My Wife's Rock Group

It's Sunday afternoon and we're in La Madeleine, which bills itself as a French bakery and café. It's a chain restaurant which does a fairly good job of acting like it isn't - in so much as that the food is decent and suggests both human agency and the possibility of someone at head office actually having been to France. I usually have the chicken friand - as it's called - because pastry encasing anything savoury is a novelty in Texas and should therefore be cherished. Instead I have a croque monsieur with a parfait for after. I'm not even sure what a croque monsieur is, but I vaguely remember the name from French lessons at school.

The cashier has a strong French accent, which I find quite exciting. I make a mental note to introduce myself once I've been sorted out with coffee and everything. She will be the first French person I've encountered on this side of the Atlantic, and I will introduce myself as a fellow European. But the moment never comes. My Gallic cashier is busy and in any case, Bess has already spotted the other women of her rock group, which is why we are here.

Six months ago, Bess began painting rocks, decorating small stones with colourful mandalas of acrylic paint. It was something she'd seen on facebook. People have taken to painting rocks and leaving them to be found in public places. The idea is simply to brighten the day of some random stranger. Bess often protests that she has no artistic ability and can barely manage a convincing stick figure, but her recent efforts cast doubt upon such a claim. The first rocks she painted now seem primitive and unfinished, just cheery coloured spots in haphazard configurations; but she's kept at it and developed her talent, and now turns out pseudo-fractal designs of astonishing beauty and precision. They have the look of patterns grown upon the shell of a sea urchin expressed as a firework display. The random strangers who have found them in parks, malls, diners, or on walls have been mostly delighted and have expressed their admiration for my wife's work on facebook. Her fame has become such that the aforementioned random strangers now make specific requests for one of her rocks, even offering to pay. The problem is that such offers miss the whole point of the rock being something found and unexpected, a little bit of magic in what might be an otherwise colourless day for someone you will never meet. Nevertheless, we've now met a few random strangers in parking lots, encounters co-ordinated through social media with me tagging along just in case one of them turns out to be a nutter. Usually my wife will exchange rocks rather than just dish them out because it seems more fair and places the two parties on an equal footing, although those rocks she receives in return tend to score higher for enthusiasm than craft. Society being what it is, we've seen plenty of them decorated with poorly rendered Disney characters. I suppose it's the thought that counts.

Today is probably the next step up from an exchange of painted rocks in a parking lot, because there are five of us and we're in a café. As usual, I'm here for support, although thankfully the other three seem approximately sane, just middle-aged women who like to paint rocks. Examples of our work are passed around, notes are compared about what's been going on in the wider world of giving painted rocks to random strangers, and then they all get out their paints. This is something I hadn't anticipated. My wife is taking a class. She has become a guru.

I hadn't really given much thought to how long we were going to be here, but I didn't anticipate it being for much longer than it takes to eat a chicken friand and drink a coffee. I need something to do because I'm not a middle-aged woman and am as such perilously close to the perimeter of my comfort zone.

'Give him a rock to paint,' one of the women suggests.

Someone hands me a couple of small rounded stones and a brush. Bottles of liquid acrylic are being passed around the table so I take dabs of what I need - yellow ochre, black, cadmium red, a yellow of some description. First I paint the Mexica sun symbol representing the current age of the world by agency of the red and blue ollin glyph at the centre. It's the first thing that comes to me because I've painted it so many times. Next I paint a traditional gnome with beard, boots, and a tall conical cap. I feel that gnomes have been under-represented in much contemporary fiction, so I've written them into a few of my own things and they're never too far from my thoughts.

After twenty minutes or so we all seem to have enough done to show everyone else. Bess has been demonstrating her technique to the others. They seem to be getting it, although their efforts are not quite so polished.

'It's an Aztec sun,' says the woman to my left, and they all coo over my efforts.

'He's an artist,' my wife explains.

Technically it's a Mixteca-Puebla style sun that I've painted, but I'm not a dick so I don't say anything. Thankfully the gnome doesn't really require explanation.

The Mysteries of Dance

Of all the supposed arts, I've never had much of a relationship with dance. I quite enjoyed all that stuff with the maypole when I was a kid, and I can appreciate the folklore of village ceremonies, or dance as defining the ritual space in which offerings might be made to Huitzilopochtli; but otherwise it generally doesn't engage me, and I don't regard it as either interesting or important. Many years ago I used to buy The Observer every Sunday, more or less for the sake of habit and because it was marginally funnier than the Radio Times, but I gave up when they printed some crappy Millennial list of the hundred people they saw as having most influenced the twentieth century. There were three choreographers in the list, because apparently choreography is important. It was probably the wankiest, most excrutiatingly middle-class thing I had ever seen in a left-leaning newspaper, so I stopped buying, at last understanding that such things weren't for the likes of me, mister.

I never danced as a kid, but I danced as an art student when I realised that the act was part of a process which, if performed correctly, might provide access to the contents of women's knickers; although it never did in my case. This was probably because I attempted to develop my own style - a kind of spastic bodypopping relative of David Byrne in the Once in a Lifetime video. I observed my peers dancing, mostly doing that thing with forearms moving up and down from a stationary elbow whilst looking bored, sort of like a mime of climbing a ladder performed by someone who is tired and doesn't really understand why you would want to know in the first place. I saw this and felt compelled to move rhythmically in a way which at least suggested that I was alive and maybe even enjoying the music. My style was knackering, but had the additional benefit of providing much needed exercise which tended to lessen the subsequent unpleasant effects of being full of beer, but it never led to sexual activity, or at least no sexual activity involving persons other than myself, and was therefore mostly a waste of time.

Nevertheless, here I am thirty years later going to a dance recital. We're going along to watch Jamie, who is seventeen or maybe eighteen and who is my friend's daughter. She's been attending a local dance class for at least a decade, and this is the big show at the end of the educational year.

We take seats and we watch.

There are four or five groups according to age ranging from five or six to Jamie's bunch, and each group performs three or four times to some song or piece of music; and as soon as it starts I realise just how much I'm out of my depth. I don't understand why I'm watching this thing, and these people have no reason to be on the stage moving around in set patterns whilst grinning or else looking confused. There is no reason for this thing to be happening, and yet here it is.

The youngest group aren't really dancing so much as going through a set sequence of vaguely illustrative gestures, more or less at the same time, and all staring intently at an off-stage teacher, aside from the one dancer who spends each performance facing the opposite direction to all the rest. It's puzzling, and yet sort of charming because it's little kids, which at least keeps my wife happy for a couple of minutes. They dance, or at least engage in roughly synchronised gestures to what sound like Shirley Temple numbers; but they really come to life during Blue Suede Shoes. Yes, they're all girls, but there's no reason why they shouldn't look at least a bit like Elvis, and their shoes are certainly blue. Then as one, they point out at the audience, furrow brows into angry-little-girl faces and yell don't step on my blue suede shoes - a startling burst of atonal noise but you can tell they're enjoying themselves.

The older groups are probably better in so much as what they do looks more like dancing, or at least more like those routines which clogged up the British television schedule for most of the seventies - top hats, teeth and high kicks all swirling around the stage to a dubstep version of some Amy Winehouse song. I still can't quite see the point of any of it, and now I have the additional conundrum of why anyone really thought Back to Black worked better as some shitty crunk ringtone with the bass replaced by that wub-wub-wub sound. Is it not enough that the poor woman is pushing up the daisies?

I say the older groups are probably better, but it's all relative. I remain aware of lumps of meat hurling themselves awkwardly across the stage to land with a thump whilst trying to smile, but it's never a convincing smile. It looks like they're mostly on the verge of shitting themselves, and the ones who aren't smiling have a face suggestive of trying to remember what the hell comes next. It's awkward and a long way from anything you could describe as graceful, but it feels somehow like we're all in this together. We all have to get through this thing so we can go home.

The styles are tap, jazz, freestyle, and a few others I've never heard of. I can see there are differences. I know what tap dancing is, and mostly they've all got that one pretty much nailed. Jazz involves sparkly top hats and a whole shitload of grinning.

Inevitably there are a few disquieting anomalies even without the missed beats and screw-ups. One group includes a girl roughly three times the size of everyone else. She's probably just regularly proportioned, but everyone else being so tiny makes her seem enormous, ungainly, and very difficult to miss; but this is some dance class not Broadway, so she's stuck with midgets of equivalent ability and that's just how it is, and now I have to feel bad for even noticing. Also there are two males in the group, and they dance well, which isn't a problem; but from my circumstantially blinkered point of view it jars. It feels forced and awkward. It's all weird and pointless, and I'm aware that my opinions don't really count for shit in this context, which doesn't make it any less weird or pointless.

Jamie herself is on a few times, and whilst I may well be biased, I can't help notice that she dances well compared to her peers. Her moves seem graceful with less huffing and puffing involved, and she looks as though she's enjoying herself rather than grinning like she's at a job interview or communicating something to people with whom she shares no common language. This is great because at least it means I won't have to lie to her mother. She dances with the others to Nights in White Satin, and thankfully it's not the dubstep version. It's not even the Dickies version, although that might have been interesting.

We end with ceremony and applause, speeches and awards, even for just showing up in a few cases. Those who have been in the class for longer than ten years take a bow, and it's most of them. I guess that dancing must be a lot harder than I imagined if some of this bunch have been at this since 2006. I don't know how many of these kids are likely to end up on Broadway, if that's an ambition. I still don't know what any of us were supposed to get out of this.

