The Don Maclean of the Rapping Scene

I invented rap in 1979. I was a slightly dishevelled underachiever at Shipston-on-Stour Comprehensive school, and I invented rap having found myself embroiled in beef with Gordon Everett who had slandered me in a poem read out before the entire class during the English lesson. Gordon's poem suggested that I farted quite a lot and might consequently be considered a somewhat pungent child, and it cleverly made these suggestions whilst eschewing the sort of language which would have prevented it being read out loud and therefore validated by Mrs. Jones, our English teacher. The poem was pretty funny. I recall the hysterical laughter of my class mates as Gordon painted a picture of my supposedly persistent trumping in awkward situations, and despite the humiliation, I myself laughed because it was funny.

To be fair, Gordon's poem may have been composed in retaliation to some earlier character assassination fired from my own cannon, figuratively speaking, but if so then I don't remember what it could have been. Perhaps the memory of some previous victory was eclipsed in that moment when an entire class of kids were driven to clutch their sides and roll around on the floor by the hilarity of the suggested scale of my energetic flatus.

If Gordon wanted a war, I decided, then I was down for whatever, if not by those precise terms. I wrote Gordon Everett and His Hand, which followed the same basic rhyme scheme as Captain Beaky by Keith Michell but carried a cruder, more confrontational message:

The biggest benders in this land,
Are Gordon Everett and his hand,
That's his hand, his balls and dick,
A-doing things that make you sick.
His hand it then goes up and down,
And Gordon makes the people frown.

I had just turned fourteen and had been given a tape recorder for my birthday, a mono portable with a built-in condenser microphone by which I made hissy recordings of my fluting, pre-pubescent voice. My first act with this fantastic new bit of technology had been to invent the mixtape - as they have become posthumously identified by fedora wearing tosspots. I borrowed Paul Moorman's extremely well played copy of K-Tel's Loony Tunes album and compiled two volumes of what I named Songs for the Hard of Thinking in order to have a whole ton of novelty records in one convenient and hilarious place - My Boomerang Won't Come Back, Susan Christie's I Love Onions, Transfusion by Nervus Norvus and others supplemented by the Goodies, Toast by Streetband, and some Sex Pistols - whom I considered to be pretty much cut from the same cloth because they said rude words; and naturally I drew my own cover for Songs for the Hard of Thinking. I wasn't really into music as such at that age, but I loved novelty records, and inevitably it occurred to me that I could make my own.

Soon after inventing the mixtape, I invented rapping and then sampling. I pressed play and record and flowed with the maniac lyrical of Gordon Everett and His Hand directly onto the tape, punctuating my verses with the trumpet break from the original Captain Beaky 7" by my boy Keith Michell - just pausing, then unpausing and dropping that wax right into the cut. That shit was dope.

I took the tape to school, and although that shit was perhaps a little too dope for the classroom, I made sure everyone got to hear it. I recall Gordon's face, a mixture of amusement and horror as he listened to me drop science, implicating him in acts of enthusiastic masturbation - something I myself would certainly never have done - and possibly also homosexuality, bestiality and cross-dressing. I don't remember the lyrics in their entirety and I don't have the tape to hand, but I don't recall pulling any punches. I'm pretty sure that was where 2Pac got the idea for Hit 'Em Up.

With hindsight, I find it all a bit regrettable, not so much because of the juvenile homophobia - which, in case it isn't fucking obvious, might be blamed on it being 1979 and my being fourteen years of age - but because I liked Gordon; and even though I haven't seen him since the early eighties, I still theoretically like Gordon and have no bad memories of him as a kid. Anyway, I suppose what matters is that from conflict was born innovation and enterprise, in this case my inventing both rap music and sampling - or at least scratching given how I was cutting Keith Michell's beats on a wheel of steel. Many sources will credit my developments to that guy out of the Fatback Band, or to the Sugarhill Gang, or Kool DJ Herc and his Bronx pals, but they're all lying.

Anyway, the point is that I was messing around with tape recorders at an early age. The machine upon which I'd recorded my damning indictment of Gordon's alleged love of wanking conked out after about a year and had to be replaced. Specifically the pinch roller wore down meaning that tapes were eaten as often as they were played, but the tape head still worked so I yanked it out of the casing, reattached it on a length of wire, and drew sections of magnetic tape across it by hand in order to create sound. Laurie Anderson did the same thing, mounting her tape head upon a violin body with which she would play lengths of tape suspended in a violin bow in place of the traditional strings. Emboldened by the success of my experiment I also made clunky cassette sized tape loops, and larger ones played on a 1960s reel-to-reel tape player donated by a friend of my mother. By the time I first came to hear a Throbbing Gristle record, I was already acclimatised to the notion of raw noise as music, of blocks of sound jammed together as part of a larger composition.

Around the same time I had joined the Pre-War Busconductors, roughly speaking a punk group with three of my friends from school. We improvised and recorded songs through a combination of ham-fisted instrumentation, cardboard box percussion, noises and shouting. Thematically we explored areas not dissimilar from those investigated in Gordon Everett and His Hand - songs about people we knew and whom we suspected of engaging in amusing sexual practices. At least a few of the songs featured rapping mainly because Graham had worked out how to play the bassline from Good Times. Unfortunately, although we were all familiar with Rapper's Delight, our rapping was very much the rapping of clueless white people who don't really understand rapping - the singy-songy bollocks heard on twee, light-hearted news features about rural schools who record their own charity rap single.

Mr. Thompson is always in class,
Unless he's shouting 'keep off the grass!'

Still, pitiful though our efforts were, we all liked the general idea of the form, and before I left home much of my final summer in Shipston was spent cruising around the tiny market town in Anders Longthorne's car blasting his tapes of Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and various Street Sounds label compilations whilst pretending to be American. We had outgrown the Pre-War Busconductors - just about - but I was still recording my own music as Do Easy - a name taken from a William Burroughs novel on the grounds that I'd seen some bigger boys do it and I wanted to be like them. By now I had a double cassette deck with a fancy microphone input and was able to layer sounds to create complex if slightly hissy pieces of experimental music. I made covers for my tapes and sold them mail order through the posthumously eulogised network of DIY tape folks. I didn't sell enough to make a living out of it, but enough for the operation to at least pay for itself.

Years passed and I drifted in and out of making my own music, just as I drifted in and out of bands formed with other people. By the mid-nineties I had reached a sort of crisis point. I was done with bands and with being helping hand to someone else's vision of a band. The Dovers had sort of fizzled out for no particularly good reason that I can recall. I hadn't really liked the single compact disc I'd helped record as a member of Konstruktivists, and whilst I'd enjoyed playing with UNIT - or Academy 23 as they had been when I joined - the task of remembering how to play someone else's increasingly baroque chord changes and time signatures was becoming more chore than fun, and Andy - our main man - had proposed a number of Doctor Who themed tracks, one of which was to be called Travels in the TARDIS. Deciding I would rather repeatedly slam my penis in a fridge door than be involved with such tomfoolery, I brought my guitar home and elected to concentrate on War Drum.

War Drum was the name for whatever it was I was doing during the nineties, rhythmic but mostly instrumental music produced by unorthodox means, sometimes harsh and noisy, but not industrial because I still had some measure of self-respect. War Drum was thematically fixated on Mesoamerican culture because that was my absorbing passion and it seemed like an area I could explore through the medium and at least come up with something a bit more interesting than David Tibet's milkman grunting Aleister Crowley's favourite limericks through a digital reverb with the decay set to fifteen minutes.

