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24.11.11
23.11.11
Excerpt
Dan had taken to spending a lot of time in a town on the coast eighty miles south of London because his crazy girlfriend Helena had rented a room there and wouldn’t come out. He’d bought a VW camper van because he’d never heard the word ‘stereotype’ and drove up to London every now again to check that the world existed past further than he could see. It did. Now you know how Berkley felt, I told him.
Didn’t make a lot of difference, Dan not being there all the time. I could always put on some awful music and burn a piece of damp carpet and think about other people having sex if I felt like re-living the good old days. He turned up now and again, anyway, sometimes spent the night in the van.
‘It’s like On The Road,’ he insisted.
‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s shit.’
He invited me back to The Van once or twice, but it was all too much for me. I’d already lived in a van and now I wanted to stand up inside people’s houses. I have to say, though, he had it sorted more than me. Mine didn’t actually move, for one thing. We called it The Shed. But that’s another story, probably a worse one. It was a worse van, anyway.
We walk up Kentish Town High Street from the train station by the old swimming baths, find his van in a side road, get in. He slides the door shut like a prison movie, we sit in the back. There are two seats at the front for the driver and his passenger, assuming it moves, and two bench seats in the back facing each other over a pull-out table, assuming it pulls out, with a little gas cooker and fridge thing underneath. There’s like a boot space at the back over the engine for drugs and stuff.
Daniel sets about what he thinks is hospitality, making some of his mustard gas tea. He can’t put any Roy on, thank God, because that’ll use up the battery and the van won’t start. I knew all about that one, mine never started anyway, even without the music. He does the tea and I look for a place to pour it won’t rust the superstructure, and he starts rolling a joint. Two women with babies in trolleys walking by see us, they’re real people, on benefit and everything, and start giggling. Look at the hippies in the van, they shriek. If I had a reputation…
‘So how’s Helena?’
‘She won’t come out.’
‘So how’s Helena?’
‘Uh…’
I rolled a cigarette. I had friends in that town too, I occasionally went down there. Once, I’d gone off to find Helena’s flat. How shocking was it to find them in a room together, doing nothing apart from various narcotics and goading each other into making more and more unlikely tea. This was hippy heaven twenty years too late. I felt like Altamont standing on their threshold.
Maybe I am missing something here. Helena was the most successful person I knew at negating her own reality. She didn’t change one jot all the time I knew her, didn’t do one thing I can clearly recall. She was on some course in Brighton, Fine Art and Despair, something, didn’t finish it, now she was on some other course somewhere else, something similar, but which didn’t involve actually doing anything. Government gave her money, she spent it, nothing happened. The illusion of movement through an infinite space. You might as well not be moving. But she was mad with the effort, or the effort had turned her mad, poor girl. She was screaming silently to drown out her own anguish. ‘STATIONARY!’ rather than still.
‘Petrol’s gone up again,’ said Dan.
‘You’re a travelling salesman now?’ The bank was paying his expenses anyway.
‘Costs loads to fill up and drive here. I nearly hit a dog.’ As if these could be related.
‘You had a fight with a dog?’
‘It…eh?’
‘Fhf…’
‘I got a parking ticket, too. For nothing.’
‘For parking, maybe? In the wrong place?’
‘No, no, it’s got someone else’s registration on it. I came back and there was this ticket on my windscreen. I have to send twenty quid to them now.’
‘Show it to me.’ He showed me the ticket. ‘This isn’t your number?’
‘No.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Outside the pub near Helena’s house.’
‘You know what’s happened, don’t you?’
‘…no…’
‘Some bloke’s parked wrong and gone into the pub, and when he’s come out, he’s got a ticket, so he puts it on your van and hopes you don’t notice the number.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Got a pen?’ He gives me a pen. I write ‘Come and get me, ya bastids’ on it and gave it back to him. ‘Send them that. That’ll sort it.’
‘That’s…’
The afternoon and our lives continued, but you could only tell it about the afternoon. Kentish Town High Street was not exactly the centre of the universe. It was barely the centre of Kentish Town. Charity shops, a deli, two or three banks, the three pillars of my financial life - donation, starvation and theft. We were parked beside a school, summer holidays now, empty playground and silent windows. It seemed like a long time since I’d been looked after.
‘Ornette Coleman kissed my fingers.’
‘Why do you tell me these things?’
‘It was at the gig I went to. I was trying to shake his hand and he leant down and kissed my hand.’
‘Does he have to form a government now?’
