I am interrupted by a man whilst nude
The woman my age in Wethers, with two blokes at the table, dips her head to sleep. She slides herself onto the floor, where she curls herself around one of her friends' chairs, the better to sleep.
"You alright?" one of her company asks, not as a question, and carries on talking to his mate.
She starts vomiting, wide-mouthed volumes of clear liquid, until the landlord, at the end of his patience with her friends' ineffectual efforts at getting her to stand up, yanks her to her feet and directs her to the door.
Someone I vaguely know at the next table starts talking about Carol, with whom he used to work. "She was quite popular, Carol. We called her Chips." "Why?" "Chips. Goes with everything."
Thursday, and I have one day at my favourite paid job, at The Big House, with Sexy Ex-Boss. An afternoon gilding the villa ready to receive the judge and his clerk. The judge arrives and after I serve a muffin and tea -- doilies and a tray -- he settles down in the wide open reception room to work on his case, which leaves me free to sit and do nothing in the kitchen.
Afterwards, the clerk is keen to engage me in some of the wine. A tense newcomer clerk arrives, who is staying one night, and gets into a panic when she discovers that the sandwiches for "Her Ladyship" tomorrow haven't been made. I go down to the kitchen to make them myself, but she finds me there and tells me to put everything back, saying she'll do them herself. She says it with a show of annoyance, but pleased to have control.
Sexy Ex-Boss, who lives in an apartment on the top floor, texts me and invites me up for a drink. The telly is on, inanely, and when she goes to get the coke I turn it down. "They'll be talking about us now, downstairs." I'm enjoying myself, whilst thinking that doing coke at gone midnight before getting up for work at six isn't good preparation for entertaining Mel the following evening.
I get a phone call from the Ministry of Discipline and Punish, saying that my vetting has been completed, confirming my job, to start on Monday week. The wages are only £300 p.a. more than what I get from cleaning toilets, but I've been promised it'll be reliable, interesting work. I'm surprised I got it, what with one self-written reference from a cafe which never existed, and their access to the more accurate records of my criminally spotted past.
Once I start working there, I want to get my own place. It'll take up a large proportion of my income, but I'm tired of composing my face as I open the front door. As if I give a shit about how anyone's day has gone.
My weekend of having the house to myself arrives. I can breathe, walk around without worrying about my footsteps. It's liberating, but I take two Sildenafil as insurance. Mel arrives, and we paw each other, my cock chemically stiff. I serve her an unpleasant soup which I botched together from what I had in, which produced a sludge of red cabbage which I tried to rescue, and made worse, with some vinegary horseradish sauce. "Don't worry looby, it's not the food I'm here for."
The following morning, I am in the shower. Nude and wet, I am interrupted by a phone call from a man who has kindly offered to deliver a two-bed settee to mine for free, from a recycling site. I manhandle it upstairs by myself. My room stinks of cigarette smoke. I open the windows to their most gaping extent, wash the clothes I was wearing and put the ones in the wardrobe on the line.
She rings. "I've got an idea looby. Why don't we do something domestic today? Maybe we could cook together. Just have a nice afternoon without drinking a bottle of wine each." I'm worried, thinking I've overstepped some mark.
She makes a delicious tomato sauce for pasta. Everything's cordial, but it's important that I establish that she can't smoke in the house again. It's too much effort for me, washing and airing and de-fumigating. Smokers are blind to how they spread their smell. I'm relieved when she anticipates this, and says that she'll only smoke outside. We go to my room.Whilst there's room for improvement, we have the best sex in our short history on the new settee.
Today, Wendy rings and wants to know about it all, in a sexual detail that surprises me. "Have you had oral sex?" she says, repeating it over a croaky mobile connection.
Then a minute later, Mel: "I've put you into boyfriend/romance status...hope that's alright X" "Fucking hell, its more than alright Mel xxx"
I disappoint Mel
Monday.
Mel rings. We discuss her coming up to my suburb. I'm faced with the homelessness of our attraction.
There's an imitation European cafe, where we might at least be warm while we drink international alcohol. There's a cosy micropub with proper cider, but it can only seat about twelve, and it's always full before the evening starts. But afterwards? This is like courting in the sixties.