I was trying to make the music which I wanted to hear simply because no-one else was. I felt I had learned a great deal from the process of putting out my earlier tapes, and this time I was going to do it right. So I borrowed as much equipment as I could, and took my time playing and recording, refusing to regard anything as finished until I was absolutely confident of it being the best that could be achieved within the limitations of what technology was at my disposal. Over and over I revised that which could have been better until it was better, and if I couldn't get it working it was scrapped. I spent time on the design of the covers, and the printing of those covers, and had copies of my tapes professionally duplicated onto high quality TDK chrome cassettes at Gold Dust Studios in Bromley - which was a good and somewhat hilly hour away by Royal Mail bicycle. A great deal of work went into producing those cassettes as a quality product, as something aspiring to represent the tape cassette as a vital, democratic, and accessible medium.

Sadly not everyone took the same view. I received the occasional enthusiastic fanzine review, and shelled out for advertising in the pages of The Sound Projector, but cassettes were apparently over, and no-one cared. I could barely pay people to listen to my music. Scat Feed Fever fanzine - which seemed to loom relatively large in weirdy music circles of the time - had denounced cassettes as the unworthy fruit of those who were merely mucking about on the grounds that the true artist would blow sailors for five dollars a pop if that's what it took to press a compact disc. The editor of Scat Feed Fever - just one of many Gira-felating industrial music autograph hunters busily turning himself into Phil Collins - seemed to typify the process of an underground becoming its own orthodoxy, which was depressing.

This didn't really make much difference to my recording habits because while an audience numbered in double figures would have been nice, the music was its own reward. By the end of the century, the composition of that music had changed considerably in reflection of my own evolving tastes. I'd more or less given up on listening to rock music, bands of four blokes with guitars or grunting industrial wankers programming their way back to 1988. From where I stood, the music I had known was half-lifing into a jangly sludge of undifferentiated corporate toss. Meanwhile all I heard at work was hip-hop, rap and R&B, and that's what the people whom I liked at work generally listened to. With Oasis and the Kaiser Chiefs as the alternative, it was probably inevitable that my ear should drift in that direction.

Whilst I'd never been what you might call a hip-hop head, not by any definition, I had kept tabs on the form at least up until the advent of LL Cool J, whose career had struck me as largely pointless. I didn't mind putting my hands in the air, but it took more than was on offer to induce me to wave them in the manner of someone who just didn't care, and I was fucked if I was going to listen to some bloke reading out his bank statements over a tinny drum machine just because the record had turned up in the same section as Whodini and Public Enemy. By the time I'd taken my fingers out of my ears, rap had become huge and confusing, and it was difficult to know quite where to start so I didn't bother; but gradually and inevitably I did bother, because for the most part it was sounding pretty good on the radio at work. I picked up a couple of CDs - having finally caved in and allowed my friend Eddy to furnish me with his old compact disc player - and I liked what I heard. The music had thankfully evolved beyond whatever that tinkling sound had been on those LL Cool J records, and no-one seemed to give a shit about what all the ladies in the house were saying; and as music built from sources which themselves weren't always conventionally musical, it suddenly began to make a lot of sense. Having served the first quarter of a twenty plus year sentence in Royal Mail, I could at least appreciate the mood of the shirtier rap numbers, so I bought more and more of it, immersing myself in the form until it became obvious why it had taken me so long to get it.

Rap, I realised, is more or less its own self-contained world. It draws references from all over, but there's no point in expecting a rap record to provide a variation on that which is done by other musical forms. It is something which can only be truly appreciated on its own terms, not some pool into which toes may be dipped between Killing Joke albums. Rap is, amongst other things, about being shat upon from a great height whilst maintaining a sense of humour, or at least venting screw-faced wrath in entertaining terms. My job was my life, and it was often hellish, and MC Ren rapping about shooting as many white people as possible before the cops took him down made more sense than it probably should have done given that I myself am white. The anger was universal, and it it made Motorhead sound like flies buzzing around in a jar. This, I would suggest, is because rap speaks mostly to the individual, usually specifically to three or four mates of the bloke holding the microphone. It tends to take a personal rather than a general view, and is as such the opposite of Sting telling us all to behave. The bottom line is that if you don't get rap, then it probably wasn't speaking to you in the first place; and yet for some reason it was speaking to me.

Inevitably its influence began to emerge in my own music, although initially as a shift of emphasis rather than any radical revision of what I was already doing; at least until I went back to rapping. I had to try it, just as I'd kicked off twenty years before with Gordon Everett and His Hand - my own version of the novelty records which constituted everything in my collection not featuring Ringo Starr. My first efforts weren't much better than charity raps about Mr. Thompson telling us to stay off the grass, but they were fun to write and record, and failure only inspired me to try harder. On the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Pre-War Busconductors I commemorated the occasion with a CD single released in a limited edition of two copies, one for myself, one for Pete, the only other former Pre-War Busconductor with whom I was still in touch. I built the track from samples of our tapes and the sort of unlistenable crap that usually emerges when white people decide that it's funny to pretend to be a gangsta. In my defence, it wasn't actually much worse than most of Kid Rock's oeuvre, but that's hardly a recommendation.

The song was called 2 Deadly 4 Fame.

Of course it was.

The thrust of 2 Deadly 4 Fame was that the Pre-War Busconductors had been such a potentially revolutionary force that the authorities had found themselves obliged to ensure that we remained just a bunch of potty-mouthed school kids whom no fucker had heard of making a racket in Graham's bedroom whenever his mum and dad went to Stratford. I played the track to Nadim from work, seeing as how we spent most mornings comparing notes and he had become, by default, my rap sensei. He listened in silence, and then regarded me with genial pity, somehow finding it in himself to concede some points for my at least having a go.

'Your beat is nice,' he observed generously, and in that moment I heard the lyrics through his ears as borne of Peter Glaze wearing a backwards baseball cap on Crackerjack whilst complaining about Bernie Clifton's comedy ostrich to Don Maclean in rhyming couplets. I threw myself into the task of becoming less shite, writing and rewriting over and over until the smell was at least not quite so bad as it had been. This music was rooted in honesty, so I was fucked if I was going to let myself turn into Tim chuffing Westwood keeping it hot to death for the yoo-kay. I had a ready-made angle in that it was difficult to miss the parallels between your rap basics and the punky DIY tape aesthetic which had informed my earlier efforts; so I emphasised this with samples from old Sex Pistols or Adam & the Ants records. I had recorded 2 Deadly 4 Fame as Loc Dogg B in a general spirit of piss-poor satire, which I abbreviated to the more pragmatic LDB, roughly a variant of my initials suggesting decibels.

I bought a CD burner and began to work just that little bit harder, bouncing between four-track portastudio master tape and a CDR, playing samples by hand on my tinny Casio SK1 keyboard or a borrowed Alesis Quadraverb, cueing and dropping in tapes with the sort of split second timing I hadn't realised was possible. The music began to take shape, and my vocal began to improve to the point of becoming something I could listen to without wincing.

'You've gotta let me jump on one of your tracks, Lawrence,' Nadim told me after the latest tape I'd sent his way. I was keen. By this point I had thrown my efforts entirely behind rap, reasoning that if people preferred Current 93 and Lustmord to my previous, more abstract and atmospheric work, then that was their tough shit and they got what they deserved. The weakest aspect of my new music was my own voice. Lyrically I felt that I was okay, or not too much worse than the average, but my delivery lacked force. It wasn't convincing. If I could just get more able tonsils to talk shit over my beats...

I'd given a tape of one of my instrumentals to Bert, another guy from work who already had a successful day job producing R&B flavoured garage at his own studio. One of his tunes had received heavy rotation on Kiss FM back before the station turned into the audio equivalent of Nuts magazine. He had an incredible voice and would wander around the office singing about his own penis with the lungs of Alexander O'Neal or one of those guys. My head is small but my seed is large, he crooned in surreal fashion, then why is my top lip so big? suffixed with the bewildering locative Brixton, yeah!!! running up and down the scale with the kind of flourishes which made the aforementioned O'Neal sound like Mark E. Smith. Bert seemed impressed with my tape, having apparently assumed my musical endeavours would probably be a bit of a tuneless racket. He said he would work something out and already had a few ideas. I said I was quite keen on the big, big seed in Brixton theme and he seemed to lose interest. With hindsight, I suspect he didn't like the idea of being a performing seal on my track.