Traffic went by, ignoring us. Kentish Town existed and persisted without our attention, but we pretended we didn’t know it. Nobody noticed. We sat in the van, an invisible fishbowl. I searched wildly for something to think of. Came up empty.
I don’t know what Daniel used to do when I was feeling like this in between the gaps in our ‘interaction.’ I could drift off on a wave of dread and he’d just sit on the beach waiting for the tide to wash me back in. What am I saying? ‘Interaction’ implies, er, an action, like doing something together, where we weren’t even convinced we existed individually. So ‘interaction’ is the wrong word, but ‘interstate’ means something else, doesn’t it? But state precedes action - I mean you have to be stupid to act stupid, right? Same as the idea that existence precedes essence, unless you are vanilla essence, I suppose. Wow, things are complicated.
The tea was ready. Daniel had come up for some interview but missed it, of course. He’d driven up the previous night and parked outside the school and waited for the day to come, and then it turned out to be the wrong day. This didn’t seem to bother him, as he probably thought it didn’t matter, or hadn’t happened, or would turn out to be all right in the end. My mistakes were the exact opposite – they did matter, they did happen and they were never all right in the end. A bit like England in the World Cup.
‘I read Great Expectations,’ he said.
‘What d’you think?’
‘Not as good as I thought it was going to be.’
‘Oh, very good.’ That whooshing sound you can hear is my comment going over his head. He handed me a mug of tea, which looked worse than usual. I put it on the pull-out table and it slid towards the edge and stopped. I was disappointed.
‘What time we meeting Stuart?’
‘Oh, in a bit.’
A bus went up the High Street, going somewhere, unlike us. I think if I began to sigh I would never stop, I’d just deflate, like a sad lilo. I yawned instead, and luckily that stopped relatively soon, compared to history. Daniel busied himself with something that didn’t warrant it, hardly a headline event. I rolled a cigarette while I smoked the last one. It wasn’t the smoking, or the rolling, it was the passing the time. Not that I could tell that anything was passing, apart from that bus.
‘I woke up last night because I needed the toilet,’ Dan said. ‘Two thirty in the morning. It was freezing.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked before I knew I didn’t want to.
‘I had to use a Sainsbury’s bag.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘I know.’
‘Did you…’
‘What?’
‘Did you throw it out or…’
‘It was freezing.’
‘So you…it’s not still…ah, fuck, Daniel!’
‘He-hee!’
Didn’t make a lot of difference, Dan not being there all the time. I could always put on some awful music and burn a piece of damp carpet and think about other people having sex if I felt like re-living the good old days. He turned up now and again, anyway, sometimes spent the night in the van.
‘It’s like On The Road,’ he insisted.
‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s shit.’
He invited me back to The Van once or twice, but it was all too much for me. I’d already lived in a van and now I wanted to stand up inside people’s houses. I have to say, though, he had it sorted more than me. Mine didn’t actually move, for one thing. We called it The Shed. But that’s another story, probably a worse one. It was a worse van, anyway.
We walk up Kentish Town High Street from the train station by the old swimming baths, find his van in a side road, get in. He slides the door shut like a prison movie, we sit in the back. There are two seats at the front for the driver and his passenger, assuming it moves, and two bench seats in the back facing each other over a pull-out table, assuming it pulls out, with a little gas cooker and fridge thing underneath. There’s like a boot space at the back over the engine for drugs and stuff.
Daniel sets about what he thinks is hospitality, making some of his mustard gas tea. He can’t put any Roy on, thank God, because that’ll use up the battery and the van won’t start. I knew all about that one, mine never started anyway, even without the music. He does the tea and I look for a place to pour it won’t rust the superstructure, and he starts rolling a joint. Two women with babies in trolleys walking by see us, they’re real people, on benefit and everything, and start giggling. Look at the hippies in the van, they shriek. If I had a reputation…
‘So how’s Helena?’
‘She won’t come out.’
‘So how’s Helena?’
‘Uh…’
I rolled a cigarette. I had friends in that town too, I occasionally went down there. Once, I’d gone off to find Helena’s flat. How shocking was it to find them in a room together, doing nothing apart from various narcotics and goading each other into making more and more unlikely tea. This was hippy heaven twenty years too late. I felt like Altamont standing on their threshold.
