It's Not Always Good to Talk

I'm very glad that you asked me that question...

I'm being interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. The interview lasts about an hour and is conducted over a Skype connection. Most of it is about my science-fiction novel, Against Nature, which was published by Obverse Books back in 2013. The interview is fun but exhausting, and I make the mistake of attempting to respond to certain questions with answers beyond the range of my ability to articulate them. I write a lot but I'm not very sociable and I don't engage in profoundly intellectual conversation on a daily or even yearly basis, which leaves me ill-equipped to discuss certain aspects of my own work. If I were able to tell you that, I should have said, I wouldn't have needed to write it in the first place.

Skype is a programme which facilitates communication between computers in different parts of the world. It makes use of a webcam so that you can see who you're talking to, and the webcam usually has a microphone built into it. My interview is conducted in audio only, but the webcam is nevertheless plugged in so that I can use the microphone, and thus am I able to watch a video image of myself as I speak. I'm sat in front of the Mexican national flag which I have hung over the back of some shelving. I'm going cross-eyed and duck-faced as I scrabble around in my vocabulary and attempt to form sentences. My hand wheels in the air at the side of my tilted head in illustration of something or other and I realise I've somehow turned into Suzanne from Orange is the New Black, and that I sound demented.

The thing is - well it's sort of, you know—what I'm getting at is that I was always looking for something. I mean I used to be into flying saucers and all that sort of rubbish, but I—well, it was like this. I discovered... I suddenly... I was looking for like a total... You know, I was always interested in ancient Egypt. I don't have the words here - what I mean to say...

As we conclude the interview, I tell them that I'm aware of having been unable to form sentences, or indeed to say anything useful, but they insist that I did fine and that they'll be able to edit it down to just the good stuff. I leave it at that.

I'm woken at three in the morning by my telephone beeping so as to alert me to the fact of the battery having run low and that it requires recharging. I've forgotten to switch the phone off because I barely even use the thing. Most of the time I keep it charged just in case my wife has an emergency and needs to reach me.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I swear and scrabble around in the darkness, struggling to unwrap the phone from my pants in the laundry basket at the side of the bed.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I turn the fucking thing off, then lie wide awake for the next few hours. I have David Bowie's Never Get Old stuck in my head and my thoughts are cycling, over and over - what I should have said, how I shouldn't have agreed to the interview in the first place, and how I wish there were a specific individual responsible for the fact of my stupid fucking phone having an alarm which beeps when the battery needs recharging so that I could track him down and smash his kneecaps and elbows with a ball-peen hammer.

I have to get up at seven, so naturally I lie awake, hot and restless and pissed off until approximately ten to seven.

I sleep briefly.

I get up at seven to feed a million cats, then come straight back to bed as my wife gets up and goes to work. I sleep until about ten and have a dream in which I am menaced by Adrian Meredith, an older boy who didn't seem to like me very much when I was at junior school. He's pushing me around. He needs me to do certain things. He wants me to go into a pawn shop and buy back his girlfriend's gold necklace, the one he pawned to them in the first place.

I get up and have a slow, crap day - headachey with a sore throat, so the oak pollen is probably high and it's something like 98° Fahrenheit outside.

In the evening my wife and I eat at Hung Fong on Broadway because the kid is with his dad tonight, and I've found myself unable to venture out onto the surface of Venus so as to visit the supermarket from which I would ordinarily purchase the ingredients for whatever I would have cooked as our evening meal. After Hung Fong we visit Northstar Mall because my wife needs the battery of her iPhone replaced. It charges, but only just, and she's had it about five years. She tried the AT&T store, but that line of enquiry went about as well as we expected it to, so now we're at the Apple Store in the mall. It's like a dining hall designed by IKEA, pine benches and the kind of stools you would expect to find in a pretentious kitchen. The place is packed, but it's hard to tell whether anything is actually happening. Everyone is stood or sat around, pissing about on MacBooks, chatting to staff without any obvious sense of urgency. The staff can be identified by their all being in their early twenties and skinny with beards, excepting the single female. Some of them also have ear gauges, and I expect there's a hat rack laden with fedoras somewhere at the rear of the store, ready for when they all fuck off home at the end of the working day - if we're going to expand the definition of work to such limits as to incorporate this bunch.

We can't tell what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to see. Each one of the staff is chatting to someone, busy in his own way. There's no queue nor till nor any obvious point of focus to the store, because that would be like sooo predictable. There's a bench at the far end of the store identified as the genius bar by text printed on the wall alongside a symbol resembling an atom with neutrons and protons in orbit, possibly so as to make a slightly mystifying association with Albert Einstein. I am familiar with the Apple corporation's repurposing of the term genius. I have iTunes on my computer, and the genius feature is something which plays my tracks at random. This seems a very loose application of the term to me, something relating to the fetishisation of the mix tape, now that we've rendered cassettes obsolete and decided that they were called mix tapes, which they never were. It's because simply choosing something is now considered a wildly creative act, so when you're putting together your mix tape and you have Madonna's Material Girl followed by something from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that makes you a genius, yeah?

Even so, I can't tell what they're doing at the genius bar, and it isn't even the sort of bar at which you could buy the beer necessary for some of this arrangement to make sense.

'Maybe we just send out a vibe,' I suggest, 'or maybe if we take our clothes off...'

A young man - I'd guess in his early twenties - with a beard takes my wife's telephone number. It's a little before eight in the evening.

'I'll send you a text when someone is free,' he tells her. 'It shouldn't be much more than three quarters of an hour.'

We leave the store and take the escalator to the upper level, the food court I suppose you would call it. We buy ice cream from Marble Slab - because there's always room for ice cream - and sit and wait for the text summons to come to the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery.

We are summoned as we head back to the store just in case they've sent the message and we failed to receive it on the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery. The time is 8.45PM, and we waste another five minutes back in the store trying to work out who has summoned us. Eventually a young man with a beard identifies himself and shows us to a couple of stools. 'Someone will be with you shortly,' he tells us.

We wait.

I reintroduce the idea of taking our clothes off, but Bess isn't so keen. I move the stool away from the bench so that I can lay on it on my stomach. I stretch my legs out back and spread my arms. 'I'm a plane!' I tell Bess.

This doesn't work either so I try to look like I'm buying something. I take a box from the shelf and pull faces so as to suggest that I'm weighing up the pros and cons of buying a household lighting system which can be controlled from your iPhone. I guess my pantomime isn't very convincing because no-one comes to manage the potential sale. Try as I might, I am unable to impersonate interest in something which no-one sane could ever possibly need in their home.

The store begins to empty. An assistant with an unusually prodigious beard leaves.

'That one must be their king,' I point out, having decided they're like an ant colony. I say it loud in the hope of annoying somebody.

Twenty minutes have passed and a young man finally comes to see what's up with my wife's iPhone. Weirdly, he has no beard and he's kind of chunky.

'It's the battery,' we say.

He takes the iPhone into the back room in order to perform a full diagnostic. 'It's the battery,' he tells us fifteen minutes later.

I think of the phone guy in Earlsdon High Street back in Coventry, England; forever sat there yacking away to his ancient sidekick, always with a fag on the go. It's my phone, you just about manage as he snatches it from your hand, presses a few buttons, pulls a face, rips the back off, replaces something, then chucks it back.

'Call it a tenner, mate.'

We're a long way from Earlsdon High Street, and still some way from a fully operational iPhone. It's booked in, but it will take an hour and a half and my wife will be able to collect it tomorrow around noon.

'An hour and a half?' Bess is sceptical. 'There's a guy on YouTube who does it in twenty minutes.'