Eventually I settled on the idea of pulling together an album length CDR, simply as something on which to focus. I recorded and re-recorded the tracks over and over until they sounded right, and I even managed to get in some guest vocals from Andy Martin and members of the Ceramic Hobs with whom I shared common ground in the DIY tape thing, and who at least understood what I was trying to do. Eventually I finished a thirteen track album called May Contain Sexual Swearwords but found myself unable to burn a definitive CD master copy for numerous tedious technical reasons which inevitably arise when reliant upon faulty or borrowed equipment because, despite working a back-breaking forty hour week, I still couldn't afford decent gear; or I could have done had I been prepared to live on bread and jam for a few months so as to prove my worth to the editor of Scat Feed Fever, but I'd been down that particular aisle of Morrisons in my twenties and had no desire to return. Additionally, my day job was so physically and psychologically demanding as to require a certain degree of post-toil luxury in order to keep me from spazzing out and doing a Hungerford - real milk rather than a big weekly can of powdered, that sort of thing.

Unable to mix May Contain Sexual Swearwords, I kept on recording, honing my craft, then going back and reworking the aforementioned May Contain Sexual Swearwords as soon as it began to sound a bit rudimentary. I continued writing, working on my rhyme schemes, getting metaphors to perform double or even triple duty, how to build secondary internal rhythms into each line, and so on. The more I wrote, the more I began to appreciate just what you can do with rap. It isn't just about making stuff rhyme, because any wanker can do that. The skill of rap is in saying whatever the hell you want to say, regardless of the limitations of the most obvious available terms, bullying the language into doing exactly what you want it to do. Whatever you want to say, there is always a way to say it even when every other word has to rhyme with bicycle.

Anyway, as I waited for equipment repairs, the tracks kept coming. I put tapes together for the sake of keeping tabs on my own progress, and Nadim seemed to think I was getting somewhere. He particularly seemed to enjoy a number called Fuck the Boss.

You fucked up good. Top marks. Well done.
When you started this job we all thought you might be the one
guy we could rely on to not be a cunt,
But now you're hated by almost everyone.
Almost? Yeah okay, Joe still thinks your cool,
But the poor fucker never really was the sharpest tool
in the box. You cock! You pain in the neck!
No-one fucking likes you and you look like Shrek.

'I've got to get on one of your tracks,' Nadim told me with renewed enthusiasm.

Either I'd been asking him to drop by and record some vocals after work for most of the previous six months, or I'd only imagined myself doing so and had in reality said nothing.

'Okay,' I told him. 'Have you got any tapes?'

He had sent plenty of cassettes and CDRs my way, but mostly mixes of the Dogg Pound, Xzibit, C-Bo and others; nothing of himself. I'd begun to doubt that he had amassed much actual time on the microphone, and the claims that would suggest otherwise had been made so long ago as to make it difficult for me to recall the details.

'Come over this afternoon. We'll sort something out, yeah?'

'Sure.'

He lived in one of the Bredinghurst flats, a peculiar architectural jumble resembling a Cubist ocean liner just off Overhill Road, the road in which Bon Scott, the singer of AC/DC, was found dead back in February, 1980. Bredinghurst was on the top of a hill and could be seen from all over East Dulwich and beyond. The story ran that the architect had committed suicide, and the flats certainly looked as though they had been conceived by someone busily in the process of losing their shit. I chained my Royal Mail bicycle to the fence at the back, overlooking Dunstans Road, and entered the labyrinth. After ten minutes of walkways leading to nowhere, I found the place by following my ears. I banged on the door for about five minutes until the music dropped a few decibels and Nadim emerged.

'Come in, man. I was listening to some music.'

'Yes. I can tell.'

I went in. He had one of those CD turntables, the first I'd ever seen. It seemed weird and futuristic and had been set up at the centre of the main room. Deafening bass rumbled through the red tiled floor, rattling large glass windows overlooking the road of much sorrow and pilgrimage for AC/DC fans all across the world - deafening bass like a truck passing and with something electronic pinging away. It sounded familiar.

'What's this?' I had to shout, mime and point.

Nadim had already slipped his headphones back on and was cueing up the next track. I had kind of expected come in, my brother followed by cups of tea and maybe even a few biccies, but that scenario was looking increasingly unlikely.

He picked up a CD case and waved it in illustration - the Goodfellas album by the 504 Boyz. I had it at home and now I realised why I hadn't played it much, because it was supposed to sound like this, not the bass-free twanging with which I was loosely familiar. I knew Goodfellas as mainly a pinging noise over which Master P suggests his listeners might like to Wobble Wobble.

A secondary, clearly unrelated noise intruded. I looked around and saw the rubberised tip of a walking cane banging against the window. We were on the fourth or maybe fifth floor, and the windows of these flats each surmounted a thin balcony with walls dividing each section from that of its neighbour. Some person living next door was out there, leaning over and reaching around to bang their walking stick against the window.

The music stopped dead.

I could hear just the tip of the cane bouncing off the glass and some tinnitus from the music. 'Maybe he wants you to turn it down a little,' I suggested helpfully.

'That fucker!' Nadim slid back the window frame and leaned out but the walking cane had already been withdrawn. He cursed and shut the window. 'One time I pulled it out of his hand and threw it.' He gestured in illustration and I imagined a walking sticking spinning into the sky, high above the grass towards Overhill Road.

'He probably thinks the music is a little bit loud.'

'Every time I play, that old cunt always starts up.' Nadim sucked at his teeth and shook his head. He hit a button on the deck and the 504 Boyz came back, still inviting us to Wobble Wobble.

I thought of my own upstairs neighbour who would stamp or drop heavy furniture in protest to the volume of a television set turned down so low that I could only follow half of the dialogue.  Nadim was a funny guy, but I was glad I wasn't his neighbour.

After about an hour I left. There had been neither tea nor biccies, just myself stood watching Nadim cue up tunes on his CD turntable until it was obvious that I've got to get on one of your tracks had been meant as a sort of figurative suggestion, a measure of approval rather than preface to anything which was going to happen in the real world.

I soldiered on, eventually accruing the material for a double CD - my second album, I suppose - and my best work, I thought. Equipment came back from being repaired and I was at last able to capture the definitive mixes and burn copies of both albums. I wasn't sure how to go about promoting any of this, but I'd paid for eighteen minutes on Godspunk, a compilation CD released by Pumf Records; and on the 21st of June, 2003 I jumped on stage with the Ceramic Hobs and performed a three minute rap at a Mad Pride event held at the Garage in Islington. I did okay. I'd rehearsed my lines over and over for weeks, and I remembered most of them, and I drew a polite round of applause as Jim MacDougall called out very swanky just in case anyone had stopped thinking about him for a minute and because he'd seen it all before.

Then nothing happened.

I had vaguely intended to build up a decent back catalogue before attempting to promote any of it, and LDB now sort of had a decent back catalogue, but nevertheless nothing happened. No-one was interested in the Pumf Records compilation, or the two that came after, and I eventually ended up leaving a huge box of my contributor copies outside Oxfam. I'd had a single enquiry as a result of my paying to put tracks on those discs, and that had been from one of the other bands. More depressing still, I didn't even particularly like the compilations. They sounded disjointed, as I suppose is inevitable given that the selection process was based on who felt like paying to be included; and the sound of my own tracks had been compressed into something I wasn't sure I really appreciated.