Five hundred pounds a month gives me a large unloved room. In place of what might have been a dado rail, there's a strip of maroon wallpaper with a wave of brown running through it. The fireplace has been flattened, as though such things should be extinct. There are unnecessarily large brown varnished wardrobes. The carpets are offcuts which don't fit and a thin rug which curls. Old-aged saggy pillows. For lighting, you can have local patches from two bendy lamps from Wilko, or a nude glare from the ceiling where a rose should be.
I could roll up the worst of the carpet, leaving the bare floor. Get a sofa from somewhere. Buy a couple more lamps. Some muslin to drape over the ugly wardrobes. But then I've still got the problem of Cath and Ingrid, the impossibility of privacy. We'll never have sex in this place. Not that I'm not aiming for sex, just now, only somewhere where we can be at our ease.
Tuesday.
Mel comes round. None of the home improvements above have happened. I rush and shove the junk into carrier bags and hide it in the voluminous wardrobes. I introduce her to Cath before ushering her upstairs. I have these ludicrous Nordic bootees on with a bobble hanging gayly from each slipper. "Now, looby, as I see you as a potential lover, I've got to ask you to change those shoes."
We start kissing. "Do whatever you want," she says. I straddle her with my legs apart, advertising a potency that I don't possess, while the klaxon announcing a flaccid cock that I hope she won't look at clangs in my head. I slide my fingers under her cunt and she moves them to where she wants them. She's wet. I like it, even as the worry klaxon rings louder.
We move onto the bed, naked, and she fiddles with my shrunken member. We give up. She's good about it, in a sophisticated way: not too much sympathy, which would make it worse.
She rolls a joint. I open the windows, stuff up the door jambs with scarves and T-shirts, but no smell leaks like tobacco. Cath shouts from the landing. "No smoking in the house looby! You know that!"
We get dressed and smuggle down the stairs and out. There's a half an hour wait for her bus. Bus stops, again. We kiss a short goodbye as her bus arrives. In bed, I feel crestfallen and wretched, useless. I text Kim. "Disastrous sex with Mel..."
"No, I know why it didn't work looby," she replied, pointing out first time nerves, the difficulty of getting a hard cock at my age, my misgivings about the state of my room, and the worry about Cath and Ingrid being in the house. "You're so sensible and reassuring Kim. I love you for that."
Friday.
We go down our pub, her local, where we go outside to sit in the lean-to, and the joints are passed around. The man with whom we played the dictionary game on a previous visit said to Mel, pointing and looking at me. "He's always smiling. Some people pretend to be happy, but he is." I had an impulse to say "I'm happy because of her," but stopped myself from doing so. My general happiness does not depend on Mel, although at that moment, the instance of it did have a lot to do with her.
Today
I have a date. I'd also told Mel I'd meet her at half two. Mel said she wanted to go for a walk without too much drinking involved. We do get a bit wankered sometimes.
In the shower, I looked down at it, and said "you fucking useless thing."
She's someone who internationally exterminates rodents. She told me about her time on Tristan da Cunha and Diego Marcia and Porto Santo, a small island off Madeira on which I once landed by swimming to it. Chatty, interesting, attractive, dressed in the grey, loose way that academic women dress. Autistic son. She made us brownies and banana cake and we sat by a Victorian pond.
I cycled to see Mel. Her friendly, unpretentious mum, to whom one has to shout somewhat. We went for a walk through Magpie's Bottom, a name which made me giggle. "I'm not sure if I want a full-blown relationship looby." And "if we have sex next weekend you won't hold it against me if I don't want to have it again?"
"I think we should just enjoy being with each other in whatever way we can," I said, affecting insouciance whilst hoping for repeated sex. She just wants a decent rodding. It's not much for a girl to ask.
We walked back through the woods, found a gap in the fence. "Put them inside," she said, inviting me inside her bra. And at last, a sign of stiffness, because I knew sex was impossible.
I do not know what I am doing here
Back here, Cath is keen to dispel any lingering Milanese warmth I might be cradling.
She emails me (emailing someone who lives with you?) "you sent the rent to the wrong account. Luckily there was enough in there to pay the rent," cc'ing her daughter in to my telling off.
Monday morning, and I've sorted the recycling incorrectly. In the street, she flings down the new bag we've been given from the council for Type a(2)(b) (not brown or multicoloured except if Type c(1)) paper and card. She shouts up to my window. "Looby! Can you come down?" "What's the problem Cath?" "Can you sort this out? They won't take it otherwise!", before slamming the car door and driving off.