'Well there are other jobs we have, cracked screens to be replaced and so on.'

Neither of us can be bothered to point out that these alleged cracked screens are nothing to do with us. We just want to go home.

On the way to the parking lot we pass a Microsoft concession out in the mall. I wonder out loud if they have fights with the Apple colony, like the Bash Street Kids and their rivals in the pages of the Beano.

'Maybe that's where the King went. Maybe someone challenged him to a duel?'

We may never know the answer.

Airport

Here's how a modern airport works. Far beyond the end of the runway, beyond all those fairy lights, off in the long grass stands a little man with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. He spends the day looking up into the sky, looking at all the planes that come and go and noting down their number plates. Sometimes there are too many planes, and in such cases he'll count them all a couple of times over just to be sure, then mount his bicycle and get back to the control tower as quick as he can.

'Too many planes,' he'll shout up at the window, and providing someone up there hears him, they'll talk to the men flying the planes by means of a special two-way radio, just to make sure they don't all try to land at the same time. Sometimes there are only a few planes, but on other days there might be a lot of planes, especially when one of those new countries has been discovered - like Valeria or Lexavia to name but two of the most recent; so that's a sudden increase in tourism and, by association, air traffic, and before you know it, there are just too many planes up there. Worse is that we have no way of telling just how many planes there might be. There is simply no way to be sure. It's something we shall never understand. It's a mystery.

I'd spent three weeks back in England. I'd had quite a time. I'd met up with family, friends, and old friends I hadn't expected to see. I'd packed a suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes - obscure and mostly noisy bands from the eighties and nineties whose work I intend to digitise and make available on the internet - and this time I took the trouble to check what luggage restrictions would apply.

Back in 2015, I turned up at Heathrow with as much crap as I could physically carry, materials which never made it into the shipping container when I first moved and which were subsequently marooned at my mother's house. I had an earlier suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes, an acoustic guitar, a large portable art portfolio, and three or four additional bags all bursting at the zippers. I knew there might be some kind of excess baggage fee, but I didn't mind paying another twenty quid or so. Unfortunately the anticipated twenty quid fee turned out to be closer to four-hundred, so I wasn't going to make that mistake again.

This time, I'd weighed the suitcase on my mother's bathroom scales, then taken out one cassette after another until the weight crept below the permitted limit. This left me with a surplus of twenty-six cassettes which I posted to myself. I spent about a hundred quid posting stuff to myself because it wouldn't fit in my luggage, and thankfully it all arrived at the other end in one piece.

My mother drops me off at the coach station in Coventry, and this time I manage not to cry. I give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which represents a gaudy demonstration of affection in our family because we're civilised and not inclined to ostentatious sentiment. The coach trip is boring, but it gets me there in plenty of time. I bum around Terminal Five looking for things to do, smoking my last ciggies for a while and eating bland sandwiches before getting into a fight with a machine. It's the check-in machine, one of those features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency.

I press an icon on the screen and it asks to see my passport, face down in the scanner.

It asks to see my green card.

This unit cannot process your request at this time, it tells me. Please seek assistance.

I get the same response from a second machine.

I find a human and she suggests that I simply go straight to the check-in desk, which I would have had to do anyway even if the machine had worked. I suppose it's okay for me to go straight to the check-in desk because at least I made the effort to use the machine. The human at the check-in desk tells me that my possession of both a passport and a green card probably confused his mechanical colleague. I hump my permitted twenty-three kilo suitcase of industrial noise onto the scales and begin to sweat, waiting to be told how many thousands of pounds I've just incurred in excess baggage charges.

'Is it okay? ' I ask after a silent minute. 'Not too heavy?'

'It's fine,' he tells me.

The flight is long, cramped, and boring, and I'm stuck right in the middle. I watch Rowan Atkinson in Maigret Sets a Trap, which I find soothing because I've spent the last three weeks watching relaxing crime dramas - Midsomer Murders, Lewis and the like, these constituting my mother's preferred viewing these days. Then I watch Doctor Strange - which is okay despite the presence of Cucumber, Arrival - which is excellent, and finally a sappy American made music documentary which compensates for minutes wasted on boring Fatboy Slim by showcasing the altogether more entertaining Virus Syndicate. Once I've watched all the in-flight telly I can stand to watch, I fill in a customs form, declaring that I'm not bringing anything naughty into the country. I value my precious suitcase of noisy tapes at five quid, because there's really no point in trying to work out what they're all worth. It's not like I'm going to sell my rare Opera for Infantry cassettes and use the money to fund the downfall of the dangerous orange shitgibbon.

Eight hours after take off, we land at Chicago. We land at Chicago later than anticipated because there were too many planes at Heathrow. Apparently they had all turned up at once, completely unexpected, not even a phone call or anything; and so we were unable to leave on schedule. As I shuffle from the plane, I consider asking a stewardess whether she thinks I'm really going to be able to make it across the airport in time to catch my connecting flight to San Antonio, but I already know the answer. I already know the answer because when travelling in the US, I always miss the connecting flight. Every single occasion of my coming back across the Atlantic, I've ended up stranded in Philadelphia or Charlotte or New York because they can't find the plane, or they've found the plane but some kids have drawn cocks on the side, or they've run out of fuel, or it might rain, or there's poo on the fucking runway. It has happened every single time, and tonight I get an unscheduled stay in the windy city. I've been in transit for thirteen hours and somehow I'm still thousands of miles away from home.

As I squirt from the connecting tunnel into the womb of O'Hare international, I raise a finger to catch the attention of a stewardess, but before I've even finished my question she directs my attention to the wall upon which an array of envelopes are affixed with tape. I see that my surname is written on one of the envelopes, but my thoughts are momentarily elsewhere, flustered by the blandly efficient tone of the stewardess telling me that I'm screwed, albeit not in those specific terms. I thought they had been trained to sound like they at least give a shit.

Amazingly, I don't lose it. I was expecting this eventuality. In fact, I would have been more surprised had I made my connecting flight without disruption. The envelope contains a letter telling me how deeply everyone regrets everything, along with tickets which will secure a room and breakfast at some local hotel.

I am swept through baggage claim by tidal crowds exiting the plane, then on through to customs and Homeland Security. Every few minutes I have another piece of paper shoved at me. They all go into different pockets as I try to concentrate on what the hell is going on and where I need to go. I ask directions of a woman who turns out to have a near impenetrable Swedish accent, and who helpfully barks at me whilst pointing at a line of machines, features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency. I can't even get to the machines because there are too many people and the crowd is chaotic, and I don't even know what the fuck I'm expected to do once I get there. After some wrestling, the robot asks for my passport and I answer a series of questions. It prints out my forty-seventh piece of paper to add to all the others I will eventually be expected to hand over to someone or other. Eventually I am through to passport control, or whatever it is. I am asked a couple of questions by a guy who doesn't care, and I'm subsequently waved through. My pockets are still very much stuffed with pointless forms, tickets, declarations, dockets and bits of paper. At no point has anyone asked to see any of them, and yet I've already entered the United States. Almost an hour has passed since I stepped from the plane.

I wait outside with other disgruntled passengers. It's dark and hot, a temperature differential which confirms that I'm back on American soil, accordingly bringing me the only twinge of pleasure I am able to experience under the circumstances. We wait forty minutes until a minibus bearing the name of our hotel appears. It fills to capacity before I can get a seat. The driver tells us that his colleague will be along in another half hour.

We continue to wait. I compare disgruntled notes with a fellow traveller, a German. He is unsure as to the departure time of our replacement San Antonio flight in the morning. I empty my pockets of all the slips of paper I've accrued, but somehow I've mislaid my boarding pass, the one piece of paper which actually does useful shit, the ticket which will eventually get me home.