Equipment continued to fail, and a number of the discs I had burned degraded, becoming unplayable after about a year, a problem which I've never had with cassettes but have often found with CDRs; and I simply became fed up of paying for the repair of equipment which should have been better made in the first place, of catering to a seemingly unanimous lack of interest whilst Andy of my previous band referred to me as a gangsta rapper in the manner of an indulgent elderly uncle. I was nearly forty, and suddenly none of the effort I had put in over the years seemed to matter, or to have amounted to anything in the real world. Even had I managed to fool someone into buying my LDB tapes or compact discs or whatever, it's not like I was ever going to take to the stage with this stuff, or do anything to push it any further. That one night at the Garage had been fun, but not the sort of thing I cared to repeat.

My rap ambitions had never really been any more substantial than those of Nadim, and in 2005, faced with the prospect of having to get my borrowed portastudio - already an obsolete piece of equipment - repaired yet again, I stopped caring. I'd given up on band membership, and now I was dropping music entirely. I'd sold a few tapes over the years, but no-one had ever really cared, and I'd spent most of the time banging my head against a wall. People don't really want anything they haven't heard before, whether it be rock or rap or yet another dolt who once met David Tibet in a betting shop releasing another droning album with Crowley on the cover. People want product, something they recognise, something with a logo serving to guarantee certain expectations. Novelising, writing and publishing aren't even significantly better, but I find myself able to take more satisfaction from the finished work.

So I suppose LDB - or whatever the hell that was - has left the building. It was fun while it lasted.

The Mission is Terminated

Excerpt from A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to That
William Burrough's House... the autobiography of Porridge:

It was the beginning of the end when Throbbing Gristle did a pop concert in San Francisco and we were singing An Old Man Smiled which is one of the ones what I wrote although Peter come up with some of it too, mainly that sort of twangy bit that sounds like how you used to make a farting noise with a ruler on the edge of the desk at school. We was doing An Old Man Smiled and I could hear Cosey Fanny picking out the notes of Popeye the Sailor Man on her guitar and I looked at her and she pretended not to know why I was looking at her because she is sneaky like that, the cow.

'Very funny,' I said but I was being sarcastic because I didn't think it was funny at all and it was not fair of Cosey to make fun of my sticky out eyes like that because it's my glands and I can't help it and anyway once I saw her put her hand in her drawers and scratch a bit when we was around at Cabaret Voltaire's house because they was borrowing our lawnmower and she took her hand out and sniffed it and then looked around because she thought no-one was looking but I saw it. Anyway she didn't hear me say nothing because we was doing our songs so loud so whatever. I wasn't bothered anyway.

When we had done the concert I was talking to some bloke from Research which is a magazine about murderers and lots of scary things and doing drawings of men's cocks on government buildings and stuff like that. It is a very good magazine but not a lot of people read it because they are scared of the truth about stuff and things. Anyway I was telling this bloke about how I was going to invent acid house but I was going to wait a bit because no-one was ready for it and I had only just invented punk rock a few years before and I wanted to pace myself a bit. That was when I spoke to that Malcolm MacLaren who is the ginger bloke out of the Sex Pistols. He came up to me when we was backstage with the famous Lou Reed.

'What am I going to do, Porridge?' he asked me. 'No one is interested in my band! They are not even as famous as the Rubettes!'

I couldn't think of nothing so I showed him my tattoo of Aleister Crowley sticking up the Vs to the Pope because I had just had it done and that's how he had the idea for Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols because there was a bit of space between Aleister Crowley's fingers and the Pope and I said, 'Oh Mr. Sebastian left that bit vacant,' and it was because I said it that he got the idea for it and that's why they got banned off the telly and became famous and all because I done it!

Anyway I was talking to this bloke from Research and he had said to me where do you get your ideas? so I was telling him and I was also telling him about the new song we were going to do which was about poo and it was a really playful and subversive song.

I see you,
I see you on the loo,
I see you doing a poo,
You are very nice and I am too.

Anyway there was a knock on the door. It was none other than that Ian Curtis from Joy Division. He had been following me around ever since we played in Liverpool where they are from and he came to see us and he came up to me after the gig and said he liked all of the songs what I wrote but the ones that Cosey Fanny did and that other bloke with the train set did weren't much good. His band were called Sad Sector but I had said to him that name is rubbish, Ian - you should change it is what you should do, and I told him Joy Division would be a good name because it was like the opposite of Sad Sector and I had playfully turned it upside down and inside out and stuff so it was subversive because it meant like those prozzies what the Nazis used to go and see behind the back of the van when they was feeling a bit randy and wanted to have it off and that. Ian said it was a dead clever name and he couldn't wait to see the faces of the fans when they heard it, and then they became famous, and that was sort of because of me when you really think about it.

'Come in, Ian Curtis my famous friend,' I told him, and he did and I could see Chris Carter looking over all envious and that because all he had was his blumming train set and I was the one who had all the fans asking me what's this song about, Porridge? and all the lady fans always wanted to have it off and that and no-one even knew about smelly knickers at the back fiddling with his knobs and switches. What a sad case! Ha ha ha! Once he kept pestering me because I had some toffos and I wouldn't give him none and he wanted a toffo and he kept saying pleeeaaase give us a toffo, Porridge and I said UFO to him which is the letters for you you-know-what off but I didn't want to say the middle word out loud because his mum was in the kitchen making us some chips, but I reckon that was how he got the idea for the X-Files and he never said thanks or nothing. Typical.

'What can I do you for?' I asked Ian Curtis.

'I'm fed up of Joy Division,' he said. 'I want to form a band with you, Porridge. I've even done a drawing of what it would look like,' and he showed me a drawing he had done of a gig and all the crowd were cheering and holding me up because I had jumped into the crowd like Iggy Pop or something. It was a really good drawing.

'This could be our album cover, Ian Curtis!' I said, excited.

Just then the one with the glasses out of the Shadows came by and he was looking for his friend Burt Weedon because he wanted to learn a really complicated guitar bit, and he said, 'does anyone know where Burt is?'

I didn't but I'd had another great idea.

What can I do you for, Ian Curtis?
Does anyone know where Burt is?

Tim Westwood was there because him and Chris Farter knew each other from being in the scouts and Chris had forgotten his sandwiches because he was too busy thinking about switches and knobs and the difference between OO gauge model railways and N gauge model railways and so his mum had got Tim to bring them. That's what I called him sometimes by the way - Chris Farter - hur hur hur. Once I even called him Piss Farter, which was dead funny. Everyone said so. Even Peter was laughing and he never laughs at anything because he is always serious. Anyway, Tim said 'Man, you're on fire tonight, Porridge! Lay that science on me one more time,' and he said some of the words in a funny voice like he was having a seizure or something, but anyway I said it all again once I had worked out what he was asking for and I thought up some more and sort of carried it on.

Chris is sitting on the chair.
He is sitting over there.

I just made it up like that, just saying it as soon as I thought of it. I didn't have it written down or nothing. I just made it up and said it. While I was saying it Tim was making funny shapes with his fingers and kept saying things like yeah boy, Porridge is keeping it hot to death for the UK, and he said UK like yooooo kaaay which was a bit weird, but I wasn't really paying him too much attention because of course I had just invented rapper's music.

'That was right good that was,' said the man who had bought Cosey Fanny a basket of complementary muffins from the man who had organised our pop concert.

'Yes,' I said. 'What be your name, my good man?'

'Afrika Bambaataa,' he smiled.

And that was how I done it. Even though Throbbing Gristle was splitting up but I knew I would always be able to think of something new to keep myself busy.

