The rest of the school was being gradually overtaken by grass and weeds; a dark and decaying staircase with a spidery tracery of banisters wound up into unknown regions above, the steps worn into hollows by the tramp of long dead feet. We visited each classroom in turn, gazing in on the huge main hall, its floor strewn with glass and lit by sunlight slanting in through large arched windows. Plants grew in green profusion from the walls.

Upstairs, Lee found his way into the tower up a cramped and steeply narrow staircase hemmed in by walls, up into a tiny secluded room lit by floor level windows—quite tidy. Through a hole onto the roof we could look out over the hazy skyline of Easterby.

We had a coffee at a Schofield Street café and I spied a girl I remembered from school, feeding her baby. She’s nineteen. Lee signed on at 3 and we said goodbye. I bought Joy Division’s Closer, but when I got home I discovered it was scratched.

In the evening I met Lee, Jeremy and—a ghost from the past—Tommy Whelan, at the Egley Former Students Disco. It was inauspicious. Tommy hasn’t changed a bit. Harvey’s was as crap as ever, a handful of people from our year there but we ignored them and they ignored us. Several times I felt hidden feet attempt to trip me up as I walked to and fro from the bogs. I ran into Julie Crabtree and Dawn Jagger, both very different now. Dawn was dressed all in white; gone the monkey boots and spiky locks of yesteryear and Julie’s hippy days are over too, apparently; she was dressed conservatively in a white skirt and red T-shirt with a page-boy haircut. She’s getting married next year.

We sat ourselves in a distant corner and hooted at the dancers, all girls initially, flowing virginal pastel shades of green and yellow predominating. They stood like statues, decked out in glowing ultra-violet whites, twisting and swaying imperceptibly in time to the music; they were soon joined by clone-like lads in tight jeans and white socks.

We spied Matthew Knight who looked like some gone-to-seed overweight thirty-year old. All the usual wankers were there, flashily dressed Mr. Farrar in mouthy good humour, Lynn Norden gone the way of all the rest it seemed. By way of parody and just for the doss, Lee and Jeremy went and stood out on the dance floor, totally motionless, gazing blankly into space like two waxwork dummies while people danced around them.

Tommy and I joined them and soon we began to attract attention, people pushing us or waving their hands in front of our faces. The wanky DJ said “They don’t realise how stupid they look, do they?” Them and us, and we were four.

I was hassled by stray dogs on the way home and got back at ten to two.

The luxury gap

I was up early. Dad dropped me off at Moxthorpe so I could get my hair cut. This done, I walked home and we set off for Nanna B’s.

The weather was again very hot and muggy, too warm for comfort. Nanna B. was unchanged and  quite entertaining, but I sat there feeling uncommunicative, apart, and totally removed from this circle. She fell to reminiscing, reciting school rhymes word perfect from sixty one years previously with all the rush and enthusiasm of a little girl.

She also revealed more tantalising fragments of family history: William John Martindale, my Dad's grandad, committed suicide in Loney’s Dam early one Sunday morning in 1906 following the death of his wife Emily, leaving their three children orphans. Eldest son Ernest grew up to die in WW1, Harold became my granddad and Esther, battered by her husband, died one day in 1926: the incident was hushed up and passed off as meningitis.

N.B. gave me £2 for my birthday and with the empty fussings ringing all around, we left. Dad dropped me in Easterby. It was too warm to move.

Later on in the evening, Dad and I went down to the station to pick up Andrew but his bus was late, leaving Dad and I to wander through the station to the incongruous strains of military music over the PA. Eventually there was that familiar self-conscious half-smile, sliding in aboard the coach. He looked tanned and we settled back into our well-worn ways immediately.

Dad dropped me off at Jeremy’s ½ an hour later than I’d arranged.

We went up for a drink at a noisy crowded Kerforth pub, The Adelphi, which was filled to overflowing with beery affable groups of loud people. Jeremy and I sat inconspicuously on a bench to one side while the crowd swore and laughed and talked and screeched, the girls fashion conscious in the pastel shades of their smart ‘going out’ clothes, the blokes all in jeans, tight T-shirts, white socks and low slung shoes. A handful of Hell’s Angels hung about in the obligatory denim waistcoats, their girls in tow.

Jeremy and I reminisced and bemoaned our lack of a social circle here. He seemed to have limitless resources compared to me and quite happily bought me drinks and kept my glass filled.

By closing time I was in a sloppy mood and as we walked down Whincliffe Road we were intercepted by two flat-capped drunken occupants of a red open-topped Triumph Herald. Jeremy knew one of them. Terry and Kevin were both pissed and, as they said they’d give me a lift home, we clambered into the back of the car and roared off doing eighty at least while I shivered in my thin shirt. Jeremy laughed unbelievingly as we screeched through Farnshaw, a Heaven 17 cassette at full volume, the two in front jeering drunkenly whenever we encountered a lone figure wending his or her way home.

We stopped at the petrol station near Moxthorpe roundabout, and curses were directed at the pale-faced petrol attendant in his glass cubicle. I was persuaded to stay in the car and go down to Jasper’s, an ominous sounding nightspot in Easterby. As we hurtled along the main road I was amazed no one stopped us, for Terry drove like a madman, overtaking on the inside, screeching to a halt at junctions, cursing and laughing as the traffic lights changed on us.

Just beyond Lodgehill he screeched to a halt and threw up over the side of the car. A hundred yards or so further on it happened again, but he drove off right as rain, laughing, spitting and wiping his mouth on the imitation leopard skin steering wheel cover. Somehow we made it to our destination in one piece and Jeremy paid for me to get in.

Jasper’s a typical Easterby night club, the mating game in full swing inside, couples snogging and dancing. We stood about drinking (me on Jeremy’s money) and left after about an hour for a curry up by the poly, where our hosts entertained us with beery bombast.

Kevin enthusiastically described for us in graphic detail his day spent in the shower with his girlfriend Alison. “It were real!” he said, with a raucous laugh. I had a chicken curry and ½ a prawn curry too, and we watched an Indian film on the TV along with the intent, white-coated staff.

At two a.m. we raced back to Egley and I am writing this. . . .

Catalogue

An uneventful day, much like yesterday.

Jeremy rang, punctuating my grey stifled mood with his satire.He’s been quite busy making £80 a week putting together Empire Stores catalogues in Kerforth. We agreed to go out for a drink.