Afterwards we visit the south side and eat at some place on Military Drive, which is fine during the day but can get a bit shooty in the evenings. Once we've eaten, we drop in on Flipside Records because it's almost next door to the restaurant and I've always wanted to take a look at the place. The incense is so thick I can barely see the bongs and related paraphernalia on sale at the rear of the store, but I browse the racks of used records and find a Stranglers album I've been after, which is nice. Three Mexican girls come in and begin looking for some Moody Blues album. I can't work out quite which record they're looking for, but wonder if it might be the one containing Nights in White Satin.

If there's a pattern to any of this, I don't think I will ever understand it.

Durham, NC

'Don't you just love fandom?' the fanzine editor asked me. We'd met for a drink and there had been a peculiar lull in the conversation, at which point he just came right out with it. It was as much a statement as a question, and to my ears it had the cadence of isn't life so much better with the love of our Lord Jesus? The problem was that I didn't love fandom and I didn't know how to answer. I felt bad for the fanzine editor, and then bad for myself because he was the nice guy whilst I was the cynical gremlin of judgement, not even true to myself, choking back my own poison lest it reveal me as such and ruin the mood. I had once enjoyed the thing enough to have bought a ton of tie-in novels and to be able to hold a conversation with the fanzine editor, but my interest had dwindled when the television company resumed making the series; and my interest had further curdled to a faintly carcinogenic slurry as the show began to engender a new, more toxic species of fan, and as their numbers began to multiply.

My problem stems principally from the fan aspect, at least as I understand its contemporary meaning. There are plenty of things which I like but for which I'm reluctant to call myself a fan. There are probably entire episodes of The Sopranos which I can recite line by line from memory, but that's because I like The Sopranos. I have no need to belong to a greater whole of anything, or to define myself as such for the benefit of my peers. I see fandom as being about branding - dedication to a commercial franchise signified by a set group of ideas and images. Whatever may be done or said by those ideas and images is usually of importance secondary to their repetition; and when I say branding I specifically mean brand loyalty of the kind which either excludes everything external to the franchise, or which at the very least favours mainly that which echoes some aspect of the franchise, not least the fact of it being a franchise as distinct from any more organic expression of culture.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties. I no longer really draw comics as I once did, and as for reading the things, I've had an on-off relationship with the medium for the last two decades. There are comics I still enjoy, but nothing I enjoy so much that I need to pay fifty quid or equivalent for the privilege of dressing up as one of the characters whilst hanging out with others similarly costumed as what may as well be corporate mascots. I've never wanted to belong to any club which would have me as a member because if they want my membership then it's unlikely that they really know anything about me, or that they care to know anything about me.

Besides, in my day - seeing as I'm now of an age which allows for use of such a preamble - it was the fancy dress parade. I refuse to acknowledge the term cosplay - a clumsy conflation of costume and play by which participants distance themselves from an activity traditionally associated with very small children. It isn't the activity which particularly bothers me so much as the implicit anticipation of not only my approval, but my hearty endorsement of persons who feel best able to express their inner selves by dressing as Batman, or River Song, or Pinkie Pie. It isn't that I disapprove so much as that if you reduce yourself to a dull, juvenile symbol by your own free will, if you identify so heavily with what is essentially just merchandise, then I simply don't think that you and I will ever have much to say to each other because I suspect that behind the glitter and the cape, you probably won't have much to say about anything; and this makes me feel sorry for you, and disappointed. I don't want you banned, stamped out, or subjected to scorn, but neither do I want to have to think about you for any length of time, and you don't get a cookie just for being you. You shouldn't need my approval.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties, but Charlie said he'd been invited to one in Durham, North Carolina - right here in America. I told him, 'great - maybe me and Bess can fly up there and meet you or something.' This had been suggested in England back in June - one of those commitments you make as a sort of place-holder whilst knowing it will cost and therefore probably won't happen. I mentioned it to my wife as soon as I was home in Texas, and she provided the motive force which would ordinarily have faltered as I faced up to the reality of travel plans and plane tickets and places to stay. I'm glad she did, because Charlie is one of those people I should have seen with a little more frequency over the past couple of decades. We were at art college together, we attended comic book conventions together, and so much as any of us ever had a little gang, we were in the same one. Then our lives flew off in different directions and everything became complicated; but once a couple of decades have passed, life becomes too short to let the complications get in the way.

Charlie draws a hugely successful comic book called The Walking Dead, itself the inspiration for a hugely successful television show, and he is as such probably the closest I come to knowing a celebrity. My comic habit is severely reduced compared to what it was, and I haven't really enjoyed what few episodes of The Walking Dead I've seen. I can see that it's a quality product but it probably just isn't for me, which isn't unusual given there being very little television I like at all these days. Charlie, being both a fully grown man and a nice guy, doesn't seem to mind.

Because I don't just love fandom, I suppose I have a few reservations about the event, but the point is getting to hang out with my old pal, and getting on a plane and having an adventure, and the sort of adventure which Junior might hopefully appreciate despite it occurring in the real world rather than on a screen. It's the sort of thing which we, as a family, probably need to do more often.

We fly on Friday the 13th, changing at Atlanta then arriving at the airport in Durham after dark. We haven't spent long in the air when you add it up, although with all of the waiting around, it feels as though we have. Happily I have not been driven to silently grinding my teeth whilst assembling a series of barbed comments, as occasionally transpires when we spend time as a family. It's not that I don't get on with Junior but that his behaviour can sometimes be quite demanding. On bad days he may come across as rude, needy, and entitled, although in all fairness this could be partially because I have become actively attuned to notice such behaviour - feeding the irritation like you scratch at an itch. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and rests significantly on the fact of his being a twelve-year old boy, and things tend to go better when I'm able to keep this in mind. The prospect of the three of us up in the sky squashed into economy seats for a couple of hours was one I had been trying not to think about, but once it happens it's fine.

We land at Durham and take a taxi to the Marriott Hotel, the one in which the comic book convention is to be held. The trip seems to take some time and I guess that the airport is some way out of town. I find it frustrating that it's already dark because even just the bushes and trees at the side of the highway - what I can see of them in the glare of sodium lamps - are a testament to our being somewhere other than Texas. I've been to North Carolina before but just passing through, changing flights or a night at some anonymous hotel when a flight has been cancelled. I want to get a look at the state to see how well it compares with my mental image, cohered during many hours of listening to David Sedaris describe his formative years growing up in Raleigh. I want to be able to see if the place is anything like I imagined, but it's dark and all I can do is boggle at trees with tall, thin trunks and the unsettling absence of cacti. We come to Durham and I try to recall the name of the flooring company run by Paul Sedaris, younger brother of David, but I know it's unlikely that he would have an office or an outlet in Durham, or that we might just happen to drive right past it, or that it will mean anything if we do.

The hotel is huge and ornate, tall ceilings with gold fittings and many reflective services. We sign in, and the receptionist chuckles as she notes that we are from Texas. 'Like I couldn't tell.'

I'm wearing my Stetson and one of my favourite shirts, one that makes it look as though I'm wearing the state flag, most likely originated with either a garage or some fried chicken concession.

'He's not even American,' my wife chuckles, and we all laugh. The joke should be old by now but it still contains some magic.

We find the room and realise there's been a misunderstanding. We have two single beds. This means the boy will have a bed of his own as requested, but Bess and I will have to sleep whilst balanced side by side on a mattress with the dimensions of a long thin sofa cushion, and neither of us are what you'd call petite. Otherwise, the room seems fine. We return to reception and explain that one bed fails to meet out requirements as Texans. Unsurprisingly there's nothing they can do. Everything is fully booked due to the convention.

There seems to be a dining area, a raised enclosure at the heart of the lobby in which persons dressed as characters from The Legend of Zelda pick at plates of hotel food. We're all hungry, not having eaten fried chicken for a number of hours, and so we pick a table and direct meaningful glances at staff whom we hope are passing waiters but who may simply be porters. We watch entire teams of Avengers and other characters I don't recognise pass by and at least know that we are in the right place.

I've sent Charlie a text message to explain that we are here but I haven't heard back.

'He's probably busy,' Bess suggests.

Having myself been let down by mobile phones failing to work in foreign countries, contrary to the claims of the network provider, I'm not so sure; and I'm almost at the point of scarfing leftover fries from the abandoned plates at the table recently vacated by girls dressed as Japanese cartoon characters. I go for a walk to find a waiter or someone, just so far as the end of the lobby, although it should probably be noted that you could almost certainly park a Boeing 747 in this particularly lobby. I follow Spiderman, Deadpool, and a couple of Klingons past the bar to the glass double doors beyond which are the convention halls. I can see security guards and swarms of people dressed as cartoon characters on the other side of the glass. Stranger still is the promotional poster pasted to a board: NC Comicon and just one name in huge letters, Charlie Adlard.

'Fuck,' I say to myself, quite loudly.

I've understood my friend's fame at least since the days when he briefly considered changing his name to Charlie X-Files Adlard because that was how it was written by everyone else. He's now Charlie Walking Dead Adlard and it has only just sunk in. I have an urge to grab complete strangers by the sleeve and tug and point and yelp, 'that's my mate!'