Fanfuckingtastic.

A second minibus eventually shows. It's after nine. We landed a couple of hours ago. I talk to an old couple who take up the seat in front of me. They tell me that they very much enjoyed England. I tell them that I'm glad to be back in America, despite this evening.

I phone my wife once I'm at the hotel. She already knows what has happened, and knows not to wait for me at the airport. I think she's more distressed by it all than I am. I consider phoning Joe, my friend who lives in Chicago. About a month back I told him that my connection would occur in his city, and that it almost certainly wouldn't be happening given my previous experience of trying to catch a fucking plane in America. I may be giving you a call if I end up in some hotel, I told him, but now that I'm here I realise my mood is best kept in quarantine, and that I will make for terrible company this evening. I don't know Joe very well, but from what I do know, I already respect the guy too much to ask him to babysit some pissed off English dude.

Next morning, I have breakfast at the hotel. It's free, as it should be. I kill time, watch some television, then eventually make my way back to the airport. The missing boarding pass turns out to be no big deal after all.

Yesterday I wore my Lone Star shirt and stetson. I wear the stetson as a matter of course, but I figured that wearing it in combination with the shirt would give me a notionally patriotic appearance, reducing my potential significance to those factions within the Department of Homeland Security who now - so I am informed - make it their business to check your social media to see if you've referred to the current president as a dangerous orange shitgibbon, an identification you might imagine would be covered by that whole deal with freedom of speech, that thing which is supposed to make America great. I had already deleted all references to the dangerous orange shitgibbon from my facebook page, and also any links which might expose me as one of those bleeding heart liberal faggot types; but still, I'm reluctant to take chances, hence the shirt and the stetson. However, I'm now behind schedule and I'm not going to wear the Lone Star shirt a second day running because I have standards. Instead I opt for my Henry Rollins for President t-shirt because it at least suggests patriotism in some form.

I make it through customs and security just fine, aside from one officer having a rummage through my backpack, seemingly intrigued by all the funny looking shit which showed up on the x-ray machine. He scowls at my ancient tapes of industrial noise, but thankfully doesn't find my pornography - a 1993 issue of Knave which I own because I'm in it. Specifically the magazine features an article about A Reflection, an unpublished comic strip written by myself and drawn by Charlie Adlard way back at the beginning of his career. Ignoring the bongo periodical, the security officer finds a set square once owned by my grandfather. I guess maybe it looked like a weapon on the x-ray. Once it's obvious that I'm not about to blow anything up, I'm through. Weeks later I discover that my friend Jane, another English citizen living in the US on a green card, experienced just the sort of difficulties I had anticipated. She was detained at length, and interviewed twice before being allowed to re-enter the country. I'm inclined to wonder whether it was the stetson which helped, which eased the process for me.

I head for my departure gate and an old coot similarly kitted out with a stetson squints at my t-shirt. 'Who do you want for president?'

'Henry Rollins,' I tell him. 'It's a long story.'

My estimation of his voting habits thankfully turn out to be entirely wrong. 'Well, I ain't got no idea who that is,' he sighs, 'but he can't be no worse than that dang fool we got ourselves right now.'

My flight back to Texas runs without incident.

Finally I am back in San Antonio.

Heading for baggage claim I see Daisy Bee hamming it up on the concourse before a bunch of school kids. She is my first familiar face, our famous local clown. She is our equivalent of Krusty because, as I've noticed, there are certain peculiar parallels between life in San Antonio and what you see on a typical episode of The Simpsons. We have a clown. We almost certainly have a guy in a bee costume. We even have our own version of Kent Brockman. I've watched him on the news and I've shaken him by the hand.

Baggage claim echoes traditional song from a marginally less traditional trio of female Mariachi musicians - violin, guitar, and guitarrón. It feels like a personal welcome, as though they're playing just for me, and it makes me think of Michoacan, which makes me happy. The air is hot and the music is sweet.

I am home.

World of Sport

We were in a pub having a drink, very probably watching some band when three young men approached our table - two white guys and a skinny Asian with a leather jacket and long hair. They wanted a quick word with my drinking companion, Popeye the Sailor Man. They were forming a band and wanted to know whether he would sing for them. I kept a diary going for most of 1985 and yet can find no reference to this encounter, although I've a hunch it may have been Saturday the 23rd of March, upon which I noted:

Today I went to Rochester flea market with Popeye the Sailor Man and Olive Oyl. I found out that I am not so overdrawn at the bank as I thought, and by quite a margin in fact. That cheered me up. We visited all sorts of shops and places. I like Olive Oyl. She is a nice person, childlike without being childish. I also met Rosa who was also nice. She is a professional fashion designer who has been in i-D magazine and Look Now! I watched Doctor Who, which was ace, and went to the Good Intent to see the Product who were excellent. Some flat-top beer wallies were slam dancing at the front, although surprisingly there was no violence. Popeye the Sailor Man did an hilarious impersonation of the really fat one. Olive Oyl also came to the pub a bit later. I love Chatham. It is such an interesting and diverse place with nice people and no arty types.

Obviously this wasn't really Popeye the Sailor Man. The individual concerned was hypothetically my best friend from our course at Maidstone College of Art. He lived in Chatham, and I laughed at all of his jokes and regarded him as a musical genius. We had little contact with each other once our course came to an end in 1987, but just enough to have subsequently fallen out for stupid reasons, specifically either because I posted unkind remarks about his favourite television programme on facebook, or because I think I'm cool but I'm really not, or because I've failed to remain exactly the same as I was thirty years ago. People change and these things happen, and these days he may as well be Popeye the Sailor Man so far as I'm concerned.

To get back to the point, I was there when Andy, Rajun, and Alun asked Popeye the Sailor Man to sing for their band. The band was called Apricot Brigade and was, I suppose, something in the general direction of contemporary psychedelia - nothing so obvious as a revival but approximately post-punk with occasional nods to the Doors or the less ponderous regions of Pink Floyd's oeuvre. By way of contrast, Popeye the Sailor Man was himself of a more traditionally gothic sensibility, tending towards tortured songs of self-loathing, regret, and that feeling you get when you've drunk the last of the rum with two days to go before you hit port. Oddly, the four of them all seemed to match each other quite well, and Apricot Brigade became regulars on the Medway live circuit, even attracting something of a following.

Then at some point which I've failed to record in my diary, presumably during either the spring or early summer of 1986 - I was asked to join the band. I was already in a band - Total Big, with my friends Carl and Chris - but whilst it was a lot of fun, Total Big hadn't quite been the sort of band of which I had ever envisioned myself as a member. It was loose and conspicuously lacking in Joy Division style bass lines, and I'd always aspired to something a little more self-important and po-faced. I didn't really see why I shouldn't be in more than one band at the same time - although I later learned this to have been the cause of some frowning for Carl and Chris; and besides, Popeye the Sailor Man and myself had played together with some frequency in the course of our respective solitary musical dabblings at college, and so it didn't seem like my joining his group would be such a wild leap.