This evening, she texts me about today's "house meeting" which I'd forgotten about. I lie and say I'm with Mel but could get back for about half past eight. "Not tonight then, but we have to have a meeting. Saturday 6pm?"
Why do we have to have a meeting? More generally, what is the advantage to them to me being here? Why didn't they get a two-bed place for themselves?
I'm walking down the high street when I am hailed by a woman. "Hiya looby!" She was sat with a bloke on the perimeter wall of a pub. She looked unrecallably familiar, until I realised that I'd met her outside a pub a month or so ago, when we ended up down a side street doing weed and speed on some office building's steps. It's a pharamceutically silly combination; but the social cement it formed was more important.
She texted me three times today. "Were u to"; "ring"; "meet down the park".
As I do so, work rings to offer me a housekeeping job at five hundred pounds a week and a one-bed flat. But you have to drive. I gesture to Cory with a questioning, drinking gesture. I think it's rude to take phone calls when you're with someone, but I need money. She replied with the apologetic shrug of someone who has none.
After the call, I explain why I took the call, and go to the offy to get us a drink. She told me about her friend who used to make mcat in the bath; her children, two younger ones with their dad, two older ones with her sister-in-law, and access arrangements; about getting off crack and heroin. Clean for five days now.
I told her about Cath's peskiness. "Well, I've got a three bed house. Just up there on --- Ave. All brand new. I wouldn't see you short of a place."
I don't want to push myself onto Mel, who's just back from Greece, but I ring her anyway, and I'm delighted when she suggests I come over to our pub. I'm tired from a night shift, ten till six, shelf stacking at Sainsbury's, so I nip back to mine and do a little speed. I bump into Cath at the front door who tells me that I've got something just there on my nose.
Our pub is closed, so we go to another, a cold, deserted place. She gives me a present and tells me to take a drink from it. It's one of those paint strippers that Scotland and southern Europe produce. I want to ask her to circle her finger in my palm, which excited me early on, the first time we started touching, but I don't. It's not the right situation.
The apologetic young landlady tells us that the pub is shutting at nine, so we walk up to my bus stop where there is no bus for half an hour. Her mouth is faggy from her smoking, and it's an effort to retrain myself to like it, but we spend the half hour kissing, my hands sliding around her anoraked waist.
The sad realisation of us having nowhere to go for our courtship other than bus stops comes upon us both at the same time: she living with her mother, me sharing a house with a wound-up spring in human form.
Un ballo in maschera
Back from Milan, and my favourite letter on the table is Scarlet's masterful transcription of Kitty's advice -- "be kind to her in all ways" -- in a calligraphy of a precise exuberance that doesn't really come across in a photograph, but there are some on her blog far better than the ones I was going to post here. The brilliance of the colours radiating off the page, and the energy in the lettering, in the collaged setting, come together in one beautiful ensemble.
Thank you so much Scarlet. I will frame it properly, without cheap Chinese clip frames from Argos that ping off every five seconds.
I have the feeling I am being taken for a ride, by the driver of a car that knocked me over yesterday.
I came out of the cider house, and seeing the road clear to the bus stop on the other side I darted across. Out of nowhere, a car appeared, braked hard, and gave me a small nudge which knocked me over. I'd had three pints of cider, which isn't usually enough to make cars appear.
I was fine apart from a slightly sore ankle and continued my dash to the bus stop. A few minutes later I was approached by the driver who wanted to show me the damage I had, he alleged, caused to his car. I was surprised to see a few concentric fractures a few inches in diameter and a larger one about a foot long extending vertically.
He was worried because it was a company car. This morning, I had a phone call from his boss. The driver had said that the windscreen had been damaged by my phone flying out and hitting it.
Feeling a little delayed shock, I left a garbled message for Hayley from the bus, using the same phone that had not only acted as a surprisingly potent projectile minutes earlier but which had somehow bounced back into my bag.
"Well, I'm glad you're OK," he said, moving to his real concern. "It's just the windscreen. How do you intend to resolve this?" "Well, we'd have to decide on liability wouldn't we?" He said that someone else would be ringing me tomorrow to discuss it further.
Something isn't right here. There is no way that a phone which weighs three ounces could have caused such damage to toughened glass. My guess is that the driver had done something to the windscreen and wants to pin the blame, and the cost of its replacement, on me.