I return to the wife and kid, and miraculously we attract the attention of a waiter who delivers conflicting statements: the kitchen is now closed but yes, he will be happy to take our order. We've been waiting forty minutes and are grateful just for the attention, even if we can't quite tell whether we've just ordered food or not. It eventually turns out that we have, and that with which we are served probably isn't great but nevertheless tastes amazing to us; and in any case Junior is past caring, being at the point of kid-overload having spotted the millionth person dressed as a ninja from some game or other. I wonder to myself whether he knows these are simply regular people dressed up, or whether he thinks those three stood over by the elevator are actual Mario brothers. It probably doesn't matter.

By the time we've eaten, it's late so we go to bed. Bess and I do our best, balanced on our thin strip of mattress. Junior snuggles under the sheet of his bed to yelp and hoot to himself for another couple of hours whilst playing games on his iPad, at least until I let fly with some of the barbed comments I'd set aside for just such an eventuality as this. Part of the problem is that he requires no more than about ten minutes of sleep a week, and short of gagging and locking him in a trunk, he can on occasion be slow to respond to suggestions such as shut up and go to sleep. I'm not even convinced he quite understands it as an instruction. If he considers his room-mates at all, I expect it's only in terms of what he will tell us about the game over which he's been yelping and hooting next morning, because we'll be dying to know.

Parenting is more difficult than it looks, although not necessarily more difficult than I thought it would be.

We don't sleep well, but we do sleep and are awake at eight. I have a bath and we return to the lobby for breakfast, which is when I notice that I've had a message from Charlie. Still jetlagged, he hadn't received my text until after we were all asleep. So we have breakfast and I give him a call. We arrange to meet at one of the dealers' tables within the convention, a retailer of signed Charlie Adlard originals.

We enter the convention and wander around for a little while. I don't see anything I understand well enough to want to buy, but probably about half of the attendees have come in some sort of costume and it's entertaining by itself just watching them. I stand by everything I said in the first couple of paragraphs, but find there is nevertheless something oddly life-affirming about this peculiar situation. Everyone seems to have made a significantly greater effort than they ever did in my day, and regardless of which corporate mascot is represented, I cannot help but appreciate how much fun they all seem to be having, and the fact that no-one really seems to give a shit what anyone thinks.

Why are they doing this?

For FUN, man! Pure fuckin' FUN!, I think, recalling the line from one of my favourite Baby Sue comic strips. I dislike fandom and cosplay and the obsessing over details which only matter because it's either that or recognise that one's entire life has been a waste of time, and I dislike these things particularly when they are pursued to the exclusion of every other potential cultural experience; but when you glance across a crowded room to see some guy dressed as Groot, the tree person from Guardians of the Galaxy - presumably on stilts inside a papier mache construction resembling a tree trunk, those objections are reduced as unto a fart in a thunderstorm whipped up by Thor himself.

My wife and I are speechless - awestruck, and Junior is close to exploding with kid-excitement.

Somehow even more impressive is a distinctly well fed Ghost Rider - a kind of supernatural biker with a flaming skull for a head, in case you've made better use of your life than I have. Our boy simulates flames with a day-glo orange wig over a rubber skull mask, and if any of his friends have pointed out that he's a little on the chunky side compared to the comic book character, then I guess he must have told them to piss off. I'm so impressed that I take his photograph.

When we encounter Charlie he is with a young woman whom he introduces as his personal assistant. Her name is Nicole, and by absurd coincidence it turns out that she once lived in San Antonio, and she lived in a place just off Eisenhauer, a road I cross on an almost daily basis. I briefly wrestle with the coincidence, and also the realisation that Charlie has a handler these days. He submits a fake growl and paws the air with imagined claws like an enraged bear, and I fail to notice that as we discuss hotels and schedules, Nicola is batting away autograph hunters so we can talk in relative peace. Bess fetches out a stack of issues of The Walking Dead because there are a load of folks back home in San Antonio all lined up for autographed copies. They can scarcely believe I'm friends with a genuine star, and Charlie doesn't seem to mind because he's a nice guy and I guess he's used to it. He whips out a magic marker and scrolls an elegant signature across the covers of copies for the kid, his dad, and Duncan, our boy's best friend at school whose entire family identify as Walking Dead obsessives. Charlie has a mammoth signing session this afternoon but will be free to talk under less hectic circumstances for a while after that, so we arrange to meet again around six.

We look around the dealers' room.

'Nice costume,' some guy tells me, because I still have my Stetson on. I was going to tell anyone who asked that I'd come as Hank from King of the Hill, but I suppose I could just as easily be that Walking Dead guy; you know - the one with the hat.

Image Comics have just published a hardback called The Art of Charlie Adlard, and I leaf through a copy at one of the stalls. It's strange to see some of the older material in this historical context, and I can remember him spreading pages of The Tar Baby across the dining table at my dad's house in Coventry. His figures had an initially exaggerated, cartoony quality, but have since tightened up, and his use of shadow has always been astonishing. It feels amazing to see someone I know personally having done this good, having gone so far in his chosen field without either compromise or turning into a dick. It's the kind of success story which sod's law generally prevents, but just this one time it has all worked out just right. I've known this for a while obviously, but now that I've seen the evidence I feel so proud of my old friend that it's embarrassing.

The guy running the stall comes over and tells me he can probably get hold of a signed copy if I'm interested. I buy Mark Millar's 1985 instead.

We have a look at the Lego exhibition, and then Junior stops at a stall selling wooden props, an actual size recreation of Thor's hammer or a replica of the gun with which Bloodstab shot Facepuncher in that issue of Foe Destroyer. He examines a selection of fake swords, then picks an angular wooden shield with a black squiggle on the front, which is handy because it's the only item airport security are likely to allow on the plane. It's from The Legend of Zelda, Junior explains to us in greater detail than we really need.

'Shield bash!' he keeps exclaiming, pulling a melodramatic expression and thrusting the wooden plaque at an imaginary enemy. 'Shield bash!,' he tells us over and over.

The thing looks kind of underwhelming, pretty much an irregular offcut of wood to which someone has added a fabric handle and varnish; but Junior thinks it's great and that's what matters. Even as I write, six months after the fact, I notice that he still sleeps with the thing in his bed from time to time.

Eventually we get tired and return to our room to rest, passing an impressive Asian incarnation of Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who as we do; and then we share an elevator with an individual who I'm fairly certain is the real Captain America.

I only rest for a little while, and then go out for a walk around Durham just to get the lay of the land. Strangely it feels like England to me, or at least more like England than Texas ever has. The trees are all different but they're more or less the same shape, and whilst curbstones and buildings are definitively American, the air tastes similar, or maybe it's some chemical on the breeze, or just the fact of it being so cold as to warrant layered clothing. I experience no nostalgia because I am reminded of those freezing days when the sun barely rose above the level of the rooftops on the other side of the street, which is something I know I will never miss. I walk so far as something called the Old Five Points. It seems to be a run down neighbourhood suffering the first incursion of gentrification so far as I am able to tell. There's a parking lot full of people with some kind of makeshift stage being set up, and some guy asks if I would like to be included in their prayers.

'I'm good,' I tell him as though I've just been offered a cigarette, smiling like we both know how hard it is to give them up.

After an hour I make my way back to the hotel. My wife is awake and is watching the news which is now full of explosions in Paris but with not very much in the way of actual information. Everyone interviewed says that they think what has happened is terrible, which doesn't really need stating. I guess we must be gearing up for another war.

At 4.30PM we return to the lobby as arranged and meet Charlie for a beer. He's been signing autographs for most of the afternoon, both him and Gerard Way, the former singer of My Chemical Romance. It turns out Gerard Way is here because he's written a comic book called The Umbrella Academy which has proven popular, winning awards and everything. I try to remember what I know of My Chemical Romance, which isn't much but I have an impression of them sounding like the Bay City Rollers with black eyeliner. Charlie doesn't seem to have any strong opinion of the music, but he regards Gerard Way himself as a decent guy. Typically we spend most of the time talking about bands, one of the threads of our shared narrative being the band for which I once played guitar supporting the one for which he once played drums. Charlie has recently been in the studio with the Cosmic Rays for whom he presently plays drums. We talk about the album they've had pressed, and the new guitarist, and the old guitarist, and absent friends, and America. Junior has his picture taken with Charlie, but is otherwise suffering from stage fright. Bess later observes that for her the best part of the entire weekend was seeing the smile on my face as Charlie and I caught up.

He has to return to signing duties around six so the rest of the evening is mostly just bumming around and filling time for Bess and myself. Junior plays games on his iPad. At one point I step outside for a walk and buy an issue of NC Slammer from a gas station.

NC Slammer is a local newspaper comprising the mugshots of everyone arrested in the Wake County area presumably since the previous issue, giving names and reason for arrest - overdue library book to kiddie fiddling to mass murder and all points in between. The paper is divided into sections, grouping certain kinds of perp together. The Love Birds - Jail Birds section, for example, lists married couples who have been arrested together. This pair of doozies, reads one typical and dubiously grammatical entry, was arrested in Auburndale, FL for stalking and harassing their neighbors. And their neighbors' elderly parents. Tearing down their fence, putting up surveillance cameras, hollering out obscene insults, shining high intensity lights through their windows all night long. Threatening to kill their dog! and mug shots of the unhappy couple are inset into a pink love heart. A disclaimer runs along the foot of the page reading all suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, just in case you had forgotten. I suppose if nothing else it brings comfort to angry shut-ins, at least confirming that the rest of us really are out to get them.

Who's paranoid now?

I take my copy of NC Slammer back to the hotel and show it to Bess.

'This is what your friends and relatives think America is like,' she sighs.