Alun Jones - Apricot Brigade's drummer - had gone into the studio with the Dentists - a more conspicuously popular Medway band - and contributed to the recording of their Down and Out in Paris and Chatham EP around Easter 1986. This had inspired some debate over Alun's loyalties particularly as the Dentists had recently lost their previous drummer, Ian Greensmith. It was probably also significant that Alun and Popeye the Sailor Man didn't appear to get along particularly well, which with hindsight I would attribute to Alun having been a fairly good judge of character, possibly excepting his friendship with Bluto. Amongst the solo recordings made by Popeye the Sailor Man in the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art is a track called The World of Alun, apparently named in a general spirit of sneering at that which he considered saaaaaad in some respect, the world of Alun presumably being a modest realm characterised by jumpers your mum knitted for you, quite unlike Popeye the Sailor Man's important cosmopolitan multiverse of existential contemplation and tortured poetry. I chose not to notice it at the time, but Popeye the Sailor Man seemed stricken by a pathological need to define himself by means of his enemies, possibly adapting to the fact that he made enemies fairly easily. This was effected mainly through drinking to excess in combination with shagging whoever seemed available, activities which tended to generate self-loathing on his part and open hostility in others.

Popeye the Sailor Man inevitably regarded Alun's jumping ship as a betrayal on the scale of that which it might have been had their initial encounter been characterised by some sort of oath drawn in blood; but on the other hand it also meant that Alun graduated to a better band, one which released records, and that I was presented with a new opportunity for scowling meaningfully before a paying audience in the hope of some of them consenting to sexual intercourse with me.

Of course the most obvious objection to my replacing Alun as drummer was that I had no drum kit and no experience of playing one. I expect this may have initially made me something of a tough sale so far as Rajun and Andy were concerned given that they had no reason to view me as anything other than the scruffy bloke who always turned up at the pub with Popeye the Sailor Man and laughed at all his jokes. I was to operate a drum machine, play keyboard, and help take the band in a new direction. I had the feeling this new direction was driven mainly by Popeye the Sailor Man, but I could be wrong.

Uncle Fester - as Andy insisted we would now be called - had its first rehearsal at his dad's house in Chatham on Saturday the 14th of June, 1986. We worked our way through five or six Apricot Brigade songs, shifting them around a little so as to accommodate my presence. Rajun provided me with a Roland TR606 drum machine and Roland RS09 polyphonic keyboard, in addition to which I played manual electronic percussion on an MPC Industries Kit and Clap. I also had a small four channel mixer and a couple of Roland pedals to beef up the otherwise unimpressive rhythms I was either playing or programming. Andy provided an ironing board upon which I could set up all of this equipment; and if I wasn't playing two fingered organ melodies or tapping the pads, I was out front drumming away on whatever bits of metal were to hand. This was because it was 1986, and we weren't going to be left out of the loop in terms of what Nigel Ayers describes as fashionable metal percussion in the sleeve notes of Nocturnal Emissions' Drowning in a Sea of Bliss album.

So the line-up of World of Sport - as was Andy's next suggestion for a name, and the one we really should have stuck with - was Popeye the Sailor Man on rhythm guitar and vocals, Andy playing bass, Rajun playing lead, and myself doing something else depending on the song. I was in essence a musician without portfolio - possibly excepting the musician element - and this was probably what doomed me to failure, namely that I wasn't really required to do any one specific thing, and it was sometimes hard to tell quite what was expected of me; and given that I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, I tended to take a back seat.

Nevertheless, it was initially fun, not least being in a band which sounded more like the sort of thing I would listen to at home, and less like the sort of thing which traditionally would have had me as a member. To point out that the songs were self-involved and lacking in humour is at least as much of a dead end as suggesting that the Barron Knights lacked gravitas; and Rajun was a great guitarist, and Popeye the Sailor Man had a great voice. It sounded at least as dark and serious as the Sisters of Mercy, without necessarily resembling them; and it was fun in a social sense as well.

I would cycle the eight or so miles to Chatham every Friday evening, stay the night at Andy's place, and then we'd have a rehearsal on the Saturday depending on the state of the hangover incurred by Popeye the Sailor Man. Andy's dad never seemed to be around, and I don't even recall if I actually ever met the man. I believe Andy's mother had left some years before, so it was usually just the two of us. It was odd and a little awkward - although not to the point of being unpleasant - because I didn't really know Andy well enough to be staying at his house with such regularity but he was the only one with a spare bed. His house was spotless, almost a show home, large and suburban middle class of the kind associated with sitcoms in which Terry Scott shits himself because his Rabelasian boss is coming over for tea on the evening of June Whitfield having scheduled a visit from their unusually prudish vicar. I felt vaguely guilty simply walking through the front door, as though I might abruptly find myself sans trousers and about to deposit a turd dead centre of the pristine living room carpet before I knew what was happening. Additionally, while Andy was generally both amiable and very, very funny, he tended towards the sort of quiet reserve which leaves you wondering what he's thinking, even when he may not be thinking anything, which did nothing to allay the fear that I might be imposing upon his hospitality.

On one occasion I stayed at Rajun's house for some reason, although it was less practical, Rajun's house also being occupied by his parents and his brother, Prez. I'd met Prez a few times and got on well with him, and vaguely knew their parents from the Blue Lagoon, the combined burger bar and music venue they ran in the high street. I didn't know them so well as to strike a casual attitude when crossing the landing in the middle of the night in need of a pee only to encounter Rajun's dad stood glowering in the dark in just his pants.

'Hello, Mr. Amin,' I squeaked pitifully. 'Just needing the er...'

Mr. Amin glowered and said nothing.

Maybe he was sleepwalking.

Anyway, ambiguous silences and nudist fathers notwithstanding,  I got to know Andy and Rajun reasonably well and grew to enjoy their company. Peculiarly I even got to know Alun whom I had replaced, and found him considerably more personable than Popeye the Sailor Man, which was strange and unexpected. Despite Popeye the Sailor Man being the one member of the band whom I'd known for longer than five minutes, I never stayed at his place, if he even had a place at the time. Let's just assume that Olive Oyl probably didn't want strangers trudging through the house waking Swee'Pea.

At some point or other, we settled on Envy as the new name. Inspired by one of Andy's more surreal monologues, I'd come up with a logo for World of Sport - a candle burning gothically atop a football, but Envy sounded a bit like Greed, which was an album by the Swans, so that was it. As well as a name, we had our first gig - Friday the 8th of August, 1986 at Pickwicks in Rochester High Street. We were support to a band called Robert Underwater, and according to my notebook of the time our set comprised Pale Orchid, Cut So Deep, an untitled instrumental, Cat & Mouse, We Will Fall during which Andy had some trouble with his bass, Twenty-One Years, I Yam What I Yam*, No Sound, Goodnight, and Howling Moon. I don't remember anything about it because it was thirty years ago and I was almost certainly drunk, although I have a feeling Robert Underwater all wore sunglasses despite it being night time.

Our next date was Friday the 29th of August, 1986 at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Strookas and Swinging Time. Our set comprised the still untitled instrumental, No Sound, Carmilla, Goodnight, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, I'm Strong to the Finish 'Cause I Eats Me Spinach*, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, and Cat & Mouse. I have dim memories of this performance being better than the previous gig, but that I felt vaguely ridiculous in my role, essentially an imposter. The other three were producing music. I was pressing buttons or hunkering down on the floor to hit an empty petrol can with a tack hammer; and I wasn't the only one having doubts. In my sketchbook, a note dated to Saturday the 30th of August, 1986 reports:

Andy has just said he's left the band. He may have changed his mind by the morning, although I doubt that he will. I'm sad, and I hope that he does change his mind, but I can fully understand his decision. It's all gone bad - very bad. We argue constantly, and so far as I'm concerned a drum machine should provide fast bone crushing rhythms that kicks the audience in the teeth rather than something which could quite easily be replaced by a metronome. Also I'm sick and tired of having to apologise to Popeye the Sailor Man for pissing him off by finding myself sick and tired of his shit.