School Reunion

This is a short essay about the time I went for a drink with some people I knew from school. For the Doctor Who episode School Reunion, please follow this link and then develop an interest in something more appropriate to your age group, maybe read a book or something...

'Are you sure about this?,' my mother asked as I headed out of the door. She seemed amused by my determination, although it was a reasonable question. She hadn't enjoyed her own school days, and had perhaps accordingly developed a certain independence. It wasn't that she'd ever been antisocial so much as that she had never felt the need to be forever surrounded by friends or family as so many seem to. These were qualities she had apparently passed on to me. I hadn't really enjoyed school either, and yet here I was heading off for a reunion of people from my year.

'Yes,' I replied firmly for my own benefit as much as anything. I was cycling the thirty miles from Coventry to Shipston-on-Stour, which I guessed would take maybe three hours or so. It seemed admittedly ambitious, but would be less aggravating than taking at least twice the time to get there by a succession of ambling rural bus services. Twenty miles by bicycle was no big deal, and this would only be a little further, albeit towards the dubious goal of sitting in a pub with people I'd barely known thirty years before.

'Yes,' I said, understanding that it was too late to back out.

They had all laughed at me, but who would be laughing now blah blah blah...

A few years earlier, having a bit of a slow evening, I'd signed up with Friends Reunited, a social networking website predicated on the notion of our all being secretly curious about whatever became of that kid at school, the guy who used to set stuff on fire, whatever he was called. I submitted my details, and then considered the list of names associated with the school I'd attended from 1977 to 1982. I was surprised and a little saddened by how few of these people I was able to remember, but then nearly three decades had passed since I left Shipston and I hadn't really kept in touch with anyone. That said, there were some vaguely familiar faces, and even if I wasn't falling over myself to rekindle any acquaintance which had been tenuous even in its heyday, it was at least nice to know they were still alive.

Ethan Rock though - what the fuck? I wondered, squinting at the screen and scouring deep into the more ancient wrinkles of my brain. There had been no-one at our school by the name of Ethan Rock. If there had been, I would have remembered because his life would have been a living hell. Ours was a comprehensive school, home to all the kids who hadn't proven themselves sufficiently refined for the grammar school in Stratford-on-Avon. There may well have been a few bright sparks, but there were also farm kids who'd been raised by wolves, or else by parents who were in their own way not lacking in lupine qualities. Anything above possession of suspiciously elaborate shoelaces marked you out as flamboyant and therefore a legitimate target for playground justice. Ethan Rock would have lasted about a week.

Anyway, I signed up, and in August, 2008 I received a message which read:

Lawrence - you always helped me with my art. Glad to hear you went further with your art. You drew some fantastic drawings! Hope life is good, from the girl who threw stuff at you all the time in our art lessons with Miss Davis.

It was humbling that someone had remembered me after all this time, but embarrassing that I wasn't quite sure who this Shirley had been. The name was familiar, but nothing else came back, at least not immediately. We exchanged a few further messages, and the wheels of my memory began to turn, creaking and groaning and churning up material which had remained more or less untouched during the most recent half of my life. She had been a little rounded but sort of cute, or at least cuter than she'd probably realised at the time judging by her own less flattering description of her younger self. I distantly remembered that she had been one of those pupils who were forever being caught smoking behind the music room during break, which meant I probably would have been terrified of her, partially because she was a girl, and partially because I was terrified of nearly everyone.

But what does this mean now?, I wondered.

I tend to distrust anyone claiming that school accounted for the best days of their life, but mainly because I just don't understand such a viewpoint. Junior and infants school was fine, at least so far as I remember, but the five years of secondary education were difficult in most respects. So far as at least a few of my generation were concerned, Shipston-on-Stour was the middle of nowhere, and our future prospects entailed working either in some local shop, up at the Norgren Engineering plant, or with one arm inside a cow. I didn't want to do any of these things, but neither did I wish to leave the town in which I'd grown up. The outside world seemed to be full of explosions, and it was a long way away and looked quite scary. At one point Miss Davies - our Kate Bush-esque art teacher - arranged for a few of us to nose around a design studio in the centre of town, just above the flats next to the toy shop. This, we learned, was the creative wellspring which had given unto the peoples of the Earth the red and yellow heraldry of the Bird's custard powder packet. Being of artistic inclination, this was to be my future if I played my cards right.

Some of the kids at our school were fairly bright, despite having failed to get into the grammar school at Stratford-upon-Avon. They worked hard, and did well, and they seemed to enjoy doing so. Others, having learned how to strip down the gear box of a Massey Ferguson before they could even walk, might not have had much to say on the subject of Geoffrey Chaucer, but probably wouldn't have too much trouble finding work once they left. The rest of us were either just plain lacking in academic potential, or couldn't summon the enthusiasm, or we had other things to worry about. I was probably somewhere in the middle. I could draw and paint, and I quite liked English even if I wasn't very good at it, submitting essays which now read like the work of a promising chimpanzee; but in most other respects, I found it impossible to engage myself with anything I didn't find interesting or didn't understand. It felt like a waste of time.

Additionally, I was aware of being not entirely stupid, and that my appreciation of art might be deemed weird by some, not least in troublesome combination with my hatred of games and team sports - which from my point of view mostly seemed like an opportunity for the tougher kids to legitimately batter anyone who they thought seemed a bit gay, that apparently being the whole point of rugby football. I spent a lot of time laying low, trying to blend in, to avoid association with academic high flyers, the squares who actually liked school. It wasn't because I believed myself to be better than anyone else - although I probably did on some level, and probably wrongly. I just didn't want enemies, and aspired to a quiet, uneventful life without having either my head or my trousers flushed down the toilet on a daily basis. I just wanted to be left alone.

I finished school with the impression that at least a few of the kids regarded me as a bit odd and therefore suspicious. Unfortunately, Shipston-on-Stour was then a fairly small market town and as such felt both isolated and slightly claustrophobic, or at least it did to me. It was difficult to go anywhere without running into someone who viewed me with some measure of apparent hostility. I recall, for example, that I had got on reasonably well with Shane Perkins at school. He was no rocket scientist but otherwise he was okay, a massive and amiable red-faced kid with the pudding basin haircut of a mediaeval serf and a school uniform previously worn by at least two elder brothers; then we all turned sixteen and he was transformed into a denim-clad smasher of looms blocking pub doorways and laughing hur hur hur hur as you walked past because you were either gay, a loser, or a gay loser, or you thought you were lush but you weren't, or whatever.

Now I was cycling thirty miles to hang out with these people, or at least some of these people. The thing that bothered me most was that I, having moved away from Shipston as quickly as possible and not having been back since, might be viewed as believing myself some sort of big shot, one of those prodigal sons you always hear so much about, still full of shit after all these years.

'Greetings peasants,' I would chortle in the voice of Stephen Fry, riding into town on my huge, white horse, scattering gold sovereigns to local crones I would recognise as once having been dinner ladies. 'Let me regale you with tales of my amazing life in realms most distant, Chatham, Coventry, even that London, far off lands where the people go around naked and have their heads set below their shoulders...'

I'd had brief online conversations with at least two ex-classmates who seemed to assume that we were better because we had escaped, and that I too probably hated all those thickies with whom we had been at school. Unfortunately I didn't hate anyone, and the assumption that I might have done helpfully identified anyone who had believed as much as a tosser to be avoided in future. The thing was, I never really liked the town, particularly once I realised it was just one option of many. I personally couldn't understand why anyone would still live there, having grown old enough to move away. It was difficult for me to regard it as anything other than a strange choice. I've never been in the position of passing someone with whom I was at school on the street, and it always seems odd when it happens to my wife or other people that I know.