We begin the next morning with another walk. I've spoken to Charlie and it doesn't seem like we're going to get another chance to see him, as we suspected would probably be the case. He's committed to another day of dishing out autographs. He's now at the stage where certain fans even have his autograph tattooed onto their flesh. We step outside the hotel and see a sandwich board pertaining to this morning's signing session. Charlie and the bloke out of My Chemical Romance will be signing your shit at ten in such and such a building, it says. The building in question is across the other side of the square. Fans clutching copies of Walking Dead and Umbrella Academy are already lined up in their Frankenstein boots and black eyeliner. The queue is about three wide and maybe two-hundred feet long, and it is eight in the morning - two hours to go before the doors open.

'I guess Charlie's going to be busy today,' my wife observes.

We have a stroll in the crisp morning air - something we don't really get in Texas - and then we gather up the kid and get a taxi to the airport. The taxi driver is from Somalia and he spends the journey telling us about his country, which I find fascinating because he's giving us a positive spin in telling us about his family and so on, reminding me that the qualities of a person or a place are rarely the same as what we Americans have heard about them on the news - using we Americans here for the sake of argument.

We fly back to San Antonio.

I have seen my old friend, and I have seen how well he's done for himself. I have seen a different state of the country in which I now live. Junior has his shield and is still proclaiming 'shield bash!' every thirty minutes, throwing dramatic shapes for the benefit of an imaginary audience; and he has his signed copies of comics for himself, his dad, and his friend Duncan. In my diary I have noted:

These conventions seem significantly less macho than the ones I used to go to, and there are more little kids so the atmosphere seems less oppressively spotty and teenaged.

I still don't love fandom, and I still think adults who dedicate their entire existence to what is in essence escapist children's entertainment to the exclusion of everything else are fucking idiotic, and I still have nothing to say to the person whom comedian Louis CK described as a non-contributing product-sponge cunt; but the weekend has nevertheless opened my eyes. I shared an elevator with Captain America, and it's an encounter I will never forget.

The Love That Isn't Quite Sure How to Spell Its Name

Even if you regard yourself as absolutely 100% decided in your sexuality, never to be swayed from your chosen path whether that be heterosexual or otherwise, is there not just one person who might be able to turn you, to change your mind? Is there a person you've been drawn to for reasons which feel weirdly inconsistent with what you have thus far understood about yourself, and what makes you tick, sexually speaking?

I'm paraphrasing, but this was the thrust of a question posed by Danny Baker on his phone-in radio show as it used to be on BBC London. Calls came in, and one bloke admitted that he often found himself watching videotaped footage of David Beckham's performance on the pitch over and above any real interest in football, whilst Baker himself confessed to a fascination with Bob Hoskins which even he found puzzling. As for myself, I was at work whilst the show was broadcast and was therefore unable to phone in, but were it otherwise I suppose I would have named Perry.

It wasn't even anything I'd thought about at the time, back in 1991 or whenever it was. All I knew was that there was something strangely appealing about the guy, and that I couldn't quite work out what it could be. He was my friend, a fellow postman and a couple of years younger. He was sort of funny, but not side-splittingly so, and he was bright, but some way short of anything required by either rocket science or brain surgery, and he was nice by some definition I still can't quite put my finger on. Also, he was incredibly good looking - at least so far as I could tell, not that I would really know what with my never once having been confused in that respect etc. etc. Brown hair, square jaw but not harshly so, blue eyes and a boyish smile, sort of like Leonardo DiCaprio as a charming English farmhand of the early sixties. Except I didn't notice any of this because he was just Perry, my mate from work, obviously.

Maria on the other hand certainly noticed, which was doubly annoying because within two weeks of her having started at our office - by which point I had made the formal decision that I would fancy her - she and Perry were an item; and because I was Perry's friend, I was soon also a friend to Maria and as such had ceased to fancy her, which was probably for the best. Perry put in a good word for me, and so Maria would give us both a lift in her car, out to our respective walks in Catford. I was delivering to the road which, by coincidence, was where Perry lived with his parents and sister.

Sometimes Maria and I would sit in her car, waiting because Perry had told us at last minute that he needed to take a shit. Eventually he emerged from around the corner of the office, red faced and with the three or four bundles of second post stuffed in his delivery bag.

'What happened?' Maria asked. 'Did it come out sideways?'

As Perry jovially told her to fuck off whilst taking up residence of the passenger seat, I noticed an unsettling feeling of pleasure at the extremely attractive Maria and I no longer being alone together. It was confusing. It felt like some horrible sixties film by someone French. We both loved him, or something.

I had a heavy comics habit, so Perry would lend me James Hudnall's The Psycho - to which I never quite warmed - or VHS tapes of the Manga series 3X3 Eyes, or the film Tetsuo; the Iron Man. He once lent me a tape recording of what appeared to be himself playing some animé based game. I watched ten minutes before I realised I would never understand what I was supposed to get from the viewing. In return I think I may have lent him Watchmen and maybe Frank Miller's version of Batman, works which had already come to be regarded as old school classics by 1991. We exchanged media, but never quite connected across whatever divide existed, either cultural, age or whatever. The shutters had come down behind me as I left school, meaning that neither video games nor Transformers nor anything bearing too close a resemblance to an episode of Marine Boy would ever make any real sense to me.

One evening I somehow ended up at Perry's house, having gone back after the pub. It was kind of awkward and we'd been drinking since about three. I'd watched the animés and he had presumably read Watchmen, but still we could find no common ground beyond the usual grousing about work. I say work meaning Royal Mail, although Perry now apparently had some sort of job on the side, a male model of all things, presumably standing around in his underpants and pointing at distant objects with a beatific smile. He'd told me about it, but I didn't really want to discuss the subject. I was glad he had found something besides the back-breaking shite at Royal Mail, but felt otherwise a little uncomfortable, as though just talking about it might take me somewhere I wasn't sure I wanted to go. He showed me the cartoon strip he'd been working on. It was terrible. It looked like the work of a ten-year old, and I suddenly realised he wanted, even needed my approval; and then he was crying.

'Are you okay?' He obviously wasn't but it seemed right to ask.

'You just don't know, Lol,' he sobbed, affording me a briefly terrifying glimpse into his world. He was just bright enough to realise that he probably wasn't that bright, and delivering pizza leaflets alternating with standing around in a pair of y-fronts was probably as good as it would ever get for him. I think he believed I might know something that he didn't, that I might be able to see a way out of our bullshit lives of carrying heavy weights in the pissing rain six days a week. This was all the more terrifying because I knew I had elevated him to a similar position, envying his casual veneer of confidence, his clear vision uncluttered by all that art college bollocks which was yet to pay off, and the way in which women all turned to check him out when he entered the room and he didn't even seem to realise it. I wanted to be him, but it seems even Perry didn't want to be Perry.

I stepped quietly out of Perry's room in the house of Perry's mum and dad, and caught the bus home. The next day we were hungover as we stood together at the sorting frames, which was not in itself an unusual occurrence. Our voices were just a little more self-consciously deeper, more gruff than they had been the previous morning; because we were men, and we had drunk such lakes of lager as to have forgotten last night, whatever it was that had happened after the sixth round. We were men and we laughed because that's how we were.

Théza

Marian's mother had a place in the south of France, a pension as is the term. She'd been a secretary at the British Embassy in Paris - or something of that sort - and had a long standing connection to the country. She had bought a house in the village of Théza, situated in the Eastern Pyrenees, formerly part of Spain. Once she would live there half the year, but by the time Marian and I were a thing she was old and disinclined to have adventures. The pension was still tended by Elke, her friend from the village, and would be offered as a potential holiday destination to friends and relatives, should anyone be passing that way.

The father of my first girlfriend had been some sort of big knob in the Conservative party, but otherwise I tended to form my sexual liaisons with those from a similar socio-economic background, at least until I met Marian who was related to all sorts of historically famous scientists, bankers, millionaires, poets and the like. They lived in mansions in Richmond, except for Marian who lived in Dulwich in a house which her mother had bought for her with small change found down the back of the sofa. Having been raised in a home in which the toilet paper was an original Gutenberg Bible hung upon a nail in the crapper, Marian never quite grasped that having been given a house demarcated her as socio-economically distinct from the rest of us. In fact she seemed to regard it as what you or I might consider a shitty break, what with inheritance tax and everything.

So of course Mum had a place in the south of France. It wasn't a big deal. If anything it was another massive pain-in-the-arse, an inheritance which Marian would one day have to sort out all on her own, as usual.

It was 2007, and we were heading to the pension for a holiday, Marian and myself. Actually getting aboard the plane in the first place had been an adventure in itself, an adventure in which we missed the scheduled flight because Marian had needed to engage in some litter-related task so important that she wouldn't actually tell me why she was doing it at the precise interval of our already being late. I wouldn't have understood. I was too stupid. We tried again the next day, paid extra, and were soon flying across the English channel heading for Perpignan.

At this point I was more or less the only person I knew who had never been to France. I'd been to Mexico five times, but not once to France, working with a habitually limited budget and never having had any really good reason to go there. It certainly wasn't that I had anything against France, but the lure of free accommodation was a significant inducement; although ultimately it wasn't exactly free.

Alighting from the plane, we piled Marian's many, many suitcases and my single backpack into a taxi and made for the village of Théza, a distance of six or seven miles. Marian had assured me that her French would be sufficient to get us by, which was a relief because mine was rotten, having lain more or less fallow for the two decades since secondary school; not that it had ever been great. As I marvelled at the unfamiliar landscape, she began chatting to our driver. I listened, astonished.