Andy changed his mind, and we played another gig at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Herbs and the Martini Slutz on Wednesday the 3rd of September, 1986, possibly not representing a significant improvement because in my sketchbook on the following Tuesday I note:

I am in a band of which I don't really know if I want to be a member. It isn't fun any more, and that should surely be the most important part of it. It isn't even as though I add anything to the equation.

Murmurs about the worth of my contribution accordingly began to emerge, mostly voiced by Popeye the Sailor Man, and unfortunately lacking any concrete suggestion of what was actually expected of me beyond some nebulous definition of loyalty dependent upon my understanding of how lucky I was to be in the group, and how many strings he had pulled to bring this about. I'd seen him pull this same sort of passive-aggressive shit before, and was at last beginning to recognise it for what it was - just Popeye the Sailor Man playing divide and rule.

So I contributed a song, not a very good song, but a song nonetheless. It was called Said I Was A Reptile and it sounded like Portion Control impersonating the Cure. We rehearsed it once at the Blue Lagoon, in the basement which also served as bar and music venue. It felt like a waste of everyone's time.

The next diary-equivalent note to appear in my sketchbook, and the last to refer to the group, dates to Wednesday the 17th of September, 1986 and reads thus:

Today was my twenty-first birthday. Andy gave me a small baseball bat so I can hit things during gigs. Envy played at Churchills in Chatham with the Sceptres. Our set comprised the instrumental, No Sound, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, Carmilla, Sailor's Hornpipe*, Goodnight, and Cat & Mouse.

I'd found some more old oil cans on a bit of waste ground, the kind which would have held three or four gallons, and I pounded these with the baseball bat during whichever song it was we had decided would benefit from inept metal bashing. It was probably a novelty in terms of Churchills, but doubtless looked absurd to anyone who'd ever been to see Test Department. Another couple of rehearsals slid past, possibly even a gig I failed to note in my sketchbook, and the moment inevitably came.

We need to have a talk.

It had been a decent Saturday afternoon on Rochester High Street, possibly following some sort of Dickens related public festival - more or less a weekly occurence in that part of the Medway towns - and I was as usual lightly but pleasantly drunk. We all went to sit upon the grass opposite what is now the Tara Baker Hair Studio, and may have been the Tara Baker Hair Studio even then for all I can remember. I had assumed we were just going to talk about stuff, but immediately realised it was a sacking.

'It's not working,' said Popeye the Sailor Man, making it clear that this wasn't something to be negotiated.

'But but but,' I countered ineffectively.

Andy stepped in with unexpected anger, pointing out just how many weeks I'd had in which to scour local rubbish dumps for the sort of scrap by which I would transform Envy into a sort of Kentish Einsturzende Neubauten, and how I hadn't actually done this. In fact it was difficult to say what I actually had brought to the group, and obviously he made a good point.

I had no defence, and although I'd become accustomed to the passive-aggressive observations of Popeye the Sailor Man, these harsh words from Andy came as a complete surprise and a shock. I don't think I'd even seen him angry before that moment. Weirdly, I started crying, which probably didn't help my case. I felt ashamed because I'd really wanted it to work, but I knew it had been a waste of time all along. Possibly the others had also known this, but it had still seemed like it was worth a try.

They carried on without me, acquiring a proper drummer, and continuing for as long as any of the respective members could stand to be in the same room as Popeye the Sailor Man, each eventually and inevitably making it onto his enemies list for one reason or another. I have seen both Rajun and Andy since, and it was great to see them again, and to be able to have a decent conversation without giving a shit about that stupid band we'd been in. I resumed full-time pissing about in Total Big, appreciating it all the more having briefly gone through the misery of being in a serious band performing songs about what is to be seen as one gazes stony faced into the blackness of the human soul vowing that never again shall those shallow fools laugh at thine tortured musings as scribbled in diseased hand upon the cursed parchment of eternity...

You live and learn.

*: Not really.

Mental

In June, 2004, I finally went mad; not mad as in drinking quite a lot, having a curry, then climbing atop a bus shelter with my trousers worn upon my head, nor mad meaning I walked through the village one Sunday wearing a rather unusual hat like one of those tediously middle-class fuckers who used to write in to John Peel's Home Truths radio show; no - my madness took the form of serious clinical depression, according to my doctor. Work at Royal Mail, and by association my own life, had been getting steadily more difficult since at least the mid-nineties, contrary to the truism that a job will become easier as one accrues experience and seniority. Each year, the management made more cuts in the name of savings. Each year, we were asked to do more and to do it quicker until the demands of the job began to border on the impossible.

Then at some point around February 2004, the hearing went in my right ear, replaced at first by a jangling noise, next day becoming something sounding like one of the less tuneful Merzbow albums. I had experienced tinnitus before but only infrequently, usually after going to see a gig and having forgotten to take earplugs with which to deaden the sound; but this was different - just one ear and so loud that it prevented my sleeping for the first couple of nights. Worse still, I'd begun to suffer dizzy spells and had experienced trouble crossing the road, or indeed doing anything which required me to turn my head.

Something was very clearly wrong so I went to see the doctor. She shone lights into my ear and told me it looked fine. She brought in another doctor who told me that I should take care when listening to music with earbuds. The advice seemed useless, not least because it contained no actual diagnosis of my problem. I listened to music a lot whilst at work, and so accordingly took great care regarding volume and how many continuous hours I would spend listening to CDs of enthusiastically violent rap music. Working without music wasn't really an option, because it was the constant soundtrack of drive-by shootings and territorial violence which was keeping me sane. Months passed, and neither the work nor the ear were getting any better. Return visits to Crystal Palace Road Medical Centre brought no new understanding beyond the reality of lengthy NHS waiting lists for specialist treatment.

On Sunday the 4th of April 2004 I wrote in my diary:

I feel approaching normal for the first time in almost a week. I am able to string two thoughts together. I am not completely knackered. The ear infection has waned a little, the blockage and horribly jangling high frequency noise are mostly gone, although the tinnitus remains.

I rose at eleven after an enforced lay-in - I needed it, plus my enthusiasm for consciousness is not all it could be at the moment. I'd had a slightly restless night with dream after dream of work related horror without any actual symbolic content. I stayed up and watched Brassed Off last night, which seemed apt. The part where Stephen Tompkinson hangs himself from the colliery pit head may have been intended as humour, seeing as he was dressed as a clown - albeit very black humour - but it didn't make me laugh.

Work is unbearable - really, really, really unbearable. We are expected to do what is tantamount to ten hours work in an eight hour day, and it absolutely cannot be done. The carrot on the stick is a five rather than six day working week, but it isn't worth it; not when all the me time is spent in recovery; and why should this be exactly? Because Tom Willis - who has never actually done the job - believes the Royal Mail has to change, as he phrases it - another one of those meaningless mantras employed by corporate cock suckers in service of making themselves appear thrusting and businessy.

Why?

Why does it have to change?

It was working before, just about.

Now it's fucked.

Brilliant.

I once at least had the minor satisfaction of doing a pointless job well. Now I can't even say that much, and it's become a Kafkaesque exercise in moving bits of paper that no-one wants to read backwards and forwards between sorting frame and pouching box until someone finds time to deliver it to the house containing the dustbin into which it will inevitably fly unopened.

I cried my fucking eyes out on Monday when I was finished, having got a mere third of the shit delivered. I was crying yesterday too, stood before a sorting frame about twice the size of what I'm used to, just staring at those massive piles of shite knowing I had no chance of getting it done, and even with at least another four hours to go. It's killing me.

I described another minor breakdown similar to the above in greater detail in a letter sent to Allan Leighton, predatory corporate carnivore and then chairman of Royal Mail. The letter, dated Tuesday the 4th of May, attempts to explain at length why the changes to Royal Mail working practice which he had implemented were impractical from the perspective of us poor cunts trying to do the job.