On the other hand, I'd never presume to know what was best for anyone besides myself, or claim to have made the superior choice; and in part I admire those who remain in touch with their own geographical roots, because they have something I've been lacking for most of my life. It's not that I've enjoyed moving around so much as that it's simply taken me a long time to find anywhere I really want to be. All of which adds up to the question of why I was doing this, who this was for? I wasn't rolling into town grinning look who's back and expecting congratulations. I've never liked the man who assumes that everybody in the next room is talking about him, and hope someone will have the wherewithal to give me a slap if ever I go down that road.

I guess I wanted to find out just who I had been at school with, now that we were all old enough to talk about it without playground politics getting in the way. I wanted to be sure that I actually had been to school with these people, because it was all so long ago that it no longer seemed real.

As I approached Shipston, my calves were beginning to feel the distance, but the thirst for novelty carried me forward as I recalled sights I'd passed every single day as a child and yet had not seen in three decades; and the incongruities, like an emu farm where once there were cattle, houses newly built where I remembered fields, and all the other subtle changes. I cycled through the town, then out the other side to a bed and breakfast on the A3400. I'd called ahead to arrange for a room. The place, when I arrived, was unfamiliar - an old converted farmhouse just off the main road, less than five miles from where I'd lived for almost a decade, and yet entirely unfamiliar to me, which probably says something about life in Shipston, or at least my life in Shipston.

I settled in, made coffee on the machine that came with the room, watched some television, and felt oddly as though I was in a film. This was my land, the land to which I was born; I had come home. This was how I believed I should have felt, and yet I didn't. It was nice to be here, but aside from that, it was just strange.

Rested, I saddled up once more and cycled back into Shipston for something to eat. The layout of the town was so ingrained in my memory as to make it feel like I'd never been away, except half of it was all wrong or different. The Chinese takeaway was still there at the end of West Street, although I'm not convinced it was called the China Kitchen in my time, all those millions of years ago.

Shipston-on-Stour in the late seventies and early eighties wasn't exactly what you would call multicultural. Out of the six-hundred or so kids at the school, a mere seven were anything other than ethnically white, and Alan Ip and his elder sister were the only Chinese. I didn't know Alan particularly well, but we shared some of the same friends so we got on okay, at least well enough to find that the occasional takeaway was on the house because you friend with Alan, as Alan's dad would explain in fairly poor English. I guessed that he appreciated the occasional relatively friendly face. I'd heard horror stories of older kids riding motorbikes into the takeaway and sitting there, revving up whilst smecking away with hur hur hur hur Mrs. Yip - fuckin' yellow cunt. Apparently that sort of thing is really funny if you're a useless inbred lump of shit with brain cells numbering in single figures, and may possibly indicate some of why I was glad to move away when finally I did. I suppose there's no place on Earth without it's share of useless tossers, but in a small town you tend to be more aware of them and their little gang of followers all stood around belching hur hur hur hur good one Baz.

Anyway, some things had clearly changed because opposite the Chinese takeaway there was now an Indian restaurant. This seemed like a good sign, so I went in and had a curry - not the greatest curry I've ever eaten, but it did its job. We were all supposed to be meeting at The George, a pub in the square, at seven or thereabouts; and although The George served food, I had a nightmare image of myself cornered by Shane Perkins wanting to know what business I thought I had showing my face around here again after all this time whilst I sat immobilised by the arrival of my pie and chips.

I was worrying too much.

I paid the bill, took a walk around the square being as it was still light, then a deep breath and into the pub. There was no-one there, or at least no-one I recognised. I bought a pint, and immediately realised I was stood about four feet from Julia Goulter. She looked different and yet the same, which was strange. We had hardly been friends at school, in fact I don't recall us liking each other at all, but it was suddenly obvious how long ago it had all been, and that life was too short for bullshit. Her face lit up, and I expect mine did too, and we talked like old friends, or at least like old friends who hadn't really known each other very well. I vaguely knew she had spent some time in the fire service and asked about that, and hearing her talk about it made me feel strangely proud to know this person, somebody who had saved lives, who had really done something.

More people turned up, faces which took a second of processing before I could recognise them, and the odd one I couldn't bring back, there being no good reason why I should remember them or why they should remember me. Half of their number I had almost entirely forgotten or hadn't expected, because word of mouth had brought them to this place, a call spread out into the real world from the facebook page which had been my own main point of reference. It soon became confusing as they piled in, numbers doubling, and I found myself at a table with Tom Pike and Fiona Morris.

Tom had been my best friend for a few years back at junior school, but we'd drifted apart as people often do when the friendship is based on the sort of crap you get up to when you're seven. Our friendship was based in part on games played in the fields at the back of his house in which Tom was Captain Kirk and I was a Cyberman from Doctor Who, which I don't remember ever working quite so well as we had hoped. When I told Tom that I was about to have a science-fiction novel published, he asked if it was based on any of the games we had played, which is to date probably the best question anyone has ever asked me on the subject or writing.

Fiona sat opposite me during art lessons conducted by the previously mentioned Miss Davies. I seem to recall that she had spent at least some of the time pulling long-suffering faces and rolling her eyes at my more ill-considered observations. This would have been contemporary to Shirley pelting me with bits of paper, and as it all came flooding back, I wondered whether it could be possible that I had been a little more popular than I remembered, or at least funnier. Distracted by the thought, I somehow encountered difficulty with my attempt to become seated, and mumbled something about how after all this time you would think I might at least have got the hang of basic chair operation.

'You haven't changed.' Amused, Fiona pulled a long-suffering face and rolled her eyes in testament to my general incompetence. She and Tom were now married, which seemed like a good match, but which also seemed quite strange as nothing I could recall from school had foreshadowed their eventual union, and so it felt a little like Beryl the Peril turning up in a Spiderman comic.

Others found places at the table in the room we had occupied with the enthusiasm of a Normandy landing, faces coming into focus with great big dabs of memory sherbert popping off left and right. Laughing, Guy Loveridge took Tom's spectacles and tried them on for size. 'You must have fucking good eye sight to see through these things!'

You never really forget a name like Guy Loveridge, but I still couldn't reverse engineer the face back to whoever he'd been at school. Maybe he was one of Jason Roberts' friends, I decided. Matthew Gibbins and Alan Newman looked completely different, and yet I knew both of them straight away, marvelling at the changes. Ringing not one single bell, some woman turned out to have attended our school only for the last two terms of the final year, but I guess she lived in the area and had known most of the others for a while, and was probably less the imposter than myself. It was getting confusing, and I made my way to the bar just as another bunch wandered in.

'Chewie!' I hadn't even considered the nickname in thirty years, let alone its owner, but here at last was someone I immediately recognised without my internal lens irising in and out to compensate for the passage of time. I never found out why Mark Nason had picked up the name Chewie, but I suppose he was roughly on the husky side, and we were one of the Star Wars generations.

He smiled, embarrassed. 'Sorry, mate.'

It wasn't him, but a doppelganger who happened to be in the pub on the night of the reunion. It was quite a coincidence. Stranger still, the cheer that had greeted his arrival was for another of his party, Darren Bell.

Darren had been a small angry-looking kid, or at least one who didn't seem to smile much. He'd been the only mixed race boy at the school, and so he'd stood out. Keeping in mind that I was eleven and didn't know shit, he had looked like trouble to me, so we'd hardly spoken to each other. Once during assembly I felt a weird plucking sensation at the back of my neck. I turned to see Darren Bell and Michael Sumners, both seated in the row behind, leaning across to pick something from the shoulders of my uniform, like they were plucking a chicken. They ignored me, going about their work and muttering to each other as though I wasn't there. I still have no idea what they were doing. I think I would have remembered having fleas, and although my dandruff had been fulsome, it didn't exactly feel like the primate social grooming it resembled. Maybe they were just trying to freak me out.