'He's speaking Spanish,' I suggested.

'Don't be stupid,' Marian instructed me with a long-suffering look before resuming her discourse with fluttering hands, wide expressive eyes, and an exclamation of oh la la every three or four sentences. I didn't know much about the French as a people, but I had a hunch that oh la la was no more a common exclamation than bowler-hatted English gentlemen describing anything as either spiffing, topping, or jolly dee. She sounded like a character from 'Allo 'Allo!, but there probably wasn't much point to my mentioning it.

After a few minutes I realised that our driver was indeed speaking French but with a strong Spanish accent. This was confusing to me being as my Spanish was fairly decent, so it felt like I should have understood what was being said better than I did. Of course, I realised, the Eastern Pyrenees had once been part of Spain, and we were only ten miles or so from the border.

We arrived in Théza at about four in the afternoon. It was warm but overcast. The village seemed small and deserted and reminded me a lot of the smaller villages I'd passed through in Mexico, the dust and the adobe buildings, the cacti and the scrubby plants adapted to dry conditions. The pension, was a two-story corner house overlooking a square. The windows were covered with either mesh or wooden shutters. The door was protected within a porch of rusting iron bars which Marian unlocked with a huge set of mediaeval looking keys. The place seemed old, and I had a feeling that no-one had been inside for some time. Marian also had this feeling and  articulated it with short, venomous sentences confirming that everything was indeed just as shit as she had known it was going to be, and that someone would pay. That was probably going to be me, given that this was how it usually worked, although I was still unsure of just what I'd done wrong this time.

We inspected the interior of our pension in the south of France. We were ankle deep in cobwebs, dust, and dead leaves which had blown in beneath the door of the upper floor balcony. There was no electricity, but we found the junction box and switched it on, and were then able to determine that there were no functioning electric light bulbs in the house. On the positive side, the gas was connected, so we would be able to cook. I went outside for a smoke, and realised that against all odds, I was enjoying myself. I'd already decided that I liked France, and the village seemed to present a thousand exciting possibilities for discovery and unfamiliar experiences.

Back inside, Marian had begun sweeping leaves from the upper floor, down the stairs into the main room, and then out onto the street. I took up a broom and joined in. After an hour or so, the place looked okay to me, but Marian continued, narrating her efforts with ambiguous threats.

'It seems all right now,' I suggested. It was hardly the Ritz, but we had cleared most of the crap and rubbish. I had stayed in worse places.

Marian's response indicated that it was far from all right, and that someone or other was going to suffer for this indignity. I listened and gradually pieced together that the house was supposed to have been cleaned prior to our arrival.

'She's done this on purpose,' Marian said, referring to her own ageing mother. 'I told her we were coming two weeks ago. She's done this on purpose so that we have to do all the cleaning.'

'Would she really do that?'

'Yes, Lawrence. She would.'

I had met Marian's mother and seriously doubted it. Given the woman's advanced years I suspected either that she had forgotten, or had been unable to decode any specific requests from her daughter's hysterical jumble of passive-aggressive demands and edicts.

'Well, we're here now and that's the main thing.'

I went out to find a shop, somewhere I could buy food as Marian continued to clean. I'd recognised the gleam of mania in her eyes. It wasn't so much that she had an actual formal cleaning obsession, but you could be forgiven for thinking that she had, and she would clean and clean and clean until the subject of her efforts shone and she was satisfied that the extent of her own suffering had reached sufficient levels to tip some poorly defined cosmic balance in her favour.

I found a small shop on the next block along, a family run business by the look of it. Their selection seemed erratic and eccentric once you were past the basic vegetables, but it wasn't like there was anywhere else to which I could take my custom. I bought potatoes, onions, garlic, bacon, eggs, fruit juice, bottled water, tomato puree and a loaf of bread. I attempted to pay in Spanish, having apparently forgotten that I was in France, prompting extended miming and chuckles.

Yes, I was indeed English, and no, my understanding of the French language could not be relied upon. More startling to me was that the couple who owned and ran the shop knew Marian's mother from the times she had lived in that house on the corner. They were pleased that she had once again returned to the fold of the community, albeit by proxy. I got the impression that they liked Marian's mother, which made perfect sense because so did I, and so did everyone else who wasn't Marian. Realising I was English, the couple began to talk about their love of rugby football. Whenever they visited England, they went to watch the rugby, and it was at this point that the conversation became too confusing for me to follow.

I returned and made an omelette with all that I had bought but for the fruit juice, water, and bread. It tasted great, as food often does when prepared under siege conditions. Marian took a break from her cleaning to eat and to reiterate that her mother would ordinarily have made a phone call to a person named Elke, the friend who lived elsewhere in the village, and Elke would have arranged for the house to be cleaned in advance of the arrival of guests. This had not been done, Marian suggested, because her ageing mother liked to make her only daughter suffer, and to let her down, just as the woman had been letting her down her entire life. There was that time when Mum had taken some fancy man into the pub to get drunk on booze, abandoning young Marian, leaving her in the car with just a bottle of pop and some crisps; and there was that time when...

I myself still favoured the maybe she just fucking forgot hypothesis, but that was one argument I wasn't going to have. Instead I took the view that the house had required cleaning when we arrived, and that we had now cleaned it to a reasonable standard and might therefore reasonably commence our holiday, and that this was all the information we needed. Curses directed towards an elderly, absent-minded, and almost certainly innocent woman presently located nearly a thousand miles north of the village were therefore a waste of fucking time; but I said nothing, and we carried on with the cleaning, now at the stage of actively seeking out that which might benefit from a wipe rather than the simple damage control of before.

That night we slept exhausted in separate beds, an arrangement on which Marian insisted for some spurious reason with which I couldn't be bothered to argue because I was beyond caring. I snored, or I moved around, or I did something else to prevent her sleeping. She always had trouble sleeping. I attributed this to her rising no earlier than noon each day, usually going to bed at about three in the morning, and rarely ever doing anything which could reasonably be termed exercise; but then I wasn't actually a medical professional.

Next morning I made us toast and another omelette, and discovered the balcony of the upper floor looking out across the square. It could only be accessed by means of a sturdy plank placed across the stairwell from the upstairs landing, about four feet by five with a deck chair and a host of cacti in their pots. I cleaned out all the dead leaves and decided that this would be my sanctuary for the duration. I could smoke out here, and Marian was disinclined to cross the plank, so I was safe. My hands and legs were itching from the thousand tiny cactus spines which had become embedded as I'd been cleaning, but it was worth it. I sat back, took in a sun much brighter and warmer than its English equivalent, rolled myself a fag and looked forward to whatever France had in store for me.

Whatever France had in store for me was going to have to wait, because Marian had another three days of cleaning in store for me. I tried to coax her towards something logical along the lines of how we didn't actually need to see our faces in any fittings besides the bathroom mirror, but she wasn't having it. She had to work this one through, and so we went at it for another two miserable days until I'd had enough and pointed out that I hadn't come all of this way, and paid to come all of this way to clean her mother's pension to a higher standard than I demanded of my own accommodation.

Saturday came and Marian decided that we deserved a day off, this being something unrelated to my suggestion. She declared this as though it was a treat, a reward for our work despite most of mine having been noted as typically substandard and executed with a characteristic lack of enthusiasm. On Wednesday evening we had taken a break from cleaning and gone for a walk out along the Route de Corneilla, a narrow tree-lined avenue running out into the vineyards south of the village. We had picked rosemary which grew wild and in great abundance and used it to season our omelette. Now we caught a bus and followed the same road to the historic town of Elne, the original capital of the region before Perpignan. We spent the morning wandering around the mediaeval part of the town, and the undeniably spectacular cathedral which had been consecrated in 1069, and then we went for lunch.

The café was a hole in an ancient wall with seating and tables arranged on the other side of a peculiarly desolate square. I watched as a fat white grub, slick with olive oil, looped its way out of my salad towards the edge of the plate.

Marian thumbed through her French-English dictionary to find the word for caterpillar. 'Chenille,' she announced.

We laughed for a minute, and then ate in silence.

The food was not great, and ordinarily Marian would have told me to go and complain on her behalf because I was a man and they would take notice of me. Now, having freshly established that I was in all senses useless due to my poor grasp of the French language, she was unable to give me such an order without contradicting herself. Her acknowledging my present state of uselessness demanded that I had existed in a prior state of non-uselessness, that I had once been useful, contrary to her stated views which might therefore be exposed as fallible.

By this point the silence was killing me. Marian had barely uttered a word as we dutifully plodded around the town and its cathedral. She could not be induced to conversation.

'I've had about enough of this,' I heard myself say, eventually.

'What?' She appeared genuinely surprised.

'This is too miserable for me. I want to start having fun.'

'We've been having fun.'

'We've been cleaning your mother's pension all week. This is the first time we've emerged out into the sunlight and I may as well have been wheeling a statue around on a handcart. You've hardly said a word. Am I really that boring?'

'Haven't we been having fun?' She really did seem puzzled. 'What about the chenille?'

We paid up and wandered some more, mainly markets and shops selling rugs, blankets, and the sort of thing which appeals to tourists. The conversation remained conspicuously absent but for the basics of directions.

'Is it this side do you think, or the other?'

I looked at the map, and then at the two bus stops of which only one would take us back to our village. 'I think it's that one.'

'Are you sure?'