Two weeks ago, after finishing (barely) at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the café as is my custom. I bought a newspaper, ordered a very late breakfast and sat down. First I found that I could not actually read the paper. I could not keep an entire sentence in mind for longer than it took to read. Then my food arrived but I found that I could not eat it. So I just sat there, staring into space, crying - a grown man of thirty-eight sat in a café crying without even knowing why.

Surprisingly he never replied. Maybe he wrote back but it was mislaid in the mail, the hopelessly inefficient mail.

I was beginning to lose it. My snapping point occurred on one particularly improbably heavy day as I opened up my pouching box. A pouching box is either free-standing or attached to an existing post box, a kind of safe in which a Royal Mail driver will deposit additional bags of sorted mail when the mail for a designated delivery route is of such volume as to exceed what the postman or postwoman is able to carry under their own steam. It was, as stated, an improbably heavy day, and so much so that I hadn't finished preparing my mail for delivery until just before noon - a task which would once have been done by eight in the morning at the latest. This left me two hours in which to deliver roughly four hours work, but I just had to get on with it and do what I could, and any mail left undelivered by the time I was due to finish my eight hour day was simply not my problem. I'd done all of those little closes off East Dulwich Grove - Steen Way, Deventer Crescent and the rest - and I was at the pouching box. I took out my key, unlocked the box, and wrestled the grey mailbag onto the ground. I took one corner and tipped everything out, then started picking up the individual bundles of mail, noting the addresses so as to stuff them into the front basket of my bike in the right order - Matham Grove, Tell Grove, the lower numbers of Glengarry Road...

I stared at the addresses unable to work out why none of them made sense. These were the wrong bundles of mail. These were bundles of mail which should have been in the bag dropped off at the pouching box outside the working man's club, half a mile down the road. This mail should be in the other box. My driver had mixed up the bags. There was more mail here than I could carry on my bike, and it would requite two or three trips to set it right, to take this mail down the road and fetch back the bundles I needed right now, but for some reason I couldn't seem to fit all of this information inside my head in one shot, and apparently I was talking to myself and had been doing so for a couple of minutes. The day had been kicking me in the arse since five that morning, and this was just one kick too many.

I couldn't think.

I stuffed the bundles of mail back into the bag, then the bag back into the box and locked up. I cycled back to the sorting office and went in. Something was wrong with me, but I couldn't quite tell what.

The sorting office was empty but for Lee, the manager, and some agency worker. The two of them were talking, and talking slowly, and I badly needed to say something, to explain what had happened but I couldn't interrupt, and I had a feeling that whatever I said would sound mad. I felt as though I was about to explode. All I could hear was this person I had never seen before in my life telling the manager about something which didn't matter, droning on and on and on, never ending, blah blah blah...

Feeling an upsurge of something unpleasant and unavoidable, I went to a different part of the office - a safe distance - and attacked one of the sorting frames, mainly headbutting, some kicks and a few thumps - really putting everything into driving my fucking skull through that stupid sheet of stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking metal. I screamed in pain but couldn't get it anything like as loud as it should be. I screamed so loud that my throat hurt but it wasn't enough. Hopefully I would be sacked, and would no longer have to deal with any of this stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking stupid shit. There was no conceivable future in which this situation was going to sort itself out.

To my astonishment, Lee understood completely. I tried to explain what had set me off, and how I had lost the ability to think straight, to hold more than a few basic thoughts in my head at the same time. I recall words interspersed with manic flourishes of laughter, just like when you see a crazy person in a film, and I was amused - maybe even a little pleased - to realise that it had come naturally and that clichéd mad laughter was really a thing. I may even have shared this observation with my manager. In any case, he seemed to get it and told me to go home and not come back until I'd sorted myself out.

'Your mental health is more important than this fucking job.'

I could tell that he meant it.

So I went home, then took another trip down to the medical centre and had myself signed off for a couple of weeks with stress, or serious clinical depression, as it was described to me. My panic response, the instinct which would have inspired fight or flight under other circumstances, had become jammed on eleven as a result of month after month after month of working under such back-breaking conditions whilst upper management told us that it wasn't enough. This explained the bursting into tears for no obvious reason apparently. This made me feel a little better, an authority figure telling me that my job was definitively shit, as opposed to scowling and asking if I couldn't just put a little more effort into it.

Every so often a missive would come down from on high, from Allan Leighton himself, stressing how we really needed to start pulling our fingers out so as to ensure the future success of Royal Mail as a business. We're all in this together, he would tell us, so let's crack on. I suppose he imagined us all stood around sneering in our respective sorting offices - huh, men in suits, what do they know?

'Hold up, lads,' one of us would cry like the first worker who really gets it in a 1930s Soviet propaganda film. 'This bloke's speaking our language!,' and thus would we crack on.

Working a back-breaking eight hour day and still having trouble paying the rent, or being paid a million pounds a minute to blow shareholders in some board room - we were a team, all cogs in the same machine, apparently.

I went home and spent a couple of weeks as a walk-on part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, making the most of the sick pay which I really felt I had earned; and I knew that I couldn't go back to Royal Mail. Before I'd signed up back in 1988, I'd had an interview with London Underground. Apparently I had done well on the interview, but I wasn't offered a job. It seems that this had been down to the answer I gave to one crucial question.

You're on your own on the platform late at night, just yourself and a gang of fifty rowdy skinheads, obviously pissed, all busily kicking someone's head in. What do you do?

'Well, I would advise them to behave and to conduct themselves in a more orderly fashion,' I squeaked, 'and then I would call for assistance.'

This was the wrong answer I was later told, because it means you're either an idiot or a liar, and London Transport are reluctant to employ people who are likely to get themselves kicked inside out by fifty rowdy skinheads. Now knowing that this was obviously the wrong answer, it seemed like I may as well try again, and so I applied and was interviewed, and was told I would be given a start date at some point soon; but the call never came. I went back to the doctor and was signed off as mad for another month without feeling even remotely guilty, and I continued to wait.

Eventually the word came back. The hold up was due to the fact of my having been to see a doctor about my ear during the previous six months, and that doctor had recommended me to a specialist, bringing about a Kafkaesque situation. We've written to your doctor asking for him to write to the specialist to write back to your doctor with the results of your consultation so he can send them to us, and that was the last I heard from them. I made phone calls back and forth, then eventually gave up and reluctantly shuffled back to the sorting office around September. I had been away for two glorious months and had even begun to remember what it was like to not feel knackered and pissed off all the time. Unfortunately things had changed since I had been away. Lee, our manager, had been pulled on the grounds of his inability to bully workers into delivering square pegs unto round holes. In his place was Audrey.

My doctor had told me I was to insist on light duties, not least because my ear was not significantly better, and I had experienced a resurgence of the problem with my balance.

Audrey was a slender, hawkish black woman with shoulder pads and a harsh, barking tone. I knocked and went into her office to introduce myself. 'I'm afraid you'll need to put me on something light for a week, or so, because the—'

'Let's just get this straight, Mr. Burton.' Her voice rose to  unnecessary volume, sharp stabbing words with the sort of emphasis you employ when setting a five-year old on the right path; and she was smiling, which seemed kind of weird. 'You do not come into my office and tell me what you are going to do or what you are not going to do. Do I make myself clear?'

I tried to remember the last time I had been spoken to in this way, but couldn't because I've never been in either the army or prison.

'If you have a problem then you come and tell me about it, and I make the decision about what you can or cannot do. Do you understand?'