Maybe I am missing something here. Helena was the most successful person I knew at negating her own reality. She didn’t change one jot all the time I knew her, didn’t do one thing I can clearly recall. She was on some course in Brighton, Fine Art and Despair, something, didn’t finish it, now she was on some other course somewhere else, something similar, but which didn’t involve actually doing anything. Government gave her money, she spent it, nothing happened. The illusion of movement through an infinite space. You might as well not be moving. But she was mad with the effort, or the effort had turned her mad, poor girl. She was screaming silently to drown out her own anguish. ‘STATIONARY!’ rather than still.
‘Petrol’s gone up again,’ said Dan.
‘You’re a travelling salesman now?’ The bank was paying his expenses anyway.
‘Costs loads to fill up and drive here. I nearly hit a dog.’ As if these could be related.
‘You had a fight with a dog?’
‘It…eh?’
‘Fhf…’
‘I got a parking ticket, too. For nothing.’
‘For parking, maybe? In the wrong place?’
‘No, no, it’s got someone else’s registration on it. I came back and there was this ticket on my windscreen. I have to send twenty quid to them now.’
‘Show it to me.’ He showed me the ticket. ‘This isn’t your number?’
‘No.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Outside the pub near Helena’s house.’
‘You know what’s happened, don’t you?’
‘…no…’
‘Some bloke’s parked wrong and gone into the pub, and when he’s come out, he’s got a ticket, so he puts it on your van and hopes you don’t notice the number.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Got a pen?’ He gives me a pen. I write ‘Come and get me, ya bastids’ on it and gave it back to him. ‘Send them that. That’ll sort it.’
‘That’s…’
The afternoon and our lives continued, but you could only tell it about the afternoon. Kentish Town High Street was not exactly the centre of the universe. It was barely the centre of Kentish Town. Charity shops, a deli, two or three banks, the three pillars of my financial life - donation, starvation and theft. We were parked beside a school, summer holidays now, empty playground and silent windows. It seemed like a long time since I’d been looked after.
‘Ornette Coleman kissed my fingers.’
‘Why do you tell me these things?’
‘It was at the gig I went to. I was trying to shake his hand and he leant down and kissed my hand.’
‘Does he have to form a government now?’
Traffic went by, ignoring us. Kentish Town existed and persisted without our attention, but we pretended we didn’t know it. Nobody noticed. We sat in the van, an invisible fishbowl. I searched wildly for something to think of. Came up empty.
I don’t know what Daniel used to do when I was feeling like this in between the gaps in our ‘interaction.’ I could drift off on a wave of dread and he’d just sit on the beach waiting for the tide to wash me back in. What am I saying? ‘Interaction’ implies, er, an action, like doing something together, where we weren’t even convinced we existed individually. So ‘interaction’ is the wrong word, but ‘interstate’ means something else, doesn’t it? But state precedes action - I mean you have to be stupid to act stupid, right? Same as the idea that existence precedes essence, unless you are vanilla essence, I suppose. Wow, things are complicated.
The tea was ready. Daniel had come up for some interview but missed it, of course. He’d driven up the previous night and parked outside the school and waited for the day to come, and then it turned out to be the wrong day. This didn’t seem to bother him, as he probably thought it didn’t matter, or hadn’t happened, or would turn out to be all right in the end. My mistakes were the exact opposite – they did matter, they did happen and they were never all right in the end. A bit like England in the World Cup.
‘I read Great Expectations,’ he said.
‘What d’you think?’
‘Not as good as I thought it was going to be.’
‘Oh, very good.’ That whooshing sound you can hear is my comment going over his head. He handed me a mug of tea, which looked worse than usual. I put it on the pull-out table and it slid towards the edge and stopped. I was disappointed.
‘What time we meeting Stuart?’
‘Oh, in a bit.’
A bus went up the High Street, going somewhere, unlike us. I think if I began to sigh I would never stop, I’d just deflate, like a sad lilo. I yawned instead, and luckily that stopped relatively soon, compared to history. Daniel busied himself with something that didn’t warrant it, hardly a headline event. I rolled a cigarette while I smoked the last one. It wasn’t the smoking, or the rolling, it was the passing the time. Not that I could tell that anything was passing, apart from that bus.
‘I woke up last night because I needed the toilet,’ Dan said. ‘Two thirty in the morning. It was freezing.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked before I knew I didn’t want to.
‘I had to use a Sainsbury’s bag.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘I know.’
‘Did you…’
‘What?’
‘Did you throw it out or…’
‘It was freezing.’
‘So you…it’s not still…ah, fuck, Daniel!’
‘He-hee!’
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