'I have no idea. You've been here before. I haven't. I don't even know why you're asking me.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

'I'm not.'

We waited an hour, and then watched as a bus listing Théza amongst the destinations written on a piece of card behind the windshield picked up passengers from the other side of the road, whizzing away before we could react.

'You said it was this side!' Now she sounded furious.

We crossed the road to wait at the other stop, standing apart. She sat in the shade at the stop. I stood about twenty feet away in the sun. I didn't want to be anywhere near her. Another hour passed and we caught the next bus. We boarded and came together on adjacent seats, but it felt fraught, like some teacher was forcing me to take the seat next to the school bully on a long coach trip because it was that or nothing.

'Are we going to talk again at some point?'

'I'm talking now, Lawrence.'

I fumbled through a series of vague accusations rendered impotent, defused of the specific object which would unleash the full force of her psychosis. The question was why do you have to be such a cunt all of the fucking time? but it was difficult to express in the anaemic language of the self-help workshop, the only language to which she would deign to respond under such circumstances.

There may have been further cleaning, but the rest of our time in the south of France is something of a blur, vague impressions occurring in no particular order. We went for walks, and we drank in a local bar. At one point I bought sausages from a local butcher, and we talked about our respective countries, and I realised I already liked him more than my girlfriend and travelling companion.

Eventually we met up with Elke, the friend of Marian's mother who had apparently not been informed of our arrival and had thus failed to have the pension cleaned in advance. Elke was German, married to a Spanish man, and a lovely woman. She recalled Marian visiting many years earlier as a child. She served us food and wine, and then drove us to Collioure for a day out. Collioure is an astonishingly beautiful coastal town, very old, with a labyrinth of tall, thin streets scaling the steep hills looking out over the Mediterranean. It was the first time I had actually set eyes upon the Mediterranean sea. It was vivid and distinctive, and I couldn't imagine mistaking it for any other large body of water. I felt I had a sudden and new insight into the paintings of all those artists drawn to this part of the world around the turn of the previous century. Marian was able to shop for the sort of things hand-crafted from twigs which had been targeted at tourists such as herself, and I was able to have an intelligent conversation with Elke, so at last we were all happy.

Another day was spent failing to travel to some other nearby town - possibly Perpignan itself - once we realised that Théza was directly served by a single bus which went through daily rather than hourly. We had a relatively wonderful evening out in Collioure with Elke and some other friend of hers. Then on the last day she took us to the beach at Saint-Cyprien, which was developed, and very windy, and suggestive of David Niven sipping Martinis whilst adjusting his cravat; but it was a new place, and that in itself was interesting. As Elke picked us up, she apologised - quite unnecessarily - for having failed to realise that we lacked any means of getting about. Had she known, or had one of us mentioned it, she would have happily driven us around and shown us the sights for most of the two weeks, but the two weeks had come to an end and it was over.

Marian had mellowed following the initial episode of mania, and the setting had been of a beauty sufficient to ensure that I enjoyed at least the latter part of the trip. I'd had very little direct experience of the French only two weeks before, and I found that I liked them very much, and that I liked what I had seen of France.

During one of those evenings when we hadn't really been engaged in anything, somewhere between eating and settling down for the evening with a book - there being neither television nor radio in the pension - I had noticed villagers playing pétanque, the local variation on bowling, in the square outside. I suggested we might go out and join in, or at least watch. Marian said she would rather not as she knew a few of them. This was news to me. She explained that she had lost her virginity to one of them many years before, and it had occurred right here under this roof. She had been about fifteen, and he was eighteen, and he'd locked the door. This was why she had been wary of coming here, which was also news to me. She had hoped that enough time had passed, but apparently it hadn't.

'You were raped? Is that what you're telling me now?'

Apparently it wasn't, or she couldn't bring herself to accept that it had been such, and as with many of the events which had destroyed Marian's life, whilst there was clearly some deeply unpleasant aspect, it was difficult to identify the precise detail of the trauma. My guess is that she was either talked into something she didn't want to do, or willingly did something for which she later felt considerable shame. I have friends who have endured unambiguously horrific sexual assaults in their lives, the kind of attacks involving knives and screaming for help, and mostly they have found ways to rise above the horror and to get on with their lives because it's either that or let it destroy you completely. Either Marian had endured something which had destroyed her, or this had been another wrong of lesser consequence worn as a hair suit by someone who had in all other respects enjoyed a life of unusual privilege. Going on previous form, I had a strong hunch it was the latter, but then I wouldn't presume to understand the intimate psychological landscape of another person, and certainly not Marian.

Maybe this was the answer to my unvoiced question why do you have to be such a cunt all of the fucking time?

I don't suppose I will ever know; but I think back to that holiday now, and all I can recall with any feeling is France and the wonderful Mediterranean landscape; which seems about right.

Florence la Petite Goth Français Gênante

It was Autumn 1993 and Mandy and I were renting a flat in Derwent Grove in East Dulwich. The street comprised mainly Victorian terraces which had been divided into flats. We shared our front door with the couple who lived on the uppermost floor, and adjacent to the steps leading up to our shared front door were a set of steps leading down to the basement flat, situated below street level. I had moved from a single room in a house in Lewisham, and Mandy had previously occupied a bedsit on the corner of Melbourne Grove.

Our relationship was heavily seasoned with crossed wires and misunderstandings, but with hindsight it was probably exactly what both of us needed at the time. Our union was hardly a match made in heaven, but it beat the alternative. Cautiously approaching thirty, I had become increasingly cranky and terminally single, developing a mournful nostalgia for my previous girlfriend of ten years earlier. Sarah had been my first and was at that point my only, but for a hugely depressing one night stand in the summer of 1987. I had not known the tender touch of a woman in a decade, five drunken minutes of 1987 excepted, so I was wearing black clothes, listening to Death In June records and taking them far too seriously - having not yet realised that there could be anything more sinister to their frowning misery than a simple neoclassical aesthetic. Mandy on the other hand had been interred within a secretarial job which she insisted had been driving her mental, and she had most recently been involved with some guy who sounded less than wonderful from what little she told me. This was to be a new start for the both of us, not least because neither of us had tried living with a partner.

Leaving school, Mandy had spent three years studying at the Cheshire School of Art and Design but became disillusioned and moved to London, ending up in a secretarial job. Eventually she realised that she had somewhat lost her way and would have done better to pursue some more artistic calling. I suspect this was part of my appeal in that I had already done a fine art degree and come out of the other side. When we first met she had already begun to shrug off the somewhat drab persona demanded by her initial career choice, ditching a bubble perm resembling that of a Liverpudlian footballer, dying her hair, buying music, going to gigs, dressing with more flair, and generally making an effort to have the sort of fun she probably should have had in her teenage years. In some respects this was where we contrasted in that I'd never been a party animal, and never would be, and Mandy was always much more of an extrovert than myself; but it was nevertheless good to see her enjoying life, having a blast after so many years in a windowless nine to five.

'Is he a goth?' her friends would ask when they phoned to hear all about the flat and the new boyfriend.

'He has a gothic soul,' Mandy explained, probably in reference to my taking Death In June far too seriously. I'd begun to wear more extravagant shirts, and we had dyed my hair but it had gone wrong and come out navy blue rather than the desired black, which had made life interesting at Royal Mail for a couple of weeks; but I'd never really wanted to be a goth, and I wasn't very good at it.

Mandy on the other hand was now giving it her best shot. She had packed in the secretarial job and signed up for an art foundation course at one of the local colleges. She dressed well and always looked very striking when we went out together, but more than anything she needed goth buddies, a group with which she could compare notes and acquire definition; and this was how she met Florence.

Mandy and I went to gigs and to clubs, but I think she would have liked to go to a great many more gigs and clubs whilst I could have happily lived with fewer. Her appetite for entertainment being greater than mine, it seemed only right that she should branch out on her own, and branch out she did, and specifically to Paris. She went there on holiday with a friend, but investigated Parisian goth clubs under her own steam, and in one such place she had struck up a friendship with a slightly younger, endlessly enthusiastic goth girl called Florence. Florence had an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the scene, of wearing black clothes, and presumably of doing that dance where you make funny shapes with your fingers and wave your hands across the front of your face. She was small, theatrical, and cheery, the sort of person with whom it was easy to imagine yourself making friends.

Mandy and Florence wrote to each other from time to time - these being the days before widespread internet access - and met on at least one other occasion prior to my first encountering Florence. I wasn't really keeping track, it being more Mandy's business than mine. In January 1993 Florence sent a letter written on the reverse of a large colour photocopy assemblage of assorted photographs of Nina Hagen. The letter read as follows:

I hope you're fine and that the new year has begun good for you. I have pictures of Niall Murphy but they're not very nice 'cause he has red eyes on instead of having two beautiful blue eyes! I hope to see when I'll be to London on February. I'll certainly pass my Birthday in London. Do you want I send you Mephisto Walz album?

Have you received my photos and my postal card? Rachel - my penfriend whom you had spoken with by phone - has written me a card in which it was written Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. I'm waiting for your photo and another letters and cards.

Alien Sex Fiend will come in France for a concert on June and Nosferatu on April. Will you come during Easter holidays? I'll be go and see The Addam's Family II to the cinema with friends. I hope is better than the first. I didn't really enjoy it.

Do you like your new flat? Is it comfortable? What is look like? Big flat, with or without a balcony, small kitchen? I have a chinchilla but it bite. I prefer my rabbit which is nice and sweet. The kittens run in all the house. It's a really hell!