I either nodded or grunted, some token acknowledging that I wasn't resisting arrest, and that there was no need for the taser.

She introduced herself as a sort of postal celebrity - although I hadn't asked - describing how she had come over from Camberwell sorting office, airdropped in on the strength of a solid reputation for getting problem offices working. Such was her popularity that she was known as the people's manager to some, so she claimed. She seemed to be working by the assumption that I could be restored to fully operational status through bullying alone, and seemed strangely crestfallen when I told her I had an appointment for an MRI scan in hope of discerning whatever the hell was wrong with my ear. I had denied her some small pleasure, because it might be something real. She was silent for a moment and then testily informed me that I would need to bring her a letter from my doctor confirming the appointment.

I was assigned to inside duties for a week which meant I saw a lot of Audrey, and heard a lot of her as she patrolled the office loudly explaining her own excellence to whichever subordinate happened to be available. Each time she passed my way she seemed to be in the middle of expanding upon her thoroughly Darwinian views of the sick, the lame, and the useless. I had the impression she didn't like me very much. The next week I went back out on a delivery regardless, because it was better than being stuck inside listening to Audrey with all her theories of success - every morning I like to begin the day with some uplifting Gospel music, and other soundbites which could easily have been quoted from The Silence of the Lambs or American Psycho.

In December I had the MRI scan but nothing was found, and eventually my ear set itself right of its own accord. Thankfully I managed to sign for one of the better walks in the office, and whilst Audrey remained an abrasive and often unpleasant personality, she seemed to thaw a little, at least towards me. I had stopped caring, and had adopted a policy of agreeing to whatever unrealistic demand she made, then just going ahead and doing whatever was practical in the time given. Weirdly, being white, I no longer seemed to be a target. For some reason she really seemed to have it in for young, black males. Had she herself been white, I suspect the issue may not have been quite so readily dismissed when formal complaints were made.

There is a theory presently finding increasing support in psychiatric circles that mental illness is, in a majority of cases, an inevitable by-product of capitalism. In the March 2015 issue of Southwark Mental Health News, Robert Dellar summarised the correlation quite succinctly:

People with diagnoses like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the exponentially growing varieties of "personality disorder" of which there are currently about five-hundred, are affected by these states in ways which very often lead to withdrawal, isolation, hopelessness, confusion, chaos, inability to look after themselves, to distinguish fantasy from reality, and all too often, suicide. These situations can often be proven to be caused by concrete social factors. Their progression and the possibility of their alleviation, or at least their co-existence with a decent quality of life are influenced without exception by concrete social factors.

I've known some mad buggers in my time, and whilst a few were undoubtedly already playing with a stacked deck, the above seems to pretty much nail it, and certainly rings bells with me. Week after week, month after month, year after year I struggled with a job often so demanding as to mean that the remainder of my free time was mostly spent either asleep or recovering from the day's labour, because rampant capitalism given free-reign will tend to human centipede its workforce into disposable biological profit generators by whatever means it can get away with. In our case this included sending out an employee satisfaction survey every few months in the mistaken belief of our being so stupid as to believe it meant they gave a shit; and I suppose it helped shareholders sleep better at night, in the event of concerns of our well-being ever troubling them, which I find unlikely.

I always took great trouble over those surveys, ticking the boxes - strongly disagree in most cases - then giving reasons with assorted home truths in the space allowed for those who responded other. The surveys posed hypothetical statements such as I am very happy with my job and feel that I am adequately paid, or I am confident that as an employer Royal Mail has my best interests at heart. I don't know a single person who would have ticked strongly agree, agree, or even no opinion to any of that sort of thing, and yet a week or so later, the results always came back the same. The manager would gather us together and tell us that most Royal Mail employees were very happy in their work, but some were just a teensy weensy bit fretful over job security, although they didn't really like to mention it because they felt confident it would all be sorted out in the end.

Somehow we got the impression that the employee satisfaction survey was a waste of time. I regularly concluded mine with hyperbolic intimation of suicidal thoughts, made partially for the sake of indicating strength of feeling; and yet the one time I was called into the office to give account of my supposedly confidential answers was the time when I adopted a more sarcastic tone, ticking strongly agree to anything with which I strongly disagreed, and suggesting I would be happy to have half my wages cut if I could just be sure it guaranteed superior investment security for my superiors.

'You were joking, right?' the manager asked, regarding me with some caution, as though I had properly flipped. I don't think he'd had much experience of sarcasm at such levels of toxicity.

'Yes, I was joking.'

He seemed relieved, and most depressing of all, I could tell he understood. He probably felt the same.

Arse

It was Monday evening and I'd been struggling with a pain in my lower gut for most of the day. To be specific, pain should here be regarded as an overstatement, discomfort being the more accurate term. A month or so before, I'd experienced something which could be more securely identified as pain - and quite severe pain at that - in the same spot, and it was so bad that I'd ended up at the emergency medical clinic on Broadway. The doctor told me I had something called diverticulitis, prescribed codeine and antibiotics, and then sent me on my way. I stuck to the recommended diet, low fibre switching to high fibre after a few weeks. I took my medicine and everything seemed fine; and yet here I was again.

Diverticulitis results from tiny pockets developing in the wall of the lower intestine. Small items of food can become trapped in these pockets and go bad, leading to infection or worse. This was what I had, and the doctor warned me off eating anything containing small seeds. Sesame seeds seemed to be the worst. I had eaten beans on toast on Sunday evening in response to a craving, and couldn't understand why suddenly I felt unwell again after more or less a month without any trouble. One stipulation of the recommended initial low fibre diet had been the avoidance of the skin of certain vegetables, requiring for example that I peel my potatoes before boiling them. Baked beans had skins, I realised, so maybe it was that. In any case, the discomfort wasn't anything like so bad as it had been on the previous occasion, so I figured it would probably be okay. Maybe it was just good old honest indigestion.

At about eight in the evening we went back to the emergency medical clinic just in case. I would see a doctor, get another prescription for codeine and antibiotics, and everything would be fine. We sat in the waiting room for a while, my wife and myself, and then were ushered into a small room. A nurse asked me questions, took my blood pressure, and took me to have a CT scan, which was kind of unexpected. Even more unexpected was when we returned to the first room and she jabbed a massive hypodermic needle into the crook of my elbow, hooking me up to a drip of saline solution and morphine. This was something new. I was now attached to an IV buddy, a mobile stand with the bags of fluid, the tubes and so on, and I wasn't entirely sure why. This wasn't how it had happened last time.

'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' my wife told me.

The discomfort wasn't anything like so bad as it had been on the previous occasion, and yet the treatment I was receiving suggested something more serious. Furthermore, I had just discovered how much I hated hypodermic needles. I'd been inoculated plenty of times, and had of course received injections at the dentist. I imagined myself more or less without fear where needles were concerned. I now realised that this was because I'd never before been pierced by one of the big military issue fuckers tooled from sharpened lengths of steel pipe, just little pinpricks which can be ignored if you think about something else hard enough for a second or two. By way of compensation, the morphine was really beginning to kick in. I felt enveloped in psychic cotton wool, moderately euphoric, and with a renewed insight into the writing of William S. Burroughs.

'Man, this be some good shit right here,' I told Bess without any of the irony which would ordinarily have underlined such an observation. I knew the morphine and the drip meant there was a possibility of my being in serious trouble, but for the moment I didn't really mind too much.

We waited.

Eventually, as the my body metabolised the morphine - or however it works - I began to mind.

Another member of staff arrived, a woman whose name I forget played by Judith Furse who had given such a memorable performance as the evil Doctor Crow in Carry On Spying. Oddly, she was still in character. She asked me to describe my symptoms.