Talking to Darren now, I began to wish I'd been less of a coward at school. He chuckled, explaining with a trace of the Tom Jones how he was doing very well with his own business and living somewhere or other in Wales.

'You don't remember me, do you?'

'I've really no idea.' He laughed again, because it was admittedly an absurd question. 'I'm sorry, mate, but it's been thirty years, you know?'

I bought myself a drink, and realised now that I knew some of the people in the public bar, those who were here because it was a pub and it was Saturday night; and I'd been stood right next to one of them for the past couple of minutes.

'Richard Benfield!' Yet another one of those name that hadn't crossed my thoughts in a long time.

He didn't seem too enthusiastic. 'You here for this reunion, then?'

I nodded. 'You too?'

He shook his head and shrugged. 'No-one told me.'

He gave a quick account of the story of his life. I'd always thought of him as one of the hard kids, an associate of Darren Bell and Michael Sumners, although we got on okay, and he never seemed like he felt he had anything to prove. It turned out that we'd led similar lives in some respects, many years spent holding the shitty end of corporate sticks for the sake of a wage, a great deal of sweat from which someone else had made a ton of money. It was oddly comforting to know we had ended up with more in common than either of us could have predicted, and as we were talking, another piece of jigsaw puzzle slotted into place, specifically someone I'd noticed lurking in the background for most of the evening, someone resembling Mick Jones of The Clash. He'd been watching us, but hadn't spoken to anyone. Now realising he'd been spotted, he conceded a sly grin. 'I was wondering how long it would take.'

'You should have said something.'

'Oh I don't like a fuss. You know me.'

I did, or at least I used to. His name was Chris Adams, one of the bunch who had turned up on facebook recently, memorably reporting that he now had four children of his own. You've been busy, I told him and he didn't seem to mind. Chris had always been the calm sort at school, and I don't recall ever having seen him get upset or angry over anything. In this respect he hadn't changed, and so we stood talking for a while about life, family, Shipston, bowling - his sport of choice, and anything else we could think of. It was the umpteenth old face conversation of the evening, and yet I don't recall having to repeat myself.

'You should have let me know you were coming along,' Chris told me. 'You could have slept on our sofa. We've got so many in the house, one more won't make no difference.'

Tom had made the same offer, and it was touching. I hadn't expected either this sort of welcome or such generosity from anyone.

'So I've got to ask - do you remember Ethan Rock?'

'Don Timms.'

'Holy shit. Don Timms? Really?'

'He went to America and reinvented himself. I don't think he was ever very happy.'

'But Ethan Rock - of all the names...'

Chris chuckled, but not unkindly.

Don Timms had been an average, likeable kid. It was really difficult to imagine him so unhappy as to want to change his name. The evening had been one revelation after another, and I would need some time to take it all in.

Last orders approached and we all cohered within our commandeered room for the inevitable group photographs. Even more old faces had shown up. It seemed like there were hundreds of us. Stewart Ward bundled forward from the group, grinning. He'd been another one of the hard kids, like a smaller, tougher version of the singer from Showaddywaddy. He'd also been very funny at least some of the time, even if it was mostly the sort of funny you had to be there to appreciate. His finest hour was, as I recall, trapping Michael Sumners inside the tall cupboard at the back of Mr. Stanier's technical drawing class. Mr. Stanier was elderly and not well equipped to deal with living versions of the Bash Street Kids.

Let me out, the cry came with muffled thumps as Michael attempted to punch his way out of his wooden prison. Mr. Stanier eyed the four boys stood respectfully in front of the cupboard, but apparently didn't feel up to telling them to get back to their desks.

'Oh dear. What have you done with Michael?'

'We don't know, sir.'

Thump thump thump - I'm in here, sir, Make them let me out.

'This really won't do. Have you got Michael in there?'

'No sir,' and so on for the next twenty minutes. Eventually Mr. Stanier returned sadly to the blackboard and resumed chalking up a load of angles, reasoning that they would eventually get bored and let their prisoner go, which they eventually did.

Stewart no longer resembled the singer out of Showaddywaddy, but looked like he'd spent the years since school lifting concrete blocks for a living.

'I fucking love this bloke,' he growled happily and grabbed me in a headlock with an arm that could easily have punched holes in the hull of Popeye's boat.

'I like you too,' I squeaked, surprised to remember that I did.

An hour later and full of just the right amount of beer to compensate for my fear of cycling along pitch black country lanes without lights, I headed back to the bed and breakfast in the pouring rain, happy in an entirely unexpected way.

There were still people I'd had no chance to talk with, or to whom I'd said nothing, having no idea what to say and feeling awkward. There were people to whom I had probably spoken for the very first time that evening. There were some who probably regarded me as a wanker, and others who didn't; yet they all felt like my people. I had come along not really knowing what to expect, with all of my bullshit and assumptions, and none of it had mattered in the least; and strangest of all - at least to me - after all those years, it genuinely felt like it had been an honour to have gone to school with such a fine bunch, and I only wish I'd been better equipped to appreciate that at the time.

Two Americas

The agent who showed us around the house smiled a lot, emphasising all that should be considered a positive. The yard was a desert with a dead tree at the centre against which was propped rusting barbecue equipment, one wheel broken off. The metal caps of a million beer bottles were trodden into the dusty earth. Three lively young men had lived here, and they had been keen on having fun and all the activities traditionally pursued by lively young men. They had been less keen on cleaning and domestic repairs. Indeed the evidence suggested that they found such activities a positive chore. A small hole had been either booted or thumped in the kitchen wall, and a few of the doors showed signs of having been kicked in at some point. The agent pointed to the greying metal and plastic skeleton of a large circular garden table, reduced to a sun-bleached ornamental wheel by the absence of glass. It was of a kind I'd seen on sale for about thirty dollars in the home and garden department at Walmart.

'You might be able to buy some glass to fix up that table,' the agent suggested helpfully. 'There's a large branch of Lowe's just around the corner.'

I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on a specially commissioned circle of glass for the repair of a fairly unpleasant bit of cheap garden furniture, although I did buy a small bottle of ReRack, a xylene based liquid plastic by which I restored the decrepit rusting shelving inside the fridge to a state suitable for storing something other than beer.

Despite its faults, despite that our landlady seemingly regarding the place as falling only a little way short of a gold-tapped mansion, despite all the work which needed doing and the fact of the garage door buckling in the middle so much that it no longer opens, we liked the house and said yes, and then moved in.

The street seemed quiet. The neighbours were mostly Hispanic and mostly pretty civilised. There had been a murder on the street behind ours about a month before, but it was the first incident of that kind in decades according to police records, which my wife checked before we made our decision. Also, a major dealer lived a few houses along, a dealer formerly of the kind popularised on the television series Breaking Bad, but more recently taken to a quieter life having been carted off to the stripey hole a few too many times for his liking. The cars would still show up, friends of friends of friends who would slow their vehicles to conduct furtive transactions with the motor running, but all the houses here are some way apart, so the trade could be relegated to just one of those things happening over there, a habit of some other guy which will forever remain happily none of our business. My wife's relatives came to visit, in one instance to cast a Hyacinthine eye over where we had landed and to offer the sort of veiled discouragement you would expect, just in case we hadn't realised quite how far we had fallen from Alamo Heights, from the lawn sprinklers and no socialism; but we took no notice. We preferred Junior's take on our relocation, which was specifically that we were now well situated for a great many cats and a wide variety of fast-food restaurants.