I'll come February 13th to February 26th to London but I'm afraid of being put in a family in Heathrow. It's far to your home, but I think I'll go to Slimelight and Electric Ballroom discos. I haven't your new number-phone. I don't know when I'll tell you that I arrived in London or I'll go to pub or something else. This is a problem.

I'm going to do my homeworks now ' cause I have an exam in one week.

The letter is signed love from Florence and French Goths, with a large-eyed biro drawing of Nina Hagen as postscript to illustrate the additional observation of Nina Hagen is wonderful, isn't she?

Niall Murphy was then the singer of Nosferatu, a band for which Florence expressed an unusual level of devotion. She would refer to individual members as though she knew them personally, but then maybe she did know them personally. She was young, tending towards a certain intensity typical of her age group, and as I eventually began to appreciate, she seemed to make more sense in a club environment with the distraction of music, lights, and spectacle where communication was reduced to basic expressions of approval or otherwise. Anyway, this was the impression I got from what Mandy told me of subsequent encounters with Florence. The tribal bond and the sense of belonging to something, the unity of black pointy shoes - these were fine up to a point, but beyond that point was daylight and conversation, and even without any appreciable language barrier, Florence didn't really seem to be interested in much beyond goth clubs, Nina Hagen, and the beautiful blue eyes of Nosferatu's Niall Murphy.

The evening she came to stay was peculiar - this small, flappy Gallic pixie wrapped in ten miles of lace turning up at our home like some exotically twittering bird. She and Mandy were heading out to one of the clubs mentioned in the letter, a place Florence had been meaning to visit for some time. Somehow I had been delegated the task of coming up with an address, despite my having no knowledge of any club scene, goth or otherwise. In the absence of Google or any better ideas, I phoned the offices of the Melody Maker - the music weekly of which I was a regular reader.

'My girlfriend has some random French penfriend over to visit,' I explained to the journalist to whom the switchboard had connected my call. 'She wants to go to a club called the Slimelight, and apparently it's my job to find out where it is, but I've never heard of the place.'

'I haven't heard of it either,' the journalist told me.

I read Melody Maker with enough attention paid to recall that it was usually Simon Price who covered the more conspicuously back-combed artists.

'How about Simon Price? Maybe he would know?'

'Yes, it sounds like his sort of thing,' the journalist admitted, but the man in question was not available to answer my question, and I didn't really care enough to push it further..

The address was found by some other means in any case, and so Mandy and Florence got ready to go out on the town - doing their make-up, getting togged up in their most ostentatiously gothic clothing, and discussing Nina Hagen and Niall Murphy's dreamy blue eyes - at least that was what Florence seemed to be talking about. I was beginning to get the impression of Mandy having bitten off a lot more than she really felt like chewing. It was as though Mandy had mentioned in passing her once having enjoyed an episode of Star Trek, then found herself sat down and forced to watch all seventy-nine episodes back to back whilst being served Star Trek themed snacks by someone dressed as Spock. The whole goth deal was fun for sure, but Jesus Christ...

After an hour or maybe two during which I'm fairly certain I could hear Florence dishing out tough-love suggestions to my girlfriend, encouraging her to become ever more gothic in appearance, they emerged, ready at last to call a cab and head off for a night of doing that dance. They came into the kitchen so that I could take a photograph. In the photograph they stand poorly lit in front of a shelf of my comic books. Florence looks ready to go. Mandy wears the startled expression of someone recently informed of having been adopted, like she's doing her best to adjust to this new information. It isn't that she looks unhappy so much as that she's trying to work out what the fuck just happened.

Their night out at the Slimelight was, so I gather, okay, but not something Mandy wished to repeat too soon. Florence had in the meantime gone off to stay with either a relative or some other friend. She would be returning to us in a couple of nights.

'Really?'

Mandy nodded. She wore the same look of restrained panic as in the photograph, so I left it at that.

The evening arrived without fate intervening to inform us that Florence had regrettably been called back to Paris, perhaps for some last minute expert inspection of a monument dedicated to the striking blue eyes of Niall Murphy prior to its official unveiling. The door bell rang, and we immediately knew that Florence had returned just as she had promised despite our refusing to think about it.

Mandy wasn't moving.

'Aren't you going to answer the door?'

She said nothing and we both looked along the hall towards the front room. The curtains were drawn and the lights were out. The hall light was also off. From outside it would appear as though we were not home. We turned off the kitchen light just in case and sat in darkness.

The bell rang again and footsteps thumped across our ceiling, down the steps and into the shared hallway. Florence was now inside the building knocking upon our inner door. The footsteps of our neighbour thumped back up to his or her own domain, then back down again in response to further knocking. Florence's twittering explanation fluttered around the gaps in the wood towards our darkened kitchen. She had come from France and she did have not our number-phone, but our neighbour had no advice to impart. Only Mandy and myself could say for sure that we were at home, and we were both as quiet and still as statues.

'We're really doing this?'

There was no need for Mandy to whisper an answer. For once we were thinking approximately the same thoughts.

Everything went quiet, and we resumed breathing. We had almost certainly heard the front door close as Florence gave up and went on her way. We tiptoed into the front room and drew back the edge of the curtain just enough to see the girl stood upon our doorstep, not going anywhere.

Shit, I either thought or said very, very quietly. I settled back into a chair from which I intended to discreetly observe Florence's departure before announcing the all clear, when the time came. She remained as she was, thankfully unable to see into our front room, patiently waiting for our return - five minutes, ten, then fifteen...

'Why doesn't she just go?'

'I don't know,' I hissed. 'I suppose she thinks you got delayed and will probably be back soon. She's your friend, not mine.'

'Yes. I'm well aware of that, thanks very much.'

After about half an hour, I realised that our visitor was nowhere to be seen. I cautiously moved around so as to be able to see through the gap between the edge of the curtain and the window frame, looking out onto the street. 'I think she's gone.'

We sighed a mutual sigh of relief and crept back to the kitchen to boil the kettle and make tea. It still seemed too soon to turn the light back on even though it was getting dark. I tried to imagine what it would be like to find oneself alone in a foreign city, and to have the people with whom you were staying turn out the lights and pretend they were out. I'm pretty sure Mandy was thinking the same thing. We were terrible people, but this understanding of our dreadful behaviour was not in itself more painful than listening to Florence talk about Nina Hagen and Niall Murphy's beautiful blue eyes.

We heard more knocking, but different.

'She's gone downstairs.'

'Oh fuck.'

We listened as whoever lived in the basement answered their door, then Florence's twittering explanation, then a door closing but we could still hear the conversation. We returned to our front room on tiptoe and listened. We could hear most of the conversation as Florence explained her dilemma to our downstairs neighbour, then after a while - maybe ten or twenty minutes - we realised she was telling our downstairs neighbour about Nina Hagen and about Niall Murphy and his beautiful blue eyes. This was worse than simply refusing to answer the door. We had forced innocents to take part in our suffering. Florence would not go away. She would sleep on the sofa of our neighbours, twittering on until someone finally called the police. We knew that we had to end this charade and face the music.

We sneaked out of the house, taking minutes to carefully open then close each of the two doors without a sound, and then once we had both crept to the lowest step outside, we made the big, loud show of stamp stamp stamp and well, here we are home at last, and where can my friend Florence be? Perhaps we have missed her...

Bizarrely, it didn't work, further obliging us to wait what we considered a likely time before going down to the basement to ask neighbours with whom we had never before spoken if they had by any chance seen an eccentrically dressed French girl hanging around and looking lost.

'She is here with us.'

Oh really? Well, that's a relief. We were so late and we were worried we might not be back in time blah blah blah...

It seemed to work in so much as our collective conscience wasn't going to be kicking us in the ass for the rest of the evening, although the downside was another endless night of observations on Nina Hagen and the beautiful blue eyes of Niall Murphy. Mandy was knackered and really didn't want to go out clubbing, but was now doomed to do just that by the mighty force of Florence. Neither of us understood how we had been overpowered by something so small and tweety with such an imprecise grasp of the English language, but by now we knew that we had only one option - to do as Florence said and wait for it all to be over. Admittedly I had it easier in this respect. Florence understood that whilst I might have a gothic soul, at thirty I was just a little too old and fat to be bullied into dressing up as a vampire and dancing to Christian Death records. Mandy gritted her teeth, pulled on the lace, and out they went. I guess she had an okay time, or at least as good a time as someone who would rather have stayed at home was going to have.

The next morning was a Sunday, and it was weird to wake with a twittering stranger in our flat greeting the dawn with fluting discourse on the subject of Nina Hagen and just how blue that guy's eyes looked in a certain light. I tried to make conversation that wasn't about either Nina Hagen or Niall Murphy, digging out my copy of the Ronsard album by Déficit Des Années Antérieures, or DDAA as their name is usually rendered.

'They're French,' I explained helpfully, immediately recognising myself as the old man getting down with the kids by digging out his Herman's Hermits collection.

Florence regarded me as though I had just suggested a threesome, then remembered something she had forgotten to tell Mandy about Nina Hagen. It being Sunday, I began to make breakfast, specifically a huge passive-aggressive fry-up. Mandy had introduced me to vegetarian bacon, as sold by the excellent SMBS delicatessen in Lordship Lane, and although It did a poor job of replicating bacon, it was nevertheless delicious in its own right. I supplemented my soya rashers with beans, fried potatoes, fried eggs, fried bread probably. I didn't even like fried bread, but I was really getting into my theme. Florence was the opposite of anything or anyone you would find in a transport café as the sun rose to dissolve all those pasty-faced Bauhaus fans, and so my artery-clogging breakfast assemblage came together as a sort of invocation of whichever forces would send our tweety intruder on her way.