I began to describe my symptoms, and she started talking over me before I'd even reached the halfway point of the first sentence.

'You have diverticulitis, Mr. Burton,' she told me frostily. 'It's not just going to go away. You have it whether you like it or not, and you're going to have to take it seriously.'

I continued my statement regardless. I wasn't going to be interrupted, and certainly not by someone who had actually asked me to answer her question in the first place. Marian used to do that all the time, prompting you to speech and then speaking over you as part of some sort of passive-aggressive pissing contest. It was annoying, and I had learned to simply continue my monologue with greater force despite the interruption. Now I considered Doctor Crow's ominous warning.

You have it whether you like it or not, and you're going to have to take it seriously.

I thought back to the previous visit to the emergency medical clinic, that poor egg-headed physician stuttering his useless brainiac advice as Bess and I piled back into our hotrod.

'Whatever you say, Poindexter!' I had laughed, slamming a cassette of Link Wray's Rumble into the tape deck and spitting out a demonstrative mouthful of Wild Turkey. I turned to my wife. 'Hit the gas, baby. Let's go get us some sesame seeds and 'tater skins.'

But now I would have to take my diverticulitis seriously.

'Maybe if someone would actually tell me what the problem is,' I suggested pointedly. No-one had yet delivered anything resembling a verdict on why I should require a saline drip, morphine, or CT scan, much less whether anything had been revealed by the same.

Doctor Crow responded with further bewildering admonishments regarding the severity of my condition, whilst leaving said condition still entirely unquantified, and then she left the room. As the door was briefly opened I caught a snatch of conversation between two other members of staff, one of them being the man who had talked me through the CT scan. It sounded like something had popped, and I picked up the words trailing fat. My mind's eye formed a picture of a diverticule resembling a tiny burst balloon leaking blobs of liquefied bacon rind into the surrounding region of my abdomen.

Thankfully this wasn't what had happened, as the next nurse to arrive explained, but it was something which might happen in which case I would be in serious trouble. She began to discuss hospitals.

'I'm not going home tonight?' I still couldn't square this - whatever it was that was happening - with the fact of my not actually being in any serious amount of pain, as I had been on the previous occasion.

'You're fine at the moment,' she told me, 'but you should probably go into hospital as a precaution in case it gets any worse.'

Shit.

I'd never been in hospital, not as a patient, and certainly not staying overnight. This was all very unexpected, and it was difficult to know what to think.

'The ambulance will be about forty minutes. Do you need to get anything from home?'

'Ambulance?' Bloody hell. I shared a look with my wife. 'Can't we just drive there.'

The nurse went back out to consult with Doctor Crow, then returned to tell us that it would be okay. She removed my drip, and I sat in the waiting room as my wife went home to pick up a few things - my diary, toothbrush, and something to read during my stay. As we left, Doctor Crow looked up from securing Kenneth Williams to a conveyor belt, bisected at halfway along its length by a huge circular saw. She smiled. 'You will be seeing Doctor Narvaez,' she told me. 'He is a great doctor. You will like him.'

'Okay,' I said, trying to work out whether she had failed to understand that we were enemies, or whether she understood it very well, and this new, friendlier tone was simply part of some strategy.

What a strange woman. How the hell did she know whether or not I was going to like the guy? How did she know that Narvaez and myself would not both perish, locked together in a fight to the death with lasers on the airless surface of some distant asteroid, our dying moments shared like dancers in some fatal ballet? Could she claim to see the future?

We drove to North East Methodist, and then spent ten minutes looking for signs of life. It was approaching midnight, and only the emergency admissions desk was still manned. After the traditional round of filling in yet more forms with the same information I had already submitted five or six times - the sort of thing you might imagine would have become unnecessary since the advent of information technology - I was dressed in one of those gowns which leaves one's arse exposed, and settled into a room. There were two beds in the room, but the other remained unoccupied during my stay, so I took the bed next to the window and was afforded a good view of the most spectacular storms to hit Texas since I moved here. A succession of different nurses came and went, asking more of the same questions, probing an agonising succession of major veins and arteries before eventually finding one in my hand which would be good for the drip.

Next day I was back on the clear liquid diet I'd been obliged to endure back in March. Bess brought her laptop in and worked at my bedside. I dozed, failed to enjoy a collection of Graham Greene short stories, and watched crap television - mostly peoples' court shows in which network appointed judges arbitrate disagreements between different groups of tattooed losers who either owe each other money or want their cars back; but I also found time to catch up with El Chavo, an eye-watering Mexican sitcom in which tiny argumentative children are played by adults in kinderwear with freckles drawn on their faces. The humour is based mainly on the premise of it being funny when people fall over or are hit in the face with a frying pan. It's like a more nightmarish version of the Benny Hill show, but all in screeching Spanish.

Eventually the fabled Doctor Narvaez turned up, and uncannily I found that I really did like him. I told him about my previous bout of diverticulitis, the low fibre diet and so on.

He pulled a face and waved a dismissive hand. 'I have my doubts as to whether any of that makes any difference,' he said. 'The jury is still out on much of this. It seems better just to remember what foods give you trouble, and then don't eat them.'

I recalled a recent indigestive flare-up immediately following the consumption of a burger bun from which I couldn't be bothered to scrape the sesame seeds. I decided that the Narvaez version rang more true than the previous advice I had been given.

Next day I was on solid but bland food, extended even to overcooked brisket and broccoli - a terrible choice for someone suffering from diverticulitis according to my earlier understanding. I ate with pleasure, having previously resigned myself to nothing but apple juice and broth for at least three days; and I experienced no ill effects.

The second evening came, and the head nurse returned to admonish me about my failure to follow her directive. She had showed me a pair of sleeves made of some material. These were to be fitted over my lower legs before I went to sleep in order to prevent blood clots.

'Blood clots!?'

'Yes, blood clots,' and she began to describe the clotting process as though I had never heard of such a thing.

'Wait. Am I at any serious risk of having blood clots form in my legs? Is this something associated with diverticulitis?'

She didn't seem to understand the question, only that I should do as told. She began to tell me about circulation.

'I'm forty-nine,' I said. 'I cycle fifteen miles a day. I think my circulation is probably okay, unless you know something that I don't.'

She didn't seem to understand this either.

I had spent the night either sweating or shivering because I found the bed uncomfortable and the air conditioning never seemed to be quite as I would have wanted. It was difficult to sleep as it was, even without nurses waking me up at 4.00AM so as to make sure I'd been sleeping properly, or to take a blood sample, or to ask whether I'd done a poo yet. I wasn't going to swathe my legs in something hot and uncomfortable as preventative to something which wasn't going to happen anyway.

Next evening, the same head nurse made an indulgent tutting noise. 'We've been a naughty boy,' she said, explaining that I would not be able to wriggle out of it for a second evening. No-one was dying of poor circulation on her watch.

I said nothing, but apparently projected a field of ambient hostility of such strength as to prevent her from further pushing the issue.

By Thursday I was deemed out of risk and well enough to return home. An orderly conveyed me to the exit in a wheelchair because patients aren't allowed to make the trip from bed to parking lot under their own steam.

'This is for legal reasons, right?'

He chuckled. 'Once you've made it outside, whatever happens to you out there is your problem.'

That seemed to be the end of it, barring a colonoscopy about a month later, the duration of which I spent under general anaesthetic. Nothing was found beyond a single small polyp - which I should probably have looked at in another five years - and that the offending diverticule is very small, and that my colon is otherwise so clean that you could probably eat your dinner off it.

So there you go.

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.