Milan. Golly. For someone who delights that we have stolen the continental words "flâneur" and "dilettante", Milan is a gift, where people watching is worth every Euro of the pricey drinks in the bars with the best views. I overspent on clothes from the secondhand shops, but have ended up with three lovely Italian pieces which will last and last. The shops in the centre are Huysmanesque galleries. The beautiful arrangements of handmade paper and glinting, iridescent fountain pens in a stationer's made it look more like a jeweller's showroom.
We stayed in an ex-council flat with a filmmaker and her two cats, in what might be a fractious suburb. A bit of graffiti read "Romii sunt animali". Not a flicker of disharmony all week between me and Jenny, which surprised me somewhat. La Scala was open, but unfortunately the cheapest remaining tickets for La Traviata were 112 Euros. From Madrid came the news that audience members in the more crowded cheaper seats had forced the Teatro Real to abandon a performance. The opera? Un ballo in maschera.
Artist and title unknown due to author's Slack Alice attitude
My new haircut, modelled on the Beijing Military Academy School of Progressive Socialist Hairdressing, must make me look like an art thief, since Jenny and I were tailed by two security guards through every room of the Gallery of Modern Art, thwarting my attempts to strengthen my holdings of the Scapigliatura movement.
Once I'd got over the weird feeling provoked by complying with Jenny's wish to have me film her eating, we had a long lunch, where a waiter keen to talk about the brewing scene in Milan supplied us with free post-prandial digestifs of limoncello, something made from mango, and a revelatory drink new on me, Rattafia. It's a fortified wine flavoured with sour cherries that had us both going "oh!" in unarticulated pleasure. As we left, he gave me a bottle of the local beer I had had with my pizza.
Leaving for our separate airports on the last day, I felt wrenched away, sad to leave. "This is my city," said Jenny. I've made her a little card. She was excellent company. Organised, curious; considerate and chatty with our host. And looked great too, even by the testing standards of the Milanese.
I went to collect some post from The Beautiful House. The vandalising owner has grubbed up all Cath's years of gardening. I sat on the Common with some cider, when Trina, who always waits long enough so that the surprise is greater, texted with a proposal. She wanted to know if I'd like to go away with her for a week next year. To Milan.
Polish Cleaner
In a few hours' time I'll be in Milan with middle daughter. I saw a flight for £20 return and she's found us a cheap place to stay on the outskirts. Before that I had to finish a week's work as what was sold as an office cleaner, but there was a lot of toilet involved. One of the detergents was called Polish Cleaner.
It was in a fleet car leasing firm's offices. There were racks where you can catch up on back issues of Fleet Leasing. The packaging of an unwrapped headset had a picture of a baby crawling about with a plastic bag on its head and a red line through it.
On a whiteboard, people's names in circles together with a number, as if anyone's ever been motivated by being shamed. "Let's smash it!" said the slogan, above coloured stars in felt-tip. I debated as to whether dead flies are general waste or recycling, and wondered if the administrative classes and I were thinking the same thing about each other: "glad I'm not doing your job."It began at six, which entailed getting up at half four. Cath lent me a front light for my bike. Scary bits of rusting public sculpture along the cycle path in the dark, looking like rapists. In the afternoon, male cyclists in skin-tight lycra tore along as though late for an S&M party.
When I left they offered me a full-time position, on the minimum wage. Instead, I went and had my hair cut quite severely. Middle daughter said "you actually look quite cool, which is a bit worrying as that's not the way I'm used to seeing my papa."
Breaking away from the loud improv theatre of the winos sitting around in the park, a large brown dog lopes up to me. I start stroking it and talking to it, and its owner comes up and apologises, swinging what remains of a bottle of rosé. "But you don't mind?" "No, no, not at all. She looks friendly enough."
He tries the traditional scam of saying that they're just off to get some crack if I'd like to chip in, but they remain chatty and I am invited to join them. On this occasion I wanted to ring Kitty, but I can tell it won't be long before I am admitted into park society.
Hayley, posing as an estate agent, rings and leaves a message on my phone.
Oh hello Mr Looby, this is Barbara from Abbey Lets. It's just about your references for the new house. Unfortunately it has come back saying that you are a dirty Northern cunt. If you'd like to get back in touch and discuss this with me, the number is 01637 suck my cock 425. Thank you!