He wasn't kidding about the cats. The street is full of them, lounging in the sun across various lawns or patches of yard that would be lawn if there wasn't an el Camino parked there. That said, most of them now spend their time lounging in the sun across our lawn, having discovered that I'm a soft touch and will feed a stray cat if it looks sufficiently hungry. This habit began with SOF, a fluffy stray whom we suspect may be the Son of Fluffy - hence the acronym - our own hairy cat whom we were only able to afford to have fixed a few months after moving in. Naturally, we both felt fairly guilty about Fluffy's brief but successful efforts towards making more cats, but there wasn't really much we were able to do about it, besides putting out the odd bowl of food for SOF whenever he passes through following some itinerary known only to himself. We should probably feel similarly guilty that SOF himself now appears to have made even more cats with another stray whom Junior has named Emerald in recognition of her green eyes; although if it hadn't been SOF, Emerald would almost certainly have made additional cats with the help of one of the other four million felines apparently living under the shed in our next door neighbour's wilderness-themed back garden.

Emerald is small, so her waddling transformation into a silky, black pumpkin was difficult to miss. She resumed her figure after a while, and a few weeks passed before we noticed her sneaking back to temporary accommodation within an unused bedding trough attached to the neighbour's house. Inside, well sheltered from the weather by wooden boards, were three small but surprisingly chunky kittens, still with blue eyes. They were black of course, but fluffy like SOF and his father before him, and we spent an hour cooing over them.

'What chunky little monkeys!' Bess observed, melting, which became chunkamonks, then just the chunks.

'Have you seen the chunks today?' she took to asking me each evening as she arrived home from work. Usually I hadn't as Emerald had moved them elsewhere following our visit. We had no idea where, although it seemed reassuring that Emerald herself was still to be seen hanging around on a daily basis.

Weeks later, I am peering through the glass diamond set into our front door, angling my head to get a view of the drive, to where Emerald tends to wait around in hope of being fed, and where we've seen the kittens playing on previous occasions. Something catches the corner of my eye and I look over to Betty's house just across the way. Betty is the mother of Justin, who comes over to play with Junior from time to time. My wife and I get the impression that he doesn't have a particularly happy life at home and we often hear him arguing with his mother, whom he describes as crazy. He has a stepfather, some weasely looking guy who shows up every few months and is apparently on his third strike so will be inside for a long, long stretch next time he breaks into a house, steals a car, or whatever new means he chooses in pursuit of making his living. We don't say anything, but we're hoping that the magic third strike comes soon, providing it isn't our house he hits. Justin doesn't say anything, but we get the impression he's also looking forward to that day.

I see the movement again, a tiny puppy lolloping towards the rear of Betty's house, and then another, and another.

'Damn!' I step outside, then call to my wife. 'Bess, come and see!' We cross the street watching the stream of puppies. Betty is now out front with her teenage daughter - Justin's sister. The puppies bundle across the scrubby lawn, all crowding around the woman's feet. They are large and dumpy but still quite young, and there are eleven of them, or maybe twelve. It's difficult to count. We all stand around cooing for a few minutes. The puppies are friendly and still very much at the silly stage of their development.

'I'm going out to buy some food for these.' Betty is not happy, but then I'm not sure I've ever seen her crack a smile. She has a puppy in her arms as she glares across to the neighbour's house on the right, speaking loud as though addressing a person hidden behind the curtain. 'Someone has to take responsibility.'

'They're from that house?' My wife glances across. We don't really know the people who live there, except that they are Mexican and seem to have a yard sale every other weekend.

'She don't know how to look after them. Every time is the same. They get animals and they cannot take care of them.' Betty's venom is delivered with righteous volume. 'Fucking wetbacks!'

You can tell that she wants the insult to be heard. I understand the term to refer to illegal immigrants from south of the border, but my wife later tells me it has come to serve as the Mexican equivalent to white trash. It's strange to hear Betty deliver such an insult given that she too is Hispanic.

'Stupid crackhead.' There is no anger, just powerful disgust.

I see another dog, an adult boxer, trotting along at the end of the street, just past the purple house in which there resides the Wiccan family, as denoted by a web address stencilled on the trunk of their car. A few months before, the house opposite the Wiccan residence declared itself an evangelical church of some persuasion, although the banners and flags came down after a few days, presumably because you can't just declare your home to be a church if you happen to feel like it. I was glad as it had seemed kind of rude, even confrontational. The Wiccans were hurting nobody.

'Do you know who the mother is?' I myself imagine it may be the boxer, but as usual I get the impression that everyone is confused by my English accent. I am a piece that does not fully make sense in this jigsaw puzzle.

'Are you working at HEB?' My wife now has one of the puppies in her arms, whilst Betty is presumably about to get in her car and drive to HEB - the local supermarket - for dog food. Justin told us that she had applied for work there. She handed in her notice at Walmart, and none of us could really blame her, considering the long hours and everything.

'They didn't want me.' She shakes her head. 'They escaped from back there. They were in the garage, no food or water.'

She means the puppies. I am losing track of this conversation.

'Those idiots don't know how to look after their animals.' Betty regards the boxer as it approaches, sniffing the grass. 'I don't think that she is the mother.'

'I hate that thing.' My wife catches herself, realising how harsh it sounds, but we all understand.

'I think it is called Boy.' Betty turns, looking across to our side of the street, to where friends of friends of friends slow their vehicles to conduct furtive transactions with the motor running. 'The dog is from the drug house. It is a terrible animal.'

Bess describes the time she came home and found Boy stood snarling at her on our porch. I recall several occasions of this also happening to me, but I'm not sure if it was the same dog. San Antonio has a real problem with strays.

Boy disappears around the side of the house, and we hear a voice calling out.

Just you git back here, Boy!

The call echoes from our own house across the street, a peculiar ricochet effect, and I hear the mention of someone shooting a dog, shooting a puppy, although not one of these puppies.

'I called the police,' Betty tells us, 'but they say they can't do nothing. They say he has a right to shoot an animal if it is threatening him, but it was a puppy!'

'Who shot the puppy?' I'm beginning to wonder what the hell I'm hearing. This tale is getting stranger by the minute.

'It was just with a BB gun, but it is still no good. You cannot shoot a puppy like that. What is wrong with him?'

'This is the drug guy?'

'No, the yellow house.'

I look past where Cabbage Man lives, but the yellow house is out of sight around the curvature of the street. Cabbage Man grows cabbages and tomatoes in wooden frames on his lawn out front. He's very good at it, and knocks on our door to give us free fresh vegetables every few weeks over summer. The only thing with which I've had much success here has been zucchini, which I can grow by the ton, so Cabbage Man in return gets the run offs.

'Is that the guy who always seems to be out there working on his truck? That redneck type, is that who you mean?'

Again Betty doesn't seem to have quite followed the gist of my question, and the neighbours have now returned in their own truck, the alleged wetbacks. They look across to us, and the puppies flood over the lawn to meet them. The woman seems a little thin, but not really crackhead material from what I can tell.

'Look.' I point to the wood fence at the side of Cabbage Man's house. Two tiny black kittens have emerged from a gap to watch us. 'Bess, it's the chunks!'

Puppies and now kittens. It's all too much.

After a while, Betty drives off to buy dog food, despite the escaped puppies now apparently reunited with their owners, and we return to our own home, at least glad to know that Emerald has her kittens somewhere safe. For a while it felt as though we might have been labouring under an illusion, my wife and I, with our quiet life in the hood, blind to the John Singleton film going on all around us.

'You think those people are really crackheads?'

Bess sighs. 'I think Betty tends to exaggerate, you know?'

We close the door and recall all the drama that Justin has had with his mother, enough at least to give him the idea of moving away for a while. It's a shame as he's a nice kid, and a good example for Junior - very responsible and level-headed. I think of the puppies kept locked in the alleged wetback garage without food for days at a time.

'You know, those little guys seemed pretty plump and happy to me. They didn't seem underfed at all.'

My wife agrees with another sigh, then shakes her head.

Neither of us bother to remind ourselves that we like living here, because regardless of everything, it still goes without saying.