'Mmmm - delicious,' she observed without obvious sincerity as she headed for the door. Within an hour she had gone from our lives, presumably heading back to Paris to spend her fluttery enthusiasm on those who better deserved it.

On Punching Brick Walls

I could be wrong, and I may quite easily have conflated one bad memory with another, but as I recall it was the night of the party. The party was in Overhill Road in East Dulwich, not far from where Bon Scott, one time vocalist of the Australian hard rock band AC/DC famously and tragically cashed in his chips. I didn't know the people, although I had delivered their mail for a couple of years back when I'd been on that route. They were friends of Dora the Explorer, my girlfriend of the time. I'm not sure how she knew them.

I hadn't wanted to go to the party, because I dislike parties as a general principle. I dislike the noise, the smoke, the terrible musical preferences of other people, and my face hurting from grinning at strangers and people in whom I have either little or no interest. I am simply not a person who enjoys social situations, and typically Dora the Explorer told me that this was because I never made the effort to enjoy them, and that I needed to branch out. I was by now well accustomed to her holding four fingers aloft and telling me that I could see five, so there didn't seem to be much point in fighting over it. It was true, I conceded, that the party was in the future, and that I had no psychic ability by which I could see into said future, and I was thus unable to say with absolute conviction that I really would hate every second of the party; and so by default Dora the Explorer was right as usual.

Her name wasn't really Dora the Explorer of course, but she was short and with that same haircut, so the name will do for now. I suspect the anger issues and what we may as well refer to as short woman syndrome were possibly more pronounced than with her animated namesake, but then cartoon Dora was lucky enough to have been born in some undifferentiated third world Banana republic and was thus spared the living hell of growing up in Richmond with an expensive private education and the grim spectre of inheritance tax enforcing sale of the place in France when mother joins Bon Scott in that great big shareholder's meeting in the sky.

So we set out for the party, walking up Lordship Lane towards the Plough, or the Goose and Granite as some faceless corporate carbon blob had retitled the historic pub at the junction of Lordship Lane and Barry Road. We waited at the bus-stop, then caught a bus two-hundred yards to the corner of Overhill Road. Dora the Explorer had declared that this was a long, long way, and too far to walk, because apparently she was only two feet tall and had already walked to the shop at the end of her road that day. I couldn't be bothered to argue. I already knew I would be wrong.

My powers of precognition had been similarly acute with regards to the party. We stayed for three or four hours. I watched Dora the Explorer hand out business cards she'd had printed, advertising her services as a gardener. She had stopped turning up at the two or three regular gardens which she supposedly tended, but I guess she liked the feel of thrusting her business cards in the faces of complete strangers. She called it networking, and this made her a more successful person than the rest of us.

I failed to find interesting conversation because I couldn't hear anyone over the probably ironic seventies disco records rattling speakers arranged all about the house, and the people out in the garden were smoking joints, or partaking as they say in the business. I've always found the smell unpleasant, and the conversation which comes with it dull and repetitive, because no-one can just light one up; they must talk about it as well. I hated the party, having decided that I didn't want to enjoy myself, as Dora the Explorer later explained.

It wasn't a good evening. We weren't fully recovered from the argument which had concluded with my punching a brick wall. As stated, I'm no longer absolutely certain of the terrible party having followed this particular disagreement, but even if it didn't, it may as well have done.

She had arrived at my flat - my new flat - all dressed up and ready to go, purple backpack bulging with business cards, Overhill Road dutifully marked on the map as it sang away in the back pocket of her jungle adventure shorts. If there's a place you got to go, I'm the one you need to know...

It wasn't that I made a habit of punching brick walls, but it was something I did from time to time when experiencing significant frustration. I was almost always on my own, and I never punched too hard, just enough to vent sufficient anger as to allow me to think in a straight line once more. It seemed more dignified than throwing my head back and howling like either a wolf or Robert Plant. I had a friend who broke his guitar hand by punching a shopping centre. It had struck me as a particularly stupid thing to do, not least because the motivating frustration had, as I recall, been some idiocy entirely of his own making, either a heroin habit, or a girlfriend calling him an insulting name having discovered him to be shagging someone else on the sly. Whatever it was, it had been a situation to which poor me didn't really apply, but nevertheless that had been the thrust of his campaign. Whatever my failings, I was at least better than that.

I had moved into my new flat, smaller than the previous one and with the rent costing three times what I'd been used to. It wasn't an ideal situation, but it had been the best I could find, although quite naturally I was not entirely happy about it. As usual, Dora the Explorer's sympathy was not overwhelming. Her lips narrowed, and she flicked her hair, raising her head to regard me through school ma'am spectacles.

'Well, perhaps you should have listened to me for once.'

'Listened to you...' It felt as though I rarely had the opportunity to do anything else, and I was confused as to where I'd screwed up this time given that I'd hardly been actively seeking smaller and more expensive accommodation.

'You'd be helping both of us by moving into my spare room, but no,' and there followed a detailed list of the ways in which I had let us both down.

Dora the Explorer had a room in her house which she rented out to students from time to time. Laura, her most recent lodger, had recently left, leaving Dora the Explorer with no income other than the gardening jobs in which she had lost interest. She had suggested that I become her lodger, thus killing two birds with one stone, providing her with an income, and bringing us one step closer to living together as a couple. I tried to explain that I didn't want to move into her spare room. I had too much stuff, I was in my forties, and I had no wish to be in a relationship with my landlady. Additionally, I doubted I would be particularly easy to live with, and knew for sure that this was equally true of Dora the Explorer.

She expanded on her disappointment, and I understood that my problems had come about because I had failed to do as Dora asked. This was her understanding of the situation. This was her understanding of most situations. She began to explain how hurtful it was to know that I had no respect for her opinion, that I had failed to value her advice, taking another problem to the place in which they all came to rest. Dora would figuratively kick you in the shins, and then complain that you had not thanked her, and when finally you thanked her because it was the only thing that would shut her up, she would complain that you had not sounded sincere and ask you to say it again, and to keep saying it until she believed you.

I went over it again, why I didn't want to move into her spare room, trying as hard as I could to emphasise why it was potentially as bad an idea from her perspective as from mine. As I finished, I realised I had mistakenly reiterated the case for my defence in Mandarin Chinese, and that she hadn't understood a word. Again she explained how hurtful it was to know that I had no respect for her opinion, and that as ever I failed to value her advice.

'Shall we go to this party?' I suggested, hoping to sound breezy and enthusiastic, and that she would be so confused as to forget what we'd been talking about. Unfortunately I forgot to not speak Swahili, and my suggestion came out as yoo a lọ si yi kẹta?

She went on, her voice rising in tone as she began to resemble a tiny female Davros with a Johnny Ramone haircut. She was beginning to rant, the usual stuff about how I never listen, and how her Daleks would once and for all wipe the scourge of the Thals from the face of Skaro. She held up her hand, showing me four fingers which I knew would be five. I understood on some level that this was fucking ridiculous, and that I wasn't going to be bullied this time. An irresistible metaphorical force met a figurative moving object and I experienced a sort of mental white-out.

I had walked out into the hall and thumped the wall next to the door to the kitchen. There were a few small cracks in the plaster and my hand hurt like hell, but for a second all I could think of was how beautiful was the quiet. Then I felt awkward, ridiculous.

Dora the Explorer sat in silence. She had begun to cry.

'What's wrong?' I was amazed at how calm I felt.

'I was scared you were going to hit me.'

'I would never have done that.' This was true. The idea seemed ludicrous. I just didn't work that way, but I knew then that I had only given Dora the Explorer something new with which to beat me over the head. From that point on my terrible temper would be invoked each time we argued as a result of my failure to obey without question. She would refer to battered women, and tell me that this was not a fate she wanted for herself, thank you very much.

Next day we travelled to Richmond to meet her mother, the woman who was the alleged cause of all Dora the Explorer's problems, or at least those problems which weren't directly my own fault. I liked her mother as I had never had a good reason not to. She was small, frail, very old, and almost unfeasibly upper-class. Her face would light up with genuine affection as she finally made it to the door when her daughter came to visit, but the smile would fade as Dora the Explorer began to upbraid her about the state of the seemingly clean and tidy house, or items in the fridge which were past their sell by date. Margaret, a neighbour of similar age and horsey heritage drove us all to a nearby botanic garden somewhere past Hampton Court. We ate a civilised lunch in the restaurant.

'I say, what did you do to your hand, old thing?'

I regarded my swollen knuckles. I had made a brave attempt to affect nonchalance, to eat with one hand as though it were a conscious choice, sawing things in half with the edge of the fork.

'I had an accident at work.'

'Oh goodness! You really must be more careful, dear boy.'

The concern was unexpected but appreciated. I savoured the sensation of someone giving a shit about my well-being, these elderly matriarchs of a world I would never understand, a world which had somehow spawned the passive-aggressive control freak to whom I was betrothed. I looked around the table, at the two old women enjoying the day out and relishing the splendour of their surroundings, then at Dora the Explorer as she scowled at her food, already silently composing the usual complaints regarding service or standards; and I wondered what any of us could have done to deserve this.